THE SEVENTH-CENTURY KINGDOM 101in ensuring the continued agricultural prosperity of his province by
virtue of his great spiritual merits.^23
Just as we know all too little about ordinary civil life in the city in
the period, albeit plentifully informed about its religious affairs, so
too does the Lives of the Fathers fail to tell us about the civil and
military administration, whilst being most forthcoming on aspects of
the ecclesiastical. Our author does refer to various Gothic counts who
opposed Bishop Masona. One of these, interestingly, is named as the
future king Witteric (603-610). It is unlikely from what we do know
of Visigothic administrative practices that more than one of these
officials was permanently resident in Merida. This was the Comes
Civitatis or Count of the City, appointed by the king as the principal
royal representative and civil administrator in the city. He was also
responsible for the overseeing of the running of local lands belong-
ing to the royal fisc and doubtless for forwarding at least a proportion
of their reven ues to the officials in charge of the king's treasures. The
counts, drawn from the upper strata of Gothic society, also had re-
sponsibility for the local Visigothic population and controlled what
garrison there might be in the city. They also acted as judges in law
suits involving purely Gothic participants, whilst another official, the
iudex or judge, did the same for the Roman population. This was
more likely to have represented a distinction between military and
civil jurisdiction than one between rival systems of national laws, as is
sometimes made out.
This of course raises the crucial questions of the nature, extent and
whereabouts of the Visigothic settlement. Unfortunately only hypo-
thetical or negative answers can be given. If it is accepted that the
cemeteries excavated by the German archaeologist Zeiss in the 1930s
do not necessarily represent Visigothic necropolises but are just as
likely to be those of indigenous Ibero -Roman communities, then the
notion of the Meseta -the high plateau land of Leon and Old Castille
- as the principal area of Gothic settlement must be given Up.24 This
view has not been sufficiently forcibly challenged, as archaeologists
have remained content enough with it not to look for alternatives,
and it has led historians to interpret many facets of the history of
these centuries in terms of conflict between a Gothic north and a
Romanised south and east. However, Visigothic garrisons must have
been established in the major urban centres of the peninsula from
the fifth century onwards, leading to a diffuse settlement, with lands
all over Spain being distributed and redistributed to their particular