Practice question · True or false
The Germanic successor kingdoms discarded Roman law and Roman administration and governed by custom alone.
Hints
- Ask who actually collected the taxes and drafted the charters in sixth-century Gaul or Spain.
- The Visigothic and Burgundian kings issued written law codes in Latin for their Roman subjects.
Show the answer
False
Why
False. These kings kept Roman fiscal machinery, Latin as the language of record, and Roman lawyers. The Visigothic Breviary of Alaric (506) is an abridgement of the Theodosian Code; Theodoric in Italy retained the Senate and the praetorian prefecture. The rupture is real in the archaeology, not in the paperwork.
Practise Late Antiquity and the Germanic Kingdoms
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