Although Gregory is the most familiar figure of sixth-century Gaul, and therefore the one we often turn to for descriptions of the period, he is not our only contemporary source. Relying excessively on him blinds us to a wider variety of perspectives and experiences that he chose not to share. Venantius Fortunatus (d. 600), an Italian-born poet writing in Gaul, was a friend of Gregory and wrote many poems under his patronage. Among the multiple scripts of identity these men could choose from within the common discourse of their time and place, Gregory elected not to describe his contemporaries as Romans, but Fortunatus did, though in rather different senses within the poetic genre. By exploring the ways Fortunatus wrote about Roman identity and related it to barbarian and Frankish identity in his poems (and a few saints’ vitae), historians get a glimpse into the fluctuations of these identities within their society.

Studies of Venantius Fortunatus have historically understood him as a last bearer of traditional Roman rhetoric in an increasingly barbarian world or as the first medieval poet to turn traditional motifs into something new. Dill, for example, called him ‘almost the last link between the classical and the medieval world’, and Tardi ‘a last representative of Latin poetry’. Recent scholarship has begun to understand him as simply living in a time of rapid change and drawing on the resources of the past to help himself and others navigate this shifting landscape. As they did so, they began to think about Romanness and other identities in new ways, and Fortunatus aided this process. Among his most potent resources was classical rhetoric about Romans and barbarians. Though of course both terms could have widely varied meanings in both the imperial and the post-imperial eras, their common pairing as opposites – one civilized and the other not, one a political grouping and the other seen as kin-based – remained a powerful image.

When Fortunatus mentions peoples of the Merovingian kingdoms in his writing, it is usually as Romans and barbarians. Sometimes he specifies particular barbarian groups with ethnonyms like ‘Frank’, but only in specifically royal or international settings.

In the spring of 507, King Alaric II of the Visigoths was killed while fighting the Frankish King Clovis at the Battle of Vouillé in Gaul. As the Franks moved in to control the former Visigothic territory in the region, the defeated Visigoths retreated from their Gallic capital at Toulouse into the territory they loosely controlled in Spain, keeping only the southern region of Septimania – which they called Gallia or Gallia Narbonensis – of all their Gallic possessions. From this point on, their home would be Spain. Over the course of the sixth century, they would come to dominate the peninsula and to wrest its other inhabitants into (sometimes uneasy) submission. These inhabitants included Germanic Sueves who had settled in Gallaecia, Basques in the north, and the citizens of the former Western Roman Empire whom we often call Hispano-Romans.

As these Romans adapted to being ruled by the Visigoths, their Roman identity would also adapt and ultimately fade away. Unlike in Gaul, as we will see later, this process in Spain was aided by the kings. After a period of Ostrogothic regency, succession crises, and a civil war leading to Byzantine control of some lands along the Mediterranean, Leovigild (r. 569-586) came to the throne. He promptly began a campaign of unification, on multiple levels. Politically, he asserted full, central control over most of the Iberian peninsula. He conquered both semi-independent cities like Córdoba and entire regions like the Suevic kingdom in the northwest – including territory in the south which his rebelling son, Hermenegild, had claimed in the early 580s – and he asserted greater control over places which he already held, like Mérida. Although for purposes of propaganda, these land gains were portrayed as reconquests by a rightful ruler, much of the territory which Leovigild ‘regained’ had probably never truly been under Visigothic control. He also built a new city named for his other son, Reccared, to assert his authority and to portray himself as a proper imperial successor. Along with this territorial unification, Leovigild attempted ethnic unification by giving official sanction in his revised law code to marriages between those of Gothic and Roman descent.

Study of Visigothic Spain prior to 589 is hampered the paucity of contemporary texts. Some of our key sources for events of this time were written between 620 and 640 – early enough that their authors might have witnessed some events and be able to interview other witnesses, but possibly using language current to the time of writing rather than that of events. However, their language can shed light on how this earlier period was viewed in the decades that followed and reflect early seventh-century perceptions of the changes that took place. They also cover many of the same events as the earlier sources and can help us to better piece together a picture of sixth-century Iberia.

