Unlike the Merovingians, however, the Visigothic kings were not able to establish
a stable dynasty. The minority of a king’s son almost always sparked revolts by rival
families, and the child’s deposition was often accompanied by wholesale slaughter of
his father’s followers and confiscation of their lands. This may help to explain why
Visigothic courtiers painted a particularly lustrous picture of their kings, resplendent
and dazzling, their throne “radiant with shining gold,” and why royal laws punished
treason by death or blinding.^18
It was precisely the centralization of the Visigothic kingdom that proved its
undoing. In 711, a small Islamic raiding party killed the Visigothic king and thereby
dealt the whole state a decisive blow. Between 712 and 715, as we have seen, armies
led by Arabs took over the peninsula through a combination of war and diplomacy.
The conquest of Spain was less Arabic or Islamic than Berber. The generals who
led the invasion of Spain were Arabs, to be sure; but the rank-and-file fighters were
Berbers from North Africa. While the Berbers were converts to Islam, they did not
speak Arabic. The Arabs considered them crude mountainfolk, only imperfectly
Muslim. Perhaps a million people settled in Spain in the wake of the invasions, the
Arabs taking the better lands in the south, the Berbers getting less rich properties in
the center and north. Most of the conquered population consisted of Christians, along
with a sprinkling of Jews. A thin ribbon of Christian states—Asturias, Pamplona, and
so on—survived in the north. There was thus a great variety of religions on the
Iberian Peninsula. (See Map 2.3.) The history of Spain would for many centuries
thereafter be one of both acculturation and war.
Unlike Visigothic Spain, Lombard Italy presented no united front. In the center of
the peninsula was the papacy, always hostile to the Lombard king in the north. (See
Map 2.3.) To Rome’s east and south were the dukes of Benevento and Spoleto.
Although theoretically the Lombard king’s officers, in fact they were virtually
independent rulers. Although many Lombards were Catholics, others, including
important kings and dukes, were Arians. The “official” religion varied with the ruler
in power. Rather than signal a major political event, then, the conversion of the
Lombards to Catholic Christianity occurred gradually, ending only in the late seventh
century. Partly as a result of this slow development, the Lombard kings, unlike the
Visigoths, Franks, or even Anglo-Saxons, never enlisted the wholehearted support of
any particular group of churchmen.
Yet the Lombard kings did not lack advantages. They controlled extensive
estates, and they made use of the Roman institutions that survived in Italy. The kings
made the cities their administrative bases, assigning dukes to rule from them and
