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In the beginnings of the IV century, three barbarous populations assaulted Spain: two
were German, the Suevi and the Vandals, and the other, the Alans, Iranian. In the
distribution that they made, the Alans occupied Lusitania and part of Beatica, including the
region of the Village of Turdes: reached to be in 409 and, in the eight years that they attained
to stay in the region, their presence is reduced to the usufruct in the own benefit of the
taxation correspondent to the Roman functionaries and the periodic looting of some villages.
To face the invasion, the Roman General Constantius, in the name of the Emperor Honorius,
contracts the King Wallia of the Visigoths through a foedus signed in the year 416: by this
treaty the Visigoths agreed to fight, in quality of federated of the Empire, against the
barbarians that occupy Spain, receiving in turn lands to establish in the South of the Gaul, in
the Tarraconensis and in the Narbonensis. The Alans were rapidly annihilated, while the
Vandals didn't realize incursions to the Beatica yet until they finally abandoned the peninsula
to Africa.
When in 476 the Heruli Odoacer deposes the Roman Emperor Augustulus, giving end to
the Western Roman Empire, from five years ago that the Visigothic King Euric was occupying
Spain. This time, the Visigoths entered to finish with the Suevis, in fulfillment of the foedus of
the year 418, but they would not leave for the next two hundred years.
The permanent presence of the Visigoths in Spain not affected in a determinant manner
the lives of the Hispanic-Romans, except in the case of the owners of great estates latifundiums
that were obeyed by the foedus to distribute their lands with the German «guests». Such was
the case of the Lords of Tharsis, when they had to host a Visigothic family named Valter and
to give them one third of the terra dominicata and two thirds of the terra indominicata. But
after this expropriation, that constituted a fair payment for the tranquility that the Visigoths
family assured in front of the recent invasions, all continued as the days of the Roman Empire:
only the destiny of taxes had changed, which was not Roman anymore but more closer to the
Toledo; the amount and the periodicity of the exaction, and even the collector functionaries,
were the same that in the Roman Empire.
Three fundamental points separated from a beginning the Visigoths and the Hispanic-
Romans: A law that prohibited the marriages between Goths and Hispanic-Romans, the
religious difference, and the numeric proportion between both populations. The first was
solved in the year 580 with the annulment of the law, remaining opened the barrier that
impeded to mix both populations: since then, Valter's family integrates with many marriages to
the House of Tharsis, remained restoring the primitive patrimony of the Lords of Tharsis.
The second point means that, while the totality of the Hispanic-Roman dwellers
professed the catholic religion, the Visigoths guests maintained the Arianism. In fact, both
populations were Christians and ignorant of the theological quibbling’s that the Priests
established dogmatically. And in this case, the difference that Arius had signalized was of
extreme subtlety. The Visigoths were evangelized, when they still inhabited in the shores of the
Black Sea, by the Goth Bishop Ulfilas, devotee of Arius; then, when advancing through occident,
pushed by the Huns, would discover with satisfaction that their Christianity was different from
the Roman and they would hang on tenaciously to that difference, often incomprehensible.
They would work in this form because the Goths had developed in great grade the
national pride and they needed to dispose of some tangible difference, an own unifying

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