104 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINseventh century, as the author of the Lives of the Fathers of Merida
found nothing strange or untoward in these events in themselves in
his incidental recording of them. Of course, considerable changes in
the population had occurred with the coming of the Visigothic nobil-
ity and their followers, but these seem to have fitted relatively easily
into the pattern of local alliances and loyalties. The division by race
can have mattered little if a Goth could be as devoted to the patron
saint of the city as Masona was, and rise to become its bishop and
Metropolitan of Lusitania. Why not, seeing that his two predecessors
had been Greeks? Some aspects of administration and government
may have changed from Roman days, but not substantially, and in
these areas the Visigoths were merely building upon Roman founda-
tions. A better understanding of the military and governmental pro-
cedures of Late Roman times, especially of the fifth century, might
make some features of the Germanic successor kingdoms less differ-
ent from those of their great predecessor than they now appear. On
the basis of what has been seen in Merida, and most of it must be true
of the other major cities of the south, the notion of the isolation of
Spain in the Visigothic period needs to be drastically revised. Certain
parts of the peninsula remained, particularly in the light of contin-
ued Byzantine political and commercial interest in the West, very
much part of a wider Mediterranean world.
All of that may be true of some regions, particularly the south and
the eastern seaboard, but there certainly were parts of the peninsula
that were, and in some cases still are, remote from not only the world
beyond the frontiers but even from the rest of the kingdom. Also,
however cosmopolitan some aspects of the cities might be, to go
outside of them into the countryside was to enter a zone of rapidly
diminishing horizons, as indeed it had been in previous centuries.
Little as we may really know about the cities, it is much harder to gain
any impression of those other parts of the peninsula, especially where
there was little urbanisation and where Roman tradition had a weak
hold. The Life of St Aemilian written by Bishop Braulio of Zaragoza
(631-651) for his brother Fronimian, abbot of the monastery that
grew around the site of Aemilian's former hermitage, does give some
glimpses of life in the upper Ebro valley in the later sixth century.
The work itself is further evidence of that considerable pro~ess of
liturgical composition that was carried out in Spain in the sixth and
seventh centuries. The Life, which is basically a collection of miracle
stories put in roughly chronological setting, was composed for