Waiting for the Barbarians? The Notion of the Stranger-King among the Ostrogoths and Visigoths

This chapter will discuss how the Ostrogothic and Visigothic rulers of Italy and Iberia embedded their foreign identity as a stranger-group onto the Italian and Iberian peninsulas in order to legitimise their rule over the region. The early Ostrogothic and Visigothic kings were representatives of an ethnic and religious minority in the lands they ruled, yet the fortunes of the respective kingdoms were wildly different. In Italy, King Theoderic's firm assertion of Ostrogothic separateness from their Roman subjects helped allow the resurgent Byzantines to ultimately dismantle his kingdom within a few decades of his death. But in Iberia, where the Byzantines attempted a “mini-reconquista” during the 550s CE, the Visigothic monarchy responded to this challenge by creating a new “vision” of the peninsula which, while not abandoning a Gothic identity, also sought to create a new image at the expense of East Roman claims to be its legitimate rulers. Visigothic rule was presented as both new and different, therefore, drawing on many of the legitimising aspects of stranger-kingship. It was both justified as being the natural culmination of Iberian history and also different as their power became paradoxically rooted in its familiarity. The evolving nature of this response is explored in this chapter through the policies of King Leovigild and King Reccared in particular, but also through the historical writings of the Hispano-Roman Isidore of Seville, whose writings present us with a developed literary version of this project.