(West Goths, or Thervingi), a Germanic tribe, a western branch of the Goths. The Visigoths, who lived east of the Dnestr River in the third and fourth centuries, participated (from the 370’s) in the Great Migration of Peoples. In 418 they founded a kingdom in southern Gaul—the first barbarian kingdom on the territory of the Western Roman Empire—with Toulouse as its center. In the second half of the fifth century they conquered the greater part of Spain, which (after the Visigoths lost southern Gaul to the Franks in 507) became the main territory of the kingdom of the Visigoths. Its capital from the middle of the sixth century was the city of Toledo. The Visigoths confiscated two-thirds of the arable land from some of the local landowners. Close contact with Roman customs furthered the transformation of the Visigoths from a patrimonial-tribal order to an early feudal one. The Visigoths—conquerors who were the predominant ethnic group in the western Gothic kingdom— gradually mixed with the local Spanish-Roman population and were assimilated by them. In the years 711-718 the Visigothic state was conquered by the Arabs.