Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (8 page)

Nonetheless, despite the efforts of the Vouglaisiens and the Rennains – not to be confused with the Rennois of Rennes-les-Bains – the modern French nation has never really warmed to the Visigoths. Their trail is far stronger in Spain than in the country where their statehood began. This is only to be expected. After the retreat from Aquitania, the Visigoths established themselves as the dominant element in Iberia. Their second realm, the Kingdom of Toledo, lasted twice as long as the Kingdom of Tolosa, and has penetrated deeply into modern Spanish consciousness.
³⁶
The Visigothic kings, including the monarchs of Tolosa, are honoured by statues in Madrid,
*
but not in Toulouse.

Some imaginative method needs to be devised, therefore, for reclaiming the lost Visigothic culture of the Aquitanian era. It might be possible, for example, to work backwards from the known realia of Visigothic Spain. After all, the religious and artistic practices which the Visigoths would have taken with them from Aquitania were dominant in parts of Iberia until the late sixth century; the Gothic speech, which Sidonius heard in Tolosa, held its own in Toledo until the seventh century; and the Visigoths’ political culture as first defined by Euric continued to evolve until the eighth century. Of course, great care is needed. Not everything that bears the Visigothic label, like Visigothic Chant or Visigothic Script, derives from the Visigoths. And the Iberian cultural soil into which Visigothic customs were transplanted, though similarly Romanized, was not identical to that of Gallia Aquitania.

Even so, there are several leads to work on. In ecclesiastical architecture, the exquisite simplicity of the Visigothic church of San Pedro de la Nava at Zamora could well have had parallels in post-Roman Gaul. Its surviving horseshoe arches and tunnel vaulting were clearly inspired by something that went before it. The symbolism and style of Visigothic sacred art has Byzantine roots and would also have passed through Tolosa. The influence of Gothic language on the indigenous population, though limited, would have been much the same on both sides of the Pyrenees. Words such as
suppa
(soup) or
bank
(bench) belong to the long list of Germanisms adopted by the neo-Latin idioms.
³⁷
And, since prayers learned in childhood are the ones remembered longest, we can plausibly assume that the Gothic form of the Lord’s Prayer, as recited at every stage of the Visigoths’ journey from the Danube to the Douro, was also recited devoutly at Nostra Domina Daurata:

*

The fate of the Kingdom of Tolosa naturally prompts reflections about ‘alternative history’. What would have happened if Clovis had been defeated, and the Visigoths had won? It was quite possible for them to have done so. The alternative
was
a possibility, and it opens up vistas of an unrealized future. On the eve of the Battle of Vouillé, the Franks controlled perhaps one-third of post-Roman Gaul. The Visigoths, Arian Christians, were becoming overlords of Iberia as well as southern Gaul, and were linked to the Ostrogoths in Italy. The bishop of Rome enjoyed no special position among the five patriarchs of Christendom, and by far the larger part of Europe remained pagan. Had Alaric II fought off Clovis, it is entirely realistic to envisage Western Europe dominated by a pan-Gothic hegemony, while a diminished Roman Church retreated before the double advance of Arianism and Byzantine Orthodoxy. In which case, France may never have come into being, or may have developed somewhere else or in a different way. The future power of the papacy, which the Franks were destined to promote, may not have come about. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is perfectly predictable.

Yet the endless alternative scenarios, which exist at every stage of history, do not warrant too much attention. The past is not a board game that can be played and replayed at will. What happened happened. What didn’t, didn’t. Clovis the Frank
did
kill Alaric the Visigoth. The Franks drove out the Visigoths, and not vice versa. It is not unreasonable to maintain, therefore, that ‘The history of France began at Vouillé’.

The story of the ‘post-Roman twilight’ is complicated enough as it is. Historians have to take account of the sheer diversity of the ‘barbarians’, and hence of the richly polycultural and multi-ethnic flavour of their intermingling with settled populations. Numerous unexpected twists and turns occurred in their interactions. Above all, the timescale was enormous. The gap between the collapse of the Western Empire in 476 and the emergence of recognizable modern states like France or England spans five hundred years at least. The post-Roman twilight lasted twice as long as the Western Empire itself.

