A CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 79monastery?) and denied communion until upon his deathbed.^45 This
conspiracy has been linked with the existence of a unique coin of the
Toledan mint in the name of an otherwise unknown king Sunifred.
The style of the coin would put it into the late 680s or the 690s, and
thus it is held that Sisbert's plot led to this brief and unsuccessful
usurpation. However, the name of Sunifred does not appear in the
list of the bishop's fellow conspirators given in the acts of the council,
nor is there any indication there that this plot ever went beyond
words.^46
A former Toledan cleric and pupil of Bishop Julian called Felix,
who had been elevated to the see of Seville some time after 688, was
translated to the office left vacant by Sisbert's deposition. He has left
us the final continuation of the chain of On Famous Men in his eulogy
of Julian, but no other work of his is known. He died c. 700, and his
successors Gunderic and Sindered, the last bishops of Toledo of the
Visigothic period, are even obscurer. The latter fled Spain during the
Arab invasion, a desertion for which he was posthumously castigated
in the Toledan Chronicle of 754 as the hireling who abandons his
sheep. He retired to Rome, where he signed the acts of a council in
72l.47
It is regrettable, in view of its important formative influence on so
many of the leading figures of the Spanish Church in the Visigothic
period, that so little is known of the monastic life of the peninsula at
that time. The province of Tarraconensis is notable as the only part
of the peninsula for which there is evidence of the existence of
monasticism in the period before the reign of Leovigild. Monastic
institutions appear to have been much slower in developing in Spain
than in most other parts of western Europe in the fifth and sixth
centuries. Although individual Spaniards with an interest in the grow-
ing ascetic movement are known from as early as the fourth century,
such as the lady Egeria who went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Places
and Egypt in 383-4 and wrote an account of it, there is little evi-
dence of monasteries being founded in Spain, as they were in Gaul,
during the next two centuries. The conditions inside the peninsula
during the lengthy period of the invasions may help to explain this.
But in the south it was only the influx of ascetics from Africa in the
550s and 560s that seems to have led to the establishing of monastic
institutions in Baetica, Lusitania and probably Carthaginiensis. The
cause of this movement of monks, who seem to have brought some
of their books and their learning with them, was probably the