108 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINonly practical sanction of that authority, although supernatural ones
were increasingly invoked through the employment of oaths of
loyalty.33
Much hinged upon a king's success, or lack of it, in the conduct
of his military undertakings, not least his own survival. Warfare was
intimately connected with the political stability of the kingdom,
and also in some measure to its economic prosperity. The Visigothic
rulers, like their Frankish and other Germanic contemporaries,
inherited various rights and powers from the Roman emperors whom
they had replaced. These included limited rights of legislation, which
it took them some time to exceed, but may not have comprised the
kind of comprehensive powers of taxation once exercised by the
emperors. Taxation can only be raised effectively where a right to levy
it is recognised, however grudgingly. The Visigothic monarchy re-
ceived revenue from the lands belonging to the royal fisc, which
included all of the former imperial possessions in the peninsula,
together with others that successive kings may have confiscated.
Whether they inherited residual rights to tax their Roman subjects is
unclear, and whether they could have had any such powers over their
free Gothic ones, who had never been subject to Roman taxation, is
most doubtful.
At the same time the demands made upon a king's generosity by
the more powerful men in the kingdom, particularly at times of
political crisis or in the aftermath of a royal succession, must have
been considerable. Unless the possessions of the fisc were to be alien-
ated, thus further depleting the principal source of the royal revenue,
land and property acquired by conquest was necessary to maintain
political loyalty. In the period that stretches from the beginning of
the campaigns of Leovigild in 570 to the final expulsion of the
Byzantines in 624, the wars of the Visigothic monarchy served to
strengthen royal authority by providing a fairly ready source of supply
of lands, goods and offices to reward the king's friends and to in-
crease their number. That this period of expansion, which ended
when the peninsula was effectively pacified and unified, should be
followed very rapidly by the political upheavals of the 630s is hardly
surprising. However, during those decades the Visigothic monarchy
had, through the conversion of Reccared I, gained a new and valu-
able ally that proved a staunch friend in the difficult times to come.
The kingdom united, in its religious convictions at least, by the
decisions of III Toledo and the extinction of Arianism, was potentially