36 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINpeople. The office of Judge' did not survive the entry of the Visigoths
into the Roman world, and the concurrent abandonment of their
pagan religion in favour of Christianity. So, for the Visigoths there
could be no tradition of loyalty to a dynasty as occurred in the cases
of the Ostrogoths and the Franks. They were thus unable to contem-
plate the succession of a minor, as the Ostrogoths did in 376 and 526.
The king had of his very nature to be a warrior, and no dynastic
loyalty could outweigh this. Further, should a king prove unsatisfac-
tory in his principal task, that is war-leadership, he might be deposed
or killed, as happened to Gesalic and Amalaric. There was thus no
guarantee that a new king would be chosen from the same family as
his predecessor, though as long as the late monarch's heir looked a
credible choice he would be likely to be elected. For one thing, the
intrusion of a new ruling family could unsettle the status quo and
adversely affect the interests of those who benefited from the previ-
ous regime. Sigeric (416) was not of the family of Alaric I, and there
is no evidence that Wallia (416-419) was either. Indeed the link
between Theoderic I (419-51) and his descendants with Alaric is
dependent upon a single reference, and is by no means certain.lO
The dynastic succession of the Visigothic kingdom in the fifth century
is more tenuous than is allowed, and depended entirely upon the
competence and continuing military success of the individual kings.
All of them succeeded in the full vigour of their years, and they led
their forces in person. Two of them, Theoderic I in 451, and Alaric
II in 507, died on the field of battle. Several kings were also mur-
dered, Ataulph and Sigeric in 416, Thorismund in 453 and Theoderic
II in 466, though the reasons are not always clear. Thus there is little
to distinguish the Visigothic kingship of the fifth century from that of
the more troubled periods of the sixth and seventh.
The first successor of the defunct Bait dynasty was the Ostrogothic
general Theudis (531-548). His nephew Ildibad was briefly king of
the Ostrogoths in Italy (539-40), but there appear to have been few
close ties between the two branches of the Goths at this time. The
final destruction of the Ostrogothic kingdom in 552 seems to have
made no mark on the Visigothic one. Much of Theudis's power in
Spain seems to have come, according to the Byzantine historian
Procopius, from a marriage he contracted with a Roman heiress, the
slaves of whose estate he formed into a private army.!! In this period,
a generation after the Visigothic settlement of Spain, the problem of
military manpower must have presented a serious difficulty for the