Roderich

This article is about the King of the Visigoths. For namesake see Roderich (first name) .

Roderich ( Spanish Rodrigo ; † between July 19 and 26, 711 on the Guadalete ) was king of the Visigoths in Hispania from 710 to 711 . In the legend he was known as the last Gothic king . Most of his life is in the dark. He came to power as an opponent of the family of his predecessor Witiza and was controversial among the nobles. His defeat by an Arab-Berber army in the battle of the Río Guadalete , in which he fell, led to the fall of the Visigoth Empire .

Surname

The name Roderich (also Ruderic, Roderic, Roderik, Roderick) is of Gothic origin and is rendered in Spanish and Portuguese in the form Rodrigo , also Latinized Roderico , short form Rui or Ruy . The Arabic form of the name is Ludhriq (لذريق).

ancestry

Only a late Asturian source, the chronicle of King Alfonso III, provides information about Roderich's ancestry . from Asturias , but there is no specific reason to doubt the credibility of their statements. According to this source, Roderich's father was called Theodefred and was a son of King Chindaswinth (642–653) and brother of King Rekkeswinth . With the death of Rekkeswinth in 672 and the subsequent election of Wamba , who was not descended from Chindaswinth, the dynasty founded by Chindaswinth was disempowered. Accordingly, the choice of Roderich is to be understood as a return to the 672 ousted Chindaswinth dynasty.

King Egica is said to have suspected Theodefred of conspiratorial intentions, therefore ordered his dazzling and banished him from Toledo. According to the chronicle's account, Theodefred then lived in Cordoba , where he married a woman of noble descent named Ricilo, who became Roderich's mother. Roderich grew up in Córdoba.

Elevation to King

Before his accession to the throne, Roderich was probably responsible as a dux for the administration of the Baetica region. The most important source for his assumption of power is the Mozarabic Chronicle (formerly also called Chronicle of 754 and Continuatio Hispana ). It is considered credible, but its presentation is extremely brief, and its information is generally difficult to understand because of the anonymous author's very poor knowledge of Latin. This chronicle reports that Roderich the kingdom ( regnum ; meant: the royal dignity) stormy ( tumultuose ) obtained at the request of the "Senate". The question of the meaning of this statement has been discussed for a long time in research. The Visigoths did not have a senate. The majority opinion of Spanish and German historians is that it was a legal election according to current law and that the "Senate" was the assembly of nobles and bishops entitled to vote, which met after the death of King Vitiza. The procedure for the election of a king was regulated by the relevant provisions of the 4th Council of Toledo. The term "stormy" therefore refers to the fact that the election was not unanimous, but took place against the resistance of a minority, because the defeated supporters of the Witizas family wanted to assert the inheritance rights of his sons.

Roger Collins takes a different view . He suspects that Witiza was overthrown by Roderich and probably killed in the process. This assumption is speculative, however, since no source reports a fall and violent death of Witiza.

In the past, some historians believed that King Agila II , who ruled part of the territory in the final phase of the Visigoth Empire, was an anti-king who was raised around the same time as Roderich. This view was refuted by Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, who showed that Agila II was raised only after the death of Roderich. The distribution of the coin finds is cited as evidence of a split in the empire by an anti-Agilean king; In some areas ( Tarraconensis , Septimania ) no coins from Roderich have been found, but those from the earlier kings and agilas. Only twelve coins from Roderich have survived, all of which were minted in Toledo and "Egitania". This small number of chance finds does not allow any far-reaching conclusions; it can be explained by the very short reign of Roderich. It is undisputed that Agila never ruled more than one part of the empire and therefore his coins were only used there. A statement in the Mozarabic Chronicle about an internal conflict among the Visigoths relates to the time after Roderich's death.

Occasion of the Muslim invasion

Late sources report that a certain count ( comes ) Julianus, called Ilyan by the Arabs, who was in command of the city of Ceuta on the African coast, committed treason and thus facilitated the advance of the Muslims. He is even said to have played a key role in the invasion. Legend has it that Julian wanted to take revenge on Roderich because he made Julian's daughter pregnant. Serious research does not give this popular, literarily embellished legend any historical credibility. Ceuta did not belong to the Visigoth Empire, but to the Byzantine Empire . It is uncertain whether Julian ever existed or is fictitious. If he existed, he was likely either a Byzantine commander in Africa or a Berber prince. In any case, it cannot be assumed that he could play an essential role in the fall of the Visigoth Empire.

