Rey y poder en la monarquía visigoda

Abstract

The only clearly defined and regulated political institution in the History of the Visigoths was the Monarchy, and the others that we can refer to were either political instruments of the Monarchy, or regarding its relations of power with the clergy and the aristocracy, mechanisms for limiting or controlling its power. It seems clear that the Visigothic Monarchy is a political institution, an organ of government. By means of an accumulation of these institutions, a society with a complex structure, as was the case of the Visigothic society, administers its resources, imposes and collects taxes, limits or abuses its power, legislates and administrates justice and creates a bureaucracy, and an army, for dealing with all these activities. The institutionalisation of the Visigothic Monarchy was a long process that was interrupted by the Moslem invasion, but the evidence from the last stages of the kingdom seems to present a process of centrifugal disintegration with an ever greater imposition of private interests over public ones, and where the Monarchy was becoming weaker and weaker.