The Visigoths were energetic and ambitious lawmakers. Their enthusiasm for making rules appears vividly in two separate areas: the canons of church councils and the corpus of rules gathered in the Visigothic Code. These sources constitute the most important surviving evidence for our understanding of the political, social, and religious world of the Iberian peninsula from the fifth century to the Muslim conquest in 711. Only the works of Visigothic churchmen and intellectuals such as Isidore of Seville and Julian of Toledo rival them in significance. Early medieval Europe witnessed the creation of law codes in other regions ( the Lombard Laws, the Laws of the Salian Franks, or the Burgundian Code), but the Visigothic Code is more detailed, more extensive, and more Romanized than its contemporaries. This introduction will describe the gradual evolution of the Visigothic Code and will suggest some of the ways in which the Code informs our understanding of Visigothic Spain. For more information on the legislative activity of Visigothic church councils, see "Law in Visigothic Spain II: Councils."
King Euric issued one of the earliest Germanic law codes in Europe in the late fifth century, before most of the Visigothic population had migrated southward into the Iberian peninsula. Euric's code does not survive, but his lawmaking activity set an important precedent. As early as 506, King Alaric II issued his Breviary or Lex romana visigothorum. This collection was composed largely of rules drawn from the Theodosian Code and was meant to be applied only to the Visigothic king's Roman subjects.
The next major step in the history of Visigothic legislation came under King Leovgild. Sometime in the late sixth century, Leovgild carried out a thorough revision of Euric's code. Isidore of Seville described Leovgild's project in his Historia gothorum. According to Isidore, Leovgild sought to eliminate unnecessary rules from Euric's Code, to correct confusing rules, and to add news rules as conditions demanded.
Leovgild's Code does not survive, but more than 300 of its rules formed the foundation of the Code of King Recceswinth, promulgated in 654. Leovgild's Code became known as the Book of Judges (the Forum Iudicum or later, in Castilian, Fuero Juzgo). Recceswinth's father and predecessor, King Chindaswinth, had initiated the wholesale overhaul of the earlier Code. Some evidence suggests that King Chindaswinth promulgated a revision of the Code in his reign, but no such version survives. Recceswinth's Code, promulgated a few years after Chindaswinth's death, marked the next significant achievement in Visigothic lawmaking. Aside from the revisions and additions Recceswinth and his advisors made, the Forum Iudicum was significant because it mandated that this single body of rules be applied to all the Visigothic king's subjects, both Romans and Visigoths. The Forum Iudicum explicitly prohibited the use of any other law code. While the earliest Visigothic law had adhered to the principle of the personality of the law (that is, different legal regimes applied to different ethnic groups), by the time of the promulgation of Recceswinth's Code, the law was territorial; it applied to every inhabitant of the Visigothic kingdom.
King Erwig undertook a further revision of the Code a few decades later when he asked the bishops of the Twelfth Council of Toledo to correct errors in the Code. The result of their labors was published in 681. Later kings, such as Egica or Witiza, continued to tweak the Code, adding scattered rules as they saw fit, but Erwig's recension was the final significant revision of the Code.
The above summary of Visigothic legislative activity will have already suggested that the Code was not the product of a single burst of legislative energy by like-minded lawmakers. On the contrary, the Code evolved gradually over the course of the seventh century. Rules in the Code are often labeled with the names of kings who promulgated them, and these labels give us a sense of the shifting priorities of Visigothic rulers.
The final product of all these overlapping layers of lawmaking activity is a vast, impressive, but not always consistent body of rules related to every aspect of social, political, economic, and religious life. These rules are valuable sources of information about many features of life in Visigothic Spain. They reflect certain long-term continuities in Roman institutions related to the administration of justice and taxes. They reveal the gradual amalgamation of Germanic and Roman legal traditions. Aside from institutional continuity and change, the rules tell us something about social, religious, and ethnic divisions. Many of the rules reflect legislators' concern about how Romans and Goths, Christians and Jews, slaves and freemen should live and work together. They afford rare glimpses into the contours of Visigothic families. The Code includes valuable information about kingship and rule. Some rules make impressive assertions of the prerogatives of royal power, while others rules indicate that bishops and nobles strove to limit royal power or, at the very least, to prevents its arbitrary abuse.
