Liuvigild

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Statue in Madrid (F. Corral, 1750-53).

Liuvigild (Leuvigild, Leuvigildo, Leovigild, Leovigildo, Leogild) was King of the Visigoths from 569 to April 21, 586.

Liuvigild was declared co-king with his brother Liuva I on the throne of the Visigoths after a short period of anarchy which followed the death of King Athanagild, who was a brother of them both. Both were Arian Christians. Liuva, who was favored by the Visigoth nobles, came to rule the Visigothic lands north of the Pyrenees, while Liuvigild ruled in Hispania.

Liuvigild married Athanagild's widow, Goisvintha. His first wife, Theodosia, the mother of his sons, had died.

In 572 or 573 Liuva died. Liuvigild began his sole reign of the reunited Visigothic territories by seizing the Byzantine-ruled city of Córdoba, where the Byzantines had recently answered Athanagild's call for help by establishing a stretch of Byzantine territory in the southeast of the Iberian peninsula. Liuvigild also ousted the Germanic Suevi from their strongholds at León and Zamora, thus enlarging his kingdom to the north and west as well, but for another generation the eastern Roman emperor retained a base in southeastern Spain, which retained its old Roman name of Hispania Baetica.

Though constantly at war with the Byzantines in southern Hispania, Liuvigild accepted the administration of the Byzantine Empire, adopted its pomp and ceremony, and imitated its coinage. He made important improvements in Visigothic laws. Liuvigild further reinforced possibilities of a peaceful future succession, a perennial Visigothic issue, by associating his two sons, Hermenegild and Reccared, with himself in the kingly office and placing certain regions under their regencies. Hermenegild, the elder, was married to a Frankish princess Inguthis (Ingund), daughter of King Sigebert I, the Austrasian king at Metz.

From 584-585, Catholic historians tell, Liuvigild demanded that his Roman subjects convert to Arianism, not otherwise an aspect of his method. Liuvigild did insist on appointing Arian bishops, however; this met with resistance headed by the Catholic bishops, and Baetica revolted under the leadership his son, Hermenegild, who had converted to Catholicism after marrying a Frankish princess. When the Byzantine powers failed to aid the revolt, Hermenegild was imprisoned then killed and Liuvigild went on to subdue the Basques. In the north Liuvigild took advantage of internecine friction among Suebi factions in dispute over a succession and, in 584, he defeated the Suebic kingdom of Galicia and added the kingdom of Galicia to his crowns. By the end of his reign, only the Basque lands and two small territories of the Byzantine Empire made up the non-Visigothic parts of Iberia.

The Visigoths were still a military aristocracy in the peninsula, and Arianism was still the royal religion. New monarchs had to be ratified by the nobles, even though this was merely a form. Visigoths and their subjects were still separately governed according to two distinct law codes. During Liuvigild's reign, Leander, an Ibero-Roman who was Catholic bishop of Seville, together with the princess Ingunthis, convinced her husband Hermenegild, the eldest son of Liuvigild, to convert to Catholic Christianity, and defended the convert in an uprising (583 - 584) that occasioned his father's reprisals.

Liuvigild wasn't in general a bitter foe of the Catholic Christians, although he was obliged to punish them when they conspired against him with his external enemies. He ruled in part through the local prestige of the Catholic bishops, some of whose sees had almost four centuries' standing. For this Arian monarch Catholicism was the religion of his Roman subjects and Arianism was a rallying-point to counter his Byzantine enemies in the south; conversion was a preamble to treason.

After besieging and taking Byzantine Seville, Liuvigild took his son prisoner in Córdoba and banished him safely north to Valencia, where he was murdered by Liuvigild's agents (585)— and later canonized as Saint Hermenegild by Sixtus IV at the urging of Philip the Catholic. The Frankish princess was delivered to the Eastern Emperor Tiberius II Constantine and was last heard of in Africa. Liuvigild had exiled the troublesome bishop, too, who spent the years before Hermenegild's rebellion, 579 to 582, at the court of Byzantium; the Roman Catholic Church has canonized him as Saint Leander of Seville. Gregory the Great gives some vivid details of Byzantine venality and Arian fanaticism in a highly colored Catholicizing version of these events (Dialogi, III, 31).

Liuvigild's last year was troubled by open war with the Franks along his northernmost borders. But overall, Liuvigild was one of the more effective Visigothic kings of Hispania, the restorer of Visigothic unity, ruling from his capital newly established at Toledo, where he settled toward the end of his reign. (From this, the Iberian Visigothic monarchy is sometimes called the "Kingdom of Toledo".) The capital at Toledo, established in the previous reign, marked the first move inland of a center of culture from the Mediterranean coast or the southern Tartessus.

The Visigoths in Hispania considered themselves the heirs of western Roman imperial power, not its enemies. Until Liuvigild's reign, the Visigoths minted coins that imitated the imperial coinage of Byzantium which circulated from Byzantine possessions in Baetica. From the reign of Liuvigild onwards, however, the Visigothic kingdom issued coarse coinage of its own designs. While facing the rebellion in southern Hispania, Liuvigild struck an issue of tremisses with a cross on steps on the reverse, a design that had been introduced for the very first time on Byzantine solidi by emperor Tiberius II (578-582).

City-oriented Ibero-Roman culture continued to erode during Liuvigild's reign. There evolved in Visigothic Hispania the new post-Imperial pattern of regional and local overlordship based upon regional dukes (duces), who were military leaders, and lords of smaller districts or territories called counts (comes). A similar evolution was taking place in Italy and, more slowly, in the east as well. The new ducal administrations tended to coincide with the old Roman provinces; the territories of the counts with the old cities and their small hinterlands.

With the death of Liuvigild, his son Reccared, who had converted to Catholicism in 589, brought religious and political unity to link the Visigoths with their subjects. But the Catholicizing of Visigothic Hispania encouraged the rise of the bishops and the decline of the institution of kingship itself. In 633 a synod of bishops at Toledo usurped the nobles' right to confirm the election of a king. With loyalties transferred to the local bishop, as both inspiration and the fount of patronage, wider-scale resistance couldn't be coordinated when the Moors threatened in the eighth century, and the bishoprics collapsed one after another.