34 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINat some point in his reign, and this was probably the starting point
for a fantastic medieval legend that makes Isidore the Ostrogothic
king's grandson.^5 However, no contemporary evidence survives to
substantiate such a visit by Theoderic to Spain at any stage of his
career.
The effective reign of Amalaric that was initiated by the death of
Theoderic in 526 was brief and inglorious. It is likely that his grand-
father's Ostrogothic viceroys, of whom the principal was a man called
Theudis, still exercised much power and influence, as the sequel
showed. Amalaric married a Frankish princess Clotild, daughter of
Clovis. His ill-conceived and violent attempts to force his wife to re-
nounce her Catholic beliefs in favour of Arianism gave her Frankish
relatives an excuse for intervention. In 531 her brother Childebert I
(511-58) invaded the Visigothic realm. Once again Narbonne was
taken, and the king fled before his enemies across the Pyrenees to
Barcelona. There trying to escape by sea Amalaric was murdered,
probably by his own men, and with him died his dynasty.6 In his place
the Visigothic nobility chose the Ostrogothic general Theudis, who
may have had a hand in killing Amalaric.
Why had the Visigoths proved so consistently weak before succes-
sive Frankish onslaughts from 507-531? Although many of the factors
that would go to explain this cannot now be known, there is one
feature of the period leading up to this era of defeat that may make
the failure of the Visigoths to do more to hold on to their lands in
Gaul less incomprehensible. This is the Visigothic migration into Spain
during the last decade of the fifth century. The Visigoths had been
established in Aquitaine since 418, and even after their conquest of
the Iberian peninsula under their kings Theoderic II and Euric, their
principal interests seem to have still lain to the north of the Pyrenees,
and the royal capital remained at Toulouse. However, in the 490s a
southward movement into Spain of substantial numbers of the
Visigoths appears to have occurred. This is known from two entries
in the fragmentary Chronicle of Zaragoza. This brief work has a remark-
ably complicated textual history, and now only survives in the form of
marginalia to two sixteenth-century copies of a lost medieval manu-
script; one of these has itself been destroyed in the Spanish Civil War.
It has been argued and generally accepted that the original ch.ronicle
was the work of a seventh-century bishop of Zaragoza, Maximus (c. 599-
619). However, it is possible to show that Maximus probably never
wrote a chronicle, and that the extant extracts derive from a set of