2 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINOnce inside the Empire a new identity was forged by the Theruingi
out of times of humiliation and hardship.2 Initially settled between
the southern bank of the Danube and the Balkan Mountains, they
were exploited so severely by local Roman officials and military com-
manders that within two years they were driven into revolt. In battle
at Adrianople in 378 they routed the imperial army, killing the
Emperor Valens. Although his successor Theodosius I was able to
bring them to terms by 381, this was to establish them more firmly
inside the Empire and to give them an important role in the em-
peror's fighting forces. Their crucial involvement in the two civil
wars of 388 and 394 during Theodosius's reign served further to unify
them, and on the emperor's death in 395 Alaric, one of the military
commanders who had briefly rebelled against the Empire in 392, was
chosen as leader of most of the confederacy.
It was in this same period of the entry into the Roman Empire that
the new Visigothic people adopted Christianity as its religion, desert-
ing a previous paganism of which virtually nothing is known. The
earliest Christian missionary activity amongst the Theruingi had taken
place in the middle of the fourth century, when the Arian heresy,
that subordinated the Son and the Holy Spirit to the Father in the
Trinity, had been receiving imperial support, and it was as Arians that
the Visigoths became Christians. They now had the scriptures trans-
lated into their own language by Ulfilas, the first Gothic bishop. The
year 381, however, had also seen the final defeat of Arianism in the
Church inside the Empire, and thus these new converts were to find
themselves at odds in religion with their numerous Roman subjects
in the centuries to follow.^3
The necessities of feeding and supplying the people, if their
new-found unity were to be preserved, together with the confused
politics of a divided Empire, caused Alaric to take an active role in
the events of the subsequent decades. Eventually, in 408, he led his
followers into Italy to coerce a hostile but indecisive administration
into honouring promises made of payment and supply. The xeno-
phobic;: intransigence of the emperor Honorius, secure behind the
marshes of Ravenna, drove the Goths firstly into supporting the pre-
tensions of a usurper in Rome and then, when he proved as unwilling
to accommodate them as his rival, into sacking the former imperial
capital in 410. Alaric died in the same year and his successor, thwarted
of imperial recognition and driven by the constant need for secure
and regular supplies of food to keep the confederacy in being, led