In this respect, the example of the Visigoths serves as a case study for ‘Barbarian Europe’ as a whole. Their sojourn in Aquitania was but one stop on a very long road. Like their cousins, the Ostrogoths and the Lombards, and their sometime neighbours the Burgundians, they belonged to an ethnic and linguistic sub-group which has totally died out. Their customs and speech were not close to Frankish, which was the progenitor of modern Dutch and Flemish and which provided the catalyst for transforming Gallo-Roman Latin into Old French. It is unlikely that Alaric II could have conversed with Clovis at Amboise without resorting either to Latin or to an interpreter. What is more, the Visigoths encountered many other ‘barbarians’ on the road, no doubt ‘contaminating’ their language, their culture and their gene pool in the process. Among them, the Vandals were East Germanic, the Suevi or ‘Swabians’ were Central Germanic, the Huns were Turkic, and the Alans were Iranic (like the modern Ossetians).
³⁹

Popular memory-making plays many tricks. One of them may be called ‘the foreshortening of time’. Peering back into the past, contemporary Europeans see modern history in the foreground, medieval history in the middle distance, and the post-Roman twilight as a faint strip along the far horizon. Figures like Alaric or Clovis remain distant, faceless specks, unless plucked from their historical setting, magnified, dressed up and lionized for reasons of latter-day politics or national pride. Clovis I, king of the Franks, the victor of Vouillé, is commemorated by a magnificent tomb in the Parisian abbey of St Denis. Alaric II, whom Clovis killed, had ruled over a larger realm than that of the Franks. Yet he has no known grave, no modern monument.

Historical memory spurns even-handedness. The Visigoths must have known it. In their wisdom, they had buried their leaders in a traditional way which honoured the dead but which left no trace. The sepulchre of Alaric I, ‘the Ruler of All’, was washed into the sands of the sea long before his successors founded the Kingdom of Tolosa. No one but an occasional German Romantic cares to recall the moment:

Nächtlich am Busento lispeln

Bei Cosenza dumpfe Lieder.

Aus den Wassern schallt es Antwort

Und in Wirbeln klingt es wieder
.

(‘Mournful songs whisper in the night / near Cosenza, along Busento’s banks. / The waters murmur their answer, / and the whirlpools resound with singing.’)
⁴⁰

*
Arius of Alexandria (d. 336), the principal heresiarch of the fourth century, was condemned by the Church Council of Nicaea for denying the full divinity of Christ and hence the prevailing view on the nature of the Trinity. After Nicaea, his teaching was banned by the imperial authorities.

*
Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople in 428–31, the principal heresiarch of the fifth century, was condemned by the Council of Ephesus for holding that Christ’s nature was equally human and divine.

*
An unconfirmed site usually located in the vicinity of Châlons-en-Champagne.

*
Next to the Royal Palace in the Plaze de Oriente.

Alt Clud

Kingdom of the Rock

(Fifth to Twelfth Centuries)

I

Dumbarton Rock is not one of Britain’s premier historical sites. It does not figure in Britain’s top fifty places to visit. It is not classed in the same league as Stonehenge or Hampton Court, or its more famous Scottish neighbours, Stirling and Edinburgh. If people know it at all, they rate it as little more than a striking local landmark.

Yet modest Dumbarton is one of those special places that have the power to conjure up the stark contrast between what is and what once was. The past is not only a foreign country that we half knew existed; it is hiding another concealed country behind it, and behind that one, another, and another – like a set of Russian
matryoshki
, in which larger dolls conceal smaller. Certainly, the surface is not a reliable guide to what lies underneath. In this case, the surface exhibits a country which we know as Scotland. Another country called England lies beyond the Borders. But Dumbarton beckons us to a world that flourished before England or Scotland had been invented.

Geologically, Dumbarton Rock is just a volcanic plug, the residual core of a prehistoric volcano whose outer cone has been washed away by erosion over aeons. Ever since the last Ice Age, it has protruded through the floodplain on the north bank of the Firth of Clyde at the point where the River Leven flows down from the Highlands. Strategically, it has had immense importance. For centuries it dominated the traffic on the Firth, guarding the gateway to the country’s heartland. It deterred the invaders and intruders who sought to sail upriver from the Irish Sea, and it sheltered all those who awaited a fair wind or an ebb tide to take them downstream to the ocean. To the south, on the opposite bank, lie Paisley, Greenock and Gourock, the first of which is the site of a magnificent medieval abbey. To the east sprawls industrial Clydebank, and beyond that the great city of Glasgow. The Kilpatrick Hills and the ‘Bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond’ rise to the north. To the west, as the Firth broadens out into an imposing estuary, islands great and small come into view, Bute, Arran and Ailsa Craig, and in the far haze the desolate Mull of Kintyre. Nothing, one might believe, could be more Scottish.

The position of Dumbarton Rock can be best appreciated from the air as one lands at Glasgow Airport. The main flight path brings planes in from the north, over the green and bracken-coloured braes towards the point on the Clyde where the narrow stream ends and the Firth begins. Looking from the right-hand window of the plane, one passes close to the modern Clyde suspension bridge, and enjoys a grandstand view of the shimmering waters beyond. The view is particularly dramatic on a fine summer’s evening. The red glow of the sunset outlines the distant lochs and islands. The broad expanse of the Firth shines silver, and the twin peaks of the Rock stand out against the light like a pair of Egyptian pyramids.
¹