Leadership, Social Cohesion, and Identity in Late Antique Spain and Gaul (500-700) 9789048553778

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Building Leadership, Forging Cohesion: Bishops and Charity in Late Antiquity
2. The Logic of Control: Postulating a Visigothic Ontology of Human Being
3. Ritual Communities and Social Cohesion in Merovingian Gaul
4. Constructing New Leaders: Bishops in Visigothic Hispania Tarraconensis (Fifth to Seventh Centuries)
5. Coexisting Leaderships in the Visigothic Cities: A ‘Coopetitive’ Model
6. Leadership and Social Cohesion in Merovingian Gaul and Visigothic Spain : The Case of Military Groups
7. Between Rome and Toulouse : The Catholic Episcopate in the regnum Tolosanum (418–507)
Index

Citation preview

Leadership, Social Cohesion, and Identity in Late Antique Spain and Gaul (500–700)

Late Antique and Early Medieval Iberia Scholarship on the Iberian Peninsula in late antiquity and the early middle ages is burgeoning across a variety of disciplines and time periods, but the publication profile of the field remains rather disjointed. No publisher focuses on this area and time-period and there is certainly no series devoted to the topic. This series will thus provide a hub for high-quality publications in the field of late antique and early medieval Iberian Studies. The series moves beyond established chronological dividing lines in scholarship, which segregated Muslim Spain from ‘barbarian’ Spain, and ‘barbarian’ Spain from late Roman Spain. We also seek to be geographically inclusive, encouraging scholarship which explores the north of the peninsula, southern Gaul, and northern Africa insofar as they were integrated administratively, politically and economically with Hispania in our period. Series editors Jamie Wood, University of Lincoln, UK Editorial Board Andy Fear, University of Manchester, UK Catarina Tente, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal Dwight Reynolds, UC Santa Barbara, USA Eleonora Dell’Elicine, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina Glaire Anderson, University of Edinburgh, UK Inaki Martin Viso, Universidad de Salamanca, Spain Nicola Clarke, Newcastle University, UK Robert Portass, University of Lincoln, UK

Leadership, Social Cohesion, and Identity in Late Antique Spain and Gaul (500–700)

Edited by Dolores Castro and Fernando Ruchesi

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Patrimonio Nacional. Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial, {d-I-2 (1º)}, fol. 0142R Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 595 8 e-isbn 978 90 4855 377 8 doi 10.5117/9789463725958 nur 684 © The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Introduction 7 Dolores Castro and Fernando Ruchesi

1. Building Leadership, Forging Cohesion: Bishops and Charity in Late Antiquity Dolores Castro

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2. The Logic of Control: Postulating a Visigothic Ontology of Human Being 63 Michael J. Kelly

3. Ritual Communities and Social Cohesion in Merovingian Gaul

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4. Constructing New Leaders: Bishops in Visigothic Hispania Tarraconensis(Fifth to Seventh Centuries)

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Alexander O’Hara

Meritxell Pérez Martínez

5. Coexisting Leaderships in the Visigothic Cities: A ‘Coopetitive’ Model 159 Pablo Poveda Arias

6. Leadership and Social Cohesion in Merovingian Gaul and Visigothic Spain: The Case of Military Groups

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7. Between Rome and Toulouse: The Catholic Episcopate in the regnum Tolosanum (418–507)

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Fernando Ruchesi

Christian Stadermann

Index 255 List of Figures 1. Political map of Roman Hispania in the fifth century. 2. Political map of the Regnum Visigothorum ca. 636.

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Introduction Dolores Castro and Fernando Ruchesi Between 640 and 650, it is recorded, Queen Nanthild (610–642) and her son, the young Clovis, visited the city of Orleans, in the Kingdom of Burgundy, where she summoned all members of the aristocracy – including duces and bishops – to a meeting. The reason behind this gathering was her intention to appoint a new mayor of the palace: Frank Flachoald. She knew, however, that this decision had to come from the members of the primati regnum Burgundiam.1 An interesting detail is that Nanthild won the loyalty of these lords, one by one, during the ceremony, and her chosen candidate was finally appointed without arousing suspicion or conflict. She even offered her niece to Flachoald in marriage. Certainly, not all situations were resolved peacefully and, in some cases, violence played the primary role. As illustrated by the war between King Theoderic II (595–613) and his brother, King Theodebert II (595–612), leaders often confronted each other, even when relatives were involved. We read that Theodebert was defeated and later humiliated by Theoderic in a parade in the city of Cologne, in which the former was divested of his royal clothing. This act was significant since it meant depriving the defeated opponent of the legitimizing elements of monarchical power.2 Another account reports that Theoderic actually murdered his brother and hung his head from the walls of Cologne. Moreover, the anonymous author of the Liber Historiae Francorum mentions that Theoderic took the city and its treasures, and that the Franci seniores swore loyalty to him in the Church of Saint Gereon.3 As these episodes illustrate, the creation and consolidation of leadership and ties of social cohesion in late antique societies involved practices and strategies of a diverse nature: peaceful negotiations between coexisting authorities, deployments of military rites of victory, public demonstrations of power in 1 Fredegar, Chronicle IV.89, pp. 165–166. 2 Fredegar, Chronicle IV.38, pp. 139–140. 3 LHF, 38, pp. 307–309.

Castro, D. and Ruchesi, F. (ed.), Leadership, Social Cohesion, and Identity in Late Antique Spain and Gaul (500–700). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463725958_intro

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significant places, humiliation of defeated opponents, uses of distinguished markers of legitimacy and identity, with many more examples possible. The complex scenario that emerged after the disappearance of the political structures of the Western Roman Empire, a process that affected the former imperial provinces in many different ways, appears to us as an interwoven patchwork of identities and communities in which new forms of leadership and social cohesion were being shaped.4 Political, cultural, and socio-economic transformations, however, did not necessarily imply abrupt changes or a complete rupture with the past.5 On the contrary, continuities and adaptations of local practices and Roman institutions were key elements in the construction of the newly established barbarian kingdoms and their relationship with the wide variety of communities spread across the former imperial territories.6 How were leaderships created, preserved, and reinforced? What strategies and approaches were put into practice to establish unity and cohesion? Which discursive devices and rhetorical skills were involved in these processes? How did leaders interact and relate to each other? These questions underpin the themes explored in this book. Each chapter addresses the intersection of leaderships, identities, and social cohesion in Late Antiquity from different angles, and with a particular focus on Visigothic Spain and Merovingian Gaul. *** Over the last three decades, an increasing number of collective volumes on the Visigoths and Merovingians have been published, focusing on their 4 Some of these forms of social cohesion and identity began to be modified by the authors of the sixth century: As Walter Pohl suggests, while these writers did not identify themselves with the ruling elites of the Western regna, they legitimized their government through their writings. See: Pohl, ‘Archaeology of Identity’, p. 13. 5 These continuities were the result of the integration of the barbarians within late-Roman structures, a process that gained momentum from the fourth century onwards. In Evangelos Chrysos’s words, ‘The political terms concerning the regulations for settlement on public, confiscated or derelict private land, the conditions of autonomous (legal) conduct within the Roman system of control and coercion, the framework for trade and the transfer of foods for the people […] all these and many other, more or less obvious channels of communication and means of affiliation served as the instruments for shaping the regna within or at the edge of the Roman Empire.’ See Chrysos, ‘The Empire’, p. 15. 6 The adoption and transformation of these key elements have become a focus of widespread attention in recent years. Scholars have demonstrated how crucial they became in the making of political entities in the late antique West. An example of this is to be noted in Wormald’s study of the written law codes of the sixth and seventh centuries, which were implemented by most – if not all – post-Roman kingdoms. See Wormald, ‘The Leges Barbarorum’, esp. p. 21.

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history, origins, culture, and society. To quote just a few examples, it is worth mentioning the series of books edited by the San Marino Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Stress (CIROSS), organized within a research project directed by Giorgio Ausenda, focused on the Visigoths (edited by Peter Heather), and the Franks and Alamanni (edited by Ian Wood).7 Other noteworthy examples include Framing Power in Visigothic Society (2020),8 The Visigothic Kingdom (2020),9 The Merovingian Kingdoms and the Mediterranean World (2019),10 and the most recent publication of The Oxford Handbook of the Merovingian World (2020).11 Despite this growing interest and the substantial research publications in recent decades, few attempts have been made to engage in dialogue-building between late antique Spain and Gaul.12 Following this perspective, the current book aims to provide a suitable framework for addressing some of the key questions described above, which are central to these political entities and geographical spaces that grew and developed during the demise of Roman structures in the West. Both Visigothic and Frankish kingdoms managed to adapt to varying circumstances and changing contexts, enduring the test of time across centuries. These groups did not only share their origins as foederati for the Western Roman Empire during the fourth and the fifth centuries13; research over the last decades has demonstrated the continuity of late Roman practices, especially in the bureaucratic and administrative spheres, which both regna modified according to their current needs.14 They also developed close contacts with each other, as well as different kinds of relationships: from trade and war to political alliances, including alliances brokered through marriage between their royal families.15 Such a dynamic context of mutual 7 See Heather, The Visigoths; Wood, ed., Franks and Alamanni. 8 Dell’Elicine and Martin, Framing Power, esp. pp. 9–22. The introduction offers a good summary of the latest collective works on Visigoths. 9 For an overview of the current perspectives on negotiation of power in Visigothic Iberia, see Panzram and Pachá, eds, Visigothic Kingdom, pp. 17–38. 10 The encompassing perspective adopted by the contributors and editors of this volume can also be traced back to Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome (2009) and Fischer and Wood’s Western Perspectives on the Mediterranean (2012). See also Pérez Martínez’s contribution in this collection. 11 Effros and Moreira, The Oxford Handbook. 12 See, for example, Buchberger’s Shifting Ethnic Identities in Spain and Gaul, 500–700 (2017). The author provides a new framework to explore identity shifts in the Early Middle Ages. On episcopacy, see Natal and Wood, ‘Playing with Fire’. 13 Chrysos, ‘The Empire’, pp. 13–14. 14 Goetz, ‘Introduction’, p. 6; Halsall, Barbarian Migrations, pp. 489–491. 15 For some examples on alliances through marriages, see Heather, ‘Gens and Regnum among the Ostrogoths’, pp. 94, 97; Collins, Visigothic Spain, pp. 41, 73–74.

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relations is further expressed in material, cultural, and social exchanges, which developed among the various communities spread throughout Spain and Gaul: literary and narrative models, objects and accessories related to secular and military offices, political and administrative practices, rituals, trends, and strategies spread and circulated fluidly across the frontiers. Contributions in this volume also stress the relevance of interdisciplinary collaboration and the diversity of sources – hagiographical, historiographical, legal, theological, material, and archaeological. Over the last few decades, archaeology has become a growing field within late antique studies. Methodological renewal and increased research activities, especially in the area of urban archaeology, have made a remarkable impact on the study of urban elites, landscapes and topographies, and architectural representations of power.16 During the fourth and fifth centuries, cities underwent material and symbolic transformations that resulted in a ‘new concept of the urban space’.17 Despite the heterogeneity of urban developments, these changes encompassed the emergence of new political and territorial markers, both civil and religious, and new ideological and cultural representations and identities.18 Archaeological and epigraphic evidence, thus, has significantly contributed to a more complete understanding of late antique and early medieval towns and cities, questioning traditional theories which for a long time had considered ancient urbanism – with its splendour and monumentalism – as the urban model par excellence. Current archaeological debates, instead, have stressed the importance of putting aside categories such as ‘catastrophe’ and ‘decline’, traditionally used to describe this period, inviting us to contemplate this urban world on its own terms. The topics discussed in this volume have a long history: research areas such as ethnicity and strategies of identification, the transformation of Romanness, and the many methods involved in building social cohesion and leadership in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages have received increased attention during recent decades, and more studies have been 16 The bibliography on this topic is vast. See, for example, Sánchez Ramos and Morín de Pablos, ‘Los paisajes urbanos’; Gutiérrez Lloret, ‘Repensando la ciudad’; Panzram and Callegarin, eds, Entre civitas y madīna, Sánchez Ramos and Mateos Cruz, Territorio, topografía y arquitectura de poder, and Gurt Esparraguera and Sánchez Ramos, ‘Las ciudades hispanas’; Kulikowski, ‘Cities and Government in Late Antique Hispania’; Ferdière, Capitales éphémères; Gauthier, ‘Christianisation et espace urbain’; Loseby, ‘Decline and Change’; Christie and Loseby, Towns in Transition; For a comparative study between Italian and Spanish medieval archaeology, see Gelichi and Hodges, eds, New Directions. 17 Sánchez Ramos and Morín de Pablos, ‘Los paisajes urbanos’, p. 99. 18 For an excellent survey of the changes in Roman architecture and monumental building during the fourth century, see Halsall, Barbarian Migrations, pp. 79–96.

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conducted with significant outcomes.19 This book is intended as a contribution to these ongoing research frameworks exploring the different processes of creation, negotiation and uses of identities, leadership, and social cohesion. It is no coincidence that most chapters deal – in greater or lesser depth – with episcopal leadership. The fourth and the fifth centuries witnessed the rising power of bishops within the later Roman Empire: they became prominent figures in public life, fulfilling judicial, defensive, administrative, political, as well as doctrinal and spiritual functions. In the last few decades, an increasing number of studies have addressed different facets of this influential figure in Late Antiquity: its history, image, and patterns of leadership. Moreover, recent historiography has explored the role of bishops exhaustively in an attempt to encompass its complexity – and its correlation with other major transformations such as the expansion of monasticism and the promotion of ascetic qualities among the elites – and to overcome long-established assumptions which had installed a clear-cut and no longer sustainable distinction between secular and religious spheres. Philip Rousseau,20 Conrad Leyser,21 Andrea Sterk,22 and Claudia Rapp23 are some examples of this historiographical trend. A more comprehensive understanding has been further pursued among scholars, addressing the multiple dimensions involved in the emergence and development of the episcopal figure in Late Antiquity. Questions related to local leadership were also discussed by Raymond Van Dam in his seminal study Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul.24 In examining this relationship, the author has raised broader historiographical issues about the need to abandon the traditional distinction between secular and ecclesiastical history, to understand leaderships in close connection with the communities within which they emerged and developed, and to address the challenges posed by the available sources. By exploring these questions in depth, the contributions in this volume aim to revisit how late antique and early medieval communities were organized and structured, societies within which the Church, understood not only in 19 Some of the most recent work on ethnic materials and its important role in the shaping of political and cultural identities in the Early Middle Ages include Pohl and Reimitz, eds, Strategies of Distinction; Pohl and Heydemann, eds, Strategies of Identification; Pohl and Heydemann, eds, Post-Roman Transitions, and Pohl et al., eds, Transformations of Romanness, esp. pp. 3–40. 20 Rousseau, ‘The Spiritual Authority’. 21 Leyser, Authority and Asceticism. 22 Sterk, Renouncing the World. 23 Rapp, Holy Bishops, esp. pp. 3–22. 24 Van Dam, Leadership and Community, esp. pp. 1–6.

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its institutional dimension, took a leading position: organizing practices, producing knowledge, and defining values, norms, and beliefs. An underlying concern here is therefore to understand leadership not as part of an autonomous sphere, but, rather, as being closely intertwined with religious and social life. Hence leadership cannot be studied in isolation. Questions of identity, urbanism, social status, war, and violence are also raised and examined in direct relation with the transformation and consolidation of authority and the building of networks of patronage. Over the course of the contributions to this book a picture is developed of the pivotal role of bishops and its transformation over the period. New challenges had to be faced in the newly established post-Roman realities. After the demise of Roman hegemony in the West – along with the resulting breakdown of sponsoring local elites through gifts and patronage – local authorities underwent a series of changes, and had to forge and re-elaborate political alliances, and build new connections within the centralized kingdoms.25 In fact, different kinds of authority came to coexist within a range of interrelationships that could vary, as shown by Meritxell Pérez Martínez and Pablo Poveda Arias (Chapters 4 and 5, respectively), from cooperation to confrontation. Cities were politically dynamic centres, and urban leaders – mainly bishops and comites ciuitatis, but in some cases duces and local potentes, too – interacted within competitive environments. Noteworthy here is Poveda Arias’s use of the concept ‘coopetition’ to illustrate this complex scenario of overlapping spheres of influence and jurisdictions. In fact, as the author points out, a ‘coopetitive’ framework did not actually imply that the two strategies – cooperation and confrontation – were mutually exclusive or that they could not occur simultaneously. Competition was experienced in various fields, but bonds of cooperation could also emerge and became relevant in certain circumstances, as observed in the legal evidence regarding the degradation of bishops’ secular duties over the course of the seventh century. Such a phenomenon, attested both in Visigothic Spain and Merovingian Gaul, although it may have led to confrontation and conflict between urban leaders, did not necessarily entail the end of cooperative relations. This ‘coopetitive’ model of interaction helps us to better understand the political dynamics of late antique cities as a system of counterbalancing powers, that compete, confront, but also cooperate with and control each other. As Pérez Martínez also asserts, bishops assumed a leading role in shaping new post-Roman identities within the territories of Hispania tarraconensis 25 In the case of Merovingian Gaul, see Halfond, Bishops and the Politics of Patronage; Halfond, Archaeology.

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from the fifth to the seventh centuries. This case study draws our attention to how leaders had to readapt and reconfigure their authority, interacting with new political actors and agendas, and how Roman identity was both preserved and transformed. In a diachronic approach, the author emphasizes the continuity of the Roman component in close connection with both the preservation of a Mediterranean identity and the history of Tarraco as a Roman provincial capital and metropolitan see. Pérez Martínez’s contribution challenges traditional views, showing that the Visigothic settlement should not be labelled either as a collapse or a total break with the past. Further studies also reveal signs of continuity – e.g. the preservation of Roman administrative structures – and urban revitalization in a context in which traditional patterns of loyalty were being transformed. The sixth century witnessed the institutional and jurisdictional consolidation of the metropolitan see of Tarraco, especially over the bishoprics in the coastal areas of the province, and the strengthening of the episcopal position through the patronage of local saints (a practice also adopted in other cities such as, for example, Merida), conciliar activity, and through an urban restoration programme. Pérez Martínez also captures the complexity of the post-Roman period, shedding light on the changes that affected the regional churches against the backdrop of a political and religious identity emanating from Toledo and its pre-eminence as sedes regia and ecclesiastical see, during the seventh century. The close relationship between bishops and cities is in fact another major theme that runs through the contributions gathered in this volume. Post-Roman urbanism underwent several changes, and while some places retained an important economic or political role, as was the case with Tarraco or Merida, other developments included the dismantling of the existing urban structures and the emergence of polynucleated settlements.26 Urban transformations would sometimes go hand-in-hand with the development of the church and the presence of episcopal leaders, also deeply engaged in political, economic, and social affairs. Building and reasserting leadership, therefore, entailed the deployment of manifold resources and overlapping strategies that could range widely from military rhetoric to the implementation of rituals associated with the secular, military, or even religious spheres. The implementation of a ‘martial pedagogy’ based on violence, threats, and exempla became crucial not only to reinforce authority, but also to bring cohesion to armed aristocracies and 26 For a comprehensive overview of the continuities and transformations of urban landscapes in Hispania, see Martínez Jiménez et al., The Iberian Peninsula, esp. pp. 153–188.

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their followers, as Fernando Ruchesi demonstrates (in Chapter 6). In this context, objects, symbols, and rituals were also important devices – e.g. military banners, insignia of office, weapons, and armour – used to reinforce command and nurture a military identity uniting armies around common activities, feelings, and wartime experiences. Such methods, moreover, revealed the continuity and further development of late Roman military traditions, presumably inherited by the Frankish and Visigothic armed groups. Leaders were expected to demonstrate their military skills and to ensure divine assistance on the battlefield. They orchestrated religious and collective rites before battle, and celebrated victory to raise the morale of the troops and strengthen their unity, not only through the celebration of the victory per se but also through the distribution of plunder, and the sharing of hardships. In addressing narrative and legal evidence, Ruchesi explores how common experiences and memories could have strengthened the ties between military leaders and warriors, stressing the fundamental part played by the army as a mechanism of integration within late antique societies. However, protection and defence were not just a matter of battles and conflicts. Other ways of exhibiting leadership by assuming a protective role were more concerned with founding and building activities, and performing charitable works. As Dolores Castro explores (see Chapter 1), the language of charity framed several hagiographic accounts of the period, helping to enhance the position of leaders as mediators and protectors of communities. Depicting these figures as generous, protective (often closely connected to local saints), and charitable (distributing food, helping the poor, and showing hospitality) also meant the promotion and shaping of local interests, identities, and traditions. Additionally, the integration of ascetic values and founding initiatives into the social and political culture helped to bolster the newly established elites as studied by Alexander O’Hara (Chapter 3) regarding the Merovingian dynasty and the Frankish aristocracy. As the author puts it, religion, and especially monastic culture, came to fill the vacuum left by the ancient civic and secular normative codes after the demise of the Roman Empire in the West. Particular attention is given to the role of Columbanus in providing a model of monastic foundation that was embraced by lay elites during the seventh century. Thus, the appropriation of monastic strategies of distinction – such as burial rituals, settlement patterns, ascetic norms, values, and new forms of atoning for sins (giftgiving and penance) – played an important role in shaping new aristocratic identities and defining social status and authority. As O’Hara explains, drawing on cultural anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse’s study of social cohesion, collective practices such as rituals could foster cooperation and

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trust among the members of a community, enhancing their inner cohesion due to their participation in collective goals. In light of this perspective, monastic sponsorship and piety became ritual activities through which group cohesion and identification were enhanced and strengthened in Merovingian Gaul. Thus, members of the ruling class exhibited and bolstered their authority, legitimizing their leading role as divinely approved Christian rulers. In such a process, the boundaries between court and monastic spheres became blurred during the seventh century. Barbarian leaders also adapted and further developed legal resources to deal with political factions and opposition. This is the case studied by Christian Stadermann (Chapter 7) regarding royal sanctions – e.g. exile, ban on episcopal consecrations, and prohibition of synodal activity – enacted by Visigothic rulers against the Catholic episcopate in Gaul. Drawing on a wide variety of documentation – historiographical and hagiographical sources, conciliar and imperial legislation, and epistolary literature – Stadermann outlines the political character of such sanctions, putting aside previous interpretations based on Euric’s religious zeal and his alleged interest to ‘Arianize’ the Catholic population of the kingdom. Such measures, as Stadermann argues, were in fact intended to weaken the Church as an institution, to undermine political factions, to eliminate immediate threats, and to deal with conflicts of loyalty. However, integrative measures during the reign of Alaric II – e.g. allowing bishops to convene and attend synods – would also have been aimed at suppressing conflicts affecting the monarchy. Thus, oppositional strategies towards the Church, confrontation as well as recognition and integration, were aimed, as Stadermann points out, at strengthening social and political cohesion in two different political scenarios. In line with other contributions in this volume, the author provides insight into leadership formation within a changing context of competition and transformation of loyalties, networks, and social-political ties. Late antique and early medieval elites forged and expressed their own conceptions and representations of the society in which they lived. They experimented with explanations of the relationship between heaven and earth, the spiritual and the secular, God and mankind. They also wondered about the prerogatives, responsibilities, and roles to be assumed by each member of the ecclesia: What was the part to be played by the monarchy, the aristocracy, the clergy or the people within the providential plan created by God? Such questions were often carried over to the conciliar scene, where the Visigothic and Frankish bishops were respectively discussing disciplinary, dogmatic, and also political issues. Societies and their ruling classes made an enormous effort to classify individuals and social

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collectives, to exclude and marginalize all those who did not fit in and did not accept their principles of identity and traditions. Michael J. Kelly’s contribution (Chapter 2) is an example of how discourses create identity by constructing – and formulating contrasts with – others who did not meet the hegemonic criteria of what it meant to be a member of the society, and, on the other hand, how such discourses also produce mechanisms of social control by classifying, including, and excluding individuals and social collectives. The question of human nature, studied by Kelly, brought the situation of the Jews – and minorities – to the table. Neither religious nor political leaders would have been unaware of this source of concern, which could be traced back to early Christian times. Theological writings, sermons, and homilies have depicted Jews as alleged enemies, as polluting and infectious forces that endangered the ideal Christian society. They were also labelled as subhuman, and associated with carnality, impurity, and corruption, being identified with animals and wicked, unfaithful creatures. By drawing on philosophical insights, Kelly explores this concern with human nature in Late Antiquity, with special attention to Visigothic councils, and demonstrates its connection to the prevalent logic of social control and surveillance. Up to seventh-century Hispania, Jews had retained their own rituals and traditions, defying disciplinary ecclesiastical norms, and represented a potential threat to Visigothic elites who sought to consolidate the unity of the kingdom. Strengthening a Christian identity – and political integration – went hand-in-hand with combatting the spread of beliefs regarded as erroneous and blasphemous. It was not only bishops who dealt with doctrinal and disciplinary issues concerning the Jews, but Visigothic kings such as Recceswinth, Erwig, and Egica also took the initiative and enacted measures that led to their civic degradation.27 Thus, building a kingdom and consolidating an identity around Christian practices, values, and leaders was inseparable from marginalizing other identities and rejecting any individual or collective that would oppose the prevailing hegemonic normative systems. Defining and recognizing otherness was thus central to the construction and assertion of identities and leaderships, and to the cultivation of a world view of inclusion and exclusion. *** Originally coined within the field of social sciences, the concept of ‘social cohesion’ has become extremely pertinent in late antique studies. As Dick 27 See Martin, ‘La degradación cívica’.

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Stanley explains, social cohesion refers to the ongoing process in which the shared values of a community are developed, as well as shared challenges and opportunities, which are based on a sense of hope, trust, and reciprocity.28 The author claims that social cohesion is the sum over a population of individuals’ willingness to cooperate with each other without coercion in the complex set of social relations needed by individuals to complete their life courses. A socially cohesive society, then, is a population which has sufficient social cohesion to sustain that complex set of social relations beyond at least the average life span of individuals in the population.29

Such willingness could be experienced in different contexts, which, as the author described, are usually perceived as difficult. For example, Nils Weidmann and Christoph Zürcher have demonstrated how an adverse context shaped by war could affect the internal cohesion of the members of small communities in Afghanistan.30 Other social theorists, such as Jeffrey Reitz, assert that integration and social cohesion are in fact interrelated. In this regard, Reitz conceives social cohesion as the ability of a society to establish long-term objectives and to deploy the instruments to fulfil them. Hence, a cohesive society could act more efficiently than one that is not: in societies lacking cohesion, the members of the community or group fail to contribute to effective collective action.31 Finally, for Brian Heuser, social cohesion comprises both economic and social phenomena. He envisions social cohesion as a fundamental antecedent for wealth, which enables the members of a community to act and live in integration according to norms and values. For Heuser, these sets of values in turn contribute to the inner stability of such community, something that fosters its wealth development and guarantees the society’s level of cohesion, given that economic life is profoundly entwined with social life.32 The author emphasizes that while social capital is founded on the development of trust among members of communities, groups, and organizations, social cohesion indicates the degree

28 Stanley, ‘What Do We Know about Social Cohesion’, pp. 7–9. 29 Stanley, ‘What Do We Know about Social Cohesion’, p. 9. 30 Weidmann and Zürcher, ‘How Wartime Violence’, pp. 2–3, 16. 31 Reitz, ‘Assessing Multiculturalism’, pp. 20–21. 32 Heuser, ‘Ethics of Social Cohesion’, pp. 8–9, 10–13. In the case of Social Capital, Heuser follows Heyneman and Fukuyama, to whom trust and reciprocity are some of the main elements that bind people together.

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of inclination of said members to behave virtuously, as a requirement for the common good. Within the field of history, the concept has been used particularly by the members of the Vienna School.33 As Walter Pohl has demonstrated, the notion of social cohesion could be helpful in the analysis of communities and societies in order to explore the resolution of inner conflicts and the confrontation of difficult situations like the antagonism of a rival group or enemy, or a context of economic crisis. This is not to suggest, as Pohl also warned, that social cohesion implied a complete absence of conflicts or contradictions within late antique and early medieval societies. On the contrary, such elements played an important part in the development of strategies and responses in order to deal with changing contexts and conditions.34 At this point, some of the questions raised at the beginning of this chapter reappear: What was the role of elites in the processes of creating social cohesion? What measures and resources did they deploy to achieve unity and why? Certainly, integration could be encouraged through a variety of devices and institutional procedures. As we have already discussed, several of the contributions to this volume explore mechanisms such as the distribution of land and the spoils of plunder amongst the members of the army and the distribution of goods and wealth within local communities. In other cases, cohesive bonds were nurtured through the creation or preservation of a particular identity and the development of signs of identification connected, for example, to ethnicity and religion.35 Christianity, as we shall see in the following chapters, played a key role in the transformations and reconfiguration of ancient modes of reference and identification.36 *** Identification and questions connected to identity in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages have received a great deal of attention from the 33 Major contributions on social cohesion in the Early Middle Ages have been developed in the context of the European Research Council Advanced Grant ‘Social Cohesion, Identity and Religion in Europe, 400–1200’, carried out at the Institut für Mittelalterforschung (ÖAW) and the University of Vienna. The results of the project will be available in the forthcoming Social Cohesion and Its Limits, edited by Walter Pohl and Andreas Fischer. 34 Pohl, ‘Social Cohesion’, pp. 23–24. 35 Pohl conceives ethnicity as a system of distinctions among analogous social groupings, which are also inclusive, and based on ethnonyms. Thus, ethnicity constitutes a means of endowing such groups with agency and meaning. See: Pohl, ‘Introduction: Early Medieval Romanness’, p. 29. 36 Wolfram, History of the Goths, pp. 16, 135.

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scholarly milieu in recent decades, especially from the Vienna School, and are usually concerned with the study of the gentes barbarae and the Migration Period.37 While a complete literature overview is beyond the scope of these pages, it would remiss of us to neglect to mention Reinhard Wenskus, whose classic work Stammesbildung und Verfassung epitomizes the historiographical renovation dating from the second half of the twentieth century. Wenskus’s theory on the origins of the so-called Germanic peoples explains how barbarian groups joined larger contingents, drawn by their prestige and reputation, a position founded on the preservation of a kernel of oral traditions, myths, and legends.38 Especially noteworthy were Herwig Wolfram’s reformulations, centred on the concept of ethnogenesis, which had an undeniable impact on late antique studies. As the author explains, three elements were particularly relevant in the formation of peoples. The first one was to carry out an important or legendary deed in the past, such as crossing a river, or defeating a powerful enemy. The second had to do with the change of cult. The third, finally, was the identification of a common and sworn enemy.39 Wolfram went even further in an attempt to construct a categorization of the types of ethnogenesis.40 Another important point in Wolfram’s arguments is related to the implications and deep influence that the policies of the Late Roman Empire exerted on the inner composition and organization of the barbarian gentes.41 These groundbreaking contributions, though not without criticism,42 were crucial to anchoring the origins of the barbarians within the processes of 37 Pohl, Die Völkerwanderung; Halsall, Barbarian Migrations, pp. 14–16. 38 Wenskus, Stammesbildung, pp. 429–431. 39 Wolfram, History of the Goths, pp. 9, 12; Wolfram, The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples, pp. 8–9. 40 Wolfram, ‘Typologie des ethnogénèses’. 41 Wolfram, Intitulatio, pp. 35–36; Wolfram, ‘Gotisches Königtum’, pp. 26–27. 42 Goffart, Barbarian Tides, pp. 1–12. See also the critiques offered in Andrew Gillett’s On Barbarian Identity that are focused on the use of the ethnogenesis concept and the challenges posed by late antique sources. Michael Kulikowski’s critical response, for example, argues that the canonical approach to ethnogenesis as well as other variants – even if they acknowledge the distorting character of narratives – assumes that it is still possible to grasp the reality of the barbarians. This concern about the sources lies at the core of Kulikowski’s approach. In fact, the attempts of the ethnogenesis theory to unravel the interpretatio romana are, following Kulikowski, quite fruitless. He emphatically considers sources as ‘opaque barriers’ that are ultimately open to different interpretations and addressed in conceptual frameworks that are foreign to them. Moreover, neither were the sources interested in the meaning of ethnicity or its manifestations. For further development, see Kulikowski, ‘Nation versus Army’. Other criticisms of the Wenskus–Wolfram model are echoed in Alexander Murray’s work. In examining Wenskus’s paradigmatic work, focused on the interpretation of names and philological similarities, he points

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identity manipulation. Research studies in this field were further shaped by the analysis of Fredrik Barth, who contested traditional views that ethnic identities were inherited, immutable, and fixed. Instead, he argued, such identities were in fact flexible, allowing individuals to change their identity according to particular interests and throughout their lives.43 Identity, thus, was at the core of heated and complex debates that revealed how old dichotomies became epistemological obstacles to developing a better understanding of the multifaceted processes of cultural and social change that took place in the post-Roman world.44 Separating identity from nationalistic and biologically reductive theories was indeed a major step, enabling a comprehensive process of rethinking categories and reframing late antique communities.45 As Patrick Geary also suggested, ethnic identities may be conceived as situational constructs – malleable and arbitrary – that are susceptible to manipulation and appropriation in very different political and social contexts.46 Subsequently, several studies addressing barbarian polities as well as the sources that describe them, pointed out the ideological content of legends and origin narratives,47 which grew from an active work of re-elaboration and adaptation of different oral traditions, materials, and backgrounds. Walter Pohl continued and broadened this perspective, studying how late antique authors employed and selected signs of identity – such as language, clothing, weapons, and hairstyles – to label and distinguish groups from each other. In so doing, Pohl changes the question: it is not a matter of elaborating a fixed ethnic classification based on those criteria, but asking how such elements were employed, and when and why they became relevant.48 Barbarian communities experienced a high degree of cultural transformation during Late Antiquity – through contacts with the Roman Empire, as to a confusion between history and philology, which leads to a separation of ‘the philological dimension of language’ from its context. See Murray, ‘Reinhard Wenskus’, pp. 40, 58–59. Charles Bowlus also questions the suitability of the ethnogenesis concept for describing each and every group within the migration period, taking the examples of the Burgundians and the Bavarians. Not one of these, affirms Bowlus, could have fitted into Wolfram’s scheme, since there is no evidence of a primordial deed, nor a single declared enemy. See: Bowlus, ‘Ethnogenesis’, pp. 255–256. 43 Barth, Ethnic Groups, pp. 22–24. See also Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism, pp. 30–32. 44 Pohl, ‘Introduction: Early Medieval Romanness’, pp. 6–7. 45 For an excellent survey of the development of ethnic nationalism during the nineteenth century, see Geary, Myth of Nations, pp. 6–7, 11–12. 46 Geary, ‘Ethnic Identity’, pp. 15–26. 47 Pohl, ‘Ethnicity, Theory, and Tradition’, p. 223. 48 Pohl, ‘Telling the Difference’, p. 19.

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well as with other non-Roman political entities – and identities were exposed to constant changes.49 The fact that late antique and early medieval sources ascribed certain features and customs to one particular gens did not necessarily mean that all individuals were alike or followed the same model, as many scholars have previously noted. There are certainly many facets to the concept of identity and its use requires a cautious approach. It may be understood in different ways – ‘as static or dynamic, as objective or subjective, as social or individual, as factual or as constructed’50– and its ideological implications should also be considered. In the changing political context of the late antique West, ethnic discourses and the construction of traditions based on cultural memory aimed at defining large groups of people and strengthening social cohesion by creating a sense of belonging and identification.51 In this regard, texts and sources from the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries were not simple reflections of realities or automatic repetitions of ancient traditions: in selecting, adapting, excluding, or including materials, choices were made that followed and expressed the interests, aims, personal motivations, and concerns of a particular time. It is worth noting that although texts played a significant part in the creation of meaning, they were not the only means of shaping social contexts and realities.52 Furthermore, adopting certain literary genres and vocabulary or performing certain practices and rituals also meant moulding and controlling the message, that is to say, the channels and mechanisms through which such messages were communicated. Finally, late antique and early medieval authors forged their own conceptions and representations about the society where they lived, preached, and fought. They sought and offered explanations about spiritual and secular matters, about the relationship between God and mankind. They attempted to make sense of the world they saw and experienced. And in so doing, they sought to ‘construct the past’, a process in which a great effort was made to reconcile contradictory opinions and sources.53 Texts and histories concerned with past identities not only dealt with identities of the past and their present: such texts helped to create, reaffirm, modify, and legitimize; the narratives had the potential to shape communities and identities.54 *** 49 Halsall, Barbarian Migrations, pp. 131, 152. 50 Pohl, ‘Archaeology of Identity’, p. 10. 51 Pohl, ‘Telling the Difference’, p. 67; Pohl, ‘Historiography and Identity’, p. 12. 52 Pohl, ‘History in Fragments’, pp. 347–348. 53 Pohl, ‘History in Fragments’, p. 353. 54 Pohl, ‘Historiography and Identity’, pp. 11–12.

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This book raises questions that invite future research to explore the intricate set of transformations that took place during Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, encouraging interdisciplinary dialogues and comparative perspectives. Ultimately, the aim of this text is twofold: first to contribute to ongoing discussions about the creation and negotiation of leaderships, identities, and social cohesion in a complex and changing post-Roman world, and, second, to further the scholarly debate on the continuity of Roman cultural structures and traditions into the Early Middle Ages. This last point is of particular significance, since not only has nationalism greatly contributed to the spread of misleading perspectives – projecting the early medieval world to as the immediate and direct origin of modern European states – but also mass media and popular culture continue to disseminate a prejudiced and stereotypical image of the Early Middle Ages, depicted as a dark, primitive, irrational, and extremely violent age. Much has been done to dismantle these preconceptions and visions, but echoes of them still remain. As we shall see, the studies collected in this volume examine the intersections of leadership, social cohesion, and identity, revealing the development of particular social and political dynamics and the emergence of new patterns – and the reconfiguration of old ones – which we consider to be useful for rethinking late antique forms of power and community.

Bibliography Primary Sources Fredegar, Chronicle = Chronicarum quae dicuntur Fredegarii Scholastici Liber IV cum Continuationibus, ed. by Bruno Krusch, Fredegarii et aliorum chronica. Vitae Sanctorum (MGH, SRM T II) (Hannover: Impensis Bibliopolii Hahniani, 1888). LHF = Liber Historiae Francorum, in Fredegarii et aliorum chronica. Vitae Sanctorum, ed. by Bruno Krusch (MGH, SRM T II) (Hannover: Impensis Bibliopolii Hahniani, 1888).

Secondary Sources Barth, Fredrik, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969). Bowlus, Charles R., ‘Ethnogenesis: The Tyranny of a Concept’, in On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches on Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Andrew Gillett (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), pp. 241–256.

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Buchberger, Erica, Shifting Ethnic Identities in Spain and Gaul, 500–700 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017). Christie, Neil, and Simon T. Loseby, Towns in Transition: Urban Evolution in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996). Chrysos, Evangelos, ‘The Empire, the Gentes and the Regna’, in Regna and Gentes: The Relationship between Late Antique and Early Medieval Peoples and Kingdoms in the Transformation of the Roman World, ed. by Hans-Werner Goetz, Jörg Jarnut, and Walter Pohl (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 13–19. Collins, Roger, Visigothic Spain 409–711 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). Dell’Elicine, Eleonora, and Céline Martin, Framing Power in Visigothic Society: Discourses, Devices, and Artifacts (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). Effros, Bonnie, and Isabel Moreira (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Merovingian World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives (London–East Heaven, CT: Pluto Press, 1993). Esders, Stefan, Yitzkak Hen, Pia Lucas, and Tamar Rotman (eds), The Merovingian Kingdoms and the Mediterranean World. Revisiting the Sources (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019). Ferdière, Alain, Capitales éphémères. Des capitales de cités perdent leur statut dans l’antiquité tardive (Tours: FÉRACF, 2004). Fischer, Andreas, and Ian Wood (eds), Western Perspectives on the Mediterranean: Cultural Transfer in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, 400–800 AD (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). Gauthier, Nancy, ‘Christianisation et espace urbain’, in Topographie chrétienne des cites de la Gaule des origins au milieu du VIIIe siècle, vol. 16.2: Christianisation et espace urbain: atlas, tableaux, index, ed. by Nancy Gauthier, Jean-Charles Picard, and Françoise Prévot (Paris: De Boccard, 1989), pp. 359–399. Geary, Patrick, ‘Ethnic Identity as a Situational Construct’, Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien, 113 (1983), 15–26. Geary, Patrick, ‘Medieval Archivists as Authors: Social Memory and Archival Memory’, in Archives, Documentation and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, ed. by Francis X. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), pp. 106–113. Geary, Patrick, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Gelichi, Sauro, and Richard Hodges (eds), New Directions in Early Medieval European Archaelogy: Spain and Italy compared. Essays for Riccardo Francovich (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015). Gillett, Andrew (ed.), On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches on Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002).

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Goetz, Hans-Werner, ‘Introduction’, in Regna and Gentes: The Relationship between Late Antique and Early Medieval Peoples and Kingdoms in the Transformation of the Roman World, ed. by Hans-Werner Goetz, Jörg Jarnut, and Walter Pohl (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 2–11. Goffart, Walter, Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Gurt Esparraguera, José María, and María Isabel Sánchez Ramos, ‘Las ciudades hispanas durante la antigüedad tardía: una lectura arqueológica’, Zona arqueológica, 9 (2008), 183–202. Gutiérrez Lloret, Sonia, ‘Repensando la ciudad altomedieval desde la arqueología’, in La ciutat medieval i arqueologia: VI Curs Internacional d’Arqueologia Medieval, ed. by Flocel Sabaté and Jesús Brufal (Lleida: Pagès Editors, 2014), pp. 17–41. Halfond, Gregory I., The Archaeology of Frankish Church Councils, AD 511–768 (Leiden: Brill, 2010). Halfond, Gregory I., Bishops and the Politics of Patronage in Merovingian Gaul (London: Cornell University Press, 2019). Halsall, Guy, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Heather, Peter, ‘Gens and Regnum among the Ostrogoths’, in Regna and Gentes: The Relationship between Late Antique and Early Medieval Peoples and Kingdoms in the Transformation of the Roman World, ed. by Hans-Werner Goetz, Jörg Jarnut, and Walter Pohl (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 86–133. Heather, Peter (ed.), The Visigoths: From the Migration Period to the Seventh Century: An Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 1999). Heuser, Brian L., ‘The Ethics of Social Cohesion’, Peabody Journal of Education, 80, no. 4 (2005), 8–15. Kulikowski, Michael, ‘Cities and Government in Late Antique Hispania: Recent Advances and Future Research’, in Hispania in Late Antiquity: Current Perspectives, ed. by Kim Bowes and Michael Kulikowski (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 31–70 Kulikowski, Michael, ‘Nation versus Army: A Necessary Contrast?’, in On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches on Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Andrew Gillett (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), pp. 69–84. Leyser, Conrad, Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). Loseby, Simon T., ‘Arles in Late Antiquity: Gallula Roma arelas and urbs Genesii’, in Towns in Transition: Urban Evolution in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Neil Christie and Simon T. Loseby (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), pp. 45–70. Loseby, Simon T., ‘Decline and Change in the Cities of Late Antique Gaul’, in Die Stadt in der Spätantike – Niedergang oder Wandel?, ed. by. Jens-Uwe Krause and Christian Witschel (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006), pp. 67–104.

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Martin, Céline, ‘La degradación cívica de los judíos en el reino visigodo de Toledo’, in Marginados sociales y religiosos en la Hispania tardorromana y visigoda, ed. by Raúl González Salinero (Madrid–Salamanca: Signifer, 2013), pp. 221–241. Martínez Jiménez, Javier, Isaac Sastre de Diego, and Carlos Tejerizo García, The Iberian Peninsula between 300 and 850: An Archaeological Perspective (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018). Murray, Alexander Callander, ‘Reinhard Wenskus on “Ethnogenesis”, Ethnicity, and the Origin of the Franks’, in On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches on Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Andrew Gillett (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), pp. 39–68. Natal, David, and Jamie Wood, ‘Playing with Fire: Conflicting Bishops in Late Roman Spain and Gaul’, in Making Early Medieval Societies: Conflict and Belonging in the Latin West, 300–1200, ed. by Kate Cooper and Conrad Leyser (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 33–57. Panzram, Sabine, and Laurent Callegarin (eds), Entre civitas y madīna: El mundo de las ciudades en la Península Ibérica y en el norte de África (siglos IV–IX) (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2018). Panzram, Sabine, and Paulo Pachá (eds), The Visigothic Kingdom: The Negotiation of Power in Post-Roman Iberia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). Pohl, Walter, ‘Archaeology of Identity: Introduction’, in Archaeology of Identity: Archäologie der Identität, ed. by Walter Pohl (Vienna: ÖAW, 2010), pp. 9–24. Pohl, Walter, Die Völkerwanderung. Eroberung und Integration (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2002). Pohl, Walter, ‘Ethnicity, Theory, and Tradition: A Response’, in On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches on Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Andrew Gillett (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), pp. 221–239. Pohl, Walter, ‘Historiography and Identity: Methodological Perspectives’, in Historiography and Identity I: Ancient and Early Christian Narratives of Community, ed. by Walter Pohl and Veronika Wieser (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), pp. 7–50. Pohl, Walter, ‘History in Fragments: Montecassino’s Politics of Memory’, Early Medieval Europe, 10 (2001), 343–374. Pohl, Walter, ‘Introduction: Early Medieval Romanness – A Multiple Identity’, in Transformations of Romanness: Early Medieval Regions and Identities, ed. by Walter Pohl, Clemens Gantner, Cinzia Grifoni, and Marianne PollheimerMohaupt, Millennium Studies 71 (Berlin–Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), pp. 3–39. Pohl, Walter, ‘Social Cohesion, Breaks, and Transformations in Italy, 535–600’, in Italy and Early Medieval Europe: Papers for Chris Wickham, ed. by Ross Balzaretti, Julia Barrow, and Patricia Skinner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 19–38.

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Pohl, Walter, ‘Telling the Difference: Signs of Ethnic Identity’, in Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300–800, ed. by Walter Pohl and Helmut Reimitz (Brill: Leiden, TRW 2, 1998), pp. 17–69. Pohl, Walter, and Gerda Heydemann (eds), Post-Roman Transitions: Christian and Barbarian Identities in the Early Medieval West (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013). Pohl, Walter, and Gerda Heydemann (eds), Strategies of Identification: Ethnicity and Religion in Early Medieval Europe, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 13 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013). Pohl, Walter, and Helmut Reimitz (eds), Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300–800 (Brill: Leiden, 1998). Pohl, Walter, Clemens Gantner, Cinzia Grifoni, and Marianne Pollheimer-Mohaupt (eds), Transformations of Romanness: Early Medieval Regions and Identities, Millennium Studies 71 (Berlin–Boston: De Gruyter, 2018). Rapp, Claudia, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Reitz, Jeffrey G., ‘Assessing Multiculturalism as a Behavioural Theory’, in Multiculturalism and Social Cohesion: Potentials and Challenges of Diversity, ed. by Jeffrey G. Reitz, Raymond Breton, Karen Kisiel Dion, and Kenneth L. Dion (New York: Springer, 2009), pp. 1–47. Rousseau, Philip, ‘The Spiritual Authority of the “Monk-Bishop”: Eastern Elements in some Western Hagiography of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries’, The Journal of Theological Studies, new series 22, no. 2 (1971), 380–419. Sánchez Ramos, Isabel, and Jorge Morín de Pablos, ‘Los paisajes urbanos de la Antigüedad tardía en Hispania’, Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie 1. Prehistoria y Arqueología, 7 (2014), 97–128. Sánchez Ramos, Isabel, and Pedro Mateos Cruz, Territorio, topografía y arquitectura de poder durante la Antigüedad Tardía (Mérida: Instituto de Arqueología, Mytra 1, 2018). Stanley, Dick, ‘What Do We Know about Social Cohesion: The Research Perspective of the Federal Government’s Social Cohesion Research Network’, The Canadian Journal of Sociology, 28, no. 1 (2003), 5–17. Sterk, Andrea, Renouncing the World Yet Leading the Church: The Monk-Bishop in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Van Dam, Raymond, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Weidmann, Nils B., and Christoph Zürcher, ‘How Wartime Violence Affects Social Cohesion: The Spatial-Temporal Gravity Model’, Civil Wars, 15, no. 1 (2013), 1–18. Wenskus, Reinhard, Stammesbildung und Verfassung. Das Werden der frühmittelalterlichen Gentes (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1961).

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Wickham, Chris, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400–1000 (London: Allen Lane, 2009). Wolfram, Herwig, ‘Gotisches Königtum und römisches Kaisertum von Theodosius dem Großen bis Justinian I’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 13 (1979), 1–28. Wolfram, Herwig, History of the Goths, trans. by Thomas J. Dunlap (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990). Wolfram, Herwig, Intitulatio. Teil 1, Lateinische Königs- und Fürstentitel bis zum Ende des 8. Jahrhunderts (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2014). Wolfram, Herwig, ‘La typologie des ethnogénèses: un essai’, in Des Royaumes barbares au ‘Regnum Francorum’. L’Occident à l’époque de Childéric et de Clovis (vers 450–vers 530), ed. by Françoise Vallet, Michel Kazanski, and Patrick Perin (Paris: Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 1998), pp. 127–136. Wolfram, Herwig, The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples, trans. by Thomas J. Dunlap (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005). Wood, Ian (ed.), Franks and Alamanni in the Merovingian Period: An Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998). Wormald, Patrick, ‘The Leges Barbarorum: Law and Ethnicity in the Post-Roman West’, in Regna and Gentes: The Relationship between Late Antique and Early Medieval Peoples and Kingdoms in the Transformation of the Roman World, ed. by Hans-Werner Goetz, Jörg Jarnut, and Walter Pohl (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 21–53.

About the Authors Dolores Castro is a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and assistant professor at Universidad de General Sarmiento, Argentina. Her current research explores the fields of religion and political power in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, with particular focus on the Visigothic period. Fernando Ruchesi received his PhD at the Universidad de Buenos Aires in 2015. At present he works as a Researcher at the Universitat de Lleida, Spain. His research focuses on the development of social cohesion in Merovingian Gaul and Visigothic Spain, with particular emphasis on the north-east of the Iberian peninsula.

1.

Building Leadership, Forging Cohesion: Bishops and Charity in Late Antiquity Dolores Castro

Abstract In Late Antiquity, bishops were figures of power and leadership. They bore responsibility for spiritual guidance but also for the administration of Church goods and resources. Their role as mediators made them powerful players: they became the greatest benefactors and protectors of the well-being of the community, being in charge of teaching, interpreting, and communicating the Word of God. This chapter addresses the role of charity in constructing episcopal leadership in late antique Iberia. Based on a close examination of hagiographic literature, it will explore the use of charity as a potent tool of legitimation and power, with the aim of enhancing our understanding of how bishops – though not exclusively – built their leadership, and organized and reinforced social ties in seventh-century Hispania. Keywords: hagiography, bishops, leadership, Visigoths, charity

Fides, spes et caritas summae uirtutes sunt. Nam a quibus habentur utique ueraciter habentur.1 Agnoscat episcopus seruum se esse plebi non dominum; uerum haec caritas, non conditio exigit.2 – Isidore of Seville 1 Isid. Hisp., Sent. II, 36, 7, p. 164: ‘Faith, hope and charity are the greatest virtues. Those who possess them certainly possess them in an authentic manner’ (trans. Knoebel, p. 124). 2 Isid. Hisp., Sent. III, 42, 3, p. 285: ‘A bishop recognizes that he is to be a servant to his common people and not their lord [cf. Matt. 20:25]; truly charity demands this, not the rank of the person’ (trans. Knoebel, p. 192).

Castro, D. and Ruchesi, F. (ed.), Leadership, Social Cohesion, and Identity in Late Antique Spain and Gaul (500–700). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463725958_ch01

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As these words of Bishop Isidore of Seville (d. 636) suggested, charity was considered to be essential to episcopal office. Many of his writings were concerned with ecclesiastical duties, both moral and spiritual, and addressed the responsibilities involved in pastoral care. He vehemently exhorted bishops to engage in charity, one of the highest virtues, which since Early Christianity had been closely connected to episcopacy. Emphasis on charity, therefore, was not new in the seventh century. Its importance can be traced back to Jesus’s teachings found in the Synoptic tradition and the Pauline texts, and revived later in the writings of the Church Fathers during the Early Christian centuries.3 As bishops were becoming central figures within the Christian Church and within the communities where they lived and preached, an episcopal model focused on virtues – and particularly on charity – was also being shaped. As a result of extended and heated controversies that sought to define the scope of episcopal authority, bishops strengthened their positions in local communities by concentrating wealth, acquiring privileges, and assuming old practices and social responsibilities. Among the duties that fell under the jurisdiction of the bishops were Christian education and the moral guidance of the flock, the administration of liturgical rites, the protection of marginal and essential groups, the administration of ecclesiastical resources, and the foundation of churches and monasteries. At a local level, they became authentic preachers and leaders by forging and claiming a multifaceted relationship between the earthly and the celestial worlds.4 It is against this background of unity between charity and bishops that this chapter examines the construction of episcopal leadership in Late Antiquity, with a special focus on seventh-century Hispania, as well as the mechanisms and strategies involved in the creation of identities and social cohesion within Christian communities. Moreover, by studying the uses and discursive representations of charity – with an emphasis on Visigothic hagiographies – this study will explore strategies of constructing and legitimizing leaderships, which exalted bishops in their role as spiritual and material mediators, and evoked a particular relationship between the leader and his community, both bound together in a network of circulation 3 For this period, see Garrison, Redemptive Almsgiving, pp. 135–142, and Brodman, Charity & Religion, esp. pp. 11–13. 4 The bibliography on bishops in Late Antiquity is vast and varied. See, for example, Gauthier, ‘Le réseau de pouvoirs’; Rapp, Holy Bishops; Gwynn, ‘Episcopal Leadership’; Fear et al., The Role of the Bishop; Patzold and Van Rhijn, eds, Men in the Middle; especially on Hispania: Stocking, Bishops, Councils and Consensus; Castellanos, ‘The Significance of Social Unanimity’; Natal and Wood, ‘Playing with Fire’; Wood, ‘Building and Breaking Episcopal Networks’.

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of goods and graces which spread throughout the entire social structure and permeated all levels of social life. Furthermore, as scholars have emphasized, narrative devices such as hagiographies, which portrayed bishops as prominent figures of power endowed with virtues and popular support, became essential tools for building loyalties, reinforcing social unity, and strengthening the position of the Christian Church within local contexts. The language of charity thus came to frame social relationships, drawing distinctions and giving form to specific social and political networks.

Building Episcopal Models: Bishops and Charity in Visigothic Hagiography Traditionally, hagiography has been studied almost exclusively from a religious point of view, mainly concerning areas such as the history of religion and liturgy. However, more recent studies have gone beyond this religious dimension and have stressed its relevance for historical research in all fields, from the history of mentalities to economic history. In this framework, there has been a growing interest in hagiography within late antique and early medieval studies, which developed a methodological and historiographical renovation: new editions and translations, but also new theoretical approaches and perspectives have given rise to renewed examinations of these sources, and enabled the development of original lines of research and questions related to the complex processes involved in the construction and functioning of communities.5 Hagiographical literature abounds in idealized images of bishops turned into holy men embodying the highest Christian virtues and practices, which were considered to be worthy of a true servant of God. From Peter Brown onwards, a long tradition of research has addressed the emergence of this key figure, by focusing on the foundation of its power and authority.6 5 Within this process of revaluation of hagiography as a historical source, the works of Peter Brown undoubtedly represent a major contribution. Since the publication of his seminal article ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’ (1971), his lines of research – concerned mainly with the study of sanctity, the cult of saints, and relics – have provided a significant impetus to the field of Late Antiquity. On his academic career, with a special focus on his studies of the cult of saints, see Howard-Johnston and Hayward, The Cult of Saints. See also: Bozóky and Helvétius, eds, Les reliques; and Bozóky, Hagiographie. 6 In addition to Brown’s significant contributions on the holy man, see, among others, Van Dam, Leadership and Community, and Coates, ‘Venantius Fortunatus’.

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During Late Antiquity, lives of holy men circulated in the form of hagiographies, which adopted and communicated a variety of models of sanctity: from the hermit living in isolated seclusion to the bishop deeply involved in urban matters. Within these images, a certain set of features became essential, creating a fixed repertoire of narrative structures and topoi.7 Idealized descriptions, however, were much more than a combination of genre conventions. Moreover, these texts may express shared values, and communicate a set of qualities and duties expected of bishops who exercised a leadership role within the community and the emerging church. Certainly, different kinds of authority coexisted and competed in Late Antiquity, and not always peacefully. The emergence of conflicts and alternative sources of power, both secular and spiritual, raised the question of leadership and its foundations. What were the strategies of power deployed by bishops within this complex context of competing forms of authority? How was episcopal leadership constructed and sustained? What was the relationship between episcopal leadership, identity, and social cohesion? Another question must be addressed: Why hagiographic sources? Saints’ lives must be studied with extreme caution. The challenges involved in interpreting such documents lie in their particular nature, which – as previously mentioned – entailed the use of conventional genre types, formulaic narratives, and a wide range of traditions and sources that, combined and re-elaborated, shaped new meanings for different contexts and audiences. Marc van Uytfanghe has drawn attention to the performative dimension of such stylized accounts, which, in describing the exemplary careers of selected characters, would have been composed with various aims in mind such as defence, idealization, instruction, or edification.8 Additionally, Patrick Geary also stressed the need to approach this literature with a cautious methodology and to focus on the specific contexts in which these accounts and models of holiness were elaborated, produced, and disseminated.9 Stories of saints circulated on both sides of the Pyrenees, as did other types of narratives and literary forms. However, while the flourishing of this tradition is attested in Gaul,10 in the heat of the expansion of the Church and the significant growth of the cult of the saints, the Visigothic corpus 7 An exhaustive list of key elements within episcopal descriptions is provided in Coates, ‘Venantius Fortunatus’. See also Rapp, ‘Charity and Piety’. 8 Van Uytfanghe, ‘L’hagiographie’, pp. 147–148. 9 Geary, Living with the Dead, p. 20. 10 For an inventory of hagiographic texts in the Merovingian context, see Heinzelmann, ‘L’hagiographie’. A more cautious account can be found in Van Uytfanghe, ‘Pertinence et statut’.

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remains rather small.11 Despite the scarcity of sources, some observations can be made regarding the uses of charity in Visigothic hagiography, thereby providing further evidence about its important role in Late Antiquity. Among the sources available to us are the Vita uel Passio Desiderii, written by King Sisebut (c. 613), the anonymous Vitae Sanctorum Patrum Emeretensium, the Vita Aemiliani by Braulio of Zaragoza (c. 645), and the Vita Fructuosi (c. 670). Hagiographies provide valuable resources for exploring and understanding central aspects of the post-Roman world, characterized by complex processes of transformation and political, social, and cultural reconfiguration. As mentioned above, these texts reveal much more than a concatenation of events surrounding the life and character of a particular saint. Rather, hagiography enables us to envisage relationships and strategies of power involved, for example, in the promotion of the cult of saints or in the veneration and control of relics. Moreover, such documents played an important role in strengthening social cohesion and local identities within the Christian communities of the sixth and seventh centuries; they conveyed and reproduced models of sanctity and codes of behaviour, and communicated traditions rooted in local contexts. Among the standard topoi and traditional motifs used in hagiographic sources to describe the lives and characters of saints, charity was held up as an essential quality. Charity, since Early Christian times, was understood as an affection or love for God and for one’s neighbour.12 Biblical passages illustrating this concept are found in the f irst letter of John regarding the statement ‘Deus caritas est’ (1 John 4:8.16), which was later picked up and discussed by Augustine of Hippo. Christian teachings on charity are further developed in the Gospel tradition and the Pauline texts.13 In this regard, concerns about the unity of the Church, hospitality and generosity to the needy – considered, as Garrison argues, as a demonstration of genuine love14 – feature very prominently in Paul’s epistolary collection. In addition, the Gospel of Matthew has become a seminal source on the 11 According to some scholars, this body of work could also include the autobiographical works of Valerio del Bierzo. See, for example, Velázquez, Hagiografía y culto, p. 150. The case of Gaul differs considerably, revealing a much larger hagiographic tradition, including the works of Sulpicius Severus, Venantius Fortunatus, and Gregory of Tours. On Gallia, see Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles, and Fouracre and Gerberding, Late Merovingian France, esp. pp. 1–78. 12 In this sense, as argued by Anita Guerreau-Jalabert, every sin against charity was considered both as an offence against God and an offence against the social order (Guerreau-Jalabert, ‘Caritas y don’, p. 37). 13 On the connection between charity, reward and atonement in Early Christianity, see the exhaustive analysis of Downs, Alms. 14 Garrison, Redemptive Almsgiving, p. 69.

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connection between charity – and righteous works – and heavenly reward (e.g. Matthew 6:1–21; 10:1–42; 19:16–30; 25:31–46). It was also the Gospel of Luke (e.g. Luke 11:37–41) that helped to shape the thinking on charity, especially almsgiving, in connection with the cleansing of post-baptismal sins. The atoning value of giving alms became particularly relevant in the writings of the Greek and Latin Fathers such as John Chrysostom, Cyprian of Carthage, and Augustine. In third-century North Africa, Cyprian – bishop of Carthage from 248 to 258 – claimed that almsgiving and deeds of mercy were effective means of washing away sins after baptism.15 Drawing on the Scriptures, he exhorted his congregation to adopt a behaviour based on charity and almsgiving in pursuit of eternal salvation and future reward. Augustine also took up this primary concern later in the fifth century, which he promulgated in several sermons and treatises, also encouraging his flock to perform charitable works.16 Likewise, in the sixth and seventh centuries, prominent bishops such as Isidore of Seville and Braulius of Saragossa echoed the discourse of charity in their works.17 Deeply concerned with the unity of the kingdom, Isidore insisted in Sententiae on the ideal of a fraternal community bound together in charity.18 He also forged a moral and pastoral message for those entrusted with the care of souls and the guidance of the faithful on the way to salvation. His monastic rule, for example, instructed that new members should renounce all worldly ties, either by distributing their goods to the needy or by contributing them to the monastery.19 In fact, the Rule established that the wealth of the monastery should be divided into three parts, one of which was to be destined for the poor.20 At the heart of this Isidorian work a common life took shape, in which monks shared food, prayer and work, with humility, obedience and hospitality. These monastic values defined models of conduct available not only for monks and those devoted to the contemplative life, but also 15 Particularly relevant in this regard is De opere et eleemosynis, 2. Although Cyprian’s work may have contributed to the development of a doctrine on almsgiving, it is also worth noting that other early Christian writings – such as the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hermas – have also envisaged its redemptive power. 16 About Augustine and the sermons on almsgiving, see Finn, Almsgiving, pp. 147–150. 17 In Sententiae, for example, Isidore brought up once again the meaning of caritas as love for God and neighbour, also mentioned in his Liber Differentiarum. He def ined caritas as ‘perfecta dilectio in Deum et proximum’ (Diff. II, XXXIIII) and further claimed: ‘Sola caritas in aeternum perseuerabit, ipsa sola utramque perducens ad Christum, ipsa sola perfruens gaudium sempiternum.’ 18 Isid. Hisp., Sent. II, 3. 19 Isid. Hisp., Reg. IV. 20 Isid. Hisp., Reg. XX.

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for those who would rule the Church and the kingdom, engaged in active life and worldly affairs. Concerns about charity and social welfare permeated conciliar legislation, too. While an exhaustive survey of this subject goes beyond the scope of the present study, a few representative examples have been selected. The Council of Orléans I (511) stipulated the allocation of revenues for the repair of churches, the maintenance of bishops and the poor, and the redemption of captives. Canon 16 also exhorted bishops to provide food and clothing for the poor and the sick, a decree that was to be repeated, for example, in Orléans V (549) and Lyon III (583) with a special focus on lepers. Councils also legislated against iudices aut potentes who oppressed the poor, and called for their excommunication.21 They also addressed hospitality, the founding of hospices and enacted measures concerning foreigners and fugitives. Charity became a pillar of the Christian world view. The many expressions of charity included almsgiving and care for vulnerable groups, hospitality, release of captives, and building initiatives. In performing these activities, earthly leaders could bolster their authority and status, exhibiting power, and creating and strengthening social ties and cohesion. Moreover, acts of charity would become a source of legitimization and display of a shared system of beliefs and values. In Visigothic hagiography the close relationship between charity (and its varied manifestations) and the bishop is clearly attested, and can be observed especially in the Vitas Sanctorum Patrum Emeretensium (VSPE).22 This work narrates a series of miracles which occurred in Merida (province of Lusitania) approximately between the reigns of Leovigild (568–586) and Reccared (586–601).23 These stories involve monks and authorities belonging to different monasteries – the young Augustus, a servant of Eulalia, the gluttonous monk of Cauliana, and the abbot Nanctus – but the bulk of the text is devoted to the lives of Paulus, Fidelis, and Masona, all depicted as prominent bishops in Merida. A variety of miracles, from heavenly visions to incorrupt bodies, turned the city into an active focus of sanctity and a prosperous religious environment. However, miracles would not be at the centre of these holy men’s lives nor of their relationship with the local 21 Tours II, c. 27 [26]; Toledo IV, c. 32. 22 All Latin references are to VSPE (the critical edition by Maya Sánchez). 23 On the authorship of the Vitas Sanctorum Patrum Emeretensium, see VSPE and Velázquez, Vidas de los Santos Padres de Mérida, esp. pp. 11–15. According to Maya’s study, there are two drafts of the work. The first one was written by an anonymous author during the episcopate of Bishop Esteban, between 633 and 638, while the other consists of a revision made by a deacon of Merida named Paulus in the 670s.

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community. More significantly, Paulus, Fidelis, and Masona were described as being righteous men, associated with the highest values and virtues, and having moral and pastoral aptitudes.24 The episcopal ideal transmitted by the chronicler made charity an essential virtue of bishops, a personal attribute and sign of distinction, a standard extremely difficult to reach and equal. Charity was not only a matter that concerned clergymen and theologians. As Anita Guerreau-Jalabert states, it represented the model of the social bond for all men, a bond that encompassed different relationships – from horizontal to hierarchical ones – and structured important facets of social organization. In this sense, charity implied the creation of a spiritual bond that spread through society as a whole.25 Therefore, bishops’ charitable activities were associated with the care of the entire community, with special attention given to the most vulnerable groups, such as the poor and the sick.26 Indeed, this image of bishops was typical of the hagiographical narrative during Late Antiquity.27 In the VSPE, for instance, both Fidelis and Masona were described as generous and giving men, dedicated to the well-being of Merida and its inhabitants. Masona, for example, is pictured, echoing biblical terminology, as ‘a lover of his brethren, a constant intercessor for his people’.28 Furthermore, the account of Paulus and the aristocratic couple could be understood in the same vein. 24 Descriptions of both Fidelis and Masona include charity among their virtues. On Fidelis: ‘Qui mox effectus habitaculum Spiritus sancti omnibus uirtutibus ita est inradiatus ut sanctitate, karitate, patientia et humilitate uniuersum trnascenderet clerum’ (‘Fidelis, now the tabernacle of the Holy Spirit, was so radiant with all virtues that in holiness, charity, patience, and humility he surpassed all the clergy’) (VSPE IV, IV, 8–10; trans. Garvin, p. 173). And, further on, about Masona: ‘genere quidem Gotus, sed mente promtissima erga Deum perquam deuotus atque uiriliter Altissimi uirtute fundatus, moribus sanctis ornatus habituque magni decoris pulcrificatus, karitatis humilitatisue ab ineunte etate refulgenti stola circumamictus’ (‘by birth a Goth but with ready heart entirely devoted to God and steadfastly reliant upon the power of the Most High, adorned with holy manners, beautiful by a very charming bearing, clothed with the refulgent robe of charity and humility from his early years’) (VSPE V, II, 2–6, trans. Garvin, p. 191). 25 According to Magnani, ‘Dans une société chrétienne référée au divin, le lien social est représenté en termes de caritas, ‘dans le sens de l’amour spirituel, véhiculé par le Saint-Esprit et transitant par Dieu’, qui irrigue toute la société. La circulation des biens par le don étant un moyen de création et de renouvellement des liens sociaux, c’est la même logique de la caritas qui lui est attribuée. Ainsi, plutôt qu’une relation binaire entre le donateur et les moines/clercs, il faudrait voir une relation ternaire puisque tous les dons transitent nécessairement par Dieu’ (Magnani, ‘Du don aux églises’, p. 1). 26 On early Christian attitudes toward the poor and the meanings of wealth distribution, see Brown, Poverty and Leadership; Brown, Through the Eye, pp. 252–304; and Brown, Treasure in Heaven, pp. 40–75. On the ambiguity of the concept of ‘poor’, see Díaz, ‘Marginalidad económica’. 27 See, for example, Greg. Tur., DLH, V. 42.46. 28 Cf. VSPE V, II, 10: ‘amator fratrum, multum orans pro populo’ (trans. Garvin, p. 191).