Christian medieval historians claimed from 9/10. Century on, the destruction of the Visigoth Empire was caused by treason . According to her, the sons of Witizas invited the Muslims to the invasion and supported their advance in order to get revenge on Roderich, who had deprived them of the line of succession. These claims have been proven by modern research to be tendentious inventions.

The Muslim Invasion

For a long time before the invasion of 711, Muslim units had carried out raids into Baetica, which was then still administered by Roderich as dux . When the predominantly Berber army of Muslims landed near Gibraltar in the spring of 711 under the leadership of Tāriq ibn Ziyād , Roderich was in the north on a campaign against the Basques. In the summer he turned to the new opponent. In the battle of the Río Guadalete , which lasted eight days (19-26 July 711), the Gothic army was defeated and Roderich fell. Although the Muslim conquest of the Visigoth Empire took several years to complete, with this battle the decision was already made. The remnants of the Gothic force fled north. They took Roderich's body and buried him in the city of Viseu in northern Portugal.

Roderich's widow Egilo later married Abd el-Aziz , the Muslim governor of the Iberian Peninsula, who was murdered in March 716. Abd el-Aziz apparently wanted to consolidate his power with this marriage; his marriage to the king's widow was supposed to give him the loyalty of the Christian population.

reception

middle Ages

During the centuries of Muslim rule and the Reconquista , Christians sought a religious explanation for the catastrophe, which they saw as the fall of the Visigoths Empire. Christian historians attributed the defeat to the wrath of God. This presupposed that the Visigoths had committed grave sins that were punished in this way. This resulted in a very negative assessment of the last Visigoth kings Witiza and Roderich. In the 13th century, the legend of Roderich's alleged debauchery was already fully developed, as the account of the chronicler Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada shows.

The legend of Roderich's rape of the beautiful daughter of Count Julian, who then took revenge by causing the Arabs to invade, first appears in Muslim sources. But it was probably created among Mozarabic Christians, although originally the role of rapist was not assigned to Roderich, but Witiza. The first Christian source to report the desecration is a Latin chronicle ( Chronica Pseudo-Isidoriana ) written by a Mozarab in the Arab part of the Iberian Peninsula in the late 11th century. This chronicler accuses Witiza of the wrongdoing. The unknown author of the Historia Silense (early 12th century) is the first Christian historian who - following Arabic tradition - describes Roderich as the one who violated Julian's daughter. According to his account, the king kept her as a concubine . From the first half of the 13th century a different version spread, according to which Roderich dishonored Julian's wife, not his daughter.

According to another legend that spread across parts of the Iberian Peninsula, Roderich escaped the battle alive and fled to the monastery of Cauliniana near Mérida in disguise . From there he fled west with a monk from the monastery, taking a miraculous image of the Madonna with them to save it from the approaching Muslims. The two then lived as hermits in a mountainous area near what is now the Portuguese town of Nazaré . After Roderich's death, the image of the Blessed Mother remained hidden there until it was found after the Christian reconquest of the area during the Reconquista in 1179. The Madonna was then venerated as Nossa Senhora da Nazaré , and Nazaré became one of the most important centers of Marian devotion on the Iberian Peninsula.

Modern times

In the 16th century, several printed editions of the Crónica del Rey don Rodrigo ( Crónica sarracina ) , written by Pedro de Corral around 1430, appeared . This is an imaginative literary design of the Roderich material. The poetic arrangements of the material, the Romances del rey Rodrigo, were based on this work . Lope de Vega wrote a comedy El postrer godo de España ( The Last Goth in Spain ), which was printed in 1617. In the 19th century, the poet José Zorrilla y Moral took up the subject in a one-act play El puñal del godo ( The Goth's Dagger ). In 1875 Felix Dahn published the tragedy King Roderich .