Two main observations can be made of the language in these texts. First, that religious divisions were expected to map closely onto ancestral ones. Historically, the Goths were followers of the Arian variety of Christianity, with many of them originally converted by Ulfila. Sources for sixth-century Spain therefore tend to assume that all people identifying as of Gothic descent followed Arian doctrine. This is not just because the authors whose works survive were themselves Catholics, or because later authors may have generalized for ease or out of ignorance – council records show that even the kings framed their visions of the Gothic community as Arian (and after conversion, as Catholic). Of course, there were exceptions that did not match the assumed stereotype, and their existence could cause problems for kings trying to promote a specific narrative of who and what their people were, as we will see. Secondly, the texts of this period clearly demonstrate that the conversion of ‘the entire people of the Goths’ was both intended and viewed as a conscious attempt at unifying the diverse populations of Iberia. The close association between Arianism and Gothic identity – and between Catholicism and Roman identity – that pervaded the common contemporary discourse was a barrier to imagining all subjects as a single people. Conversion of one group to the other's faith was an important strategy to encourage social cohesion.

There are four main sources that help us understand the available repertoires of identification in this period. Two are contemporary: John of Biclar's Chronicle and the records of the Third Council of Toledo. The other two were written in the 620s-630s: the History of the Goths of Isidore of Seville and the hagiographical Lives of the Fathers of Mérida.

The kingdoms of Western Europe changed significantly over the course of the sixth and seventh centuries, and a large part of this change was the weakening of Roman identities in favour of greater identification with Gothic, Frankish, and other rulers. For most of the fifth century, the Roman Empire still existed in the West, and its citizens were still politically Roman, serving in imperial offices and being, at least nominally, under Roman rule. While on a local level many of them were ruled by barbarian federates, the fact that these federates were supposedly managing on behalf of Rome provided an illusion of Roman control even if actual Roman control was shaky. By the seventh century, however, the Western Empire had faded into memory in much of the West, and descendants of Roman citizens in most of Gaul and Spain had become clear subjects of barbarian kings. No one alive then, outside of the strip of Byzantine holdings on the Iberian coast, had experienced imperial rule first-hand, and thus Roman identity had lost much of its resonance for these later generations. In Spain, it was even associated with the Byzantine enemies of the Visigothic kings, who aimed to be the ‘true’ heirs of Rome in comparison. The most essential identity of those of Roman descent – Roman – no longer matched the political state(s) in which they lived. People born to Roman parents under barbarian rule who participated in a mixed society and a barbarian army and court are likely, therefore, to have identified more strongly with these barbarians than with their distant Roman ancestors.

Many aspects of their lives, however, were much the same, particularly in the sixth century. In southern Gaul especially, Romans maintained a similar culture, social structure, and set of world views as they had before. The words they used to express their experiences reflected this ‘Roman’ milieu. Writing in sixth-century Gaul, Venantius Fortunatus contrasted ‘Roman’ with ‘barbarian’, as was common in antiquity. Roman ancestry in his view meant being civilized, cultured, educated, and otherwise privileged, while barbarian birth predisposed a person to incivility and uncouthness and was often a handicap, though not an insurmountable one. One could claim Roman identity through education and culture in addition to descent from Roman citizens, and outside of an imperial framework, descent became a more important facet.

While both Gregory and Fortunatus wrote a handful of saints’ vitae, some of which I have already discussed, the majority of the hagiographical texts for the sixth and seventh centuries are the work of others. A look at the full corpus for these two centuries confirms that the focal shift from a Roman to a Frankish society was not solely the invention of a few cunning authors, but a trend occurring throughout their society.

In these saints’ vitae, two main points become clear. First is that Frankish identity came to be discussed more often in political terms over the course of the two centuries, as an inclusive label that could encompass all within the kingdom. Sixth-century hagiographers used ‘Frank’ less often than seventh-century ones, and their language when using it is reminiscent of Gregory’s. Kings of the ‘Franks’ and Franks as an army make appearances, and a few individuals are described as ‘a Frank’ or ‘a certain Frank’. In seventh-century texts, individuals are often said to be Franks ‘by birth’, which at first glance might seem counter to a unifying Frankish identity. However, they regularly appear alongside Burgundians, Romans, or Saxons ‘by birth’, all of whom are included in group descriptions of ‘the Franks’. Only some were Franks by descent, but all were Franks by political affiliation. This political usage is far more frequent in seventh-century texts than in earlier ones, and is responsible for the great increase in the use of the term ‘Frank’ generally during this century. ‘Kingdom of the Franks’, for example, is present on multiple occasions, while it is absent completely from sixth-century vitae.

The second key trend is that Roman identity was asserted more frequently in seventh-century vitae, undoubtedly because it was coming to be seen as exceptional and thus especially worth noting. As with Gregory's Histories, Romanness as a local identity is completely absent from sixth-century examples. This makes Venantius Fortunatus’ poetry the only literary source from this period in which locals appear explicitly as Roman. In contrast, nine vitae spread fairly evenly across the seventh and very beginning of the eighth centuries mention local ‘Romans’. Almost all of these are Roman ‘by birth’, and all but one came from south of the Loire.