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It is said that this bishop, after refusing an enormous amount of wealth that was donated to him by an aristocratic couple – as a gesture of gratitude for having saved the woman’s life – eventually accepted it reluctantly, but on the condition that a significant amount should be devoted to helping and benefitting the poor. It is also noted in the VSPE that Fidelis’s works of charity continued over the course of his entire life: even just before he died, he gave alms to the poor and cancelled debts, helping prisoners and comforting indigents.29 Among these special groups were also widows, who regularly received episcopal aid and assistance.30 Thus, these holy men engaged in righteous works throughout their whole lives and careers. As shown by the itinerary of Masona, even during his years in exile, almsgiving and care for the poor continued to be one of his central concerns.31 The same ideal of charity, especially focused on almsgiving, is also known from across the other side of the Pyrenees, in the writings of Venantius Fortunatus32 and in many other hagiographic texts that proliferated in Gaul. Some examples of this topic can be found, for instance, in the Vita Audoini episcopi Rotomagensis, in the Passio Leudegarii and in the Passio Praejecti. This traditional feature also appears in the works of Gregory of Tours, in several descriptions of saints. Although charity was not a feature exclusive to the episcopal figure, many of the bishops who make up the Gregorian repertoire of holy men were endowed with outstanding charity.33 It is worth noting that, unlike extant Visigothic texts, a significant number of Merovingian hagiographies were dedicated to nobles and political leaders, such as kings and queens, who were also exalted and supported by the Church for their appropriation of Christian behaviour and values. As illustrated in the Vita Sanctae Balthildis, for example, Balthild was portrayed 29 VSPE IV, X, 4–6: ‘Deinde multis captiuis et egenis multa largitus est stipem. Ad ultimum redditis cirografis cunctorum deuita relaxauit’ (‘Then he gave large alms to many captives and needy persons. Lastly he gave back to everyone their notes and canceled their debts’) (trans. Garvin, p. 187). 30 See, for example, VSPE IV, X, and VSPE V, VII. 31 VSPE, V, VI. The exile of holy men is another traditional topos in hagiographic texts. After Masona refused to embrace Arianism and to hand over the tunic of St. Eulalia to Leovigild, the king decided to send him away to a monastery of unknown location. The Vita Desiderii, written by King Sisebut, a main source for the VSPE, also depicted Bishop Desiderius of Vienne in exile. On exile, see Vallejo Girvés, ‘Los exilios’; Martin, ‘L‘évêque dans un petit navire’. 32 Coates, ‘Venantius Fortunatus’, pp. 1120–1121. For example, in poem 3.13, dedicated to Bishop Vilicus of Metz, he described the latter as the ‘protector of the flock’ and ‘builder’. Furthermore, he continued: ‘If a new guest asks for sustenance, you offer food; and he f inds a home of his own under your roof. […] Here you clothe the naked, there you feed the needy; the beggar gives nothing to you in return, God gives it in love’ (trans. J. George, pp. 1–2). 33 Some examples in the writings of Gregory include GC 60; 74; 75; 92, and LF IV; VI; VII.

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as a generous and loving queen, who, like a faithful nurse, gave alms to the poor and needy.34 Hence, both religious and secular elites would appeal to models of authority based on Christian virtues to secure and reinforce local prominence. Furthermore, these stories were extremely revealing about the complex relationship that ecclesiastics, and especially bishops, forged with the material world throughout Late Antiquity: as administrators of Church goods and patrimonies – a powerful position that in some cases implied the management of significant wealth – they were necessarily and deeply involved in earthly matters. Conflicts could emerge in the context of episcopal elections and management of personal assets. Examples of this are found in the VSPE. Fidelis’s appointment, on the one hand, was marked by the discontent of the clergy, appeased once he decided to donate his assets to the church after his death. Or, on the other hand, Masona is shown bravely recovering the goods stolen by Bishop Nepopis, when the latter tried to flee the city. These episodes may illustrate the behaviour of bishops in harmony with the Christian ideal, either by renouncing personal possessions for the welfare of the church or by defending ecclesiastical material resources.35 They were held up as examples of the righteous use of wealth, which, after all, was to be oriented to salutary purposes and good works.36 Matters of wealth thus were frequently at the core of the tensions, alliances, and fierce disagreements that emerged over the episcopal seat and ecclesiastical resources.37 Episcopal elections were not always conducted peacefully and conflicts arose repeatedly, reflecting the opposition of factions and interests. In fact, conciliar legislation throughout the seventh 34 Vita Sanctae Balthildis, 4. 35 VSPE IV, V, 4–9: ‘Quod quum ille perpendisset et se una cum rebus suis ab eorum insectatione separare uoluisset, conperro illi quod ille sublatis de iure eclesie prediis suis se ab eis separaret, illis omnino nihil remaneret, plus inuiti licet quam sponte pedibus eius prostraberunt ac ne eos desereret multi precibus flagitaberunt’ (‘When Fidelis became aware of the plotting and determined to free himself with his goods from their persecution, they, learning that he would leave them, taking all his property away from the control of the church [and] that they would have nothing, unwillingly rather than voluntarily prostrated themselves at his feet and with much pleading besought him not to leave them’) (trans. Garvin, p. 175). 36 Cf. Isid., Hisp. Sent. III, 60, I: ‘Grauiter in Deum delinquunt qui diuitias a Deo concessas, non in rebus salutaribus, sed in usibus prauis utuntur. Nesciunt enim inpertire pauperibus, oppressis subuenire despiciunt, et inde magis augent delicta, unde redimere debuerunt’ (‘They sin gravely against God who use the riches given to them by God not for salutary purposes but for evil. They do not know how to share with the poor, they despise to assist the oppressed, and thus they do even greater evil from which they need to be redeemed’ (trans. Knoebel, p. 213). On greed: Sent. II, 41. 37 On conflicts and tensions, see Castillo Maldonado, ‘Ecclesia contra ecclesiam’.

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century reveals continuous attempts to control clergy elections by regulating and defining specific criteria to facilitate access to ecclesiastical office. Moreover, conciliar canons also sought to shape the role of bishops in the Church administration through the delineation of boundaries and responsibilities, since there were frequent irregularities in the management of both ecclesiastical and personal patrimonies.38 As Carles Buenacasa Pérez explored in his study on Ricimiro’s will, there was a permanent tension between Christian spirituality and economic rationality,39 that is, between Christian teachings based on charity and generosity, and actual economic interest. After all, wealth was necessary for charity and charity was necessary for legitimizing wealth. Hence, bishops also became models of good management and, in this context, so-called negative features such as the unavoidable connection with the material world – particularly compared to the spiritual path followed by monks or hermits – were given a positive spin by portraying bishops as champions of charity, major gift donors, and builders. However, bishops should also demonstrate reasonableness and moderation. Therefore, outlays and uses of wealth must not involve abuses or excessive waste of ecclesiastical resources, since the impoverishment of churches would also drastically reduce their capacity to take care of the community and enhance the Church’s local presence and leadership. This close relationship between wealth and generosity was a crucial aspect in the construction of an episcopal model that was to display moderation and austerity. In this regard, even though the Church of Merida was portrayed – probably with a propagandistic tone – as an example of prosperity and abundance, its bishops, embodying the Christian ideal of renunciation, were not supposed to hoard anything for themselves. Instead, as is shown, a 38 As María Teresa de Juan argues, the confusion between personal and ecclesiastical patrimonies was common among bishops in Late Antiquity. According to the author, the distribution of ecclesiastical wealth in Hispania was determined by a tripartite system that involved the bishop, the support of the clergy, and the preservation of buildings and liturgical material. It is worth noting that the amount of income allocated to the poor and to the care of the faithful was not clearly defined. See De Juan, ‘La gestión de los bienes’, esp. pp. 169–180. On patrimony, see also Martínez Díez, El patrimonio eclesiástico, esp. 83–102, and Díaz Martínez, Formas económicas, esp. pp. 18–27. 39 Bishop Ricimiro of Dumio died in 656. His last will and testament was a charitable bequest. Besides manumitting servants, he stipulated that all his goods should be given to the poor and needy, causing a significant decrease in the wealth of his church. That same year a council held in Toledo discussed Ricimiro’s last will, and decided to partially annul the document. Among the reasons put forward by the bishops was the bishop’s misappropriation of resources and the fact that the poor of Dumio did not have such a great need as to leave the church with nothing. However, they could not invalidate the whole testament since it was inspired by charity. For further analysis, see Buenacasa Pérez, ‘Espiritualidad vs racionalidad económica’.

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bishop should give everything for the well-being of his people, but also of his Church, strengthening ties between the clergy and the community. As the example of Masona shows: ‘All were enriched by him with gifts and made wealthier by presents. Not only to his brethren and friends but also to the slaves of the church did he show himself generous beyond belief.’40 In fact, as many scholars have explored, gifts played a significant role in forging power relationships in Late Antiquity, since not only giving but also receiving and rejecting gifts brought about significant social consequences. Gifts could indeed create alliances, consolidate loyalties, make enemies, and modify social status.41 Masona is a clear example of this dynamic. He repeatedly refused to accept gifts sent by Leovigild – by means of which the ‘heretical’ king sought to convince him to abandon his faith and embrace Arianism instead – because the acknowledgment and reception of those would have meant not only the renunciation of the Catholic faith, but also the display of a different relationship with the monarch. By rejecting all gifts from the Arian king, under the leadership of Masona the Church of Merida demonstrated its strength and endurance.42 As observed, both Masona and Leovigild are described as gift donors. But significant differences can be outlined between them. First, Leovigild’s gifts served particular and unrighteous purposes: to influence the Catholic bishop to conversion, or to obtain Eulalia’s relics in return. Moreover, the king’s act of giving was guided by his own political interest, whereas Masona’s gifts were intended for the well-being of the whole population of Merida. Such descriptions based on stereotypical behaviour and contrasting characters were an expected element of hagiographic narratives, and may have served different purposes. Whether such purposes included teaching, fostering an identity, entertaining, or even legitimizing a local tradition – or all of these at once – they were in fact framed within a discourse of gift-giving. Charity thus was a key element in building and staging episcopal leadership. It envisaged a unique bond, which enabled the elevation of bishops above any other local or central authority. Charity exerted a cohesive and unifying force by nurturing a network of relationships around them. In 40 VSPE V, III, 48–51: ‘Omnes ab illo augebantur donis ac diuitiis locupletabantur, et non tantum fratribus et amicis quam et ipsis seruulis eclesie se muneribus largum ultra quam credi potest prebebat’ (trans. Garvin, p. 197). 41 The bibliography on this subject is abundant. For an introduction to the studies on the gift with a special focus on the Early Middle Ages, see Davies and Fouracre, eds, The Languages of Gift, esp. pp. 1–17. See also Algazi et al., eds, Negotiating the Gift, and the collective volume Medieval Transformations, edited by Cohen and De Jong. 42 Cf. VSPE V, IV, 20–22, and V, VIII, 36–41.

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fact, as intercessors between the earthly and the spiritual world43 and as guarantors of the circulation and distribution of goods on earth, bishops articulated a bond between God and the faithful, a bond that would extend to all members of the community. The episcopal charitable gesture was thus considered to be wider in scope, encompassing not only the Christian community but also Jews and Gentiles.44 This point is underlined, for example, in Masona’s foundation of a xenodochium on the outskirts of the city. The medical personnel were given the order to gather all sick people in Merida regardless of their religion or legal status.45 To cite another example, Masona also instructed those in charge of the kitchen and the storing of food in the church to provide assistance – by giving wine, oil, or honey46 – to all people coming from both the city and the countryside.47 Following the example of Jesus, Masona’s generosity had no religious or geographical boundaries. These accounts show that the church –with its bishop included– and other buildings constructed on episcopal initiative were important centres of attraction, drawing both urban and rural populations, and, at the same time, functioned as organizing poles for Merida, creating unity and embracing all. In this sense, the episcopate of Masona is described as a period of great abundance and prosperity for the city and its inhabitants. It is said that both rich and poor enjoyed the benefits equally and lived devoid of 43 However, it is worth noting that this significant role was not only limited to the capitalization of charitable works and neither was it exclusive to the episcopal leader. From the interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures to the administration of sacraments and the realization of miracles, there were a variety of attributes and duties that made a whole hierarchy of religious men, mainly bishops, the true mediators between God and mankind. 44 VSPE V, II, 29–32: ‘Non solum autem in omnium fidelium arcanis eius fraglabat inmensa karitas, sed omnium Iudeorum uel gentilium mentes miro dulcedinis sue affectu ad Xpi gratia pertraebat’ (‘Not only immense love for him burn in the hearts of all the faithful but he drew the minds of all Jews and pagans to the grace of Christ by his marvelous kindness’) (trans. Garvin, p. 193). 45 VSPE V, III, 13–21. 46 Among the goods that were distributed through charity were food (especially wine, oil and honey), money, notes, and cancellations of debts. 47 VSPE V, III, 27–32: ‘Si quis uero de ciuibus urbis aut rusticis de ruralibus ad atrium ob necessitate accessisset, licorem uini, olei uel mellis a dispensantibus poposcisset et uasem paruulum in quo lebaret exibuisset et eum uir sanctus uidisset, ut erat semper obtutu gratus, iucundi uultu, mox ipsud uasculum confringi et ut maiorem deferret precipiebat’ (‘Whenever any citizen of the town or rustic from the country came to the atrium because of need, asked the stewards for wine, oil, or honey, and held out a small vessel in which to carry it away and the holy man saw it, gracious of countenance and of pleasant mien as he always was, he would at once order the vessel broken and a larger one brought’) (trans. Garvin, p. 195).

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disease and scarcity, all connected by charity.48 Although this description abounds in classical topoi, which paint a picture of social unanimity and consensus around Masona,49 it is indicative of the efforts made to bolster the role of the bishop as the undeniable leader of Merida, a leadership that went beyond religion, origin or legal condition. He led not only the church, but the whole city. Other Visigothic hagiographies such as the Vita Desiderii and the Vita Fructuosi reproduced the topos of charity and exhibited similar characteristics to the holy men of Merida, particularly Masona. These are also partial biographies focusing on the lives of saint-bishops,50 depicted as the embodiments of virtue and Christian morals, and distinguished by their extraordinary character, devotion, and charitable works.51 The traditional image of the holy man is found, for example, in the Vita Desiderii, reinforced by biblical quotations, especially from the New Testament. As studied by José Carlos Martín,52 Desiderius’s description is based on Matthew 25:35–3653 and stressed qualities such as hospitality (considered to be one of the most meaningful demonstrations of love), generosity, and assistance to foreigners. Biblical endorsement, thus, even further enhanced the edifying character of this episcopal image, which was intended to provide an example of righteous conduct and to communicate a model of sanctity grounded in Christian virtues and precepts. Other characters, on the contrary, such as the Frankish 48 VSPE V, II, 21–22: ‘Omnibus inerat gaudium, cunctis aderat pax, nulli aberat felicitas, in omnium corda florebat perfecta karitas’ (‘In everyone there was joy, in everyone there was peace, no one lacked happiness; in the hearts of all flourished perfect charity’) (trans. by Garvin, p. 193). 49 On this topic, see Castellanos, ‘Social Unanimity’. 50 Desiderius occupied the see of Vienne from 596 to his death in 607, while Fructuosus held the see of Braga from 656 to 665. 51 Cf. Vit. Des. 2: ‘esurienti iuxta euangelicum uictum, sitienti obtulit potum, praebuit infirmo carceratoque solacium, peregrino hospitium, nudo uestiuit amictum. Non illum cunctis inimica elatio uirtutibus extulit, non languida temulentia sauciauit, non ciborum nimia praesumptio onerauit, non uorax libido corrupit, non fallax mendositas demutauit, non cupiditas nocitura persuasit’ (‘He brought food, as the gospels tell us to do, to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, gave solace to the weak and imprisoned, hospitality to the stranger, and clothes to the naked. Pride, the enemy of all virtue, did not possess him, nor did he fall a victim to slothful drunkenness. He was not burdened with gluttony nor did insatiable lust corrupt him. Deceitful lies did not shake his resolve nor did the fatal love of money tempt him’) (trans. Fear, p. 1). 52 On the Vita Desiderii, see Martín, ‘Una revisión de la tradición textual’; Martín, ‘Verdad histórica y verdad hagiográfica’; Martín, ‘Caracterización de personajes’. 53 ‘For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.’

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kings opposed to the bishop, were depicted with typically negative traits and portrayed as cruel and abhorrent adversaries, highlighting through contrast the positive qualities of the saint. According to this narrative, charity and community care also lay at the core of episcopal leadership. Two examples will be considered to illustrate this point. First, the return of Desiderius to Vienne – after spending a period in exile – was described in terms of the restoration of social order and the eradication of miseries, plagues, and revolts, which had deeply affected the community during his absence.54 The bishop is depicted as doctor and protector, and as the true leader of Vienne. The second example recounts a miracle performed by the bishop: after being informed that wine was in short supply and was no longer sufficient to satisfy the crowd, he performed the sign of the cross over the jar and, through this ritual gesture, it was filled again.55 Such a miracle was not only an acknowledgement of Desiderius’s holiness, but also an endorsement of his image and reputation as a caretaker responsible for providing the community with the divine circulation of goods. Moreover, these performative acts included liturgical elements56 such as wine that accentuated his role as a mediator, as a true channel of God’s will. Similar acts of charity are also attributed to St. Aemilian. With biblical echoes, this holy man also multiplied wine for a large crowd, and, as recounted by Bishop Braulius of Saragossa, he cut off and gave away the sleeves of his robe and his cloak to a group of poor people who approached him asking for assistance.57 Another key aspect of the bishops’ charitable work was, as already mentioned, the founding of monasteries and other buildings related to the assistance of the sick, pilgrims, and travellers. It is not therefore unexpected that the lives of late antique bishops abound with this practice. Bishop Masona sponsored the construction of basilicas and monasteries, which we are told were endowed with properties and resources, and inaugurated a hospital or xenodochium, which he equipped with personnel and supplies taken from the ecclesiastical patrimony. Furthermore, he provided monetary support to the basilica of St. Eulalia for charitable use, with particular 54 Cf. Vit. Des. 11. This topic is also found in the VSPE. Bishop Masona’s return from exile is similarly described as the recovery and restoration of the health and well-being of the city’s inhabitants. 55 Cf. Vit. Des. 12. 56 On the relationship between charity and the Eucharist, see Magnani, ‘Du don aux églises’. 57 An earlier similar episode is recorded in the Life of St. Martin written by Sulpicius Severus (VM, 3).

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focus on the welfare of the poor and the indigent.58 Before Masona, Fidelis funded the restoration of the atrium and of Eulalia’s basilica, improving the building with new architectural structures.59 An intense building activity is also described in the anonymous Vita Fructuosi, which depicted the saintly itinerary of Fructuosus, bishop of Braga between 656 and 665. Before and after being appointed to the episcopal seat, Fructuosus is described as having established and founded numerous monasteries, giving away his patrimony, and distributing alms. It is said that he built the monastery of Compludo, ‘according to divine precepts, and keeping nothing for himself, but spending all his wealth on it’.60 The topos of the ‘bishop-as-monk’ founder of monasteries is also attested in the Gallic sources of the period, as Mathisen explains through the examples of the Vita Hilarii and the Vita Caesarii, among others.61 In brief, these examples show that charity was more than just an attribute within a long list of traditional topoi used to define holy men in Late Antiquity. Above all, charity was a key element through which local leaderships, especially bishops and religious leaders, were described, representing ideals of behaviour, which outlined and bolstered their role within society. Moreover, performing charitable gestures helped to legitimize the relationship between bishops and the earthly world, between bishops and wealth. The task of managing the ecclesiastical goods and resources rooted them necessarily in the material domain. Therefore, bishops had to exhibit generosity and virtue of character by giving up their possessions and distributing goods to the people, especially to those in need. In so doing, as charity was considered to have a divine origin, they acted as intermediaries assuring the distribution of spiritual gifts on earth. Furthermore, charity helped to distinguish bishops, but also other members of the elites, who sought to be embedded within established patterns of authority. Organizing and controlling charity was a sign of power within a context of competition and coexistence between different sources and traditions of authority. And, in this context, assuming charitable duties would also have been an effective way of enhancing the essential role of mediators within society. 58 VSPE V, III, 36–41. 59 VSPE IV, VI, 30–32; Caballero Zoreda and Sastre de Diego, ‘Espacios de la liturgia hispana’. On St. Eulalia: Mateos Cruz, La basílica de Santa Eulalia. 60 LFB, 3, trans. Fear, p. 125. There are plenty of examples of his building activity such as the foundations of the monasteries of Rufianum, Visunia, and Peonense, among others (LFB, 6–7). 61 Life of Caesarius, 1, 35; Mathisen, ‘The Ideology’, p. 218. See also Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 85–92.

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Building a Charitable City: Spaces of Charity in Merida Iconic lives were not easy to emulate, and neither were iconic cities. Merida was depicted – not without a dash of propaganda – as a prosperous and thriving city, a major economic and trading centre, renowned for the presence of merchants and foreigners.62 However, economic splendour, though a sign of power, was not the only reason why Merida became such an important pole of attraction in Late Antiquity.63 The veneration of the martyr Eulalia attracted the local faithful, but also pilgrims and devotees from afar, who sought to visit the extramural Basilica, the most important cult site dedicated to this saint.64 The VSPE represented Merida as an example of mobility and circulation: a place where distinct religious traditions met and coexisted, and a place where local inhabitants (urban and rural, rich and poor), pilgrims, merchants, sailors, foreigners, Catholics, Arians, and Jews converged. Merida was the charitable city par excellence, the ultimate expression of hospitality and sanctity. Concrete examples of foreigners who prospered in the city were Abbot Nanctus and Bishops Paulus and Fidelis. The former had arrived from Africa, the latter from the East, and all had reached prominent positions in the Church. Inhospitality, on the contrary, 62 Merida was founded in Augustan times around 25 BC. The splendour of its urban landscape, exhibited in monumental architecture, reflected the prominent social and cultural position achieved by the city in the first centuries of the Roman Empire. After being declared capital of the diocesis Hispaniarum in the third century, Merida underwent significant urban transformations and reforms. Current archaeological research shows that the development of Christian architecture in the city did not take place until the fifth century. Funerary and martyrial basilicas were built outside the walls, and, at the same time, several churches were constructed in the interior of the city where the episcopal complex formed by the baptistery, the cathedral, and the episcopal palace was also built. These places carried great liturgical and identity-forming value for the community. On the urban development of Merida, see Mateos Cruz, ‘Augusta Emerita’; Mateos Cruz, ‘El culto a Santa Eulalia’; Mateos Cruz, ‘El urbanismo emeritense’; and Mateos Cruz and Pizzo, ‘Augusta Emerita’. On Christian transformations, see Alba Calzado, ‘La participación de la Iglesia’. The capital status of Emerita Augusta is discussed in Arce, ‘¿Hispalis o Emerita?’ 63 Recent interpretive approaches and investigations in the field of urban archaeology have developed renewed views on cities and their role in Late Antiquity. The old models that saw the city in the light of Roman splendour were questioned, and new studies based mainly on archaeology and epigraphy provided new frameworks with which to think about late antique urban settings, no longer in terms of decay or catastrophe, but from a multiplicity of processes of continuity and discontinuity, of change and permanence. For an overview of this historiographical renewal, see Panzram and Callegarin, eds, Entre civitas y madīna. On urban archaeology, see Gutiérrez Lloret, ‘Repensando la ciudad altomedieval’; Brogiolo and Gelichi, La città nell’altomedioevo; and Sánchez Ramos and Morín de Pablos, ‘Los paisajes urbanos’. 64 See Arce, ‘The City of Mérida’.

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was a sign of wickedness, denial of God, and a characteristic often attributed to political enemies.65 Within this hagiographical depiction of the urban setting, the bishop appeared as the civic and religious leader chosen both by God and the people of Merida, as a central figure who forged a permanent bond with the local community, strengthening social ties and local loyalties. This multifaceted relationship was expressed and articulated in charitable activities, such as almsgiving and the provision of food, care and shelter, which took place not only in religious buildings (churches, monasteries, basilicas) but also in public spaces (roads, gates, walls). These places brought the community together in common experiences and habits, especially in religious rites and ceremonies, and became important centres of refuge and charitable assistance. People gathered around the episcopal church expecting food and drink, around monasteries, and basilicas. Thus, a centripetal force emanated from the presence of the leader that attracted groups of people – even from outside Merida – to these buildings and to other urban spaces. The VSPE offers many examples of how leader and crowds met and how the relationship between them was recreated. Such is the case of Fidelis, who at the end of his life, brought together poor and prisoners to the Basilica of St. Eulalia, where, as described earlier, he performed several charitable works. It is not our aim here to point out the full authenticity of these accounts, but rather to highlight the importance of portraying the local bishop in his multifaceted role as protector of the community. This facet was also exhibited, as we shall see, in the defence of religious buildings and relics of the saint – another major protective force and symbol of local identity – and in the provision of charitable relief and distribution of supplies. The bishops’ charitable dispensation took place in specific settings and buildings that gathered individuals and groups of people, encouraging relationships and collective emotions not only with each other, but also with the spatial dimension itself. These places held much more significance than religious or cult sites: they became reference points within the city where the local population, and occasionally itinerant people, gathered periodically – in the search for food, money, shelter, or company – forging a sense of belonging and participation. Whether located in the heart of the 65 In Gregory of Tours’s Decem libri historiarum, for example, the Longobards are portrayed in the vision of Hospicius as having no faith and prone to perjury (Greg. Tur., DLH, VI. 6). And, he added: ‘[T]hey do not feed the poor, they do not clothe the naked: no hospitality is offered there to strangers, and they are not even given enough to eat’ (The History of the Franks, VI. 6, trans. Thorpe, p. 333).

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city or outside the walls, they played an important role in the shaping of identities and social bonds bringing unity and strengthening cohesion, and, at the same time, connecting the community to a leader and to a specific territory. Merida appeared in the hagiographical record as a Christian city, endowed with a large number of churches and monasteries as the result of episcopal initiative.66 It is worth noting that both churches and monasteries appeared in the VSPE to have been closely related at the time, showing no sign of conflict with each other. During Late Antiquity, it was common that bishops would have a monastic past, a background highly appreciated at the time, and contemplative life was upheld as an ideal path of perfection and divine devotion. Even though monasteries were indeed under episcopal authority and disputes over their jurisdiction emerged frequently in conciliar laws, the VSPE show no disagreements or disputes between them, and bishops and monks often converged at the same places. Moreover, the VSPE depicted an expanding monastic environment. In this context of growth and development of monasticism in Hispania, from the fifth century onwards, monasteries multiplied and gradually acquired a major social role.67 Moreover, recent archaeological studies have revealed the significant role of such settlements in the life of the city.68 These religious buildings, disseminated as a network in the urban and suburban landscapes of Merida, became important places of social expression and collective manifestation. They provided a framework for relationships, gestures, and practices, and an opportunity to be in the presence of the bishop, the mediator of divine will. Hence, charity – in the many forms it adopted at the time – helped to develop an asymmetric and vertical bond between the community and the episcopal leader. The bishop demonstrated his power and enhanced his prestige through pious giving, but also in controlling the means, the forms, and the recipients of his charitable gesture. In the same vein, the construction and foundation of monasteries and similar buildings were also a demonstration of episcopal power: bishops, by making use of ecclesiastical resources, 66 Cf. Velázquez, ‘Mérida’, pp. 175–180; Alba Calzado, ‘Secuencias en la transformación’, pp. 54–65. 67 The development of monasticism in Hispania has been extensively studied. See, for example, Díaz, ‘Las fundaciones monásticas’; Díaz, ‘Monasticism and Liturgy’; García Moreno, ‘Los monjes y monasterios’. On the charitable role of monasteries, see Díaz, ‘Marginalidad económica’. 68 See, for example, Sastre de Diego et al., ‘Territorio y monacato emeritense’. Unfortunately, as Chavarría argues, rural monasteries are diff icult to identify in the archaeological record because of their modest construction. See Chavarría Arnau, ‘Monasterios, campesinos y uillae’; Chavarría Arnau, ‘Suburbio, iglesias y obispos’.

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displayed building activities which benefitted cities and their inhabitants. Such initiatives strengthened the presence of the church and its authorities, especially in remote areas far from the urban centre, regulating and organizing people’s circulation, controlling and containing the poor and the indigent, and channelling an entire population who dwelled at the margins of society and, thus, at the margins of ecclesiastical and civic regulation. The extramural construction identified as a xenodochium69 could be seen as an example of this strategy: rooting ecclesiastical authority beyond the walls, organizing space and, at the same time, people and resources. Its location, only 200 metres away from the Basilica of St. Eulalia, was definitely not arbitrary. This shrine attracted large crowds of pilgrims and devotees, a phenomenon that could have caused the erection of other buildings and settlements in the surrounding area, such as monasteries and minor churches. Therefore, as Peregrine Horden suggested, hospitals could have played an important social role in configuring urban space and organizing the distribution and circulation of people.70 According to the hagiographer, this building would provide medical care to those who were sick, suffering, or dying. And, as mentioned before, Masona sent for every sick person in the city, regardless of his or her religion or origin, reinforcing the medical facet of episcopal charity particularly stressed in the VSPE: the bishop could establish centres dedicated to healing or even show surgical skills, as exemplified in the Life of Paulus. Therefore, despite the lack of information regarding the actual functioning of the xenodochium, the hagiographical text describes its foundation and maintenance mainly as episcopal achievements. This connection was extremely valuable in terms of bolstering the reputation of bishops as protectors and true leaders. While this is the only available record of the existence of hospitals within the Visigothic kingdom, charitable institutions in Gaul seem to have been more abundant. An early example of this phenomenon is the hospital founded by Caesarius, bishop of Arles from 502 to 542, attested in the Vita Caesarii.71 Other episcopal, but also 69 Mateos Cruz advances three main arguments that provide strong support to the xenodochium theory: the chronology – since the construction of the building (second half of the sixth century) coincided with Masona’s episcopacy – the extramural location and its proximity to St. Eulalia’s Basilica, and the character of its architecture and its similarity with other xenodochia. See Mateos Cruz, ‘Identificación del Xenodochium’. Another view of the subject in Chavarría Arnau, ‘Suburbio, iglesias y obispos’, esp. pp. 444–445. About hospitals in Late Antiquity, see Horden, ‘The Earliest Hospitals’, p. 377; Watson, On Hospitals, pp. 59–79. 70 See Horden, ‘The Earliest Hospitals’, pp. 364–365. 71 Life of Caesarius, 1, 20.

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royal and lay aristocratic, foundations of xenodochia are also reported in Gallic sources from the sixth and seventh centuries.72 While such places could have functioned as mechanisms of social inclusion – by organizing and regulating the extra-urban population, providing assistance and health care, and promoting communal togetherness and sociability – they could also have played a signif icant role in def ining exclusion, keeping any undesirable and itinerant sectors of the population outside the walls. As mentioned above, religious buildings, predominantly monasteries, could have served as confinement spaces in which certain people were kept, such as Bishops Masona and Desiderius, who challenged the monarchy and exhibited increasing power. However, this fate was not only reserved for prominent figures of political significance. Seventh-century conciliar legislation also revealed that errant and itinerant lifestyles were a major concern among the bishops. As exemplified in the Fourth Council of Toledo, canon 53 ruled that religious itinerants who were neither clergymen nor monks were to be assigned to monastic institutions or put under clerical control. In the same vein, canon 5 of the Seventh Council of Toledo legislated against the growing trend of individuals who wandered and circulated through indeterminate places without a fixed destination or a stable domicile.73 Frankish councils also expressed concern about the presence of itinerants and their wandering within the borders of the kingdom. Through building activity, the bishop would have provoked substantial social changes in the urban and suburban landscape, Christianizing spaces, assuming caring duties as the responsibility of the church and erecting buildings that could have functioned as anchor points for a diverse population.74 72 On Gallic foundations, see Horden, ‘Public Health’. An example of a royal foundation is recorded in the Council of Orleans V (549). On that occasion, the bishops gathered in the assembly approved the hospice created by King Childebert and his wife (Orleans V, c. 15). 73 For a complete exposition of these canons, see CCH, 5, p. 232 and pp. 352–355. 74 The ways of dealing with sickness were extremely diverse. The VSPE repeatedly refer to this subject, noting that disease was a constant aspect of society. Certainly, illness and diseases were a recurring topic in hagiographies, which affected both good and evil characters. The VSPE revealed cases of sudden illnesses, which led to mystical visions (the young Augustus) or materialized divine punishment, and other illnesses resulting from the natural life cycle. The episode of the aristocratic woman, for example, describes a complication linked to pregnancy and birth, one of the main causes of mortality at the time. Others are presented as the inevitable prelude to death, as the consequence of an advanced life cycle. Moreover, the significant part played by disease in late antique life is also attested, for example, in the return of Bishop Masona to Merida after his exile. The church of Merida rejoiced ‘because the sick had found relief, because the oppressed had obtained help, because food was not wanting to the needy’ (VSPE V, VIII, trans. Garvin, p. 229). Anyone could suffer illness and require convalescence: good and evil, rich and poor, holy men and non-holy men. Unfortunately, the VSPE do not provide us with any further

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Building Cohesion: The Martyr, the Bishop and the Local Community As described in the episode of Paulus and the aristocratic couple, the Church of Merida was greatly enriched by their significant donation, which by episcopal decision was to be destined primarily for the relief of the poor. Christian education encouraged the rich and the wealthy to make donations to the ecclesiastical institution since acts of generosity and charity were conceived as redemptive. Furthermore, the growth and enrichment of the Church was seen as the result of exemplary Christian behaviour. The hagiographer illustrated here an ideal circuit of material resources, from the wealthiest sectors of society to the poorest, from the Church to the vulnerable, all orchestrated by the episcopal figure. However, the position of the bishops was not to remain unchallenged. The hagiographical accounts of the time are peppered with lively accounts of conflicts with other authorities and helped to build the image of a true leader and protector. Holy men’s lives were not always calm and peaceful and on many occasions they had to deal with evil kings, ambitious aristocrats, or even Arian bishops who threatened to displace the saint and destroy his faith. Masona, for example, confronted all of them over the course of an itinerary that took him from Merida to Toledo, from Toledo to exile and, after a prolonged confinement in a monastery, back to Merida.75 He is portrayed as remaining strong in his convictions and faith in spite of the bribes, insults, and Leovigild’s vain attempts to capture the tunic of Eulalia.76 These confrontations did nothing but elevate the bishop by reinforcing his leadership and his identification with Merida: on the one hand, he stood up to defend not only Eulalia’s relic, which he hid beneath his clothes, but also the religious buildings in the city, symbols of urban identity. He is portrayed as the protector of the spiritual bond that the city had with the martyr and with all those urban settings that guaranteed the religious and social life of the community. The first struggles between Masona and Sunna were all about seizing control of buildings, mainly of a religious character. information on how the xenodochium would have actually worked. In Late Antiquity, coping with ailments, pains and disease involved a multiplicity of options ranging from healers to holy men and relics. And, as Park argues, monasteries had not yet assumed the important role that they would play from the ninth century onwards regarding not only the study and transmission of medical knowledge, but also the care of the poor and the sick in the monastic hospitals. Cf. Park, ‘Medicine and Society’, p. 71. 75 Cf. Castro, ‘El obispo en movimiento’. 76 See Castillo Maldonado, ‘¿Rivalidades ciudadanas en textos hagiográficos hispanos?’

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The eagerness of the Arian bishop for appropriating churches and basilicas went beyond a religious imperative: it also meant an appropriation of places of power – places where the whole community gathered and forged an identity as a collective – and also of redistributive practices such as the leader’s prerogatives and duties associated with those buildings and that community. Those places became strong signs of local identity, insofar as they involved the whole community in a liturgical agenda, and enabled close contact with the bishop and other ecclesiastical authorities. Certainly, there were other spaces of sociability beyond religious sites. As already mentioned, roads, gates, and walls, for example, also constituted significant markers of local identity, and the VSPE shows how a continual effort was made by the Catholic Church to Christianize them. Processions, celebrations, festivities, and social conflicts took place in the urban framework.77 Bishops followed by the people moved from one church to another, mainly from the episcopal cathedral to the Basilica of St. Eulalia, creating new habits and forming a Christian circuit which traversed the city, imbuing the landscape with new meanings. As previously discussed, new Christian buildings were erected, and the landscape of Merida underwent profound changes, both physical and cultural. Pious giving, repeated processions – during special days of the Christian calendar, such as Easter, or after mass – and celebrations, for example, on the occasion of the triumph of Masona in the theological dispute against Sunna, implied the recognition of an authority and the creation and consolidation of urban ties and identities. Additionally, holy men were depicted as leading the crowds – another topos of hagiographic accounts – giving food, and protecting the city and its inhabitants from evil forces and calamities. These were visible activities that asserted the presence of the church in social interactions, in the landscape, and in everyday life. The bedrock of leadership therefore lies in many aspects and behaviours. In the case of Merida, images of charitable leaders were reinforced by the connection drawn between bishops and the martyr Eulalia. Cities would commonly be associated with heavenly patrons, and Eulalia was considered to be Merida’s. In fact, saints and relics were significant components in the process of identity making not only for individuals, but also for the city as a whole. This association, thus, could enhance the position of the urbs within the urban map of Hispania, asserting its status as a powerful locus of sanctity, something that few cities could boast of at the time. Another example in the seventh century is Toledo, a city that emerged and consolidated as an icon of Christian faith and orthodoxy. From Reccared onwards, the city 77 See Díaz, ‘La rue à Merida au VIe siècle’.

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became the most important political, administrative, and ecclesiastical centre, accompanied by a process of civil, ecclesiastical, and monastic building renovation. The Church of the Holy Apostles and the Basilica of St. Leocadia are illustrative of this development. The veneration of a martyr of its own was therefore a powerful strategy in the making of a true urbs regia, endowed with its own celestial patrons.78 Merida housed the most important shrine dedicated to Eulalia, and her relics, especially her tunic, were kept under the protection of the Catholic bishop. So crucial was the claim of a saint as patron that conflicts between cities or local authorities took place frequently. As Santiago Castellanos puts it, relics were important elements in building and defining social cohesion, and in consolidating episcopal status. Moreover, the author identifies three essential factors that would be of great importance in the definition of community identities during Late Antiquity: the loca sacra, the city walls, and the bishop, and, at the core of this process, the saintly patrons and their relics.79 The VSPE are a clear example of these phenomena. First, Masona and Sunna disputed control of the Basilica. The entire population, it is said, defended their most precious sanctuary side-by-side with the leader of Merida.80 Apparently, the resistance was so effective that Sunna had to carry out a new strategy. The Arian went to Leovigild to request that he directly grant him dominion over the basilica. The account however tells us that the king was inclined to take a more cautious approach: the organization of a theological debate between the bishops. Masona’s victory left no room for doubt: not only had he demonstrated his solid biblical knowledge, but also that he exclusively had the support of the saint. In a second confrontation, Masona had to face the king himself to protect Eulalia’s relic and prevent it from falling into the hands of Toledo and the Arian church. These episodes, summarized in a few lines here, demonstrate 78 As Díaz y Díaz underlined, the expansion of the cult of Leocadia – the liturgical construction of her status as a martyr or confessor – needs to be seen in relation to the dominant role that Toledo would assume in the peninsular context. Cf. Díaz y Díaz, ‘Cuestiones en torno al culto’, p. 53. See also Velázquez and Ripoll, ‘Toletum’, p. 557; Martin, La géographie, pp. 221, 225. 79 Castellanos, ‘Las reliquias de santos’, p. 19. See also Castellanos, ‘La capitalización episcopal’. 80 VSPE V, V, 36–41: ‘Cui quum sanctus Masona episcopus uel uniuersus cum eo populus resisteret ac uehementer obpugnaret, supradictus pseudoepiscopus Sunna antefato principi multa in accusationem sancti uiri scripsit eique suggessit ut ipsa sacra baselica, quam adire iniaberat, catholicorum potestate sublata dicionis sue regio imperio tradetur’ (‘When the holy bishop Masona and all his people resisted keenly and fought back sturdily the false bishop Sunna made many written accusations to the king against the holy man and suggested to him that the basilica which he longed to lay hold of be taken from the authority of the Catholics by royal order and handed over to his control’) (trans. Garvin, p. 203).

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the tight – and necessary – bond that was created between the (Catholic) bishop, the saint and the city. Eulalia even appeared before King Leovigild, calling Masona her ‘servant’ and, subjecting the king to harsh punishments, ordered him to bring the bishop back from exile.81 The saint and the city were claiming their leader.

Conclusions Most canons of the Fourth Council of Toledo, presided over by Bishop Isidore of Seville in 633, were concerned with disciplinary matters and the uniformity of practices, revealing irregularities in episcopal ordinations (c. 19) and clerical behaviours (c. 22, c. 29). Ignorance, lack of instruction82 and a correct administration of ecclesiastical property (c. 33, c. 67, c. 68) were at the centre of the discussions. Against this background, canon 32 reminded bishops of their duty to protect the people and the poor, to defend them from the oppression of iudices ac potentes. This ideal of episcopal behaviour is clearly exhibited in the hagiographic discourse. For example, the holy men of Merida were identified above all as protectors of the community, and mediators between the mundane and the heavenly worlds. What do these paradigmatic examples tell us about the construction of leadership and social cohesion in Late Antiquity? To begin with, they exhibit values and behavioural standards. They embodied role models, examples of virtues and Christian merits that glorified a particular past and tradition. Reality, however, often differed from those faultless images. Conciliar legislation reveals the attempts of Visigothic bishops to regulate religious practices and access to ecclesiastical offices, and to define liturgical rites within the kingdom. Between rural and urban contexts, churches had to deal with diversity. Economic growth was uneven among ecclesiastical structures and sees, and not all of them had the necessary resources to allocate to the distribution of charity. Above all, the lives of these holy men reveal the significant role of bishops within late antique communities. Among the multiple prerogatives and 81 VSPE V, VIII, 15–19: ‘Denique nocte quadam recubanti in stratu suo impio Leouigildo tiranno adstitit eique flagris diu multumque utraque latera uerberauit dicens: ‘Redde mici seruum meum. Nam si moram feceris ad reddendum, scito te acrioribus suppliciis excruciandum’ (‘She appeared one night to the impious and tyrant Leovigild as he lay upon his bed and beat his sides for a long time with a scourge, saying: Return my servant to me. If you delay returning him know that you will be tormented with worse punishment’) (trans. Garvin, p. 225). 82 See, for example, canons XXV, XXVI.

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responsibilities – from liturgical and pastoral care to financial administration – charitable activities were at the core of their duties. Through charity, bishops forged a bond with the community. On the one hand, they appeared as the protectors of the people, giving away food and money, and even granting freedom and cancelling debts. In this sense, the hierarchical relationship between leaders and community was strengthened through redistributive gestures that took shape in specific places: religious buildings, such as cathedrals or basilicas, attracted the entire community around a Christian agenda and the episcopal figure. These spaces became stages for the exhibition of power. Furthermore, not only was a relationship built that united the crowd with the leader, but intra-community bonds of cohesion were also created and recreated in these places and through these practices. Charity, however, implied much more than distribution of goods. Since charity was conceived of as a love of God and neighbour, bishops were also mediators between divinity and the people. People sought a spiritual encounter with the divine, forging a bond with its earthly representatives, an encompassing bond that assigned a role for everyone within salvation history. At the same time, bishops needed charity and alms giving to attain and assert their leadership. The poor since early Christian times had been given a special place in the Bible and in the writings of the Church Fathers. Through alms giving donors found a path to salvation, and donations found a path to the poor and to churches. Bishops were depicted as charitable examples. They had not only restored an ancient practice based on civic generosity, which helped to enhance their social position and status, they had also oriented it towards the Christian Church. Hence, charity was essential to episcopal leadership: material and spiritual, human and divine, all these elements intertwined in one particular bond and figure. In possessing charity, one of the most praised virtues, bishops were legitimizing their own spiritual paths, their own place within God’s divine plan, proclaiming their commitment to the holy poor and to the entire community as their responsibility and specific mission. The hagiographer of the VSPE described Merida as a heterogeneous society, composed of different social and religious groups. Acts of charity, in this sense, were one of the many aspects of a series of relationships that connected the ecclesiastical authority with the local population. By creating these idealized images of holy men, who were also bishops, gathering the whole community around them, the VSPE depicted Merida as a major symbol of Christianity, exalting its leaders as moral and political exemplars. In a post-Roman context in which loyalties and identities were being forged and renegotiated, hagiographical descriptions were fundamental

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elements in the process of strengthening social cohesion and defining local identification. These stories, which were intended to generate a particular effect among the audience, gave shape to a holy and Christian past, and to a common tradition. They burst into the present recreating values and codes of behaviour, communicating ideas of what holy men symbolized or should be characterized as. These stories also presented ideal depictions of leaders as mediators, channelling divine power and caring and protecting their flock. Against this backdrop the language of charity became a powerful device in the process of bolstering episcopal – and ecclesiastical – presence, representing power and fostering material and spiritual bonds within the community.

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LFB = Life of Fructuosus of Braga, trans. by Andrew Fear, in Lives of the Visigothic Fathers, Translated Texts for Historians 26 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997). Life of Caesarius, trans. by William E. Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles: Life, Testament, Letters, Translated Texts for Historians 19 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994). Sulpicius Severus, VM = Vita Martini, ed. and trans. by Philip Burton, Sulpicius Severus’ Vita Martini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Venantius Fortunatus: Personal and Political Poems, trans. by Judith George (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995). Vita Sanctae Balthildis, ed. by Bruno Krusch, Fredegarii et aliorum chronica. Vitae sanctorum (MGH, SSRM II) (Hannover: Impensis Bibliopolii Hahniani, 1888). Vitas Sanctorum Patrum Emeretensium, trans. by Joseph N. Garvin (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1946). Vit. Des. = Vita uel passio sancti Desiderii, ed. by José Carlos Martín, ‘Une nouvelle édition critique de la “Vita Desiderii” de Sisebut, acompagnée de quelques réflexions concernant la date des “Sententiae” et du “De uiris illustribus” d’Isidore de Séville’, Hagiographica, VII (2000), 127–180. VSPE = Vitas Sanctorum Patrum Emeretensium, ed. by Antonio Maya Sánchez (CC SL 116) (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992).

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Díaz, Pablo C., ‘Monasticism and Liturgy in Visigothic Spain’, in The Visigoths: Studies in Culture and Society, ed. by Alberto Ferreiro (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 169–200. Díaz Martínez, Pablo C., Formas económicas y sociales en el monacato visigodo (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1987). Díaz y Díaz, Manuel C., ‘Cuestiones en torno al culto de Santa Leocadia’, in Saints and Their Authors: Studies in Medieval Hispanic Hagiography in Honor of John K. Walsh, edited by J. Connolly, A. Deyermond, and B. Dutton (Madison: The Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1990), pp. 47–54. Downs, David J., Alms: Charity, Reward, and Atonement in Early Christianity (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016). Fear, Andrew, José Fernández Ubiña, and Mar Marcos, The Role of the Bishop in Late Antiquity: Conflict and Compromise (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Finn, Richard, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire: Christian Promotion and Practice (313–450) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Fouracre, Paul, and Richard A. Gerberding, Late Merovingian France: History and Hagiography, 640–720 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). García Moreno, Luis, ‘Los monjes y monasterios en las ciudades de las Españas tardorromanas y visigodas’, HABIS, 24 (1993), 179–192. Garrison, Roman, Redemptive Almsgiving in Early Christianity (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993). Gauthier, Nancy, ‘Le réseau de pouvoirs de l’évêque dans la Gaule du Haut MoyenÂge’, in Towns and Their Territories between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Gian Pietro Brogiolo, Nancy Gauthier, and Neil Christie, Transformation of the Roman World 9 (Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2000), pp. 173–207. Geary, Patrick J., Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca–London, Cornell University Press, 1994). Guerreau-Jalabert, Anita, ‘Caritas y don en la sociedad medieval occidental’, Hispania Sacra, 60, no. 204 (2000), 27–62. Gutiérrez Lloret, Sonia, ‘Repensando la ciudad altomedieval desde la arqueología’, in La ciutat medieval i arqueologia: VI Curs Internacional d’Arqueologia Medieval, ed. by Flocel Sabaté and Jesús Brufal (Lleida: Pagès Editors, 2014), pp. 17–41. Gwynn, David M., ‘Episcopal Leadership’, in The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ed. by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 876–915. Heinzelmann, Martin, ‘L’hagiographie mérovingienne: Panorama des documents potentiels’, in L’hagiographie mérovingienne à travers ses réécritures, ed. by Monique Goullet, Martin Heinzelmann, and Christiane Veyrard-Cosme (Paris: Thorbecke, 2010), pp. 27–82.

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arqueológicas en ciudades históricas, ed. by José Beltrán Fortes and Oliva Rodríguez Gutierréz (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 2012), pp. 191–210. Mathisen, Ralph W., Ecclesiastical Factionalism and Religious Controversy in Fifth-Century Gaul (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989). Mathisen, Ralph W., ‘The Ideology of Monastic and Aristocratic Community in Late Roman Gaul’, Polis, 6 (1994), 203–220. Natal, David, and Jaime Wood, ‘Playing with Fire: Conflicting Bishops in Late Roman Spain and Gaul’, in Making Early Medieval Societies: Conflict and Belonging in the Latin West, 300–1200, ed. by Kate Cooper and Conrad Leyser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 33–57. Panzram, Sabine, and Laurent Callegarin (eds), Entre civitas y madīna: El mundo de las ciudades en la Península Ibérica y en el norte de África (siglos IV–IX) (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2018). Park, Katharine, ‘Medicine and Society in Medieval Europe’, in Medicine in Society: Historical Essays, ed. by Andrew Wear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 59–90. Patzold, Steffen, and Carine van Rhijn (eds), Men in the Middle: Local Priests in Early Medieval Europe, Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 93 (Berlin–Boston: De Gruyter, 2016). Rapp, Claudia, ‘Charity and Piety as Episcopal and Imperial Virtues in Late Antiquity’, in Charity and Giving in Monotheistic Religions, ed. by Miriam Frenkel and Yaacov Lev (Berlin–New York: De Gruyter, 2009), pp. 75–87. Rapp, Claudia, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Sánchez Ramos, Isabel, and Jorge Morín de Pablos, ‘Los paisajes urbanos de la Antigüedad tardía en Hispania’, Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie 1. Prehistoria y Arqueología, 7 (2014), 97–128. Sastre de Diego, Isaac, Tomás Cordero Ruiz, and Pedro Mateos Cruz, ‘Territorio y monacato emeritense durante la Antigüedad Tardía’, in Monasteria y Territoria. Elites, edilicia y territorio en el Mediterráneo medieval (siglos V–XI), ed. by Jorge López Quiroga, Artemio M. Martínez Tejera, and Jorge Morín de Pablos (Madrid: BAR, 2007), pp. 141–162. Stocking, Rachel, Bishops, Councils, and Consensus in the Visigothic Kingdom, 589–633 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Vallejo Girvés, Margarita, ‘Los exilios de católicos y arrianos bajo Leovigildo y Recaredo’, Hispania Sacra, 55, no. 111 (2003), 35–48. Van Dam, Raymond, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

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Van Dam, Raymond, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Van Uytfangue, Marc, ‘L’hagiographie: un “genre” chrétien ou antique tardif?’, Analecta Bollandiana 111 (1993), 135–188. Van Uytfanghe, Marc, ‘Pertinence et statut du miracle dans l’hagiographie mérovingienne (600–750)’ in Miracle et karāma, ed. by D. Aigle, Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études Sciences Religieuses 109 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), pp. 67–144. Velázquez, Isabel, Hagiografía y culto a los santos en la Hispania visigoda: aproximación a sus manifestaciones literarias (Mérida: Museo Nacional de Arte Romano, 2005). Velázquez, Isabel, ‘Mérida: Transformación de una ciudad hispanorromana’, in Ciudades del mundo antiguo, ed. by Vicente Cristóbal and Jesús de la Villa (Madrid: Ediciones Clásicas, 1997), pp. 159–186. Velázquez, Isabel, Vidas de los Santos Padres de Mérida (Madrid: Trotta, 2008). Velázquez, Isabel, and Gisela Ripoll, ‘Toletum, la construcción de una urbs regia’, Memorias de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, 25 (2000), 521–578. Watson, Sethina, On Hospitals: Welfare, Law & Christianity in Western Europe, 400–1320 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Wood, Jamie, ‘Building and Breaking Episcopal Networks in Late Antique Hispania’, in Episcopal Networks in Late Antiquity, ed. by Carmen Angela Cvetković and Peter Gemeinhardt, Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 137 (Berlin–Boston: De Gruyter, 2019), pp. 227–248.

About the Authors Dolores Castro is a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and assistant professor at Universidad de General Sarmiento, Argentina. Her current research explores the fields of religion and political power in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, with particular focus on the Visigothic period.

2.

The Logic of Control: Postulating a Visigothic Ontology of Human Being* Michael J. Kelly

Abstract The fourteenth canon of the Sixth Council of Toledo (638) declares it inhuman (inhumanum) not to reward fidelity. This reveals that the council had a concept of ‘human nature’ and that it was ready to use it to discipline and punish. This chapter works to uncover that seventh-century Visigothic ontology and its relationship to faith, and, in the process, reveals how by this ontological discourse an ontotheology that excluded Jews from human society emerged. Keywords: Visigothic ontology, ideology, theology, Judaism, Catholicism, Isidore of Seville

‘I know that I am a human being.’ In order to see how unclear the sense of this proposition is, consider its negation. – Wittgenstein, On Certainty1 The role of fear in the ordering of Visigothic society: Reason speaking to Man: ‘Let the destruction of godless people draw you back from sin; […] let the extinction of the condemned pull you aside.’ – Isidore, Synonyms, 1.512

* I would like to thank the RomanIslam Center at the University of Hamburg, and especially Sabine Panzram, for the Senior Research Fellowship that supported my research for this project on early medieval ontology and ideology. 1 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, proposition 4, p. 2e. 2 Throop, trans., Isidore, 29. For the critical edition, see Elfassi, Isidori Hispalensis episcopi ‘Synonyma’.

Castro, D. and Ruchesi, F. (ed.), Leadership, Social Cohesion, and Identity in Late Antique Spain and Gaul (500–700). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463725958_ch02

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Well then, my perfect historian must start with two indispensable qualifications: the one is political insight, the other the faculty of expression. – Lucian, The Way to Write History, 343

The following research represents the early findings of my current monograph project in which I propose that Visigothic Catholicism – and perhaps Catholicism more broadly in Late Antiquity – functioned, or intended to function, as secular ideology and not as religion. Instead of reflecting the History-shattering Truth Event that was the Christ Event and the alternative truths that Jesus demanded of his faithful subjects – such as the full renunciation of wealth4 – Visigothic Catholicism advocated and performed as a false commitment to the Christ Event, as a commitment, instead, to other prevailing truths of Late Antiquity but with the appearance of being Christian (i.e. faithful to the radical Christian Truth). As such, this means two things: 1. Visigothic Catholicism operated as secular ideology that used the identifier ‘Christian’ as an Imaginary Subjectivity to prevent the encounter with the Real, with the genuine Christian Truth. 2. It is in this gap between conservative, ideological operation and professed commitment to a radical, anti-historical (i.e. anti-ideological) Event that we can see the essence of Visigothic Catholicism, its real intentions, the meaning of its acting-out, and its anti-Christian, non-transformative discourse. We may see from this research that what defined Late Antiquity was not the grand transformation and break from antiquity, per se, but rather the emergence of an alternative form – ‘Christianity’ – for preserving, or replicating, antiquity’s logic, that is, a sustained or least repeated occulting of the Christ Event in order to avoid the catastrophe: the collapse of the ancient 3 Lucian of Samosata, The Way to Write History, ch. 34, http://lucianofsamosata.info/wiki/ doku.php?id=home:texts_and_library:essays:the-way-to-write-history. 4 For some examples of Jesus’s thoughts on wealth and the requirement to renounce it to follow him, see Matt. 6:24, 10:34–39; Luke 18:22–28; and Acts 4:32–35. See also the Lord’s Prayer, the Letter of James, the Acts of the Apostles 2, 5, 8, and, beyond the Bible, the writings of the Pelagianists, the De divitiis, De vita Christiana, and the work of Julian of Eclanum. De divitiis presents the argument that without the rich, there would be no poor, which is effectively what is said in the Letter of James as the truth of Jesus and is surely more faithful to the Christian truth than Augustine’s arguments contra the Pelagianists. For further discussion, see Brown, Through the Eye, chs. 18–23 and, Kelly, ‘Visigothic Catholicism as Secular Ideology’.

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social logics – of wealth, of private property, of plutocracy, of sexism and patriarchy, of slavery, and so on.5 In order to elicit the relationship between truth and ideology in Visigothic Hispania and reveal Visigothic Catholicism as an emergent secular ideology, I begin by exploring a basic ontological question: ‘What did it mean to be human in Visigothic Hispania?’ In other words, what was ‘human nature’ and what did it mean to be for Visigothic Catholics? The answer to this was directly related to the dominant ontotheological question of the seventh century: What was the essence of Jesus’s humanness? In the minds and in the discourse of Visigothic Catholics, to be a human being meant to be able to imagine a historical world beyond the present and its past, beyond the prevailing logics of the situation. This indeed is the radical attempt that Jesus had made: to shatter the ontological situation, even though some aspects of the prevailing epistemological apparatus were important to reconstitute – or reterritorialize – in the new world, the historical situation, such as the covenant with God and the Ten Commandments, the narrative of virgin birth, conversion, etc. Yet, despite the recognition of this necessity to be a faithful subject of Christ, Visigothic Catholic writers in their ideological existences were committed to an ontological situation that largely accepted the reality as it was, and as Jesus had largely witnessed it. And so, there was within these writers a dual, contradictory commitment, a type of scenario which, nevertheless, Isidore rebuked in the third book of his Sententiae in reference to certain monks, and one which Jesus had condemned, saying that: ‘No one can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and property/ wealth [mamonae].’6 How in a historical situation (i.e. a ‘world’, or, ‘logical set’), do contradicting propositions coexist in a singular, logical, and even obvious statement? I contend that Visigothic Catholicism as a secular ideology sustained the existing sociopolitical logics of the ancient into late-ancient Mediterranean. The Christ Event had exposed some of these logics and in so doing called for an entirely new ontological situation: one that we may call anarchocommunist (i.e. true Christian subjectivity). But, in order to prevent such a 5 To be clear, this is not to deny that from a religious and social perspective we do see a transformation of the Roman world, while we see a fall or break when viewing the period through other historical prisms, e.g. politics and the military. 6 Matt. 6:24. For the Isidore passage referenced, see Isidore of Seville, Sententiae, 3.19 (Cazier, ed., Isidorus Hispalensis Sententiae, pp. 248–249; Knoebel, trans., Isidore of Seville, ‘Sententiae’, p. 171).

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traumatic encounter with the Real – the truth of the Christ Event, full fidelity to Jesus, and its shattering of the historical present – Visigothic Catholicism served as an Imaginary, a fetishized figuration, to engender and proliferate a Subjective order beyond the Christian truth (Real), a Subjective order tied to the prevailing, pre-existing ontological and historical situation. In this constellation, Christ was a monstrous Other who, instead of eliciting a radical break, served as the basis for a (false) Christian subjectivity tied to the Visigothic Catholic Imaginary and its prevention of the genuine encounter with Christ (except for the few, e.g. monks, for whom the ideologically ‘unrealistic’ was realizable and thus containable). The ontological paradox of theology – in which opposites (e.g. finite and infinite, time and eternity) merge/appear as unities – in the Imagined figure of Christ – operated in this Visigothic Catholicism (and, of course, not only in Visigothic Catholicism) as ideology, allowing contradictions to make sense, allowing the irrational to seem rational: e.g. the general taking of oaths yet ‘Christian,’ owning and advocating for private property yet ‘Christian’, and so on.7 As I will demonstrate in this chapter, the ontological juxtaposition inherent in the Visigothic Catholic conception of ‘human being’ – that it is a driving force of radical change and yet also the opposite – reveals the external, political commitments of the authors who developed it. What I begin to show in this is how such thought became manifest as doctrine and policy during the debates over Monothelitism: the period of the 630s to the Sixth Ecumenical Council of 680/681, as an initial step in questioning whether Visigothic Catholicism ever became functioning ideology, that is, commonsense practice (vs. a popular other, a religion). Twenty-first-century interest in ‘human nature’ tends to be from a scientific perspective, or rather, a capitalist-pharmaceutical-profits perspective: assuming that there is an ideal brain type, and one that is and has been stable for centuries (or longer), the scientific community postulates how ‘normal’ brains function, and this subsequently defines ‘human being’, a being that, ultimately, is predictable – as chemical reactions – and ‘curable’, in part through the for-profit medical industry and in the interest of ‘security’ and individual ‘happiness’.8 In Visigothic Spain, ‘human nature’ tended 7 On Jesus’s position on oaths, see James 5:12; Matt. 5:33 (only oaths to God allowed). 8 This is perfectly, while also comically and terrifyingly, encapsulated in the mission statement of the Journal of Happiness Studies (published by the capitalist press, Springer, a subsidiary of a holding company [Mannheim LLC] that invests in the medical industry): ‘The international peer-reviewed Journal of Happiness Studies is devoted to theoretical and applied advancements in all areas of well-being research. It covers topics referring to both the hedonic and eudaimonic perspectives characterizing well-being studies. The former includes the investigation of cognitive

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to be viewed from a theological perspective: the nature of Christ and his relation to humans and humanness, and the ontological: human as a being that can hope for a better world, another historical age, an alternative historical situation. In seventh-century Hispania, a long-established local belief system, Judaism, became so denigrated by a pseudo-imperial state, the Visigothic kingdom, that by the 680s its adherents could be considered the converse of human: ‘inhuman’ or not fully human.9 By this, it became possible to ‘morally’ remove such individuals from society on grounds that their (abnormal) being is contrary to ‘human nature’ and, as such, a danger to the ideal community10 and to the (fragmented reality of the) political ‘consensus’ vision expressed in 633 at the Fourth Council of Toledo (IV Toledo).11 Five years later, at VI Toledo, the unfaithful are labelled ‘inhuman’. Five decades later, by 688, Jews have become the primary embodiment in Visigothic discourse of the subhuman. To get to this point, Visigothic authors, jurists, and theologians needed to construct, or confirm – via wider contemporary debates on the nature of Jesus – their working concept of human being. The Visigothic ontology expressed in VI Toledo and the 630s is fueled by several factors: the sedes regia’s and the Visigothic Church’s inability to eliminate dissenters; the wider crises of monoenergism and monothelitism in the Catholic Church between the 630s and early 680s; and Toledo’s antagonistic relationship during these decades with the Roman Curia, on matters concerning Jews dimensions such as satisfaction with life, and positive affect and emotions. The latter includes the study of constructs and processes related to optimal psychological functioning, such as meaning and purpose in life, character strengths, personal growth, resilience, optimism, hope, and self-determination. In addition to contributions on appraisal of life-as-a-whole, the journal accepts papers investigating these topics in relation to specific domains, such as family, education, physical and mental health, and work.’ 9 The kingdom was significantly modeled on the Eastern Empire and employed many Easterners to build itself. On the relationship between the Visigothic kingdom and the East, see, for instance, Martínez Jiménez, ‘Engineering’. 10 Of course, one could argue, as a historian, as passing from text to thought, from the spatial – the text – to the rhizome of the mind, from Einstein’s famous formula E = mc2 to Niels Bohr’s quantum entanglement, the discursive space between the 630s to 680s is irrelevant because of the entanglement of the units of discourse. On the relationship between language, truth, statement and discourse, see Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Part 3. 11 The authoritative edition of the Iberian councils is La colección canónica hispana, which is edited by Gonzalo Martínez Díez and (from 1982 as co-editor) Félix Rodríguez over six volumes, and is referred to hereafter simply as CCH, with the respective volume noted. The edition of Vives, with its Spanish translation of the councils, is also useful: Vives, ed. and trans., Concilios visigóticos. It is referred to hereafter simply as Vives, with the respective page numbers cited.

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and on theology itself. The eventual ontotheology that emerges with Julian of Toledo in the 680s is a product of this Visigothic ontological process from the 630s. Hispania in the 630s was as explosive culturally as it was volatile politically and religiously.12 The literary output of this decade is a remarkable example of the productive antagonisms between Christian circles vying for autonomy or authority. Texts produced or finished in these years represent some of the most recognizable in Visigothic history, including the first versions of the Hispana – a carefully edited collection of Hispania’s conciliar past, and the Vitas Patrum Emeretensium (Lives of the Fathers of Merida),13 as well as final versions of Isidorian texts such as the Etymologies, De Origine Gothorum (On the Origin of the Goths), and the Sententiae (The fundamentals of Christian wisdom).14 In addition, an anonymous writer in Toledo put together the Passio S. Leucadiae, the saint for whom the recently deceased bishop of Toledo, Helladius, had consecrated a church.15 Bishop Braulio of Zaragoza also finished his Vita Sanctae Aemeliani.16 In 633 Helladius as well as Isidore of Seville’s sister, the nun Florentina, died, as did Isidore himself in 636. In other religious and political events, the most subjectively violent and disruptive public episode was the usurpation 12 As was the case elsewhere in the Mediterranean; see Inclusion and Exclusion in Mediterranean Christianities, 400–800, a recent collection of essays edited by Fox and Buchberger. 13 Previous confusions concerning the dating and authorship have been resolved by the suggestion that the Vitas Patrum Emeretensium was produced in two recensions, the first written between 630 and 638 and the second between 670 and 680. Antonio Maya Sánchez suggests that it was the second recension that was written by a deacon of Merida named Paul. The first recension was also written by a deacon of Merida, perhaps working in the basilica of St. Eulalia, but whose name eludes historians (VSPE; Arce, ‘The City of Mérida’, p. 3). This conclusion seems to clarify the apparent problem of authorship as expressed by Fontaine, who dated the text to 633 and 638, with the sole authorship of the Vitas Patrum Emeretensium to Paul of Merida (Fontaine, ‘Conversion et culture’, p. 108, and see Garvin, The ‘Vitas Sanctorum Emeritensium’). 14 The authenticity of a dedicated version of the De Origine Gothorum to Sisenand from a later medieval manuscript and edited by Mommsen is debated (Mommsen, ed., Dedicatio ad Sisenandum, Chron. min. ii, 304). For more on this, see Kelly, Isidore of Seville, ch. 3, n. 39. 15 The oldest manuscript of the Passio S. Leucadiae is from the tenth century, but the original text was likely written slightly before 633. See ICERV, no. 93, and Fábrega Grau, Pasionario hispánico, pp. 65–67, for the text, and p. 262 for the dating. The church of St. Leocadia in Toledo was consecrated by Helladius on 26 October 618, a point later mentioned in the mid-ninth century by Eulogius of Cordoba, in his Liber apologeticus martyrum, XVI, p. 5 (Gil, ed., Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum, II, p. 483). 16 Finished in 636. For an edition of Braulio’s Vita Aemiliani, see Vázquez de Parga, Vita Aemiliani, and for discussion, see Castellanos and Fernández Ardanaz, Hagiografia y sociedad; Castellanos, Poder social; Lomas Salmonte, ‘Análisis y funcionalidad’; and the short introduction in Barlow, Braulio of Saragossa.

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of the Visigothic throne. In 631, Sisenand, a Frankish-aided rebel17 and noble from Narbonensis (as had been a previous king earlier in the century, Gundemar [r. 610–612]18) successfully deposed the Visigothic king Swinthila.19 This interruption had a number of consequences, including the emergence of at least one other challenger to the throne, Iudila.20 Perhaps the most shocking, but not unprecedented, result, was the eruption of episcopal violence on the streets of Toledo, that is, fighting between two episcopal factions: that of Justus, the rightful heir of Helladius, and that of the attempted episcopal usurper Gerontius, who was supported by the royal usurper Sisenand.21 In December 633, after Sisenand’s usurpation was secure, the Fourth Council of Toledo was convened. Once the council opened, Sisenand spared no time in condemning specific rebels and passing a canon against rebellion generally.22 This was reinforced, it was hoped, by the elaboration of the role of the king and Church in canon 75.23 A primary issue for IV Toledo was the prevention of future usurpation and public violence, and one way to do this, it was felt, was also to deal with Jewish apostasy and perceived perfidy. Canon 59, for instance, expresses the council’s fear of relapsed Jewish 17 Sisenand was proclaimed king in Zaragoza, perhaps by way of royal unction. On Sisenand’s elevation at Zaragoza, see Fredegar, Chronicles, 4.73 (Krusch, ed., Fredegarii et aliorum chronica, pp. 157–158). For a translation of Book 4 of the Chronicles, see Wallace-Hadrill, The Fourth Book. For a discussion of the possibility of the use royal unction by Sisenand, see King, Law and Society, p. 48, n. 5. 18 Gundemar was governor of the province of Narbonensis, as seen by the letter to him from Count Bulgar (Ep. Wis., 14 in Gundlach, ed., Epistolae Merovingici et Karolini aevi, pp. 681–683). 19 And perhaps by Braulio, who praised him in his preface to the Vita Sancti Aemiliani, ed. Vazquez de Parga, 5: ‘Et tibi domino meo, destinatum misi et hanc ipsam epistolam meam capiti eius praeponere curaui, iudicioque tuo probandum committens, ut ad singula recognitum si in aliquo displicuerit aut emendes aut reprobes; si uero placuerit, et ipse habeas, et cui uoluntas permiserit dari concedas atque pro me creatori nostro, cuius sunt omnia bona, grates rependas. Sed unum quaeso; ut si corrigenda in eo aliqua censes, prius emendetur quam proferatur nec ante reprehendatur quam quod delectet inueniatur. Uolo autem, ut quia sanctissimus uir Citonatus presbyter atque Gerontius adhuc in corpore degent, omnia quae in eo scripsi ante recognoscant, et eorum discussione uentilata, si nec nominum nec rerum me fefellit sententia, habeantur confirmata.’ I thank Reed Morgan at Harvard for pointing this out to me. 20 On the challenges to Swinthila leading up to the moment of Sisenand’s usurpation, see García Moreno, ‘La oposición a Suinthila’. 21 Gerontius was roundly admonished for the affair later. On him, Justus, and the heirship to Bishop Helladius, see Ildefonsus of Toledo, De Viris Illustribus, preface and ch. 7 (Codoñer Merino, ed., Ildefonsus Toletani Episcopi, pp. 599–600, ls. 44–50 and pp. 609–610, ls. 114–126), and the potential reference to the affair in Braulio in Ep., 35. For more on the Gerontius affair, see Kelly, Isidore of Seville, ch. 4.3.5. 22 Canon 45, CCH 5, 228, ls. 866–868. 23 On the famous canon 75, see Stocking, Bishops, Councils, and Consensus, ch. 5; Velázquez, ‘Pro patriae gentisque Gothorum statu’.

