A dynasty’s religious conversion can require rewriting its own foundational history

Evidence

It was the Visigoths who had sacked Rome in 410; historians since Augustine had cast them in the role of divine scourge, a role well known to all steeped in the reading of the Old Testament: the Visigoths were to the Romans as the Assyrians and Babylonians had been to the Jews of old; this role seemed to fit them all the more since they were Arian heretics. But in 589, at the Third Council of Toledo, Reccared, king of the Visigoths, announced his conversion to Catholicism and the end of the (heretical) Spanish Arian church. Now that the Visigoth Reccared was both master of Spain and Catholic, the history of his Visigothic ancestors needed a face-lift. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 103

Categorization

• XREF: Political rebranding through rewritten genealogy — connects to how patronage histories get sanitized after power changes hands; echoes contemporary regime-change historiography. — connects to: A radical conversion reinterprets the old project as a past it must supersede. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1124
• SEED: An essay angle on how ‘traitor’ or ‘scourge’ peoples rebrand themselves once they seize power — from the Visigoths’ 589 conversion to modern revolutionary parties laundering their founding myths.