Within the first few centuries after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the majority of those westerners once considered Romans adopted the identities of their barbarian rulers. They came to be identified as Franks or Goths or Saxons, and people called ‘Romans’ disappeared almost entirely from the written record.

How this happened is a matter of some controversy. Much progress has been made in recent years in understanding this process, but it has been hampered by a continued tendency to use terms like Goth, Roman, and Frank in a mutually exclusive manner, as if ‘Frank’ could mean only one thing at any given place and time. Thus historians have argued that, for example, the increasing use of ‘Goth’ in mid-seventh-century Spain to refer to all the king's subjects must mean that these subjects had all become ethnic Goths or, as Herwig Wolfram has suggested, that ‘Goth’ had ceased to have any ethnic meaning in favour of a wider, more inclusive political one. The reality, however, is far more complicated. A person can have multiple identities or affiliations simultaneously. Someone living in the seventh-century Visigothic kingdom could be a Roman by descent and a Goth politically, for example. When all of these aspects of identity are conflated, historians see what seem like inexplicable contradictions or paradoxes in our sources, or sometimes instantaneous or nonsensical changes to these identities. However, when the existence of multiple layers is acknowledged and examined more closely, suddenly they become both understandable and crucial witnesses to the ways these various layers could be renegotiated to effect shifts in ethnic identities over the long term.

This book is an attempt to offer a new model for discussing the multilayered nature of early medieval identities and for using the evidence of these layers to better understand the mechanisms by which such identity shifts occurred. By distinguishing between the political, religious, and descent overtones with which the ethnonyms Goth, Frank, and Roman were used in Visigothic Iberia and Merovingian Gaul, this study will shed light on the complex ways they interacted to shape contemporary society. By addressing both Iberia and Gaul, it will also illuminate the common mechanisms operating across both societies and the differences in the ways identity shifts played out based on the unique histories and concerns of each kingdom.

Gregory, bishop of Tours from 573 until 594, is the best-known individual from the Merovingian kingdoms, and the source of the bulk of our knowledge of the late sixth century, for better or worse. He is, therefore, the obvious writer with whom to begin. It is commonly known that in his Histories and hagiographical works, Gregory described people in his native Gaul as ‘Roman’ when writing about the late Roman empire and its immediate aftermath, but not for his own contemporaries in the sixth century. There were certainly some who identified themselves or were identified by others as Romans, as we will see in the next chapter, yet Gregory did not choose this strategy of identification himself.

Historians have long puzzled over and attempted to explain this terminological choice. For Godefroid Kurth, there were no Romans to mention because everyone had become a Frank. Michel Rouche argued that as a descendant of Roman senators, Gregory would have felt a sense of superiority over non-Romans and continued to describe an extant Roman identity with terms like ‘senator’. However, these explanations rested on two long-held assumptions. First was that Gregory's work is an accurate, unmediated reflection of his society. During the literary turn of the late twentieth century, by contrast, Ian Wood and others demonstrated that, in fact, Gregory could be a cunning manipulator of information who recorded, omitted, and ordered episodes for specific purposes. These manipulations might have been ideological, or simply practical moves to preserve his status in volatile political situations. The second assumption was that his work was titled The History of the Franks and as such was meant as a story of the Frankish people. By tracing the reception of Gregory's work over the centuries, Walter Goffart showed that his Histories (or Ten Books of Histories) were only titled ‘of the Franks’ in the tenth century, on a copy of a seventh-century abridged recension. Abridgers who wanted Gregory's Histories to tell a somewhat different story less focused on Gregory's social connections trimmed his account to six books, and the name stuck once tenth-century editors retitled it for their own purposes.

Like 589, the year 654 was a turning point for discourses of identity in Visigothic Spain. It marks the end of the strong emphasis placed on Gothic identity during the first half of the century, with Isidore and various kings promoting the union of religious and political identity under the Gothic label. It was also the point at which differences between Romans and Goths – if any still existed – were formally eliminated in law. Clear statements that the whole Christian population should be treated equally appeared as kings reworked old laws that remained in use in a hodgepodge mix into a single code that would make unambiguous and uniform the law of the land.

Laws after this point, both civil and canon, would cease to refer to Romans and even Goths except in antiquated contexts, evidence that their authors no longer felt the need to specify their subjects’ ethnicity. They assumed the populace was homogenous and that in all ways that mattered, everyone in the Visigothic kingdom was to be considered a ‘Goth’. In place of Roman and Gothic, other identities came to be more salient, including factional loyalties between contenders for the throne and orthodox Christian identity in contrast with Jewish faith, practice, and ancestry.