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converts, many of whom, it is claimed, were performing circumcisions and other Jewish rituals.24 Adding fuel to this fire, several years later, in January 638, during the Sixth Council of Toledo, a letter from Pope Honorius arrived in Toledo. In it, Honorius admonished the Toledan Church for being too lenient with Jews. In response, Braulio – who had ‘shone above the rest’ at IV Toledo, ‘excelled the others in dignity and properly infused godly doctrine into the Christian minds’ at V Toledo (636), and was in attendance at VI Toledo25 – sent a letter to Honorius saying that, in fact, the Visigothic Church was acting more in line with divine precepts than the papacy itself, and, even more than that, it was interpreting Scripture more accurately.26 In reference at least to Honorius’s lax approach toward monoenergism, Braulio may have had a point. In a letter read out decades later, in 680 in Constantinople at the Sixth Ecumenical Council that condemned monoenergism and monotheletism, we learn of Honorius’s epistolary exhortation: ‘[W]e confess one will of our Lord Jesus Christ, since our [human] nature was plainly assumed by the Godhead, this being faultless, as it was before the Fall.’27 But, if Jesus had had a human nature that was pre-Fall, then his humanness could not suffer death – since death was a punishment imposed on humanity, was made part of human nature post-Creation, a result of Adam’s sin – and this would cause a number of Christological problems.28 24 IV Toledo 59, CCH 5, 237–238, ls. 968–976. 25 Chronicle of 754, 17 and 18 (Wolf, trans., Conquerors and Chroniclers, pp. 95–96). For the Latin, see Mommsen, ed., Chronica Minora, p. 340. 26 Braulio, Ep., 21. Braulio’s letters survive in only one manuscript, the León Cathedral 22, which additionally contains the letter to Pope Honorius (fols 65r–67 v) and a profession of faith by Jews in Toledo (fols 48v–51v). Both of these can be dated to around the time of VI Toledo, around when Chintila also sent the Pope a gift inscribed with a personal dedication, perhaps written by the king himself (see Riese, ed., Anthologia Latina, I.2, no. 494, and the short discussion in Collins, ‘Literacy and the Laity’, p. 115). For more on the letters between the Hispanian Church and the papacy, see Ferreiro, ‘The Bishops of Hispania’, and Ferreiro, ‘Epistolae Plenae’. 27 Honorius in his letter to Sergius: ‘Unde et unam voluntatem fatemur Domini nostri Jesu Christi, quia profecto a divinitate assumpta est nostra natura, non culpa, illa profecto quae ante peccatum creata est, non quae post praevaricationem vitiata’. The original Latin letter is lost. What is extant is a later Latin translation of the Greek translation (also still extant) that was made for the Sixth Ecumenical (Hefele, A History of the Councils, pp. 28–29). 28 This is a potential problem also in III Toledo’s declaration of faith, even though, following Chalcedon, it declares Jesus as perfectly human and perfectly divine: ‘Consentientes igitur sanctis Patribus unum eundemque Filium confiteri Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum consona voce partier edocemur: perfectum eundem in divinitate, perfectum eundem in humanitate, Deum verum et hominem verum, eundem ex anima rationali et corpore; secundem divinitatem unius cum Patre naturae, secundum humanitatem eundem unius naturae nobiscum, per omnia similem nobis absque peccato; ante saecula quidem ex Patre natum secundum divinitatem, in novissimis

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In his letter to Honorius, Braulio even appears to mock the Pope, reversing the pastoral roles by telling Honorius that the proper path for the Church is to patiently work toward converting Jews, allowing time to genuinely spread Christian love and teach true wisdom. Braulio does this via Paul’s instruction to Timothy (now Braulio’s instruction to Honorius): ‘A slave [servum] of the Lord should not quarrel, but should be gentle with everyone, able to teach, tolerant, correcting opponents with kindness.29 It may be that God will grant them repentance that leads to knowledge of the truth.’30 This echoes the prevailing Isidorian view that Jews should be converted for the sake of their souls and that this should be done by persuasion, not by force: ‘At the beginning of his [Sisebut’s] reign he led Jews to the Christian faith and had indeed an ardent zeal, but not in accordance with wisdom, for he forced them by power when he should have roused them by the doctrine of faith’31; ‘patience is an imitation of Christ’s passion’.32 Isidore’s sentiments are evident also in IV Toledo: ‘This council commands that Jews no longer be forcibly converted’33; and ‘They (Jews) should be saved not against their will, but willingly, and by this, justice is done.’34 vero diebus eundem propter nos et propter salutem nostrum ex Maria virgine Dei genetrice secundum humanitatem; unum eundemque Christum Filium Dominum unigentum in duas naturas inconfuse, immutabiliter, indivise, inseperabiliter cognoscendo; in nullo naturarum differentia propter unitatem perimendas, magis autem salua utriusque naturae proprietate et in una coeunte persona unoque statu concurrente, non in duabus personis partiendum vel dividendum, sed unum eundemque Filium unigenitum Deum Verbum Dominum Jesum Christum, sicut ab exordio prophetae de eo et ipse nos erudivit et Patrum nobis tradidit symbolum.’ But this expression leaves us with the confusing situation of Jesus as both human as humans in another historical era used to be, that is, humans before the Fall, the first sin, and as human as we are humans today in this post-Fall, pre-Parousia age. 29 Ironically, given the context, this represents Jewish teaching at the time (and now), via Hillel (d. 10 CE). In fact, this attitude is what defined the rabbinical preference for Hillel over his younger contemporary Shammai (d. 30 CE). For a classic example of this contrast in modes of conversion (to Judaism) and Hillel’s clear influence on the Christian thinking expressed by Braulio, see the Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a, 5–9. 30 2 Timothy 2.24–26. All biblical passages are cited from the vulgate Bible, unless otherwise noted. 31 Isidore, De Origine Gothorum, 60 (Rodríguez Alonso, ed., Las historias de los godos, pp. 272–273, ls. 4–10): ‘Qui initio regni Iudaeos ad fidem Christianam permouens aemulationem quidem habuit, sed non secundum scientam: potestate enim conpulit, quos prouocare fidei ratione oportuit.’ 32 Di Sciacca, Finding the Right Words, p. 19: ‘[Isidore’s] Synonyma II, 33, where the virtue of patience is defined as an imitation of Christ’s passion.’ 33 IV Toledo 57 (CCH 5, 235, ls. 942–943.): ‘De Iudaeis autem hoc praecepit sancta synodus, nemini deinceps ad credendum vim inferre.’ 34 IV Toledo 57 (CCH 5, 235, ls. 944–945): ‘Non enim tales inuiti salvandi sunt, sed volentes, ut integra sit forma iustitiae.’ See also IV Toledo 17: those who convert of their own free will prove to be better Christians.

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In contrast, in the 680s, Bishop Julian of Toledo argued, following Augustine, that Jews must remain in order that they bear witness to the categorical error of their ways at the Second Coming35: they were to live that they may suffer. Julian’s vengeful approach to his Jewish neighbours, workers, and, perhaps, even friends and family is evident in a less passive (objective) and more active (subjective36) way in the 630s and the 650s. In conflictual dialogue both with the legacy of Isidore’s (and Braulio’s) policy of patience and Sisebut’s forced conversions is, in the Eighth Council of Toledo’s (653) Liber Iudiciorum, another attempt to force Jews to convert. In this promise to King Recceswinth in the early 650s, originally made (post-IV Toledo) in the 630s to Chintila, the core charge against Jews to which they are responding is infidelity, lack of faith: We, the Jews of Toledo who have hereto attached our signatures, call your attention to the fact that formerly we were compelled to present a memorial to King Chintila [c. 638], of holy memory, by which we bound ourselves to uphold the Catholic faith, as, likewise, we do now. But, whereas the perfidy born of our obstinacy, and the antipathy resulting from our ancestral errors, influenced us to such an extent that we did not then truly believe in our Lord Jesus Christ, and did not sincerely embrace the Catholic faith.37

At the end of the 630s, in his letter to Honorius, Braulio asks rhetorically: ‘What is greater or more suitable to the human being [humanae creaturae] than to obey the divine precepts?’38 This rhetorical emphasis on devotion to justice as an essential feature, if not the highest element, of a human being is reverberated in the opening lines of VI Toledo 14: ‘It is not only inhuman, but it is also unjust to defraud the faithful of their prize.’39 However, instead 35 See Hart, ‘What Lies beyond Capitalism?’ 36 Objective violence refers to systemic repression vs. subjective violence which is immediate and confrontational. Both can work together. In the United States, for instance, we can say that the subjective violence of police forces is both allowed by and works to sustain a systemic injustice. For more on these categories, see Žižek, Violence, pp. 1–15. 37 Liber Iudiciorum, 12.2.17 (Zeumer, ed., pp. 425–426). 38 Braulio, Ep. 21 (Patrologia Latina 80, col. 668 B; Ep. 16 in Miguel Franco, trans., Braulio de Zaragoza, pp. 121–124): ‘Quid enim maius aut quid potest esse commodus humanae creaturae, quam praeceptis divinis obtemperare[, et aemulatione discretae scientiae desperatorum animos studio vigilanti ad viam salutis reducere]?’ 39 CCH 5, 319, ls. 267–268: ‘Praemium fraudare f idelibus non solum inhumanum sed etiam exsistit iniustum.’ All manuscripts use the word ‘inhumanum’, including the Autun Hispana (MS Vat. lat. 1341, fol. 82v), interpolated by pseudo-Isidore. (On the Collectio Hispana

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of simply imagining desired human qualities or condemning disloyalty – ‘in religious and secular affairs’ – canon 14 declares it ‘inhuman’ (inhumanum) not to reward the faithful.40 Considering the charge of infidelity against Jews in the above placitum from the time, and the Sixth Council’s wider condemnations of Jews – canon 3, for example, announces the planned eradication of Judaism and the elimination of non-Catholics from the kingdom, and that no one shall become king who does not persecute Jews, even cursing such a person in Aramaic: ‫ – מרן אתא‬this is a fairly terrifying proclamation: Jews are not quite human.41 But what did this ‘inhuman’ actually mean and why was it used? Christian writers up to VI Toledo, generally speaking, considered the ‘inhuman’ a type of person who was somehow wicked, for example, someone who preferred the mundane to the holy, as seen in Tertullian and Lactantius.42 Isidore Gallica Augustodunensis and its two recensions, see Kulikowski, ‘An English Abridgement’. For a somewhat different narrative of the manuscript, as authentic, see Kéry, Canonical Collections, pp. 69–70.) The one exception is MS Vienna, Nationalbibliothek 411, which uses ‘inmanum’ (Martínez Díez and Rodríguez transcribe this incorrectly as ‘immanum’). Vienna 411 is of Gallic origin, written in pre-Carolingian (non-Visigothic) minuscule, and represents a Gallic adaptation of the early-eighth-century Vulgata version of the Hispana. It is partly derived from the 788 manuscript of Bishop Rachio of Strasburg (see Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores, vol. 10, no. 1477). For a complete facsimile and notes, see Mazal, Wiener Hispana-Handschrift, volume 41 of the series Codices selecti phototypice impressi. For more on Vienna 411 in particular, see CCH 6 (2002), pp. 103–109, and the Appendix below. For an annotated list of the Hispana manuscripts and collection, see Kéry, Canonical Collections, pp. 61–86. For an English translation of VI Toledo, see Brodman, ‘Sixth Council of Toledo’. 40 The rewarding of the faithful is subsequently repeated in the councils through to the last recorded one, XVII Toledo. Its canon 8, which blames Jews for an attempted royal usurpation, states: ‘Just as the virtue of the faithful ought to be recompensed with great and rich rewards, correspondingly the wickedness of infidels deserves to be smitten by the hardest strokes of the judges’ swords.’ XVII Toledo 8, trans. by Summer, ‘Council of Toledo XVII’, p. 30. 41 In modern Hebrew, ma’arah (‫ )מארה‬is a noun for ‘curse’ and ata (‫ )אתה‬is the masculine ‘you’, so, not exactly as the ancient Aramaic, yet it is reasonable to see the text of VI Toledo 3 as a curse, a conclusion buttressed by the ‘anathema’ before the ‫מרן אתא‬. Also, ancient Hebrew generally can have an aleph (‫ )א‬where a hey (‫ )ה‬would be used today. The Latin line in canon 3 is: ‘Isto postquam ordine praemissio ad gubernacular accesserit regni, si ipse temerator exstiterit huius promissi, sit anathema marantha in conspectu sempiterni Dei et pabulum efficiatur ignis aeterni, simul cum eo damnatione perculsi quicumque sacerdotum vel quilibet Christianorum eius implicati fuerint errori’ (CCH 5, 306, ls. 140–144). This echoes the Vulgate version of the curse in 1 Corinthians 16:22: ‘si quis non amat Dominum Jesum Christum sit anathema marantha’. 42 Tertullian, De virginibus velandus (Patrologia Latina 2, col. 903A): ‘Ceterum satis inhumanum, si feminae quidem per omnia uiris subditae honorigeram notam uirginitatis suae praeferant, qua suspiciantur et circumspiciantur et magnificentur a fratribus, uiri autem tot uirgines, tot spadones uoluntarii, caeco bono suo incedant, nihil gestantes quod et ipsos faceret illustres.’

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associated the lack of human-beingness not necessarily with Jews, per se, but with anti-Christian activities, such as the contempt for Christ: In 443 […] Radagaisus, king of the Goths, a Scythian by birth, a man devoted to the cult of idolatry and most savage in the fierceness of his barbaric cruelty [barbaricae immanitatis], attacked with violent devastation the regions of Italy, together with 200,000 soldiers, vowing, in contempt of Christ, that he would make a libation of the Romans’ blood to his gods if he should win.43

The ‘inhuman’ here is associated with the unfaithful and is consistent with Isidore’s citation of Ezekiel to condemn heresy and referring to the Jewish ‘error of infidelity’ (‘infidelitatis errore’).44 Isidore also refers to the Goths as savage (immanitas) in Chapter 16 of the same book. But the ‘inhuman’ – VI Toledo’s inhumanum – is not a term that Isidore uses so explicitly. In the Etymologies, he uses immanes to mean savage or terrifying,45 referring specifically to Germanic peoples as immanis46 and generically to ‘Horrible [immanis], because not good, but cruel [and] terrible, for manus means “good”’.47 Isidore also uses immanis to refer to monsters (‘immanis bellua’) and to label Germania as ‘fierce’,48 but overall it refers broadly to wicked persons. Augustine presents a theologically more dynamic understanding of the nature of the ‘inhuman’ human in De vera religione. In this text, Augustine contends that it is inhuman not to love man: ‘I mean, it is more inhuman to love a man not for being a man but for being your son.’49 In this line and wider passage, Augustine condemns it as inhuman to see in man only the Lactantius, Divinae institutiones (Patrologia Latina 6, col. 672B): ‘quod cum intellegeret inhumanum esse ac nefarium’. 43 Isidore, De Origine Gothorum, 14 (Alonso, ed., 192, ls. 3–11: ‘Ragadaisus [sic] genere Scytha cultui idolatriae deditus barbaricae immanitatis feritate saeuissimus cum ducentis armatorum milibus Italiae partes vehementi vastatione adgreditur, spondens in contemptum Christi Romanorum sanguinem diis suic libare, si vinceret.’ 44 Isidore, Sententiae, 1.16.15–16, ref. Ezekiel 16:3 (Cazier, ed., Isidorus Hispalensis Sententiae, 59, ls. 21–32). 45 Isidore, Etymologies, 1.37.24 (Barney et al., trans., The ‘Etymologies’, p. 63). 46 Isidore, Etymologies, 9.2.97 (Barney et al., trans., p. 197). 47 Isidore, Etymologies, 10.1.139 (Barney et al., trans., p. 221). 48 Isidore, Etymologies, 14.4.4 (Barney et al., trans., p. 289). 49 Hill, On Christian Belief, p. 89. Augustine, De vera religione, 1.88 (Patrologia Latina 34, col. 161): ‘magis enim est inhumanum non amare in homine quod homo est, sed amare quod filius est’.

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quality in him that can make him a possession of another man, instead of what in him is the collective quality of belonging to God, the human still being a possession but a just one. Late in his life, Augustine engaged in a prolonged debate with the Pelagian, Julian of Eclanum, and their conversation elevated the inhuman into a position which the Visigothic theologians from Braulio to Julian would have recognized, one related directly to the debate over human will and the nature of Christ. A related issue on which Isidore and other Visigothic theologians and jurists agreed with Augustine was the relation of the inhuman to injustice, or human nature to justice.50 VI Toledo 14 says that it is not only inhuman to be disloyal to the faith – it is also unjust. This concern with injustice and the effects of it on a person resonate with the anxieties of the 630s. These stemmed from a variety of factors, including royal and episcopal usurpations, the passing away of major Church figures, the new ‘post-Byzantine’ situation in the peninsula, the plague, and so on. Taking on the voice of a man lamenting, Isidore ponders rhetorically in Synonyma, 1.7–8: If nothing is lawful, if there is no truth in judgment, if fairness is rejected, if law is not trusted, if justice is denied to all, avarice has increased, law has perished. Through love of avarice, laws are of no avail, inducements and gifts have brought power to the laws. Everywhere money conquers, and everywhere judgment is for sale. […] Unjust people become saved, honest people perish; […] harmful people are powerful.’51

In his Sententiae, finished in the 630s, Isidore further declares: ‘The wicked, when they look upon the constancy of the just in the midst of their persecutions, waste away in confusion of their mind.’52 For Isidore, fidelity in its whole sense can only be achieved under the condition of justice: an unjust society cannot produce true faith because unjust acts cannot produce true fidelity. And hence the subsequent irony of the Eighth Council of Toledo’s citation of, in the process of minting him a doctor of the Church and re-issuing a forced-conversion decree, Isidore’s Sententiae and Synonyma arguments that oaths made in bad faith are not 50 See, for instance, Augustine (Ep. 153, 6.20 [Patrologia Latina 33, col. 662]): ‘sed inhumanum non est etiam pro talibus intercedere tamquam pro reis criminum non ad hoc, ut minime restituantur aliena, sed ne frustra homo in hominem saeuiat ille praesertim, qui iam remisit culpam, sed quaerit pecuniam et fraudari metuit, non expetit uindicari’. 51 Isidore, Synonyms, 1.7 (Throop, trans., p. 12). 52 Isidore, Sententiae, 3.57.11 (Cazier, ed., p. 315, ls. 61–64).

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valid53: ‘One’s bond should not be kept by which one carelessly promises an evil thing, as for example, if anyone promises an adulteress a perpetual commitment to remain with her. It is more tolerable not to maintain one’s bond than it is to remain in the shameful crime of def ilement’54; ‘Those who have not completed what they vowed are counted among the unbelievers […]. A promise fulf illed by a crime is godless.’55 Elsewhere in the Synonyma, Isidore says: ‘Do not acquiesce in carrying out a bad order. […] A person is not free of the crime if he has complied with its being done.’56 He, moreover, stresses the significance of taking an oath and implies that one should only be taken when absolutely necessary.57 In Synonyma, 2.56 Isidore says: Keep yourself from swearing, abolish the use of swearing, forbid yourself from taking an oath. It is dangerous to swear. Constant swearing creates the habit of perjury. May ‘yes’ be in your mouth, may ‘no’ be in your mouth. Truth does not require swearing. Faithful speech fills the place of an oath. May the promise of your oath be steadfast.58 53 VIII Toledo 2 (CCH 5, 386–412, ls. 249–516) deals with deserters and traitors (‘refugis atque perfidis’) and the dilemma caused by the recent rebellion of Froia against Recceswinth. The latter had taken an oath to his father, Chindaswinth, that demanded blinding and capital punishment for attempted usurpers and their associates, a rule that was confirmed by holy authority. This commitment now left Recceswinth with a diff icult decision: either show clemency to Froia and his supporters ( fautoribus) or maintain the integrity of oaths. Recceswinth’s solution was to elevate Isidore to the status of Doctor of the Church and then cite his passages absolving the king of his oath while also sustaining fidelity to oaths and to their holy sanctity. On the oath that Recceswinth had taken, see VII Toledo 1 (CCH 5, 342–343, ls. 69–71): ‘omnes paene Spaniae sacerdotes omnesque seniores vel iudices ac ceteros homines officii palatini’. 54 Isidore, Sententiae, 2.31.9 (Cazier, ed., 156, ls. 27–31; CCH 5, 411–412, ls. 503–507): ‘Non est conservandum sacramentum quo malum incaute promittitur, veluti si quispiam adulterare perpetuam cum ea permanendi fidem polliceatur: tolerabilius est enim non implere sacramentum quam permanere in stupri flagitium.’ The citation from the Sententiae in the Vives edition of the canon is slightly different from other earlier and later editions. For instance, in Patrologia Latina 83, it reads Non est conservandum, and quo instead of quod, logically presents adulterae over adulterare, and reads perpetuo against perpetuam and flagitio over flagitium. Other than the differences with perpetuam and flagitium, the new critical edition of the Sententiae (CCSL 111) follows the Patrologia Latina version. 55 Isidore, Synonyma, 2.58 (Throop, trans., p. 67). As it is in VIII Toledo 2 (CCH 5, 412, ls. 507–510): ‘In malis promissis rescinde fidem; in turpe votum muta decretum; quod incaute voviste, non facias. Impia est promissio quae scelere adimpletur.’ 56 Isidore, Synonyma, 2.75 (Throop, trans., p. 74). This echoes the prescription of James 4:17. 57 Isidore, Synonyma, 2.56 (Throop, trans., p. 66). This runs counter to the teaching of Jesus as expressed in James and Matthew, on which, see notes above. 58 Isidore, Synonyma, 2.56 (Throop, trans., p. 66). A fine ideological closing line.

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This emphasis on justice, peace, and being human is evident earlier and in the East as well. The fourteenth canon of the Council of Serdica of 343,59 in dealing with Arianism, announces that it is inhuman for a bishop not to receive his fellow bishop: ‘Therefore, the time for this must be f ixed, since it has been deemed to be inhuman not to welcome a visiting bishop.’60 This refers to bishops visiting other cities or provinces and trying to usurp the bishop there. But, since it is inhuman not to welcome a bishop, the council set out to limit the times of visits so as to avoid both the confrontation between the brethren and injurious actions toward the faithful. Of the Visigothic councils, the first to use the word ‘inhumanum’ is VI Toledo, followed by VIII Toledo, which uses it twice in its extensive opening tome. And this is the royal opening that also cites Isidore for his opinions on oaths, as a way for Recceswinth to break his oath to his father and show clemency on the rebel Froia. Recceswinth says that those in power must be moderate in temperament on oaths, to avoid becoming inhuman in the act of fulfilling an oath.61 And once again, in Recceswinth’s lengthy declaration of the faith and goodwill, Recceswinth wiggles out of his oath in order to let a rebellion slide, and in that discussion we read again, following VI Toledo, that it is inhuman not to show fidelity, that to deny a promise, to fail to honour an oath, like Jews have done and continue to do through Julian’s time, is to lack humanity.62 The infidelity of Jews remains tied in the councils to their sacrilege and their inability to fulfil oaths, even when discussing them in the context of an attempted coup, as in Egica’s XVII Toledo 8 (in 694): ‘On account of the well-known fact that the Jewish people are besmirched with the evil stigma of sacrilege 59 CCH 3, 129–130, ls. 212–231: ‘Ut episcopus in alienam provinciam non immoretur.’ 60 CCH 3, 130, ls. 221–223: ‘def inite ergo tempus, quia et non recipere episcopum coepiscopum suum inhumanum est, et diutius residere perniciosum: ne f iat ergo providendum est’. The independently circulating version of the canon in MS Vienna 411, fol. 17 r, also reads ‘inhumanum’. 61 CCH 5, 376, ls. 122–127: ‘Unde iam vestrum erit inspirante vobis miseratione divina ita utriusque discrimis temperare mensuram, ne aut iuramenti condicio teneat reos aut inpietatis ultio habeat inhumanos; sicque vestris nos instruat forma iudicii, ut subiectos populos nec in profanationibus habeam subditos nec inpietatis vinculis doleam comminutos.’ 62 CCH 5, 399, ls. 371–378: ‘Stabunt ergo sacrae auctoritas vivida iussa nec vana profanatione erunt aliquatenus temeranda. Verum ne iuramenta quae data sunt videantur in nos ita penitus miserationum conclusisse praecordia, ut nullam de pietatis affectu animae viscera concipiant indulgentiam parituram, sic stabilitis contractibus iuramenti sinum misericordiae aperimus atque ita cunctis Deo placita devotione miserere censemus, ut nos nec iuramenti teneat cautio reos nec inhumanitas faciat exsecrandos.’

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[…] and polluted by the oft-repeated profanation of oaths.’63 Ironically, in XV Toledo, led by Julian in 688, Egica, in his first year as king, asks to be allowed to break his oath.64 The associating of justice and faith is paramount, since justice is tantamount to fidelity: through justice we can hope for another world, and so salvation.65 And thus, as Recceswinth says in the Liber Iudiciorum, ‘Now that laws have been given to the faithful, it is time to rein in the unfaithful’66 and ‘Law is the rival of divinity, the oracle of religion’.67 Moreover, he argues, ‘For men are better armed with equity than with weapons; and the prince should rather employ justice against an enemy than the soldier his javelin’68 and ‘Law is […] the messenger of justice’.69 It was not simply a political move to promulgate the Liber Iudiciorum at VIII Toledo, as the issue of justice has direct theological implications: Jesus is the Redeemer and the Judge at the End of Times and is so – there to mete out justice – specifically because he is fully human, not in any way inhuman or less than completely human. Since the ultimate reward of faith is the Second Coming, the arrival of the hoped-for salvation with resurrection and the reunification of bodies and souls in the ‘inhuman’ claim in canon 14 of VI Toledo has deep Christological significance. For Isidore, human nature is entangled with Creation, the divine, and the spiritual. A human is a being first of all because she rises up from the soil, because within her is the innate power to grow.70 But to be specifically a human being is to be the sole creature that by nature ‘stands erect and looks toward heaven so as to seek God’.71 Moreover, a human being has both a body (‘homo corpus’) and a soul (‘homo anima’) – that is, a human being is made up of two essential features, two natures that within them contain three: mind, will, and soul – and this is important theologically.72 First, it is this that differentiates human beings from animals (animalia), 63 XVII Toledo 8 (trans. Summer, ‘Council of Toledo XVII’, p. 30). 64 To protect his predecessor’s family. 65 This sentiment is actually not far off from the Pelagianism of Julian of Eclanum, yet it aligns with the principles of Visigothic theology and law. 66 Liber Iudiciorum, 12.2.1 (Zeumer, ed., p. 411): ‘Quod post datas fidelius leges oportuit infidelibus constitutionem ponere legis.’ 67 Recceswinth, Liber Iudiciorum, 1.2.2 (Zeumer, ed., p. 41). 68 Liber Iudiciorum, 1.2.6 (Zeumer, ed., p. 42). 69 Liber Iudiciorum, 1.2.2 (Zeumer, ed., p. 41). 70 Isidore, Etymologies, 11.1.1–4 (Barney et al., trans., p. 231). 71 Isidore, Etymologies, 11.1.5 (Barney et al., trans., p. 231). 72 Isidore, Etymologies, 11.1.6 (Barney et al., trans., p. 236). Julian effectively repeats this tripartite definition of Jesus in his second Apologeticum.

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who are also beings and have souls.73 Second, it pertains directly to the Parousia and the ‘inhumanity’ of the unfaithful, namely, Jews. For Isidore, ‘The difference between Deus and divus is that God exists always, while a human being becomes a deity’.74 In canon 13 of the Second Council of Seville (619), Isidore further elaborates on humanitatis in his discussion of the one person and dual nature of Christ: ‘In his Passion he reveals himself as fully human’,75 ‘And in one person can exist independently the two natures of God, that before the birth of the world and that in these days of humanity’, human nature in this historical world.76 And by the prophecy of Isaiah, Christ demonstrates both the nature of divinity and of humanity: Isaiah 7:14 (‘[Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign]: the virgin shall be with child, and bear a son[, and shall name him Immanuel]’)77 and Isaiah 9:6 (‘For a child is born to us, a son is given us[, upon his shoulder dominion rests.]’).78 The child is Christ who became man: ‘Parvulus enim Christus ad susceptae humanitatis naturam pertinent, quia homo factus est’, a man unique to this historical era of human nature, for as Isidore elsewhere notes, ‘after the resurrection human nature progresses to parity with the angels’.79 This nature of Christ is further emphasized in II Seville 13: in citation of Paul’s Letter to the Colossians 1:15–18: ‘The first born of the dead, he is before all, and by him all exist […] He is the head of the body of the Church’.80 God was endowed fully with our post-Fall human nature when he was born through Mary: ‘We believe in God, omnipotent, and in Jesus Christ, his only begotten son, God of true God, manifested as human through the mother. Incarnation of the Holy Spirit through the Virgin Mary.’81 73 Isidore, Differentiae, 1.50 (Throop, trans., p. 97): ‘animalia have a soul, animantia pertain only to spirits’. And, Isidore, De Natura Rerum 1.27 (Kendall and Wallis, trans., Isidore of Seville, p. 155: ‘without a soul, there cannot be motion in any body’ (ref: Augustine, De Genesi ad literram: ‘the flesh of living creatures is animated by the souls of living creatures’). Isidore, Synonyma, 2.7 (Throop, trans., p. 45): ‘one must first cleanse their mind, and with that the soul/spirit are clean and the flesh won’t sin’. 74 Isidore, Differentiae, 1.168 (Throop, trans., p. 117). 75 II Seville 13 (Vives, p. 172): ‘passionemque eius in sola humanitatis susceptionem manifestare’. 76 II Seville 13 (Vives, p. 172): ‘in una subsistenti persona duas naturas habentem, deitatis quae ante saecula genitus est, humanitatis in qua diebus ultimis editus est’. 77 II Seville 13 (Vives, p. 173): ‘ecce virgo in utero concipiet et pariet filium’. 78 II Seville 13 (Vives, p. 173): ‘Parvulus natus est nobis, filius datis est nobis’. 79 Isidore, Sententiae, 1.3.1b (Knoebel, trans., p. 39; Cazier, ed., p. 11, ls. 7–8). 80 II Seville 13 (Vives, p. 174): ‘Primogenitus omnis creaturae ipse est ante omnes, et omnia in illo constant. […] Ipse est capud corporis ecclesiae.’ 81 II Seville 13 (Vives, pp. 174–175): ‘Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem et in Iesum Christum filium euis unicum, Deum et Dominum nostrum; humanitatis ex matre dum adiecit. Natum de

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Jesus Christ is perfect in divinity, perfect in humanity: ‘eumdem Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum, perfectum in divinitate, perfectum eumdem in humanitate’,82 Julian of Toledo expresses in his second Apologeticum of 686 – the first was sent to Pope Benedict II before XIV Toledo. The main aim of that council, in November 683, was, per the request of the late Pope Leo II, to confirm agreement with the position of the Sixth Ecumenical Council (680/681) on the human nature of Christ against monothelitism. The council did this, and Julian had expected his (first) Apologeticum to clarify this to the Roman Curia’s satisfaction. However, Benedict II questioned the validity of Julian’s work on the nature of Christ,83 including the claim that ‘the will begets the will’ (‘voluntatis genuit voluntatem’84) – which could hint at monotheletism’s claim that Jesus has only one will, and that Jesus was created by the will of the Father – and that Jesus is of three substances in one: two human and one divine.85 Julian was incensed, and in response, in early 686, he drafted and sent to Rome a second Apologeticum, the Apologeticum De tribus capitulis.86 Julian defends his position on the will, saying that he is perfectly capable of understanding the differences in matters of divine and human voluntas. On the tripartite substance of Jesus, Julian defends his position through Augustine’s Holy Trinity 13.17: ‘Since human nature could so be joined to God, that one person could be made of two substances, and thereby indeed of three – God, soul, and flesh.’87 In May 688, at the elevation Spiritu Sancto ex utero Maria virginis.’ 82 Julian of Toledo, Liber Apologeticus, ch. 17, Patrologia Latina 96, col. 535D. 83 On the matter, see the Chronicle of 754, ch. 41 (Wolf, trans., pp. 103–104; Mommsen, ed., p. 350). 84 See the letters of Benedict II, Patrologia Latina 96, col. 422 B, and Julian’s second Apologeticum, Patrologia Latina 96, col. 526A (Liber Apologeticus, de tribus capitulis). 85 Julian’s second Apologeticum, Patrologia Latina 96, cols 528C–529A: ‘Ad secundum quoque retractandum capitulum transientes, quo idem papa incaute nos dixisse putavit, tres substantias in Christo Dei Filio profiteri; sicut nos non pudebit quae sunt vera defendere, ita forsitan quosdam pudebit quae vera sunt ignorate. Quis enim nesciat, unumquemque hominem duabus constare substantiis, animae scilicet et corporis?’ I Toledo (c. 400) had declared, at the end of its profession of faith (CCH 4, p. 342, ls. 233–235): ‘We believe in the future resurrection of human flesh, and we hold that the soul of man is not a divine substance or part of God but a creature created by divine will’ (‘Resurectionem vero futuram humanae credimus carni; animam autem hominis non divinam esse substantiam aut Dei partem, sed creaturam dicimus divina voluntate creatam’). This is what Julian contends he meant with his ‘voluntatis genuit voluntatem’. 86 Felix of Toledo, Vita Iuliani 8, Patrologia Latina 96, cols 448C–449B, and in CCSL 15A. The text is mostly preserved in the records of XV Toledo. I refer to the most recent reproduction, along with translation (into German), in Pabst, Das theologische Profil, pp. 448–455. See also Chronicle of 754, 41 (Wolf, trans., pp. 103–104; Mommsen, ed., p. 350), and XV Toledo’s confession of faith. 87 Julian’s second Apologeticum (Vives, p. 460; Patrologia Latina col. 533B): ‘Sanctus Augustinus in libro Trinitatis Dei id ipsud exprimens dicit: Sie Deo coniungi potuit humana natura, ut

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of the new king, Egica, Julian led a plenary council (XV Toledo), in which the Visigothic Church officially adopted Julian’s Christology. Julian was also able to use the council as a platform to – echoing Braulio’s attack on Rome in 638 – denounce the Roman Curia, calling the Roman theologians thoughtless, ignorant, and superficial,88 and accusing the past pope (Benedict II) of superficial attention to Christology.89 In his lost work on the ‘Unusual Properties of the Persons of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit’,90 in which he combated monothelitism, Ildefonsus, bishop of Toledo (657–667) and the teacher of Julian,91 would have presented another crucial component to the theology of human nature. In section 3 of his Perpetual Virginity of the Holy Mary,92 he does this, citing Isaiah 7:14 to prove to his imaginary Jewish opponent – whom he refers to as drunk (crapulatus) on primeval faithlessness (primaevae perfidiae)93 – that Mary remained a virgin after she gave birth to Jesus.94 He says from this that ‘a miracle is apparent if there comes to be in a human conception [i.e. the virgin birth] – that which human nature doesn’t know in this circumstance!’95 In a Marian sermon of the Homiliae Toletanae, variously ascribed to Ildefonsus, the audience is asked: ‘Is the virgin St. Mary giving birth contrary to nature?’96 According to Jews, the sermon contends, yes:

ex duabus substantiis fieret una persona, ac per hoc iam ex tribus, Deo, anima et carne.’ See Augustine of Hippo, On the Trinity, translated by Arthur West Hadden. 88 Patrologia Latina 84, cols 513A–520A; Patrologia Latina 96, cols 525–536. 89 Patrologia Latina 96, 526A. 90 Opusculum de Proprietate Personarum Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti (Patrologia Latina 96, col. 44A). The book is now lost, but we know that it did exist thanks to Julian’s reference to it in his DVI biography of Ildefonsus (see following note). 91 On the relationship between Ildefonsus and Julian, see the latter’s Elogium Ildephonsi (Patrologia Latina 96, cols 42–44), a biography of the teacher by the student added to Ildefonsus’s De Viris Illustribus. See also Hillgarth, ‘St. Julian of Toledo in the Middle Ages’. 92 For a discussion of this text, see the introduction to it in Ildefonsus of Toledo, De Virginitate Sanctae Mariae (Urquiola, ed.). 93 Ildefonsus, De Virginitate (Urquiola, ed., 166, l. 240). 94 A real Jewish opponent, as Ildefonsus makes clear in the passage, would have disagreed with Ildefonsus at the very least on simple semantic grounds. The Vulgate Latin version of Isaiah 7:14 reads ‘the virgin shall conceive’ (‘ecce virgo concipiet’), while the Hebrew Bible says that a young woman is pregnant (‘‫)’הנה העלמה הרה‬. Ildefonsus lambasts his imaginary Jew for reading this as a ‘young woman’ instead of as a ‘virgin’. 95 Ildefonsus, De Virginitate (Donalson, trans., The Perpetual Virginity, p. 16; Urquiola, ed., 167, ls. 257–259): ‘[In illo] ostendi miraculum, si in humana conception fierit quod humana natura nesciret’. 96 Patrologia Latina 96, col. 232A: ‘Et Virgo sancta Maria non potuit contra naturam ex iussu Dei Filium generare?’

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‘E contra Judaeus: Contra naturum, inquit, parere virgo Maria non potuit.’97 Using the light and the glass metaphor, the sermon contends that the virgin birth is a natural phenomenon: Mary remains a virgin after birth as glass remains the same after light travels through it.98 This is a problematic argument though because the light maintains its essence after the event, while Jesus does not; Jesus is transformed and incarnated as human. But this is also what makes the whole argument work, as from the solidly Ildefonsine material, that the Marian birth endows Jesus with humanity – our humanity, which suffers birth and death – by the act of a miracle.99 If a miracle would occur on some occasion when light went through glass it, too, like the Eucharist, could be transformed into or endowed with another essence, or will, while maintaining its integrity as one entity. Jesus’s humanity is thus contingent – contingent on a miracle, the immaculate conception and virgin birth: a miracle transforms the essence of God from being one nature into being of two natures. (This requires, for Julian, both belief – in the universality of God, in miracles, etc. – and faith, utopian f idelity.) This is just as how human nature itself is a historical contingency in that its essence depends on events that determine it, like the f irst sin and its introduction of death: Paul, Romans 5:12: ‘Therefore just as through one person sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came to all.’100 (All that is contingent is historical.) We 97 Patrologia Latina 96, col. 231D. For a recent discussion of the Toledan Homilary, see Chase, The ‘Homiliae Toletanae’. 98 Patrologia Latina 96, col. 232B: ‘Solis radius specular penetrat, et soliditatem eius insensibili subtilitate per trajicit; et talis videtur intrinsecus, quails et extrinsecus. […] Specular ergo non rumpit radius solis; integritatem Virginis ingressus aut regressus vitiare poterat Deitatis.’ On the history of the analogy in Christianity, see Breeze, ‘The Blessed Virgin’. 99 In De Virginitate, Ildefonsus repeats the arguments of the Athanasian Creed, that God/ Jesus are in hypostatic union and that Jesus earns his human nature through Mary: ‘He is of God from the essence of the Father, begotten before time; and he is human from the essence of his mother, born in time; completely God, completely human, with a rational soul and a human flesh; equal to the Father as regards divinity, less than the Father as regards humanity.’ 100 Julian of Toledo, Prognosticum futuri saeculi, 1.2: ‘Death reaches human beings as a layer of sin. It is not to be believed that God made mankind in the same way in which he made the angels, in such a condition that, even though they had sinned, they could no longer die. He had so made them that if they fulfil the obligations of obedience, an angelic immortality and a blessed eternity might ensue without the intervention of death; but if they disobeyed, death should strike them with just sentence’ (Julian of Toledo, trans. Stancati, p. 379); Augustine, City of God, 13.1: ‘The first human being was created in such a condition of nature as to be absolutely capable of immortality and mortality; not immortal to the point that, also sinning, he would not have been able to die; not mortal to the point that, also not wanting to sin, he would have been submitted to death.’

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could say then that contingency is an absolute of ‘human nature’, but it is not an absolute: God is not contingent. No miracles are required for God to be. God simply is, and you either believe that or you don’t. Faith is introduced into humanity with the birth of Jesus, and so is intimately associated with him. Faith is a hope for eternal life in Heaven, perfect beatitude. And this will come only through Jesus. VI Toledo 14, VIII Toledo, and Julian tie being human to loyalty to the faithful – VI Toledo 14: It is inhuman to defraud the faithful of their rewards, of, for instance, everlasting life by the Second Coming. Through their disloyalty, Jews threaten to undermine the hope of the faithful by arguing that Jesus is only human and cannot reward the faithful in the ways for which they hope. This anti-utopian pragmatism makes a Jew inhuman: she is incapable of f idelity and so untrustworthy and prone to the unjust, hence the inhuman associations in VIII Toledo and XII Toledo. (This is reminiscent of the Tanakh’s Isaiah 7:9 ‘If you will not believe, you cannot be trusted.’101) VI Toledo’s canonical legislation on the inhuman thus has both extreme Christological and eschatological signif icance. At a moment, the 630s, when the wider Church was struggling with monoenergism and monothelitism, the council’s pronouncement on the inhuman helped to conf irm the Visigothic Church’s belief in the full humanness of Jesus.102 For, at the Resurrection, it is Christ the son, not God the father, who will reward the faithful with perfect beatitude in the new world. This, crucially, is the act of a human, as it is in the nature of humanness. It would be inhuman not to reward the faithful, which is why Jesus does so and why it is Jesus and not God the father who returns during the Parousia to do it.103 101 ‘‫’אם לא תאמינו כי לא תאמנו‬. The Latin Vulgate has this, instead, as ‘if you will not believe, you shall not continue’ (‘si non credideritis non permanebitis’). 102 For more on monoenergism in the period, including Byzantine support leading up to VI Toledo, see Pabst, Julian von Toledo, pp. 238–240. 103 A few decades earlier, the antagonistic neighbour of the Visigoths, Gregory of Tours, presented an informative anecdote relating to this idea. In it, he and the Frankish king Chilperic encounter a Jewish man named Priscus on the outskirts of Paris and have a cordial discussion with him about the humanness of Jesus. Priscus maintains that God is not willing to share his kingdom and does not need a son. Chilperic is unable to mount a strong defense to this. Gregory, however, in a more convincing rebuttal, adjusts the argument by suggesting that, sure, God did not need a son, but, he presented one in the world for our human benef it: ‘For had he not been made flesh, he could not have redeemed man from the captivity of sin, or from his servitude to the devil.’ Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, 6.5 (trans. Thorpe, pp. 372–376).

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Isidore had maintained that all appearances of God to humans must be visions of Christ (as an angel), in part because no man can see the eternal Father and live.104 Supported by the biblical passages of 1 Corinthians 10:9 and Jude 5, this theological position is evident across early Christian theology, for example, in Tertullian and John Cassian, and later Julian of Toledo.105 And it is here in this particular discussion on the Parousia and the nature of Christ, that we can find Isidore at his closest to the anti-Judaism later to be found in Julian’s theology. Building from Augustine’s Contra Judaeos, as well as the political spirit of John Chrysostom’s Adversus Judaeos,106 Isidore, in his De Fide Catholica contra Judaeos (On the Catholic Faith against the Jews) is clear, via a Christological exhortation and biblical exegesis, about his general disagreement with Jewish theology, arguing that Jews were guilty of purposely denying that Christ is the resurrected Messiah – a claim reiterated in the 660s by Ildefonsus107 – and, as such, they are now awaiting

104 Isidore, De Fide Catholica contra Judaeos, 1.1.7 (Summers, trans., St. Isidore of Seville’s De Fide Catholica, p. 14): ‘Thus He is the Son Himself, who, being sent from the Father, was constantly appearing visibly to men. From this sending he is rightly named angel.’ MS Paris BnF lat 13396, fol. 3v: ‘Ipse est enim Filius, qui semper a Patre missus visibiliter apparebat hominibus. Ex ipsa ergo missione recte angelus noncupatur.’ 105 Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, 2.27: ‘God would have been unable to hold any intercourse with men if He had not taken on Himself the emotions and affections of man, by means of which He could temper the strength of His majesty […] by such a humiliation as was indeed degrading to Himself, but necessary for man, and such as on this very account became worthy of God, because nothing is so worthy of God as the salvation of man’; citing Galatians 4:4: ‘But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law’; Cassian, On the Incarnation of the Lord, 4.1: ‘Learn then first of all from the Apostle the teacher of the whole world, that He who is without beginning, God, the Son of God, became of the Son of man at the end of the world, i.e. in the fullness of the times’ (Tertullian, Against Marcion, https://www. newadvent.org/fathers/03122.htm and https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/35094.htm). 106 For a recent discussion of these homilies and John Chrysostom’s anti-Judaism, see Wilson VanVeller, ‘John Chrysostom.’ 107 Ildefonsus, De Virginitate, 4 (Donalson, trans., p. 22): ‘because of the obstinance of your most wicked heart, because of your faithless mind, because of your evil conscience, because of your yoke of unbelief, because of your arrogance, because of your deceitful obedience, because of your unfaithful promises, because of your inconstant faith […] Jeremiah says: “With collusion the house of Judah has rebelled against me”, says the Lord, “They have denied me and they had said: ‘it is not he’”. Because until now, O Jew, because of this Christ, my Lord, the Son of this Virgin, you say it is not He; hoping for another with whom you should perish, that is, the Antichrist.’ Urquiola, ed., pp. 173–174, ls. 361–372: ‘De te autem propter cordis tui pessimi obstinationem, propter impuram uoluntatem, propter infidam mentem, propter conscientam malam, propter incredulitatem iugem, propter superbiam ueram, propter obedientiam fallacem, propter promissa infidelia, propter fidem inconstabilem […] Item Hieremias: Praevaricatione praevaricata est in me domus Iuda, ait Dominus. Negauerunt me et dixerunt: Non es ipse, quod nunc usque, Iudeae,

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an antichrist, a false messiah.108 ‘Oh the unfortunate error of Jews!’,109 Isidore exclaims, for turning their backs on Christ.110 The intellectual battle between Julian of Eclanum and Augustine two-plus centuries prior involved debate over at least one theological matter pertinent to Julian of Toledo and the Visigothic Church: the issue of free will. Julian of Eclanum – whose thinking on the matter is surprisingly close to Hegel’s absolute negativity111 – argued that sin is not endemic to human nature as it is in the world today, post-Fall: ‘“You ask me why I would not consent to the idea that there is a sin that is part of human nature?”, Julian wrote of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, “I answer: it is improbable, it is untrue; it is unjust and impious; it makes it seem as if the Devil were the maker of men. It violates and destroys the freedom of the will”.’112 In his letter to Honorius I, Braulio claims that humans are endowed with free will. If this is the case, and, as Julian of Toledo maintains, Jews have chosen by this human capacity infidelity, then are they not equally human beings? No, because the choice to be faithful is a central component of human nature. The human has free will insofar as by it they make the ‘right’ (just) decision, while the wrong decision, infidelity, leads Jews to being inhuman, or less than human. According to the eighteenth-century biblical scholar and Talmudist Chaim ibn Attar, God cares not about the living dead, that is, those who have sinned purposely and have thus effectively lost their souls. As God says in Ezekiel 18:32: ‘For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies, says the Lord God. Return and live!’ For Julian, the living dead are the Jews, whose souls propter hunc Christum Dominum meum huius uirginis filium, dicis ‘Non est ipse’, exspectans alium cum quo pereas, antichristum.’ 108 Isidore, De Fide Catholica, 1.1.1 (Summers, trans., p. 12): ‘The Jews, with abominable unbelief, denying that Christ is the Son of God, being impious, hard-hearted, having no faith. […] For the one they accept as about to come, they deny to have already come.’ ‘Judaei nefaria incredulitate Christum Dei Filium abnegantes, impii, duricordis, prophetis veteribus increduli, novis obstrusi, adventum Christi malunt ignorare, quam nosse; negare, quam credere. Quem enim venturum accipiunt, venisse iam nolunt. Quem resurrecturum legunt, resurrexisse non credunt.’ The Latin is cited from MS Paris BnF lat 13396, fols 2r-v and fol. 22r, De Fide Cath., 1.18, where Isidore cites Jeremiah 5.11 to blame Jews for forsaking God and say that they are awaiting a false messiah. 109 Isidore, De Fide Cath., 2.28, MS Paris BnF lat 13396, fol. 71v: ‘O infelicium Judeorum deflenda dementia!’ 110 This was not only Catholic language, as the Arian Theoderic, the Ostrogothic king, spoke also of erring Jews in his letter to a Jewish community in Genoa: ‘sed errantium votum laudabiliter improbamus’ (Cassiodorus, Variae, 2.27, Theodor Mommsen, ed., p. 62, ls. 3–4; Barnish, trans., pp. 34–35). 111 See Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, p. 110. 112 Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 390.

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are damaged for denying Christ and the faith that he ushers into the world. As such, at the Parousia, Jews will not even be judged, a point which Julian uses to confirm that Jews are inhuman, less than human, of no interest to God, incapable of salvation: When Christ, the Son of God, comes to pass judgment, all the just and unjust will see his humanity in the same way. The unjust, nevertheless, will not see his divinity since only the just were promised to see it. That the unjust would not see his divinity then was attested to by Isaiah (26:10), who says: ‘the ungodly is carried away so that he does not see the majesty of the Lord.’113

Only the just – who can witness the eternal, salvation, and grace – are able to reward fidelity and therefore share in the full sense of human being, of human nature.114 In the Sententiae, Isidore argues that the just and the wicked at Parousia are ‘two different classifications of human being’115 – both are human beings, even though the wicked are damned without judgement. This becomes irreconcilable with the Trinitarian logic of Jesus’s humanness combined with VI Toledo’s declaration of the inhuman. For Julian, only the righteous are able to see beyond the human identity of Christ but also generally past the profane, while the unjust – the ‘inhuman’, the Jews – can see only the humanity of Christ. They will be able to bear witness to the Second Coming, the resurrection of all bodies and the judgement, but will not be able to see paradise, the new history: Jews are able to witness the humanity of Jesus, but only that, not his eternity – which is what prevents them from full humanness and salvation.116 Their inability to attain afterlife means that they are not now fully alive as humans. As Julian says in his Prognosticum, 1.8: Death is that act by which ‘one passes over to life’,117 citing Julian Pomerius, ‘Therefore, those regenerated cannot pass to eternal beatitude without the death of the flesh’,118 and John Chrysostom, ‘But the 113 Julian of Toledo, Prognosticum futuri saeculi, 3.8 (Stancati, trans., p. 434). Isaiah 26:10, Vulgate: ‘et non videbit gloriam Domini’. 114 See Matthew 25:31–46; Isidore, Sententiae, 1.27.8 (Cazier, ed., p. 84, ls. 39–42). 115 Isidore, Sententiae, 1.27.10 (Cazier, ed., p. 85, ls. 48–64). 116 The inability for Jews to comprehend the divine is evident also in Isidore, De Fide Catholica 2.20–21 (MS Paris BnF lat 13396, fols 67r–68r). 117 Julian of Toledo, Prognosticum futuri saeculi, 1.8 (Stancati, trans., pp. 381–382): ‘Death, by which the body is separated from the soul, is generally good for those who are good, since through it one passes to future immortality.’ 118 Julian of Toledo, Prognosticum futuri saeculi, 1.9 (Stancati, trans., p. 382).

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reason why the Cross will appear and why the Lord will come preceded by its manifestation is evident: so that those people who have crucified the Lord of majesty may learn the intention of their iniquity. […] they will be aware, but too late, of their sin, and in vain they will recognize their cruel blindness.’ And so, again, human nature is a historical phenomenon (and death contingent): there was a time when human nature did not include this aspect of humanness, did not require the living of two historical lives and the experiencing of one biological death, as symbolized perfectly in Jesus. Christ as the perfect symbol of ‘human nature’ as it had become in a post-Fall historical era, one in which the essence of human nature is different from what it was before (and will be after): ‘[W]e have become, to a certain extent, contrary to our (original) nature because of sin.’119 According to this logic, then, God could change its mind again, but also, ‘human nature’ is historically contingent. The essence of human being is stable only inside of a certain logical set, a historical world. The Catholic constellation of humanness, as outlined by Visigothic theologians themselves, is not universal. And, to follow Julian’s thesis through would mean to conclude that truth could, in theory, derive from somewhere other than the Church’s interpretation of history, of human nature, and of the Divine plan. And theologians at the time were aware of this possibility and its danger, and this is what they meant when they spoke of heresy, heresy as a Logic, a Truth, that derives from beyond the Christian Truth, such as from the Classics, or from pagan literature, or from Jewish teachings, like the Talmud, parts of which were already in Latin and circulating in Julian’s Spain.120 In Julian’s De comprobatione sextae aetatis mundi adversus Judaeos 119 Isidore, Sententiae, 1.11.1d-2 (Knoebel, trans., p. 54; Cazier, ed., p. 39, ls. 16–17): ‘culpae quodammodo merito contra naturam sumus effecti’. 120 See Rohmann, ‘Reading Sin’; Stancati, trans., Prognosticum, p. 124. See also Braulio’s references in his letter to Honorius to another science (i.e. Christianity vs. science – the truth source of others). On the Talmud in the Latin West and as read or responded to by Julian, see Stancati, trans., Prognosticum, pp. 123–129, and Hillgarth, ‘St. Julian of Toledo in the Middle Ages’, p. 10, n. 25. Per the request of Ervig, Julian wrote his De comprobatione sextae aetatis to respond to the Talmudic (Sanhedrin 97a-b and that tractate’s prognostication) claims about the coming of the Messiah. Hillgarth, and Stancati following him, suggests Julian’s engagement with the Talmud, and both follow an older historiographical tradition in this thinking (see Hillgarth for reference to that tradition). Based on his engagement with its ideas (and perhaps because of his Jewish family living down the street?), it is not unreasonable to believe that Julian was familiar in some ways with Talmudic material, at least the parts dealing with the coming of the Messiah and the discourse of Sanhedrin. Moreover, the Babylonian Talmud, and the vast rabbinical material that informed it, was at this point about two centuries in existence. In addition, we have evidence that the Talmud was circulating in the Roman world and perhaps in Latin, and

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(Demonstration of the sixth age of the world against the Jews), he virtually debates rabbinical teaching on the timing of the Messiah’s arrival and in so doing clearly demonstrates his concern for an alternative history that could challenge the Christian interpretation of the past and the future, the Christian teleology, and within that the historicity and meaning of human nature, of humanness, of who was, is, and can become fully human or remain forever inhuman or partially human. In maintaining that death has a historical origin and that it arose unexpectedly to shatter God’s original plan of universal life for humans – that is, to shatter the prevailing logic of the time – Julian’s theology offers emancipatory potential, the chance for radical historical change, to shatter any ideologies that claim ‘x’ is simply ‘human nature’ or universal.121 And, moreover, what constitutes human ‘nature’ is actually by the conscious decision of human beings: we decided, for instance, to sin, and therefore to add death to human nature. But we could also by this logic decide to add, or detract, other aspects, such as, for instance, violence, selfishness, greed, thirst for inequality, etc. We have the free will to determine what that this fact (or these facts), at least, was known in Visigothic Hispania. On 8 February 553 Justinian issued a novel encouraging vernaculars of Scripture but attacking the oral Jewish traditions as uninspired texts (Justinian, ‘Novel 146’). Justinian’s laws certainly circulated in seventh-century Hispania. That Cartagena was fully stocked with Justinian’s Corpus Iuris civilis is evident from the 603 Exemplum Legis from Cartagena/somewhere in Byzantine Spania, which cites the Novels and the Digest, and lays out the case against one bishop Stephanus (Canellas López, ed., Diplomática hispano-visigoda, p. 176). Also, the Liber Iudiciorum of the 650s, revised in Julian’s day under Ervig, contains a number of references to the Justinianic Corpus, e.g. LI, 3.1.5 (Nov., 97), 6.1.7 (Dig., 48.4), 8.4.2 (Dig., 47.2), 9.1.10 (Cod., 6.1.4), and 10.1.17 (Nov., 156; attributed to Chindaswinth). 121 For Julian the theologian there is a clear sense of human nature, which is not entirely removed from his historical sense of human customs and learned behaviours. In the opening of his Historia Wambae, Julian says that humans tend to be slow to act virtuously (Patrologia Latina 96, col. 763A): ‘Habet enim ipsa human moris instantia pigrum quemdam internae virtutis affectum. Et inde est quod non tam citatior ad virtutes, quam ad vitia proclivior reperitur.’ But this habit can be countered through literature, through texts whose narratives encourage us to valour. See the translation in Martínez Pizarro, trans., The Story of Wamba, p. 179. Pizarro translates ‘human moris’ as human nature. I think seeing this as a comment on human habits is a more accurate expression of Julian’s sentiment, especially vis-à-vis his theological understanding of human nature. Death, for instance, is an essential component of human nature; it is not a habit that can be resolved. And the same could said about faith, as a component of human nature: it is not a tradition but rather it is an endowed part in those who are fully human. As such, those without the trait of fidelity are not quite fully human and so by nature (and not custom) they are not able to be fully human. Julian begins and ends the Historia with references to human customs, and I believe that the ‘humanum morem’ in the closing paragraph refers also to bad habits, for instance, conceit. For a brief comment on this passage, with the original line in question, see Pizarro, The Story of Wamba, p. 221, n. 135.

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constitutes our human being, and so the ability to put ourselves in position to receive salvation from Christ at the Parousia and once again change the essence of human nature, to one that is post-death. And we can do this through the miracle of resurrection and the reunion of bodies and souls,122 but this is contingent firstly on us being faithful, having hope that another form of human being, a better one, is possible. (Jews, for Julian, lack this fidelity.) But how does how this apparent absolute contingency sit within the theology, ontology, and ontotheology?123 ‘If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false.’124 If we say that there are no absolute, idealist truths, only materialist universals125 and if truths are grounded in subjectivity, loyalty to a truth Event, an ‘Anti-History’ Event that shatters the present logic (as sin did) and, with enough loyal support, is, during the subjective process, subsequently made into an historical event that is the basis for a new logical set, a new world (e.g. this post-Fall world), then there is no absolute grounding for the Visigothic Church’s Idea. Visigothic theology would disagree, seeing its subjective process of forming the Catholic and Visigothic truths as grounded in the absolute, uncreated true, God. The same could have been said about its category of ‘human nature’, except that the theology itself gives away the secret that human nature is malleable. Yet, the theology allows space for both ontologies, or a fusion of them, in that, although God is absolute, devotion to his vision requires the subjective process of Christianization, of creating loyal subjects faithful to the hope of eternal salvation in a new historical era through Jesus Christ. Perhaps this represents an ontological dyophysitism, the cooperation of the theories in hypostatic union via an absolutist pendulum swinging between God and contingency. But is contingency truly a theological absolute? Is the transformation of the Eucharist, for example, contingent on something? Yes, on prayer and miracle. Is the truth of God contingent on anything? Again, for Visigothic theology, no, it is not, because it simply is. Thus, contingency itself is contingent, immanent within the absolute of God. But, if we don’t believe this absolute truth of God, then there could in fact be for us, for Jews, no absolute truth in the Christian sphere, and no possible basis for the ability simply to believe, or, say, to make a valid 122 Julian of Toledo, Prognosticum futuri saeculi, 3.13–17 (Stancati, trans., pp. 437–438). 123 For more on the concept of contingency as (the only) absolute, see Meillassoux, After Finitude. 124 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, prop. 205. 125 Truths derived from material existence and which oscillate between dormancy and actualization in the world. As such, they, like, for example, the Communist Idea, remain universal. See Badiou, ‘The Communist Hypothesis’.

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oath (again, a primary concern of Egica at XV Toledo and of Recceswinth’s referring to what is inhuman in VIII Toledo). Such a person, a Jew for instance, couldn’t be trustworthy, couldn’t be faithful, and so could not be human. To be human was to believe in Truth itself as a grounding (God), and not truth grounded in a materialist Event (contingency), even if that is what a miracle entails and is what the human life of Jesus was (Jesus’s life, his humanity, was a materialist truth: he existed as a human as a result of materiality and physical events, his birth through Mary and his death, and not as a result of his mind, of perception; his divinity is an idealist product). Thus, in this theological constellation, truth is historical and universal: Jews can see only the historical because they do not have faith, they deny the reality of such an idealist-materialist being, Jesus as the product of the mind and of the world, and its representing a utopian vision destined to be fulfilled. For Julian, following Augustine, faith is indeed utopian: ‘faith is really faith when it waits in hope for what is not yet seen in reality’,126 and Augustine in a letter to Paulinus of Nola: ‘Do we not all long for the future Jerusalem? […] I cannot refrain from this longing: I would be inhuman if I could.’127 Julian’s prayer opening the Prognosticum: ‘Dwelling, blind and ill, in the desert of Idumea, I cry to you, Son of David, to have mercy on me. I seek, in fact, Jerusalem, my eternal homeland; I desire to see its inhabitants, but I cannot find the guides with which to pass over there.’128 Faith is, then, not belief in an Event, in a truth Event, say, (the revelation of) God, but rather hope in the eventuality of an Event: the Christian as such lives in the Real as the non-subject awaiting subjective actualization through the Event; and yet, the Christian must at the same time be the actualized subject faithful to the Event, the truth Event of Jesus’s life and death.129 And so there is in the Christian a union of belief – in the absolute truth of the transcendent God – and faith, the hope for another world to come. And so for anyone to be ‘reborn in Christ’ at the Parousia, their hope must be for what is not (yet) seen, the eternal, instead of out of a desire ‘to possess without end this visible life’, which, Julian contends, is the only life that Jews can see because they deny Christ. As such, again, Jews are incapable of fidelity and so are 126 Julian of Toledo, Prognosticum futuri saeculi, 1.9 (Stancati, trans., p. 382; Patrologia Latina 96, col. 464B): ‘quae tunc est fides, quando exspectatur in spe, quod in re non videtur’. 127 Augustine, Ep. 27.1; Brown, Augustine, p. 206. 128 Stancati, trans., Prognosticum, p. 375. 129 On the Lacanian concept of the Real, see Kolozova, Cut of the Real, or the various writings of Slavoj Žižek.

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incapable of – following also VI Toledo 14 – being fully human.130 Faith allows us to overcome the tribulations of Earthly life: the unfaithful, those without hope for a better world, live perpetually in Hell.131 The real concern may have been less eschatological than political: Jewish refusal shattered the idols of the Visigothic Church and state, smashed to the floor all that represented its ideology of consensus. In the 630s, the discussion of ‘human nature’ and the proscriptions against Jews were responses to various local crises and broader events. So too in Julian’s period was this making of Jews inhuman part of the response to political and religious crises, including the Sixth Ecumenical Council’s condemnation of monothelitism, the suppression of the local Toledan bishopric at the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, and the attempted murder of King Wamba and the usurpation of his throne by Ervig, potentially with the assistance of Julian. After elevating Julian to the royal episcopacy, Ervig called an emergency church council on 6 January 681 (XII Toledo) to confirm the new royal order and promulgate his new book of anti-Jewish laws to be added to Recceswinth’s Liber Iudiciorum. In his opening tome to the council, Ervig was transparent about his position on Jews: they are pests, a plague (Judaeorum pestem, the same word used for the actual plague, as seen in XVI Toledo [693]) that need to be exterminated (exstirpate). Julian’s Prognosticum sustains this narrative, reminding readers that Jews continue to exist to bear witness to their crime and to witness that they are inhuman humans, as because of their sins they cannot fully die and so cannot pass over to (eternal) life. Moreover, in his letter to Julian on his receiving the Prognosticum, Bishop Idalius, his friend, wrote: ‘And indeed, here comes a certain Jew, named Restitutus, almost without the light of intelligence, for so to say an animal’ [brutum animal]’.132 In fact, it is this same Idalius with whom Julian was inspired to write the Prognosticum. According to Julian, as they lay reading together, Idalius in the pains of gout, the Holy Spirit, which descended upon our heads from the hem of his garment, illuminated us by setting us on fire for this most necessary inquiry. Having thus been invited to such a rich feast, we began to inquire 130 Julian of Toledo, Prognosticum futuri saeculi, 1.9, citing both Augustine and the Augustinian Julian Pomerius, via their City of God, 13.1 and (the lost) De animae natura vel qualitate eius, 8, respectively. 131 Julian of Toledo, Prognosticum futuri saeculi, 2.13 (Stancati, trans., p. 405). 132 Patrologia Latina 96, col. 458A.

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between ourselves, in what manner the souls of the dead exist before the final resurrection of the body.

Julian goes on to explain the writing and editing process, his intended name for the book, and that ‘[t]he first book concerns the origin of human death, the second how souls of the dead exist before the resurrection of the body, and the third treats of that same resurrection to come’. Julian wrote the book, he says, so that ‘the remorseful mind may return in time to where this meal is laid out most conveniently before it. […] For if we consider in careful meditation what we will become in the future, I believe that we would rarely or never sin.’133 The intention of the book then is to prevent sin and to promote fidelity, that is, to encourage hope in a future world, what Augustine says – and Julian quotes – is the essence of faith. In the discourse of the time, Jews, unable to imagine this future history, were incapable of faith, inhuman. Julian’s Prognosticum is a treatise on human nature and on the benefits of being human, as well as the pitfalls of being not fully human: a denunciation of both Jews and monothelitism. Julian’s exaltation of the sole power of the Visigothic state against the validity, voice, and authority of Judaism and Jewish figures is evident also in his De comprobatione sextae aetatis mundi adversus Judaeos, prepared for Ervig in 686, the same year as the second Apologeticum. In it, Julian says that the barking Jews (‘rabidis Iudaeorum latratibus respondere’) in the darkness of infidelity (‘qui caeca infidelitatis nocte possessi’) still proclaim it to be the fifth age of the world.134 For Julian, though, there were others, described without the vitriol directed towards Jews, who were also confused over the calculation of the ages (‘sed etiam quosdam e fidelium numero titubare compellunt’). The Jewish ‘miscalculation’, however, earns them a vicious rebuke and once again the labeling of ‘unfaithful’, and therefore ‘inhuman’. This anti-Judaism is evident in the contemporary references to Jews as rabid, as pests, and as non-human animals that need 133 Stork, ‘A Spanish Bishop Remembers the Future’, pp. 46–48. 134 Julian of Toledo, De comprobatione, 1, ls. 1–9 (Hillgarth, ed., De comprobatione Sextae Aetatis libri tres, p. 149): ‘Nascentis fidem ecclesiae testibus idoneis roborandam excipiens, huic opellae initium ab ipsis patriarchis et prophetis attribuam, nitarque, quantum Deo opitulante valuero, rabidis Iudaeorum latratibus respondere, qui caeca infidelitatis nocte possessi, non solum ipsi barathro detestabilis perf idiae concidunt, sed etiam quosdam e f idelium numero titubare compellunt, cum Christum Dei Filium necdum pro salute hominum in mundum venisse, sed adhuc venturum esse quadam temeraria calcuatione annorum cancerosis sermonibus disputare praesumunt, dicentes eo quod adhuc quinta aetas saeculi evolvatur, et necdum adhuc venerit aetatis sextae curriculum, in quo venturum nasci oporteat Christum.’

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to be exterminated, and in the potential referencing of what is contrary to human nature in XII Toledo.135 In closing, as Foucault shows in Madness and Civilization, at the start of the eighteenth century, ‘madness’ became a category that defined a group of individuals who, as such, needed to be entirely separated from society. These ‘mad’ people were irrational, and mentally and morally not part of ‘our’ world, of our community.136 In the Visigothic search for ‘human nature’, we see not simply the removal of Jews from society but also their exclusion because they were ‘inhuman’. They met, by Visigothic standards, all the ‘scientific’ criteria for being inhuman – they were not, according to Visigothic writers, faithful (not to God, not to their kingdom, not to their business partners, not even to each other), and they certainly did not reward the faithful. Once the category ‘inhuman’ was circulating in the discourse, it was possible to move Jews from being simply enemies of the state and society to being ontological others who were outright subhuman. The past is an idea, not a fact. The past is a concept of history, which itself is a theory, and, as theory, what it does is postulate and defend the classifications and ‘truths’ that it constructs. In this sense, theology is also theory in that, like history, it reveals facts and does so by creating concepts, for instance, its own imaginations of past and future. As a theory of being, Visigothic ontology is likewise a history of being, a defined manifestation – a revelation – of what constitutes the subject. The ontotheological, in this Visigothic context, accepts this historical subject while endowing it with a universal relationship with the non-revealed (the non-historical), that is, it theorizes a subject (‘human being’) whose ‘[human] nature’ is set in motion by its own actions, yet within the rubrics of the non-revealed and best exemplified by this eternal’s (non-historical’s) full experience of humanness (the historical). The inability not only not to believe this but also especially not to have faith that it was this precise reality manifest that did, and would, usher in a new historical age and an alternative human being made one, in late Visigothic ontology, inhuman.

