Balt dynasty

The Balti dynasty existed among the Visigoths, a Germanic people who confronted the Roman Empire in its declining years in the west. The Balti took their name from the Gothic word baltha or bold. It thus meant the Bold ones or Bold men. Also called the Balthi dynasty, its members can be called Balths.

The Balti were considered next in worth among Gothic fighters and next in royal dignity to the Amali. But it was Alaric the Visigoth, a Balti, who led his people to the sacking of Rome in 410 CE and founded a dynasty that would come to rule much of Roman Gaul for a century and all of Roman Hispania for longer, establishing a kingdom in the latter that would last until early in the eighth century.

The Balti dynasty of Visigothic kings reigned from 395 to 531, comprising the following:

• Alaric I
• Ataulf
• Wallia
• Theodoric I
• Thorismund
• Theodoric II
• Euric
• Alaric II
• Gesalec
• Amalaric

Edward Gibbon in footnote 4, Chapter 30 of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire adds:

This illustrious race long continued to flourish in France, in the Gothic province of Septimania, or Languedoc; under the corrupted appellation of Boax; and a branch of that family afterwards settled in the kingdom of Naples (Grotius in Prolegom. ad Hist. Gothic. p. 53.) The lords of Baux, near Arles, and of seventy-nine subordinate places, were independent of the counts of Provence, (Longuerue, Description de la France, tom. i. p. 357).