The prime instigators of change this time, as in the 580s, were a father-son pair: the kings Chindaswinth and Recceswinth. This chapter will begin with them, including the church councils held under their reigns and the law code they compiled, known to us as the Visigothic Code. The second part of the chapter will examine the language of church councils from the year 666 on and of laws added to the Visigothic Code by Wamba, Ervig, and Egica. Finally, the evidence for all of sixth- and seventh-century Spain will be brought together into a coherent picture of the transformation of Romans to Visigoths to simply ‘our people’.

Chindaswinth, Recceswinth, and Visigothic Law

King Chindaswinth (r. 641-653) came to power at an old age after Gothic nobles deposed the previous king. His attempts to assert his authority included suppressing – and even killing – some elements of the nobility in favour of those loyal to him and enacting laws relating to treason and conspiracy. In 649, he made his son Recceswinth (r. 649-672) co-king, and together they undertook an extensive overhaul of the laws of the kingdom.

As in the Visigothic kingdom, a new political identity developed in the Merovingian kingdoms of the Franks during the sixth and seventh centuries. By the seventh century, political Frankishness had developed to the point that people of any background could identify with it, usually without renouncing their other identities. Unlike in Spain, however, Frankish political identity did not become so all-encompassing as to eliminate Roman and other identities from the map. In part because of continued geographical separation which created Frankish (north), Roman (south), Burgundian (Rhône valley) and other enclaves, and in part because of official sanction of continued ethnic difference in the Lex Ribuaria and later law codes, Merovingian society developed an environment in which at least two layers of identity remained especially salient and mutually compatible. A diverse number of ethnic identities were still expressed and even encouraged, overlaid by a single Frankish political identity that unified inhabitants under the common banner of the Frankish kings as their subjects and participants in a kingdom-wide society.

To understand why Gaul was different, we need to look at the establishment and growth of the Merovingian kingdoms. When the Western Roman Empire ceased to be in 476 – or 480 – Gaul had already been settled and governed by ‘barbarians’ for some time. The Visigoths had been imperial federates in Aquitaine in southern Gaul since 418, and the Burgundians in the Rhône valley since c. 440. The Franks were never settled by treaty on Roman territory and gradually entered northern Gaul from the north and east. Clovis became king of a small region in 481 and began a campaign of conquest, first lands held by other Franks, then those held by their neighbours. In 507, he defeated Alaric II, the king of the Visigoths, at Vouillé and took most of his territory in Gaul, pushing the Visigoths firmly into Spain, as we have seen. Around the same time, Clovis converted both himself and many of his people to Catholicism. Thus religious unity came early enough to the Frankish kingdoms that divisions along these lines never became problematic the way they did in Iberia.

Isidore and John, in the late sixth and early seventh centuries, could describe contemporary Goths in a religious sense as Arians or new Catholics, in a political sense as subjects of the king, and in an ancestral sense as descending from earlier Goths. All of these options for identifying as Gothic enjoyed widespread currency at this time in Spain. This does not mean, however, that they all remained equally prevalent – and in fact, they did not. The sources for the first half of the seventh century reveal significant shifts in the use of each of these modes of identification.

Once Arianism was banned in 589, religious Gothicness came to be associated instead with Catholicism, and both Isidore and the monarchy endorsed this change. What prevailed alongside it was the political element of Gothic identity – again actively promoted. With these subjects united on religious terms, it became easier to envision them as a cohesive unit on political terms as well. The potential repertoire for identifying as Gothic had expanded and strengthened, and this period saw deliberate encouragement of all residents to redefine themselves as Goths.

This chapter follows the traces of this conscious linkage of Gothicness with Catholic faith and political loyalty. Isidore of Seville’s historical writings, which we have already encountered, offer considerable insight into the ways narrative could be put to work for the goal of common identity. In his role as a bishop, he had enormous influence over church policy in this area, as can be seen in the Fourth Council of Toledo. He was also very influential over fellow bishops and scholars like Braulio of Zaragoza, who continued his efforts in the following decades. Two other councils held in the years immediately following his death (Toledo V and VI) use the language and ideas set forth in Isidore’s time and set out the roles good kings should play in managing the unity of Visigothic society. By examining all of these sources, we will see the development of a common message during the mid-seventh century that all loyal, Catholic subjects could claim Gothic identity on both a religious and a political level.