Appendix The Twelfth Council of Toledo’s tome may contain a reference to laws being ‘contrary to human nature’. The manuscript tradition, with the Spanish 135 See Appendix. 136 Foucault, Madness and Civilization.

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editors and translator, has left a confusing collection of versions of a line by Ervig closing a section of paragraphs of vitriol against Jews.137 In a version of the Collectio Hispana systematica of the mid-ninth century, the tenth-/ eleventh-century MS Paris BN lat. 1565, lines 3–4 of folio 3r, we read it as it is edited by Martínez Díez and Rodríguez: ‘Nam et hoc generaliter obsecro, ut quicquid in nostrae gloriae legibus absurdum, quicquid iustitiae videtur esse contrarium, unanimitatis vestrae iudicio corrigatur.’138 Vives didn’t consult Paris 1565 and as a result his edition is slightly different, transliterating ‘quidquid’ instead of ‘quicquid’: ‘Nam et hoc generaliter obsecro, ut quidquid in nostrae gloriae legibus absurdum, quidquid iustitiae videtur esse contrarium, unanimitatis vestrae iudicio corrigatur.’ The meaning is the same, though: ‘And I ask of you, in general, the following: that whatever appears absurd or contrary to justice in our glorious laws, shall be corrected by your unanimous decision.’ The meaning of this sentence is quite different in the ‘humanitatis’ manuscripts. In them we go from a ‘whatever appears contrary to justice’ to a ‘whatever appears contrary to human nature’. For instance: Vat. lat. 1341, fol. 103r: ‘Nam et hoc generaliter obsecro ut quicquid in nostre gloriae legibus absurdum quicquid iustitiae videtur esse contrarium humanitatis vestrae iudicio corrigatur.’139 We should engage with Vat. lat. 1341 cautiously because of its association with pseudo-Isidore. It is, however, built off the genuine Gallic recension of the Hispana, and so the use of ‘humanitatis’ can be compared against that tradition for consistency.140 A genuine Gallic Hispana, Vat. Pal. lat. 575, is a Juliana recension with Vulgate characteristics made in circa the ninth/tenth century. At fol. 46r it reads: ‘Nam et hoc generaliter obsecro ut quicquid in nostre gloriae gelibilibus absurdum quicquid iustitiae videtur esse contrarium humanitatis vestrae iudicio corrigatur.’141 Of the same family is Vienna 411, dated c. 780–820, whose XII Toledo tome reads142: ‘Nam et hoc generaliter obsecro ut quidquid in nostrae glorie gelibilibus absurdum quidquid iustiae uidetur esse contrarium humanitatis vestrae iudicio corrigatus.’143 Moreover, the Toledan family of manuscripts, written pre-775, and the recensions of the Juliana, have differing versions specifically 137 CCH 6, 145–146, ls. 131–132. 138 MS Paris BnF lat. 1565. See also Kéry, Canonical Collections, pp. 71–72. 139 Vat. lat. 1341, fol. 103r, lines 10–12, 2nd col. 140 On the Collectio Hispana Gallica Augustodunensis, see n. 39 above. 141 Vat. Pal. lat. 575, fol. 46r, col. 2. 142 For more on Vienna 411, see n. 39 above. 143 MS Vienna 411 fol. 171 r, ls. 4–6. For a facsimile of the manuscript, see Mazal, ed., Wiener Hispana-Handschrift.

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of XII Toledo, yet they agree on the ‘humanitatis’ matter.144 This tradition, thus, appears to be more genuine as it seems also to be more aligned with Visigothic opinion from VI Toledo through Julian, that the primary attention goes from being on justice during Isidore, reflecting Christ as the just, as the lawgiver, to VI Toledo through Julian and the focus on the essence of human nature and Christ as both fully of that human nature and of the divine essence.

Bibliography Manuscripts Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 1565. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ btv1b10523823w/f15.item.r=1565 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 13396. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ btv1b8426784k Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Pal. lat. 575. https://digi.vatlib. it/view/MSS_Pal.lat.575 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 1341. https://digi.vatlib.it/ view/MSS_Vat.lat.1341 Vienna, Nationalbibliothek 411. For a complete facsimile and notes, see Otto Mazal, Wiener Hispana-Handschrift: Vollständige Faksimile-Ausgabe im Originalformat des Codex Vindobonensis 411, Codices selecti phototypice impressi 41 (Graz: Akademische Druck-und Verlagsanstalt, 1974).

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Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1943); trans. by Claude W. Barlow, Braulio of Saragossa. Iberian Fathers 2 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, 1969). Canellas López, Á ngel (ed.), Diplomática hispano-visigoda (Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 1979). Cassian, John, On the Incarnation of the Lord (De Incarnationem Domini), trans. by C.S. Gibson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 11 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1894). https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3509. htm Cassiodorus, Variae, ed. by Theodor Mommsen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctorum Antiquissimorum 12 (Berlin: Weidman, 1894); trans. by S.J.B. Barnish, Selected ‘Variae’ of Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, Translated Texts for Historians 12 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006). Chronicle of 754, trans. by Kenneth Baxter Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1990); ed. by Theodor Mommsen, Chronica Minora. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctorum Antiquissimorum 11 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1894), pp. 334–360. Fábrega Grau, Ángel, Pasionario hispánico (siglos VII–XII) (Madrid–Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1953). Felix of Toledo, Vita Iuliani, Patrologia Latina 96, cols 445–452. Fowler, H.W., and F.G. Fowler, trans. The Works of Lucian of Samosata (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905). Fredegar, Chronicles, ed. by Bruno Krusch, Fredegarii et aliorum chronica, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum 2 (Hanover: Hahn, 1888), pp. 1–193; trans. by Michael Wallace-Hadrill, The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960). Gil, Juan (ed.), Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum (Madrid: Instituto Antonio de Nebrija, 1973). Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, trans. by Lewis Thorpe (New York: Penguin, 1974). Gundlach, Wilhelm (ed.), Epistolae Merovingici et Karolini aevi, Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Epistolarum III (Berlin: Weidmann, 1892), pp. 658–690. Hispana = La colección canónica hispana [CCH], ed. by Gonzalo Martínez Díez and (from 1982 as co-editor) Félix Rodríguez, 6 vols (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1966–2002); ed. and trans. by José Vives, Concilios visigóticos e hispano-romanos (Barcelona and Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Enrique Flórez, 1963); James Brodman, ‘Sixth Council of Toledo’, Classical Folia: Studies in the Christian Perpetuation of the Classics, 33, no. 1 (1979), 5–18. G.V. Summer, ‘Council of Toledo XVII’, Classical Folia 33, no. 1 (1979), 19–32.

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ICERV = Inscripciones cristianas de la España romana y visigoda, ed. by José Vives, Biblioteca Histórica de la Biblioteca Balmes 18 (Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas/Instituto Enrique Flórez, 1969). Ildefonsus of Toledo, De Virginitate Sanctae Mariae, ed. by Valeriano Yarza Urquiola, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 114A (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 21–144; trans. by Malcolm Drew Donalson, The Perpetual Virginity of the Holy Mary (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011). Ildefonsus of Toledo, De Viris Illustribus, ed. by Carmen Codoñer Merino, Ildefonsus Toletani Episcopi: De Viris Illustribus, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 114A (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 595–616. Isidore of Seville, De Fide Catholica contra Judaeos, trans. by Kirk Mims Summers, ‘St. Isidore of Seville’s De Fide Catholica ex Veteri et Novo Testamento contra Judaeos’ (MA thesis, University of Nebraska, 1988). Isidore of Seville, De Natura Rerum, trans. by Calvin B. Kendall and Faith Wallis, Isidore of Seville, ‘On the Nature of Things’ (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). Isidore of Seville, De Origine Gothorum, ed. by Cristobal Rodríguez Alonso, Las historias de los godos, los vándalos y los suevos de Isidoro de Sevilla (León: Centro de Estudios e Investigación ‘San Isidoro’, 1975), pp. 168–321; ed. by Theodor Mommsen, Dedicatio ad Sisenandum, Chron. min. ii. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctorum Antiquissimorum (Berlin: Weidman, 1894). Isidore of Seville, Differentiae, trans. by Priscilla Throop, Isidore of Seville’s ‘Synonyms (Lamentations of a Sinful Soul)’ and ‘Differences’ (Charlotte, VT: Medieval MS, 2012). Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, trans. by Stephen A. Barney, W.J. Lewish, J.A Beach, and Oliver Berghof, The ‘Etymologies’ of Isidore of Seville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Isidore of Seville, Sententiae, ed. by Pierre Cazier, Isidorus Hispalensis Sententiae, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 111 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998); trans. by Thomas L. Knoebel, Isidore of Seville, ‘Sententiae’, Ancient Christian Writers 73 (New York: Newman Press, 2018). Isidore of Seville, Synonyma, ed. by Jacques Elfassi, Isidori Hispalensis episcopi ‘Synonyma’, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 111B (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009); trans. by Priscilla Throop, Isidore of Seville’s ‘Synonyms (Lamentations of a Sinful Soul)’ and ‘Differences’ (Charlotte, VT: Medieval MS, 2012). Julian of Toledo, De comprobatione, ed. by Jocelyn N. Hillgarth, De comprobatione Sextae Aetatis libri tres (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). Julian of Toledo, Elogium Ildephonsi, Patrologia Latina 96, cols 42–44. Julian of Toledo, Historia Wambae, trans. by Joaquín Martínez Pizarro, The Story of Wamba: Julian of Toledo’s ‘Historia Wambae regis’ (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005).

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Julian of Toledo, Liber Apologeticus De tribus capitulis, Patrologia Latina 96, cols 525–536. Julian of Toledo, Prognosticum futuri saeculi, trans. by Tommaso Stancati, Julian of Toledo: ‘Foreknowledge of the World to Come’, Ancient Christian Writers 63 (New York: Newman Press, 2010). Justinian, ‘Novel 146: Concerning the Hebrews (De Hebraeis)’, in Justinian’s Novels, trans. by Timothy Kearley, Annotated Justinian Code (College of Law George W. Hopper Law Library, 2014), http://www.uwyo.edu/lawlib/blume-justinian/ ajc-edition-2/novels/index.html Lactantius, Divinae institutiones, Patrologia Latina 6, cols 111–820B. Liber Iudiciorum, ed. by Karl Zeumer, Leges Visigothorum antiquiores, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Legum (Hanover and Leipzig: Hahn, 1902), pp. 33–456. Riese, Alexander (ed.), Anthologia Latina (Leipzig: Tuebner, 1906). Tertullian, Against Marcion (Adversus Marcionem), trans. by Peter Holmes, AntiNicene Fathers, vol. 3 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885). https:// www.newadvent.org/fathers/0312.htm Tertullian, De virginibus velandus, Patrologia Latina 2, cols 887–914. VSPE = Vitas Sanctorum Patrum Emeretensium, ed. by Antonio Maya Sánchez (CC SL 116) (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992).

Secondary Sources Arce, Javier, ‘The City of Mérida (Emerita) in the Vitas Patrum Emeritensium (VIth Century A.D.)’, in East and West: Modes of Communication: Proceedings of the First Plenary Conference at Merida, ed. by Evangelos Chrysos and Ian Wood (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 1–14. Badiou, Alain, ‘The Communist Hypothesis’, New Left Review, 49 (2008). Breeze, Andrew, ‘The Blessed Virgin and the Sunbeam through the Glass’, Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies, 1 (1988), 53–64. Brown, Peter, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000). Brown, Peter, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Castellanos, Santiago, Poder social, aristócracias y ‘hombre santo’ en la Hispania visigoda. La ‘Vita Aemiliani’ de Braulio de Zaragoza, Biblioteca de investigación 20 (Logroño: Universidad de La Rioja, 1998). Castellanos, Santiago, and Santiago Fernández Ardanaz, Hagiografia y sociedad en la Hispania visigoda. La ‘Vita Aemiliani’ y el actual territorio riojano (siglo VI), Biblioteca de temas riojanos 103 (Logroño: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 1999).

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Chase, Nathan, The ‘Homiliae Toletanae’ and the Theology of Lent and Easter (Leuvens: Peeters, 2020). Collins, Roger, ‘Literacy and the Laity’, in The Uses of Literacy in the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 109–133. Di Sciacca, Claudia, Finding the Right Words: Isidore’s ‘Synonyma’ in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). Ferreiro, Alberto, ‘The Bishops of Hispania and Pope Innocent I (401–47)’, Visigothic Symposia, 3 (2018), 19–35. Ferreiro, Alberto, ‘Epistolae Plenae’: The Correspondence of the Bishops of Hispania with the Bishops of Rome: Third through Seventh Centuries, The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2020). Fontaine, Jacques, ‘Conversion et culture chez les Wisigoths d’Espagne’, Settimane di Studio, 14 (1967), 87–147. Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Routledge, 2002). Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Routledge, 2005). Fox, Yaniv, and Erica Buchberger (eds), Inclusion and Exclusion in Mediterranean Christianities, 400–800, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 25 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019). García Moreno, Luis A., ‘La oposición a Suinthila: Iglesia, Monarquía y Nobleza en el Reino Visigodo’, Polis, 3 (1991), 13–24. Garvin, Joseph, The ‘Vitas Sanctorum Emeritensium’ (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1946). Hart, David Bentley, ‘What Lies beyond Capitalism? A Christian Exploration’, Plough Quarterly, 21 (2019). Hefele, Charles Joseph, A History of the Councils of the Church: From the Original Documents, Volume V: A.D. 626 to the Close of the Second Council of Nicaea, A.D. 787, trans. and ed. by William R. Clark (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1896). Hegel, G.W.F., Phenomenology of Mind, trans. by J.B. Baillie (Mineola: Dover, 2003). Hillgarth, J.N., ‘St. Julian of Toledo in the Middle Ages’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21, no. 1/2 (1958), 7–26. Kelly, Michael J., Isidore of Seville and the ‘Liber Iudiciorum’: The Struggle for the Past in the Visigothic Kingdom, The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World 80 (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2021). Kelly, Michael J., ‘Visigothic Catholicism as Secular Ideology: Toward A De-Othering, or ‘Saming’, of Jews in Visigothic Spain’, in Popular Religions in Late Antiquity, ed. by Sabine Panzram and Stefan Heidemann (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, in press).

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Kéry, Lotte, Canonical Collections of the Early Middle Ages (ca. 400–1140): A Bibliographical Guide to the Manuscripts and Literature (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999). King, P.D., Law and Society in the Visigothic Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Kolozova, Katerina, Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Kulikowski, Michael, ‘An English Abridgement of the Hispana of Autun at Antwerp’, in Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung (1997), 198–208. Lomas Salmonte, Javier, ‘Análisis y funcionalidad de la Vita Aemiliani (BHL 100)’, Studia Historica. Historia Antigua, 16 (1998), 247–266. Martínez Jiménez, Javier, ‘Engineering, Aqueducts, and the Rupture of Knowledge Transmission’, Visigothic Symposia, 3 (2018), 36–54. Meillassoux, Quentin, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. by Ray Brassier (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008). Pabst, Stefan, Das theologische Profil des Julian von Toledo: Das Leben und Wirken eine westgotischen Bischofs des siebten Jahrhunderts (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2021). Rohmann, Dirk, ‘Reading Sin: Textual and Spatial Exclusion in Scholarly Communities in Late Antiquity’, in Inclusion and Exclusion in Mediterranean Christianities, 400–800, ed. by Yaniv Fox and Erica Buchberger, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 25 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), pp. 47–68. Stocking, Rachel, Bishops, Councils, and Consensus in the Visigothic Kingdom, 589–633 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Stocking, Rachel, ‘Early Medieval Christian Identity and Anti-Judaism: The Case of the Visigothic Kingdom’, Religious Compass, 2, no. 4 (2008), 642–658. Stork, Nancy P., ‘A Spanish Bishop Remembers the Future: Oral Traditions and Purgatory in Julian of Toledo’, Oral Tradition, 23, no. 1 (2008), 46–48. Velázquez, Isabel, ‘Pro patriae gentisque Gothorum statu (4th Council of Toledo, Canon 75, A. 633)’, in Regna and Gentes: The Relationship between Late Antique and Early Medieval Peoples and Kingdoms in the Transformation of the Roman World, ed. by Hans-Werner Goetz, Jörg Jarnut, and Walter Pohl (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 161–217. Wilson VanVeller, Courtney, ‘John Chrysostom and the Troubling Jewishness of Paul’, in Revisioning John Chrysostom: New Approaches, New Perspectives, ed. by Chris L. De Wet and Wendy Mayer, Critical Approaches to Early Christianity 1 (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 32–57. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, On Certainty, trans. by Denis Paul G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). Žižek, Slavoj, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008).

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About the Author Michael J. Kelly lectures history, critical theory, and the philosophy of history at Binghamton University (State University of New York) and directs Networks & Neighbours and Gracchi Books. He is preparing a monograph on the concept of ‘human nature’ in the Early Middle Ages, supported by a Fulbright Fellowship and the RomanIslam Center, University of Hamburg.

3.

Ritual Communities and Social Cohesion in Merovingian Gaul1 Alexander O’Hara

Abstract This chapter traces the development of elite sponsorship of monastic communities in Merovingian Gaul with a particular focus on the seventh century. This period witnessed a revolution in social, religious, and political praxis whereby monastic culture became entangled with the expression and exercise of secular authority (and which would have long-lasting consequences for the Carolingian world and beyond). While this phenomenon has largely been approached from political and socioeconomic perspectives, this contribution explores the underlying religious foundations and dynamics of this movement and how this complimented broader sociological developments. It applies the work of the cultural anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse on ritual and social cohesion to explain some of the reasons why this transformation in ritual practice by the Frankish elites took place. Keywords: Merovingian Gaul, Columbanus, monasticism, ritual, seventh century, Harvey Whitehouse

Sometime towards the end of the sixth century a wandering holy man and his small band of companions came to the court of a Frankish king. The holy man was going to continue on his journey, but the king begged him to stay – everything would be provided for if he remained within the bounds of the kingdom. At length, the holy man was persuaded by the 1 The research for this study was supported by the Austrian Science Fund Project P25175: ‘The Columbanian Network: Elite Identities and Christian Communities in Europe (550–750)’. I would like to thank Walter Pohl, Andreas Fischer, Hagar Barak, and Merle Eisenberg for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Castro, D. and Ruchesi, F. (ed.), Leadership, Social Cohesion, and Identity in Late Antique Spain and Gaul (500–700). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463725958_ch03

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king’s arguments – he would satisfy his desire to follow Christ by finding an ascetic retreat in the wilderness, while his presence would contribute to the salvation of the king and his people.2 Whatever the truth of this story about the encounter between the Irish peregrinus Columbanus and King Sigibert I (d. 575) that led to the establishment of Annegray,3 Columbanus’s first monastic foundation on the Continent, its author, Jonas of Bobbio, used it to illustrate the reciprocal relationship that, by the mid-seventh century, had now become commonplace between monastic founders and the Frankish elite. Annegray was the first in a series of monastic foundations that continued well into the seventh century that would transform the inter-relationship between monastic groups and secular authorities in the early Middle Ages.4 Within a century of Columbanus’s death in 615, more than a hundred new monasteries had been founded in the Merovingian kingdom.5 The majority of these new foundations were situated in the northern and eastern parts of the kingdom, areas largely devoid of such religious institutions prior to this period, but now the heartlands of the great estates of the Frankish kings and their burgeoning warrior aristocracy.6 The foundation for the proprietary wealth of the medieval Church was largely established during this period as an unprecedented ritual economy developed whereby world view, economy, power, and human agency interlinked to effect social change. One consequence of this was the transfer of vast amounts of land and resources into the hands of religious institutions.7 Underpinning this was a radical reimagining of the Christian economics of salvation and changing beliefs in individual and social responsibility.8 2 Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Columbani, I, 6, p. 163. All Latin references are to the critical edition by Krusch, Ionae Vitae Sanctorum. For English translations and commentary, see O’Hara and Wood, Jonas of Bobbio. 3 Sigibert I had been assassinated in 575 and Columbanus did not arrive in Gaul until 590/591, so Columbanus’s royal patron is more likely to have been either Guntram or his successor, Childebert II. See Wood, ‘Jonas, the Merovingians’. 4 On Annegray and Columbanus’s other monastic foundations, see O’Hara, ‘Columbanus ad Locum’. 5 Atsma, ‘Les monastères urbains’; Prinz, ‘Columbanus, the Frankish Nobility’. 6 The key studies are Prinz, Frühes Mönchtum; Fox, Power and Religion. 7 Wood, The Proprietary Church; Wood, ‘Entrusting Western Europe to the Church’; Hodges, ‘Shrine Franchises’; Lebecq, ‘The Role of the Monasteries’. 8 Hillgarth, ‘Eschatological and Political Concepts’; Brown, ‘The Decline’; Brown, Ransom of the Soul; Kreiner, ‘Autopsies and Philosophies’; Kreiner, The Social Life of Hagiography. For a thoughtful survey of how concepts of eternity and salvation influenced historical processes in the Middle Ages, see Eire, A Very Brief History, esp. ch. 3, ‘Eternity Overflowing’.

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During the course of the sixth century Merovingian kings, influenced by the social teachings of their episcopal advisors, became more conscious of their responsibility as Christian rulers of their community.9 Kings and queens began to endow and support religious institutions that bolstered their authority as Christian monarchs while ensuring (they hoped) the prosperity of their kingdoms. At this stage these were relatively infrequent royal initiatives, divorced from the involvement of the Frankish elites.10 The leadership of Christian praxis and cult sites remained firmly under the control of the Gallic episcopate, largely drawn from members of the Gallo-Roman senatorial aristocracy, and monasteries remained peripheral to Frankish society and the exercise of power.11 Following the turbulence of the civil war period when members of the Merovingian dynasty violently competed amongst themselves for supremacy, a period of consolidation and expansion ensued that saw the gradual emergence of the Neustrian branch of the dynasty under Chlothar II (d. 629) and his successors as the rulers of a united kingdom from 613. This corresponded with an acceleration and intensification in the politics of piety which had developed in the course of the sixth century, but which witnessed the large-scale participation of new Frankish elites and the transformation of monastic foundation and its role in Frankish society. This was nothing less than a revolution in social, religious, and political praxis whereby monastic culture became entangled with the expression and exercise of secular authority (and which would have long-lasting consequences for the Carolingian world and beyond). While this phenomenon has largely been approached from political and socio-economic perspectives, much remains to be said about the underlying religious foundations and dynamics of this movement and how this compliments broader sociological developments.12 In this case: Why did Frankish kings and their warrior aristocracy invest vast amounts of their land and resources in the construction of monasteries throughout their kingdom and in liturgical production and specialization? What was the particular appeal of this new model of monastic foundation and why was it so successful? How did these specialized ritual communities shape and 9 Moore, A Sacred Kingdom; Hen, ‘The Church in Sixth-Century Gaul’, with further references. I am grateful to Professor Hen for sharing this article with me prior to publication. 10 For the background, see Diem, ‘Who Is Allowed to Pray for the King?’, esp. pp. 76–78. 11 On the Gallic episcopate: Hen, ‘The Church in Sixth-Century Gaul’; Patzold, ‘Zur Sozialstruktur des Episkopats’; Heinzelmann, Bischofsherrschaft in Gallien; Moore, A Sacred Kingdom esp. pp. 122–160. 12 See, for example, Wickham, Framing; Hummer, Politics and Power; Costambeys, Power and Patronage; Fox, Power and Religion.

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contribute to social cohesion in the Merovingian kingdom? In trying to look deeper into the causes for these transformations, we first need to sketch the development of ascetic discourse in Gaul from the fifth century up to the time of Columbanus’s arrival at the end of the sixth century. Then, we can more fully consider some of the dynamics of this new model of monastic foundation that Columbanus and his Frankish successors spearheaded, and how this was part of a distinct ritual economy that developed around the turn of the seventh century.

Drawing the Line: The Development of Ascetic Discourse in Merovingian Gaul The development of monastic culture(s) in Gaul between the sixth and eighth centuries, which set the blueprint for the subsequent model of medieval monasticism in Western Europe, can best be understood in terms of a divergence from Augustine’s understanding of the monastery and its relationship to society.13 For Augustine, there was no neat binary division between secular society and monasticism, between the world of the City and the Desert. Place was irrelevant for Augustine – what mattered was the working of grace in the lives of individual Christians. The harmony of monastic life in community could serve as a pre-figuration of the Heavenly City, but it could not serve as a model for society because any social group was inherently a mix of the holy and the damned. However, Augustine’s eschatological and human perspective was sidelined for the simpler binary scheme of two ideal types, the City and the Desert, which began to fuse. ‘Secular society came to be looked at from the vantage point of the ascetic,’ as Robert Markus noted in his masterful account of this process.14 The ‘ascetic turn’ of the fifth and sixth centuries was a Gallic development spearheaded by the monastic pioneer John Cassian (d. 435).15 While the pursuit of perfection in this life was also an elusive goal for Cassian, the active cultivation of virtue and the rooting out of vice could be pursued within the controlled environment of the monastery. Place mattered for Cassian. The individual Christian could take steps towards salvation by 13 Excellent introductions to this subject are Dey, ‘Building Worlds Apart’; Dey and Fentress, Western Monasticism. 14 Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, p. 177. Much of the following is indebted to Markus’s thinking on this subject. 15 On Cassian’s influence, see Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, pp. 181–197; Leyser, Authority and Asceticism, pp. 33–61; Stewart, Cassian the Monk.

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following a spiritual programme with the aim of inner transformation – however tenuous that process may be – in order to teach spiritual truth to others. Cassian’s monasticism was not far removed from the City and was to be a vehicle for disseminating Christian truth to the wider community. Nevertheless, the division between the monastery and the world was one that Cassian wished to maintain. The monastery was a training ground for spiritual development that would in turn serve as a springboard for transforming the saeculum. Cassian’s influence on the development of Gallic monasticism was seminal. The contrast between Augustine’s views on monasticism where the monk was to be in the world and where place was immaterial and Cassian’s can most fully be seen in Eucherius of Lyon’s De Laude Heremi, written in the 420s, to his confrère on Lérins, Hilary, later bishop of Arles (d. 449). Both men belonged to the early community of the monastery founded on the island by Honoratus in around 410. Eucherius’s language is imbued with the language of Exodus, of flight from Egyptian captivity and of settling in a holy land. Lérins is a place set apart, a holy island, and its community are the new Israelites: ‘You are now the true Israel who gazes upon God in his heart, who has just been freed from the dark Egypt of this world’, Eucherius told Hilary, who had just returned to the community.16 This rhetoric is continued in Hilary’s later Life of his kinsman, the founder of Lérins, and predecessor as bishop of Arles, Honoratus, written sometime after 429 when he had succeeded his kinsman to the bishopric of Arles. In his description of Honoratus’s establishment of a coenobitic community on the island, the contrast between the haven of monastic solitude and the world outside is again made explicit. Lérins is ‘the camp of God’ (Gen. 32.1–3), miracles occurred there that mirrored those of the Israelites in the Desert, while those who came to the island ‘rejoiced in rest after a long and heavy slavery under the Pharaohs’.17 Cassian dedicated his second set of Conferences to Honoratus and Eucherius, and the imprint of Cassian’s thought is not difficult to detect in the spiritual self-congratulation of the Lérinese monastic authors.18 While the Lérinese elite ignored Cassian’s injunction to his monks not to have anything to do with bishops, they became enthusiastic proponents of his social thinking that the monk’s monastic discipline and scriptural 16 Eucherius of Lyon, ‘De Laude Heremi’, 44, pp. 193–194. I follow the critical edition by Wotke, Sancti Eucherii Lugdunensis. 17 Hilary of Arles, Vita Honorati, 16, 17. I follow the critical edition by Cavallin, Vitae Sanctorum Honorati et Hilarii. 18 On which, see Leyser, ‘This Sainted Isle’.

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understanding served as the basis for his ability to teach others.19 For the Gallo-Roman aristocrats of Lérins, this meant the assumption of episcopal office and a prominent leadership role in the city communities of fifth- and sixth-century Gaul. Ascetic discourse – what had been confined to a small monastic elite – began to enter the mainstream of social and political discourse through the monopolization of episcopal office by this coterie. Honoratus, Hilary, and Eucherius all became bishops as did many other Lérinese monks who had served their monastic apprenticeship, notably Caesarius, who followed his illustrious predecessors as bishop of Arles from 503 to 543.20 Sidonius Apollinaris, a member of the Gallo-Roman nobility and urban prefect of Rome who became a bishop later in life, although he had not been a monk of Lérins, could nevertheless write of the ‘Senate of Lérinese ascetics’ who were his colleagues as Gallic bishops.21 Not unlike an old boys’ club, this network of Gallo-Roman ascetic bishops could serve to maintain class and ethnic boundaries as well as access to the sacred. As Robert Markus commented: Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries is the area where the continuity of a dominant class of Late Roman society can be traced through the comparatively small number of families, often related among themselves, with a shared culture and background, who had a near monopoly of episcopal office. Among them asceticism came to blend with, even to give additional support to, the traditional ideology and prestige of the Gallo-Roman elite class.22

Martin Heinzelmann noted that of the 179 bishops he identified from his prosopographical research into the Gallic episcopacy, only 8 of these did not have a senatorial lineage.23 The development of this ascetic culture in southern Gaul took place within the backdrop of the imposition of a new barbarian ruling elite in Gaul. As the Franks rose to pre-eminence as the dominant social group in Gaul in the sixth century, the Gallo-Roman bishops accommodated themselves to the new rulers while the Franks were equally keen to work through 19 Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, p. 188. 20 For the background, see Prinz, Frühes Mönchtum 47–87; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, 69–205; Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms, pp. 22–23. 21 Sidonius Apollinaris, Epistula, IX.3.4 (cited in Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, p. 200). 22 Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, pp. 200–201; also Hen, ‘The Church in Sixth-Century Gaul’. 23 Heinzelmann, ‘L’aristocratie et les évêchés’.

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this influential network of civic administrators. Bishops became in effect civil servants, appointed by and closely allied to the Merovingian ruling dynasty and embroiled in the factional politics of the Frankish kingdoms. They claimed the pioneers of Gallic monasticism, such as Saint Martin of Tours (d. 397), for themselves and maintained control of their cult sites. They convened councils amongst themselves to regulate the Church in Gaul and brooked no competitors to their spiritual authority.

An Unlikely Alliance: Columbanus and the Franks It is no surprise that Gregory of Tours mentions nothing about Columbanus or his arrival in Gaul in the early 590s at the end of his Ten Books of Histories even though he was closely linked with the Austrasian court where Columbanus had been welcomed. The Bischofsherrschaft to which Gregory belonged would prove staunch opponents of the maverick Irish monk and the new ascetic impulse that his arrival in Gaul spearheaded. Columbanus’s somewhat unlikely appeal was his particular brand of Irish fundamentalist asceticism: ‘It was their asceticism which made the Irish so popular. If it came to a choice between a comfortable, traditional, Frankish cleric and a wild ascetic “mad for God”, the choice fell upon the madman.’24 Columbanus’s peregrinatio or ascetic exile to continental Europe marks a watershed in the development of the Western monastic tradition and the integration of monastic norms and values into social and political elite culture. While the impact of Columbanus as a catalyst is increasingly debated and re-assessed by new scholarship in this field, the underlying reasons and dynamics for his remarkable success (and failure) with the Frankish elite are less well understood.25 Given his combative personality and the harsh, penal nature of his monastic practices, what exactly was his appeal for the Franks and what drove the remarkable expansion in monastic foundations in the decades after his death? The principal achievement of Columbanus (and his primary attraction for the Frankish elite) was in providing a model of monastic foundation that bypassed bishops and opened up monastic foundation to lay elites. 24 Fouracre and Gerberding, Late Merovingian France, p. 144. 25 See the various contributions in O’Hara, ed., Columbanus and the Peoples of Post-Roman Europe; Flechner and Meeder, eds, The Irish in Early Medieval Europe, and the volumes in preparation following the fourteenth centenary conferences on Columbanus held in Bangor, Luxeuil, and Bobbio in 2015.

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Because Columbanus sidestepped the jurisdictional authority of the local bishop – through appealing directly to royal patronage, establishing his monasteries on diocesan boundaries, having his altar blessed by an Irish bishop, claims to moral superiority, and through recourse to the rhetoric of ascetic exile – his monasteries developed outside the control of the Gallic bishops.26 This unsurprisingly led to conflict, as did issues over lay access to the inner precincts of monastic space, which were forbidden to the laity.27 While Columbanus’s royal patron Theuderic II (d. 613) failed to realize the benefits of having a ritually pure monastic space in his kingdom, and ultimately banished Columbanus for his intransigence in 610 over refusing to bless his illegitimate children and for his unwillingness to compromise with local customs, the new political regime that took power from 613 and the unification of the Merovingian kingdoms under Chlothar II saw the possibilities of capitalizing on this monastic model. What we find from the second quarter of the seventh century is that the new Neustrian elites have accepted these boundaries by founding their own communities inspired and modelled on Columbanus’s principal foundation of Luxeuil and ratified their special status by granting charters of immunity. Moreover, monastic norms and thinking appear to have more deeply penetrated the political arena and the identity formation of the Frankish elites themselves.28 Monastic foundation on the model pioneered by Columbanus served in part to bolster the authority of the Merovingian dynasty and of the new Frankish aristocracy. The success of this foundation model was only possible in the light of the social changes that were transforming Frankish society around the turn of the seventh century. Religion, particularly ascetic and monastic forms, filled the vacuum left by the disappearance of ancient civic and secular normative codes following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. Elite sponsorship of religious foundations and royal identification with Old Testament models of kingship served to bolster royal authority and the formation of new aristocratic elites.29 Monastic foundation and sponsorship of religious praxis became an elite ritual activity that served to bind together the ruling class while simultaneously enforcing their authority in the countryside and in grassroots 26 On Columbanus’s attitudes towards the Gallic episcopate, see his Epistulae 1–4. I follow the critical edition by Walker, ed., Sancti Columbani Opera. An excellent study on which is Leso, ‘Columbanus in Europe’; also Stancliffe, ‘Columbanus and the Gallic Bishops’. 27 On Insular concepts of monastic boundaries and the hierarchization of sacred space, see especially Jenkins, Holy, Holier, Holiest. 28 See Rosenwein, Negotiating Space; Rosenwein, Emotional Communities; Hen, Roman Barbarians. 29 Hen, ‘The Uses of the Bible’; Hen, ‘Conversion and Masculinity’; Moore, A Sacred Kingdom.

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communities. The fact that many of these new monastic foundations were situated on the fringes of the Frankish kingdom also allowed the Merovingian kings to incorporate more fully these outlying regions within their political sphere.30 Emerging concepts of royal divine ministry, a pastoral concern for the salvation of souls, the promotion of a more rural form of monasticism, together with a strong eschatological awareness, did not at the same time mean that the elites were not averse from taking advantage of the very practical and material benefits that these new forms provided. A ‘coexistence of an apocalyptic world view and continuing material politics’ were not necessarily incompatible, as Guy Halsall has observed.31 The remarkable success of Columbanus’s model of monastic foundation was only possible in the light of the social and cultural changes that were transforming Frankish society at this time. This success was largely accidental. The fact that a comparable explosion in monastic foundation did not take place in Lombard Italy indicates that the structural and religious conditions in the Lombard kingdom were different from those in Gaul, in particular the relationship between the monarch and the Lombard aristocracy. The elites of the Lombard kingdom, at least from the time of the Arian king Rothari (r. 636–652), appear to have favoured barbarian modes of identification over that of Christian concepts of kingship, perhaps in deliberate contrast to imperial and Roman forms of identification which had been more prominent during the reign of Agilulf (d. 616) and his son Adaloald (r. 616–626).32 Bobbio, Columbanus’s final monastic foundation and burial place which he founded in 613 on fiscal land, remained somewhat of an anomaly in the Lombard kingdom.33 As an exile and outsider who relied directly on the patronage of kings, Columbanus successfully articulated his difference and doggedly strove to maintain customs which were out of step with those in his host societies. In contrast to continental tradition, his monasteries were outside the control of bishops, his monks had a different cut of tonsure, they celebrated the feast of Easter at different times because he followed another system of time reckoning, there was not a strong cult of relics but instead each monk wore a chrismal around his neck containing the Eucharist, lay access to the inner monastic space was strictly prohibited, monks had to frequently confess their sins and 30 See Esders, ‘Nationes quam plures conquiri’, for further references. I am grateful to Professor Esders for sharing this article prior to publication. 31 Halsall, ‘Changing Minds around 600’. On the changing social dynamics of Merovingian society, also see Halsall, ‘Social Identities’. 32 See Borri, ‘Romans Growing Beards’; Pohl, ‘Deliberate Ambiguity’. 33 Richter, Bobbio in the Early Middle Ages; Gasparri, ‘Columbanus, Bobbio, and the Lombards’.

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follow a novel system of penance, while the ascetic and ritual stance of life in the community was severe and demanding with eight offices a day and as little as two hours of sleep a night and a plethora of corporal punishments for transgressing the normative codes.34 Columbanus’s two Rules, the Regula monachorum and the Regula coenobialis, do not make for easy reading. And yet, these strategies of distinction introduced by Columbanus that were meant to mark off the monastic community as a container of sacred space inadvertently complimented broader social developments that were taking place in Merovingian Gaul. Monastic strategies of boundary marking complemented trends in the demarcation of social status by secular elites who increasingly sought to distinguish themselves from their neighbours. What for Columbanus had simply been a strategy necessitated by his desire for ascetic exile and to remain faithful to the monastic formation he had received in Ireland became, for the Frankish elites, a means of asserting social boundaries.35 The use of boundaries to assert elite status becomes increasingly apparent in burial and settlement patterns amongst the Franks prior to, and during the time of, Columbanus’s arrival.36 A more sharply differentiated social hierarchy in the countryside becomes apparent which corresponded with the shift in power from the civitates to the countryside in the seventh century. The economic structure of Irish monasticism may also have appealed to the Frankish elite. Irish monasteries were rural and seem to have been run on a sort of manorial system which was the system that began to develop in the royal heartlands of Neustria in the seventh century. The Irish had expertise in agricultural exploitation – Jonas of Bobbio noted how Columbanus and as many as 60 of his monks worked together in the fields around their monastery in Burgundy.37 Such mass labour indicates large-scale rural production which would have appealed to new elites whose control and exploitation of land was critical to their power. As Matthew Innes has noted, The rise of local landed elites did not eclipse the position of bishops. But the relatively cohesive and coherent elite that found its spokesman in Gregory of Tours, and was able to dominate Gaul south of the Loire in 34 On Columbanus’s monasticism, see Stevenson, ‘The Monastic Rules of Columbanus’; Stancliffe, ‘Columbanus’s Monasticism’. 35 Columbanus’s adherence to Irish custom is clearly evident in his letters and in his Regula coenobialis. On Columbanus’s dual sense of self-identification as an Irish peregrinus, see O’Hara, ‘Patria, peregrinatio, and paenitentia’. 36 Effros, Caring for Body and Soul; Halsall, Cemeteries and Society; Halsall, Settlement, pp. 262–270; Loveluck, ‘The Dynamics of Elite Lifestyles’. 37 Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Columbani, I, 12, 13, 17, pp. 172, 173, 183.

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the sixth century, dissolved into a series of regional aristocracies in the changed political and social context of the seventh century.38

The rise of new elites also led to social differentiation in the northern and eastern parts of Gaul, precisely those regions where the greatest density of Columbanian monasteries were established. In burials, elite status was progressively articulated through the erection of special structures over a grave – first wooden huts, followed by barrows, burial within a church close to the altar, and finally the aristocratic family mausoleum usually within a monastery founded by or closely associated with the family.39 The patronage of the Merovingian dynasty undoubtedly made Columbanus’s monasticism fashionable and attractive for these new Frankish elites, some of whom sent their sons to be educated at Luxeuil.40 This may have been due not only to Columbanus’s radical and charismatic form of asceticism, but to his successful articulation of difference. For the Franks, Columbanus’s cultural capital lay in his difference. As Peter Brown has emphasized, during the sixth century there arose a demand from the laity for intercessors who were clearly ‘other’ to the average Christian: In the sixth and early seventh centuries, the pressure of religious giving accounted for the most striking feature of the age. As givers, the laity came to insist that the clergy should be clearly other to themselves. If they were not, gifts to the churches would not work for the relief of the sins of the givers.41

This othering of the clergy turned them into a sacral class and their effectiveness as intercessors came to increasingly depend upon their ‘otherness’. This complements shifting concepts of gift-giving as the laity sought to exchange temporal gifts of money and land in return for spiritual ones – to store up ‘treasure in heaven’ – and to atone for their sins.42 The strong emphasis on sin 38 Innes, Introduction, p. 294 (an excellent and often overlooked survey of this period). 39 Effros, Caring for Body and Soul; Halsall, Cemeteries and Society; see also Paxton, Christianizing Death. 40 Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Columbani, I, 10, pp. 169–170: ‘Ibi nobilium liberi undique concurrere nitebantur, ut, exspreta faleramenta saeculi et prasentium pompam facultatum temnentes, aeterna praemia caperent’ (‘The children of nobles everywhere strove to come here so that, by despising the trappings of the world and by scorning the pomp of present wealth, they might seize eternal rewards’) (trans. by O’Hara and Wood, Jonas of Bobbio). 41 Brown, Through the Eye, p. 517. 42 Angenendt, ‘Donationes pro anima’; Head, ‘The Early Medieval Transformation of Piety’; Brown, Ransom of the Soul, esp. pp. 181–211.

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and the necessity for its atonement through a system of repeatable penance is clearly evident in Columbanus’s promotion of a penitential system which developed in British and Irish monastic circles in the sixth century.43 This penitential system which Columbanus advocated not only for his monks but for the laity as well, ‘mirrored the secular world of family and feud, or favours to be reciprocated and wrongs avenged’.44 The laity’s focus came to increasingly rest on monks as liturgical specialists and the interest in and patronage of the liturgy, especially from the reign of Dagobert I (r. 629–639), is linked to their investment in new forms of piety as a means to atone for their sins and to ensure the well-being of the realm.45 Some extent to which the Frankish nobility appropriated the norms and values of Columbanus and his followers can be seen from the desire of Frankish nobles-turned-monks to undertake ascetic exile to Ireland – this was Columbanus’s peregrinatio in reverse. Jonas mentions the case of the Luxeuil monk named Autiernus who wanted to go to Ireland as an ascetic exile. Columbanus went into the forest with him to try to discern if this was God’s will.46 A similar compulsion seized the Austrasian aristocrat Wandregisel who, after abandoning his aristocratic life at court, travelled to Bobbio –having been guided there by an angel as had Columbanus before him – where he too determined to go to Ireland on peregrinatio.47 He only seems to have gotten as far as the Seine estuary where he founded the monastery of Fontanella (later named after him: Saint-Wandrille). His Merovingian Life also reports that one night, Wandregisel, prior to establishing his monastery and at the very start of his eremitic life, was beset by a lurid dream. To atone for a nocturnal emission Wandregisel waded into the icy cold stream nearby his cell where he recited the entire Psalter with his arms outstretched.48 Wandregisel’s practice of the ritual of crosfigell, a practice common to Irish monks who prayed the Psalms with arms outstretched as a form of penance,49 shows the extent to which Insular monastic norms had been adopted by some members of the Frankish elite. Whether in the case of Autiernus, Wandregisel, or that of the Frankish 43 Columbanus, Paenitentiale, pp. 168–180. All references are to the edition by Walker, ed., Sancti Columbani Opera. On which, see Charles-Edwards, ‘The Penitential of Columbanus’. 44 Innes, Introduction, p. 296. 45 Hen, ‘The Church in Sixth-Century Gaul’; Hen, Royal Patronage, pp. 33–42; Hen, Roman Barbarians. 46 Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Columbani, I, 11, pp. 170–171. 47 Vita Wandregisili, 9, p. 18. 48 Vita Wandregisili, 8, p. 17. 49 Ryan, Irish Monasticism, p. 400.

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aristocrat-monk Barontus, whose account of the vision before he died shows the influence of the new system of penance in social and religious practice,50 hybrid practices can be discerned that grew out of the new ascetic impulse initiated by Columbanus and his monks.

The Ritual Economy of the Seventh Century The surviving monastic rules written by Columbanus and his successors vividly illustrate the severe ascetic and punitive nature of this monastic tradition, albeit a contested one.51 Columbanian communities strove to be total institutions dominated by ritual choreography, liturgical expertise, and thought control (in the form of confession). When the renegade Luxeuil monk Agrestius rebelled and instigated the Synod of Mâcon in 626 one of his principal complaints was against the ritual obscuranticism and liturgical heterodoxy of Columbanian practice.52 Underlying Columbanus’s fierce asceticism which was inspired by the example of the Desert Fathers was a sense of urgency, more fully seen in the contemporary writings of Gregory the Great, that the Last Days were imminent.53 From Milan Columbanus had written in no uncertain terms to Pope Boniface IV in 613: Watch, dear Pope, it is time to arise from sleep, the Lord approaches, and already we stand almost at the end [et prope iam in fine consistimus] in the midst of perilous times. See, the nations are troubled, the kingdoms are moved; therefore soon shall the Most High utter His voice, and the earth shall be shaken.54

Columbanus’s intimations that the end was near were later echoed in the epitaph carved on the tomb of Mellebaudus of Poitiers towards the end of the seventh century: ‘[A]ll things become every day worse and worse, for the 50 Visio Baronti. 51 Diem, ‘Columbanian Monastic Rules’. 52 Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Columbani, II, 9, pp. 249–250. On the Agrestius affair, see O’Hara, Jonas of Bobbio and the Legacy of Columbanus, pp. 68–86; Dumézil, ‘L’Affaire Agrestius de Luxeuil’; Fox, Power and Religion, pp. 92–97. 53 Columbanus, Ep. 5.7, 5.15, Instructio 10.1, Carmen de mundi transitu, 42, 54, pp. 100–102, 182–184. All these references are to the critical edition by Walker, ed., Sancti Columbani Opera; on Gregory’s apocalyptic views, see Markus, Gregory the Great and His World, pp. 51–67. On the context, see Palmer, The Apocalypse, pp. 55–87. 54 Columbanus, Ep. 5.7, p. 43.

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end is drawing near.’55 Seen from this perspective, the sacred space of the monastery became the purgative arena where souls could best prepare for the imminent afterlife. By collectively pursuing a regime of extreme mortification – what Columbanus called the ‘training of all trainings’ (‘disciplina disciplinarum’)56 – matched with an exacting liturgical timetable, these new monastic communities became both waiting rooms for the afterlife and effective hubs of intercessory prayer for society at large. But these rituals (and establishing monasteries was a group ritual activity) also served at the same time to bolster the social order – in this case the authority and legitimacy of the Merovingian kings and the elite. Most of the lands that were given to establish these communities belonged to the royal fisc and were given as gifts by the king to favoured courtiers. It was firstly a royal, not an aristocratic initiative. The recent work of the cultural anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse on ritual and social cohesion can help to explain some of the reasons why this transformation in ritual practice by the Frankish elites took place.57 Rituals inspire trust and co-operation by signalling commitment to the group and often involve heavy costs in terms of resources (costly signalling or what he terms CREDs, ‘credibility-enhancing displays’), which funding, building, and running a monastery certainly entailed. These rituals serve to rejuvenate commitment to collective goals and to ensure compliance to the will of the group and deference to authority.58 Whitehouse distinguishes between two forms of social cohesion that are reliant on different kinds of collective ritual packages. The first kind of cohesion – what he calls ‘identity fusion’ – takes place when a social identity becomes an essential component of one’s personal self-concept. This stems from what Whitehouse terms the imagistic ritual mode which comprises causally opaque conventional actions (i.e. actions that don’t have an obvious objective or end goal) combined with high levels of dysphoric arousal (i.e. pain). This produces very strong social cohesion, but this usually occurs only in smaller groups like bands of warriors or hunters who share difficult, intimate, and often painful experiences. He argues that ‘rites of terror’ produce very strong social cohesion: ‘the more horrible the experiences shared the stronger the resulting fusion of identities’.59 From this point of view, the severe ascetic practices and penal nature of Columbanus’s 55 Cited in Palmer, The Apocalypse, p. 106. 56 Columbanus, Instructio 4.1, p. 78. 57 Whitehouse and Lanman, ‘The Ties That Bind Us’; Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity; Whitehouse, ‘Modes of Religiosity’. 58 Whitehouse and Lanman, ‘The Ties That Bind Us’, pp. 674–675. 59 Whitehouse, ‘Human Rites’.

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monasticism could have served to bind the actors together and to think and act as a group. While this may have been partly the case, the dissent and conflict that appears to have divided the early and subsequent communities does not indicate a strong sense of cohesive action.60 There were deep divisions with the communities at an early stage, as becomes clear from reading Columbanus’s letters. Certainly, Agrestius’s criticisms were in part directed against the causal opacity of many Columbanian rituals. What was the point in blessing spoons or seeking a blessing every time a monk entered or left a building? Why all the extra prayers and collects?61 Columbanus’s communities which comprised many different ethnic groups may have been too large to produce identity fusion generally found in the smaller scale groups that Whitehouse and his colleagues have studied. The second form of social cohesion – ‘group identification’ – seems more applicable to our case. This was a less powerful form of cohesion whereby individuals feel certain shared features with other group members, but which are not essential to their self-identification. This stems from the doctrinal mode of ritual practice – frequently repeated causally opaque conventional actions with low levels of dysphoric arousal but heavily emphasizing credibility-enhancing displays (CREDs) for beliefs, ideologies, and values. Whitehouse argues that different kinds of collective rituals produce different kinds of group cohesion and that these two ritual packages evolve to support particular resource-acquisition strategies depending on the circumstances.62 In the case of the doctrinal mode – where an increase in the frequency of collective rituals typically precedes and accompanies processes of state formation – this leads to routinization, regular participation in collective rituals, and the ability of these rituals to produce and enhance identification with the group – a way of codifying and transmitting creeds that lead to identification with large, centralized, hierarchical traditions.63 This seems more applicable to our case whereby the collapse of previous normative codes in the West with the fall of the Roman Empire prompted new elites to look to Christianity to bolster their authority and legitimacy to rule over their subjects. It was also a way for the Merovingian kings to bind their far-flung landed aristocracy closer to them, especially following the unification of the Merovingian kingdoms in 613. The foundation model of rural monasticism sponsored by lay elites that Columbanus championed in Gaul provided the 60 Columbanus, Ep. 4, pp. 26–36. 61 Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Columbani, II, 9, pp. 249–250. 62 Whitehouse and Lanman, ‘The Ties That Bind Us’, pp. 681–682. 63 Whitehouse and Lanman, ‘The Ties That Bind Us’, p. 680.

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Frankish elites with a ritual activity and credibility-enhancing displays (CREDs) that led to group identification with other members of the ruling class. These elite monuments had both a visual impact on the landscape and served to bolster Frankish authority and consensus in rural and fringe areas. The doctrinal mode of ritual activity activates coalitional thinking and group identification. The building of these monasteries ultimately signalled commitment to the Frankish monarchy and the moral authority of the elites to rule. That is why aristocratic identity becomes ever more pronounced in the hagiography of this period—the so-called self-sanctification of the aristocracy (Adelsheiligkeit).64 The monastery becomes in one sense the totem (a collective symbol that represents both God and society) for the Merovingian Kingdom of the seventh century. Monastic sponsorship and the patronage of religious life by the elites served to create a new moral consciousness that in turn came to influence the whole of society. The implantation of a monastic culture into Tibet during the seventh century by foreign Buddhist masters and the close alliance that developed between these groups and the Tibetan imperial regime provides an interesting comparative case study to what was emerging in the West around the same time.65 It is worth noting that in both cases these developments followed instances of epidemic and plague.66 As Matthew T. Kapstein explains with regard to Tibet: Following the breakup of the old Tibetan empire, those vying for authority sought to recapture elements of this confluence of divinity, wisdom, and power, and connections with Buddhist learning and those who had reputations for spiritual attainment emerged as important signifiers of merit. […] Personal mastery of Buddhist learning and ritual […] now became the preeminent marker of personal excellence, and hence the defining feature of an emerging cultural elite.67

It was during the reign of Songtsen Gampo (c. 617–649), whose conquests defined the beginnings of the Tibetan Empire, that Indian and Chinese 64 Prinz, ‘Heiligenkult und Adelsherrschaft’. 65 Much the same could be said about the aristocrats of the early Tang period in seventh-century China and their sponsorship of Buddhist monasteries, on which, see Lewis, China’s Cosmopolitan Empire, pp. 207–240. On comparative case studies on this topic, see the preliminary reflections by Borgolte, ‘Foundations “For the Salvation of the Soul”’. 66 Little, Plague and the End of Antiquity; Kapstein, The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism, pp. 53–54. 67 Kapstein, The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism, p. 17.

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Buddhist masters established Buddhism in Tibet. This coincided with the introduction of a system of writing and codification of laws.68 A similar growth in record keeping and writing is discernible from the same period in Merovingian Gaul.69 Buddhism was successful because it preserved a cosmological framework while bolstering the authority of the Tibetan elites who sponsored its practice: ‘The royal possession of the Dharmakaya – the corpus of the Buddhist’s doctrine – became in effect a new source of royal charisma.’70 While this new religion competed with traditional beliefs and practices it was only from the early 760s when the Tibetan emperor Trhi Songdetsen adopted Buddhism as the religion of his court that Buddhism became firmly established. It was during this period that Tibet’s first monastery, Samye, was established in around 779. Samye, like its Columbanian and later Carolingian counterparts, was not only the ‘symbolization of a particular world order, but of the active construction of that order through the imperial promotion of religious monuments and icons’.71 In the context of Merovingian Gaul in the seventh century it is possible to trace how an ascetic habitus fed into aristocratic self-representation and the formation of a Neustrian Frankish identity in the wake of the unification of the Frankish kingdoms in 613 that legitimized their position as the leading Franks. This is clearly seen in Jonas of Bobbio’s Vita Columbani. While demonizing the Austrasian royal branch of the Merovingian dynasty for their opposition to and expulsion of Columbanus, Jonas drew attention to Columbanus’s support of Chlothar II to legitimize the new Neustrian regime. The events of 613 by which Chlothar annihilated his rivals and united the Merovingian kingdoms under his sole authority were presented by Jonas as the fulfilment of a prophecy made by Columbanus.72 In the damnatio memoriae of Brunhild and the legitimization of Chlothar II’s regime by means of Columbanus’s prophecy, a new more public and political element influencing hagiographical writing is discernible.73 Regime change led to the emergence of a new Neustrian elite closely allied to the Columbanian familia and its ideals, as Barbara Rosenwein has discussed.74 The Franks became equated with the Neustrians as we find in Jonas of 68 Kapstein, The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism, p. 54. 69 Wood, ‘Administration, Law, and Culture’. 70 Kapstein, The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism, p. 56. 71 Kapstein, The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism, p. 64. 72 Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Columbani, I, 24, pp. 207–208. See O’Hara, Jonas of Bobbio and the Legacy of Columbanus. 73 On which, see Kreiner, The Social Life of Hagiography. 74 Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, pp. 130–162.

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Bobbio and in the later Liber Historiae Francorum and the Neustrians cemented their legitimacy as the ruling elite of the Franks by founding monasteries throughout their land and by adopting a politics of piety.75 This elite appropriated the norms and values of Columbanus’s monastic movement in the wake of the unification of the Frankish kingdoms that legitimized their position as the leading Franks. Men were now judged not only on their military prowess or status at court, but by their adoption of a monastic habitus which came to play a role in aristocratic selfrepresentation. Aristocratic birth became almost a prerequisite for sanctity in the seventh century and concern with status markers becomes more apparent in references to saints’ noble birth in Merovingian hagiography.76 Famously, the Breton king Judicael refused to eat with Dagobert I due to his loose morals and chose to eat instead with his courtier Dado/Audoin, who was known for his pious life and who founded the Columbanian monastery of Rebais while still a layman in 635 and later became bishop of Rouen in 641.77 Judicael’s snub recalls that of Columbanus, who refused the hospitality of Theuderic II or even to cross the threshold of his court.78 This was a further affirmation by Columbanus of the different boundaries distinguishing the monastic and court spheres.79 In the course of the seventh century, these boundaries became more blurred as a distinctive ritual economy centred on prayer, intercession, and atonement developed that dovetailed with the emergence of new elites and the ways in which power was exercised. Secular involvement in monastic foundation was radically transformed as elite patrons invested in monastic foundations not only for their own temporal and spiritual benefit, but as a means of signalling commitment to the Merovingian polity and its welfare. These were social enterprises meant for the benefit of everyone, even if in practice they took the place of the poor who had been the principal beneficiaries of Christian piety in Late Antiquity.80 There was a dark side, however, as Jamie Kreiner has suggested in relation to the peasantry. As the elites increasingly invested vast amounts of land and resources in pious foundations that contributed to the kingdom’s welfare, they may have had a sense of a debt to be repaid by the rural population: 75 On the Liber Historiae Francorum and the Neustrians, see Fouracre and Gerberding, Late Merovingian France, pp. 79–87; Dörler, ‘Liber Historiae Francorum’. 76 Keller, ‘Mönchtum und Adel’; Prinz, Heiligenkult und Adelsherrschaft. 77 Chronicle of Fredegar, IV.78, p. 66. I follow the edition by Wallace-Hadrill, The Fourth Book. 78 Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Columbani, I, 19, pp. 188–189. 79 De Jong, ‘Monastic Prisoners or Opting Out?’ 80 Brown, Ransom of the Soul, pp. 195–196.

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A pronounced presence in a social hierarchy also means greater visibility, and elites may have come to expect more tangible returns from the beneficiaries of their generosity. […] Elite donors may have acquired a sense of entitlement to the rents and labour of the subjects whose existence they were increasingly obliged to recognize. This was the poison of the Gift: those who received it might become bound somehow to repay it.81

While Columbanus ultimately failed to create cohesive communities – by all accounts his monasteries were fraught with tension and dissent that continued well after his death – his success lay in providing a model of foundation that appealed to the Frankish elites and in providing a calibrated and precise method for atoning for sin in the form of a penitential system which would become widely adopted. The new regime of Chlothar II from 613 was successful in harnessing this new impulse and in creating a dynamic and cohesive court culture that attracted the sons of the nobility to the court school in Paris and rewarded them with secular and ecclesiastical office. It was this close-knit group of courtiers, many of whom became bishops and are singled out by name in Jonas’s Vita Columbani and in the letters of Bishop Desiderius of Cahors, who would become key f igures in the Merovingian kingdom.82 This was a cohesive group, but following the death of Dagobert I in 639 and a succession of royal minorities, other aristocratic factions felt increasingly excluded from access to the Neustrian court, which led to increasing competition and violence, culminating in the turbulent period when the Neustrian aristocrat Ebroin was mayor of the palace (658–673 and 675–680). A Klosterpolitik developed as rulers and aristocrats used monasteries and church positions as chess pieces for their own political ends.83 The competition for precedence amongst the Frankish elites and the rise of aristocratic factions in Austrasia led to fighting among different factions. The aristocratic clan of the Pippinids would successfully harness similar strategies of distinction in order to legitimize their claim to power and the usurpation of the Frankish throne in the following century.84 81 Kreiner, The Social Life of Hagiography, pp. 227, 228. See also Theuws, ‘Landed Property and Manorial Organization’. 82 Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Columbani, II, 8, 10, pp. 245, 255; Epistulae S. Desiderii Cadurcensis (I follow the edition by Norberg). On Desiderius’s letters in the context of the Neustrian court culture, see Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, pp. 136–149. 83 On Balthild’s monastic policy, see Ewig, ‘Das Privileg des Bischofs Berthefried’; Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms, pp. 197–202; Fox, Power and Religion, pp. 39–43. 84 Fouracre, ‘Observations on the Outgrowth’; Fouracre, The Age of Charles Martel.

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What had initially begun as a new kind of interrelationship between monastic groups and secular authorities through the networks established by Columbanus and his successors with the Neustrian court – and that played a role in shaping the social cohesion of the Neustrian ruling elite in the seventh century – paradoxically contributed to its eclipse in the following century. By appropriating ‘the politics of piety’ that had increasingly come to inform the exercise of political power and ideas of Christian rulership, the Pippinids could represent themselves as the divinely approved Christian rulers of the Franks in comparison to the rustic simpleton Merovingians as found in Einhard’s ninth-century parody.85 It was a strategy that ultimately worked as the Carolingians became the true heirs of the processes that were set in motion during the course of the seventh century. The ritual economy that had developed at this time and which lay the foundations for the future Carolingian Empire was grounded in a cultural shift in the way kings, nobles, and monks conceived of their society and of their identities as Christian rulers, warriors, and sinners. The sense of apocalyptic urgency in the years around 600 hastened the leading political and ecclesiastical groups of Frankish society to work together in creating new ritual communities that sought to atone for their individual and collective sins and which ultimately served a social function of intercession for the kingdom and all its peoples. In the process, they created a new society.

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Little, Lester K., Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Loveluck, Christopher, ‘The Dynamics of Elite Lifestyles in the “Rural World”, AD 600–1150: Archaeological Perspectives from Northwest Europe’, in La culture du haut Moyen Âge: une question d’élites?, ed. by François Bougard, Régine LeJan, and Rosamond McKitterick (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), pp. 139–170. Markus, Robert A., The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Markus, Robert A., Gregory the Great and His World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Mathisen, Ralph W., Ecclesiastical Factionalism and Religious Controversy in Fifth-Century Gaul (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989). Moore, Michael Edward, A Sacred Kingdom: Bishops and the Rise of Frankish Kingship, 300–850 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011). O’Hara, Alexander, ‘Columbanus ad Locum: The Establishment of the Monastic Foundations’, Peritia, 26 (2015), 143–170. O’Hara, Alexander, Jonas of Bobbio and the Legacy of Columbanus: Sanctity and Community in the Seventh Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). O’Hara, Alexander, ‘Patria, peregrinatio, and paenitentia: Identities of Alienation in the Seventh Century’, in Post-Roman Transitions: Christian and Barbarian Identities in the Early Medieval West, ed. by Walter Pohl and Gerda Heydemann (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 89–124. O’Hara, Alexander (ed.), Columbanus and the Peoples of Post-Roman Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Palmer, James T., The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Patzold, Steffen, ‘Zur Sozialstruktur des Episkopats und zur Ausbildung bischöflicher Herrschaft in Gallien zwischen Spätantike und Frühmittelalter’, in Völker, Reiche und Namen im frühen Mittelalter, ed. by Matthias Becher and Stefanie Dick (Munich: Brill, 2010), pp. 121–140. Paxton, Frederick S., Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). Pohl, Walter, ‘Deliberate Ambiguity: The Lombards and Christianity’, in Christianizing Peoples and Converting Individuals, ed. by Guyda Armstrong and Ian N. Wood (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), pp. 47–58. Prinz, Friedrich, ‘Columbanus, the Frankish Nobility and the Territories East of the Rhine’, in Columbanus and Merovingian Monasticism, ed. by H.B. Clarke and M. Brennan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 73–87.

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Prinz, Friedrich, Frühes Mönchtum im Frankenreich: Kultur und Gesellschaft in Gallien, den Rheinlanden und Bayern am Beispiel der monastischen Entwicklung (4. bis 8. Jahrhundert) (Munich/Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1965). Prinz, Friedrich, ‘Heiligenkult und Adelsherrschaft im Spiegel Merowingischer Hagiographie’, Historische Zeitschrift, 204 (1967), 529–544. Richter, Michael, Bobbio in the Early Middle Ages: The Abiding Legacy of Columbanus (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008). Rosenwein, Barbara H., Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). Rosenwein, Barbara H., Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). Ryan, John, Irish Monasticism: Origins and Early Development (London: The Talbot Press, 1931). Stancliffe, Clare, ‘Columbanus and the Gallic Bishops’, in Auctoritas: Mélanges offerts à Olivier Guillot, ed. by Giles Constable and Michel Rouche (Paris: PU Paris-Sorbonne, 2006), pp. 205–215. Stancliffe, Clare, ‘Columbanus’s Monasticism and the Sources of His Inspiration: From Basil to the Master?’, in Tome: Studies in Medieval Celtic History and Law in Honour of Thomas Charles-Edwards, ed. by Fiona Edmonds and Paul Russell (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), pp. 17–28. Stevenson, Jane Barbara, ‘The Monastic Rules of Columbanus’, in Columbanus: Studies on the Latin Writings, ed. by Michael Lapidge (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1997), pp. 203–216. Stewart, Columba, Cassian the Monk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Theuws, Frans, ‘Landed Property and Manorial Organization in Northern Austrasia: Some Considerations and a Case Study’, in Images of the Past: Studies on Ancient Societies in Northwestern Europe, ed. by Nico Roymans and Frans Theuws (Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1991), pp. 299–407. Whitehouse, Harvey, ‘Human Rites’. Aeon, 12 December 2012. https://aeon.co/essays/ rituals-define-us-in-fathoming-them-we-might-shape-ourselves Whitehouse, Harvey, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Whitehouse, Harvey, ‘Modes of Religiosity: Towards a Cognitive Explanation of the Sociopolitical Dynamics of Religion’, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 14 (2002), 293–315. Whitehouse, Harvey, and Jonathan A. Lanman, ‘The Ties That Bind Us: Ritual, Fusion, and Identification’, Current Anthropology, 55 (2014), 674–695. Wickham, Chris, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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Wood, Ian, ‘Administration, Law, and Culture in Merovingian Gaul’, in The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe, ed. by Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 63–81. Wood, Ian, ‘Entrusting Western Europe to the Church, 400–750’, Royal Historical Society Transactions, 23 (2013), 37–73. Wood, Ian, ‘Jonas, the Merovingians, and Pope Honorius: Diplomata and the Vita Columbani’, in After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History: Essays Presented to Walter Goffart, ed. by Alexander Callander Murray (Toronto: University of Toronto Pres, 1998), pp. 99–118. Wood, Ian, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–751 (New York: Longman, 1994). Wood, Susan, The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

About the Author Alexander O’Hara is a Fulbright Fellow at Harvard University. His works include Jonas of Bobbio and the Legacy of Columbanus (OUP, 2018), Columbanus and the Peoples of Post-Roman Europe (OUP, 2018), and St. Sunniva: Irish Queen, Norwegian Patron Saint (Bergen, 2021).

4. Constructing New Leaders: Bishops in Visigothic Hispania Tarraconensis (Fifth to Seventh Centuries) Meritxell Pérez Martínez

Abstract When the Roman Empire came to its political end in the West, societies went through a long-lasting process of transformation. The barbarian kingdoms were not merely observers of the process; they had to play a leading role in forming new identities. This chapter examines the construction of an Iberian Visigothic society in the territories of Hispania Tarraconensis through the evidence provided by bishops and their role in defining a new social elite. This study focuses on how bishops adapted and constructed their authority with the new political leaders in the course of the sixth and seventh centuries; and, how much of their Roman identity was preserved and transformed together with the demands and purposes of the new political agendas. Keywords: bishops, leadership, identity, Tarraco, Visigothic Hispania, Church history

When the Western Roman Empire came to its political end, societies went through a long-lasting process of transformation, allowing the changes of late Roman society to consolidate. The barbarian kingdoms were not mere observers of the process and had to play a leading role in forming new post-Roman identities. Recent scholarship has placed ‘identity’ in a leading position in the theoretical frameworks which deal with the study of Late Antiquity and the most controversial debates on the period (transformation, breakdown, continuity, etc.). Scholars have already stressed the value of ‘identity’, when

Castro, D. and Ruchesi, F. (ed.), Leadership, Social Cohesion, and Identity in Late Antique Spain and Gaul (500–700). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463725958_ch04

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used in the broad sense, as a complex of new and varied perspectives with which to work. To what extent factors such as origin, status, confession, ethnicity, or sense of belonging can contribute to a better understanding of multi-defining identities, rather than historiographical constructed identities, is something that only more particular research can help to elucidate.1 This chapter examines the construction of an Iberian Visigothic society in the territories of Hispania Tarraconensis through the evidence provided by bishops and their role in defining a new social elite in post-Roman Iberia. Bishops became real social leaders throughout the late Roman period. This is especially seen in the provincial capitals, where metropolitan bishops were able to spread their power and influence to the fringes of the provinces, working hand in hand with the Roman Empire’s public representatives. This study focuses on how bishops adapted and constructed their authority with the new political leaders in the course of the sixth and seventh centuries; and, how much of their Roman identity was preserved and transformed together with the demands and purposes of the new political agendas. Sources allow us to undertake a project of the kind, as they put the history of the ancient Church of Hispania Tarraconensis and its bishops at the core of the process of defining a particular Iberian Visigothic identity in the Christian post-Roman world which followed the political end of the Roman Empire in the West. More specifically, the information gleaned from the capital city, Tarraco (Tarragona, Catalunya), allows us to diachronically improve our knowledge of the question of the transition to the Middle Ages in the Iberian Peninsula, with the ruptures and continuities of a long historical process. It also attests a continuous, natural and peaceful development, without major shocks, whose main feature was a deep respect for and a continuity of the Roman element. Writing the history of Tarraco in Late Antiquity is a task that inevitably depends on the consideration of the Mediterranean Sea as a historical region.2 As we shall see, at the end of the seventh century its identity was still predominantly Roman.3 The omnipresence of the Mediterranean Sea in the ancient history of Hispania Tarraconensis had an impact on the early diffusion of Christianity in these lands. The oldest documental evidence goes back to the mid-third century and it appears as a reflection of a second phase in the growth of ecclesiastical life, which had already lost the memory of its foundation. The martyrdom of Bishop Fructuosus and the deacons Augurius and Eulogius, 1 That was the topic of Castro and Kelly, eds., Visigothic Symposium 2. 2 Braudel, Il Mediterraneo. 3 This is the main thesis of the book by Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, 2012.

