The Visigoths (Latin: Visigothi, Wisigothi, Vesi, Visi, Wesi, or Wisi) were one of two main branches of the later Goths, the Ostrogoths being the other. These tribes were among the Germanic peoples who spread through the late Roman Empire during Late Antiquity or the Migration Period. The Visigoths emerged out of the Gothic groups who entered the Roman Empire in and after 376 and defeated the Romans at the Battle of Adrianople in 378. The Visigoths invaded Italy under Alaric I and famously sacked Rome in 410 AD, eventually settling in Spain and Portugal, where they founded a powerful Kingdom.

After numerous years of migration, which led the Visigoths to compare themselves to the Biblical Hebrew people wandering for 40 years in the Sinai Desert, the Visigoths settled in southern Gaul as foederati of the Romans in 418. For unknown reasons, they soon fell out with their hosts and established their own kingdom with its capital at Toulouse. Extending their authority into Hispania at the expense of the Vandals, their rule in Gaul was ended by the Franks under Clovis I at the Battle of Vouillé in 507. Thereafter the only territory north of the Pyrenees that the Visigoths held was Septimania, such that their kingdom became limited to Hispania. The province came to be dominated by the Visigothic small governing elite at the expense of the Byzantine province of Spania and the Suebic Kingdom of Galicia.