Toledo, a site in fact populated since the Bronze Age, is according to an old Spanish tradition founded in the year 540 BCE by Jewish colonists, who name it Toledoch, that is, mother of people.

One might suppose a Phoenician settlement, as there will be no actual Jews, as such, until a century later, when the Judahites are released from their captivity in Babylon, return to their homeland, and codify the Judaic religion.

The Romans, having defeated the Carthaginians in Iberia, battle fierce resistance from the Iberians themselves, especially in the north.

Cato, having become plebeian aedile in Sicily in 199 and, a praetor, governing Sardinia, had become consul with Lucius Valerius Flaccus in 195.

Fighting in Spain, he had organized its provincial administration.

A well established city located on steep bluffs above the Tagus River, about forty miles (seventy kilometers) southwest of present Madrid, falls to Rome in 192.

As Toletum (present Toledo), it becomes the provincial capital of Carpentia.

It has taken the Visigoths seventy-two years to conquer Spain.

Arian Christians like the Vandals, they have left the Spanish Jews the full religious freedom they had enjoyed under Roman rule.

Hispania's lay culture under the Visigoths is not so highly developed as it had been under the Romans, and the task of maintaining formal education and government shifts decisively to the church because its Hispano-Roman clergy alone are qualified to manage higher administration.

As elsewhere in early medieval Europe, the church in Spain stands as society's most cohesive institution, and it embodies the continuity of Roman order.

Religion is the most persistent source of friction between the Roman Catholic Hispano-Romans and their Arian Visigoth overlords, whom they consider heretical.

At times this tension invites open rebellion, and restive factions within the Visigothic aristocracy exploite it to weaken the monarchy.

In 589 Recared, a Visigoth ruler, renounces his Arianism before the Council of Bishops at Toledo and accepts Catholicism, thus assuring an alliance between the Visigothic monarchy and the Hispano-Romans.

This alliance will not mark the last time in Spanish history that political unity is sought through religious unity.

Court ceremonials introduced at Toledo—from Constantinople—tproclaim the imperial sovereignty and unity of the Visigothic state.

Still, civil war, royal assassinations, and usurpation are commonplace, and warlords and great landholders assume wide discretionary powers.

Bloody family feuds go unchecked.

The Visigoths have acquired and cultivated the apparatus of the Roman state, but not the ability to make it operate to their advantage.

In the absence of a well-defined hereditary system of succession to the throne, rival factions encourage foreign intervention by the Greeks, the Franks, and, finally, the Muslims in internal disputes and in royal elections.

Toledo becomes the capital of the Visigothic Kingdom that controls the Iberian Peninsula.

King Theudis expands Visigoth rule at the expense of Constantinople in the southern regions, called Hispania Baetica.

Theudigisel, a leading general of King Theudis when the latter is murdered, manages to have himself proclaimed ruler of the Visigothic Kingdom.

He had repelled the Franks from Spain after their invasion of 541, cutting them off in the pass of Valcarlos, but accepted a bribe to allow them to return to home.

The supporters of Agila, in fear of the Empire’s recent successes, turn on him and assassinate him in late March 555, making Athanagild the king of the Goths.

According to Isidore of Seville, Agila’s people realized the destruction Agila's wars to retain power had caused, but "fearing even more that Roman soldiers might invade Spain on the pretext of giving help".

Quickly the new king acknowledges the suzerainty of the Empire and tries to rid Spain of the imperial presence, but fails.

A short period of anarchy that follows the death of King Athanagild in April 567, following which his brothers Liuva and Liuvigild, or Leovigild, succeed to the throne of the Visigoths.

Both are Arian Christians.

Liuvigild, who rules in Hispania, marries Athanagild's widow, Goisvintha, his first wife, Theodosia, the mother of his sons, having died.