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on 21 January 259 in Tarraco’s Roman amphitheatre, is considered evidence of a certain degree of development in the ecclesiastical establishment. Nevertheless, the nature of the existing documentation (hagiography) and the absence of continuity in the following years prevent us from learning the full historical significance of the episode for the future of the Church in the Roman provincial capital and its province.4 To find the birth of the Church of Hispania Tarraconensis as a proper institution we have to come to Himerius of Tarraco, whose episcopate is both an illustration and a culmination of the important changes carried out by the Latin Church in the context of the Roman principalitas that followed the First Council of Constantinople in 381. Himerius’s collaboration in consolidating the pontifical primacy in the West was a huge step forward in the ecclesiastical institutionalization of the episcopal see, as seen by the decretal epistle sent to him by Pope Siricius in 385.5 The mission Siricius entrusted to Himerius in the aforementioned epistle stands at the origin of the metropolitan nature of the Church of Tarragona and predates the diffusion of the ecclesiastical organization by provinces in Hispania.6 The close relationship established between Himerius and the Pope had an impact on the creation of a new focus of ecclesiastical interest on the Iberian Peninsula that predates the promotion of the eastern axis of the dioecesis Hispaniarum in the fifth century, as we shall see. At the same time, it came about through the consolidation of a strong local power and the active participation in the affirmation dynamics of the prevailing episcopal power in the contemporary ecclesiastical panorama. Coinciding with the beginning of the conversion of the Roman aristocracy to Christianity, the imperial legislation in Theodosius’s time endorsed the strengthening of the episcopal f igure and gave general validity to the canonical regulations that established a lasting and inseparable link between the bishop and his city, through the exercise of a patronage that was not only spiritual, but also political. The conversion of the senatorial families can be found in the origin of the definition of a new leadership of episcopal status, which accelerated the reformulation of the traditional ceremonies, the adoption of a language of authority and consensus and the introduction of the aristocratic tastes and lifestyle into the local churches.7 4 The Passio Sanctorum Martyrum Fructuosi episcopi, Augurii et Eulogii diaconorum is the only extant document. Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 55–67. 5 Epistola I Siricii Papae ad Himerium Tarraconensem, PL XIII, 1141–1147. 6 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 67–93. 7 Orselli, ‘L’idée chrétienne de la ville’; Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 93–111.

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The increasing influence of the local cult of the bishop martyr Fructuosus occupied an important place in the institutional reinforcement process undertaken by Himerius. This is suggested by the updating of the original Passio and the beginning of a proper martyrial cult being organized in the capital city, both in the transformation of the suburbs (funerary cult) and the liturgy.8 This phenomenon coincides with a period of revitalization of martyr worship in the West, inspired by the actions of Bishops Damasus in Rome and Ambrosius in Milan. The Church of Hispania Tarraconensis prospered and grew stronger along with the city’s political role. The exceptional situation of Tarraco, the Roman provincial capital, during the fifth century was strengthened by the political map following the crossing of the Rhenish limes by a group of barbarian peoples in 406, and corresponded to a shift in imperial interest towards the eastern axis of the Iberian Peninsula, closer to the western political centre of the Prefecture of the Gauls, with its seat in Arles. However, the revitalization of Tarraco at this time can be explained above all because it remained the capital city of the sole Roman province of Hispania in the hands of the legitimate imperial power of the West after the sharing out of its provinces between the barbarian peoples in 411, after entering the Iberian Peninsula in 409. Sources confirm that Tarraco turned into the base of operations and destination of the high commands sent to Hispania by the legitimate imperial authority of the West throughout the fifth century, together with the army, to fight against barbarians and, most particularly, against usurpers.9 Diverse reasons could have caused the decision: the city’s status as administrative capital of the Roman province, seat of the governor and metropolitan see; its having an active and well-connected seaport; and, its unique location at the crossroads of the coastal road – the Via Augusta, which connected Hispania, Gallia, and Italia – and the inland road, the Via de Italia in Hispanias. By virtue of the new political situation, Tarraco remained a city loyal to the empire, thus allowing the Roman structures to be preserved. Tarraco took on the representation of the empire on the Iberian Peninsula, which resulted in a strengthening of its status as provincial capital in all respects. These questions conf irm the validity of the empire in these territories, as well as the continuity in the feeling of belonging to a bigger 8 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 93–111; Pérez Martínez, ‘Loca Sanctorum Tarraconis’, pp. 49–56. 9 Orosius, Historiarum adversus paganos, 7, 42, 1; Arce, Bárbaros y romanos en Hispania, pp. 203–212; Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 121–126.

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Fig. 1: Political map of Roman Hispania in the 5th century (Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, Fig. 2, p. 447)

political entity of Roman identity.10 Furthermore, it allowed the city of Tarraco to exert a leading role over the whole Iberian Peninsula again. Something similar to what happened at the very beginning of the Roman conquest of Hispania occurred again. These facts led to closer ties with the Roman capitals of southern Gaul, at the same time as they explain the extent of the urban reform project undertaken in Tarraco beginning in the second quarter of the f ifth century.11 The city’s vitality during these years is also borne out by the reactivation of the port infrastructure and the increase in imports from different parts of the Mediterranean would leave a deep imprint on the economy of the capital and the territory’s rural establishments.12 10 Kulikowski, Late Roman Spain and Its Cities, p. 61; Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 114–126. 11 Remolà and Pérez Martínez, ‘Centcelles y el praetorium’. 12 Remolà et al., ‘Tarraco, una base de operaciones’.

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Last but not least, Tarraco had a ruling class loyal to the empire, as shown by the bonds of its most distinguished citizens with the imperial machinery by means of direct kinship ties (Asterius), dating by consulates (RIT 947), and erecting commemorative statues and dedications in the honour of the emperors (RIT 100).13 This ruling social group, responsible for preserving established procedures and displays of prestige, knew perfectly well of the need to show loyalty to the empire and the emperor, especially in times of misfortune. They also had the material means to carry out demonstrations of the kind. This is evident thanks to the abundant amount of imports that have been found in the waste dumps that archaeologists have uncovered in the city in recent decades.14 The metropolitan bishop of Tarraco used the solid foundations of his episcopate to become one of the effective powers of the civitas christiana during the fifth century. The preserved sources attest the participation of the bishop in the doctrinal and disciplinary polemics of the period, at the same time as they tell us about how relations were maintained with the heads of the pontifical see.15 In accordance with the correspondence of the episcopal see of his ministry with the Roman provincial capital, the bishop of Tarraco took part in the general process of strengthening the urban episcopates, resulting from the monopolization of the institutions by the senatorial aristocracy. According to Consentius’s Epistle 11*, bishops were urban leaders who came from well-off families and who exercised effective control over the urban situation, in which the secular and spiritual spheres of their ministry become confused and feed off each other.16 The growth of the effective authority of the bishop in the city was a gradual process, which is demonstrated by the close collaboration established with the Roman state civil servants. The bishops and the late Roman officials cooperated in different areas, such as encouraging the obedience of the provincials and 13 We know about comes Hispaniarum Asterius and his family, who were well settled in the city and the province according to Consentius’s Epistle 11*. Leucadius, primicerius domesticorum, passed away in Tarraco in the first decades of the century (RIT 971). Other funerary inscriptions tell us about other relevant personalities, amongst which the vir honoratus Aventinus (RIT 946), Ampelius (RIT 954), and Optimus (RIT 937). In 30 June 471, Rusticus was buried in the same Christian cemetery, close to the River Francolí. We know the date thanks to the mentioning the consulates of Severus and Jordanes in his funerary inscription (RIT 947). RIT 100: A study in-depth with a new context for the inscription may be found in Pérez Martínez, ‘El final del Imperio romano de Occidente en Tarraco’. 14 TED’A, Un abocador del segle V; Remolà, Las ánforas tardoantiguas; Remolà and Sánchez, ‘El sector occidental del suburbi portuari’; Remolà et al., ‘Tarraco, una base de operaciones’. 15 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 136–154. 16 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 155–180.

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the urban improvement activities documented in the last quarter of the fifth century in cities such as Tarragona and Merida. We know that, at some point in 464/465, Metropolitan Bishop Ascanius of Tarraco decided to gather a council, where all the bishops of the Hispania Tarraconensis agreed to write a letter to Pope Hilarius, in order to request his opinion in relation to some very serious problems of insubordination inside the province.17 According to the epistle, the bishops made the decision to consult the Pope on the advice of the dux provinciae nostrae Vincentius, who had previously informed them about Hilarius’s sensitivity to the problems of the provincial churches.18 Located on the western fringes of the Hispania Tarraconensis, the church of Calagurris (Calahorra, La Rioja) brought together ecclesiastical life in the lands of the upper and middle Ebro valley at a time when the progressive detachment of the provincial elites from the capital created nuclei of resistance organized around local civilian and ecclesiastical elites. These groups became focuses of opposition to the empire.19 As metropolitan bishop, Ascanius found himself obliged to intervene and did so. Ascanius reported the illicit behaviour of the Westerners to the Pope and, in doing so, found the institutional support of the dux Vincentius, who sought to quell any disobedience of provincials.20 The ecclesiastical policy developed by Ascanius of Tarraco reveals full awareness of the pre-eminence of the metropolitan bishop, as well as of the importance of the obedience of the provincials in order to obtain an effective degree of control over the churches. The regular calling of provincial councils reveals a growing dynamism in the ecclesiastical province as administrative unit in this period, too.21 Although it is not plausible to believe that a perfectly regulated and delimited provincial demarcation had been created at that time, the jurisdictional conflict led by Silvanus of Calagurris shows us that in the middle years of the fifth century the western end of the Roman province (the former Clunia conventus) still came under the nominal jurisdiction of the capital city and metropolis in Tarraco. 17 Ascanius and the bishops of the Tarraconensis wrote two epistles to Pope Hilarius between 464 and 465. They have been preserved in the collection of Epistles of the Pope, attached to Hilarius’s response in PL 58 (1847), 12–19. About Bishop Ascanius, see Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 180–191. 18 Epistula II Tarraconensium Episcoporum ad Hilarum Papam, PL 58, 16. 19 Larrañaga, ‘Entorno al caso del Obispo Silvano de Calagurris’, pp. 181–187. 20 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 180–192; Pérez Martínez, ‘Obsessa Terrachona marithimas urbes obtinuit’; and Pérez Martínez, ‘Being Roman under Visigothic Rule’. 21 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 180–192.

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At the same time, Vincentius’s performance confirms the role played by Tarraco all along the fifth century, as base of operations of the high commands in charge of recovering Roman Hispania for the Western cause. These questions reveal the uninterrupted interest of the Roman Empire in Hispania, as well as the leading role of Tarraco as the centre of the irradiation of Roman power to the peninsular territories. Vincentius’s activity in the events of 464/465 adheres to a well-settled tradition in a city that, as Roman provincial capital and metropolitan see, continued to hold the empire’s representation in the peninsula. This character did not vanish in the last decades of the fifth century, as suggested by the dux provinciae Vincentius and his close collaboration with the ruling elites in the capital, the bishop being included. The cooperation of the dux provinciae with the bishop could have had an impact inside the metropolis, too, as suggested by certain works of repair and refurbishing that have been documented in Tarraco for the same years.22 Just one decade before the end of the Western Roman Empire, the metropolitan bishop of Tarraco exercised influence over an extensive province and, despite the focuses of revolt against his theoretical authority in the former Clunia conventus, this was translated into the consecution of a building activity fostered by the episcopate in the interior of the ecclesiastical capital itself. The monumental transformation of the suburbs of Tarraco during the fifth century is the only material evidence we have of the institutional strengthening of the bishopric of the time. Stratigraphic studies and the preserved burial inscriptions confirm that the south-western suburb became the preferred focus of attention of the civitas christiana as the fourth century changed to the fifth. The construction of the martyrial basilica in the Francolí Necropolis, in honour of the local martyrs, Fructuosus, Augurius and Eulogius, coincides chronologically with the building of the northern funerary basilica, as well as with the rebuilding of the secondary access roads to this suburb.23 The transformation of this local cemetery into a shrine for supra-regional martyrial worship during the fifth century is attested by the epigraphic sources. The preserved inscriptions also allow us to deduce that the fusion of traditional forms of religion and Christianity was a natural and peaceful process in Tarraco, as it came about slowly and progressively. As political and ecclesiastical capital city of the last province of Roman Hispania, Tarraco lived a period of prosperity and dynamism for most 22 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 126–132. 23 López Vilar, Les basíliques paleocristianes; Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 126–132; Remolà et al., ‘Tarraco, una base de operaciones’.

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of the fifth century, which did not prevent the city to participate in the conflicts of the high politics of the Western Roman Empire as another cog in the wheel. Anthemius’s premature death, in the summer of 472, put an irreversible end to the dream of recovering Hispania.24 The chronicles place the Visigothic conquest of Tarraco by the armies of King Euric in that same year, thus allowing him to exert control on the entire Roman province (Hispania Tarraconensis). According to the traditional view, historiography interpreted these events as being a real break, as well as the beginning of an irreversible period of decline that would have resulted in an almost complete loss of its former competences as capital city, both civilian and ecclesiastical.25 The repercussions of this are still only partly known, although both the texts and archaeology do not show us the decadence that traditional historiographies thought. According to the Chronica Gallica of 511, a Visigothic army, coming from the Gauls, under the command of the comes Gothorum Gauterit, crossed the Pyrenees and conquered Caesaraugusta (Zaragoza, Aragón) and the neighbouring cities. Next, another wing of the same Visigothic army, led by Heldefred, entered the Eastern ports following the Via Augusta and, with the complicity of the dux Hispaniarum Vincentius, took possession of Tarraco. Capturing the capital city of the last province of Roman Hispania allowed them to ensure the obedience of the most relevant urban centres in the coast.26 These events, which have to be interpreted as a conquest, took place in 472 and, with them, the authority of the Western Roman Empire vanished in Tarraconensis, giving birth to its political dependence on the Visigothic Kingdom of Toulouse.27 Euric moved then to Gaul, where Arles 24 Chronica Gallica 511, ad ann. 471/472; Jordanes, Romana et Getica, 45, 238–239; Fasti vindobonensis priores, 606, ad ann. 472. Full context in Pérez Martínez, ‘El final del Imperio romano de Occidente en Tarraco’. 25 The classical works on the subject are Sánchez Albornoz, Ruina y extinción del municipio romano en Hispania, pp. 96–97; Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘El gobierno de las ciudades’, pp. 360–385; Lacarra, ‘Panorama de la historia urbana’, pp. 330; Abadal, Del reino de Tolosa al reino de Toledo, pp. 55–66; Torres, ‘Instituciones económicas, sociales y político-administrativas’; Thompson, Los godos en España, pp. 46–55; García Moreno, ‘Estudios sobre la organización administrativa’; García Iglesias, ‘El intermedio ostrogodo en Hispania’, p. 120; Orlandis, Historia de España, pp. 84–89; Arrechea and Jiménez, ‘Sobre la provincia en el reino hispano-visigodo’. To know more about the impact of the Visigothic conquest, see Pérez Martínez, ‘Obsessa Terrachona marithimas urbes obtinuit’. 26 Chronica Gallica 511, ad ann. 472/473. 27 Isidorus, Historia Gothorum, 34, ad ann. 466–483: ‘Euricus […] qui post captam Pampilonam Caesaraugustam invadit totamque Hispaniam superiorem obtinuit’ (‘Euric […] took Pamplona and Saragossa and brought Upper Spain under his power’) (trans. Donini and Gordon, p. 17).

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and Marseilles were also conquered.28 By then, the imperial authorities did not have the resources or the military strength to protect the most Western territories, which would be sacrificed. The provincials had finally left alone. Isidore’s reference to the resistance posed by the Hispano-roman nobilitas to the Visigothic early domination has been widely used by historiography as a proof of the provincials’ rejection to Euric and his Visigoths.29 However, the Chronica Caesaraugustana attests the domination of the Visigoths from Toulouse over the Tarraconensis for the years 494–506, the troop movements along the Ebro valley, cases of usurpations and the reinstatement of the legitimate authority of the Visigothic kings after punishing the rebels.30 The extant sources do not allow scholars to resolve all the questions posed by the new political situation with its diverse complexities. Nonetheless, a review of the written sources in consideration of broader current perspectives reveals a rather limited impact of the initial episodes of conquest, as well as a deliberate preservation of the Late Roman social fabric by the new rulers for most of the sixth century.31 Even if obtaining the most important cities of Hispania Tarraconensis did not infer a systematic and fully organized settlement of the Visigoths, we know that an early Visigothic presence in the province could have produced small settlements of Visigothic soldiers and their families, when they were an essential part of the Western imperial armies as federate troops.32 Textual sources place in 415 the settlement of King Athaulf and his court in the city of Barcino (Barcelona, Catalunya), after being compelled to leave Narbonne by the general and patrician Fl. Constantius. This stay would have been temporary.33 The situation may 28 Chronica Gallica 511, ad ann. 476/477; Jordanes, Romana et Getica, 45, 244; Consularia Caesaraugustana, ad ann. 473; Isidorus, Historia Gothorum, 34, ad ann. 466. 29 Isidorus, Historia Gothorum, 34, ad ann. 466–483: ‘Tarraconensis etiam provinciae nobilitatem, quae ei repugnaverat, exercitus irruptione evertit’ (‘He also destroyed with an invasion of his army the nobles of the province of Tarraco who had resisted him’ (trans. Donini and Gordon, p. 17). 30 Consularia Caesaraugustana, ad ann. 494–497; ad ann. 506. PLRE II, Burdunelus and Petrus 25. 31 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 126–132; Pérez Martínez, ‘Being Roman under Visigothic Rule’. 32 Current historiography has conveniently put into context the number of Visigoths settled in the province at this time (Arce, Bárbaros y romanos en Hispania, p. 146), while the archaeological studies have confirmed the problems derived from identifying the material remains only by ethnicity criteria: Pampliega, Los germanos en España, 1998; López Quiroga, ‘La presencia germànica en Hispania’; Ripoll, ‘The Archaeological Characterisation’. 33 Orosius, Historiarum adversus paganos, 7, 43, 8; Hydatius, Chronica, 52 [66], ad ann. 416; Olimpiodorus, Fragmenta, 26; Chronica Gallica 511, ad ann. 416–418; Isidorus, Historia Gothorum, 19, ad ann. 410.

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have changed in 472; once control over the capital and the leading groups of Roman Tarraconensis was obtained, it was only a matter of time before the Visigoths started to exert effective power over the whole province.34 The archaeological evidence provides supplementary data to overcome previous interpretive limitations and which suggests a significant continuity between the pre-conquest dynamics of urban transformation and those of post-conquest Tarraco.35 The case of Tarragona is symptomatic of the low impact of the episodes of conquest and the initial settlement of barbarian peoples on the historical destiny of the cities of the Iberian Peninsula, the most visible alterations of which had begun to materialize beforehand, as a result of the particular dynamics of local adaptation to the political, economic, social and cultural transformations of the late Roman Empire (some of them starting as far as the second century). The Visigothic conquest did not entail a break in the general guidelines previously initiated by Tarraco. This continuity can clearly be seen in the study of archaeological finds, from which we can see that the city continued to be an active urban centre, integrated into the contemporary Mediterranean commercial and cultural circuits. Excavations carried out in the port suburb of Tarraco in recent years have confirmed the urban revitalization of this urban sector, at the same time as the commercial port was reactivated.36 Recent works of revision allow us to emphasize that, besides the episodes of aristocratic opposition in the province mentioned by Isidore and the Consularia Caesaraugustana, there is evidence of another type of source which refers to the immediate and natural cooperation that was established between local leaders and the representatives of Visigothic power. Vincentius’s collaboration with the Visigoths in the episodes that drifted into the conquest of the main cities of Hispania Tarraconensis by King Euric in 472 marks the political end of Roman Tarraco. At the same time, Vincentius’s cooperation with the Visigoths provides very crucial information to reconstruct how this end occurred. The dux Hispaniarum Vincentius, who is in all likelihood the dux provinciae with the same name mentioned in Pope Hilarius’s letter of 464/465, had been loyal to the empire and acted as a guarantor of Roman legality in the province for almost a decade.37 He knew perfectly well the problems of the 34 Stein, Histoire du Bas-Empire, p. 393. 35 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 126–132; Pérez Martínez, ‘Being Roman under Visigothic Rule’. 36 Remolà et al, ‘Tarraco, una base de operaciones’. 37 About Vincentius: PLRE II, Vincentius 3; García Moreno, ‘Vincentius dux provinciae Tarraconensis’, Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 180–191.

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Roman province and was familiar with the elites in the capital, specially the bishop. Vincentius remained loyal to the empire in this difficult context, allowing the imperial structures to be preserved. But the uncertainty generated by Anthemius’s death in the summer might have resulted into some confusion in the far Western provinces of the empire, thus contributing to the alteration of the traditional loyalty schemes. As long as Vincentius acted in the theoretical name of the empire in the province, Tarraco had the best ally to make sure that the Roman structures were preserved in the capital and the dependant territories. But, when Vincentius aligned himself with Euric, the chances of success would finally melt away.38 The case of Vincentius illustrates the process of detachment from the empire in the north-eastern territories of Roman Hispania, which consisted of an assimilation of the Roman ruling classes by the Visigoths. It is possible that, by 472, the Visigoths were the only force able to guarantee the survival of the traditional fabric of society.39 That process could have had a greater breadth in the ancient provincial capitals, where the metropolitan bishops would have been crucial allies in deploying a still limited authority to the inland territories.40 In fact, this is also suggested by other chronologically related examples, as attested by the collaboration between Bishop Zeno of Emerita Augusta (Merida, Extremadura) and the Visigothic dux Salla in refurbishing some essential buildings and infrastructure of the city in 483.41 Referring to the capital city of Roman Lusitania, Koch came to the conclusion that it was this collaboration which made the Visigothic entry in the peninsula such a success.42 As already seen, cooperating with the new Visigothic rulers and the resulting transfer of loyalties played a significant role in the political end of Roman Tarraconensis.43 The Visigothic interest 38 For services rendered, Vincentius was given the title of quasi magister militum and sent to Italy, where he was killed by the comites Alla and Síndila (Chronica Gallica 511, ad ann. 472/473). 39 Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome, pp. 63–83. 40 Ubric, La Iglesia en la Hispania del siglo V, pp. 90–91; Arce, Bárbaros y romanos en Hispania, pp. 148–149. 41 The authenticity of the inscription (ICERV, no. 363; Ramírez and Mateos, Catálogo de las inscripciones cristianas de Mérida, no. 10), which is only preserved by handwritten tradition, has been widely questioned by specialists, even if it is still considered a key piece in order to weigh the impact of the Visigothic domination of Hispania during Euric’s reign. An exhaustive approach to these problems can be found in three contributions to a discussion forum published in Pyrenae, 39, no. 2 (2008): Arce, ‘La inscripción’; Velázquez, ‘El puente de Mérida’; Koch, ‘Nunc tempore potentis Getarum Eurici regis’. 42 Koch, ‘Nunc tempore potentis Getarum Eurici regis’, p. 140. 43 Such an interpretation supplies a new approach to the end of the Western Roman Empire in Tarraco and, at the same time, it moves away from previous hypotheses on the end of Roman

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in Tarragona, and eventually Merida, represented their explicit desire to control the ancient Roman provincial capitals as a step toward gaining authority over the provincial territories. This action implies a significant preservation of the administrative structures of Roman Hispania, too. Visigothic power over the Iberian Peninsula was sporadic until after the battle of Vogladum (Vouillé), near Poitiers, in 507. As recorded by contemporary authors, it caused the death of Visigothic king Alaric II in the battlefield, capturing the capital and the royal treasure by the Franks, the demise of the Visigothic Kingdom of Toulouse and sending-off the Visigoths out of Septimania into Hispania.44 Following the outcome of Vouillé, the focuses of political interest continued to be placed beyond the Pyrenees. Nevertheless, the military control of the north-east of Hispania was a necessity for the political survival of the Visigothic monarchy until the permanent installation of the seat of the Visigothic kingdom on the peninsula in Toletum (Toledo, Castilla–La Mancha). In fact, Vouillé provided a favourable juncture for the development of the territories of Hispania Tarraconensis as the natural passage zone between Hispania and Septimania. Moreover, it boasted the traditional mechanisms to exert influence over an extensive territory. Tarraco benefited doubly in accordance with its dignity as provincial capital and metropolitan see, and it experienced an important reactivation of the capital status as a consequence. That proved crucial when Theoderic, the Ostrogothic king of Italy, was established as the head of Iberian politics, as the regent of his grandson, the Visigoth Amalaric.45 During the period of the formal Ostrogothic protectorate (511–549), Hispania Tarraconensis was added to Theoderic’s larger political project of Roman restoration (‘restauratio romani nominis’).46 Theoderic favoured the Nicene Church in his dominions and enhanced the prerogatives of bishops in the management of civic life, as a guarantee of his own political consolidation. Bishops were asked to play a key role in the new political order, which resulted in the reinforcement of the episcopal authority and growth of ecclesiastical establishments in the territories of the Visigothic crown. Hispania (Kulikowski, Late Roman Spain and Its Cities, pp. 151–153; Arce, Bárbaros y romanos en Hispania, pp. 145–146). 44 Consularia Caesaraugustana, ad ann. 507; Chronica Gallica 511, ad ann. 505–506; Vita Caesarii Arelatensis episcopi, 1, 28; Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, 2, 37; Isidorus, Historia Gothorum, ad ann. 483. 45 Consularia Caesaraugustana, ad ann. 513; Isidorus, Historia Gothorum, ad ann. 507. 46 Leicht, ‘Epilogo’; Saitta, ‘Custodia legum civilitatis est indicium’, p. 391; Liebeschuetz, ‘Ravenna to Aachen’, p. 20.

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Hispania Tarraconensis treasures a series of documentary sources of ecclesiastical origin that provide crucial information to attest the reactivation of the provincial capitality of Tarraco coinciding with the political end of the Visigothic Kingdom of Toulouse and the beginning of the Ostrogothic protectorate. The assimilation of the Roman officers and ruling classes by the new leaders, the reactivation of the capital status of Tarraco, and the explosion of ecclesiastical life in these very years talk about a period of institutional and organizational effort which had a visible impact in the spiritual and material rebuilding of the capital city and the metropolitan domain. The political and ecclesiastical revival of these years is another argument to sustain the limited impact of the Visigothic conquest in the time of Euric, while it provides us with very interesting data to reconstruct the historical process of affirmation and the settlement of the Visigothic dominion in these territories at the king’s death. Tarraco experienced a real blossoming of ecclesiastical life in the course of the sixth century.47 The sources of Bishops John and Sergius reveal a new age of creative and institutional growth aimed at the spiritual and material rebuilding of the episcopal see and the territorial articulation of the episcopal domain, beyond the physical limits of the ecclesiastical metropolis itself (both in the diocese and in the province).48 That marks the beginning of the period of real flowering for the naturally diverse regional Iberian churches in Hispania. The result of all this was a period of opening up in which the influence of the church and bishops, which had previously been perceptible, now began to grow unstoppably. The Council of Tarragona, held in 516, was the first of a series of provincial synods in which we can perceive a manifest interest in organizing a stable diocesan structure by fostering and protecting the rural communities and subjecting them strictly to the lex diocesana. The positive expansion of the role played by the metropolitan bishop in the diocese also impacted on the institutional and jurisdictional consolidation of his authority over the bishoprics in the coastal areas of the province. The regular calling of provincial synods between 516 and 546, and the exportation of the church’s hierarchical structure to the secondary towns in the province (municipia, castra, and vici) reveals the ecclesiastical dynamism of the Tarraconensis during these years. The provincial councils of Tarragona (516), Girona 47 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 209–292. 48 John and Sergius were energetic and autonomous bishops, who gave solidity to the bishopric during the period of influence of the Ostrogoth monarchs (Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 209–259).

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(517), Barcelona (540), Lleida (546), and València (546) were convened by Metropolitan Bishops John and Sergius, or under their direct influence. These synods include the first preserved documentary evidence for the episcopal churches of Emporiae (Empúries), Dertosa (Tortosa), Ausona (Vic) and Urgellum (Urgell).49 At the same time, there are hints to support the idea that the bishop of Tarraco played a significant role in promoting the church of Carthago Nova (Cartagena, Murcia) against the rising church of Toledo in the province of Hispania Carthaginensis.50 This fact should have crucial consequences in the Iberian Visigothic church during the next decades. The measures adopted in the provincial councils of the Hispania Tarraconensis during the first half of the sixth century presuppose the introduction of a hierarchical model of highly evolved episcopal centralization inspired by the Council of Agde of 506. These synods introduced to Hispania the directives of the ecclesiastical reform initiated by Caesarius of Arles in southern Gaul. The bonds with the ecclesiastical structure of southern Gaul, caused by the joint administration of the Visigothic possessions located on both sides of the Pyrenees after 507, could explain the quick arrival of the reformist guidelines promoted by Caesarius. They also prefigure the organizational effort that would later spread and crystallize in the regum Visigothorum throughout the seventh century.51 The blossoming of the Church of Tarraco in the sixth century had its own reflection in the consolidation of a new topography of episcopal power in the metropolis itself. This may be inferred by the transfer of the ecclesia mater and the settings of episcopal representation to the ancient Roman Acropolis in the upper part of the city, and the restoration of the martyrial sites in Fructuosus’s honour in the suburbs.52 On an undetermined date during the first half of the sixth century, the main church was transferred to the symbolic centre of the Roman provincial capital, which favoured the transformation and substitution of the power setting of the classical city with a new significance. The shift of the scenes of power of the bishop of Tarraco symbolize the conclusion of the conquest of the Christian space. The proper christiana civitas was born. Although we lack evidence to reconstruct the process of supplanting the sites of paganism (imperial cult temples and buildings), it appears that this did not take place earlier than the second quarter of the sixth century.53 49 50 51 52 53

Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 259–292. Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 283–292. Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 269–274. Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 599–616. Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 249–255.

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For the same years, there was the consecution of an extensive restoration and monumentalization programme at the sites of the cult of the local bishop and martyr Fructuosus, as well attested by the Visigothic basilicas in the Francolí Necropolis and the amphitheatre, both of them in the suburbs.54 Right in this period of institutional development, the increasing influence the martyr patronus became an ideal formula for boosting the position of the episcopus patronus.55 As known in other contemporary capital cities of the period, the linking of the current bishop with the first historical bishop/martyr of the episcopal see was a powerful argument of solidity, authority, and legitimacy that the title holders of Tarraco did not hesitate to put into practice. This concern for invoking the patronage of local saints was present in the religious life of other cities in the province, too, and it became very soon one of the main arguments in the political disputes between the episcopal sees.56 The ecclesiastical flowering of the first half of the sixth century demonstrates that the Gothic dominion coincided with a religious freedom for Catholics, at least initially, which favoured the institutional strengthening of the Nicene Church in Hispania Tarraconensis, both in the capital city and in the province.57 The religious freedom of the Catholics is the only plausible hypothesis to explain this aperture and strength. So too did the continued dependency on the prosperity of cities for political stability. The authority of the new rulers was still dependant on the prosperity of cities, and that was still necessarily linked with the fact of favouring the Church and its local representatives, the bishops. As a result, Tarraco enjoyed a new period of urban and commercial development. We already mentioned the building activity promoted by the bishop in the upper city and the suburbs. The significant amount of products of Eastern origin confirms the vitality of its commercial port, as well as the existence of a demand for imports by the wealthy, both lay and ecclesiastical, who still saw the city as an appropriate place to live.58 54 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 248–259. 55 Orselli, ‘L’idée chrétienne de la ville’. 56 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 283–293; Pérez Martínez, ‘Loca Sanctorum Tarraconis’, pp. 49–56. As Tarragona was the see of Fructuosus, Merida was that of Eulalia, and Toledo that of Leocadia. 57 There is no evidence (neither written nor archaeological) of Arian bishops or churches in the city during the dominion of the Ostrogothic kings, who were Arians themselves (Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 210–215). 58 Macias, La ceràmica comuna tardoantiga; Remolà, Las ánforas tardoantiguas; Macias and Remolà, ‘L’àrea portuària de Tarracona’; Remolà et al., ‘Tarraco, una base de operaciones’.

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The strengthening of the capital status of Tarraco during the period of the Ostrogothic protectorate of Hispania, a few decades after the Visigothic conquest, indicates that it any break or transformation would not have been as decisive as once was thought. All these issues go far beyond the continuity debate in the former Roman provincial capitals of the West, as they pose a big amount of data on the theme of how the wide range of situations derived from the encounter with Romanitas made it possible to transform and to adapt previous and new realities in the post-Roman world. In Tarraco, its status as political and ecclesiastical capital of Hispania Tarraconensis continued to play a key role in the development of the city during the sixth and seventh centuries, making it possible to exert its influence over a still very large provincial territory. The city continued to identify itself with the Mediterranean and openly displayed its Roman identity, without significant disruptions, up to the Islamic conquest of much of the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century. But major changes had to occur in the seventh century. The efforts to build up a centralized and centralizing kingdom in Toledo in the course of that century would condemn the more distant, peripheral capitals (Tarraco and Narbo, mainly) even if preserving de iure their traditional status as the respective heads of their territories as provincial capitals and metropolitan sees. At some point in the seventh century, the idea of a certain political identity and a religious identity were prone to converge. That caused that the former and naturally diverse regional Iberian churches of Hispania were sacrificed by a newly born political and religious consciousness, spread from the brand new capital in Toledo and its kings, and nourished by the most influential clerics of the regnum Visigothorum such as Leander and Isidore of Sevilla, first, and Ildefonsus and Julian of Toledo, lately. To f ind the beginning of this new trend we have to come to the crucial reigns of Leovigild and his son Reccared. The absence of explicit documentary testimonies hinders our reconstruction of how Hispania Tarraconensis was incorporated into the project for territorial unification and political centralization undertaken by King Leovigild, which appears as having been completed in the texts. Nevertheless, a series of testimonies reveal the undertaking of recent official activity in Tarraco and the other towns and cities in the province. In fact, sources suggest that there was a complete and programmed subjugation campaign under Leovigild that can only be dated approximately to between 569 and 580.59 The setting up of a Visigothic mint in Tarraco and the distribution of coins issued 59 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 295–300.

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in the capital city throughout the province can be linked to the project to consolidate the new political hegemony personified by the monarch, at the same time as it suggests a certain recognition of the status and prestige of the city in accordance with its rank as provincial capital.60 The contemporary sources do not reveal to us why Prince Hermenegild was transferred to Tarraco and executed there a year after he was captured in Corduba (Córdoba, Andalucía) and subsequently exiled in Valentia (València, País Valencià). However, we have to interpret this episode in the light of the tensions brought about by the confrontation between factions in the struggle for power, as a response to the demands of the introduction of Leovigild’s political project on the Iberian political map of the last third of the sixth century.61 There is information that leads us to believe that the religious restoration accompanied and completed the military occupation in Leovigild’s time. Contrary to former opinions, the preserved documentary testimonies do not allow us to attest the existence of a religious persecution in the true sense against the Catholic subjects of Hispania Tarraconensis, beyond the suppression of the synodal activity (begun by Leovigild’s predecessors on the throne), the ceding of some churches and their assets to the Arians, and the designation of a small number of Arian bishops in certain strategic enclaves of the province (Dertosa and Barcino, for instance). The Liber Orationum de Festivitatibus, composed more than a hundred years later, contains the only hint that we can link to a presumed Arian presence in Tarraco.62 We have to wait until the period of the conversion to Catholicism to find explicit evidence of an Arian ecclesiastical activity in the province. The canonical sources tell us that there was a confessional duality and a peaceful coexistence of ecclesiastical structures, with autonomous administration of their respective properties under Leovigild. These questions do allow us to suggest a certain preservation of the traditional administrative structure of Roman origin, at the same time as they pose the necessary precedent for the successful reactivation of the ecclesiastical province that came about during the reign of Reccared.63 60 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 301–304. 61 Martin, La géographie du pouvoir; Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 305–310. 62 The Liber Orationum de Festivitatibus, preserved in a manuscript in the Capitular Library of Verona, was written in Tarraco at some point at the end of the seventh and the beginning of the eighth century (Vives, ed., Liber Orationum de Festivitatibus; Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 388–392). 63 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 311–323.

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The conversion of the regnum Visigothorum to Catholicism in the Third Council of Toledo (589) during Reccared’s reign helped to consolidate the political hegemony of the rex in a new context of pacts and alliances with the regional powers of the provinces, amongst whom still were the bishops. The available textual sources are proof of the reactivation of the political prominence of Tarraco under Reccared, in accordance with its status as prestigious provincial capital and ecclesiastical metropolis. The general increase in the amount of coinage circulating, the extent of the fiscal process stipulated in the De fisco Barcinonensi and the remodelling of the former city administrative bodies are a reflection of the extensive campaign to strengthen the royal authority, which was aimed at placing the local leadership groups of Hispania Tarraconensis under strict royal control.64 On the other hand, the restitution of the former episcopal prerogatives to the Catholics and the increase in incomes resulting from the restoration of the religious officialdom and the amalgamation of the Arian Church, led to an increase in the presence of the bishops in the public life of cities and other territorial units. They were charged with cooperating in certain government and administrative tasks delegated by the monarch (De fisco Barcinonensi). Although it seems that the civil jurisdiction of the bishops was rather restricted, these questions had a bearing on the recovery of the political prestige of the bishop of Tarraco again. The policy of reactivating the Church structure based on the province and the metropolitan bishops of the Roman tradition under Reccared brought about a temporary respite for the provincial capitals of Visigothic Hispania, which would also have benefited Tarraco. After 46 years of not holding any council (546–592), the reappearance of the provincial synods allowed the bishops of the Hispania Tarraconensis to connect once again with the traditional procedures. Between 592 and 599, three provincial councils were held in the province, which were called and presided over by the metropolitan bishop of Tarraco.65 The contents of these councils attest the organizational effort faced by the governing structure of the Catholic Church in the province to successfully integrate the Arian structure. The ecclesiastical reform promoted by Reccared helped to strengthen the provincial ecclesiastical structure of Hispania Tarraconensis, as we can deduce from the establishment of the definitive number of suffragan sees, the reintegration of the bishoprics of the upper and middle valleys of the Ebro into the ecclesiastical regime of the province, and the creation of 64 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 332–334. 65 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 348–361.

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Fig. 2: Political map of the Regnum Visigothorum ca. 636 (Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, Fig. 6, p. 451)

the new episcopal see of Auca that encompassed from that time on the churches located on the border with Gallaecia.66 The episcopal sees that made up the ecclesiastical province in the period of the Catholic Visigothic monarchy were established during that time and their number remained unchanged until the Islamic conquest of Hispania: Tarraco, Dertosa, Barcino, Egara, Gerunda, Emporiae, Ausona, Ilerda, Urgellum, Osca, Caesaraugusta, Pampilona, Turiaso, Calagurris and Auca.67 To summarize, Kings Leovigild and Reccared created a political environment that favoured the vitality of cities in the Iberian Peninsula. The information gleaned from texts and archaeology attests to the transformation of Tarraco in a proper Visigothic capital city in the course of the seventh century, as well as displaying a certain pre-eminent character in the territories of north-eastern Hispania by virtue of its uninterrupted 66 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 355–361. 67 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, p. 407.

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status as the civil and ecclesiastical capital of Hispania Tarraconensis.68 The preservation of the legal character of the city allowed it to continue to act as a centre of political and religious representation in the province, perpetuating its ability to control the territory. Tarraco remained the bureaucratic and institutional centre for the north-eastern Iberian Peninsula uninterruptedly right up until the Islamic conquest of Hispania. As it had in the past, large part of its pre-eminence continued to hinge on its position as a metropolitan see. The court of Toledo fully recognized this twin status enjoyed by the city. However, on the new political map of the Catholic Visigothic monarchy, the ancient capitals of the Roman provinces were not able to exercise the same influence over the cities of the provincial demarcation anymore.69 The growing intervention of the monarchs in the political and ecclesiastical life of the provinces and the centralization of decision-making in Toledo were aimed at their aggrandisement in keeping with the new political situation of the regnum Visigothorum. These changes were not imposed without an inevitable curtailing of the powers of the ancient provincial capitals and the level of autonomy to which many of them had become used. Relegated to the periphery of a Visigothic kingdom with its centre in Toledo, these cities were subjected to an unprecedented process of adaptation to the new political and social needs, which did not exempt them from the first seeds of the break with the Roman tradition. The consolidation of Toledo as the sedes regia and the most relevant ecclesiastical metropolis for the Iberian Peninsula, the institutional regulation of the general council, and the growing royal intrusion into the ecclesiastical life of the provinces resulted in a gradual interruption of the activity of the provincial churches and the increasing loss of attributions on the part of the ecclesiastical metropolitans.70 The bishop of Toledo was about to become himself the most pre-eminent of the metropolitans in Visigothic Hispania. Even if he never reached a legal primacy in this period, he enjoyed a de facto primacy because of his proximity to the king and the court. Moreover, the privilege of the king in supplying new bishops (‘per sacra regalia’) became widespread throughout the seventh century.71 In the decade of the 610s (c. 614–620), Bishop Eusebius of Tarraco confronted rex Sisebut when the latter ordered him to establish as bishop of Barcelona his own candidate. In the letter that was written on the 68 69 70 71

Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 361–407. Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 355–361. Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 401–407. Conc. II of Barcelona, c. III.

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occasion, the king is fully aware of his authority over the bishoprics of the kingdom: bishops were established by the king and the metropolitans were forced to obey.72 To a practical level, episcopal consensus was of very little importance yet. In the epistle, Eusebius is also rebuked of obscenity by the king because of his love to the ludi theatrales. At Eusebius’s death in 631, the episcopal succession in the metropolis of Tarraco followed the promulgation of a sententia regis.73 These episodes show the links established between Toledo and the ruling echelons of the provinces in the terms of centre and periphery.74 The transformation of the role played by cities was another of the effects of the centralization of power in the hands of the rex, which translated into a decentralization of the governing and administrative bodies of the province, as well as in a further diversification of the governmental functions in different regional centres. At the end of the seventh century, Tarragona still held the position of the political and ecclesiastical metropolis of Hispania Tarraconensis. However, that status now meant sharing functions with other regional centres of the province, basically Barcelona and Zaragoza. The metropolitan bishop of Tarraco would end up losing independence and prestige during the seventh century as it became diluted in a centralized kingdom in which the metropolitan sees had no more than a theoretical honour with prerogatives delegated from Toledo. This historical process, which had obvious consequences on the evolution of the ancient provincial capitals of Roman Hispania, was not exclusive to Tarragona, although it is not so easy to document as may at first be thought. The preserved textual sources suggest that, at the end of Late Antiquity, Tarraco survived in a rather unfavourable situation. Nevertheless, there are reasons to believe that the gradual loss of its former political pre-eminence did not translate into an immediate interruption of the essential urban activities. In fact, the uninterrupted presence of the bishop in the city can be seen as an extremely important urban driving force, which made it possible to perpetuate the vitality and dynamism of Tarraco and its Church until, at least, the first decades of the eighth century. Together with the data coming from the ecclesiastical sources (Liber Orationum de Festivitatibus), the pieces of decorative sculpture and bronzes for religious rites found in Tarragona confirm the activity of the metropolis in the seventh century, as well as its participation in the ornamental trends 72 Epistola VI Eusebio episcopo a rege Sisebuto directa, PL LXXX, 370. 73 Epistola V Braulionis ad Isidorum; Epistola VI Isidori ad Braulionem, PL LXXX, 654. 74 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 368–370.

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of the period.75 Contrary to former opinions, the presence of the bishop in the city did not hinder or compromise the mercantile potential it continued to exercise, not only on a regional and provincial level, but also on the Iberian Peninsula as a whole. There was no interruption to the imports arriving at the port and the city markets. These products came from North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, via the ports of Ravenna, Sicily, and southern Italy, and they were distributed to the territory via regional trade networks.76 We are beginning to see evidence of this in Tarragona, which obliges those who saw the seventh century as a period of absolute decadence and isolation to qualify their opinion. These questions presuppose a significant survival of the traditional Roman maritime routes, on which Tarraco continued to be an important port of call. The activity of the bishop in the city during these years also became a potent aggregating factor, whose contribution continued to be decisive in the design of the urban physiognomy during the transition to the Middle Ages.77 The tensions between the Eastern Roman Empire and the caliphate led to the opening of a new episode in the history of the peoples of the Mediterranean basin. The preserved information does not allow us to fully determine the impact of the new direction taken in the political history of the Mediterranean on Tarraco and its bishops, although the preservation of its legal and institutional status and its uninterrupted mercantile potential lead us to believe that, around the year 700, the city was still important and active.78 As politics and the kings drove the regnum Visigothorum to a more centralized and centralizing version of itself throughout the seventh century, there were a series of serious attempts to provide a creative and independent Iberian Visigothic identity to be shared amongst all the subjects to the same crown. The prosperous regional Iberian churches of the past had to pay a price in this standardization process that was not always well understood in the provinces. Even if this new Iberian Visigothic identity was proclaimed and boasted in the official circles, it is obvious from the sources that the regnum Visigothorum adhered itself to a collective global common identity which was Universal, Christian, and Latin. The Church continued to put Visigothic Hispania in the orbit of a Universal Latin Church. The obvious profit was orthodoxy, legitimacy, and order, but also 75 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 401–407; Domingo et al., ‘Nuevos elementos de escultura arquitectónica’. 76 Panella, ‘Merci e scambi nel Mediterráneo tardoantico’; Remolà, Las ánforas tardoantiguas; Remolà and Sánchez, ‘El sector occidental del suburbi portuari’. 77 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 401–407. 78 Pérez Martínez, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía, pp. 401–419.

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a shared, global, common identity, which still linked them with a shared, global, common past of Roman origin. By the end of Late Antiquity, Tarraco continued exhibiting part of its former glory and influence as provincial capital of Hispania Tarraconensis and metropolitan see, and bishops still were extremely responsible for that. Bishops perpetuated the links of cities with a remote Mediterranean past, which was still predominantly one of Roman identity.

Bibliography Primary Sources Chronica Gallica 511, ed. by Richard W. Burgess, ‘The Gallic Chronicle of 511: A New Critical Edition with a Brief Introduction’, in Society and Culture in Late Antique Gaul: Revisiting the Sources, ed. by Ralph W. Mathisen and Danuta Shanzer (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 85–100. Consularia Caesaraugustana, ed. by Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann, Victoris Tunnunensis Chronicon cum reliquiis ex Consularibus Caesaraugusranis et Iohannis Biclarensis Chronicon (CCSL 173 A) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001). Fasti vindobonensis priores, ed. by Theodor Mommsen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi 9 (Berlin, 1892), pp. 274–336. Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum (MGH SRM I) (München: Unveränderter Nachdruck, 1983). Hydatius, Chronica, ed. by Richard W. Burgess (ed.), The Chronicle of Hydatius and the Consularia Constantinopolitana: Two Contemporary Accounts of the Final Years of the Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). ICERV = Inscripciones cristianas de la España romana y visigoda, ed. by José Vives, Biblioteca Histórica de la Biblioteca Balmes 18 (Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas/Instituto Enrique Flórez, 1969). Isidore of Seville, Historia Gothorum, Wandalorum, Suevorum (MGH AA, 11), Chronica Minora, II (München: Unveränderter Nachdruck, 1981). Isidore of Seville, History of the Goths, Vandals, and Suevi, trans. by Guido Donini and Gordon B. Ford Jr (Leiden: Brill, 1970). Jordanes, Romana et Getica, ed. by Theodor Mommsen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi 5 (München: Unveränderter Nachdruck, 1982), pp. 53–138. Olimpiodorus, Fragmenta, ed. by Roger C. Blockley, The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire: Eunapius, Olympiodorus, Priscus and Malchus, 2 vols (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1981–1983).

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Orosius, Historiarum adversus paganos, ed. by A. Lippold, Le storie contro i pagani (Roma: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, 1998). PL = Patrologia Latina, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, ed. by Jacques Paul Migne (Paris: Adalberto Hamman, 1844–1850). Ramírez, José Luis, and Pedro Mateos, Catálogo de las inscripciones cristianas de Mérida (Mérida: Museo Nacional de Arte Romano, Asociación de Amigos del Museo, 2000). RIT = Géza Alföldy, Die römischen Inschriften von Tarraco (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975). Vita Caesarii Episcopi Arelatensis, MGH SRM, III (München: Unveränderter Nachdruck, 1977). Vives, José (ed.), Liber Orationum de Festivitatibus. Oracional visigótico. Edición crítica (Barcelona: Biblioteca Balmes/CSIC, 1946).

Secondary Sources Abadal, Ramón de, Del reino de Tolosa al reino de Toledo (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1960). Arce, Javier, Bárbaros y romanos en Hispania, 400–507 A.D. (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2005). Arce, Javier, ‘La inscripción del puente de Mérida de época del rey Eurico (483 d.C.)’, Pyrenae, 39, no. 2 (2008), 121–126. Arrechea, Horacio, and Francisco Javier Jiménez, ‘Sobre la provincia en el reino hispano-visigodo de Toledo’, in XIV Centenario del Concilio de Toledo III (589–1989) (Toledo: Arzobispado de Toledo, 1991), pp. 387–392. Braudel, Fernand, Il Mediterraneo. Lo spazio e la storia. Gli uomini e la tradizione (Roma: Newton and Compton Editori, 2002). Castro, Dolores, and Michael J. Kelly (eds), Visigothic Symposium 2: Iberian Spaces, Iberian Identities (New York: Networks and Neighbours, 2018). Domingo, Javier, Pilar Bravo, Moisés Díaz, Reis Fabregat, Joan Menchon, Josep Francesc Roig, and M. Dolores Ynguanzo, ‘Nuevos elementos de escultura arquitectónica visigótica hallados en Tarragona’, in El cristianisme en l’Antiguitat tardana. Noves perspectives, ed. by Jordi López Vilar (Tarragona: Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2019), pp. 105–116. García Iglesias, Luis, ‘El intermedio ostrogodo en Hispania (507–549 d. C.)’, Hispania Antiqua, 5 (1975), 89–120. García Moreno, Luis A., ‘Estudios sobre la organización administrativa del reino visigodo de Toledo’, Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español, 44 (1974), 5–155. García Moreno, Luis A., ‘Vincentius dux provinciae Tarraconensis. Algunos problemas de la organización militar del Bajo Imperio en Hispania’, Hispania Antiqua, 7 (1977), 79–89.

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Koch, Manuel, ‘Nunc tempore potentis Getarum Eurici regis. El impacto visigodo en Hispania a través de la inscripción del puente de Mérida (483 d.C.)’, Pyrenae, 39, no. 2 (2008), 137–142. Kulikowski, Michael, Late Roman Spain and Its Cities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Lacarra, José María, ‘Panorama de la historia urbana en la Península Ibérica desde el siglo v al x’, in La città nell’alto Medievo, VI Settimana di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’alto Medioevo (Spoleto: CISAM, 1959), pp. 319–355. Larrañaga, Koldo, ‘Entorno al caso del Obispo Silvano de Calagurris: consideraciones sobre el estado de la iglesia del alto y medio Ebro a fines del Imperio’, Veleia, 6 (1989), 171–191. Leicht, Pier Silverio, ‘Epilogo’, in I Goti in Occidente. Problemi. III Settimana di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’alto Medioevo (Spoleto: CISAM, 1956), pp. 669–691. Liebeschuetz, John Hugo Wolfgang Gideon, ‘Ravenna to Aachen’, in Sedes regiae (ann. 400–800), ed. by Gisela Ripoll and José María Gurt Esparraguera (Barcelona: Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 2000), pp. 10–23. López Quiroga, Jorge, ‘La presencia “germánica” en Hispania en el siglo V d.C. Arqueología y procesos de etnogénesis en la Península ibérica’, Cuadernos de Prehistoria y Arqueología Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 30 (2004), 213–223. López Vilar, Jordi, Les basíliques paleocristianes del suburbi occidental de Tarraco. El temple septentrional i el complex martirial de Sant Fructuós, 2 vols (Tarragona: URV/ICAC, 2006). López Vilar, Jordi (ed.), El cristianisme en l’Antiguitat tardana. Noves perspectives. 4t Congrés Internacional d’Arqueologia I món antic. VII Reunió d’Arqueologia Cristiana Hispànica (Tarragona: Tarraco Biennal, 2019). Macias, Josep Maria, La ceràmica comuna tardoantiga a Tarraco. Anàlisi tipològica i històrica. Segles V–VII, Monografies Tarraconenses 1 (Tarragona: Museu Nacional Arqueològic de Tarragona, Tulcis, 1999). Macias, Josep Maria, and Josep Anton Remolà, ‘L’àrea portuària de Tarracona’, in VI Reunió d’Arqueologia Cristiana Hispànica (València, 8–10 maig de 2003), Monografies de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica 9 (Barcelona: IEC/Ajuntament de València/Universitat de València/Universitat de Barcelona/Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2005), pp. 175–187. Martin, Céline, La géographie du pouvoir dans l’Espagne visigothique (Villeneuve d’Ascq/Lille: Presses Universitaires de Septentrion, 2003). Orlandis, José, Historia de España. La España visigótica (Madrid: Gredos, 1977). Orselli, Alba Maria, ‘L’idée chrétienne de la ville: quelques suggestions pour l’Antiquité tardive et le Haut Moyen Age’, in The Idea and Ideal of the Town between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Gian Pietro Brogiolo and Bryan Ward-Perkins (Boston–Leiden–Köln: Brill, 1999), pp. 181–194.

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Pampliega, Javier, Los germanos en España (Pamplona: Ediciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 1998). Panella, Clementina, ‘Merci e scambi nel Mediterráneo tardoantico’, in Storia di Roma. III: L’età tardoantica. II. I luoghi e le culture (Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1993), pp. 613–697. Pérez Martínez, Meritxell, ‘Being Roman under Visigothic Rule: Space and Identity in the Northeastern Territories of the Iberian Peninsula (Hispania Tarraconensis)’, in Visigothic Symposium 2: Iberian Spaces, Iberian Identities, ed. by Dolores Castro and Michael J. Kelly (New York: Networks and Neighbours, 2018), pp. 131–154. Pérez Martínez, Meritxell, ‘El final del Imperio romano de Occidente en Tarraco. La inscripción de los emperadores León I y Anthemio’, Pyrenae, 45, no. 2 (2014), 117–138. Pérez Martínez, Meritxell, ‘Loca Sanctorum Tarraconis. Els escenaris del culte als sants en la Tarraco de l’Antiguitat tardana (ss. IV al VIII)’, in El cristianisme en l’Antiguitat tardana. Noves perspectives, ed. by Jordi López Vilar (Tarragona: Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2019), pp. 49–56. Pérez Martínez, Meritxell, ‘Obsessa Terrachona marithimas urbes obtinuit. L’impacte de la conquesta visigoda de Tarraco per Euric segons les fonts escrites i l’arqueologia’, Revista d’Arqueologia de Ponent, 23 (2013), 237–248. Pérez Martínez, Meritxell, Tarraco en la Antigüedad tardía. Cristianización y organización eclesiástica (Tarragona: Arola Editors, 2012). PLRE = Arnold Hugh Martin Jones, John Robert Martindale, and John Morris, The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971–1992). Remolà, Josep Anton, Las ánforas tardoantiguas en Tarraco (Hispania Tarraconensis). Siglos IV–VII d. C. (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 2000). Remolà, Josep Anton, Ada Lasheras, and Meritxell Pérez Martínez, ‘Tarraco, una base de operaciones de los ejércitos imperials (c. 420–470)’, in Urban Transformations in Late Antique West: Materials, Agents, and Models, ed. by André Carneiro, Neil Christie, and Pilar Diarte-Blasco (Coimbra: Coimbra University Press, 2020), pp. 135–154. Remolà, Josep Anton, and Jacinto Sánchez, ‘El sector occidental del suburbi portuari de Tarraco’, Butlletí Arqueològic, 32 (2010), 595–618. Remolà, Josep Anton, and Meritxell Pérez Martínez, ‘Centcelles y el praetorium del comes hispaniarum Asterio en Tarraco’, Archivo Español de Arqueología, 86 (2013), 161–186. Ripoll, Gisela, ‘The Archaeological Characterisation of the Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo: The Question of the Visigothic Cemeteries’, in Völker, Reiche und Namen im frühen Mittelalter ed. by Matthias Becher and Stefanie Dick (München: Fink, 2010), pp. 161–179.

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Saitta, Biagio, ‘Custodia legum civilitatis est indicium: Teoderico l’Amalo e la civiltà romana’, Antigüedad y cristianismo, VII (1990), 291–403. Sánchez Albornoz, Claudio, ‘El gobierno de las ciudades en España del siglo V al X’, in La città nell’alto Medievo, VI Settimana di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’alto Medioevo (Spoleto: CISAM, 1959), pp. 359–391. Sánchez Albornoz, Claudio, Ruina y extinción del municipio romano en Hispania e instituciones que le reemplazan (Buenos Aires: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 1943). Stein, Ernest, Histoire du Bas-Empire, 3 vols (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1968). TED’A, Un abocador del segle V d. C. en el Fòrum Provincial de Tàrraco (Tarragona: Memòries d’Excavació 2, 1989). Thompson, Edward A., Los godos en España (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1971). Torres, Manuel, ‘Instituciones económicas, sociales y político-administrativas de la Península hispánica durante los siglos V, VII y VIII’, in Historia de España. III: España visigoda, 414–711 d. C., ed. by Ramón Menéndez Pidal (Madrid: EspasaCalpe, 1963), pp. 223–245. Ubric, Purificación, La Iglesia en la Hispania del siglo V (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2004). Velázquez, Isabel, ‘El puente de Mérida; algo más que un problema de traducción’, Pyrenae, 39, no. 2 (2008), 127–135. Ward-Perkins, Bryan, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

About the Author Meritxell Pérez Martínez got her PhD in Medieval History at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona, Spain) in 2005. She is Professor in INSAFFacultat de Teologia de Catalunya, and Visiting Researcher in Institut Català d’Arqueologia Clàssica/ Universitat Rovira i Virgili and Museu Nacional Arqueològic de Tarragona (Tarragona, Spain).

5.

Coexisting Leaderships in the Visigothic Cities: A ‘Coopetitive’ Model Pablo Poveda Arias

Abstract Throughout the fifth century, during the process of dissolving imperial power in the West and with the arrival of the new barbarian powers, cities experienced a change in urban leadership patterns, with a weakening of traditional authorities and the strengthening of new ones, such as the bishops and the comites. Although on many occasions the traditional authorities did not disappear, the truth is these new officials became the main actors in the post-imperial cities, and also in the Visigothic kingdom. The main aim of this work will be to analyse the different coexistence and relationship patterns that occurred between the different urban leaderships that coexisted in time and space in the Visigothic kingdom, by applying the notion of ‘Coopetition’. Keywords: bishops, comites, coopetition, power dynamics, Visigothic kingdom

Introduction1 The dismantling of imperial power in the West and its replacement with new political realities did not imply a change in the status of cities, which continued to play a pre-eminent role throughout the entire post-imperial 1 This study has been funded by the Recognized Research Group ‘Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages in Hispania’ (ATAEMHIS) attached to the University of Salamanca and has been developed within the framework of the Center for Advanced Studies ‘RomanIslam – Center for Comparative Empire and Transcultural Studies’, sponsored by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), and within the research project HAR2016-76094 funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of the government of Spain.

Castro, D. and Ruchesi, F. (ed.), Leadership, Social Cohesion, and Identity in Late Antique Spain and Gaul (500–700). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463725958_ch05

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period, albeit with regional variations.2 Not in vain did Visigoths turned them into their main administrative centres once they settled in Gaul.3 Consequently, cities were the rooting centres for the main territorial power agents delegated by the Gothic monarchy to rule urban areas and their respective territoria. However, they had to coexist with other urban leaders – particularly bishops – in the exercise of their duties whose authority had originated prior to Visigothic domination. The civic authority of the bishops was by no means trivial, to the point that cities and episcopal sees became practically synonyms from the fifth century.4 Our aim in this work is to view the urban leaderships that took root in the cities integrated into the Visigothic kingdom from their Tolosan phase to their definitive fall following the Muslim invasion of 711. We will identify them, evaluate their influence on cities, and delve into the different modes of interrelation between the different agents involved. We therefore start from the premise that political and social interactions between them could vary from cooperation to confrontation,5 or even both at the same time. In this regard, it will be particularly interesting to analyse the competitive dynamics that took place between the different urban leaders,6 but also instances of cooperation within this competitive scenario. Thus, we suggest the category ‘coopetition’ as an instrument to comprehend the power dynamics in the Visigothic kingdom,7 a concept that has been applied in other post-imperial political realities,8 but is still unobserved in Visigothic case. Our analysis will essentially be based on the legal prescriptions that defined the relationship intended by the Visigothic power to exist between 2 These become particularly evident in the case of Hispania (Martin, La géographie du pouvoir, pp. 59–60). 3 On the relevance of cities in post-imperial Hispania, see Díaz, ‘City and Territory’. From an archaeological perspective, see Guttiérrez Lloret, ‘Le città della Spagna’. On the Gallic case, see Loseby, ‘Decline and Change’. From a general perspective on the entire post-imperial West, see García Moreno, ‘La ciudad en la Antigüedad tardía’; Wickham, ‘Bounding the City’ pp. 65–66. 4 Orselli, ‘Coscienza e immagini della città’; Wickham, ‘Bounding the City’, p. 67; Mazel, L’évêque et le territoire, pp. 21–32. 5 Martin, La géographie du pouvoir, p. 133. 6 Quoting Curchin’s words: ‘[T]he notion of elite solidarity is largely fictitious and ignores the dynamics of competition for power. […] [T]he horizontal cohesion of shared elite interests and values was in constant tension with the vertical loyalties of local relationships of power’ (Curchin, ‘Curials and Local Government’, p. 231). The variable of competition between urban leaders is also presented by Fernández, ‘Transformaciones institucionales y liderazgo cívico’, p. 271. 7 On the notion of ‘coopetition’, see Brandenburger and Nalebuff, Co-opetition; Le Roy and Yami, eds, Stratégies de coopetition. On its usefulness in understanding the historic dynamics of this period, see Le Jan, ‘Rivaliser, coopérer dans les sociétés’. 8 Le Jan et al., eds, Coopétition.

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the different urban power agents. We will also rely on other sources that can still occasionally provide us with specific cases of interaction between urban leaders.9

Identifying Urban Leaderships in Visigothic Hispania The urban leadership that flourished the most after imperial power in the West was dismantled was that of the bishops,10 something they achieved by impersonating an authority supported by institutional, social, and charismatic or spiritual elements.11 In the institutional field, bishops had been appropriating different competencies in local governments since the late imperial phase, which transcended the religious and ecclesiastical sphere.12 Performing these functions may or may not have been legally sanctioned. As stated by G.A. Cecconi, since the fifth century the civil government ‘è costruito su un intercambio elástico di funzioni formalizzate, ruoli di fatto e attribuzioni ufficiose’.13 From a social point of view, bishops established dense patronage networks in their community, much denser and more powerful than those of any other civic power agent.14 This was added to their authority as religious leaders in their community, which was claimed, for example, in the celebration of liturgy and the capitalization on the cult of saints.15 The appropriation of these different aspects of authority transformed bishops into urban leaders positioned in-between the secular and the religious spheres.16 9 Given this imbalance between legislative sources and the other available evidence, we will resort to Merovingian Gaul as a comparative complement for our reasoning. 10 For the Hispanic case, see Ubric Rabaneda, La Iglesia en la Hispania del siglo V. Regarding Gaul, see Heinzelmann, Bischofsherrschaft in Gallien; Beaujard, ‘Le réseau de pouvoirs’. 11 Gauthier, ‘Le réseau de pouvoirs’. 12 Some specialists deny bishops playing any role in local government (Curchin, ‘The Role of Civic Leaders’, p. 289). 13 Cecconi, ‘Crisi e trasformazioni del governo municipal’, p. 299. 14 See Fuentes Hinojo, ‘Patrocinio eclesiástico’; Osland, ‘Text and Context’. On the construction of these networks, the Vitas Sanctorum Patrum Emeretensium gathers some of the mechanisms used by bishops to this effect (VSPE, IV–V). On the bishop’s social leadership, see also Fernández Ortiz de Guinea, ‘Funciones sociales del cuerpo episcopal’. 15 On this more charismatic component of episcopal authority, see Gauthier, ‘Le réseau de pouvoirs de l’évêque’, p. 173. On the role of liturgy in the consolidation of episcopal leadership, see Jussen, ‘Über “Bischofsherrschaften” und die Prozeduren’. On the capitalization on the cult of saints by bishops, see Castellanos, ‘Las reliquias de santos’. 16 Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity, pp. 5–6. We must also reject every strict (and presentoriented) distinction between both spheres; an inexistent dichotomy considering that bishops performed duties that went beyond religious and ecclesiastical ones.

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Among the civil duties appropriated by bishops, even without legal endorsement, were those assigned to municipal curias.17 For example, evergetism and certain notarial functions were performed by bishops,18 among others, as well as some tax-related prerogatives.19 Thus, we know that at least since the sixth century, but probably earlier, bishops enjoyed a significant part of the regulatory competencies in terms of tax activity and the appointment of tax agents, particularly numerarii, which had been delegated to the curia during the Late Roman and Tolosan periods.20 They also obtained the ability to appoint defensores,21 a f igure with judicial responsibilities in minor cases, and in charge of protecting the populus, especially the most disadvantaged population groups.22 The episcopal ability to appoint defensores and numerarii suggests that both figures were subordinated to the bishop,23 at least for some time, which explains the supervisory role on their activity claimed by the episcopacy at the Third Council of Toledo in 589.24 Maybe this is why possible conflicts of interest between bishops and these agents are not considered in legislation. These 17 Fernández Ortiz de Guinea, ‘Funciones sociales del cuerpo episcopal’, p. 461; García Moreno ‘La monarquía visigoda y la Iglesia’, p. 266. 18 LV, II, 5, 13; II, 5, 16; IV, 3, 4. The Visigothic king and his territorial agents would have shared this task with the bishop (Curchin, ‘The Role of Civic Leaders’, p. 295; Osland, ‘Text and Context’). 19 Pérez Martínez, ‘La burocracia episcopal’ p. 27; Curchin, ‘Curials and Local Government’, p. 231. On the tax-related role of bishops in the Visigothic kingdom, see Souvirón Bono, ‘Fiscalidad y control eclesiástico en la Hispania visigoda’; Osland, ‘Tribute and Coinage in the Visigothic Kingdom’. 20 Conc. I Barc. (a. 540), De fisco Barcinonensi. On the tax-related functions of the curia in the Tolosan period, see Dumézil, ‘Le comte et l’administration de la cité’, pp. 76–77. 21 LV, XII, 1, 2. In the Visigothic kingdom of Tolosa, Alaric’s legislation established that defensores should be appointed only with the community’s agreement; therefore, without any external interference (LRV, I, 10, 1). Bishops are not conferred any role in that context, even if they possibly participated in the designation of said magistrates since the early f ifth century (LRV, Nou. Val. 12; cf. Laniado, ‘Le christianisme et l’évolution des institutions municipales’). We might wonder if the aim of this measure, rather than to describe a reality, was to prescribe some new dynamics with the objective of limiting episcopal ascendency over defensores, which has been documented for later periods, but could possibly have been real at this point. This would coincide with Alaric’s legislation, which was aimed at consciously limiting the power of bishops in certain spheres (LRV, XVI, 5, 1; Matthews, ‘Interpreting the Interpretationes’, p. 22). Such deprivation of responsibilities is implicit in the introduction to the Lex, when copies of it are ordered to be sent to the comes ciuitatum as a law source, but not to bishops (LRV, Exemplar auctoritatis). Maybe bishops were not given any competencies on tax agents for the same reason (LRV XII, 2, 1). We can see a parallel case in the East, where bishops had been choosing defensores since earlier times (Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall, pp. 110–111). 22 LRV, I, 10, 2; II, 1, 8; VIII, 2, 1. 23 García Moreno ‘La monarquía visigoda y la Iglesia’, p. 266. 24 Conc. III Tol. (a. 589), c. 18; Curchin, ‘Curials and Local Government’, p. 231. See also Mellado Rodríguez, ‘Intervención episcopal en la política judicial y fiscal’, p. 841.