While the Visigothic Code affords a great deal of evidence about life in Visigoth Spain, the Code is not always easy to interpret. On the most general level, legislative projects always reflect an ideal and it is hard to know how closely the realities of daily life in Visigothic Spain conformed to the ideal portrayed in the Code. One cannot say with certainty whether the opinions and concerns expressed by Visigothic lawmakers were widely held by the peninsula's inhabitants or whether these were merely the concerns of a small elite. Mechanisms for enforcing the law lagged far behind the ability to legislate throughout medieval Europe, and things on the Iberian peninsula were no different. In other words, it is hard to know what effect these rules had in practice. In some cases, evidence suggests that Visigothic rulers were unwilling or unable to enforce at least some of the Code's rules. The Visigothic Code provides the best mirror we have of Visigothic society, but it is a very imperfect one.
The Visigothic Code contains nearly 600 rules in 12 books. The books are further broken down into chapters and titles. For the Medieval Spains, I have organized selections from the Code into five sections. These five sections of rules from the Code should dramatize the range of concerns shown by Visigothic lawmakers. At the same time, they shed light on different aspects of life in Visigothic Spain.
Two books of the Code appear here in their entirety: Book I and Book XII.
The first book of the Code is short but significant. It deals with the nature of law and the obligations of lawmakers. In some ways, Visigothic lawmakers approached the creation of a Code as a more abstract problem than their contemporaries. In other words, while other early medieval law codes include rules about property damage or personal injuries, no other code includes the sort of theoretical reflections on the nature of the law that are found in Book I of the Visigothic Code. The first book thus shows that Visigothic rulers and intellectuals saw lawmaking as a key component of social and political order.
The Code's final book is considerably longer and deals with a very different set of concerns. The book includes regulations related to religious orthodoxy and the most notorious element of Visigothic legislation: a somewhat inconsistent but always vitriolic corpus of rules related to Jews. The section reflects some of the distinct tenor of Visigothic society and, in an indirect fashion, suggest the importance of Jewish communities in Visigothic Spain. Kings like Sisebut strove to prevent Jews from owning Christian slaves. Jews who managed to convert Christians to Judaism were subject to capital punishment and the forfeiture of all their property. Visigoth lawmakers varied in their attitudes toward these questions. Aside from telling us something about the varieties of intolerance exhibited by Visigothic elites, the rules in Book XII are of broader historical interest for other reasons. In the history of European legislation constraining and persecuting Jews, the Code provides probably the earliest and most consistently hostile treatment. The rules in Book XII also played an important role in the persecution of Iberian Jews in the later Middle Ages. In the fifteenth century, the Catholic monarchs and their advisors noted approvingly the concern for orthodoxy expressed in Book XII. Some 800 years after the legislation was originally drafted, Ferdinand and Isabella found a venerable legal mandate for their own project, to expel Jews from Spain.
Three remaining selections are composed of rules drawn from different books in the Code. These are arranged around three themes: property, justice, and family.
The selection of rules dealing with property touches on testamentary procedure, succession, and the types of property. These rules are of interest in their own right because they tell us something about the economy of Visigothic Spain, but they are also important because they were influential long after the fall of the Visigothic kingdom. Tenth- and eleventh-century scribes in Christian Spain paid considerable attention to Visigothic rules related to property. These rules enjoyed second lives, as litigants in Catalonia and Leon regularly appealed to rules governing gifts, testamentary procedure, ecclesiastical property, and litigation.
A selection of rules related to the administration of justice touches on crime, the organization of courts, and proofs. The Code established penalties for a range of different crimes, including theft, injury, rape, murder. Like many other early medieval codes, the penalties applied for infractions varied according to the identity of the accused. Romans and Goths were only gradually subjected to the same rules. The rich and noble were subject to different legal sanctions than were slaves, freedmen, or the poor. Inferiores personae and slaves were subject to corporal penalties (lashing, mutilation, execution) while their social superiors would pay fines if guilty of the same infractions.
A final section is composed of a cross-section of laws related to family life. These rules reveal some of the contours of Visigothic families. They include rules about marriage, dowry, and the mutual obligations of parents and children.
