Wamba

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Statue of wambas in the Plaza de Oriente in Madrid in front of the Royal Palace of Alejandro Carnicero

Wamba ( Flavius ​​Wamba Rex ; † 681/683) was King of the Visigoths from September 1, 672 to October 14, 680 .

Taking office

Wamba was elected king on September 1, 672, the anniversary of the death of his predecessor Rekkeswinth , who apparently had no male heir, allegedly against his opposition. He was already old then. On September 19, 672, he received the anointing of the king as an ecclesiastical rulership in the palace church of Toledo . It was the first explicitly documented anointing of a ruler in the Visigoth Empire (and in all of European history), but some historians suspect that there were anointings earlier. The model of the Old Testament anointing of the king was decisive. However, Wamba regarded the day of election as the day he took office, so the anointing did not make him king.

Riots

After gaining royal dignity, Wamba first undertook a successful campaign against the rebellious Basques and forced them to take hostages.

In the kingdom of Septimania , north of the Pyrenees, nobles and part of the clergy rebelled under the leadership of Count Hilderich von Nîmes in agreement with the neighboring Franks. Wamba sent the general Paul against them. However, Paul went over to the rebels and sat at their head. In Narbonne he was raised to the rank of king, crowned and anointed, although he wanted to give the impression that he was not aiming for the removal of wambas, but for a division of the empire; in a letter to Wamba he described himself as the "Eastern King" and Wamba as the "King of the South". Ranosind, Duke of the Tarraconensis in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula, was one of the rebels . Wamba was able to put down the rebellion quickly. He had members of his own troops who had committed rape on the march northward circumcised , that is, he made them Jews and thus expelled them from the legal community of the Goths. This corresponds to the anti-Jewish policy of the Empire of Toledo . Wamba refused to have the insurgents executed. Metropolitan Julian of Toledo describes these processes in his work Historia Wambae regis (History of King Wamba), in which he glorifies Wamba.

Paul's uprising indicates that there was a strong separatist movement in the north-east of the empire. Julian's account also shows that there was hostility and deep mutual contempt between the Goths on the one hand and the Roman population of Septimania ("Gauls") and the Franks on the other. Among other things, Julian accused the "Gauls" with sharp words of a positive relationship with the Jews living in Septimania and noted with approval that Wamba expelled the Jews from Narbonne after his victory.

Church politics

Wamba claimed for himself an unusual rule over the church for the time. He avoided convening an imperial synod and intervened in church organization by setting up several dioceses on his own initiative . One of them was a court bishopric at the Toledaner palace church, with the establishment of which the area of ​​responsibility of the metropolitan there was curtailed.

Military law

Since the campaign against Paul had uncovered deficiencies in the army organization, Wamba passed a military law on November 1, 673, in which he obliged not only the nobles and their followers, but also the bishops and higher clerics to do military service and heavy penalties if they refused to follow the army threatened. The law shows that the Visigoth army consisted mainly of the posse of nobles who led their followers into the field.

Abdication and death

In October 680, Erwig , who succeeded him, forced Wamba to abdicate. According to a late tradition in that of Alfons III. commissioned Chronica Adefonsi III. whose credibility is disputed, Erwig mixed the nerve agent Sparteine in a drink, which temporarily numbed him. In any case, as a supposedly terminally ill, Wamba received the sacrament of penance and, according to the custom at the time, was dressed in religious garb and accepted into the clerical class through the tonsure . This made him incapable of governing . He signed a document designating Erwig's successor and retired to a monastery. There he died; in the files of the 13th Council of Toledo , opened on November 4, 683 , he is described as deceased. The late claim that only appeared in the historiography of the Kingdom of Asturias that he still intervened in political events from the monastery in 687 is fictitious.

According to a late, unreliable legend, the monastery where Wamba spent the last years of his life and was also buried was in the small town of Pampliega ( Burgos province ). Allegedly, in the 13th century , Alfonso X brought the remains of Wambas to the church of Santa Leocadia in Toledo .

reception

Wamba plays a peculiar role in the legend of the holy hermit Aegidius , the alleged first abbot of Saint-Gilles . The oldest surviving biography of this extraordinarily popular early medieval saint comes from the 10th century; as a source for the historical Aegidius it is almost worthless. According to medieval legend, Aegidius lived in the wilderness; a doe fed him with her milk. One day the hunting Gothic king chased the animal. The doe sought refuge with Aegidius. An arrow shot by Wamba injured the saint. Aegidius did not accept any help or gifts from the king, but suggested that he establish the monastery, the first abbot of which the hermit then became. Aegidius with the hind was a popular motif in the visual arts of the Middle Ages. Sometimes Wamba was also depicted, for example on frescoes in the Church of St. Rupert in Weißpriach (Austria).

In the 17th century, the poet Lope de Vega wrote a comedy about Wamba, La comedia de Wamba , in which Wamba dies of Erwig's poison. In 1847 José Zorrilla y Moral wrote the play El rey loco ( The Crazy King ), in which Wamba as the main character pretends to be crazy and at the end throws his crown to the people.

The Austrian writer Erich Hackl published a fairy tale in 1991 with the title King Wamba . It is illustrated by Paul Flora and tells the story of the bearded Visigoths who subjugate a women’s village and force beardless women to be of service to them. Ultimately, through cunning, the women succeed in freeing the Goths from their beards in the long run and thereby creating justice. The fairy tale has also been published as an audio book .

literature

Web links

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

Remarks

  1. Claude p. 157.
  2. ^ Julian of Toledo: Historia Wambae regis chap. 9-10.
  3. Herwig Wolfram : The Goths and their history. CH Beck, Munich 2010, p. 113.
  4. ^ Edward A. Thompson : The Goths in Spain . Oxford 1969, pp. 224-228; Claude p. 165.
  5. ^ Julian of Toledo: Historia Wambae regis chap. 5 and 28.
  6. Thompson p. 229; Claude p. 163f .; Roger Collins: Visigothic Spain 409-711 . Malden (MA) 2004, p. 100f.
  7. Claude p. 164f.
  8. Chronica Adefonsi III. For credibility: Claude p. 166 and A. Barbero / MI Loring, The Catholic Visigothic Kingdom , in: The New Cambridge Medieval History , Vol. 1, Cambridge 2005, p. 362; on the other hand: Bronisch p. 166 and Collins p. 99.
  9. For the legend and the localization see Ricardo Martínez Ortega: Acerca de un comentario sobre el rey Wamba (672−680) y la Chronica Naierensis (see XII) . In: Fortunatae 9, 1997, pp. 215-221; on the lack of credibility Jan Prelog (Ed.): The Chronicle of Alfons III. , Frankfurt a. M. 1980, p. 171.
  10. Jacques Pycke: Gilles . In: Dictionnaire d'histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques , Vol. 20, Paris 1984, Sp. 1352-1356.
  11. Erich Hackl: King Wamba - a fairy tale . Diogenes, Zurich 2001, ISBN 3-257-23026-5 .
predecessor Office successor
Rekkeswinth King of the Visigoths
672–680
Erwig