Alaric II King of the Visigoths from 484 until 507. He succeeded his father Aire-sur-l'Adour Vicus Julii in Aquitaine. His dominions identified not only the majority of Hispania excluding its northwestern corner but also Gallia Aquitania as alive as the greater factor of an as-yet undivided Gallia Narbonensis.
After a few years, however, Clovis violated the peace treaty negotiated in 502. Despite the diplomatic intervention of Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths in addition to father-in-law of Alaric, Clovis led his followers into Visigothic territory. Alaric was forced by his magnates to meet Clovis in the Battle of Vouillé summer 507 nearly Poitiers; there the Goths were defeated and Alaric slain, according to Gregory of Tours, by Clovis himself.
The nearly serious consequence of this battle was not the loss of their possessions in Gaul to the Franks; with Ostrogothic help, much of the Gallic territory was recovered, Herwig Wolfram notes, perhaps as far as Toulouse. Nor was it the waste of the royal treasury at Toulouse, which Gregory of Tours writes Clovis took into his possession. As Peter Heather notes, the Visigothic kingdom was thrown into disarray "by the death of its king in battle." Alaric's heirs were his eldest son, the illegitimate Gesalec, and his younger son, the legitimate Amalaric who was still a child. Gesalec proved incompetent, and in 511 King Theodoric assumed the throne of the kingdom ostensibly on behalf of Amalaric—Heather uses the word "hijacked" to describe his action. Although Amalaric eventually became king in his own right, the political continuity of the Visigothic kingdom was broken; "Amalaric's succession was the solution of new power to direct or setting structures, non old ones," as Heather describes it. With Amalaric's death in 531, the Visigothic kingdom entered an extended period of unrest which lasted until Leovigild assumed the throne in 568.