Hello everyone, welcome to a new video of the Palarq Foundation. Today I want to talk to you about the Visigoths, a people who, although initially settled in other lands, ended up entering the Iberian Peninsula, where they came to create a unified kingdom. Therefore, we will delve into their history, seeing how they formed their kingdom after their arrival in the Peninsula, with the peoples who had to fight, we will meet some of the most important kings and we will see how a series of political problems ended up producing the end of the kingdom. and with it the entry of Muslims into the Iberian Peninsula, creating the time of Al-Andalus. And that's what we'll talk about today. Let's go there! INTRO Starting in the 5th century, several peoples from northern Europe burst into Hispania, coinciding with the final crisis of the Roman Empire. That was the beginning of a process that ended with the Visigoths establishing a kingdom in Hispania, which lasted until the Muslim invasion in 711 AD Thus, from the 3rd to the 5th century, various Germanic peoples, described as "barbarians" by the Romans They arrived in Hispania, some towns that occupied many areas, without encountering much resistance, taking advantage of the fact that the Roman Empire was in crisis. And it is that only the province of Tarraconense remained in the power of the Roman Empire. And with the aim of recovering the lost domain in the Iberian Peninsula, the Roman Empire agreed with the Gothic king Walia, who would be in charge of defending the rights of Rome against these Germanic tribes. This is how in the year 416 the Visigoths entered the Iberian Peninsula as allies of Rome, and they did so by defeating the Alans and part of the Vandals, with which the Roman Empire regained control of the most Romanized regions, which was the Bética and the south of Tarraconense. And this is how the history of the Visigoths in the Peninsula begins, establishing the Visigothic Kingdom of Tolosa first, as a federated state within the Roman Empire, and from 476 as an independent Visigothic kingdom. And from that time until the year 711, much of the Iberian peninsula was under Visigoth control. And we can find vestiges of this period, in many archaeological sites. Visigoth culture and architecture developed from the 5th century to the beginning of the 8th, within the period called Late Antiquity, a transition between the Ancient Age and the Middle Ages. Although the Visigoths did not initially have their own architecture, we could speak of buildings built on the Iberian Peninsula during the Gothic monarchy. The archeology of the Visigothic period in Hispania has focused, for a long time, on the study of the so-called "Visigothic necropolis". In the first half of the 20th century, a series of important funerary ensembles were discovered and exhumed that have supported what is known as the “Visigothic thesis”. All these necropolises were considered and interpreted as Visigothic necropolises, therefore, corresponding to the burial places of the Visigoths in the Iberian Peninsula. The new interpretative currents in the study of the late ancient and early medieval funerary world in Spain, together with the study of more reliable stratigraphic contexts, have led in recent years to the present, to a rethinking of the interpretation of these cemeteries, going from interpreting them as the evidence of the presence of individuals of foreign origin, who show immutable ethnic characters over time, but, on the contrary, as the result of a long process of acculturation – with a clear influence from the Roman world, with which all the barbarian peoples had been permanently in contact – which materializes in the diversity of funerary uses and customs and, logically, in clothing, decorative elements and funerary deposits, which we find in burials from the 5th to the beginning of the 8th centuries. And well, Visigothic necropolises have been found in many places on the peninsula, such as Vicálvaro de Loranca in Madrid, Arroyo de la Luz in Cáceres, El Carpio de Tajo in Toledo, Malagón in Ciudad Real, or Gandía in Valencia. In addition, there are a large number of high medieval monuments in cities such as Toledo, and hermitages or monasteries built during this period. In the year 711, Visigoth Hispania came to an end, Muslim domination began, and this change in society is perfectly recorded in the archaeological sites. But we'll talk about this period another day. And if you join us, we can continue investigating any of these topics in more videos. So if you are interested in continuing to dig into our past, don't miss the next videos, so don't forget to subscribe, hit the bell to receive notifications and follow us on the Palarq Foundation's social networks. oh! And take a look at our website, there you will find the latest archeology and paleontology news. We invite you to join us on this exciting journey throughout our history. Many thanks!