literature

• Dietrich Claude: Investigations into the fall of the Visigoth Empire (711-725). In: Historical yearbook. Vol. 108, 1988, pp. 329-358
• Roger Collins : The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710-797. Oxford 1989, ISBN 0-631-15923-1
• Julia Montenegro and Arcadio del Castillo: Le règne de Rodéric, Akhila II et l'invasion musulmane de la péninsule Ibérique. In: Francia. Vol. 34/1. 2007, pp. 1-17

reception

• Ramón Menéndez Pidal (Ed.): Floresta de leyendas heroicas españolas. Rodrigo, el último godo , 3 volumes, Madrid 1925–1927 (investigation and edition of the source texts on the medieval and modern Roderich legend)

Web links

Commons : Roderich  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Wiktionary: Roderich  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

• Medieval Sourcebook: Ibn Abd-el-Hakem: The Islamic Conquest of Spain

Remarks

1. ↑ On the identity and fate of Theodefred see Yves Bonnaz: Chroniques asturiennes. Paris 1987, p. 131.
2. ↑ Luis A. García Moreno: Estudios sobre la organización administrativa del reino visigodo de Toledo , in: Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 44, 1974, p. 148 u. Note 581.
3. ↑ Chronica Muzarabica 43, ed. Juan Gil, Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum Vol. 1, Madrid 1973, p. 31: Rudericus tumultuose regnum ortante senatu invadit.
4. ^ Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz: El senatus visigodo , in: Orígenes de la nación española , Vol. 1, Oviedo 1972, pp. 265ff .; Enrique Gallego-Blanco: Los concilios de Toledo y la sucesión al trono visigodo , in: Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 44, 1974, p. 738; Dietrich Claude: Investigations into the fall of the Visigothic Empire (711-725) , in: Historisches Jahrbuch 108, 1988, pp. 340–343.
5. ↑ Roger Collins: Visigothic Spain 409-711 , Malden (MA) 2004, pp. 113 and 132f.
6. ↑ Sánchez-Albornoz: El senatus visigodo pp. 197ff., 224f.
7. ↑ George C. Miles: The Coinage of the Visigoths of Spain , New York 1952, pp. 442f.
8. ↑ Claude p. 355 and note 106, 107. Claude also points out that not even the otherwise very active mints of Mérida and Córdoba have preserved coins by Roderich. It is beyond dispute that these cities were ruled by him during Roderich's reign. Therefore, from the lack of Roderich's coins from a mint, it cannot be inferred that its territory was not under his rule, but that of an opposing king.
9. ↑ Chronica Muzarabica 45, ed. Juan Gil, Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum Vol. 1, Madrid 1973, p. 32: dum ... non solum hostili, verum etiam intestino furore confligeretur.
10. ↑ Claude p. 337f. and notes 24, 25; 349f. (with a critical review of older research literature).
11. ↑ Claude p. 330, 343-352. For the oldest surviving Arabic version of the legend, which appears in a 10th century source, see Ann Christys: How the royal house of Witiza survived the Islamic conquest of Spain . In: Walter Pohl, Maximilian habenberger (ed.): Integration und Herrschaft , Vienna 2002, pp. 233–246.
12. ↑ Chronica Muzarabica 43, ed. Juan Gil, Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum Vol. 1, Madrid 1973, p. 31: diu sibi provinciam creditam incursantibus.
13. ↑ Sánchez-Albornoz: Orígenes Vol. 1 pp. 366-370; Claude p. 355 and note 107.
14. ↑ On the dating of Sánchez-Albornoz: Orígenes vol. 1 p. 370, 392–412.
15. ↑ Sánchez-Albornoz: Orígenes Vol. 1 pp. 330–333; Claude p. 352.
16. ↑ Claude p. 352f.
17. ↑ Claude, pp. 347-350.
18. ↑ See also Manuel de Brito Alão: Antiguidade da Sagrada Imagem de Nossa Senhora de Nazaré , 2nd edition Lisbon 1684, new edition Lisbon 2001.
19. ↑ Pedro de Corral: Crónica del Rey don Rodrigo (Crónica sarracina) , 2 volumes, ed. James Donald Fogelquist, Madrid 2001.
20. ↑ Critically edited by Ramón Menéndez Pidal: Floresta de leyendas heroicas españolas , Volume 2, Madrid 1926, pp. 75-189.
21. ↑ Edited by Ramón Menéndez Pidal: Floresta de leyendas heroicas españolas , Volume 2, Madrid 1926, pp. 231-254.

predecessor	Office	successor
Witiza	King of the Visigoths 710–711	Agila II.