Theodoric I of the Visigoths

Theodoric I, King of the Visigoths (390-451 AD), who made an alliance with the Roman general Flavius Aetius to stop the advance of Attila the Hun at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, where Theodoric was killed.

Theoderic was born in the Balkans near the Black Sea. His father Alaric I led the Visigoths in their migration from Eastern Europe and famously sacked Rome in 410, dying later in southern Italy. Theodoric became king in 418 and continued settling the Visigoths in the Roman province of Gaul, where his predecessor Wallia had stablished the Visigothic capital in Toulouse. Theodoric extended his power to southern Gaul and campaigned in northern Hispania.

The Visigoths were one of the two branches of the Goths, the other being the Ostrogoths. The Goths were a Germanic people of Scandinavian origin that first migrated to Eastern Europe, and were later forced by the Huns to migrate to Southern and then Western Europe. In the meantime, they converted to Arian Christianity. Following the fall of Rome in the 5th century, the Visigoths took control of all the Iberian Peninsula, stablishing the Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo, which lasted until the Islamic conquest of Hispania by the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus in the 8th century.

In the north of the peninsula, the Kingdom of Asturias, ruled by a Visigothic elite, remained unconquered. Wilfred the Hairy (9th century), the founder of the dynasty that ruled the County of Barcelona and later the Crown of Aragon until the 14th century, was also of Visigothic descent.