ALARIC II, king of the Visigoths. — Son of Euric and Ranachilde, he was elected king of the Visigoths upon his father’s death in 484. At that time the Visigothic kingdom extended from the strait later called Gibraltar to the Loire, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rhône, with Toulouse as its capital. A. allied himself with Theodoric, who had previously aided him in the war against Odoacer, by marrying Theodoric’s daughter Theodogota. An Arian, he imposed a harsh rule upon his Catholic subjects, exiling several of them, including bishops. Already in 506, at a solemn assembly of bishops and lay nobles held at Aire in Gascony, a compilation was published and sent to the counts with the express injunction in the *commonitorium* that it alone should be in use among those Roman subjects of the Gothic kingdom.
It contains the two sole types of sources then in force: *leges* or constitutions and *ius* or writings of jurists, including in the latter group also the Gregorian and Hermogenian Codes, which, not having been issued by imperial authority, lacked official character. The sources, each of which forms an independent whole, are arranged in the following order: 1) Theodosian Code; 2) Novels of Theodosius, Valentinian, Marcian, Majorian, Severus; 3) Gaius; 4) Paul (*Sententiae receptae*); 5) Gregorian Code; 6) Hermogenian Code; 7) Papinian.
All parts of the text, except Gaius, are accompanied by a commentary called the *Interpretatio*. The compilation is chiefly practical in its English. The collection enjoyed wide diffusion and influenced Visigothic, Salic, and other laws; it endured until about the twelfth century. It is the sole repository of certain sources and is the mildest among the barbarian laws. Among the numerous epitomes made of it, a notable one is the so-called *Lex Romana Curiensis seu Utinensis* of the eighth century.