We saw in the article "How unfair the RAE is with Goths, Barbarians and Vandals" the semantic injustices that these Germanic peoples have suffered, and today we have to address the Morbo Gothorum , an endemic disease of these peoples that turned being a king into a risky profession. The fact of being an elective and not hereditary monarchy, which divided its people into factions and led to confrontations, fueled a dangerous passion for regicides. So, make yourselves comfortable because we start a trilogy of the list of the gothic kings in its criminal version.
Alaric enters Rome
We will start with Ataúlfo , considered the first Hispanic king. In 410 Alaric I he had sacked Rome and had in his possession Gala Placidia , a woman with an enviable family tree:she was the daughter of Theodosius I the Great, and her stepbrothers, on her father's side, were Honorius , Western Roman Emperor, and Arcadius , Eastern Roman Emperor. Blue blood no, next. When Alaric died, the Visigoths elected his brother-in-law Ataúlfo as king, who, from the beginning, was involved in power struggles for the Roman purple. And although he was initially successful in betting on Honorius, in Rome loyalty was a joke in bad taste and he was shorn. The Visigoths had to flee and crossed the Pyrenees to take refuge in Hispania. But Ataúlfo did not leave alone, he took his wife, Gala Placidia, with him. Although many see in this marriage an attempt by the Visigoth to marry the transmitter of dynastic legitimacy, I want to believe, and many historians believe the same, that in that union there was more love than politics. And what could have been an idyllic life for the couple with their son Teodosio on the beach of Barceloneta, exploded into the air and fell apart. The British poet Ernest Dowson once said “They don't last long, the days of wine and roses ”. His son died as a child and Ataúlfo was attacked from behind by a certain Dubius and seriously wounded. There are several versions of why he did it:some say that it was a personal insult and others that he was a service hired by Sigerico , the leader of another Gothic faction, or even by Honorius, as revenge for having kidnapped his sister. One way or another, in 415 our first Gothic king died, but he still had time, while he was on his deathbed, to designate his brother Walia as his successor. and make him promise to return Gala to her brother, since he feared for his life. Ataúlfo should not have remembered that appointing a successor is very relative in the world of the Goths.
Ataulf
And who succeeded Ataúlfo? Well, the conspirator Sigeric . In his first week as king he dedicated himself to eliminating the competition (he killed the children that Ataúlfo had had with her first wife), ordered our beloved Gala to be flogged and made her walk barefoot for dozens of kilometers. On his eighth day as king… he was the last. Ataúlfo's supporters and his brother Walia got fed up with so much gratuitous cruelty and assassinated him, electing Walia king. . He was able to fulfill the last wish of his brother and Gala was returned to Rome.
We will let Walia die in peace and jump to 451. In this year the Battle of the Catalan Fields took place. , in northern France, which faced a coalition of Romans, led by General Flavius Aetius , and Visigoths, with King Theodoric I to the front, against Attila's Huns. In that confrontation Theodoric died, and on the same battlefield, with hardly any time to wipe the blood from his face, his son Turismundo was raised on the shield and proclaimed king. , one of those warriors you always want to have on your team. Well, despite being respected by the Gothic community, just two years later he was assassinated in a plot concocted by Teodorico and Frederick . Do you know who these characters were? Well, his own brothers. There was no need to look for foreign factions, he had enemies in his own house. In the taverns of the time it was said that Aetius himself had warmed the brothers' heads to have the Visigoths confronted and not get on the hump. Appointed king to Theodoric II .
And how did Teodorico do? Well, he suffered in his own flesh the saying "he who kills with iron, dies with iron." He did not do badly at first, he allied himself with the Roman emperor Valentinian III and had some military successes, but he was so worried about what was happening in Rome that he neglected his own house and the Galician Swabians got on his ass. beards. There came a time when he had so many open fronts that he had no choice but to agree with the Swabians, with the Franks and, furthermore, continue as a colleague with the emperor on duty. That was a sign of weakness that the Gothic nobility was not going to consent to, and they paid him with their own coin. In 466, Euric , the only living brother of his and who until now had remained anonymous (Frederico had died in battle), he sent him with his Arian God Father and, by the way, not a Trinitarian. In the Arian religion, God was God and Jesus Christ, as a good son, asked for his pay on Sundays and permission to go out until 12 at night.
Eurico
We will jump half a century and believe that even Amalric , despite some more deaths in "strange circumstances", our protagonists died in battle or due to natural causes. This new Visigothic king decided to use the old method of arranged marriage to make peace with the Franks. So, he married Clotilde , the daughter of the great King of the Franks Clovis , the founder of the Merovingian dynasty. Although this type of marriage may be strange, not because of being arranged but because the contracting parties professed different religions -remember that Amalric was an Arian and Clotilde was a Catholic-, they were frequent at this time. In fact, Clovis was an Arian and it was his wife, also called Clotilde - well, Saint Clotilde, because she was canonized - who convinced him to convert to Catholicism. And in this new marriage there was also an attempt by one of the parties to convert the other, but not with good words or theological reasoning... but by force and constant humiliation. Guess who was the pimp on duty? Indeed, Amalric. He tried it actively and passively, especially actively, but Clotilde did not give in and she continued to cling to Catholicism. The news of those humiliations reached the other side of the Pyrenees and the Franks broke the pact and gave the Visigoths a run for their money. Amalric managed to get out of the battle alive and fled to Barcelona. And here we have, as almost always, two versions of his murder -because as you intuited, he was also murdered-. One blames a Frank named Bessón , as revenge for the treatment he gave his compatriot and sister of faith, and that he had done it with the connivance of the Goths - as if seeing him coming, sword in hand, they had started to look at the sky whistling, and that did not go with them-; and, the second, points to a hitman paid by Teudis . Logically, this Teudis will be the next Gothic king.