Garonne and the Loire, as self-governing fed-erates (treaty partners) of the empire on the
basis of hospitality, either land sharing with the Roman senatorial class or receiving
Roman tax revenues. Toulouse was the center of the Visigothic settlement. Roman
officials like Aetius were able to keep the Visigoths under imperial control, and they
were prominent in the defeat of Attila in 451. After the murder of Emperor Valentinian
III in 455, the Visigoths, along with Gallo-Roman aristocrats, began to control the affairs
of Gaul and were even able to place their own candidate, Avitus, on the imperial throne
(r. 455–56).
The weakness of the Roman government led to a period of Visigothic expansion under
King Euric (r. 466–84), who came to hold Gaul south of the Loire and west of the Rhône,
and all of Spain except for the Suevic territories in the northwest. Euric held the largest
state of any Germanic king, and it appeared as if the Visigoths were the destined masters
of the West. But the accession of the Frankish King Clovis I in 482 and Euric’s death in
484 changed the future of Gaul and of the West. In alliance with Catholics of southern
Gaul, Clovis won a great victory over the Arian Visigoths at Vouillé, near Poitiers, in 507
and conquered the Gallic portions of the Visigothic kingdom, except for Septimania. The
Visigoths left Gaul for Spain, and their kingdom was thenceforward predominantly an
Iberian state. Septimania, however, remained part of their kingdom until the Muslims
conquered southern and central Spain (711–13). It was then incorporated into the rest of
Gaul by Pepin the Short. The remnant of the Visigothic kingdom of Spain was the origin
of the later kingdom of Asturias.
Steven Fanning
[See also: GOTHIA; SEPTIMANIA]
Goffart, Walter. Barbarians and Romans: Techniques of Accommodation. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1980.
Heather, Peter. Goths and Romans, 332–489. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.
Thompson, E.A. The Goths in Spain. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969.
——. Romans and Barbarians: The Decline of the Western Empire. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1982, pp. 38–57.
Wallace-Hadrill, J.M. The Barbarian West, 400–1000. 4th ed. London: Hutchinson University
Library, 1961, pp. 115–39.
Wolfram, Herwig. History of the Goths, trans. Thomas J.Dunlap. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988.
VITICULTURE
. The production of wine in France has its origins in the 6th century B.C., with the
founding of the Greek colony at Marseille. For the next several centuries, viticulture
flourished in the warm, dry Mediterranean regions of France. The northern expansion of
this industry occurred largely as a result of two distinct dynamic forces—one political,
the other religious. For the Romans, the vine was a sacred plant (sacra vitis), and as they
extended their empire beyond the Mediterranean, great vineyards were introduced as far
north as the Seine, the Moselle, and the Rhine. What seems to have allowed for the
successful introduction of vines in the colder and moist regions of the north was the
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1824