Liuva I

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (April 2008)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Liuva I (Leova; d. 572 or 573), jointly with his brother Liuvigild, succeeded Athanagild in 568 on the throne of the Visigoths. Both were Arian Christians. Liuva, who was favored by the Visigoth nobles, ruled the Visigothic lands north of the Pyrenees, until his death.

Led by Liuvigild, the brothers banished the imperial civil servants and worked to unify the Iberian Peninsula. Their efforts were more or less successful, except in the north, where the Basques, Cantabrians, and Asturians managed to hold out against them.

They maintained trade connections with the Byzantine empire, thus maintaining Hispania’s urban culture as well as its commercial and cultural connections within the Mediterranean area.

By this time the language of the Visigoths was no longer Germanic. They had corrupted the Latin of Hispania into what would become Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish.^{[citations needed]}