Decadent and do-nothing kings

Abstract

The unpalatable fact that in any given battle one side or the other has to win or at least gain the advantage has not been fully understood by those who wish to characterise the final stages of the Visigothic kingdom in Spain as being decadent, and who see the proof of this in the rapidity of its overthrow. If anything, quite the contrary conclusion can be drawn from the ‘battle in the Transductine Promontories’ between the Visigothic royal army and the Arab invaders in 711/12 and the collapse of central authority in the kingdom which resulted from it.¹ It was the extraordinary achievement of the Visigothic kings and their advisers, above all a series of outstanding bishops, that in land as geographically and culturally diverse and presenting such problems of movement and communication as the Iberian peninsula, they had been able not only to impose their own central authority but had created structures and institutions that maintained it for well over a century.²