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duties were added to others related to civil justice, with jurisdiction also over laypeople, which bishops had already received in the Late Roman period,25 but continued more or less intensely in the Visigothic kingdom.26 In fact, Isidore considered the exercise of justice as one of the responsibilities of the episcopal ministry.27 Bishops, however, were not the only urban leaders in Visigothic cities. Since the Tolosan period, possibly since Euric’s time, the Visigothic power more or less systematically delegated civil and military government tasks in cities on comites ciuitatis.28 Over time, comites gradually broadened their functions in the civil context, especially in justice, thus becoming the main secular judges.29 The position of the comes ciuitatis was initially different from that of the iudex, in spite of having the same competencies.30 This may be the reason why both terms were eventually used equally to name the main magistrate in the city.31 Besides their judicial duties, which are undoubtedly the most remarkable, they performed other policing/administrative tasks from quite early times.32 In the Hispanic Visigothic kingdom, comites were also granted tax-related duties, which would be reinforced throughout the seventh century.33 However, said duties contrast the lack of participation 25 On the bishop’s judicial duties in the late empire, see Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity, pp. 243–252. 26 Conc. Tarrac. (a. 516), cc. 4, 10; VSPE, V, 11, 90–114. On the evolution of the bishop’s judicial duties in the Visigothic kingdom, see Poveda Arias, ‘Ruling Visigothic Hispania’. 27 Isid. Hisp., De Eccles. Offic. II, 5, 17. 28 Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘El gobierno de las ciudades de España’, pp. 362–363; Wolfram, History of the Goths, pp. 214–215; Dumézil, ‘Le comte et l’administration de la cité’, pp. 85–90. 29 On the comes judicial duties in the Tolosan period, see CE, 322, 2; Sid. Apoll., Epist. VII, 2, 5; LRV, Exemplar auctoritatis; II, 1, 12; XII, 1, 5; XVI, 1, 3; Dumézil, ‘Le comte et l’administration de la cité’. Since then comites acquired the ability of sentencing on curias (LRV, XII, 1, 5). On the comes ciuitatis’s judicial duties during the Hispanic phase, see LV, II, 1, 13; II, 1, 27; III, 4, 17; III, 6, 1; IV, 2, 14; VI, 1, 1; VII, 1, 5; VIII, 4, 29; IX, 1, 6; X, 1, 16; Conc. Narbon. (a. 589), cc. 4; 9; 14. See also García Moreno, ‘Estudios sobre la organización administrativa’, pp. 10–11; King, Law and Society, pp. 79–81; Martin, La géographie du pouvoir, p. 162. 30 CE, 322; Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘El gobierno de las ciudades de España’, pp. 363–366, 374; Rouche, L’Aquitaine des wisigoths aux arabes, p. 263. 31 LV, X, 1, 16; García Moreno, ‘Estudios sobre la organización administrativa’, p. 10; Dumézil, ‘Le comte et l’administration de la cité’, p. 87. The term iudex became polysemic, being used for different figures with judicial duties (King, Law and Society, pp. 80–81; Martin, La géographie du pouvoir, p. 151). 32 CE, 322; LRV, IX, 32, 2; II, 4, 1; III, 1, 3; LV, VII, 4, 2; IX, 2, 1; IX, 2, 3–5; García Moreno, ‘Estudios sobre la organización administrativa’, pp. 10–11; Dumézil, ‘Le comte et l’administration de la cité’, pp. 85–86. For a later context, see LV, III, 4, 17; VI, 1, 1; VII, 4, 2; VIII, 4, 26; IX, 1, 20. 33 Conc. XIII Tol. (a. 683), Decretum de relaxandis tributis; Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘El gobierno de las ciudades de España’, p. 381; King, Law and Society, p. 69. Cf. Martin, La géographie du pouvoir,

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of curials in taxing within the same context, which may also suggest a takeover of the curia’s functions.34 The comes ciuitatis worked, at least in ordinary situations, as the main reference of secular authority within its jurisdiction. In the absence of confirmation from our sources, we must suppose that every city had one at its head,35 as evidenced by one of the formulae, in which even the comes’s ministry appears as a form of dating.36 In short, and quoting Céline Martin’s words, the comes ciuitatis ‘recevait une part d’auctoritas regia pour gérer tous les aspects de la vie publique dans le territoire de la cité où il était nommé’.37 Although the comes was the main secular authority in the city in the ordinary scheme, urban leadership was occasionally performed by a higher figure, such as duces. They would have essentially been military figures, but during their mission and given their leadership in the military sphere,38 duces would have had government roles in civil affairs, particularly in the cities where they lived.39 These extramilitary functions had originally been of an unofficial nature, but over time they were legally sanctioned, confirming the dux as the main judicial and tax authority where he lived.40 This is the role we associate to duces Salla and Claudius in Merida or Dogilan in Lugo,41 to which we could add the ones based in Septimania, who could possibly have performed their leadership in Narbonne.42 The relevance that other political or social agents had in the government should also be valued. We have already mentioned that the role of the p. 158. This situation would be connected to that in Merovingian Gaul, where the attribution of tax duties by comites has also been documented (Greg. Tur., DLH IX, 30). 34 Erwig’s edict itself confirms this loss of tax-related functions in the curia (King, Law and Society, p. 69; Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall, p. 134). 35 García Moreno, ‘Estudios sobre la organización administrativa’, pp. 10–11. 36 Form. Wisig. 39. 37 Martin, La géographie du pouvoir, p. 164. 38 The dux was the main military officer in the kingdom, immediately below the king (Martin, La géographie du pouvoir, p. 168). 39 Although they would have exerted their power in a relatively large region, we question the institutionalization of the dux provinciae. In this line, see Díaz, ‘El esquema provincial en el contexto administrativo’, pp. 94–98. 40 Poveda Arias, ‘The Role of the Military Factor’, pp. 121–123; LV, II, 1, 18–19; II, 1, 27; II, 2, 7; III, 4, 17; IV, 5, 6; Conc. XIII Tol. (a. 683), Edictum de tributis relaxatis; Vit. Fruct. 2. The dux’s ministry would originally have been of strictly temporary character, just as long as their military mission lasted, but over time the permanent presence of a dux was required in certain regions, such as Septimania. On the temporary character of their ministry, see Barnwell, Emperor, Prefects and Kings, pp. 79–80. On the duties of the dux, see García Moreno, ‘Estudios sobre la organización administrativa’. 41 ICERV, no. 363; VSPE, V, 10–11; Vit. Fruct. 7. 42 This would be the case of Liuva, Argimundus, Gundemar, Bulgar, or Sisenand, among others.

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curia had been waning since the Tolosan period,43 as bishops and comites gradually absorbed a significant part of their duties. One of the factors involved must have been the unappealing responsibilities of the curia, leading to a decline of this institution at least from the end of the fifth century, or so suggested the attempts of the Visigothic power to ensure its survival.44 This situation must also have taken place in Hispania before the Visigothic domination. Hydatius, for example, denied the entire role of the curia in the urban government,45 which proves that it did not even work as a reference of authority in fifth-century Iberia. Beyond its relevance, the curia kept working nominally during a large part of the Visigothic period, but it eventually disappeared in many cities from the mid-seventh century, if not earlier.46 In light of the absolute prominence of bishops, comites, and, when applicable, duces, the curia’s functions until its disappearance would have been of an essentially notarial nature.47 Therefore, we cannot attribute an urban leadership role to the curia. We do not, however, dismiss the possibility that it could have at some point, but it was lost at quite an early stage of the Visigothic kingdom. The ordo curialis would have also been displaced as an influential social figure in cities, in favour of a very limited group of local potentes,48 particularly the few that did not disregard civic issues.49 However, their specific influence in the government of cities would depend on the role that bishops and comites would grant them. We might think – like in the case 43 Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘El gobierno de las ciudades de España’, pp. 368–373; Ubric Rabaneda, ‘El ocaso de las instituciones’; Martin, La géographie du pouvoir, p. 108; Fernández, Aristocrats and Statehood, p. 165; Curchin, ‘Curials and Local Government’, p. 231. On the functions of the curia in the Visigothic kingdom of Tolosa, see Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘El gobierno de las ciudades de España’, p. 369; Rouche, L’Aquitaine des wisigoths aux arabes, pp. 261–263; Dumézil, ‘Le comte et l’administration de la cité’, pp. 75–77. From a general perspective, see Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall, pp. 124–136. 44 Dumézil, ‘Le comte et l’administration de la cité’, pp. 80–81. 45 Díaz, ‘City and Territory’, p. 18. 46 Curchin, ‘Curials and Local Government’, p. 231. The city of Cordoba might be an exception (García Moreno, ‘Building an Ethnic Identity’, esp. 276–277). 47 As stated in Form. Wisig. 21; 25. Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘El gobierno de las ciudades de España’, p. 369; Curchin, ‘The Role of Civic Leaders’, pp. 303–304. The notarial duties of the curia are testified since the Tolosan phase. LRV, IV, 4, 4; VIII, 5, 1. 48 Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall, pp. 124–127; Magalhães de Oliveira, ‘Le peuple et le gouvernement des cités’, p. 42, although it would open the door to this assumption not to be true in the Visigothic case. Similar dynamics can be observed in Gaul (Loseby, ‘Decline and Change’, p. 90). 49 Generally speaking, some carelessness can be perceived in local elites about urban government issues since the fifth century (Curchin, ‘The Role of Civic Leaders’, pp. 285–287).

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of Gaul – that the disappearance from sources (particularly ecclesiastical ones) of these powerful sectors of the populus was actually linked to a vindication strategy for episcopal leadership over the other urban agents.50 However, their lack of prominence in legislation does not allow us to attribute an urban leadership role to them; at least not at the same level as that of bishops, comites, and duces. Moreover, we consider that the populus, in a broad sense, would have also been deprived of all decision-making capacities in municipal government.51 It is true though that some regulations from the Tolosan period and subsequent afford it some competencies in the appointment of certain magistrates, such as numerarii or defensores.52 This has led some authors to assume that the common urban population played an active role in the administration of Iberian cities during the Visigothic period,53 which is nevertheless questionable. The term populus – but also its variant ciues – eventually became polysemic and could refer to the population in a broad sense or to the powerful sectors of society, among others.54 Thus, it is quite plausible for regulations to allude to this more restrictive definition of populus when they attribute it a minimum role in decision-making.55 In short, we dismiss the relevance of all collective procedures in the government of cities,56 which, if ever happened, would have only have been nominal in nature under the superior authority of bishops and comites. Some historiographical sectors claim a leadership role for the figure of the defensor, with an ability to control, for instance, bishops.57 However, this hypothesis is questionable considering that bishops influenced the appointment of defensores; therefore, it is difficult to assume that the latter would have the capacity to control the former. The fact of giving them a wider margin of autonomous action, putting them at the same level as bishops 50 Loseby, ‘Decline and Change’, pp. 91–92. 51 Its role became more active and determinant during the Late Roman phase (Magalhães de Oliveira, ‘Le peuple et le gouvernement des cités’). 52 LRV, I, 10, 1; LV, XII, 1, 2. 53 Magalhães de Oliveira, ‘Le peuple et le gouvernement des cités’, pp. 42–43, n. 182. 54 This polysemy is particularly remarkable in Gallic casuistry (Durliat, ‘Episcopus, civis et populus’, pp. 185–193; Kreiner, ‘About the Bishop’, p. 328). 55 Castellanos, ‘The Political Nature of Taxation in Visigothic Spain’, p. 219. 56 Cf. Fernández, ‘Transformaciones institucionales y liderazgo cívico’; Martínez Jiménez, ‘Local Citizenship and the Visigothic Kingdom’, p. 201. 57 Fernández, ‘Transformaciones institucionales y liderazgo cívico’, p. 261. On the figure of defensor ciuitatis in the Late Roman phase, see Chinon, Étude historique sur le ‘defensor civitatis’; Schmidt-Hofner, ‘Der defensor civitatis un die Entstehung des Notabelnregiments’; Frakes, ‘The Defensor Civitatis’.

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or comites, is just idealization.58 As in the case of the curia, bishops,59 but maybe also comites,60 gradually absorbed their functions, which would explain their disappearance, possibly by the middle of the seventh century.61 Such dynamics make sense, given that the defensor played one of the main roles of bishops; protecting the weakest and most disadvantaged people, and we assume that the episcopacy would not have been willing to share it, as it was one of the bases that justified their authority.62

Relationship Patterns between Different Urban Leaderships Once those figures embodying leadership in Visigothic cities are identified, we must analyse the relationship and coexistence patterns between them. This is not a trivial matter, because the areas of influence of bishops, comites, ciuitatis, and, when applicable, duces, overlapped each other.63 They were, in short, different powers ruling the same social mass, and for this reason, they could not ignore each other.64 This situation forced cooperation between them, but also, sharing the power over the same space at an equal level generated some unavoidable competition in order to delimit their respective jurisdictions in their favour. This coexistence of cooperative and competitive behaviour is given the name of ‘coopetition’. Said dynamics could take place simultaneously,65 but also at different times and intensities, as we will try to illustrate based on the casuistry documented by our sources. 58 Cf. Martínez Jiménez, ‘Urban Identity and Citizenship in the West’, p. 104. 59 Such dynamics find their correspondence in Merovingian Gaul (Prinz, ‘Die bischöfliche Stadhersschaft im Frankenreich’, pp. 4–5). 60 Fernández, ‘Transformaciones institucionales y liderazgo cívico’, p. 264. 61 Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘El gobierno de las ciudades de España’, p. 382. Martin, La géographie du pouvoir, p. 151, suggests that they disappeared in Reccared’s time. 62 Sources claim the role of defensores for bishops (Isid. Hisp., Sent. III, 45, 3–5; De Eccl. Offic. II, 2, 18–19; Conc. IV Tol. [a. 633], c. 32; ICERV, no. 277). On the episcopal role in the defence of the weak and the poor, see Brown, Poverty and Leadership. 63 This idea has been highlighted for Merovingian Gaul (Van Dam, Leadership and Community, p. 185). In the case of bishops and comites, their area of territorial jurisdiction was also coincident (Díaz, ‘City and Territory’, pp. 23–24). 64 ‘Évêques est pouvoirs politiques s’adressent aux mêmes individus, vivant sur un même territoire, et ne peuvent s’ignorer’ (Basdevant-Gaudemet, ‘L’évêque d’après la législation’, p. 482). 65 ‘Co-opetition refers to simultaneous cooperation and competition between different individual or organizational actors’ (Gnyawali et al., ‘Coopetition’, p. 386); ‘la coopetition équivaut à coopérer sur certains points […] et à se concurrence sur d’autres simultanément’ (PellegrinBoucher, La coopetition, p. 40). References taken from Malbos, ‘Le roi, les grands et les évêques’, pp. 322–323.

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Regarding the Tolosan period, this coopetitive model becomes useful to understand, for instance, the relationships between Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Clermont, and comes et dux Victorius, appointed by the Visigothic king Euric to rule the region of Aquitaine, including the city of Clermont when it fell under his power.66 Sidonius dedicated laudatory words to Victorius, bringing the distended relationship between both direct leaders of the city and its territorium to light.67 However, at the same time as they maintained this cooperation, both of them competed directly as leaders of Clermont, which helps us understand the euergetic activity of Victorius, who financed the columns in the basilica of Saint Julien de Brioude, as well as a church where he deposited Saint Lawrence’s relics.68 We can therefore observe that Victorius tried to claim his leadership in the religious sphere in order to counteract the enormous ascendency of Sidonius in Clermont’s Christian community. We know that Sidonius fought like no other bishop in Gaul to prevent his city from falling under Visigothic control,69 maybe to avoid having to share the urban leadership that he had so far enjoyed individually. His approach towards Victorius, who represented a power that, until shortly before, Sidonius had described as a public enemy,70 could therefore be understood as a response to a new context that forced him to cooperate with his main competitors as a means of survival. The relationship between dux Salla and bishop Zeno of Merida can be understood similarly, as they promoted the reconstruction of the city walls and bridge.71 This cooperation occurred despite Salla’s presence in Merida implying a competitive factor for Zeno over the leadership of the city that he had enjoyed on his own until then.72 The reason why he tolerated such a situation could be the need to confront the Sueves, something he could only do with the help from the Visigoth’s military wing.73 In these cases, the relationships between bishops and urban leaders were rather cooperative, but on other occasions, and always within a coopetitive context, they could 66 Greg. Tur., DLH, II, 20; In Glor. Martyr. 44; Vit. Patr. III, 1; In Glor. Confess. 32. On the difficulties revolving around his appointment, see PLRE II, 1162–1164. On the nature of his mission as a dux, see Dumézil, Servir l’État barbare, pp. 115, 119. 67 Sid. Apoll., Ep. VII, 17, 1. 68 Greg. Tur., DLH, II, 20; Brown, Through the Eye, p. 406. 69 Sid. Apoll., Ep. VII, 6, 10; VII, 7. 70 Sid. Apoll., Ep. VII, 7, 2. 71 ICERV, no. 363. For reporting this cooperation, see Koch, ‘Nunc tempore potentis Getarum Eurici regis’, p. 140; Osland, ‘Text and Context’, p. 622. 72 We cannot rule out the possibility that their cooperation was, fully or partially, a pragmatic act to share the costs of a work that was enormously expensive, yet imperative. 73 García Moreno, ‘Mérida y el reino visigodo de Tolosa’, pp. 231–236.

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become tenser, either due to overlapping jurisdictions, factional rivalry, or just a lack of personal affinity.74 One of these last two factors was perhaps what had influenced the confrontation between comes Gomacharius and bishop Leo of Agde over the former’s appropriation of a property that had until then been in hands of the city’s church, as transmitted by Gregory of Tours.75 The aforementioned cases are related to either cooperation or competitive dynamics between different urban power figures, but they also reflect how both phenomena could take place at the same time, even if at different intensities. Quoting Lucie Malbos, ‘la coopétition, c’est un mélange de coopération et de compétition, mais pas nécessairement à parts égales’.76 The documentation available on the Visigothic kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula might allow us to illustrate said dynamics in all their complexity. Unfortunately, most of it is essentially of legal character, and therefore only represents the behavioural model that legislators prescribe to the different agents that had some government responsibilities; in this case, those based in cities. Nevertheless, the enormous corpus available provides us with a much more detailed vision than the isolated episodes we can find in other sources. The impression we may have about the Iberian phase is that the cooperative way was initially promoted, maybe in light of the need for the Visigothic power to impose itself over the peninsula. For example, in the first attempts to regulate the interactions between the Church and the secular power, the latter settling for cooperating on an equal footing with ecclesiastical powers, for instance, in cases of parricide, or improper or incestuous marriages, but also in religious matters involving idolatry or profane celebrations.77 We can thus observe how in the establishment stage of the Visigothic power in Hispania, it facilitated bishops’ duties in the secular sphere together with its representative agents, whose actions would have been legitimized in this sense thanks to the political, social, and symbolic capital that the episcopacy had within its communities.78 Sources 74 A combination of these factors is also plausible. 75 Greg. Tur., In Glor. Martyr. 78. 76 Malbos, ‘Le roi, les grands et les évêques’, p. 332. 77 Conc. III Tol. (a. 589), cc. 16–17; 23. See also Conc. I Hisp. (a. 590), c. 3. In certain cases, particularly those related to idolatry or maleficent practices, both powers were kept as analogous justice bodies, except for the king (Conc. Emeret. [a. 666], c. 15; Conc. XII Tol. [a. 681], c. 11; Conc. XVI Tol. [a. 693], c. 2). The cooperation between bishops and secular powers in judicial issues is a clearly testif ied fact in Merovingian Gaul (Gauthier, ‘Le réseau de pouvoirs de l’évêque’, pp. 189–190. Greg. Tur., DLH, VIII, 39; Vit. Patr. VIII, 9). 78 King, Law and Society, p. 158.

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also show how the episcopacy occasionally appealed to secular power as well. This was the case of Montanus of Toledo, who threatened the clergy in Palencia, with which he had a dispute, to resort to Amalaric’s delegate agent Erganus, who probably was based in Toledo.79 This cooperation sometimes took place against the current political order. This is the case, on one hand, of Arian bishop Athalocus of Narbonne, who conspired together with comites Granista and Vildigernus with the purpose of usurping Reccared’s throne, and on the other, of Arian bishop of Merida Sunna, who also during the same king’s reign, colluded with some Gothic comites to kill the Catholic bishop of the city, Masona. The city of Merida happened to be ruled by a dux at that time, Claudius, who cooperated with Masona to put an end to the conspiracy.80 We can therefore observe that cooperation was promoted when one of the parties needed the other (or both each other), but the cooperation would sometimes lose relevance and turn into confrontation, whenever that power had to be shared in the long term.81 We must bear in mind that secular agents acted on an uneven playing field against bishops. Like imperial powers back in the day,82 secular urban leaders had to coexist with episcopal power, which had strong local support. The local origin of most bishops and the lifelong nature of their position favoured their ability to deploy dense and powerful personal social influence networks on the community, often with support from their own family networks. No other urban power, not even secular, reached such a degree of social support,83 which, added to the stability of their position, made it difficult to eclipse as an urban figure.84 As opposed to bishops, we must assume that duces and comites were sometimes chosen from among the local aristocracy, but we cannot believe that this was the way it worked in all or even most occasions. In such situations, the individuals appointed by the king had to face a barrage of things that were new to them, against a bishop who was already fully integrated into it for the aforementioned reasons. We must also add the fact that the role of comes or dux could be temporary in the government of the city if the king so decided. That is to say, although their 79 Conc. II Tol. (a. 531); Martin, ‘Montanus et les schimatiques’. 80 VSPE, V, 10–12. 81 Brandenburger and Nalebuff, Co-opetition, p. 250. 82 Slootjes, ‘Governor Trumped by Bishop’. 83 Fernández Ortiz de Guinea, ‘Funciones sociales del cuerpo episcopal’, p. 452. 84 ‘Contrairement aux principaux fonctionnaires urbains, l’évêque incarnait dans la cité une figure individuelle extrêmement stable, et d’autant plus puissant’ (Martin, La géographie du pouvoir, pp. 113–114). See also Ubric Rabaneda, ‘Forjando una alianza para la dominación’, p. 157.

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role could be lifelong, and sometimes even bequeathed to their offspring, the king had the power to dismiss and appoint new comites or duces. He could claim, for instance, causa inutilitas, i.e. incompetence to perform a certain function.85 The disadvantage of secular powers versus bishops became evident in some of their duties, such as justice. The authority of the comes was undermined by the existence of a parallel judicial court, the episcopalis audientia, with the capacity to judge even cases that were in theory limited to the civil sphere. Furthermore, episcopal justice, as opposed to secular justice, was seen as more appealing by the population, given that it was free of costs.86 The greater familiarity of the bishop with the local conditions and people must have also been an appealing factor,87 as well as the assumption that bishops would be less corruptible in the exercise of justice.88 Bishops also found their interests threatened by the exercise of justice in a parallel way to theirs, or that is the impression we get from the distrust and the critics by Isidore of Seville and Taio of Zaragoza towards secular judges.89 Isidore even used his writings to encourage the Christian community to choose the justice exercised by bishops over the secular one.90 It would be reasonable to wonder if the literary claims of episcopal leadership that placed it above secular agents and proclaimed bishops as more effective leaders than the others could actually be a way to respond to their presence.91 In a certain way, we could say that the coming of the Visigothic power and the appointment of comites or duces in cities undermined the urban leadership that bishops had enjoyed.92 In short, due to these structural conditions, we can observe a competitive atmosphere in the justice field.93 However, within the ‘coopetition’ framework 85 Conc. VI Tol. (a. 638), c. 14; Barbero and Vigil, La formación del feudalismo, pp. 122–125; Martin, La géographie du pouvoir, p. 146. 86 Episcopal justice was theoretically free, although some small donations were allowed as a form of gratitude (Conc. Tarrac. [a. 516], c. 10). 87 Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity, p. 245. On the handicaps of secular versus episcopal justice, see p. 248. 88 Fernández Ortiz de Guinea, ‘Funciones sociales del cuerpo episcopal’, p. 454. 89 Isid. Hisp., Sent. III, 52, 7–9; Taio Caesar., Sent. V, 12. 90 Isid. Hisp., Sent. III, 56, 1. Isidore claims for justice to be one of the main duties of bishops in other parts of his work (Isid. Hisp., Sent. III, 45, 48–52). 91 Isid. Hisp., Sent. III, 51, 3. 92 Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘El gobierno de las ciudades de España’, p. 386; Curchin, ‘The Role of Civic Leaders’. 93 This idea has been more exploited in relation to Merovingian Gaul (Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, p. 10).

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that we suggest, it did not contradict the necessary cooperation that took place between both powers throughout the entire period,94 a situation that could be observed since Reccared’s time. After dux Claudius and bishop Masona discovered the aforementioned Arian conspiracy of Sunna and the Gothic comites, we know that the bishop was reluctant to execute the sentence issued by secular justice, represented in the city by Claudius himself.95 Funnily enough, the Visigothic power somehow incited this situation. During Reccared’s reign, the previously mentioned measures calling both powers to judicial cooperation were implemented at the same time as others that promoted a competitive situation. Thus, it was determined that bishops should supervise the action of iudices locorum and actores fiscalium in order to prevent abuses of authority.96 Besides defensores and numerarii,97 comites ciuitatis and duces, if applicable, would have undoubtedly be among them.98 If we base ourselves on Reccared’s civil law, such tasks were limited to only those of vigilance, without any repressing abilities over possible abuses of authority, which would be exclusively a responsibility for the king and for those to whom he would delegate them.99 By contemplating punishments for those bishops who would not inform the king of such abuses of authority, and at the same time as competition was promoted, Reccared’s rule shows some margin for cooperation between these powers, which could collude to prevent the king from being informed of any malpractice. This competition would sometimes not be channelled through legal courses. Thanks to a letter included in the Epistale Wisigothicae, we know that bishop Aurasius of Toledo had a strained relationship with comes Froga due to the favourable treatment he gave to the Jewish community of the 94 See infra. 95 VSPE, V, 11. 96 Conc. III Tol. (a. 589), c. 18; LV, XII, 1, 2. Both rules coincide in the supervising role of bishops, but not so much in the episcopal competencies when it comes to repressing abuse of authority by civil agents. On these differences, see Mellado Rodríguez, ‘Intervención episcopal en la política judicial y fiscal’; Mellado Rodríguez, ‘Competencia episcopal en la política judicial y fiscal’. As observed by Stocking, regulations do not usually go into much detail when breaking down the situations in which supervision was allowed, from bishops in this case, in the activity of secular powers (Stocking, Bishops, Councils, and Consensus, p. 83). This left the door open to certain arbitrariness, possibly favoured. The ability for bishops to supervise the activity of secular agents would be confirmed in the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633, although it would be limited to only those cases preceded by a complaint (Conc. IV Tol. [a. 633], cc. 3; 32). 97 Curchin, ‘Curials and Local Government’, p. 231. 98 Pérez Pujol, Historia de las instituciones, p. 340. 99 Maybe said law, given that it forced the episcopacy to inform the king of such abuse, was partly conceived to prevent bishops to protect defensores and numerarii, who he had actually promoted, and precisely for this reason they were presumably reliable agents for him.

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city at an indeterminate moment at the beginning of the seventh century, but possibly prior to Sisebut’s legislation against the Jews in the kingdom.100 Without a legal base – or at least a well-known one – Aurasius took justice into his own hands, excommunicating Froga to respond to a policy that clashed directly with the anti-Jewish thinking of the bishop of Toledo, who, making the competitive atmosphere clear, considered the comes’s attitude as a personal attack against him. At first, the Visigothic power did not dare to establish similar control measures over episcopal action. It is not until well into the seventh century when we find a set of rules that enabled secular powers to monitor bishops in their ministry. It usually goes unnoticed in historiography,101 but it actually provides a lot of hints on the relationship model prescribed by the monarchy among the different powers in the kingdom, although we will focus on urban ones. The Visigothic power granted its main delegate agents the capacity to supervise episcopal action concerning Jews or fugitive slaves, even with repressive abilities.102 For example, a law by Recceswinth orders iudices to supervise the actions of bishops, particularly when not applying the legislation related to repressing Jewish practices.103 From the middle of the seventh century we can also observe certain a degradation in the secular duties of bishops as the competencies of secular powers were reinforced – particularly those of comites. For example, whereas bishops had certain autonomy to supervise secular agents’ actions in the previous stage, we know that this action had been assigned to the comes since Chindaswinth’s reign, or to whom he delegated as his representative. The bishop could be chosen as such, but only if the secular authority so decided.104 Moreover, bishops lost their judicial autonomy when their sentences needed to be ratified by the king, whereas comites or duces were free from said requirement.105 These figures even

100 Ep. Wisig. 18. Another edition in Conc. XII Tol. (a. 681), Aurasii Toletani episcopi epistola ad Fraganem. On this letter, see Martín-Iglesias et al., eds, La Hispania tardoantigua y visigoda, pp. 556–558. On the attribution of the title of comes to Froga, see García Moreno, Prosopografía del reino visigodo de Toledo, p. 49. 101 The supervision tasks of the episcopacy on secular agents have been more exhaustively researched (Martínez Díez, ‘Función de inspección y vigilancia del episcopado’). Some exceptions, albeit based on different assumptions, are found in Koon and Wood, ‘Unity from Disunity’, p. 801; Fernández, ‘Transformaciones institucionales y liderazgo cívico’. 102 LV, IX, 1, 21. Koon and Wood, ‘Unity from Disunity’, p. 802. 103 LV, XII, 3, 24. Koon and Wood, ‘Unity from Disunity’, p. 800. 104 LV, II, 1, 31. 105 LV, II, 1, 30.

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had the last word in certain cases,106 also when they concerned servants of the Church or members of the clergy.107 We have observed that during Erwig and Egica’s reigns, bishops also lost their ability to repress comites’s malpractice, although the latter could do it in the case of ecclesiastical agents.108 In fact, secular agents acquired the legal authority to summon bishops to court and submit them to secular justice, and were even allowed to impose sentences upon them under certain circumstances.109 Unfortunately, sources do not provide us with specific cases that would allow us to know how such measures were actually implemented, but it is easy to suppose that they must have led to confrontation between bishops and judges, something that has been well proven in the case of Merovingian Gaul.110 Despite the imbalance, such measures did not imply the end of the cooperation between bishops and secular agents.111 In fact, legislators kept issuing measures against possible conspiracies between both authorities.112 The actors themselves found this cooperation indispensable; a situation that explained the efforts of Hilderic, comes of Nîmes, to attract Aregius, the bishop of the city, to his cause when he rose against king Wamba. When his attempts failed, Hilderic promoted Aregius’s deposition and supported a bishop closer to him instead, which shows that personal affinity between comites and bishops did not occur in all cases, but was pursued when circumstances so allowed.113 Moreover, at the same time as the aforementioned measures against episcopal interests were implemented, the Church kept certain privileges that directly undermined the judicial authority of the main secular agents, such as the right to asylum in churches, which allowed for the bishop’s revision of the sentences issued by secular judges when they implied the 106 LV, XII, 3, 2; XII, 3, 7. 107 Conc. Emeret. (a. 666), c. 15. 108 LV, II, 1, 30; IX, 1, 21. The ability for bishops to repress malpractice committed by iudices, comites included, was maintained in very specific circumstances (LV, VI, 4, 3). 109 LV, II, 1, 19; IV, 5, 6; IX, 1, 21. Concurrently, secular justice also acquired some competencies over servants of the church and other ecclesiastical agents (Conc. Emeret. [a. 666], c. 15; Conc. XI Tol. [a. 675], c. 5; LV, II, 1, 19; III, 4, 18; IX, 1, 21). 110 Greg. Tur., Vit. Patr. VIII, 3. See Heinzelmann, Bischofsherrschaft in Gallien, pp. 182–183; Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, p. 10. 111 LV, II, 1, 24; III, 5, 2; XII, 3, 27; Conc. IV Tol. (a. 633), c. 65; Conc. XII Tol. (a. 681), c. 9; Conc. XVI Tol. (a. 693), Tomus. 112 LV, II, 1, 24; II, 1, 28; II, 1, 30; IV, 5, 6; Fernández Ortiz de Guinea, ‘Funciones sociales del cuerpo episcopal’, p. 457. 113 Iul. Tol., Hist. Wamb. 6.

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death penalty.114 Additionally, the right to asylum allowed for ecclesiastical agents to use intercessio to intervene in cases from which they were originally vetoed, such as criminal cases.115 It was, therefore, a matter that fully invaded the comes’s competencies, obstructing his work and questioning his authority by allowing for alternative sentences to be issued. This shows that, even in a context where the control duties of secular powers were reinforced, some of their prerogatives were confirmed even if they enjoyed fewer privileges than in the previous period.

Conclusions In summary, city leadership was monopolized by bishops, comites, and, when applicable, duces. They appropriated the main government duties in the cities, outshining the prominence that other actors, such as the curia or defensores ciuitatis had had during the Late Roman period. In light of this scenario, urban elites would have approached one or another of these power figures if they wanted to aspire to reach a minimum level of influence in civic issues. However, they would not have had any autonomous decisionmaking abilities other than the will of duces, comites, or bishops. Regarding the relationships between the different urban leaders, we have suggested a coopetitive interaction model that would have even been promoted by the Visigothic monarchy. Thus, we think that a municipal government scheme was designed in which different powers shared urban leadership, working as a countercheck for each other. In other words, one would ‘put limits to the other’s ambitions and accumulation of power’,116 without necessarily implying the end of the cooperation between the different urban power figures. However, this relationship model was not immutable over time. There were 114 LV, III, 2, 2; III, 3, 2; VI, 5, 16; VI, 5, 18; IX, 2, 3; IX, 3, 3–4; Conc. VI Tol. (a. 636); Conc. XII Tol. (a. 682), c. 10; VSPE, V, 11, 86–89. On the Visigothic right to asylum, see Osaba, ‘Responsabilité pénale et droit d’asile’; Osaba, ‘Ad hostes confugere, ad ecclesiam confugere’. 115 As revealed for the Gallic case by James, ‘Beati pacifici’. Unfortunately, in the Visigothic kingdom we count on only one case that dates back to Reccared’s reign, when bishop Masona of Merida interceded on behalf of the rebel Vagrila, who appealed to the right to asylum in order to successfully avoid death penalty (VSPE, V, 11, 85–90; also see Vallejo Girvés, ‘Case Studies of Church Asylum’, pp. 121–122). On episcopal intercessio, see Fernández Ortiz de Guinea, ‘Funciones sociales del cuerpo episcopal’, p. 462. 116 Fernández, ‘Transformaciones institucionales y liderazgo cívico’, p. 267, although we disagree with the author on the excessive importance he gives to civic magistrates such as defensores and numerarii. To us, they were just subordinate power instances. See also Koon and Wood, ‘Unity from Disunity’, p. 801.

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some periods when cooperation between different urban leaderships was promoted, and other periods, particularly perceptible since the middle of the seventh century, when competitive dynamics were favoured. We have specifically observed how the prerogatives of secular powers were reinforced as the institutional authority of bishops was undermined, especially in the field of justice. By acting this way, the Visigothic power would have sought to offset the significant structural imbalance that characterized urban leaderships, with bishops having an enormous ascendency over society in comparison to secular actors, particularly duces and comites, who found it more difficult to achieve a similar degree of influence in cities.

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Martín-Iglesias, José Carlos, Pablo C. Díaz, and Margarita Vallejo Girvés (eds), La Hispania tardoantigua y visigoda en las fuentes epistolares. Antología y comentario (Madrid: CSIC, 2020). Matthews, John F., ‘Interpreting the Interpretationes of the Breuiarium’, in Law, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity, ed. by Ralph W. Mathisen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 11–32. Mazel, Florian, L’évêque et le territoire. L’invention médiévale de l’espace (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2016). Mellado Rodríguez, Joaquín, ‘Competencia episcopal en la política judicial y fiscal de Recaredo: hacia una revisión’, in El mundo mediterráneo (siglos III–VII). Actas del III Congreso Andaluz de Estudios Clásicos, ed. by Julián González Fernández (Madrid: Ediciones Clásicas), pp. 401–410. Mellado Rodríguez, Joaquín, ‘Intervención episcopal en la política judicial y fiscal de Recaredo (problemas filológicos y jurídicos)’, Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español, 65 (1995), 837–848. Orselli, Ana Mª., ‘Coscienza e immagini della città nelle fonti tra V e IX secolo’, in Early Medieval Town in the Western Mediterranean, ed. by Gian P. Brogiolo (Mantova: Editrice Societè Archeologica Padana, 1996), pp. 9–17. Osaba, Esperanza, ‘Ad hostes confugere, ad ecclesiam confugere en la legislación conciliar visigoda’, Seminarios Complutenses de Derecho Romano, 22 (2009), 293–340. Osaba, Esperanza, ‘Responsabilité pénale et droit d’asile dans l’Hispania visigothique’, Méditerranées, 34–35 (2003), 77–105. Osland, Daniel, ‘Text and Context Patronage in Late Antique Mérida’, Studies in Late Antiquity, 3, no. 4 (2019), 581–625. Osland, Daniel, ‘Tribute and Coinage in the Visigothic Kingdom: On the Role of the Bishop’, Anas, 24 (2011), 71–95. Pellegrin, Estelle, La coopetition: enjeux et strategies (Paris: Hermes Science Publications, 2010). Pérez Martínez, Meritxell, ‘La burocracia episcopal en la Hispania tardorromana y visigótica (siglos IV–VII)’, Studia Historica. Historia Medieval, 18–19 (2000–2001), 17–40. Pérez Pujol, Eduardo, Historia de las instituciones sociales de la España goda, III (Valencia: F. Vives Mora, 1896). PLRE = Arnold Hugh Martin Jones, John Robert Martindale, and John Morris, The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971–1992). Poveda Arias, Pablo, ‘The Role of the Military Factor in the Political and Administrative Shaping of the Visigothic Kingdom (6th–7th Centuries)’, in Early Medieval

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Militarisation, ed. by Ellora Bennett, Guido M. Berndt, Stefan Esders, and Laury Sarti (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), pp. 115–129. Poveda Arias, Pablo, ‘Ruling Visigothic Hispania: The Role of the Bishops’, in How to Govern in the Long Late Antiquity: Institutions, Administration and Legal Structures in the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa, ed. by Sabine Panzram (Leiden: Brill, in press). Prinz, Friedrich, ‘Die bischöfliche Stadtherrschaft im Frankenreich vom 5. bis zum 7. Jahrhundert’, Historische Zeitschrift, 217, no. 1 (1973), 1–35. Rapp, Claudia, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Rouche, Michel, L’Aquitaine des wisigoths aux arabes (418–781). Naissance d’une region (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales–Éditions Jean Touzot, 1979). Sánchez-Albornoz, Claudio, ‘El gobierno de las ciudades de España del siglo V al X’, in La città nell’alto medioevo (Spoleto: CISAM, 1959), pp. 359–391. Schmidt-Hofner, Sebastian, ‘Der defensor civitatis und die Entstehung des Notabelnregiments in den spätrömischen Städten’, in Chlodwigs Welt: Organisation von Herrschaft um 500, ed. by Mischa Meier and Stefan Patzold (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2014), pp. 487–522. Slootjes, Daniëlle, ‘Governor Trumped by Bishop: Shifting Boundaries in Roman Religious and Public Life’, in The Impact of Imperial Rome on Religions, Ritual and Religious Life in the Roman Empire, ed. by Lukas de Blois, Peter Funke, and Johannes Hahn (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 219–231. Souvirón Bono, Sebastián, ‘Fiscalidad y control eclesiástico en la Hispania visigoda: supervisión de almas e impuestos’, Baetica, 31 (2009), 275–289. Stocking, Rachel L., Bishops, Councils, and Consensus in the Visigothic Kingdom, 589–633 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Stüber, Till, Der inkriminierte Bischof. Könige im Konflikt mit Kirchenleitern im westgotischen und fränkischen Gallien (466–614) (Berlin–Boston: De Gruyter, 2020). Ubric Rabaneda, Purificación, ‘El ocaso de las instituciones y de la dominación del Estado en Hispania (409–507)’, Cvdas, 3–4 (2002–2003), 85–102. Ubric Rabaneda, Purificación, ‘Forjando una alianza para la dominación. Obispos y bárbaros en el Occidente tardoantiguo’, in La Iglesia como sistema de dominación en la Antigüedad Tardía, ed. by José Fernández Ubiña, Alberto J. Quiroga Puertas, and Purificación Ubric Rabaneda (Granada: Ediciones Universidad de Granada), pp. 151–168. Ubric Rabaneda, Purif icación, La Iglesia en la Hispania del siglo V (Granada: Ediciones Universidad de Granada, 2004).

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Vallejo Girvés, Margarita, ‘Case Studies of Church Asylum and Exile in Late Antiquity’, in Mobility and Exile at the End of Antiquity, ed. by Dirk Rohmann, Jörg Ulrich, and Margarita Vallejo Girvés (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018), pp. 113–139. Van Dam, Raymond, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Wickham, Chris, ‘Bounding the City: Concepts of Urban–Rural Difference in the West in the Early Middle Ages’, in Città e campagne nei secoli altomedievali (Spoleto: CISAM, 2009), pp. 61–80. Wolfram, Herwig, History of the Goths, trans. by Thomas J. Dunlap (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).

About the Author Pablo Poveda Arias is Assistant Professor of Ancient History at the University of Valladolid. His lines of research focus primarily on the study of secular and ecclesiastical power dynamics in the post-imperial kingdoms, from the point of view of social history.

6. Leadership and Social Cohesion in Merovingian Gaul and Visigothic Spain: The Case of Military Groups Fernando Ruchesi

Abstract The aim of this chapter is to examine the mechanisms used by secular authority and the aristocracy to exert leadership among military groups in Merovingian Gaul and Visigothic Spain. Moreover, the chapter will study how social cohesion was created by kings and elites among armed groups within the aforementioned regna. With that aim, I will examine the manner in which the narrative and legal sources of the period describe and characterize such processes. My hypothesis is that elements such as violence, the control of resources (money, goods, lands, and positions of institutional power), and beliefs and symbols of authority were used by the Merovingian and Visigothic kings and armed groups in order to strengthen leadership and create social cohesion. Keywords: Merovingian Gaul, Visigothic Spain, military groups, cohesion, identity

Leadership and Armed Groups in Merovingian Gaul and Visigothic Spain Of all of the post-Roman kingdoms that emerged in Europe after the disappearance of the Western Roman Empire, the Merovingian kingdoms and the Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo were the entities that best managed to endure and consolidate their inner administrative and political structures. These kingdoms experienced both inner political struggles, which involved members of the royal family, and rivalries among the members of

Castro, D. and Ruchesi, F. (ed.), Leadership, Social Cohesion, and Identity in Late Antique Spain and Gaul (500–700). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463725958_ch06

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the aristocracy. As we shall see in this chapter, both leadership and social cohesion mutually influenced each other. During the fifth century, the dioceses of Galia and Hispania witnessed the arrival of different non-Roman groups who settled there, sometimes by means of the administrative mechanisms of the imperial bureaucracy, through their negotiations with the inhabitants, or by the use of force. This was the case of the Visigothic and Frankish groups during this period.1 Both contingents participated actively in the defence of the Western Roman Empire at the orders of the magistri militum on different occasions. At the same time, both contingents engaged in military campaigns in those territories for their own profit. In the case of the Visigoths, this consisted of raiding and besieging cities in Gaul in order to blackmail the Roman authorities – in a way, they occupied those cities and their jurisdictions. Later on, they continued developing some of these strategies of control and influence in Hispania, especially during their campaigns against the Suevi and the bacaudae in the middle of the fifth century. In the case of the Franks, they were prominent in northern Gaul, probably serving as foederati at the Rhine frontier. Many Franks would have undoubtedly comprised those laeti units which appear in the Notitia Dignitatum.2 They also fought against the confederate army of Attila at the Catalaunian Fields, and then were commanded by Egidius against the Visigoths in the same dioceses. The two groups had a history as foederati, serving in the late Roman army. They were experienced in waging war against other armies, composed of Romans or non-Romans. In these circumstances, those in command of such troops needed to exert leadership not only to wage war effectively or to raise the morale of their armed followers, but to prevent them from plundering or misbehaving in the course of a campaign, or even to prevent those under their command from rebelling. We find some of these examples in the narratives on King Clovis (509–511). According to the Histories of Gregory of Tours, Clovis used what we can call a combination of violence and threats, in order to enforce leadership both among his armed followers as well as other warriors led by the aristocracy. Gregory described the manner in which the Merovingian king reasserted his authority through 1 The bibliography on the migration period and the integration of the barbarians into the Late Roman army is quite extensive. For these processes and historiographical problems related to them, see Jones, Later Roman Empire; Elton, Warfare; Southern and Dixon, Late Roman Army; Goffart, Barbarians and Romans; Goffart, Barbarian Tides; Halsall, Barbarian Migrations; Wolfram, History of the Goths; Heather, Goths and Romans; Arce, Bárbaros y romanos; López Quiroga, Gentes Barbarae. 2 Reimitz, Frankish Identity, pp. 77–78.

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some of these methods in different situations. This was the case with the killing of Ragnachar, who was arrested by his own troops and with his arms tied behind his back he was brought before Clovis. His brother Ricchar was dragged in with him. ‘Why have you disgraced our Frankish people by allowing yourself to be bound?’ asked Clovis. ‘It would have been better for you had you died in battle.’ He raised his axe and split Ragnachar’s skull. Then, he turned to Ricchar and said: ‘If you had stood by your brother, he would not have been bound in this way.’ He killed Ricchar with a second blow of his axe.3 In this manner, the brothers were captured by some of their own troops and trusted men, having been tricked by Clovis, who used fake gold armbands to turn these men against Ragnachar and his brother. The Merovingian king delivered a similar speech to the former followers of Ragnachar as well, emphasizing that they were extremely fortunate to keep their lives after that betrayal, instead of being tortured to death for such a crime. They are obviously described as begging for forgiveness.4 As we can see, Gregory wanted to show to his contemporary audience how Clovis used shrewdness, ruthless violence, and different speeches loaded with threats in order to warn the former followers of Ragnachar not to betray him. We can suppose that the kind of authority building which resulted from the combination of these elements may have worked out rather well at the beginning of the sixth century, provided that a ruler had a strong enough army. We should keep in mind that during the Early Middle Ages, using threats of this kind to impose leadership over armed groups would have been quite typical, since violence was much more material than symbolic in that context.5 Moreover, the foederati origins of the Franks 3 Greg. Tur., DLH, II.42, p. 92: ‘At ille devictum cernens exercitum suum, fuga labi parat, sed ab exercitum cnpraehensus ac ligatis postergum manibus in conspectu Chlodovechi una cum Richario fratre suo perducetur. Cui ille: “Cur, inquid, humiliasti genus nostrum, ut te vincere permitteris? Melius enim tibi fuerat mori.” Et elevatam securem capite eius defixit, conversusque ad fratrem eius, ait: “Si tu solatium fratri tribuissis, allegatus utique non fuisset”, similiter et hunc secure percussum interfecit.’ All Latin references are to the critical edition by Krusch and Levison, Decem Libri Historiarum. 4 Greg. Tur., DLH, II.42, p. 92: ‘“Merito”, inquid, “tale aurum accepit, qui domino suo ad mortem propria voluntate deducit”; hoc illis quod viverent debere suff icere, ne male proditionem dominorum suorum luituri inter tormenta deficerent. Quod ille audientes, optaban gratiam adipisci, illud sibi adserentes sufficere, si vivere mererentur.’ 5 Here I am following Sara Elise Phang’s argument for her use of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence. Phang prefers to avoid the term ‘symbolic violence’ for the context of the Roman army, opting to use terms such as ‘subordination’, ‘social control’, or even ‘legitimation’, since violence within the Roman army was much more material than symbolic. I believe that

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in northern Gaul can help us to understand the recourse to this ‘military pedagogy’ which, in this case, consisted in pointing out mistakes made by soldiers and subordinates.6 Hence, through these methods, a sixth-century Frankish ruler could impose cohesion on the aristocracies of the kingdom. Gregory is probably describing these situations as examples of what every member of the exercitus should do in certain situations: both the regional aristocrats, as well as those who followed the king.7 The fragment quoted above communicates that no one should disobey the legitimate ruler.8 This rhetoric (which we could describe as martial pedagogy) was based on examples of what a warrior should or should not do, followed by a demonstration of these precepts before the rest of the armed followers. These kinds of exempla became the norm in the Histories of Gregory, as well as in other narrative sources (even when their intentions were not specifically related to military matters).9 We are informed that Clovis repeated this behaviour after a campaign, in order to demonstrate to his men that he was no commonplace soldier (as they were)10: At the end of that year, he [Clovis] ordered the complete phalanx to gather in the field in order to examine the state of its equipment. The king walked around inspecting all of the men, finally reaching the one who struck the vase. ‘No other man has equipment in such bad shape as yours,’ said he. […] He [Clovis] took the man’s axe and threw it to the ground. When the soldier bent down to pick up his weapon, the king raised his battle

this kind of distinction can also be applied to the context of sixth-century Merovingian Gaul. See: Phang, Roman Military Service, p. 34. 6 For discussion of the military pedagogy used by Roman duces and generals in the later Roman Empire to create discipline among subordinate soldiers, see MacMullen, Soldier and Civilian, pp. 31, 33, 38. See also: Phang, Roman Military Service, pp. 246–247. 7 Although these descriptions may seem vivid from a certain standpoint, we should keep in mind that Gregory wrote about these events involving Clovis almost a hundred years after they took place (Heinzelmann, Gregor, p. 78). Gregory could thus be significantly shaping the events he was describing (Goffart, Narrators, pp. 114–115). 8 Heinzelmann, Gregor, p. 32. 9 Gregory certainly had other objectives in mind when he composed his Histories, and this is reflected in his conception of war, and the rare mentions of capable generals, as Goffart argues. See: Goffart, ‘Conspicously Absent’, pp. 373–374. Helmut Reimitz states that Gregory’s objective was to write a new Church history in which social groups could not be independent of his history of pastoral power. See: Reimitz, Frankish Identity, p. 52. 10 According to Wynn, Gregory of Tours considered Clovis as a model of the divinely favoured warrior. See: Wynn, ‘Wars and Warriors’, p. 25.

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weapon in the air and opened the warrior’s skull with the axe. ‘This is what you have done to my vase in Soissons.’11

Leadership among armed groups was also exerted through other means, such as the display of banners, which are mentioned in Frankish historiographical sources. These elements reflected leadership and were also a sign related to the identity of the secular warrior aristocracy. For example, Gregory of Tours describes that dux Roccolen was sent to Tours by King Chilperic to capture dux Guntram Boso (accused of Theudebert’s murder). Roccolen was angry since Bishop Gregory refused to surrender Guntram, then marched and threatened those participating in the procession from the cathedral to the church of Saint Martin, riding his horse and carrying a cross and his banners.12 In the case of the Visigothic military aristocracy, leadership was also manifested by certain signs and symbols, such as banners. There is one mention of these banners in the army of Wamba, in the episode of the arrival of the king at the siege of Narbonne. In his speech, the dux Paulus explains to his followers that Wamba might have arrived hiding his banners (‘cum bandorum signis absconditis accessisse’).13 Although the banners are mentioned as not being displayed by the army of Wamba, we could suggest that the tradition of carrying these kind of flags by the armies of Hispania and the Merovingian kingdoms existed, probably, as a continuation of a late Roman military tradition.14 Moreover, the Liber ordinum describes 11 Greg. Tur., DLH, II.27, pp. 72–73: ‘Transacto vero anno, iussit omnem cum armorum apparatu advenire falangam, ostensuram in campo Marcio horum armorum nitorem. Verum ubi cunctus circuire diliberat, venit ad urcei percussorem; cui sit: “Nullus tam inculta ut tu detulit arma; nam neque tibi hasta neque gladius neque securis est utilis.” Et adpraehensam securem eius terrae deiecit. At ille cum paulolum inclinatus fuisset ad collegendum, rex, elevates manibus, securem suam capite eius efixit. “Sic”, inquiid, “tu Sexonas in urceo illo fecisti.”’ See also: Halsall, Warfare and Society, p. 135. 12 Greg. Tur., DLH, V.4, pp. 198–199: ‘Denique cum psallentes de eclesiam egressi, ad sanctam basilicam properarent, hic post crucem, praecidentibus signis, aequo superpositus ferebatur.’ 13 HWR, 16, pp. 515–516: ‘Ad haec plerique suis adstruebant, regem sine signis nono posse procedere. Ad quod ille commentabat, ideo illum cum bandorum signis absconditis accessisse, ut intellectum suis hostibus daret, alium adhuc exercitum superesse, cum quo ipse adhuc utpote cum mltiplici quam prius venerat manu post futurus accederet.’ All Latin references are to the critical edition by Levison, Historia Wambae regis. 14 We can glimpse how some of these military regalia might have looked in the Notitia Dignitatum. Nevertheless, we should be careful: Robert Grigg has argued that the shield emblems of each unit might have served as a way to create the impression that the Notitia represented a bureaucracy which was comprehensive in terms of administration. Thus, the shield emblems would not reflect a mechanism to distinguish different military units. See: Grigg, ‘Inconsistency

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the procedures of a Christian ritual to be performed before the departure of the king to war. The ritual involves the carrying of a golden cross with a reliquia (a fragment of the wooden vera crux) in front of the Visigothic king by a priest, although, as Bronisch asserts, the Liber does not specify in which exact moment the cross should be carried (whether it is before or when the king mounts his horse).15 In addition, the text describes that during the ritual, the leaders of the army have to approach the altar of the church of Peter and Paul to receive the banners, which are located behind the altar (‘accedentes unusquisque accipiunt de post altare a sacerdote bandos suos’). During the seventh century, the Visigothic army was already organized as an amalgamation of private armies led by the members of the aristocracy.16 In this regard, as Valverde Castro asserts, the description of this ritual involving the golden cross should reaffirm the king as leader of the army.17 On certain occasions, leadership also had to be demonstrated by the ability and concern of the sovereign to defend and protect the inhabitants of the kingdom. Failing to do so could entail dire consequences, such as the revocation of the insignia which legitimized a king. This is the case in Chapter 37 of the Historia Gothorum, in which we are told that Gesaleic (507–511) was divested of his insignia by King Theoderic of the Amal dynasty, as a consequence of his flight from Narbonne when the Burgundian army sacked the city.18 While the chapter fails to specify which insignia were involved (the regni fascibus are mentioned), it indicates that leadership was exerted and manifested by wearing this kind of symbols, and by the fulfilment of the obligations of the king.19 Visigothic historiographical sources, on the other hand, let us know that leadership was also legitimized by the possession of a treasure. For and Lassitude’, p. 141. On the Notitia Dignitatum in general, see Hoffmann, Das Spätrömische Bewegungsheer; Goodburn and Bartholomew, Aspects; Demougeot, ‘La “Notitia Dignitatum”’; Kulikowski, ‘“Notitia Dignitatum”’. 15 Liber Ordinum, 48: ‘El levat crucem auream, in qua lignum beate Crucis inclusum est, que cum rege semper in exercitu properat.’ All Latin references are to the critical edition by Férotin, Liber Ordinum. See also: Bronisch, Reconquista, pp. 102–103; Bronisch, ‘Cosmovisión’, p. 220. 16 See: Isla Frez, Ejército, sociedad; Díaz, ‘La dinámica del poder’, pp. 191–192; Pérez Sánchez, El ejército, p. 177; Barbero and Vigil, La formación del feudalismo, pp. 44–48. 17 Valverde Castro, Ideología, p. 234. 18 See: Arce, Esperando, pp. 104–105; Castellanos, Visigothic Kingdom, p. 10. 19 HG, 37, p. 232: ‘Denique dum eadem ciuitas a Gundebado Burgundionum rege direpta fuisset, iste cum multuo sui dedecore et cum magna suorum clade apud Barcinonam se contulit. Ibi moratus quousque etiam regni fascibus a Theuderico fugae ignominia priuaretur.’ All Latin references are to the critical edition by Rodríguez Alonso, Las Historias.

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example, in relation to the defeat of Agila during his campaign to the city of Córdoba, Isidore of Seville mentions that he ‘not only lost his son, who was murdered there with the troops, but he also lost the entirety of the royal treasure as well as a large quantity of wealth’.20 In this case, Isidore is highlighting the fact that Agila lost the royal treasure, and was defeated. Isidore is equating both elements in this fragment, letting his audience know that Agila failed in every aspect. We do know that the Histories of Isidore are filled with propagandistic tones to demonstrate the unity of the Visigothic kingdom.21 Therefore, the mention of the loss of a treasure would have been of great importance for the aristocracy of the early seventh century in Spain: the prestige and legitimacy of a ruler depended on it. It is also worth noting that the treasure of Toulouse is not mentioned in Visigothic sources on the Battle of Vouillé, while Frankish sources certainly include the description of the capture of such a treasure by Clovis.22 Leadership was also constructed in other ways, that is, related to oaths of allegiance demanded by the authority. Other examples from the Histories of Gregory provide hints on this matter: in Book IV, we read about Mummolus, one of the best generals in the narrative of Gregory23: He came to Tours, drove out Clovis, the son of Chilperic, and made the people swear an oath of allegiance to King Sigibert. Then he marched on Poitiers. Two of the inhabitants of the city, Basilius and Sighar, collected a mob together and prepared to resist. Mummolus hemmed them in on all sides, overpowered them, conquered them and killed them. He then entered Poitiers and again insisted on an oath of fealty.24

In this case, Gregory describes some of the confrontations which took place during the second half of the sixth century among members of the 20 HG, 45, pp. 246, 248: ‘Nam belli praesentis ultione percussus et filium ibi cum copia exercitus interfectum amisit et thesaurum omnem cum insignibus opibus perdidit.’ 21 Wood, Politics of Identity, pp. 1–2. 22 Ruchesi, ‘Military Matters’, pp. 77–79 23 Walter Goffart considers that Mummolus was one of the best Frankish generals in the Histories of Gregory of Tours, although the bishop of Tours emphasized that he betrayed his father, and then Gundovald. See: Goffart, ‘Conspicously Absent’, p. 373. See also: Laury Sarti, Perceiving War, p. 112. On Mummolus: PLRE III B, pp. 899–901. 24 Greg. Tur., DLH, IV.45, p. 180: ‘Qui Toronus veniens, fugato exinde Chlodovecho, Chilperici filium, exacta populo ad partem regis Sigyberthi sacramenta, Pectavum accessit. Sed Basilius ac Sigarius Pectavi civis, collecta multitudine, resistere voluerunt; quos de diversis partibus circumdatus oppressit, obruit, interimit, et sic Pectavum accedens, sacramenta exigit.’

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Merovingian family.25 In this context, at the order of King Sigibert of Austrasia (561–575), the Patrician Mummolus was sent to recover some of the cities which were controlled by the forces of Clovis, the son of Chilperic (561–584). Gregory mentions that after some confrontations, and the defeat of Chilperic’s forces, Mummolus demanded an oath of loyalty (‘sacramenta exigit’) from the inhabitants of Tours and Poitiers. The oath was certainly a principle associated with leadership: it highlighted the dependence of one party on another, the commitment to support the authority. The oath was also part of the set of procedures surrounding the construction of cohesion: it provided the sovereign with the legitimacy to rule over a certain territory, as well as the rights inherent to it, and its concomitant obligations (protection and defence). In the case of Mummolus, the presence of the army guided by him should be taken into account: he could demand the oath from the inhabitants of Tours and Poitiers thanks to the support of an armed force. Nevertheless, in some cases the kings exerted leadership in order to prevent armed groups and bands of warriors under their command from robbing or plundering. Leadership was thus demonstrated, in some cases, by their skills and abilities in war, with proficiency in the use of weapons or riding. This is the case of the army of King Sigibert, which Gregory tells us was also composed of ‘some people from beyond the Rhine’, who attempted to rob and burn down the houses of the local populations of the towns surrounding Paris. Since these contingents did not respect Sigibert’s orders, the monarch had to demonstrate his presence and authority among them: ‘Some of these people from beyond the Rhine began to demonstrate, because he had not let them fight. Sigibert was a brave man: he leapt on his horse and rode out to meet them and tried to calm them. Later on, he had many of them stoned to death.’26 The passage recounts that the king swiftly leapt onto his horse and rode towards those under his command. This reminds us of the speech King Totila (541–552) delivered to his army before the Battle of Busta Gallorum. Procopius describes Totila as performing an exhibition of his skills in horse 25 As Wood described it, sixth-century Gaul was characterized by civil war, and the confrontations of the sons of Clothar (Charibert I, Guntram, Sigibert I, and Chilperic I) after his death in 561. The rivalries arose basically as a dispute over the territories and divisions of the kingdom of Clothar (Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms, pp. 89–90). 26 Greg. Tur., DLH, IV.49, p. 186: ‘Obtestabat enim rex, ne haec fierent, sed furorem gentium, quae de ulteriore Rheni amnis parte venerant, superare non poterat; sed omnia patienter ferebat, donec redire possit ad patriam. Tunc ex gentibus illis contra eum quidam murmoraverunt, cur se a certamine subtraxisset. Sed ille, ut erat intrepedus, ascenso equo, ad eos dirigit eosque verbis lenibus demulsit, multos ex eis postea a lapidibus obrui praecipiens.’

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riding and weapon wielding, a performance that was intended to boost the morale of his followers.27 The case of King Sigibert is similar to a certain extent: he was trying to control and prevent those groups (who were under his command) from pillaging.28 In addition, while trying to prevent these contingents from misbehaving, the ruler was attempting to fulfil his function of protector of his subjects, as well as that of ensuring justice would be upheld. Note as well that Gregory does not describe these men as Franks, an idea that is highlighted in the text.29 Visigothic historiographical sources contain descriptions of this kind as well, involving groups of the army attempting to engage in violent theft every time an opportunity arose. In the Historia Wambae Regis, Julian relates that Wamba forbade his men from carrying out robbery and adultery on their way to Gaul, and punished them: [I]n view of an improper thirst for plunder which not only weakens our men, but also the sin of adultery was perpetrated by way of burning down the houses, the aforementioned prince punished with such disciplinary severity for the sin committed by them. […] A proof of this are the prepuces cut off some rapists, on whom the king imposed this punishment for their fornication.30

Wamba handled this situation differently compared to the Merovingian kings. Here Wamba is depicted as imposing punishment on those who misbehave, delivering an exemplary speech to his army. Despite the ideological tone permeating this episode, these kinds of offences were common both in Visigothic and Merovingian armed groups. Legal sources 27 Totila is described as mounting his horse and delivering his speech while performing manoeuvres and twirling his spear, a demonstration of his expertise in combat arts, as Pohl asserted. See: Pohl, ‘I Goti d’Italia e le tradizioni delle Steppe’, p. 227; Procopius, Gothic War, IV.32. 28 This kind of behaviour was not rare among military groups during Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. The late Roman army, heir to old traditions of discipline and commitment as we know, extorted the civilian population to exact wealth from, or even attack some Roman cities and towns after certain campaigns. See: Southern and Dixon, Late Roman Army, pp. 171–172. 29 The matter of armed bands and their misbehaviour is attested as well by both the Salic Law (PLS, XIV, XLII) and the Ripuarian Law (LR, XLV, LXVIII). All references are to the critical editions by Eckhardt, Pactus Legis Salicae, and Beyerle, Lex Ribvaria. 30 HWR, 10, p. 510: ‘Sed quia insolens quorundam e nostris motio non solum praedae inhiabat, sed etiam cum incensione domorum adulterii facinus perpetrabat, tanto disciplinae vigore iam dictus princeps in his et talibus patratum vindicabat scelus, ut graviora in his supplicia illum putares impendere, quam si hostiliter contra illum egissent. Testantur hoc praecisa quorundam adulterorum praeputia, quibus pro fornication hanc ultionis inrogabat iacturam.’

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addressed these crimes as well; however, the punishments and penalties described in Visigothic law, for example, are different.31 In this particular case, the Historia Wambae Regis probably included the description of severe punishment for the offenders from the ranks of the Visigothic army, for the purposes of depicting the strictness of King Wamba. In this manner, Julian justified this punishment and used this resource as a warning aimed at military men, be they members of the aristocracy or not. Historiographical sources inform us that leadership was related to the ability of some leaders to demonstrate their valour and skill when confronting certain difficulties. This idea of valour and martial exploits, and a ruler’s display of them, appears from time to time in the narrative sources composed in the Merovingian kingdoms and Visigothic Spain.32 For example, Chapter 41 of the Liber Historiae Francorum narrates that King Chlothar (613–629) defeated the Saxon Duke Berthoald, after coming to aid his son Dagobert. As though it were a ritual, after killing Berthoald, King Chlothar returned to his army brandishing the head of his former enemy on the tip of his spear.33 This kind of description, however, shows that leadership was reinforced by acts of this sort performed by the secular authority in order to exhibit force and skill in martial arts. Despite issues regarding authorship that a source such as the Liber Historiae Francorum might have,34 I believe that this type of narrative in which a ruler is depicted as returning victorious from a duel against an usurper (or a political rival), demonstrating his power by parading around the head of the dead enemy, played a crucial role in the construction of leadership and cohesion among lay aristocracies and warrior groups during the Early Middle Ages. The bloody image of the displayed head of a defeated enemy, however cruel it 31 For example, those who went on public expeditions and who stole or pillaged, should compensate what was stolen from their own money. If they failed to do so, the law urged the guilty to return what was robbed, and they would receive 50 lashes as punishment. LV, VIII.I.9, p. 317: ‘Quod si non habuerint, unde conponant, rem simplam reddant et CL flagella suscipiant.’ All Latin references are to the critical edition by Zeumer, K., Leges Visigothorum. 32 Although the stories these sources describe cannot be considered as heroic poetry, as Goffart asserted (Goffart, ‘Conspicously Absent’, pp. 380, 387), this does not mean that manifestations of heroic conduct were absent in the Frankish and Visigothic kingdoms, although narrative sources do not always feature them. 33 LHF, 41, pp. 313–314: ‘Consurgensque rex super eum et interf icit ipso Bertoaldo sustullitque caput eiusin conto reversusque est ad Francos. Illisque lugentibus –nesciebant, quid regi contigisset – viso eo, gavisi sunt gaudio magno. Rex vero, tota terra Saxonorum vastata, populo illo interfecto, non ibi maiorem hominem viventem reliquit, nisi ut glaudius suus, quod spata vocant, per longum habebat. Hoc signum in regione illa statuit, reversusque est rex victor in terra sua.’ I follow the critical edition by Krusch, B., Fredegarii et aliorum chronica. 34 Dörler, ‘Liber Historiae Francorum’, pp. 23–24.

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may seem to us in the modern day, could have represented the solution to strife and the definitive assertion of a ruler’s legitimacy.35 The textual fragment also describes that the king pursues his adversary alone and endures the fatigue of walking through a swamp dressed in full armour. This act of confronting great feats of hardship could also boost the morale of the warrior aristocracy and the members of the exercitus, since the ruler is providing the example that needs to be followed. Moreover, he is demonstrating that he is also a capable warrior, and that he would not hesitate to undergo adversity (thus sharing that kind of toil with his armed followers) in order to defeat an enemy.36 In addition, the passage describes his attire, weapons, and hair under his helmet.37 These elements altogether may represent the signs of a shared identity.38 I believe that the use and display of such characteristics might have contributed to the construction of a shared identity for the warrior class within the Merovingian kingdoms. Moreover, this image was widespread since texts such as the Chronicle of Fredegar and the Liber Historiae Francorum were copied and circulated throughout Francia.39 Although Gregory of Tours, Pseudo-Fredegar, and the anonymous author of the Liber had objectives other than military-oriented ones on their agendas,40 the various mentions of the garments and armour in these sources, in relation 35 This custom of holding aloft and parading the heads of defeated enemies was an old tradition already in use during the Later Roman Empire, although the details in the descriptions could vary. This practice had the goal of warning possible usurpers, rebellious generals, or instigators of dissent not to defy legitimate authority. We should remember the end of Gainas and his head sent to Emperor Arcadius by Uldin, around 399. See: Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops, p. 119. Moreover, Chapter 38 of the LHF describes that King Theudebert was killed, and his head hung from the walls of Cologne. See: LHF, 38. 36 The sharing of toils and hardships by the generals played an important role in maintaining the morale and the cohesion of their armed followers, since a stronger bond could form between commander and soldier, as Southern and Dixon argue. This was a crucial element within the constitution of military units during the High and the Later Roman Empire. See: Southern and Dixon, Late Roman Army, p. 176; Phang, Roman Military Service, pp. 240–241. 37 The passage mentions his head covered with long grey hair (‘crines cum canicie variatas obvolutas’). For hair as a symbol of the royal family, see Diesenberger, ‘Hair, Sacrality’, pp. 201. 38 Halsall, Barbarian Migrations, p. 467. 39 Wallace-Hadrill, Long-Haired Kings, pp. 71–72; McKitterick, The Carolingians, p. 239. 40 For the Chronicle of Fredegar, see Wallace-Hadrill, Long-Haired Kings, pp. 75–83; Collins, Fredegar; Reimitz, Frankish Identity, pp. 166–170. The anonymous author of the Liber, for example, presents a Neustrian perspective on the events of the f irst quarter of the eighth century. As Fouracre and Gerberding state, this author describes the rise of the Pippinid family as any other of the noble families of the Merovingian Kingdoms, thus, they exerted power still under the legitimate rule of the Merovingians. Philipp Dörler argued that the Liber was an expression of the independence and the power of the Neustrian aristocracy, which mediated between the kings

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to figures who performed administrative, public, or military functions, cannot be considered as mere coincidence. In other circumstances, leadership among military groups was constructed by the ability of a king to persuade his troops not to do something, instead of employing direct violence, or providing an example to be followed. For example, when Chlothar II prohibited Charibert and his men from continuing to pursue a blood feud that had begun with the murder of Ermarius, palace administrator in the service of Charibert, by the followers of the Saxon dux Aeghyna (‘a pueris Aeghynanae genere Saxonorum optimate interficetur’): On his orders, Aeghyna retired to Montmartre with many of his warriors. Brodulf, the uncle of Charibert, gathered together a force from all parts with the object of falling, together with Charibert himself, upon Aeghyna. But Chlothar gave strict instructions to his Burgundians that they were promptly to crush whichever party to the quarrel flouted his decision; and the fear this royal order inspired kept both parties quiet.41

This extract is interesting since it shows us that sometimes efforts were necessary to maintain the peace among the military groups who were loyal to the king. Chlothar forced both sides to avoid confrontation, imposing punishment on Aeghyna when he sent him to Montmartre with his followers. At the same time, the passage shows us how cohesion was fomented among warrior groups by means of loyalty: for example, it tells us that Brodulf gathered an army from different places (‘exercitum undique colliens’), and although the text does not indicate who these men were or why they consented to follow Brodulf and Charibert in their attempt to kill Aeghyna, it enables us to believe that it worked as an exercitum, and certainly this was the term used by Pseudo-Fredegar.42 Hence, the use of this term by the and the Austrasian nobility. See: Fouracre and Gerberding, Late Merovingian France, pp. 80–81, 86–87; Dörler, ‘Liber Historiae Francorum’, pp. 42–43; Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms, p. 257. 41 Chronicle of Fredegar, IV.55, p. 148: ‘Aeghyna iobente Chlothario in Monte Mercore resedit, pluram secun habens multitudinem pugnatorum. Produlfus auunculus Airiberti exercitum undique colliens, super ipsum cum Chairiberto uolebat inruere. Chlotharius ad Burgunefaronis specialius iobet ut, cuius pars suum uolebat deuertere iudicium, eorum instantia et utilitate oppremiretur: ea pauore uterque iussione regio pacantur.’ I follow the critical edition by Krusch, B., Fredegarii et aliorum chronica. 42 According to Niermeyer, exercitus could mean a gathering of warriors from various (most) parts of the kingdom; a military expedition, or even a host, that is, a gathering of all the available warriors, or even a gathering of freemen, among other meanings. See: Niermeyer, Mediae Latinitatis, pp. 392–393.

