The Gothic king Leovigild (519-586) faced the most terrible dilemma that a human being can face: kill one son to save the other? The historian José Soto Chica (Santa Fe, Granada, 52 years old) in Leovigild. King of the Hispanics (Desperta Ferro, 2023) remembers that this monarch was, “at the same time as a great military winner, a failed father,” which forever marked his life. He was born in the middle of a world of extreme violence, violence that he used, in turn, against those who resisted him. He expanded the kingdom of Hispania to limits never known, he enriched it, he wrote laws that made Goths and Hispano-Romans equal, he brought prosperity and wealth, but back home he only found pain, contempt and betrayal. “Leovigildo, probably during all the years of his life, had to be living a double life: that of the warrior leader who rides along with his host and who is close to his men, and that of the untouchable sovereign”, but who suffered “ “a marriage that was nothing more than a challenge, a labyrinth and a deadly game.” His family life was Shakespeare's Hamlet's doubt—to be or not to be—at its finest.
“Leovigild was more than just an aggressive and ambitious monarch, with success on the battlefield and ability to govern. Above all, because his actions and achievements resulted in the construction of something new in the until then wild and chaotic Hispania. That something new manifested itself powerfully in the value of the unity with which he endowed his kingdom,” writes Soto Chica.
He was an essentially violent man, because his time was a time singularly marked by war and extreme rudeness, in which life was easily lost and in which survival itself implied the annihilation of the enemy and even of a potential rival.
Two people will mark his 18 years of reign: his second wife, the conspiratorial and ambitious Gosvinta – “without whom the history of the Visigoths in the second half of the 6th century cannot be explained – and his first-born, Hermenegild. “That the marriage lasted, or rather, that Leovigild or Gosvinta failed to get rid of each other was more a matter of balance of power than of desire or bonhomie. It was she who became the basis, the heart of his power and who soon made him, a Goth born and raised in Gaul, a king, the first king of the Hispanics,” as the Gallo-Roman historian Gregorio defined him. of Tours (538-594).
But Leovigild was not only a brutal and skilled warrior, as well as an excellent strategist and tactician, but he was also a politician capable of understanding the usefulness of symbols and titles, in short, the essence of the legitimation of power. He directed a “project that both Hispano-Romans and Goths could join equally, even if they did not yet share the same faith.” “And so it was that the cross and the unity of Spania formed a powerful ideal during the years that extended to the end of the kingdom in 711.”
He ruled the largest kingdom in the West, with the creation, maintenance and command of an always triumphant army, the establishment of a well-oiled fiscal system, the constitution of a treasury, a healthy and full treasury, the updating, adaptation and modernization of a legislative corpus and effective justice, the articulation of a civil service capable of assisting the government of a kingdom in permanent expansion.
But the danger was at home. In 579, Hermenegild, encouraged by his stepmother Gosvinta, began to show clear signs that he no longer obeyed his father. He took up arms against him. But Leovigildo did not act as a warlord in this case, but as a betrayed father: he was paralyzed by bewilderment and pain. “In 580, the court of Toledo became a cold, sharp, dangerous place in which Gosvinta and Leovigildo watched each other, stalked each other, and intimidated each other…”
Finally, after months of unhealed pain, he acted like a wounded king. He declared all-out war on his firstborn. He defeated him and he took refuge in a church outside the walls of Córdoba. “Embracing the altar, with a loud voice, he shouted: 'May my father not come upon me, for it is impious for a son to kill his father or for a father to kill his children. This was exclaimed by the one who a year before, at the Betis ford, in Osset [Sevilla]”He plotted a plot to get his father's head.” Leovigild forgave him and sent him into exile. “The king of the Hispanics seemed to still harbor in his stony heart a spark of tenacious and destined hope. She would punish his son, of course: she would deprive him of the kingdom and humiliate him, but she would not raise her hand against him.
Leovigildo was not thinking of killing his son, because that would turn the latter into a martyr for the Church – Hermenegildo professed Catholicism as opposed to his father's Arianism – and him, into an angry and demonic heretic. But he also realized that Hermenegildo “was too similar to him not to pose an ominous and constant danger to his other youngest son, Recaredo. He was thus forced to the most devastating of situations: deciding which of the offspring should survive. The one who had been faithful to him and would be his heir, Recaredo, or the one who had waged war seeking to collect his blood in order to sit on the throne or snatch part of the kingdom? Hermenegildo definitely constituted a danger. He was to be eliminated.
When Leovigild died in the year 586, “he left behind him a powerful and orderly kingdom in which the Goths and Hispano-Romans were governed by the same law and in which his will had been imposed from the beginning. finis terrae from the now subject Suebi, to the Rhône River of the ancient Gauls and from the Cantabrian Sea, to the border with the new Roman Spania. If Leovigild had been king in contemporary Britain or Scandinavia, he would have been a legend. But he was king in Hispania and his deeds are history.” Not like Hamlet.
Leovigild. King of the Hispanics
José Soto Chica
Wake up Ferro, 2023
352 pages, 23.70 euros
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