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anonymous author might well be telling us something about the awareness these armed men had developed in relation to their warrior identity, their obligations toward Brodulf and Charibert, or even the perception the learned aristocrats had of such men. To summarize, some methods of creating leadership among military groups included violence, exempla to be followed, sharing of adversity, and even persuasion. Some of the same resources were also used to create social cohesion, as we will see in the following sections.

Social Cohesion in Merovingian Gaul and Visigothic Spain Social cohesion is an element external to any group, and depending on the circumstances, it can foster unity among the members of a community, the inhabitants of a city, or a people.43 Similarly, it can create unity among groups with heterogeneous backgrounds or ethnic origins, in order to face an adverse situation or context for the group.44 During the Early Middle Ages, one of the main factors which could foster social cohesion among military groups was violence. Since material violence was present at different levels in day-to-day life during this period,45 it could promote social cohesion basically in two ways. Firstly, when a group of individuals experienced violence (in the form of aggression) as exerted by other group, i.e. during an attack or incursion, or on the battlefield: occasions in which the aforementioned group needed to unite and cooperate if they wished to survive (leaving aside all the conflicts, differences, and rivalries inherent to its members). Secondly, and inversely, when this group exerted violence towards others, motivated by self-defence (not only in the case of soldiers but in the case of town or city dwellers as well), or in order to satisfy the economic needs of the armed groups (hence the need for plundering), or guided by the hunger for glory itself.46 The attempts to loot or acquire more lands by military means can be included within this second category. 43 Weidmann and Zürcher, ‘How Wartime Violence’, pp. 2–3; Arendt, On Violence, pp. 46, 66–69. 44 Smith, ‘War and Ethnicity’, p. 391. 45 Halsall, Warfare and Society, pp. 14–15. 46 There are some ideals inherent to military groups which are part of an esprit de corps. It has been argued that some of these ideals were already common during the High and the Later Roman Empire. According to Pat Southern and Karen Ramsay Dixon, the Roman soldiers of the Later Empire fought not for the aforementioned empire but for the prestige and glory of their unit. The authors state that ‘it is the cohesion which exists within small groups that forms the

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Hence, one of the ways in which cohesion was generated within the context of armed groups in the former territories of the Western Roman Empire was via their participation in military campaigns. As Halsall argued, military campaigns provided the army, secular groups related to it, and the government with economic motivations required for their basic sustenance during this period. This in turn manifested itself as loyalty towards the ruler or the comes or dux leading a particular armed group.47 From the point of view of the experience of the inhabitants of a conquered region or city, we can consider this as forced cohesion, which was imposed by a ruler or even a group of the aristocracy. This was probably what Gregory of Tours understood in relation to the consequences of the Battle of Vouillé, in which the Franks defeated the Visigoths and King Alaric II (484–507) was killed.48 In his second book of Histories, Gregory of Tours recounts: He [Clovis] took all the treasure of Alaric, from Toulouse to Angouleme. There, the Lord showed him such favour that the walls of the city collapsed with his own weight when he gazed at them. Then, once the Goths were expelled, Clovis subjugated the city. Later, with his assured victory, he returned to Tours [and] awarded many gifts to the church of Saint Martin.49

The above passage, short as it is, serves as the foundation for interpreting a variety of situations involving cohesion in the context of a military campaign. In this regard, Gregory of Tours describes how Clovis (481–509), who in turn was motivated by religious causes, defeated the Visigoths.50 In this fragment, the mention of the theft of treasure is interesting since it reveals that one of the motivations behind the Merovingians’ campaign was economic. This might reveal the original intentions of the Franks: to acquire more lands, and to control a city which was the head of a territorial unit with its inhabitants (a source of manpower which could be employed and taxed), greatest motivation for the soldier, since ultimately the safety of comrades is more important to the individual soldier than the safety of the army as a whole’ (Southern and Dixon, Late Roman Army, p. 169). 47 Halsall, Warfare and Society, p. 36. See also: Geary, Before, pp. 56, 99. 48 Arce, Esperando, p. 104; Castellanos, Visigothic Kingdom, p. 24; García Moreno, España visigoda, pp. 85–86. See also: Geary, Before, p. 87; Mathisen and Shanzer, Battle of Vouillé. 49 Greg. Tur., DLH, II.37, p. 88: ‘Chlodovechus vero apud Burdigalinsi urbe hiemen agens, cunctos thesauros Alarici a Tholosa auferens, Ecolisnam venit. Cui tantam Dominus gratiam tribuit, ut in eius contemplatione muri sponte corruerent. Tunc, exclusis Gothis, urbem suo dominio subiugavit. Post haec, patrata victuria, Turonus est regressus, multa sanctae basilicae beati Martini munera offerens.’ 50 Wood, ‘Arian, Catholics’, p. 140.

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that is, objectives which are not mentioned by Gregory of Tours. In addition, the reference to the treasure of Alaric is relevant since it could be interpreted as the capture of the Visigothic kingdom by the Franks.51 One of the factors which shaped social cohesion was, therefore, economic. Concerning this, there are other fragments in the historiographical sources of the Merovingian and Visigothic regna which highlight the distribution of a treasure among the members of the exercitus in the context of military campaigns. Isidore of Seville, for example, narrates the victory of Theudegisel (548–549) against the Franks, and mentions that they offered him a vast amount of wealth (‘atque ingenti pecunia sibi oblata’).52 The Historia Wambae Regis describes, in addition, that Wamba distributed part of some treasure found in the fortresses of Collioure, Oltrera, and Llivia among the members of his army.53 Moreover, in certain situations, social cohesion was constructed by a ruler, and was imposed on his followers or newly acquired subjects. This is the case of Clovis and the defeat of Ragnachar and his brother.54 In the text, we can see how the kind of leadership exercised by Clovis resulted in the imposition of vertical cohesion: after defeating a possible rival overlord by means of inducing his followers to commit treachery, Clovis managed to force those men to submit to his rule, once their former leader was dead. Thus, having a new ruler, the armed followers or leudes had no choice but to accept their integration into the regnum Clovis was forging through military expansion.55 The cohesion is therefore imposed from the top down: it is the king who shapes it and chooses the strategies to use, backing himself with a force of armed followers. The Liber Historiae Francorum presents a couple of examples of what could be considered as horizontal cohesion, that is, when cohesion is generated among peers in order to overcome a difficulty such as a political measure or a context which is not favourable to them. In these passages, such a cohesion was developed among a group of laymen.56 Hence, the members 51 As Matthias Hardt suggests, royal treasures were important during the migration period and the early stages of the Post-Roman Kingdoms. The theft of royal treasures is a topos commonly found within the narrative sources composed between the sixth and eight centuries. Such treasures were considered as being part of the history of a people. See: Hardt, ‘Royal Treasures’, pp. 256–258. See also: Arce, Esperando, pp. 88–89, for the case of the Visigoths. 52 HG, 41, pp. 238, 240. 53 HWR, 11, p. 511: ‘Multa in his castris auri argentique inveniens, quae copiosis exercitibus in praedem cessit.’ 54 Greg. Tur., DLH, II.42, p. 91. 55 Geary, Before, p. 83. 56 Pohl, ‘Social Cohesion’, pp. 23–24.

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of a community may unite themselves, and in that case the cohesion is not imposed by a central authority or negotiated as in a top-down model. Chapter 43 of the Liber Historiae Francorum describes the problems surrounding the death of King Sigibert of Austrasia, and the deposition of his son Dagobert by the maior domus Grimoald. Grimoald placed his son on the throne, and had the young Dagobert tonsured and sent on pilgrimage.57 The Liber mentions that the Franks were opposed to such measures and prepared an ambush for Grimoald. The anonymous author does not specify who these Franks were (‘Franci itaque valde indignantes’), although one can suppose that these were the leudes or, at least, members of the secular aristocracy.58 They captured Grimoald and sent him to Clovis II (639–657), who condemned him, and he was later put to death. In this example, the aristocracy were confronted with a problem which might interfere with their interests, that is, the deposition of the legitimate heir to the kingdom. This case presents us with a particular group of Franks and their will to face a conflict which emerged from within the group. Cohesion was then not imposed by a superior authority figure, as would be the case in a top-down model. The second example from the Liber Historiae Francorum in which we can see how this horizontal cohesion worked is in Chapter 45, which describes the election of Ebroin as maior domus. In a similar vein to the former example, a faction of the leading Franks gathered and plotted against the appointment of Ebroin: they captured, tonsured, and sent him into a monastery, to then summon King Childeric II (673–675) with his advisor, the protector Wulfoald.59 Horizontal cohesion was prompted, in this regard, when a faction of the aristocracy felt that a new ruler or maior domus was not aligned with their interests. Hence, to overcome this difficulty, they gathered forces once again and united (despite that, their attempt failed and Ebroin was able to return). 57 LHF, 43, pp. 315–316: ‘Docedente vero tempore, defuncto Sighiberto rege, Grimoaldus filium eius parvolum nomine Daygobertum totundit Didonemque Pectavensem urbis episcopum in Socia peregrinandum eum direxit, filium suum in regno constituens. Franci itaque hoc valde indignantes, Grimoaldo insidias preparant, eumque exementes, ad condempnandum rege Francorum Chlodoveo defeerunt.’ 58 Fouracre and Gerberding, Late Merovingian France, p. 69. 59 LHF, 45, p. 317: ‘Eo tempore, defuncto Erchonoldo maiorum domo, Franci in incertum vacellantes, prefinito consilio, Ebroino huius honoris altitudine maiorum domo in aula regis statuunt. […] Eo tempore Franci adversus Ebroinum insidias preparant, super Theudericum consurgunt eumque de regno deiciunt, crinesque capitis amborum vi abstrahentes, incidunt. Ebroinum totundut eumque Luxovio monasterio in Burgundia dirigunt.’ See also: Fox, Power and Religion, pp. 78–79.

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The Visigothic narrative and legal sources present a similar context, especially regarding the seventh century. Some of the opening speeches of the church councils describe comparable situations in which members of the aristocracy, both military and ecclesiastical, unite to depose a king who is not functional to their interests and their autonomy. Conciliar law suggests that kings were trying to prevent this situation, so it is noteworthy that these plots and usurpations were common. The Historia Gothorum, on the other hand, describes an analogous example of horizontal cohesion, with the difference that here, the cohesion is generated among the members of the army led by Agila (549–554), and not by members of the secular aristocracy (‘uidentes proprio se euerti excidio’). Isidore recounts that Athanagild (554–567) received the loyalty of the soldiers after they murdered Agila in Emerita. The reason behind this was that the Visigothic warriors preferred not to fight against their peers who were under the command of Athanagild, as Isidore explained. They envisaged that if they fought each other, the Roman army would take advantage of the situation and Constantinople would send more troops to Spain.60 The passage is interesting since it describes that the soldiers have united to resolve a difficult situation (which might affect them and their land unfavourably), in this case, the possible arrival of another contingent of imperial soldiers. So, they decided to remove Agila and surrender to Athanagild, in order to prevent conflict with their comrades. Here the danger of an external invasion was present and, at the same time, the Visigothic soldiers might have developed a strong esprit de corps, which could influence decisions such as these, involving confrontation with an authority for the sake of the group as a whole.61 Social cohesion was also reinforced by another factor: the display of a military or warrior identity. This identity was the result of the development 60 HG, 46, p. 248: ‘Uidentes proprio se euerti excidio et magis metuentes, ne Spaniam milites auxili occasione inuaderent, Agilanem Emerita interficiunt et Athanagildi se regimini tradiderunt.’ 61 This was the interpretatio of Isidore, who composed his Historiae around 70 years after these events took place (Martín, ‘“Crónica Universal”’, pp. 204–205; Fontaine, Génesis y originalidad, pp. 169–171). The episode of the soldiers of Agila, as briefly as Isidore described it, is set within the context of the rebellion of the Hispano-Romans of Córdoba and that of Athanagild, who took advantage of this situation to rise up against the king. This is a complex chain of events and, as García Moreno describes, Athanagild could only defeat Agila with the support of the Byzantine troops which, on the other hand, were not as numerous as one could suppose at first. This episode of the army’s abandonment of their loyalty to Agila may be placed during the second arrival of the imperial troops. See: García Moreno, España visigoda, pp. 100–102. See also: Collins, Visigothic Spain, pp. 47–48; Wood, Politics of Identity, p. 181; Wood, ‘Defending Byzantine Spain’, pp. 294–295.

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of shared values among the armed followers of kings and royal officers. These groups had a shared memory of former participation in wars, as well as the toll and the experience of campaigning. They probably wanted to differentiate themselves from other social groups such as secular officials, religious men, peasants, and artisans.62 Thus, such a display could have served as a mark of identity, and a way of maintaining cohesion among these groups. Traces of this display of identity can be found both in the historiographical sources as well as in legislation. This warrior identity was performed via martial symbols and rituals. Some of them consisted basically in the descriptions of the equipment and symbols used in such rituals. In the case of the Franks, the sources often describe weapons and military attire. For example, in relation to Clovis, the narratives mention that he wields an axe, and describe the way he used it to kill his enemies or those who opposed him, before the gathering of his army, as in the examples analysed above recounting the deaths of Ragnachar and that of the Frankish warrior who defied Clovis’s authority in the episode of the vessel. Furthermore, Clovis is described by Gregory of Tours as wearing Roman military garments (the chlamys, the diadem, and a purple tunic) in the event of the acclamation at Tours.63 Another example is that of Chlothar II (613–629), mentioned in the Liber Historiae Francorum as wearing chain mail armour with a helmet covering his long white hair (‘caniciae variatas obvolutas’),64 and wielding a spear to kill the usurper Berthoald. Again, the military equipment is mentioned and described in detail by the anonymous author who composed this work during the first half of the seventh century. In addition, while these signs of warrior identity were a trademark of the secular class, they were not an exclusive trait of the Merovingians: the sources describe other figures who were not members of the Merovingian family wearing some of these elements. One of those is Count Leudast,

62 Here I follow T.S. Brown on the Roman army of Italy. He argues that the army wished to differentiate itself through traditions and discipline. While we cannot straightforwardly compare the Roman army of Italy to the armies of Visigothic Spain and Merovingian Gaul, I believe that there might have been some similarities concerning the construction of identity and martial values (Brown, Gentlemen and Officers, pp. 92–93). 63 Greg. Tur., DLH, II.38, pp. 88–89. The chlamys was a standard element of the administrative attire of the Later Empire. McCormick suggested that there is even the possibility that the attire came from Constantinople with the codicils (McCormick, Eternal Victory, pp. 335–337). 64 LHF, 41, p. 313: ‘Rex quoque illuc stans, lurica indutus, galea in capite crines cum canicie variatas obvolutas.’

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who wore a cuirass, chain mail, a helmet, and carried a quiver and javelin as weapons.65 Another characteristic related to warrior identity which appears in the narrative sources composed in the Merovingian kingdoms concerns hair. One of these examples is found in the story of Gundovald, a member of the Merovingian family who migrated from Gaul to Constantinople.66 In these stories, hair is the symbol which represented this military identity as well as monarchic authority, and the right to occupy the throne. Gundovald had his hair cut twice before his departure to the East67: [W]hen King Chlothar heard the news, he sent messengers to his brother to say: ‘Let my boy go, and send him to me.’ Childebert immediately sent the boy to Chlothar, who took one look at him and ordered him to have his hair cut. ‘This is no son of mine,’ he said. After the death of King Chlothar, Gundovald was taken up by King Charibert. Later on, Sigibert summoned him and had his hair cut off a second time, sending him to Colonia Claudia Agrippinensis, which is now known simply as Cologne.68

Nevertheless, in other chapters we see Gundovald being proclaimed king by some aristocrats and the army he gathered. This was achieved through a ritual in which he was paraded on top of a shield: There Gundovald was raised up as king on a shield. As they carried him round for the third time, he stumbled and had great difficulty in remaining

65 Greg. Tur., DLH, V.48, p. 258: ‘Qui, adsumpto, ut diximus, comitatu, in tali levitate elatus est, ut in domo ecclesiae cum toracibus atque loricis, praecinctus pharetra et contum namu gerens, capite galeato ingrederetur, de nullu securus, quia omnibus erat adversus’ (‘Then he was made Count again, as I have told you, and he was so beside himself that he used to walk into the church-house in his cuirass and mail shirt, with his quiver hanging round him, his javelin in his hand and his helmet on his head. He could trust no one, for he himself was every man’s enemy’). 66 Historia Francorum, VI.24; Esders and Reimitz, ‘After Gundovald’, p. 88; Goffart, ‘Frankish Pretender’, pp. 3–5. 67 This was probably a way to keep him away from the rights to the throne, since he was not recognized by the kings. Gregory mentioned that he came to Gaul with the support of Constantinople. See: Greg. Tur., DLH, VI.24. See also: Diesenberger, ‘Hair, Sacrality’, pp. 175, 178; Halsall, Barbarian Migrations, pp. 491–492; Bachrach, The Anatomy of a Little War. 68 Greg. Tur., DLH, VI.24, p. 291: ‘Nuntiatur haec regi Chlothario, misitquae fratri nuntius, dicens: ‘Dimitte puerum, ut veniat ad me’. Ne moratus ille iuvenem fratri direxit. Quo viso, Chlotharius iussit tundi comam capitis eius, dicens: ‘Hunc ego non generavi’. Igitur post Chlothari regis obitum a Charibertho rege susceptus est. Quem Sigyberthus arcessitum iterum amputavit comam capitis eius et misit eum in Agripinensim civitatem, quae nunc Colonia dicitur.’

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upright, even with the helping hands of those standing round him. Then he advanced through the neighbouring cities.69

This was probably an attempt by Gundovald’s followers to equate him with Clovis I, since Gregory describes his acclamation as king in a similar manner. The acclamation of Clovis I took place following the death of Sigibert and his son, at which, Clovis delivered a speech to the people of Cologne. Gregory of Tours reports that ‘[t]hose who heard this roared their approval, clashing their shields and shouting; and raising Clovis upon a shield, they made him their king’.70 Other allusions to this acclamation ritual of a ruler being raised on a shield occur in the histories of Gregory, for example that of Sigibert at Vitry (just moments before his murder).71 Not only was the shield an instrument of the warrior class, but it was also an ancient symbol of military identity, and its use by the Roman army was widespread. Halsall suggests that this practice of raising a leader on a shield originated within the late Roman army.72 In this regard, one can highlight the foederati origins of the Franks being addressed in these examples: they could have taken the symbol from their contact with Roman military practices. At the same time, it is probably safe to assume that Gregory based this description on previous texts by late Roman authors, who describe similar acclamation ceremonies.73 Sources composed within the Kingdom of the Visigoths, on the other hand, do not refer explicitly to these symbols associated with a warrior or military identity. There are, of course, a couple of passages in the narrative sources mentioning ‘the sword’, although these are metaphorical allusions. On the 69 Greg. Tur., DLH, VII.10, p. 332: ‘Qui coniunctus cum supradictis ducibus Limovicinum accedens, Briva-Curretia vicum, in quo sanctus Martinus, nostri, ut aiunt, Martini discipulus, requiescit, advenit, ibique parmae superpositus, rex est levatus. Sed cum tertio cum eodem girarent, cecidisse fertur, ita ut vix manibus circumstantium sustentare potuisset. Deinde ibat per civitates in circuitu positas.’ 70 Greg. Tur., DLH, II.40, p. 91: ‘At ille ista audientes, plaudentes tam parmis quam vocibus, eum clipeo evectum super se regem constituunt.’ 71 Greg. Tur., DLH, IV.51, p. 188: ‘Veniente autem illo ad villam cui nomen est Victuriaco, collectus est ad eum omnis exercitus, impositumque super clypeum sibi regem statuunt. Tunc duo pueri cum cultris validis, quos vulgo scramasaxos vocant, infectis vinino, malificati a Fredegundae regina, cum aliam causam suggerire simularent, utraque ei latera feriunt.’ 72 Halsall, Barbarian Migrations, pp. 489–490. 73 Julian was the f irst Roman emperor to be acclaimed as such by his soldiers, raised on a shield, as described by Ammianus Marcellinus in Book XX, ch. 4. Hans Teitler suggests that the passage written by Ammianus is reminiscent of that of Tacitus in relation to Brinno (Teitler, ‘Rising on a Shield’, pp. 506–507). For Gregory of Tours and his knowledge of late Roman texts, see Zecchini, ‘Latin Historiography’, pp. 334–335; Heinzelmann, Gregor, p. 85.

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other hand, there are scant references to military equipment: in Chapters 69 and 70 of the History of the Goths, Isidore describes some of the military equipment used by the Goths, their tendency to fight on horseback, and their affinity with the art of war.74 Despite the intentions of Isidore being propagandistic (and perhaps especially in these fragments),75 we could infer that some of these weapons were used by the Visigoths.76 Another mention of a sword being held by an individual as a means to threaten other warriors is contained in the description of Witimirus in the Historia Wambae Regis. While surrounded by members of Wamba’s army in a church, Witimirus used a sword in a desperate attempt to save his own life. The same chapter also describes some of the weapons used by the Goths of Wamba when trying to capture Narbonne: javelins (‘et telorum iactu perfidorum ora petivit’) and arrows (‘et vice sagittarum alternatim sibimet utraeque partes obsistunt’).77 In addition, Chapter 2 mentions a sword being brandished as a threat by a Visigothic aristocrat. This member of the aristocracy urges Wamba to accept the throne, otherwise he will run him through with his sword.78 Finally, different weapons and equipment are mentioned in the military law of Ervig, regarding the gathering of the army in case of an attack: cuirasses, shields, swords and short swords (scrama), spears, and arrows.79 Visigothic legal sources point out the existence of a warrior identity in a couple of passages by means of the distinction of civil-military obligations and religious duties. For example, a mention from the late seventh century is found in canon 2 of the Twelfth Council of Toledo. The canon specif ically mentions the militare cingulum, and highlights that those 74 HG, 69, pp. 284, 286: ‘Porro in armorum artibus satis expectabiles, et non solum hastis, sed et iaculis equitando confligunt, nec equestri trantum proelio, sed et pedestri incedunt, uerumtamen magis equitum praepeti curso confidunt, unde et poeta: “Getes, inquit, quo pergi equo”.’ 75 HG, 70, p. 286: ‘Exercere enim sese telis ac proelis praeludere maxime diligunt. Ludorum certamina usu cotidiano gerunt.’ 76 Barroso Cabrera and Morín de Pablos, ‘Armas’, describe the weapons found in the community of Madrid. The finds date from the fifth to seventh centuries, and include spears, parts of shields, hilts, and spathae, among others. 77 HWR, 12, pp. 512–513. 78 HWR, 2, p. 502: ‘Nisi consensurum te nobis modo promittas, gladii modo mucrone truncandum te scias. Nec dehinc tamdiu exhibimus, quamdiu aut expeditio nostra te regem accipiat aut contradictorem cruentus hic hodie casus mortis obsorbeat.’ 79 LV, IX.II.9, p. 377: ‘Sic quoque, ut unusquisque de his, quos secum in exercitum duxerit, partem aliquam zabis vel loricis munitam, plorosque vero scutis, spatis, scramis, lanceis sagittisque instructos, quosdam etiam fundarum instrumentis vel ceteris armis, que noviter forstian unusquisque a seniore vel domino suo iniuncta habuerit, principi, duci vel comiti suo presentare studeat.’

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who received poenitentia (the tonsure and the habit, both signs related to ecclesiastical off ices in the Visigothic and Frankish kingdoms), as a punishment, could no longer wear the military belt.80 The mention of the cingulum militare suggests that a military tradition regarding dressing and its symbols might have been existed, perhaps acquired by the Visigoths during the f ifth century, when they served as a military contingent for the Romans in various campaigns.81 This element was no doubt incorporated via their participation in the Roman army since the belt signalled the rank of military and civil off icers.82 This canon is also interesting since it shows that a differentiation existed between the military and religious branches of offices, although those occupying such branches combined their main obligations (military or religious) with administrative functions.83 Merovingian conciliar law, on the other hand, also describes the existence of a cingulum militare, although not precisely in the context of military identity. In canon 13 of the Council of Clermont (535), the cingulum is mentioned in relation to clerics’ vestments: We have found some who, inflamed by the fire of lust, took off the military belt, and returning to old vomits, they had entered once again into improper marriage, and violated the righteous honour of priesthood by a crime like that of incest, and they even begot children.84

The prohibition of bearing weapons aimed at clerics during riots, as described by the acts of the Fourth Council of Toledo, allows us to understand that there was an intention to separate the duties of the secular aristocracy whose main function was war, from those who were clerics and probably had secular origins fulfilling other functions, but who also resorted to 80 Toledo XII, 2, pp. 10–11: ‘Si quis autem quolibet modo poenitentiam accipiens hoc violaverit synodale institutum, ut vere transgresso paternis regulis ferietur, nec enim ista instituentes sacerdotes quo[s]que ut passim et licenter donum poenitentiae non petentibus audeant prorogare, absolvimus, sed hos qui qualibet sorte poenitentiam susceperint ne ulterius ad militare cingulum redeant religamus.’ All Latin references are to the critical edition by Vives, ed. and trans., Concilios visigóticos. 81 Arce, Bárbaros y romanos; Heather, Goths and Romans; Wolfram, History of the Goths. 82 Hoss, ‘The Roman Military Belt’. 83 Pérez Sánchez, El ejército, p. 158. 84 Clermont I, 13, p. 108: ‘Quosdam repperemus ardore liudinis inflammaus abiecto militiae cingulo uomitum pristinum et inhebeta rursus coniugia repetisse adque incesti quodammodo crimine clarum decus sacerdotii iolasse, quod nati etiam filii prodederunt.’ All Latin references are to the critical edition by De Clercq, ed., Concilia Galliae.

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weapons in certain opportunities.85 There is also a parallel in canon 5 of the Council of Macon (583): No Cleric should wear tunics or other secular garments or footwear which does not correspond with religion. If after this definition a cleric is found using inconvenient or wielding weapons, he should be punished with a reclusion of 30 days by his superiors, conforming with just water and a modest piece of bread.86

Conclusions As we have seen over the course of this chapter, leadership and cohesion were two aspects that were intrinsically related to each other in military groups during this period. They were like the two sides of a coin: each could potentially shape the other. At the same time, both leadership and social cohesion could work in different ways, although they were motivated by almost the same influences (economic, or ideological in nature, for example). During the Early Middle Ages, leadership was a crucial foundation within the developing post-Roman kingdoms: it allowed kings, and aristocrats under their command to be successful in battle (if they were good enough), and 85 Toledo IV, 45, p. 207: ‘Clerici qui in quaquumque seditione arma volentes sumserint aut sumserunt, reperti amisso ordinis sui gradu in monasterio poenitentiae contradantur.’ The law issued by Wamba is an exception. This law allows clerics and other people holding regular off ices to participate in war in the event of an unexpected invasion. LV, IX.2.8, p. 371: ‘Adeo presenti sanctione decernimus, ut a die legis huius prenotato vel tempore, si quelibet inimicorum adversitas contra partem nostram commota extiterit, seu sit episcopus sive etiam in quocumque ecclesiastico ordine constitutus, seu sit dux aut comes, thiufadus aut vicarius, gardingus vel quelibet persona.’ On the one hand, Ervig military law does not mention the obligation of clerics to participate in war. This omission could be considered, on the other hand, as an exemption granted to clerics by Ervig. Moreover, as Pérez Sánchez suggested, this omission could also be interpreted as the obligation clerics had to participate in war, since Ervig military law stipulated that all men had to involve themselves in the defence of the kingdom, plus, the law of Wamba might have been still in use. Be that as it may, it could have been a special concession made by Ervig to acquire the support of the religious aristocracy, who were previously affected by the laws of Wamba. See: Pérez Sánchez, El ejército, pp. 164–165. 86 Macon II, 5: ‘Ut nullus clericus sagum aut uestimenta uel calciamenta saecularia, nisi quae religionem deceant, induere praesumat. Quod si post hanc definitionem clericus aut cum indecenti ueste aut cum arma inuentus fuerit, a seniorebus ita coherceatur, ut triginta dierum conclusion detentus aquam tantum et modeci panis usu diebus singolis sustentetur.’ Similar canons were issued in the last decades of the seventh century, more specifically at the Council of Bordeaux (662–675), and at the Council of Saint Jean de Losne. See: Bordeaux I, 1, Saint Jean de Losne I, 2. All Latin references are to the critical edition by De Clercq, ed., Concilia Galliae.

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furthermore, it allowed them to control the relations between their armed followers and the non-fighting population, something that occasionally generated trouble, both for the Merovingians and the Visigoths, as is attested by historiographical and legal documentation that we have analysed. Leadership, if well employed, could provide rulers with one of the means to create long-lasting cohesion among the nobles and their followers. This could be achieved via different strategies. On the one hand, using violence and demonstrations of force to oblige the warriors to obey or fulfil certain tasks, as the representations of Clovis provided by Gregory of Tours show. On the other hand, leadership could create a forced cohesion while using punishments (if required) or exempla of what should be done in a specific context. On certain occasions, Frankish and Visigothic kings had to punish members of their exercitus for misbehaving or disobeying orders. But not all leadership was forged through harsh methods: sometimes, kings used reason as well (or were experienced enough to persuade their followers without violence). Moreover, rulers could shape leadership by sharing hardships with their armed followers, something that could raise the morale of the troops, and could create long-lasting bonds of loyalty between ruler and soldier. Social cohesion among military groups in both regna was constructed through leadership, as we have seen, but also by means of violence, participation in military campaigns, and the sharing of the spoils of conquest. All this applied to a top-down model, in which the authority in charge could consolidate cohesion among different groups. On the other hand, there were situations in which cohesion emerged among peers: this happened especially among soldiers or lay aristocrats, at certain points, to surmount a specific threat. Finally, military identity was perhaps the result of social cohesion and leadership combined. At the same time, identity could also play a crucial role in the development of social cohesion. As we have seen, traces of an identity related to the military or warrior activities can be found within both Merovingian and Visigothic legal and historiographical sources. Sometimes, such sources offer us detailed descriptions with rituals and symbols attached to them, which permit us to infer that there might have existed something like a military identity. On other occasions, the sources merely provide us with fleeting glimpses of what that identity could have been. Although the fates of both regna were quite different, they shared some common features associated with leadership and social cohesion in the context of military groups. Such resemblances also apply to the degree

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of influence both the Merovingians and the Visigoths took from Roman culture: they continued to exert some Roman leadership strategies to boost the morale of their troops, as well as maintaining some Roman symbolism and rituals (such as the traditions of military attire, banners, and the raising up of leaders on shields).

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Sarti, Laury, Perceiving War and the Military in Early Christian Gaul (ca. 400–700 A.D.) (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Smith, Anthony, ‘War and Ethnicity: The Role of Warfare in the Formation, SelfImages and Cohesion of Ethnic Communities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 4, no. 4 (1981), 375–397. Southern, Pat, and Karen Ramsay Dixon, The Late Roman Army (London: B.T. Batsford, 1996). Teitler, Hans, ‘Rising on a Shield: Origin and Afterlife of a Coronation Ceremony’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 8, no. 4 (2002), 501–521. Valverde Castro, María del Rosario, Ideología, simbolismo y ejercicio del poder real en la monarquía visigoda: un proceso de cambio (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 2000). Wallace-Hadrill, John Michael, The Long-Haired Kings and Other Studies in Frankish History (London: Routledge, 2020). Weidmann, Nils B., and Christoph Zürcher, ‘How Wartime Violence Affects Social Cohesion: The Spatial-Temporal Gravity Model’, Civil Wars, 15, no. 1 (2013), 1–18. Wolfram, Herwig, History of the Goths, trans. by Thomas J. Dunlap (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990). Wood, Ian, ‘Arian, Catholics, and Vouillé’, in The Battle of Vouillé, 507 CE: Where France Began, ed. by Ralph Mathisen and Danuta Shanzer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), pp. 139–150. Wood, Ian, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–751 (New York: Longman, 1994). Wood, Jamie, ‘Defending Byzantine Spain: Frontiers and Diplomacy’, Early Medieval Europe, 18, no. 3 (2010), 292–319. Wood, Jamie, The Politics of Identity in Visigothic Spain: Religion and Power in the Histories of Isidore of Seville (Leiden: Brill, 2012). Wynn, Phillip, ‘War and Warriors in Gregory of Tours’ Histories I–IV’, Francia, 28 (2001), 1–35. Zecchini, Giuseppe, ‘Latin Historiography: Jerome, Orosius and the Western Chronicles’, in Greek and Roman Historiography in Late Antiquity: Fourth to Sixth Century A.D., ed. by Gabriele Marasco (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 317–345.

About the Authors Fernando Ruchesi received his PhD at the Universidad de Buenos Aires in 2015. At present he works as a Researcher at the Universitat de Lleida, Spain. His research focuses on the development of social cohesion in Merovingian Gaul and Visigothic Spain, with particular emphasis on the north-east of the Iberian peninsula.

7.

Between Rome and Toulouse: The Catholic Episcopate in the regnum Tolosanum (418–507) Christian Stadermann

Abstract The Visigothic kings of the fifth and early sixth centuries adopted a tough stance towards the Catholic episcopate in Gaul. While this has been attributed to the missionary zeal of the ‘Arians’, more recent studies suggest their aim was to strengthen political cohesion: The measures imposed were meant to break resistance of powerful authorities within and to reduce influence of those beyond the borders of the Visigothic kingdom. It is assumed that the Roman Empire used the Catholic Church to exert influence on Visigothic Gaul, turning the Catholic faith into a central element of Roman identity; yet many aspects of this argument have never received an in-depth discussion. This chapter examines the relations between the Catholic episcopate in Gaul, Rome, and the Visigothic court at Toulouse. Keywords: Visigoths, Kingdom of Toulouse, Gallo-Roman senatorial aristocracy, Sidonius Apollinaris, late antique Gaul, Catholic episcopate

Introduction In 475, Gaius Sollius Apollinaris Sidonius, a Gallo-Roman aristocrat and bishop of Clermont, wrote a letter to his colleague Basilius of Aix, who was part of an imperial embassy sent to the Visigothic king Euric (466–484) by the Roman emperor Julius Nepos (474–475). The embassy’s mission was to negotiate a peace treaty with Euric. In his letter, Sidonius paints a bleak picture of the Catholic Church in the Visigothic kingdom, which at this time

Castro, D. and Ruchesi, F. (ed.), Leadership, Social Cohesion, and Identity in Late Antique Spain and Gaul (500–700). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 doi 10.5117/9789463725958_ch07

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stretched from the banks of the Loire and the Rhône to the Atlantic Ocean and across the Pyrenees. Sidonius writes that the bishoprics of various civitates – he mentions Bordeaux, Périgueux, Rodez, Limoges, Javols, Eauze, Bazas, Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges, and Auch – were vacant because their bishops had passed away and no successors had been appointed.1 Sidonius mentions a ban on the consecration of new bishops that had been introduced by King Euric.2 Furthermore, he states that a number of bishops – Sidonius mentions Crocus and Simplicius – had been exiled.3 As Sidonius points out, these sanctions had a disastrous effect on the Catholic Church: Since so many bishoprics were vacant, lower clergymen could not be ordained. Consequently, the aforementioned cities fell prey to a spiritual devastation (‘spiritalis ruinae’), particularly because more clergymen were dying every day and their positions could not be filled. The Catholic parishes had thus been cut off from faith; desperation was taking hold.4 The Catholic communities were shrinking. Church buildings, especially in rural areas, were falling into disrepair. Sidonius speaks of cattle grazing in the abandoned churches, not only in the vestibules but also by the grass-grown altars.5 Scholars have long debated the nature and the extent of King Euric’s interference with the Catholic episcopate in his kingdom. Among other things, they have investigated his motives for banishing clerics and for banning the ordination of Catholic bishops. Older studies interpreted Euric’s policies as a kind of ‘persecution’, motivated either by his religious zeal or by his desire to ‘Arianize’ the Catholic population of his realm.6 Although some earlier scholars pointed out that there was likely a political dimension to Euric’s sanctions,7 such aspects have only recently received closer attention. According to this view, Euric attempted to overcome the resistance of the Gallo-Roman senatorial aristocracy, whence most bishops had been recruited. These aristocratic bishops are said to have played a crucial role in the resistance against Visigothic rule and to have advocated for Gaul to 1 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.7: ‘Burdigala, Petrogorii, Ruteni, Lemouices, Gabalitani, Helusani, Vasates, Conuenae, Auscenses, multoque iam maior numerus ciuitatum summis sacerdotibus ipsorum morte truncatus nec ullis deinceps episcopis in defunctorum officia suffectis’ (‘Bordeaux, Périgueux, Rodez, Limoges, Javols, Eauze, Bazas, Saint-Bertrand, Auch, and a far greater number of other cities have now, by the death of the incumbents, lost their bishops, and no bishops have been appointed to succeed the departed’) (trans. by Anderson, Sidonius, vol. 2, p. 319). 2 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.10. 3 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.9. 4 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.7. 5 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.8. 6 Cf. Koch, Der heilige Faustus, pp. 19f.; Dill, Roman Society, pp. 465f. 7 Cf. Görres, ‘Kirche und Staat’, pp. 714f.; Yver, ‘Euric’, pp. 44f.

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return to the rule of the orthodox emperor.8 Based on this hypothesis, it has been argued that – due to its close ties to the Roman Empire – the Catholic Church exerted a ‘Roman’ influence on the political landscape of Gaul. This influence, it is claimed, was beyond the control of the Visigothic kings: The Catholic Church constituted a remnant of ‘Romanness’ within the Visigothic kingdom, which could not easily be reconciled with the Visigoth’s ‘Arian’ denomination and which stood in the way of Euric’s desire for sovereignty.9 It is sometimes argued that the Catholic bishops in Gaul continued to be representatives of the Roman order even after the withdrawal of the imperial administration and the Visigothic kings had come to power.10 According to this hypothesis, the Catholic episcopate in Gaul was an instrument with the help of which powers outside the Visigothic kingdom – i.e. the imperial government, the bishop of Rome – were able to exert a certain sociopolitical influence on the Roman provincials in Visigothic Gaul. Arguably, this is why the Visigothic kings Euric (466–484) and Alaric II (484–507), who were both striving for sovereignty, felt the need to weaken the episcopate. Various aspects of this line of argument, however, still belong to the realm of speculation. Dietrich Claude and Wolfgang Giese, for instance, do not provide any evidence to justify their claim that the Catholic episcopate in Visigothic Gaul sought an alliance with the orthodox Roman emperor.11 Knut Schäferdiek and Herwig Wolfram rightly observe that no letter from the Gallic bishops to the Apostolic See – or vice versa – has survived from the time of Euric; they conclude that Euric prevented the Catholic episcopate of his kingdom from communicating with Rome.12 Beyond this finding, evidence on Euric’s ecclesiastical politics remains scarce. In this chapter, I intend to scrutinize the aforementioned hypotheses as to Euric’s sanctions against the Catholic episcopate of his kingdom, seeking out the explanation that most plausibly fits the historical data. On the one hand, it is necessary to provide reliable evidence for the view that representatives of the Catholic episcopate in 8 Claude, Geschichte der Westgoten, p. 48, states that Euric’s banishment of bishops was politically motivated, whereas the ban on the consecration of new bishops had to be explained in terms of religious zeal. For political motives, see also Stroheker, Eurich, pp. 37–61; Giese, Die Goten, p. 61; Panzram, ‘Eurich und seine Nachfolger’, pp. 126f.; Mathisen, Roman Aristocrats, p. 33; Heather, The Goths, pp. 212f.; Mathisen and Sivan, ‘Forging a New Identity’, pp. 38f.; Van Waarden, Writing to Survive, vol. 1, p. 276. According to Griffe, La Gaule chrétienne, vol. 2, p. 64, and Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 55f., religious and political motives are not mutually exclusive. 9 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 12f. 10 Cf. Stroheker, Eurich, p. 53. 11 Cf. Claude, Geschichte der Westgoten, p. 48; Giese, Die Goten, p. 61. 12 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 27; Wolfram, Die Goten, p. 204.

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Visigothic Gaul – besides Sidonius Apollinaris – advocated for Visigothic Gaul to be annexed by the imperial government. On the other hand, we need to substantiate the claim that powers outside Visigothic Gaul – i.e. the imperial government, the bishop of Rome – used the Catholic episcopate in Gaul to influence the political decision-making in the regnum Tolosanum. Apart from historiographical and hagiographical sources, this chapter will take into account conciliar and synodal legislation, imperial legislation, and the extensive epistolary literature of the fifth century, which was largely produced by Gallo-Roman aristocrats, bishops, and the bishops of Rome.

‘The wolf of this age, who feasts on the sins of dying souls’13 The historian Gregory of Tours (538–594) was first to suggest that – driven by the religious zeal of a ‘heretic’ – the ‘Arian’ Euric carried out a ‘persecution’ against Catholic Christians. In fact, Gregory of Tours writes about the ‘persecutor’ Euric (‘de Euvarege persecutore’)14: At that time, Euric, king of the Goths, crossed the Spanish border and began a terrible persecution of the Christians in Gaul. Without more ado he cut off the heads of all who would not subscribe to his heretical opinions, he imprisoned the clerics, and the bishops he either drove into exile or had executed by the sword. He ordered the doorways of the churches to be blocked with briers so that the very difficulty of findings one’s way in might encourage men to forget their Christian faith. It was mainly the Novempopulana and the towns of the two Aquitaines which suffered from this violent attack.15

Gregory mentions his source: the aforementioned letter of Sidonius Apollinaris to Basilius of Aix.16 Comparing both texts, however, we may note 13 Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.2: ‘istius aetatis lupus, qui peccatis pereuntium saginatur animarum’. 14 Greg. Tur. hist. 2.25.tit. 15 Greg. Tur. hist. 2.25: ‘Huius temporis et Euarix rex Gothorum, excidens Hispanum limitem, gravem in Galliis super christianis intulit persecutionem. Truncabat passim perversitate suae non consentientis, clericus carceribus subegebat, sacerdotis vero alius dabat exilio, alius gladio trucidabat. Nam et ipsus sacrorum templorum aditus spinis iusserat obserari, scilicet ut raritas ingrediendi oblivionem facerit fidei. Maxime tunc Novimpopulanae geminaeque Germaniae [sic] urbes ab hac tempestate depopulatae sunt’ (translation based upon Thorpe, Gregory of Tours, p. 138). 16 Cf. Greg. Tur. hist. 2.25: ‘Extat hodieque et pro ac causa ad Basilium episcopum nobilis Sidoni ipsius epistola, quae haec ita loquitur.’ (‘We still possess a letter by the noble Sidonius written

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that Sidonius’s letter does not speak of bishops who were cut down with the sword (‘gladio trucidabat’). Rather, Sidonius mentions bishops who died of natural causes and whose positions were not allowed to be filled, which meant that a large number of cities had ‘lost their heads’ (‘maior numerus civitatum summis sacerdotibus ipsorum morte truncatus’).17 Since the manuscript tradition does not point to a corruption of the text, we have to assume that Gregory of Tours misinterpreted his source – whether he did this consciously is another matter. At any rate, it is obvious that the bishop of Tours ignored the context of Sidonius’s account.18 It is worth taking a closer look at the historical context of the events in question: In the spring or early summer 475,19 the bishop of Clermont addressed this letter to his colleague Basilius of Aix. It was on the eve of the peace talks between the Visigothic king Euric and the imperial embassy to which Basilius belonged.20 Sidonius’s rhetoric was shaped by his desire to influence the peace talks.21 He calls on Basilius to advocate lifting the ban on the consecration of bishops, as he hopes that new clergy will strengthen the existing Nicene communities. Even if Roman territories needed to be ceded to the Visigoths as part of the peace treaty, these regions would stay connected to the Roman world through their shared faith. Apparently, Sidonius did not know that the surrender of his homeland, the Auvergne, to the Visigoths was also up for negotiation – he clearly pictures himself on the Roman side of the post-treaty world.22 Sidonius’s aggressive and to Bishop Basilius about this, in which he gives full details’) (trans. by Thorpe, Gregory of Tours, pp. 138f.). On Sidonius’s letter as Gregory’s source, cf. Yver, ‘Euric’, p. 43. 17 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.7. 18 Cf. Wood, ‘Continuity or Calamity?’, p. 12; Stadermann, Gothus, pp. 296f. 19 On the date of the letter, cf. Loyen, Sidoine Apollinaire, vol. 3, p. 214, n. 6; Stevens, Sidonius Apollinaris, p. 108; Van Waarden, Writing to Survive, vol. 1, p. 274. 20 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.10; for Basilius of Aix, see Duchesne, Fastes épiscopaux, vol. 1, p. 280; Loyen, Sidoine Apollinaire, vol. 3, p. 189; Heinzelmann, ‘Gallische Prosopographie’, p. 570; Harries, Sidonius Apollinaris, pp. 191, 234f., 237. 21 Cf. Harries, Sidonius Apollinaris, p. 234f.; Van Waarden, Writing to Survive, vol. 1, p. 274. 22 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.10: ‘agite, quatenus haec sit amicitiae concordia principalis, ut episcopali ordinatione permissa populos Galliarum, quos limes Gothicae sortis incluserit, teneamus ex f ide, etsi non tenemus ex foedere’ (‘Work, therefore, that his may be the chief article of the peace – that episcopal ordination being permitted we may hold according to the faith, though we cannot hold according to the treaty, those peoples of Gaul who are enclosed within the bounds of the Gothic domain’) (trans. by Anderson, Sidonius, vol. 2, p. 323). Wood, ‘Continuity or Calamity?’, p. 12, indicates that Sidonius may already have known the surrender of his homeland to be imminent. I once held this view myself, cf. Stadermann, Gothus, p. 118. However, the formulation ‘teneamus ex fide, etsi non tenemus ex foedere’, particularly the first person plural, suggests that Sidonius still considered Clermont and the Auvergne to be part of the

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polemical style is meant to put pressure on the imperial delegation, to prevent them from making far-reaching concessions to Euric. His words are supposed to strike a chord, as it were, with Basilius, who was a vigorous opponent of ‘Arianism’.23 Apparently, Sidonius deemed it more effective to warn against a ‘heretic rule’ over the Nicene communities Rome was about to abandon, rather than against the Visigothic ‘barbarian’ way of life which posed a threat to Roman culture and civilization in general.24 On an allegorical level, Sidonius compares Euric with a Pharaoh and the fate of the Catholic Roman provincials with that of the Israelites in Egypt and Babylon.25 However, contrary to what Gregory of Tours would claim a hundred years later, Sidonius does not indicate that Euric was using violence against the Catholics; the King’s measures against the episcopate are not said to go beyond the ban on the consecration of new bishops. According to Sidonius, the wolf of this age (‘istius aetatis lupus’) attacks the unsuspecting shepherds, i.e. the bishops, so as to more easily plunder the sheep hurdles of the Catholic Church, i.e. the communities of the faithful.26 He suggests the long-term consequences of Euric’s policies to be devastating for the Catholic Church in Visigothic Gaul: The parishes lack care and protection; since priests cannot be ordained, the priesthood is about to die out. Consequently, Catholic communities are shrinking, church buildings are falling into disrepair, and indeed the end of religion itself (‘finis religionis’) is imminent.27 Sidonius warns the imperial envoy of the Visigothic king, Roman Empire – even after the peace treaty had been made. This explains Sidonius’s surprise at the rumour that the Auvergne had been ceded to the Visigoths. Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.7.1–2: ‘ut fama conf irmat, misera minus fuit sub bello quam sub pace condicio. Facta est seruitus nostra pretium securitatis alienae’ (‘as the report declares, its plight was less miserable in war than it is now in peace. Our freedom has been bartered for the security of others’) (trans. by Anderson, Sidonius, vol. 2, p. 325). 23 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.2: ‘qui uiderim Modaharium, ciuem Gothum, haereseos Arrianae iacula uibrantem quo tu spiritalium testimoniorum mucrone confoderis, seruata ceterorum tam reuerentia quam pace pontificum non iniuria tibi defleo’ (‘for I saw how, when Modaharius the Goth launched his darts of Arian heresy, you transfixed him with the sword of spiritual testimony – for these reasons, without offence or slight to the other bishops, I feel justified in sadly reporting to you’) (trans. by Anderson, Sidonius, vol. 2, p. 315). Sidonius’s rhetorical strategy has been noted by Stroheker, Eurich, pp. 43-45; Wood, ‘Continuity or Calamity?’, p. 12; Harries, Sidonius Apollinaris, p. 234f.; Harries, ‘Sidonius Apollinaris and the Frontiers’, p. 43. The letter is discussed at length by Stroheker, Eurich, pp. 42-47; Courcelle, Histoire littéraire, pp. 177f.; Griffe, La Gaule chrétienne, vol. 2, pp. 62f.; Van Waarden, Writing to Survive, pp. 272-333. 24 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.6–9. 25 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.4. 26 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.2–3. 27 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.7–9.

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who – he suggests – was so opposed to the nomen catholicum that you would think him to be the leader of a secta rather than of a gens.28 It is unknown whether Sidonius’s apocalyptic warnings against an ‘Arian’ tyranny, a menace to the religious life and the very existence of the Catholic Church in Gaul, had any effect on Basilius.29 What we do know from Sidonius’s letters is that he was surprised at the outcome of the peace talks, realizing that Clermont (and thus he himself) had become part of the Visigothic kingdom. As long as Sidonius personally felt safe, he presented himself as a bishop who was not allowed to express judgements about Euric’s policy of military expansion. He suggested that he was only concerned about his fellow Nicene Christians, whom he wanted to be safe from ‘Arian’ rule.30 Once the terms of the peace treaty (and its effect on the Auvergne) had become known,31 Sidonius strikes us as a desperate civis Romanus. Writing a letter to Bishop Graecus of Marseilles, who was also a member of the imperial embassy, Sidonius tried to prevent the treaty from being ratified.32 He criticized Graecus, with whom he had been on friendly terms for some time,33 and the other imperial envoys for pursuing personal interests rather than protecting the common good.34 Sidonius complains that the surrender of Clermont and the Auvergne to the Visigoths was a betrayal of the ‘brothers of Latium’ (‘fratres Latio’), who had endured so much suffering and had fought steadfastly for the Roman cause.35 Although, when agreeing to cede the Auvergne to the Visigoths, the Roman envoys could hardly have acted without the knowledge and the authorization of the imperial government, Sidonius accuses them of having traded the security of their own territories for the Auvergne. The 28 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.6. 29 It is usually assumed that the ban on the consecration of new bishops was lifted soon after the peace treaty of 475 and the recognition of the Visigothic conquests by the imperial government. Cf. Yver, ‘Euric’, pp. 44f.; Griffe, La Gaule chrétienne, vol. 2, p. 64; Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 31; Wolfram, Die Goten, p. 204; Van Waarden, Writing to Survive, vol. 1, p. 276. 30 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.4. 31 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.7.1. 32 Sidonius (epist. 7.7.4–5) mentions a concilium, probably the concilium septem provinciarum, in which Graecus was to participate and in which he – according to Sidonius’s wishes – was meant to prevent the ratification of the treaty. Otherwise, Sidonius suggests, Graecus would support the cause of the barbarians. On the establishment of the concilium septem provinciarum, cf. Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 18f. For the invitation of bishops to the concilium septem provinciarum, see Frye, ‘Bishops as Pawns’, p. 359. Sidonius stresses the point that Clermont was prepared to continue resisting the Visigoths. Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.7.5. The letter is discussed by Courcelle, Histoire littéraire, p. 180f.; Van Waarden, Writing to Survive, pp. 334–378. 33 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 6.8, 7.2. 34 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.7.4. 35 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.7.2–3.

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contrast between the letter to Basilius and the one to Graecus could hardly be more striking. The letter to Graecus does not mention an imminent ‘Arian’ threat to the Catholic Church in Euric’s kingdom. Rather, Sidonius paints the bleak picture of a Roman province that has come into barbarian slavery.36 What is coming is not the finis religionis, but the end of Romanitas.37 The above findings strongly suggest that Sidonius deliberately dramatized the situation of the Catholic Church in Visigothic Gaul.38 He did not refer to the Visigothic king as a ‘persecutor’, as Gregory of Tours would do a hundred years later, even if the victims of Euric’s sanctions may have felt persecuted.39 Without Sidonius’s letter to Basilius of Aix and without Gregory of Tours’s interpretation of it, we would not know anything about Euric’s policy towards the Catholic episcopate in his kingdom40; these are our only pieces of evidence. It is true that the conciliar records of the ‘Second Council of Arles’ (fifth century) mention a persecutio,41 but we should beware of overestimating the value of these documents. Firstly, dating the council to Euric’s reign is anything but certain42; secondly, the acta of the council primarily reflect past synodal decisions, which means that they do not necessarily refer to contemporary matters.43 A last source worth mentioning is the Statuta ecclesiae antiqua, a collection of synodal legislation from the Provence (late fifth century): These mention people suffering distress on account of their (Catholic) faith (‘pro catholica fide tribulationes’).44 It would be going too far, however, to interpret this as evidence of a ‘persecution’ of Catholics under King Euric, particularly since other sources describe Euric’s attitude towards Catholics as anything but hostile. During Euric’s reign, Catholic churches were built in the Visigothic kingdom; Catholics such as the vir spectabilis Leo and the dux Victorius made a career at his court.45 Catholics from Vandal North Africa sought refuge in Euric’s kingdom. They 36 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.7.2. 37 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.7.5. 38 Cf. Yver, ‘Euric’, pp. 43f., who argued that the desolate state of the Church in Gaul might have been caused by internal turmoil and warfare in fifth-century Gaul. 39 Van Waarden, Writing to Survive, vol. 1, p. 276, suggests that the Catholic provincials may have felt persecuted. 40 Cf. Stroheker, Eurich, pp. 47f.; Wood, ‘Continuity or Calamity?’, pp. 12f. 41 Cf. Conc. Arelat. II, can. 10, 11; see also Yver, ‘Euric’, p. 45. 42 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 28, n. 82; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 114f.; Heinzelmann, ‘The “Affair” of Hilary of Arles’, p. 247. 43 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 28, n. 82; Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 57f., n. 79. 44 Cf. Stat. eccl. ant., can. 70, 71. 45 Cf. Yver, ‘Euric’, pp. 44f.; for Victorius, see Greg. Tur. hist. 2.20; for Leo see Sidon. Apoll. epist. 4.22.3.

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fled the repressive policies of the Vandal kings,46 who not only banned episcopal ordinations, but also ordered the confiscation of Church property and mass deportations of Catholic clerics. What is more, the Vandal kings only allowed ‘Arians’ to pursue a career at the royal court.47 This kind of ‘persecution’ in Vandal North Africa was markedly different from Euric’s sanctions. This means that the letter of Sidonius Apollinaris to Basilius of Aix remains the only contemporary testimony to Euric’s sanctions against the Catholic episcopate of Visigothic Gaul. It is clear from this letter that the actions of the Visigothic king were directed against Catholic bishops, since these constituted the functional elite of their Church. Rather than attacking the Catholic faith as such, Euric attempted to weaken the Catholic Church as an institution. This is evident from the fact that he did not try to ‘Arianize’ the Catholic population of his kingdom; nor did he go after the lower Catholic clergy, monks, or Catholic laity. He did not make any attempt to replace the Catholic Church with an ‘Arian–Homoean’ one in order to unify his kingdom in religious or ecclesiastical terms.48 The Catholic population was free to practice their religion.49 This strongly suggests that Euric’s motives for sanctioning the Catholic episcopate were political rather than religious.

‘His fathers presided over sees or courts’50 If religious motives can ruled out, this means that Euric’s sanctions against the Catholic episcopate were part of a political agenda. Today, most scholars assume that Euric’s actions against the Catholic bishops were meant to break the resistance among the Gallo-Roman aristocracy against his expansionist ambitions. In this regard, Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Clermont and one of the leaders of the Roman resistance in the Auvergne, is cited as a key witness. According to this view, the Gallo-Roman elites, who made up the majority of the Gallic episcopate, were at the heart of the resistance against the Visigothic expansion. Since these elites controlled the social, political, and economic resources of the Gallic churches, they could employ them 46 Cf. Vict. Vit. hist. 5.6; Greg. Tur. glor. mart. 57; Greg. Tur. hist. 2.23; Greg. Tur. vitae patr. 4.1; Moorhead, ‘Clovis’ Motives’, p. 332. 47 Cf. Vict. Vit. hist. 1.4, 1.5, 1.7, 1.9, 1.12, 1.14. 48 Cf. Stroheker, Eurich, p. 49; Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 28f. 49 Cf. Yver, ‘Euric’, p. 44. 50 Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.9.17: ‘parentes ipsius aut cathedris aut tribunalibus praesiderunt’ (trans. by Anderson, Sidonius, vol. 2, p. 349).

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in their conflict with Euric. If the latter wanted to break their resistance, though, he had to make sure that political, military, and ecclesiastical measures worked hand in hand.51 We should point out that this view is based on two key presuppositions: Firstly, we need to assume that Sidonius’s perspective is representative of the entire Gallo-Roman functional elite. Secondly, we need assume that, indeed, most members of the Catholic episcopate were recruited from this Gallo-Roman functional elite – a group of senatorial aristocrats whose position of power must have remained virtually unchallenged in the civitates of Gaul. The bishop was the head of his community and the representative of his church. He defended the Christian doctrine in accordance with the wishes of his superiors; he was responsible for the education of his clergymen and for maintaining order in his community. He also oversaw the worship as such, the administrations of the sacraments as well as other charitable practices of the community. Importantly, he was also responsible for the church’s property.52 The bishop thus held a position of great authority in his civitas; he was deemed suited to represent the interests of his episcopal city, which of course drew him into politics.53 In the course of the fourth and fifth centuries, the episcopate gained enormous political weight, particularly in Gaul. Bishops were no longer merely the representatives of their churches, but they also performed public tasks that had previously been carried out by Roman magistrates, such as jurisdiction (audientia episcopalis) or the maintenance of urban infrastructure. It is undisputed that such public tasks strengthened the political power of the episcopate in Late Antiquity. There is no consensus among historians, however, as to how the bishops came to performing such public functions. Did the Roman emperors transfer these public duties to them?54 Or did the bishops, of their own accord, fill the vacuum left by the withdrawal of the imperial administration?55 The growing authority of the episcopate made it attractive to members of the former Roman functional elite, the senatorial aristocracy. According to this view, the latter took refuge, as it were, in the episcopate – taking it up as their new sphere of activity. This allowed them to pursue political ambitions and to continue playing a leading role in politics and society after the disintegration 51 Cf. Stroheker, Eurich, pp. 48–54. 52 Cf. Gottlieb and Rosenberger, Christentum, p. 19. 53 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 9f.; Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, p. 8. 54 Cf. Heinzelmann, ‘Bischof und Herrschaft’. 55 Cf. Prinz, ‘Bischöfliche Stadtherrschaft’, pp. 3–16; Prinz, ‘Herrschaftsformen der Kirche’. For some criticism of both approaches, cf. Anton, ‘“Bischofsherrschaften”’; Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 10–18.

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of the Western Roman Empire had severely weakened their position.56 It has been argued, however, that the former Gallo-Roman functional elite did not simply monopolize the episcopal office at a time when it had already been fully developed. Rather, the Gallo-Roman senatorial aristocracy itself is said to have shaped the episcopal office, a position that did not require the legitimization of the imperial administration and thus left room to manoeuvre, as it were. The senatorial aristocracy, it is claimed, shaped the office in accordance with their own ideas of political order, adding to it elements of the traditional aristocratic status presentation.57 In recent years, scholars have called into question not only the (supposed) reasons for the growing importance of the episcopal office in late antique Gaul, but also the very hypothesis that the episcopal office came to be dominated by the Gallo-Roman senatorial aristocracy. The scarcity of prosopographical information on individual bishops, it has been argued, should prevent us from postulating that the Gallo-Roman senatorial aristocracy had monopolized the episcopal office. The social structure of the episcopate in Gaul was by no means as homogeneous as is often assumed. Only a few senatorial families, in only a few civitates, claimed to have held the office of bishop.58 We should also note that an ecclesiastical career was not the only way for members of the former Gallo-Roman functional elite to achieve a certain degree of influence: A career at the Visigothic court offered a similar range of opportunities.59 Some preferred to leave Gaul for Italy.60 A last point worth mentioning is that, in fifth-century Gaul, bishops certainly were not the sole representatives of their civitates. They were in competition, as it were, with the local municipal curiae, which were mostly made up of local elites, as well as with the notables and the municipal magistrates.61 If the bishoprics in f ifth-century Gaul were not exclusively held by members of the Gallo-Roman senatorial aristocracy and if the bishops’ power over their civitates was often limited, this must invalidate the claim that Euric’s ban on the consecration of new bishops was directed against 56 Cf. Stroheker, Eurich, pp. 50–52; Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, pp. 41f., 74f.; Prinz, ‘Bischöfliche Stadtherrschaft’, pp. 4, 8f.; Heinzelmann, ‘Bischof und Herrschaft’, p. 27; Heinzelmann, ‘The “Affair” of Hilary of Arles’, p. 243; Mathisen, Roman Aristocrats, pp. 89f. 57 Cf. Jussen, ‘Über “Bischofsherrschaften”’, pp. 679–699. 58 Cf. Patzold, ‘Zur Sozialstruktur des Episkopats’, pp. 121–140; Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 18–20. 59 Cf. Stroheker, Eurich, p. 50; Harries, ‘Sidonius Apollinaris, Rome and the Barbarians’, p. 307; Heather, ‘The Emergence’, pp. 89–92. 60 Cf. Mathisen, ‘Fifth-Century Visitors’, pp. 228–238. 61 Cf. Diefenbach, ‘“Bischofsherrschaft”’, pp. 97–100; Schmidt-Hofner, ‘Entstehung des Notabelnregiments’, pp. 487–522.

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the Gallo-Roman senatorial aristocracy who, on their part, was central to the resistance against the Visigothic king’s expansionist ambitions. Even though Sidonius suggests that Euric’s ban on ordinations pertained to his entire kingdom,62 we cannot ignore the possibility that the ban was merely directed against certain factions of the (senatorial) aristocracy, i.e. those who opposed Euric and who controlled a number of bishoprics in southern Gaul. For, we know that some members of the senatorial aristocracy cooperated with the Visigoths.63 Unfortunately, as has been noted above, very little 62 There is no comparable evidence as to the territories on the Iberian Peninsula under Euric’s control. If Euric’s ban on the consecration of new bishops also pertained to this area, the absence of evidence is possibly due to fact that Sidonius, whose letter is our only source for Euric’s ban, focused exclusively on Gaul. It is equally possible that the territories on the Iberian Peninsula were not sufficiently integrated into Euric’s kingdom for him to influence the Catholic Church there. While older studies, e.g. Yver, ‘Euric’, pp. 28f., 42, suggested that Euric ruled over large parts of the Iberian Peninsula, today it is assumed that Euric’s influence on Iberia was restricted to the Tarraconensis. Cf. Kulikowski, Late Roman Spain, pp. 203–209, 256f.; Pérez Martínez, ‘Obsessa Terrachona marithimas urbes obtinuit’, pp. 237–248. An inscription found in Merida attests to the fact that – at least as far as public buildings were concerned – the Gothic military elites collaborated with the local clergy. On this inscription, cf. Arce, ‘La inscripción’; Koch, ‘Nunc tempore potentis Getarum Eurici regis’, pp. 137–142. 63 Some members of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy collaborated with the Visigoths, coming to terms with the new political situation in Gaul. Some even made a career for themselves under the Visigoths, with the Visigothic kings relying on the provincials’ knowledge of administrative matters. Cf. Heather, ‘The Emergence’, pp. 86, 89–94. For the praefectus praetorio Galliarum Arvandus, who was convicted for treason in 469, see Sidon. Apoll. epist. 1.7; Yver, ‘Euric’, p. 24f.; Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, pp. 148f.; Heather, ‘The Emergence’, p. 92; Teitler, ‘Un-Roman Activities’, pp. 310–316; Harries, ‘Sidonius Apollinaris, Rome and the Barbarians’, pp. 302, 306f.; Henning, Periclitans res publica, pp. 86, 91. For Seronatus, perhaps vicarius septem provinciarum, see Sidon. Apoll. epist. 2.1, 5.13, 7.7; Yver, ‘Euric’, pp. 23f.; Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, p. 215; Teitler, ‘Un-Roman Activities’, pp. 315–317; Henning, Periclitans res publica, p. 95. For Namatius, a landowner from Saintes, who was a naval commander in the service of the Visigoths, see Sidon. Apoll. epist. 8.6; Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, p. 194. For Calminius, cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 5.12. For Vincentius, quasi magister militum, who fought on Euric’s side in Spain and northern Italy, cf. Chron. Gall. a. DXI 652–653; Henning, Periclitans res publica, pp. 87f. For Lampridius, a poet and rhetorician from Bordeaux, see Sidon. Apoll. epist. 8.9. For Evodius, cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 4.8. For Leo, vir spectabilis and consiliarius at Euric’s court, see Ennod. vita Epif. 85; Sidon. Apoll. epist. 4.22, 8.3, 9.13.2 v. 20–21, 9.15.1 v. 20–21; Sidon. Apoll. carm. 9 v. 314, 14.2, 23 v. 446–454; Wolfram, Die Goten, p. 203. For the magister militum Nepotianus, cf. Hydat. chron. 197, 201, 213; Henning, Periclitans res publica, p. 81. For Arborius, see Hydat. chron. 213; on Eparchius Avitus, see Sidon. Apoll. carm. 7 v. 471–480, 495–499. For the vir spectabilis Anianus, see Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, p. 145. For Eudomius, see Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, pp. 168f. For Evanthius, perhaps praeses of Aquitania Prima, see Henning, Periclitans res publica, p. 95. For Praesidius and Elaphius, see Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, pp. 166, 206. For the comes civitatis Timotheus, see Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, pp. 224f. For Apollinaris, the son of Sidonius Apollinaris, see Greg. Tur. hist. 2.37; Alc. Avit. epist. 24.

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prosopographical information on the Catholic bishops of Euric’s reign has survived. We therefore have no data – e.g. on allegiances or connections of kinship – from which to infer the political standpoints of individual bishops.64 As far as the bishoprics mentioned by Sidonius are concerned, it is possible to speculate that the bishops of Bordeaux and Rodez were in political opposition to Euric. Bishop Gallicinus of Bordeaux (c. 461) possibly had close ties to Sidonius Apollinaris, a professed opponent of Euric.65 It is equally possible that Elaphius, a friend of Sidonius, at some point became the bishop of Rodez.66 We know that some estates in the Rodez area were owned by Tonantius Ferreolus, the former praefectus praetorio Galliarum. His political standpoint emerges from the fact that he was a fierce opponent of his successor in office Arvandus, whom he accused of collaboration with the Visigoths.67 Still, we have no indication that the Tonantii Ferreoli held the bishopric of Rodez. In sum, our source material is insufficient to determine whether those bishoprics in south-western Gaul that Euric’s sanctions had left vacant had been held by aristocrats hostile to the Visigoths, who had colluded against Euric and had systematically taken hold of these bishoprics. We should be all the more cautious, since we cannot simply assume that Sidonius’s political standpoint was in line with that of his fellow aristocrats and bishops.68 If we assume that Euric’s sanctions against the Catholic episcopate follow a broader agenda – rather than simply being isolated attacks against individual opponents69 – it seems highly likely that the ban on ordinations and the banishment of bishops was not directed against the Gallo-Roman aristocracy as a whole. Firstly, the Catholic bishops in Gaul were not exclusively recruited 64 This did not prevent Yver, ‘Euric’, p. 45, from claiming that some bishops collaborated with Euric, whereas others – coming from the great Gallo-Roman senatorial families and therefore more closely linked to the Roman Empire – put up resistance. 65 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 8.11.3 v. 37–40. Gallicinus may have been in close contact with Pontius Leontius, Rusticus, Sidonius Apollinaris, a certain Trygetius, and Lampridius. Apart from Sidonius Apollinaris, however, none of these men expressed his opposition against Euric. In fact, Lampridius was in favour with the Visigothic king. Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 8.9.3; for Pontius Leontius, see Heather, ‘The Emergence’, p. 90. 66 In Sidon. Apoll. epist. 4.15.2, Sidonius Apollinaris claims that he wishes for Elaphius to become the bishop of Rodez. Ruricius of Limoges, however, suggests that Elaphius may have preferred a secular career. Cf. Ruric. epist. 2.7; Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, p. 166. 67 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. carm. 24 v. 32–34. 68 As much has been assumed by Stroheker, Eurich, pp. 53f.; Harries, ‘Sidonius Apollinaris, Rome and the Barbarians’, p. 298. According to Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 24, we have no evidence to suggest that all of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy distrusted Euric. Rather, the aristocracy was divided into several groups with particular interests. 69 Cf. Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, p. 55.

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from the ranks of the Gallo-Roman senatorial aristocracy. Secondly, the political standpoint of these aristocrats was by no means homogeneous. Thirdly, the bishops were not the sole rulers of their civitates, who, as such, posed a threat to the stability of the Visigothic kingdom and therefore had to be weakened.70

‘We may hold according to the faith, though we cannot according to the treaty, those peoples of Gaul who are enclosed within the bounds of the Gothic domain’71 We have seen that Euric’s ban on the consecration of new bishops and his banishment of bishops were likely not meant to ‘Arianize’ the Catholic population of his kingdom or to replace the Catholic Church with an ‘Arian–Homoean’ one; nor did he intend to break the resistance of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy, which allegedly controlled the episcopate. If this is the case, Euric’s motives must be sought elsewhere. One possibility is that Euric thought the Catholic Church to have grown too powerful and wanted to prevent the episcopate – which was largely beyond his reach – from being exploited by powers from outside the kingdom, be it the imperial government or the bishop of Rome. The above-mentioned view is supported by the fact that a law of Emperor Valentinian III, enacted on 8 July 445, which strengthened the authority of the bishop of Rome in relation to all churches in the provinces, was not included in the Breviarium Alaricianum, promulgated in February 506.72 Valentinian’s law had been enacted in the context of a conflict between Pope Leo the Great and Bishop Hilarius of Arles, the latter of whom wanted to decide Gallic ecclesiastical matters without the interference of the Pope and asserted metropolitan and primatial claims for his church.73 Settling this 70 Wolfram, Die Goten, p. 204, admits that the political attitude of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy was not homogeneous. Nevertheless, he claims that its best organized part, the Catholic episcopate, formed a (tacit) opposition against the Visigoths. 71 Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.10: ‘populos Gothorum, quos limes Gothicae sortis incluserit, teneamus ex fide, etsi non tenemus ex foedere’ (trans. by Anderson, Sidonius, vol. 2, p. 323). 72 Cf. Löning, Geschichte, vol. 1, p. 527; Arnold, Caesarius, p. 230; Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 46f. 73 Bishop Chelidonius of Besançon had been deposed by Hilarius of Arles. Therefore, Chelidonius appealed to the bishop of Rome. When the case was heard at a synod in Rome, Hilarus defended his actions and tried to prevent Chelidonius from being rehabilitated. Hilarus created a scandal, however, insisting that the Church of Gaul was the only institution to have a say in the matter. Leo the Great, who enjoyed the support of many senatorial aristocrats as well as of the imperial government, persuaded Valentinian III to enact the abovementioned law, strengthening the

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conflict, Valentinian decreed that Hilarius had to submit to the authority of the bishop of Rome. Papal decisions were to be valid throughout Gaul (‘sententia per Gallias valitura’); no one was to dare to act against the orders of the bishop of Rome (‘nec liceat praeceptis Romani antistitis obviare’).74 Whatever the Apostolic See decreed was to be binding for all. If bishops were involved in ecclesiastical disputes, their fate was to be decided in Rome. Should they refuse, the provincial governors were to enforce the will of the bishop of Rome. Furthermore, unless the bishop of Rome consented, any measures taken by the bishops must not break with ancient customs (‘contra consuetudinem veterem’).75 With this law, Valentinian gave jurisdictional primacy to the bishop of Rome (‘pontificis auctoritas in ecclesias’) and made him the keeper of orthodoxy.76 What is more, by declaring that counteracting the decrees of the Apostolic See was an affront to the emperor (‘fides et reverentia nostri violatur imperii’),77 he made clear that in Gaul imperial and papal policy went hand in hand.78 The makeup of the Breviarium Alaricianum has given rise to another scholarly hypothesis. This legal code includes the imperial decrees that, in ecclesiastical disputes, gave jurisdictional primacy to the episcopal synods79; it also contains such decisions that strengthened the position of the audientia episcopalis80 and exempted the clergy from the burden of taxation.81 In other words, the Breviarium Alaricianum includes all decrees that established the Catholic Church in Gaul as an institution in its own right.82 However, it does not mention the law of Valentinian III discussed authority of the apostolic see. Cf. Boyd, The Ecclesiastical Edicts, pp. 68–70; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 157–172; Heinzelmann, ‘The “Affair” of Hilary of Arles’, pp. 239–251. 74 Cf. Nov. Val. 17.2. 75 Cf. Nov. Val. 17.3. 76 Cf. Arnold, Caesarius, p. 230; Langgärtner, Die Gallienpolitik, pp. 74f.; Heinzelmann, ‘The “Affair” of Hilary of Arles’, p. 241. As early as 378, at the request of Pope Damasus, Emperor Gratian had allowed the bishop of Rome to decide over ecclesiastical matters, thus strengthening the position of the Apostolic See vis-à-vis other church institutions. Cf. Coll. Avell. 13.12. Gratian’s law, however, did not find its way into the Codex Theodosianus. Cf. Boyd, The Ecclesiastical Edicts, p. 13; Kempf, ‘Primatiale und episkopal-synodale Struktur’, p. 29. The jurisdictional primacy of the bishop of Rome was reaffirmed by Emperor Maiorian in 460. Cf. Nov. Mai. 11; Henning, Periclitans res publica, pp. 148f. 77 Cf. Nov. Val. 17.2. 78 Cf. Langgärtner, Die Gallienpolitik, pp. 75f.; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, p. 198. 79 Cf. CTh. 16.2.12 = Lex Rom. Visigoth. 16.1.2; CTh. 16.2.23 = Lex Rom. Visigoth. 16.1.3; CTh. 16.11.1 = Lex Rom. Visigoth. 16.5.1. 80 Cf. Nov. Val. 35.1.1–2 = Lex Rom. Visigoth.; Nov. Val. 12.1.1–2. 81 Cf. CTh. 16.2.2 = Lex Rom. Visigoth. 16.1.1; CTh. 16.2.39 = Lex Rom. Visigoth. 16.1.5. 82 Cf. Boyd, The Ecclesiastical Edicts, p. 112; Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 45f.

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above. This fact has been seen to indicate that the Visigothic kings tried to integrate into the new sociopolitical order not only the Gallo-Roman provincials but also the institutions associated with them, such as the Catholic Church. According to this view, the Catholic Church – by its very nature – had been regarded as an entity that was closely linked to, and even representative of, the Roman Empire. Euric, it is argued, did not accept essential parts of Gallic life to be subject to powers outside the Visigothic kingdom.83 This interpretation of Euric’s policies presupposes that powers beyond the control of the Visigothic kings – at least potentially – exerted a considerable influence on the social and political situation in Visigothic Gaul. Therefore, it is worth investigating whether such external influences existed before, during, and/or after Euric’s reign. It should be noted that the Catholic bishops of Gaul were crucial players in the major political issues of their time. Because of their authority and increased political importance, not only in their civitas but also beyond, civil and military officials of the imperial government and usurpers tried to control the episcopacy by intervening in Church affairs and placing bishoprics in the hands of loyal followers.84 Bishop Maximus of Valence, for example, probably supported the usurpation of Jovinus (411–413), who – his plan having failed – sought refuge in Valence.85 Already in 408, the usurper Constantine III (407–411), who had crossed into Gaul from Britain in 407, started to restructure the government of southern Gaul. Probably acting in concert with the venerable Bishop Proculus of Marseilles, he deposed Remigius of Aix, bishop of the metropolitan see of the province of Narbonensis Secunda, and replaced him by his supporter Lazarus. The latter’s friend, Heros, Constantine made bishop of Arles. Both, Lazarus and Heros, lost their position when Constantine’s usurpation had been suppressed by the magister militum Flavius Constantius and their patron fell from power.86 Constantius begun to re-establish the imperial order in southern Gaul by revising Constantine’s episcopal appointments and removing the bishops ordained under Constantine. Remigius returned and was re-established as bishop of Aix; Patroclus, one of Constantius’s followers and confidants, was established in the see of Arles, now the seat of the imperial government in Gaul, and became a key figure in Constantius’s efforts to purge the Gallo-Roman episcopate of oppositional elements and 83 84 85 86

Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 47. Cf. Frye, ‘Bishops as Pawns’, p. 361. Cf. Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, p. 62. Cf. Langgärtner, Die Gallienpolitik, pp. 24f., 33–35; Frye, ‘Bishops as Pawns’, pp. 351–353.

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Constantine’s former allies. Probably on Constantius’s insistence, Pope Zosimus (417–418) promoted Patroclus of Arles to a position of primacy over southern Gaul to the disadvantage of Constantine’s former ally, the bishop of Marseilles.87 Even after Constantius’s death in 421, Patroclus found powerful allies in the imperial government, led by the Empress Galla Placidia in the name of her son Valentinian III.88 Patroclus’s successor, Honoratus, appointed his follower Hilarius as his heir to the episcopal see of Arles; he was supported by the Prefect of Gaul and the powerful magister militum Aëtius.89 Aegidius and Agrippinus, two opposing Roman generals in Gaul, could rely on supporters from the ranks of the episcopate.90 Obviously, there existed close ties between the Catholic episcopate and the highest levels of imperial civil and military administration in Gaul. When civil and military officials tried to influence the ordination of bishops, of course, they expected their candidates’ agendas to be in line with their own.91 Furthermore, the imperial government used the authority of the bishops to represent its interests in diplomatic matters. Germanus, bishop of Auxerre, undertook his journeys to Britain with the approval of the imperial government.92 In 439, Catholic bishops arbitrated between the Visigoths and two Roman generals in Gaul, Aëtius and Litorius.93 Emperor Julius Nepos used Catholic bishops to negotiate for peace with Euric.94 Probably, several synods in Gaul (Riez a. 87 Cf. Frye, ‘Bishops as Pawns’, pp. 353–355. Frye stated ‘that both Constantine and Constantius recognised bishops as the key urban leaders of their day and put the establishment of loyal bishoprics at the very centre of their efforts to control the region’ (p. 350). Matthews, Western Aristocracies, p. 313; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, p. 36; Heinzelmann, ‘The “Afffair” of Hilary of Arles’, p. 244, and Lütkenhaus, Flavius Constantius, pp. 56f., stated that the ecclesiastical partisans of Constantine III were replaced by supporters of Constantius. This view was challenged by Dunn, ‘Flavius Constantius’, pp. 1–21, who argued that the appointment of Patroclus as bishop of Arles was not on Constantius’s initiative and the magister militum did not pursue an ecclesiastical policy in Gaul. 88 Cf. Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 28–39, 69–74; Heinzelmann, ‘The “Affair” of Hilary of Arles’, p. 245; Frye, ‘Bishops as Pawns’, pp. 359f. 89 Cf. Langgärtner, Die Gallienpolitik, pp. 74f.; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 156f.; Heinzelmann, ‘The “Affair” of Hilary of Arles’, pp. 245f. 90 Cf. Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 217–219. 91 Cf. Boyd, The Ecclesiastical Edicts, p. 66. 92 Cf. Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, p. 139. 93 Cf. Salv. gub. 7.9. 94 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.10, 7.7.4; Ennod. vita Epif. 80–92. Presumably in 474, Emperor Julius Nepos had his quaestor sacri palatii Licinianus negotiate with Euric. Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 3.7.2; Yver, ‘Euric’, p. 35; Griffe, La Gaule chrétienne, vol. 2, p. 60; Courcelle, Histoire littéraire, pp. 179–181. Since Licinianus was not successful, the emperor made a second attempt in 475, sending an embassy consisting of the Bishops Basilius of Aix, Faustus of Riez, Graecus of Marseille, and Leontius of Arles (cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.10). According to Magnus Felix Ennodius, Bishop

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439, Orange a. 441, Vaison a. 442) were linked to Aëtius’s efforts to restore law and order in the region.95 However, the Catholic episcopate and the imperial administration did not only cooperate in political matters, but also in ecclesiastical ones. Emperor Valentinian III entrusted Patroclus of Arles with combating Priscillianism in Gaul.96 Vincentius, comes Hispaniarum by imperial mandate, tried to settle a disputed episcopal election in Barcelona and eventually referred the case to the Apostolic See.97 A conflict pertaining to the metropolitan see of Narbonne proves to be revealing as to the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Visigothic kings at the time immediately before Euric came to power. Bishop Rusticus of Narbonne, who had close ties with the praefectus praetorio Galliarum Marcellus (c. 441-443) and who competed with Hilarius of Arles over the position of metropolitan bishop in Narbonensis Prima,98 tried to bring suffragan bishoprics under the control of his own followers. In Béziers, against the will of the population and the clergy, Rusticus appointed his archdeacon Hermes as bishop. Hermes struggled to hold on to his position, and eventually returned to Narbonne, where the dying Rusticus appointed him his successor in 462. The uncanonical election caused so much unrest in Narbonne that Frederic, the brother of the Visigothic king Theoderic, had Deacon John report the matter to Pope Hilarus. The Pope asked Bishop Leontius of Arles, whom he probably regarded as his representative in Gaul,99 Epiphanius of Pavia also led an embassy to Euric on behalf of Julius Nepos and negotiated for peace with the Visigoths (cf. Ennod. vita Epif. 80–92). Some scholars believe that the episcopal envoys from Gaul were unsuccessful, which is why Julius Nepos had to send a third legation to Toulouse. Cf. Yver, ‘Euric’, pp. 35–37; Griffe, La Gaule chrétienne, vol. 2, p. 60f.; Courcelle, Histoire littéraire, pp. 180f. According to Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.7, however, the four bishops from southern Gaul were indeed successful. It is possible that the four bishops from Gaul and Epiphanius were part of the same legation. Perhaps, Sidonius knew the four Provençal bishops, therefore mentioning (only) them by name. Ennodius, on the other hand, focuses on the protagonist of his ‘Life of Epiphanius’. Selvaggi, Erfolgreiche Vertragskonzepte, p. 168, assumes that the embassy led by Epiphanius preceded that of the four Provençal bishops. According to Selvaggi, the bishop of Pavia had reached a general agreement with Euric, whereas the details of the contract were negotiated later by the four Provençal bishops. According to Sidon. Apoll. epist. 3.1.4–5, Emperor Anthemius (467–472) held already peace talks with Euric. In these talks, the cession of Roman territories in Gaul was also a subject of negotiation. Cf. Giannotti, Sperare meliora, pp. 119–121; Selvaggi, Erfolgreiche Vertragskonzepte, p. 164. 95 Cf. Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 102–108. 96 Cf. Sirm. 6; Frye, ‘Bishops as Pawns’, pp. 359f. 97 Cf. Hilar. epist. 14. 98 Cf. Langgärtner, Die Gallienpolitik, p. 25; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 48–60; Heinzelmann, ‘The “Affair” of Hilary of Arles’, pp. 244f., 250f.; for ties between Rusticus of Narbonne and the prefect of Gaul Marcellus cf. Riess, Narbonne, p. 84. 99 Cf. Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 228–234.

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to investigate the election and to report back to Rome. Hilarus eventually decided to leave Hermes in off ice on account of his impeccable moral conduct; he was not allowed, however, to exercise metropolitan authority, which remained in the hands of the most senior bishop of Narbonensis Prima until Hermes’s death.100 Frederic’s motives for intervening in the dispute in Narbonne and for bringing in the bishop of Rome have been warmly debated. Did he want to pacify the city?101 Did Frederic want to get rid of an opponent of the Visigoths in Narbonne, with the blessing of the Apostolic See?102 The latter seems unlikely, since the bishop of Rome confirmed Hermes in his office, which Frederic apparently accepted. If Frederic wanted to eliminate Hermes, he would certainly have found an opportunity to do so. By bringing in the Apostolic See, Frederic followed a traditional path for settling disputes in the Catholic Church in Gaul, which used the Apostolic See as a court of appeal in ecclesiastical matters.103 King Theoderic and his brother Frederic officially recognized the Catholic Church as an institution in its own right.104 Things changed under King Euric. In fourth-century Gaul, there were various points of contact between Rome and the Catholic Church. Bishops from Gaul asked Rome for clarification on canonical questions105 and appealed to the Apostolic See in the case of internal church disputes.106 The latter, in turn, used this opportunity 100 Cf. Langgärtner, Die Gallienpolitik, pp. 93–97; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 206–211. 101 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 11f. 102 According to Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 206–211, the Visigothic presence in Narbonne gave the faction that had lost the episcopal election an opportunity to take action against Hermes. They turned to the king’s brother Frederic, who gave them his support. Mathisen believes Hermes to have had close ties with Sidonius Apollinaris and, therefore, to have been an opponent of the Visigoths. Mathisen’s assumption is based on Sidon. Apoll. carm. 23 v. 443, where we find the mention of an unnamed bishop of Narbonne, apparently a person close to Sidonius. Still, the possible link between Hermes and Sidonius does not prove that they felt the same antagonism towards the Visigoths. We should note that Leo, consiliarius of Euric, is mentioned in the same poem (Sidon. Apoll. carm. 23 v. 446). It is questionable whether Frederic wanted to get rid of Hermes, as Mathisen assumes, since he accepted the bishop of Rome’s decision to leave Hermes in office. In 462, comes Agrippinus ceded Narbonne to the Visigoths. Cf. Hydat. chron. 217; Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, pp. 57, 143f.; Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 11f.; Henning, Periclitans res publica, pp. 72, 86. 103 Cf. Kempf, ‘Primatiale und episkopal-synodale Struktur’, pp. 29f. 104 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 12f. 105 Cf. Innoc. epist. 3, 6; Boyd, The Ecclesiastical Edicts, pp. 68–70. 106 For the case of Bishop Maximus of Valence, who was accused of murder by the clergy of Valence in 418/419, see Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 60–64. For the case of Bishop Chelidonius of Besançon, who was deposed by Hilarius of Arles, see Boyd, The Ecclesiastical Edicts, pp. 69f.; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 157–166; Heinzelmann, ‘The “Affair” of

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to gain influence over the churches in Gaul. In 404, Pope Innocent I sent a collection of church regulations to Bishop Victricius of Rouen, who had contacted him with regard to some ecclesiastical questions. Among other things, this collection contained the provision that important internal ecclesiastical disputes should be decided by the Apostolic See and that clerics should not leave their dioceses without papal dispensation.107 Although Rome did not yet have jurisdictional primacy within the Catholic Church, the case of Victricius makes clear that Rome wished to exert its influence on the churches in Gaul. It also sent out the signal that, in the event of internal church disputes, dissatisfied clerics should from now on turn to the Apostolic See.108 During Euric’s reign, contact between Rome and the Catholic Church in Visigothic Gaul virtually broke off. For the 30 years in between a letter of Pope Hilarus, sent to the bishops of Gaul in 464 concerning the matter of Bishop Mamertus of Vienne, and a letter to Bishop Aeonius of Arles sent by Pope Gelasius in 494,109 we have no evidence of written communication whatsoever. It has been suggested, therefore, that Euric prevented the Catholic bishops in his kingdom from contacting Rome.110 Seeing that Pope Gelasius complains to Aeonius about a long interruption in their communication, we can be certain that our lack of evidence is not due to chance.111 During the reign of Alaric II, there was indeed contact between a Catholic bishop from the Visigothic kingdom and the Apostolic See; this fact has been attributed to political changes brought about by Alaric II.112 Still, it must be taken into account that even before Euric’s reign correspondence between bishops from Visigothic Gaul and Rome was scarce. Papal letters addressed to individual bishops in the territory of the (later) Visigothic Hilary of Arles’, pp. 239–242. For Marcellus, bishop of Die, who was made bishop by Mamertus of Vienne in 463/464 although Die was not part of his metropolitan district, see Langgärtner, Die Gallienpolitik, pp. 98–101; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 211–217. For the dispute between the Bishops of Embrun and Aix over the bishopric of Cimiez/Nice, cf. Langgärtner, Die Gallienpolitik, pp. 101–103. 107 Cf. Innoc. epist. 3. 108 Cf. Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 45–48. 109 Cf. Gelas. epist. 19; Hilar. epist. 10. The latter was directed to those bishops whose dioceses were under Roman rule at the time. Hilar. epist. 8, 10 were also sent to bishops of the province Narbonensis Prima, parts of which were occupied by the Visigoths at the time. 110 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 27; Wolfram, Die Goten, p. 204. 111 Cf. Gelas. epist. 19.1. 112 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 27. Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, p. 233, argues that the Bishops of Rome were little interested in the affairs of the Catholic Church in Gaul, which is why we learn of so little communication between the two.

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kingdom in Gaul date from the time before the Visigothic settlement in Aquitaine in 418.113 Most of the surviving papal letters concerning Gaul were either addressed to bishops whose seats were under Roman rule at the time in question,114 or to the Catholic episcopate of several provinces – or even of Gaul as a whole. It is impossible to ascertain whether these letters did in fact reach their recipients in the Visigothic part of Gaul.115 When Euric was in power, the written correspondence between the Catholic episcopate of his kingdom and Rome came to a complete standstill. The same applies to synodal activity in the regnum Tolosanum. During the existence of the regnum, thirteen provincial or regional synods took place in Gaul.116 It is remarkable that the meeting places of all these synods were outside the Visigothic sphere of influence.117 The case of the Provence is particularly striking: Synods had been frequent there in the fifth century,118 but ceased to take place exactly when the region came under the control of Euric in 477. Synodal activity only resumed in the Ostrogothic period from the 520s onwards, with synods seeking close ties with Rome.119 Of course, it cannot be ruled out that the synods, though they took place outside the Visigothic kingdom, were attended by bishops from within that very kingdom. At least for the synods whose participants we can identify with some confidence, however, this was not the case.120 In this context, it is worth paying attention to a provincial synod held at Vannes, chaired by Perpetuus of Tours (461–491), who was the metropolitan bishop of the Lugdunensis Tertia. This synod may have taken place during Euric’s reign, since Nonnechius, who had succeeded Eusebius as bishop of Nantes after 461,121 was one of its participants. 113 Cf. Innoc. epist. 3, 6. 114 Cf. Zosim. epist. 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13; Bonifat. epist. 12; Leo Mag. epist. 10, 40, 41, 42, 65, 66, 67, 68, 96, 99, 108, 167; Hilar. epist. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. 115 Cf. Zosim. epist. 1, 4; Bonifat. epist. 3; Coel. epist. 4, 21; Leo Mag. epist. 102, 103, 138. 116 Cf. Conc. Gall., pp. 61–228. 117 Cf. the synods of Riez (a. 439), Orange (a. 441), Vaison (a. 442), Arles (a. 442/506), Arles (a. 449/461), Angers (a. 453), Tours (a. 461), Arles (a. 470), Lyon (a. 470), Arles (a. 475). 118 Cf. the synods of Béziers (a. 356), Riez (a. 439), Orange (a. 441), Vaison (a. 442), Arles (a. 442/506), Arles (a. 449/461), Angers (a. 453), Tours (a. 461), Arles (a. 470), Arles (a. 475). 119 Cf. the synods of Arles (a. 524), Carpentras (a. 527), Orange (a. 529), Valence (a. 529), Vaison (a. 529), Marseille (a. 533), and Clermont (a. 533); cf. Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, p. 95. Perhaps, the reduction of synodal activity in fifth-century Gaul is due to the fragmentation of the Catholic Church in the region, on which, see Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 273f. 120 For the participants of the Councils of Riez (a. 439), Orange (a. 441), Vaison (a. 442), Arles (a. 449/461), Arles (a. 470/475), see Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 283–289; for the Council of Arles in 470/475 in particular, cf. Van Waarden, Writing to Survive, vol. 1, pp. 27–30. 121 Cf. Duchesne, Fastes épiscopaux, vol. 2, p. 365.

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Nonnechius had corresponded with Sidonius in the 470s and may therefore have been a contemporary of Euric.122 Possibly, during the reign of Euric, provincial synods were not allowed to be held at Visigothic Tours, which is why Perpetuus moved the council of his own province to Vannes, a place outside the Visigothic kingdom. On the other hand, there was another good reason to hold the synod at Vannes. For, besides discussing the order of saints and the chanting of psalms, the participants of the synod meant to consecrate a new bishop of Vannes.123 While obviously provincial synods were not allowed to be held in Visi­ gothic Gaul, Euric also tried to prevent Catholic bishops from participating in episcopal elections outside his kingdom. Sidonius Apollinaris informs us in detail about the events surrounding an episcopal election in Bourges, the metropolitan see of Aquitania Prima, around 470/471. He tells us that he had been entrusted with the organization of this election, since – of those in Aquitania Prima – his episcopal see was the only one besides Bourges that was located on Roman soil.124 According to canon law, the metropolitan of the province in question had to oversee the election of new bishops; this had to happen in the presence of at least three other bishops from the same province.125 Sidonius was unable to persuade the bishops of the Visigothic part of Aquitania Prima to participate in the election. He therefore had to ask Agroecius of Sens, the metropolitan bishop of the neighbouring province of Lugdunensis Senonia, to preside over the election.126 In order to achieve the quorum required for a canonical election, Sidonius also asked Euphronius, bishop of Autun, to attend the election.127 It is striking that Sidonius did not turn to the bishops of his own province. Apparently, Euric had made 122 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 8.13. 123 Cf. Duchesne, Fastes épiscopaux, vol. 2, p. 377; Gottlieb and Rosenberger, Christentum, p. 20. 124 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.5.3. In 469, the Visigoths had defeated the Bretons at Déols near Bourges. Cf. Greg. Tur. hist. 2.18; Iord. Get. 237–238. Due to this fact, it has been suggested that Bourges had become part of the Visigothic kingdom in 469, particularly since Sidonius mentions an ‘Arian’ faction at the episcopal election of Bourges in 470/471 (cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.8.3). These ‘Arians’ have been assumed to be Visigoths. Cf. Yver, ‘Euric’, p. 44; Griffe, La Gaule chrétienne, vol. 2, p. 55; Courcelle, Histoire littéraire, pp. 175f.; Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, p. 51, n. 49. However, Sidonius mentions that the ‘Arian’ faction nominated a candidate of their own for this election. Evidence from the later Visigothic kingdom tells us that the ‘Roman’ Catholic–Nicene and the Visigothic ‘Arian–Homoean’ Churches were largely independent from each other. Therefore, we have to assume that the ‘Arians’ of Bourges, who apparently did not have their own bishop, were Gallo-Romans. Cf. Stroheker, Eurich, p. 55, n. 78; Mathisen, Roman Aristocrats, p. 33; Wolfram, Die Goten, p. 204. 125 Cf. Gottlieb and Rosenberger, Christentum, p. 19. 126 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.5.3–4. 127 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.8.4.

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communication between the episcopal sees more difficult and had tried to stop contact between foreign bishops and the Catholic episcopate of his kingdom.128 Euric’s ban on the consecration of new bishops was part of a series of sanctions against the Catholic episcopate in his kingdom. It is worth taking a closer look at the sanctions’ historical context. When Sidonius mentions the ban on ordination in 475, numerous bishoprics had already become vacant. Unless we assume, then, that nine bishops of southern Gaul had died within a very short period of time, we may surmise that Euric’s ban had already been in place for some time. It must have been introduced a few years earlier than 475. It seems plausible to date the ban to the year 466,129 when Euric came to power, or to 469, when war broke out between the Visigoths and the Western Roman Empire. The year 469 seems somewhat more likely because, after the conflict, Euric had reached an agreement with the Western Roman Empire and had allowed Catholic bishops to return from exile.130 Possibly, Euric’s suspension of the foedus with Rome and his sanctions against the Catholic episcopate in his kingdom were his response to an alliance against the Visigoths forged by Emperor Procopius Anthemius (467–472) in concert with parts of the 128 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 25–27. Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 50–52, assumes that, in the context of the ongoing war with the Western Roman Empire, Euric did not want the Catholic bishops of his kingdom to participate in the episcopal election at Bourges, as he faced political resistance from the ranks of the Catholic episcopate. According to Stroheker, Eurich, p. 40, Sidonius could not find any bishop from the Visigothic part of Aquitania Prima, since – due to Euric’s ban on the consecration of new bishops – all of the bishoprics in question were vacant. However, the bishoprics of Albi and Cahors, both located in the province Aquitania Prima, do not appear in Sidonius’s list of vacant bishoprics. Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.7. Moreover, Sidonius’s list of the year 475 does not necessarily reflect the situation of 471, when the episcopal election at Bourges took place. 129 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 27; on the year when Euric came to power, cf. Yver, ‘Euric’, p. 14; Gillett, ‘The Accession of Euric’, pp. 1–40. It is assumed that Euric broke – or intended to break – the foedus with the Western Roman Empire shortly after his accession. This assumption is supported by some historiographical evidence according to which Euric, shortly after coming to power, sent envoys to the rulers of the neighbouring Suebi and the Vandals in northern Africa, but also to the Eastern Roman Emperor Leo I – because there was no emperor in the West in 466 (cf. Hydat. chron. 238; Isid. Goth. 34). Euric probably meant to make his accession known. We know by Hydat. chron. 238 that Euric’s envoys quickly withdrew from Vandal north Africa, since an attack by the emperor against the Vandals seemed imminent. According to some scholars, this shows that Euric was considering an alliance with the Vandals against Rome. Cf. Yver, ‘Euric’, pp. 16–19; Wolfram, Die Goten, pp. 187f. It is equally possible, however, that Euric’s envoys simply did not want to become involved in a conflict between Rome and the Vandals. 130 Cf. Yver, ‘Euric’, pp. 44f.; Griffe, La Gaule chrétienne, vol. 2, p. 64; Stroheker, Eurich, pp. 53, 58f.; Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 31; Wolfram, Die Goten, p. 204.

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Gallo-Roman senatorial aristocracy. In 468/469 Euric had been warned of this alliance by the Prefect Arvandus.131 Shortly after his accession in 467, Emperor Anthemius had begun to win over to his side the Gallo-Roman elites, who, in turn, assured him of their support. Gallo-Roman envoys, including Sidonius Apollinaris, travelled to Rome to pay their respect to the new Western Roman Emperor. By appointing Gallo-Romans to high civil and military off ices, Anthemius established close links between himself and the Gallo-Roman senatorial aristocracy.132 The emperor could be sure of the support of powerful Gallo-Roman senatorial families, such as the Aviti, Magni, Apollinares, and Syagrii. This is evident from the fact that it were leading members of these families who uncovered the plans of the Prefect Arvandus and who leaked them to the imperial government.133 Emperor Julius Nepos (474–475/480), continuing the approach of his predecessor Anthemius, also enjoyed the support of various members of the Gallo-Roman elites.134 Since Emperor Anthemius protected heretics as well as followers of the ancient cults, the relationship between him and the Catholic Church was not free of tension.135 This does not rule out the possibility, however, that the Catholic episcopate of Gaul supported the orthodox emperor, just as parts of the Gallo-Roman senatorial aristocracy did. Since the latter were part of the Gallic episcopate, Anthemius could use their influence to his advantage. These pieces of background information may explain Euric’s sanctions. As our sources do not mention any use of force, Euric apparently shied away from 131 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 1.7.5. 132 The prefecture of Gaul was held by high-ranking Gallo-Romans such as Philomathius, Felix Magnus, Eutropius, Polemius (brother-in-law of Felix Magnus), Aurelius, and perhaps Agricola (brother-in-law of Sidonius Apollinaris). Cf. Henning, Periclitans res publica, pp. 91f., 95, 99, 101. Sidonius Apollinaris held the praefectura urbi Romae in 468. Anthemius wanted Ecdicius, Sidonius’s brother-in-law, to become magister militum – however, Ecdicius only received this off ice under Anthemius’s successor, Julius Nepos. Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 5.16.1-2; Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, p. 82. Furthermore, the quaestor sacri palatii Victor, once the teacher of Sidonius in Lyon, is worth mentioning. Cf. Sidon. Apoll. carm. 1, v. 25; Henning, Periclitans res publica, p. 93; for the integration of Gallo-Roman elites by Emperor Anthemius, see also Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, pp. 79f.; Mathisen, ‘Leo’, pp. 200–203. 133 Cf. Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, p. 80; Henning, Periclitans res publica, pp. 164–166. 134 Cf. Henning, Periclitans res publica, pp. 174–176. Sidonius, who had high hopes of Julius Nepos (cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 5.16.2), tells us that – at the instigation of Sidonius’s relatives – the city of Vaison had sided with the new emperor, much to the displeasure of the Burgundians. Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 5.6.2, 5.7.1; Courcelle, Histoire littéraire, p. 179; Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, pp. 98, 145. 135 Cf. Henning, Periclitans res publica, pp. 168f.; Henning, ‘Der erste “griechische Kaiser”’, pp. 182f.

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drastic actions against the Catholic episcopate and the Catholics.136 We should also note that the ban on ordination, if anything, was very slow at breaking the resistance within the ranks of the Catholic episcopate. The fact that he introduced the ban means that Euric had time to wait for the bishops to die of natural causes. It was a long-term measure against the institution of the Catholic Church.137 Such a strategy, then, presupposes that the episcopate did not pose an imminent threat to the regnum Tolosanum.138 It is conceivable that Euric’s sanctions were of temporary nature, intended to support his military actions against the Western Roman Empire, and were therefore lifted after the war’s end. In this scenario, Euric’s sanctions served not only to halt the influence of external powers, but also to put pressure on the imperial government and the Catholic Church. By threatening the Catholic Church, its institutions, and thus indirectly the Catholic provincials, Euric forced the emperor and the Church officials to enter into negotiations and to accept the new sociopolitical order. It is certainly no coincidence that the persons sent to Euric by the emperor for the sake of negotiations were his bishops. It makes clear that the Catholic Church shared the emperor’s interest in coming to terms with Euric. As far as Euric was concerned, it was crucial for his sanctions not to be too radical, as this could have angered his negotiating partners and cost him the support of Gallic Catholics, who made up the majority of the kingdom’s population. If Euric wanted to meet immediate threats to his rule, he had other instruments at his disposal, one of which was the banishment of bishops. Although we know of some individual bishops who were exiled by the Visigothic kings, the circumstances of their banishment often remain unclear. In 475, Sidonius mentions two bishops from Visigothic Gaul who were being exiled at the time: Simplicius and Crocus.139 About Crocus, we know little more than his name.140 Simplicius, however, can almost 136 Cf. Stroheker, Eurich, p. 30; Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, p. 94. Yver, ‘Euric’, p. 43, citing the case of Bishop Galactorius of Lescars, thinks that there were bishops from Gaul who died a violent death under King Euric. One may object, however, that – if the Life of Galactorius (Vita Galac.) is of any historical value – the bishop of Lescars suffered martyrdom during the reign of Alaric II. There is evidence that he was still alive at the end of Alaric’s reign and that he was present at the Council of Agde in September of 506. Cf. Conc. Gall., p. 213; Duchesne, Fastes épiscopaux, vol. 2, p. 100. 137 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 27f. 138 Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 29, thinks that Euric’s restraint as to the sanctions against the Catholic episcopate in Visigothic Gaul was the result of the king’s political acumen. 139 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.6.9. 140 Probably, the Crocus mentioned by Sidonius is identical with the bishop of the same name who participated in a synod held at Arles around 470/475. The meeting was concerned with the teachings of the presbyter Lucidus. Cf. Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 256–264. It has

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certainly be identified as the bishop of Bourges of the same name,141 whose election Sidonius had once supported.142 This gives us reasonable grounds to believe that Simplicius – who came from a senatorial family and who had earlier championed the interests of his city against barbarian kings (‘pelliti reges’)143 – shared Sidonius’s political stance towards Euric, particularly since Simplicius had once been in a barbarian prison. After the capture of Bourges by the Visigoths – seeing that Simplicius’s loyalty was at least doubtful – Euric could hardly leave him in a position as important as the metropolitan of Aquitania Prima, a vulnerable border region.144 Perhaps, the same applies to Bishop Faustus of Riez and Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Clermont. We know of Faustus’s exile, dated to around 477,145 from his correspondence with Ruricius of Limoges, on whose estates Faustus had lived for a time.146 However, their correspondence offers no clue as to been assumed, however, that the bishops did not only discuss the teachings of Lucidus but also the difficult political situation they found themselves in: the impending collapse of Roman rule in the region. The basis for this assumption is that the about 30 bishops who gathered in Arles came from different parts of Gaul but apparently not from the territories under Euric’s control. Cf. Van Waarden, Writing to Survive, vol. 1, pp. 27–30. Following Jacques Sirmond (1559–1651), many scholars have assumed Crocus to have been the bishop of Nîmes. Cf. Görres, ‘Kirche und Staat’, p. 719; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, p. 252; Mathisen, Roman Aristocrats, p. 32; somewhat cautious: Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 44–49; contra: Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 21, n. 52. A thirteenth-century lectionary from Nîmes does mention a bishop by the name of Crocus, but it refers to the late seventh century rather than to the late fifth. Cf. Duchesne, Fastes épiscopaux, vol. 1, p. 311. According to this lectionary from Nîmes, Crocus was a contemporary of Saint Aegidius (c. 640–720) and King ‘Flavius’. Flavius had been part of the Visigothic king’s title since the middle of the sixth century and, in this case, probably refers to a Visigothic king of the late seventh or early eighth century. Since the bishops who participated in the synod held at Arles around 470 were predominantly from the lower Rhône valley and the Provence, Crocus very likely came from the same region. It is impossible, however, to be more precise. Cf. Griffe, La Gaule chrétienne, vol. 2, p. 63. Perhaps, Crocus’s capture and exile were linked to a Visigothic campaign across the Rhône in 470/471, during which several cities were devastated. For a list of the cities in question, cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 6.12.8: Arles, Riez, Avignon, Orange, Viviers, Valence, and Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux. Since we know the participants of the Synod of Arles around 470, most bishops from the cities mentioned by Sidonius Apollinaris can be identified. The cities unaccounted for are Viviers and Valence – so these are the most promising candidates for the bishopric of Crocus. 141 Cf. Griffe, La Gaule chrétienne, vol. 2, pp. 63f.; Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 21; Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 49f. 142 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.8, 7.9. 143 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.9.17, 19–20, 24. 144 Cf. Griffe, La Gaule chrétienne, vol. 2, pp. 63f.; Wolfram, Die Goten, pp. 202f. 145 For the date of Faustus’s exile cf. Stroheker, Eurich, p. 58; Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 30f.; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, p. 271; Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 74–76. 146 Cf. Faust. alior. epist. 5; Koch, Der heilige Faustus, p. 20; Mathisen, Ruricius of Limoges, p. 30; Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 71–73.

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Euric’s motives for banishing Faustus. The latter is often said to have taken a rigid dogmatic attitude towards ‘Arianism’, which is then used to explain his exile.147 The circumstances of Sidonius’s exile in Livia near Carcassonne also remain unclear. It is certainly plausible that it was related to his role in the resistance of the Auvergne against the Visigothic expansion. As in the case of Simplicius of Bourges, Euric might have thought twice about leaving one of his opponents in such an important position, particularly in the border region of his kingdom.148 Sidonius himself makes vague allusions to having been expelled from his homeland under the pretext of some service (‘officii imaginem’).149 Gregory of Tours, who was from Clermont, suggests that tensions within the clergy of Clermont were responsible for Sidonius’s exile.150 The case of Bishop Marcellus of Die is better documented, though the account is replete with hagiographical topoi.151 Probably during Euric’s campaign across the Rhône in 470/471, the city of Die was temporarily occupied by the Visigoths, and Marcellus was taken out of the city along with other citizens, first to Arles and later to Couserans.152 Although the anonymous author of the Life of Marcellus describes his exile in purely religious terms, it cannot be ruled out that – as in the cases of Simplicius and Sidonius Apollinaris – Euric’s decision to send Marcellus into exile was influenced by political considerations.153 We have more detailed information as to three bishops who were exiled during the reign of Alaric II, Euric’s son and successor. According to the historiographical tradition, the Bishops Volusianus and Verus of Tours were suspected of having collaborated with the Franks.154 This is plausible, inasmuch as that the bishops of Tours, metropolitans of the Lugdunensis Tertia, were confronted with a delicate situation: All of their suffragan bishoprics were located outside the Visigothic kingdom. The territorial organization of the Catholic Church, which was based on the former Roman 147 Cf. Stroheker, Eurich, p. 58; Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 30f.; Stadermann, Gothus, p. 122. This assumption is based on Gennad. vir. ill. 85. However, Faustus is credited with a homily in which he advocates a conciliatory attitude towards the Goths. Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 30; Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 69–77. Griffe, La Gaule chrétienne, vol. 2, pp. 67–70, discusses this homily at length. 148 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 30; Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, p. 60. 149 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 9.3.3. 150 Cf. Greg. Tur. hist. 2.23. 151 For general remarks on hagiographical topoi in texts about exiled bishops, cf. Yver, ‘Euric’, p. 44. 152 Cf. Vita Marc. 4. 153 Cf. Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 87f. 154 Cf. Greg. Tur. hist. 2.26, 10.31.

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administrative units, was no longer compatible with the political landscape of Gaul, i.e. the boundaries of the ecclesiastical dioceses did not coincide with the political boundaries of the successor states. This led to tensions, particularly since the Gallic Church insisted on its territorial organization, regardless of political changes. If their metropolitan status was dear to the bishops of Tours, they inevitably had to come to terms with the political powers beyond the Loire, without whose consent they could not fulfil their metropolitan responsibilities.155 This, in turn, could raise doubts about their loyalty to Alaric II: Perhaps, in order to get access to their suffragan bishoprics beyond the Loire, these bishops were prepared to support Alaric’s opponents.156 The case of the episcopal election of Bourges makes clear that, indeed, political boundaries could impair the work of bishops. The exile of Volusianus probably dates to 498, just after Tours had been temporarily conquered by the Franks and shortly before Clovis, who had professed Catholic faith in Tours, probably on St. Martin’s Day in 496 (or 497),157 had received baptism in Reims.158 Perhaps, it was Volusianus who handed the city over to Clovis. After the Visigoths had regained control of the Touraine,159 Volusianus was accused of treason and taken to the area near Toulouse, where he was put on trial.160 The case of Verus is similar to that of his predecessor Volusianus.161 It is very likely that his banishment took place around 506/507,162 probably on the eve of the conflict between the Visigoths and the Franks that emerged in 507.163 155 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 26f., 39f.; Wolfram, Die Goten, pp. 205f. 156 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 35–37; Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 93f. 157 Cf. Epist. Austras. 8; Becher, Chlodwig, pp. 186–190. 158 Gregory of Tours indicates that Volusianus’s term of office lasted seven years and three months, and that he had to go into exile in the seventh year of his term. Cf. Greg. Tur. hist. 2.26, 10.31. Since Perpetuus, Volusianus’s predecessor, held office until 491, the banishment must date to 498. Stroheker, Der senatorische Adel, p. 96, Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 36, and Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 94f. however, date his exile to the year 496. On the date of Clovis’s baptism, cf. Becher, Chlodwig, pp. 190, 199f.; Stadermann, Gothus, p. 175, n. 428. Around 496/498, the Franks temporarily occupied the area south of the Loire. Cf. Cont. Prosp. Havn. ad a. 496, a. 498. 159 From 500 (or a few years earlier) onwards, the Loire was once again the border between the Visigoths and the Franks. Cf. Greg. Tur. hist. 2.35. 160 Cf. Greg. Tur. hist. 10.31; Yver, ‘Euric’, p. 46; Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 95f. Volusianus is said to have lived in Foix (Dép. Ariège) near Toulouse. Cf. Fernand, ‘La violence’, pp. 129-151. 161 Cf. Greg. Tur. hist. 10.31. 162 In September of 506, Verus sent his Deacon Leo to the Synod of Agde. The fact that Verus did not come in person may suggest that there were tensions between him and Alaric II early on. Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 36f. In September of 506, Verus was at Tours (cf. Faust. alior. epist. 12 and Ruric. epist. 2.33), which means that – contrary to what Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 96f., suggests – he cannot have been in exile in southern Gaul at that time. 163 According to Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 37, Verus’s attitude towards Clovis was possibly influenced by the latter’s baptismal vow in Tours. Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, p. 99, rejects

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Caesarius, bishop of Arles and metropolitan of the Viennensis, was in a situation similar to that of the bishops of Tours, as most of his metropolitan district lay in Burgundian territory. In 505, Caesarius’s notarius Licinianus accused him of wanting to cede Arles to the Burgundians.164 Caesarius had made his career in a rather short time, having been appointed bishop by his relative and predecessor Aeonius. Since he was also criticized for his strict morals, it possible that he had enemies in the ranks of the clergy who wanted to get rid of him.165 Caesarius’s election does seem to have been controversial.166 Conflicts surrounding episcopal elections were not uncommon, particularly since the office of bishop had gained in prestige and influence in the course of the fifth century. In Rodez, for instance, the election following the death of Bishop Theodosius sparked riots, during which the church was looted and certain candidates were ‘eliminated’.167 The succession of Bishop Venerandus saw fighting break out on the streets of Clermont.168 After his consecration as bishop of Arles, Hilarius was busy restoring social peace, healing the wounds his election had left behind.169 During the election of the bishop of Chalon-sur-Saône, the Metropolitan Patiens of Lyon, who presided over the tumultuous election process, was harassed by various interest groups promoting their respective candidates.170 At the election of the bishop of Bourges, organized by Sidonius, there were so many candidates that two pews were not enough to accommodate them. Most of these candidates had nominated themselves and thought all others unfit for office; some even attempted to bribe themselves into office.171 Against the backdrop of such disputes over the bishop’s office in the fifth and sixth centuries, it would not come as a surprise if election losers tried to bring election winners into discredit. This may have been the case with the accusations made by Licinianus. Still, there could well be some truth to Licinianus’s accusation. For, at the time, Arles and Vienne were competing this assumption, dating the baptism of Clovis to the end of his reign. A letter of Bishop Nicetius of Trier, however, makes clear that Clovis became a Catholic before his conflicts with Gundobad (a. 500) and Alaric II (a. 507). Cf. Epist. Austras. 8. 164 Cf. Vita Caes. 1.21. 165 Cf. Arnold, Caesarius, pp. 109–114; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 275f.; Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles, pp. 83–87. Perhaps, Licinianus was a supporter of John, who had competed against him for the office of bishop. Cf. Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 105–108, 115f. 166 Cf. Ruric. epist. 2.31, where, in the aftermath of the election, the new bishop of Arles is asked to restore harmony. 167 Cf. Greg. Tur. hist. 6.38. 168 Cf. Greg. Tur. hist. 2.13. 169 Cf. Hilar. Arelat. vita Honorat. 28. 170 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 4.25.1–2. 171 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 7.5.1–2.

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over who was to be granted metropolitan status in the Viennensis. Vienne had the better starting position because, in political terms, most of its suffragan bishoprics belonged to the Burgundian kingdom.172 If Caesarius wanted to assert his claim on the metropolitan status in the Viennensis and to ensure the functioning of his metropolitan district – which the new political borders had made more difficult – he could not allow contact with the bishoprics in the Burgundian kingdom to break off. Perhaps, he contemplated changing the political borders that were in his way.173 We may conclude that the banishments of Catholic bishops in the regnum Tolosanum have to be interpreted in the context of conflicts of loyalty. Religious motivations on the part of Euric and Alaric seem very unlikely. This is underlined by the fact that the conditions of the bishops’ exile were anything but harsh. During his exile, Sidonius was allowed to travel to Bordeaux, maintain correspondence with his friends, continue his literary studies, and even to receive friends at his place of exile.174 Faustus continued to preach his teachings, living on the estates of his friend Ruricius near Limoges.175 During his exile, Marcellus of Die made a name for himself as a miracle worker in the area of Couserans, much like Volusianus of Tours, who worked in the area of Foix.176 In Bordeaux, the exiled Caesarius of Arles preached that, while one should not follow the Visigothic king in religious matters, he deserved obedience in the realm of politics.177 While he was still in exile, he met with other Catholic bishops so as to prepare a synod of the Catholic episcopate in Visigothic Gaul. The synod was to take place in Agde in September of 506.178 It is remarkable that Caesarius – rather than, for instance, the bishop of Toulouse – was entrusted with organizing and presiding over the synod. Apparently, the Visigothic king allowed the bishop of Arles to fill this key position in the Catholic Church of his kingdom. Perhaps, this was a compensation for the metropolitan status of the Viennensis Caesarius had been denied.179 Most of the exiled bishops were allowed to return to their episcopal sees 172 For the competition between Arles and Vienne, cf. Langgärtner, Die Gallienpolitik, pp. 32–42, 53–55, 58, 71f., 76, 80–85, 104–106, 133–135. 173 Cf. Arnold, Caesarius, pp. 194–199; Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 37–39; Wolfram, Die Goten, pp. 205f.; Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 112–115. 174 Cf. Sidon. Apoll. epist. 4.10, 4.22, 8.3, 8.9, 9.3. 175 Cf. Faust. alior. epist. 1, 2, 3, 5; Yver, ‘Euric’, p. 70. 176 Cf. Vita Marc. 5; Fernand, ‘La violence’, pp. 129-151. 177 Cf. Vita Caes. 1.23. 178 Cf. Faust. alior. epist. 12. 179 Cf. Arnold, Caesarius, pp. 223f., 261; Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 58.

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once the conflict between Euric and the Western Roman Empire had been settled.180

Conclusion: Euric and After Although the few sources from Euric’s time provide us with little information about the relationship between the Visigothic kings and the Catholic Church in their kingdom,181 a few characteristics of this relationship have emerged. Euric’s sanctions were not motivated by religious zeal; they were not an erratic reaction against the Nicene denomination. Rather, the sanctions were motivated by political considerations. He did not only impose a ban on the consecration of new bishops, but he also brought synodal activity to a standstill and prevented Catholic bishops from communicating with powers outside his kingdom. The last point is particularly striking: Before 466, the year when Euric came to power, there is some evidence on various points of contact between Gallic bishops and imperial magistrates as well as between members of the Catholic episcopate in Gaul and Italy. During Euric’s reign, however, we learn of no such contacts. It is unlikely that this lack of evidence is due to chance. Apparently, at least for a time, Euric was successful at ending contact between the Catholic bishops of his kingdom and the world outside. Euric’s sanctions were directed against the Catholic Church as an institution; the only notable exception to this is the banishment of individual bishops. This measure was meant to overcome political resistance on the periphery of his kingdom, thereby securing territories Euric had conquered only shortly before. Since concrete steps towards the integration of the Catholic Church into his kingdom cannot be observed during Euric’s reign, it is doubtful that his actions against the Catholic episcopate were ultimately intended to achieve this aim.182 This is all the more likely because (most of) Euric’s sanctions – which were directed 180 His friend Leo having pleaded his case, Sidonius was allowed to return from exile in 477. Cf. Harries, ‘Sidonius Apollinaris, Rome and the Barbarians’, p. 299; Harries, Sidonius Apollinaris, pp. 238–242; Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 63–68. On the return of Marcellus of Die, cf. Vita Marc. 5. On the return of Faustus to Riez during the reign of Euric, cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 30f.; Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 72–74. On the rehabilitation of Caesarius of Arles, cf. Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, pp. 109f. On the return of Simplicius to Bourges, cf. Stadermann, Gothus, pp. 123f., n. 141. 181 Cf. Stroheker, Eurich, p. 38. 182 Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 29f., believes that Euric’s sanctions were meant to assert his authority in the region. As long as the institution of the Catholic Church could not be integrated into the Visigothic kingdom, Schäferdiek suggests, Euric intended to weaken it.

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against the highest ranks of the Catholic Church, not against the Catholic faith per se – were only in place during the period of tension between the Visigothic kingdom and the Western Roman Empire. Soon after a peaceful settlement had been reached, the bishops who had been exiled were allowed to return to their cities. Since we do not possess a complete list of the bishops of this period, we cannot tell with certainty whether Euric also lifted the ban on the consecration of new bishops, but this is likely.183 During Euric’s reign, there is no evidence of synods of Catholic bishops taking place in Visigothic Gaul, nor of contact between Rome and any Catholic bishop of Euric’s kingdom. Since many of Euric’s sanctions were only temporary, they likely served to support his military actions against the Western Roman Empire and its allies. Perhaps, they were meant to increase the pressure on Euric’s adversaries, forcing them to acknowledge his position of power in the West. Because of its cumbersome nature, the ban on ordination surely did not overcome resistance within the Catholic Church and the Gallo-Roman senatorial aristocracy in the short term; nor did it integrate the Catholic Church into the Visigothic kingdom. Since the religious freedom of the Catholic provincials was not called into question, Euric’s sanctions are also not likely to have eliminated the Catholic Church as a focal point of ‘Roman’ identity. Alaric II, Euric’s son, finally paved the way for the integration of the Catholic Church into the new sociopolitical order. The relationship between the Visigothic kings and the Church was defined – and made binding – by two important events: Firstly, the promulgation of the Breviarium Alaricianum in February of 506 and, secondly, the Synod of Agde, convening in September of the same year.184 In Agde, the Catholic episcopate prayed for Alaric II and for his kingdom. According to the conciliar acta, Alaric II – having allowed the synod to convene – was granted the right to decide on future synods.185 He even gained the right to prohibit individual bishops from participating.186 Apparently, Alaric was trying to prevent the synods from being turned against him. Unlike the Frankish kings or the Catholic Visigothic kings of the late sixth and seventh centuries, Alaric did not play an active role in 183 In Ruric. epist. 1.16, Ruricius of Limoges refers to Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Clermont, as his frater. This makes clear that Ruricius was a bishop himself. Since Apollinaris died in the early 480s, Ruricius probably became bishop towards the end of Euric’s reign. Stroheker, Eurich, p. 31, considered it conceivable that the consecration of bishops was permitted at the end of Euric’s reign. 184 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 31, 57f. 185 Cf. Conc. Agath., praef. 186 Cf. Conc. Agath., can. 35.

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Agde. Since he belonged to the ‘Arian–Homoean’ denomination, he neither presided over the synod nor set its agenda. Still, Alaric’s influence was by no means limited to the synod’s framework, inasmuch as he gave his consent and possibly determined the time and place of the meeting.187 We must not underestimate the fact that future synods could not take place without Alaric’s permission and that the king was allowed to forbid certain bishops from attending. Furthermore, he had a say in the filling of vacant bishoprics, allowing him to promote his loyalists.188 As becomes clear from the acta of the concilium Agathense as well as from the decrees of the Breviarium Alaricianum, the episcopate of Visigothic Gaul fully acknowledged the authority of the king.189 Alaric, on his part, acknowledged the Catholic Church in his kingdom as an institution in its own right; he allowed the episcopate to deal with ecclesiastical matters without the king’s interference.190 In keeping with ecclesiastical tradition that the bishop of Arles had the right to convene Gallic synods, the king permitted the bishop of Arles to organize and preside over the synod of Agde.191 Perhaps, in supporting Arles’s claim to primatial status, Alaric intended to align the territorial structure of the Catholic Church with the political borders of his dominion and to make Arles the ecclesiastical centre of his kingdom.192 Alaric II continued the policies of his father. After Euric had established the borders of the Visigothic kingdom in Gaul and had finally gained the recognition of the Roman Empire, Alaric focused on internal matters. Attempting to strengthen social and political cohesion, Alaric concerned himself with the integration of the Catholic Church, an institution that – until then – had been deemed virtually inseparable from the Roman Empire.193 Finally, the Catholic episcopate turned towards the Visigothic court at Toulouse.

187 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 59. 188 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 54f.; Stüber, Der inkriminierte Bischof, p. 9. 189 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 54f.; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, pp. 273f. 190 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 55–67. 191 On Arles’s right to convene Gallic synods cf. Hilar. epist. 8; on Caesarius’s role at the synod of Agde cf. Langgärtner, Die Gallienpolitik, pp. 120–123. 192 Cf. Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, pp. 47f., 58. 193 Schäferdiek, Die Kirche, p. 29, suggests that Euric failed in integrating the Catholic Church into his kingdom. We have no evidence, however, that Euric did indeed try to align the territorial structure of the Catholic Church with the political borders of his kingdom.

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About the Author Christian Stadermann studied medieval history at the universities of Göttingen, Nancy, and Heidelberg. Since April 2022, he has been a member of the Department of History of the University of Greifswald. His research interests encompass the histories of Merovingian Gaul, Visigothic Gaul and Spain, and Ostrogothic Italy, as well as late antique and medieval historiography.

Index Africa 34, 45, 153, 222-223, 237 n.129 Aguila, Visigothic King 191, 201 n.61 Alamanni, the 9 Alaric II, Visigothic King 15, 143, 198, 217, 234, 239 n.136, 241-242, 243 n.165, 246-247 Anthemius, Roman Emperor 139, 142, 232, 237-238 Arianism 37 n.31, 40, 77, 220, 241 Asterius, Comes Hispaniarum 136 Athanagild, Visigothic King 201 Augustine, Bishop of Hippo 33-34, 64 n.4, 72, 74-75, 80, 84-85, 90, 92, 106-107 Aurasius of Toledo 172-173 Austrasia 121 Austrasian court 109, 200 Austrasian nobility 196 n.40 Aiustrasian royal branch 119 Banners 14, 189, 190, 209 Barbarians 19, 186 n.1, 221 n.32 Barbarian Communities 20 Barbarian Gentes 19 Barbarian Kingdoms 8, 131 Barbarian Kings 240 Barbarian Leaders 15 Barbarian Modes of Identification 111 Barbarian Peoples 134, 141 Barbarian Powers 159 Barbarian Ruling Elite 108 Barbarian Slavery 222 Barbarian Way of Life 220 Barcelona 140, 145, 151-152, 232 Belt (Roman) 206 Bishops 7, 11-13, 15-16, 29-32, 34-54, 77, 107-112, 121, 131-132, 134, 136-139, 142-146, 148-149, 151-152, 153-154, 159-163, 165-176, 216-220, 221 n.32, 223-225, 226 n.62, 227-231, 232 n.94, 233-237, 239, 240 n.140, 241-247 Bobbio 109 n.25, 111, 114 Borders 49, 150, 218, 240-242, 244 Braga 42 n.50, 44 Braulio of Zaragoza 33, 68, 68 n.16, 69 n.19 n.21, 70-72, 70 n.26, 71 n.29, 72 n.38, 75, 81, 85, 87 n.120 Britain 230-231 Brunhild, Frankish Queen 119 Buddhism 119 Building activity 10 n.18, 14, 35, 41, 44, 46, 48-49, 116, 118, 138, 146, 216, 226 n.62 Bulgar, Visigothic Comes 69 n.18, 164 n.42 Byzantines 201 n.61 Byzantine Spania 88 n.120 Byzantine support 83 n.102

John Cassian, Monk 84, 106-107 Chindaswinth, Visigothic King 76 n.53, 88 n.120, 173 Chlothar II, Frankish King 105, 110, 119, 121, 194, 196, 202-203 Claudius, Visigothic Dux 164, 170, 172 Cingulum militare 206 Clovis, Frankish King 198-199, 202, 204, 208, 242, 243 n.163 Clovis II, Frankish King 200 Coinage 149 Coins 147 Columbanus 14, 104, 106, 109-122 Constantinople 70, 133, 201, 202 n.63, 203 Córdoba/Corduva 148, 165 n.46, 191, 201 n.61 Councils Council of Agde 239 n.136 Second Council of Arles 222, 235 n.120 Council of Bordeaux 207 n.86 Council of Clermont 206 Council of Constantinople 133 Council of Macon 207 Council of Orange 235 n.120 Council of Riez 236 n.120 Council of Saint Jean de Losne 207 n. 86 Councils of Toledo 39 n.39, 49, 53, 67, 67 n.11, 69-73, 73 n.40, 75, 77, 80, 81, 83, 91, 93, 149, 162, 172 n.96, 205, 206 Council of Serdica 77 Council of Seville 79 Councils of Tarraco 137, 144, 145, 149 Council of Valson 235 n.120 Ebro Valley 137, 140, 149 Ebroin, Neustrian Major Domus 121, 200 Egica, Visigothic King 16, 77-78, 81, 90, 174 Einhard, Frankish scholar 122 Erwig, Visigothic King 16, 19, 164 n.34 Military Law 207 n.85 Ethnicity 10, 18, 19 n.42, 132, 140 n.32 Ethnogenesis theory 19, 19-20 n.42 Eucherius of Lyon Eulalia 35, 37 n.31, 45, 50-53 Basilica of 43-44, 46, 48, 51, 68 n.13, 146 n.56 Tunic of 40, 50, 52 Euric, Visigothic King 15, 139-142, 144, 163, 168, 215- 228, 230-241, 242 n.160, 244-247 Family 72, 78 n.64, 87 n.120, 113-114, 136 n.13, 185 Family Education 67 n.8 Family Networks 170 Manuscript Families 94

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Leadership, Social Cohesion, and Identity in Late Antique Spain and Gaul (500–700)

Merovingian Families 192, 195 n.37 n.40, 202-203 Senatorial Families 240 Flachoald, Frankish Maior domus 7 Franks, the 9, 108-109, 112-113, 119-120, 122, 143, 186-187, 193, 198-200, 202, 204, 241-242 Frederic, brother of Theoderic Visigothic King 232 Fructuosus of Braga 42 n.50, 44, 132, 134, 138, 145-146 Girona 144 Gregory the Great, Pope 115 Grimoald, Frankish Maior domus 200 Gregory of Tours 33 n.11, 37, 46 n.65, 83 n.103, 109, 112, 169, 186, 189, 191 n.23, 195, 198-199, 202, 204, 208, 218-220, 222, 241 Guntram Boso, Frankish Dux 189 Guntramn, Merovingian King 104 n. 3, 192 n. 25 Hagiography 29, 31, 118, 133 Merovingian Hagiography 120 Visigothic Hagiography 31, 33, 35 Harvey Whitehouse 116-117 Hilary, Bishop of Arles 107-108 Heresy 74, 87 Arian Heresy 220 n.23 Heretics 40, 218, 238 Hispania Carthaginensis (Province of) 145 Historia Wambae Regis 199, 205 Identity 8, 12-14, 16, 18, 20-22, 32, 40, 45-46, 50-51, 86, 110, 116-119, 132, 135, 147, 153-154, 189, 195, 197, 201-206, 208, 246 Ildefonsus of Toledo 147, 81, 82 n.99, 84 Isidore of Seville 30, 34, 53, 68, 171, 191, 199 Etymologies 68, 74 Historia Gothorum/De Origine Gothorum 68, 190, 201 Sententiae 34, 65, 68, 75, 76 n.54, 86 Synonyma 63, 75-76, 79 n.73 Jews 16, 41, 45, 67, 70-74, 70 n.26, 73 n.40, 74, 77, 79, 81, 83-86, 85 n. 108 n.110, 86 n.116, 88-94, 173 Jonas of Bobbio 104, 112, 119-120 Judaism 67, 71 n.29, 73, 92 Julian of Toledo 68, 72, 80, 84, 85, 147 Leadership 7-8, 10-12, 15, 22, 30, 32, 39-40, 42-44, 50-51, 53-54, 105, 108, 133, 149, 160-161, 161 n. 14 n. 15, 164-168, 171, 175-176, 186-187, 189-192, 194, 196-197, 199, 201, 207-209 Leander of Seville 147 Leovigild, Visigothic King 35, 37 n.31, 40, 50, 52, 53, 147-148, 150 Liber Iudiciorum 72, 78, 88 n.120, 91 Liber Orationum de Festivitatibus 148, 152

Liber Ordinum 189 Lusitania 35, 142 Martial Martial Exploits 194 Martial Pedagogy 13, 188 Martial Rituals 202 Martial Symbols 202 Martial Values 202 n.62 Masona 35-38, 40-44, 48-53, 170, 172, 175 n. 115 Merida 13, 35-36, 39, 40-42, 45-47, 50-54, 68 n. 13, 137, 142-143, 164, 168, 170, 175 n. 15, 226 Migration Period 19, 20 n. 42, 186 n. 1, 199 n. 51 Monasteries 30, 35, 43-44, 46-49, 50 n.74, 104-105, 110-113, 116, 118, 120-121 Monasticism 11, 47, 103, 106-107, 109, 111, 113, 116-117 Irish Monasticism 112 Monothelitism 66, 67, 80, 81, 83, 91, 92 Montanus of Toledo 170 Nanthild, Merovingian Queen 7 Narbonensis 69, 230, 232-233, 234 n.109 Narbonne 140, 164, 170, 189-190, 205, 232-233 Notitia Dignitatum 186, 189 n. 14 Paulus, Visigothic Bishop 35, 36, 45, 48, 50 Paulus, Visigothic Dux 189 Peasantry 120 Peasants 202 Penalties 194 Penance 14, 112, 114-115 Prayers 34, 89-90, 116-117, 120 Priests 220 Property 38 n.35, 169 Church Property 53, 223-224; see also Ecclesiastical Property Private Property 65-66 Pseudo-Fredegar, Frankish Chronicler 195, 196 Punishment 53, 76 n. 53, 172, 193-194, 196, 206, 208 Corporal Punishments 112 Death Punishment 70 Divine punishment 49 n. 74 Reading 91, 112, 117 Reccared, Visigothic King 35, 51, 147-150, 167 n.61, 170, 172, 175 n.115 Recceswinth, Visigothic King 16,72, 76-78, 90-91, 173 Rhine 186, 192 Ripuarian Law 193 n.29 Romans, the 74, 186, 206, 237 n.124 Gallo-Romans 238 Hispano-Romans 140, 202 n.61 Salic Law 193 n.29 Salla, Visigothic Dux 142, 164, 168

259

Index

Santa Leocadia 146 n.56 Santa Leocadia Church (in Toledo) 52, 68 n.15 Scriptures 34, 41 n.43, 70, 88 n.120 Septimania 143, 164 Settlements 48, 112 Monastic Settlements 47 Settlement of Barbarian Peoples in Hispania 141 Settlements of disputes 8 n.5, 246 Settlement patterns 14 Visigothic Settlement in Aquitaine 235 Visigothic Settlement in Hispania 13, 140, 144 Shrines 48, 52, 138 Sidonius Apollinaris 108, 168, 215-216, 218-219, 219 n. 16 n. 22, 220-224, 226-228, 232 n.94, 233 n.102, 236-241, 243-244, 245 n.180, 246 n.183 Sigibert, Frankish King 104, 192-193, 200, 203-204 Sisebut, Visigothic King 33, 37 n.31, 71-72, 151, 173 Sisenand, Visigothic King 68 n.14, 69, 164 n.42 Sites Martyrial Sites 145 Religious or Cult Sites 46, 51, 105, 109, 146 Sites of Paganism 145 Slaves 40, 71, 173 Slavery 65, 107, 222 Social Cohesion Sprit de corps 197 n.46, 201 Statues 136 Sueves 168, 237 n.129 Sunna, Arian Bishop 50-52, 170, 172 Sword 204-205, 218-219, 220 n.23 Synods 15, 115, 114-145, 148-149, 218, 222, 228 n.73, 229, 231, 235-236, 239 n.140, 240 n.140, 242 n.162, 244-247; see also councils

Tarragona / Tarraco 13, 22, 46, 132-139, 141-154, 136 n. 13, 140 n.29, 142 n.43, 146 n.56, 148 n. 62, 152-153 Tarraco mint 147 Taxation 229 Temples 145 Theodebert II, Merovingian King 7 Theoderic II, Merovingian King 7 Theoderic, Ostrogothic King 85 n.110, 143, 190 Theoderic, Visigothic King 232 Toledo 13, 50-53, 53 n. 78, 67-69, 70 n.26, 72, , 84-86, 143, 147, 149, 151-152, 170, 185 Church of 145 Totila, Ostrogothic King 192, 193 n.27 Treasures 7, 113, 143-144, 190-191, 198-199 Vandals 237 n.129 Veneration 33, 45, 52 Violence 7, 12-13, 69, 72 n.36, 88, 121, 186-187, 196-197, 208, 220 Vita Columbani 119, 121 Vita Desiderii 33, 37 n.31, 42 Vitas Sanctorum Patrum Emeretensium 33, 35, 35 n.23, 68, 68 n. 13, 161 n. 14 Wamba, Visigothic King 42, 67, 91, 174, 189, 193-194, 199, 205, 207 n.85 Military Law 207 n.85 Wandregisel, Austrasian aristocrat 114 War 7, 9, 12, 17, 105, 186, 188 n.9, 190, 192, 205-206, 207 n.85, 220 n.22, 237 Weapons 14, 20, 78, 192, 195, 202-203, 205-207 Zeno, Bishop of Merida 142, 168