126 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINThe most vivid manifestation of the feelings that swept over the
clerical establishment on the death of Chindasuinth comes in the
epitaph composed on the king by Bishop Eugenius II of Toledo: 'I
Chindasuinth ever the friend of evil deeds; committer of crimes
Chindasuinth I, impious, obscene, infamous, ugly and wicked; not
seeking the best, valuing the worst. ,66 This is the bishop who, if any-
one, was the motivating force of VIII Toledo, and it is not overfanciful
to suspect that he had a role to play in the preparation of the sub-
sequent law code.
These features which had come out so strongly from the delibera-
tions of the bishops are also found in the secular laws. Some of these,
such as one intended to 'curb the greed of rulers' (i.e. the king)
preceded the holding of the council, and probably represented a
response to pressure from the nobility, the principal sufferers under
Chindasuinth. The Liber Iudiciorum contained the new laws that sought
to contain the king's abuse of power in extortions from his subjects,
that defined the distinctions between the royal and personal property
of the monarch, and that explicitly stated the subjection of the ruler
to the law.
This last was a particularly striking concept, especially when con-
trasted with such notions of the sovereign as the fount of law as
existed in Byzantine jurisprudence. It is equally alien to the ideas of
contemporary Lombard law-makers, who, for example, ruled that
murder at the command of the king was no crime 'for since we
believe that the heart of the king is in the hand of God, it is incon-
ceivable that anyone whose death the king has ordered could be
entirely free of guilt'.67
While Byzantine and Lombard lawbooks commence with statements
of the will and intention of the royal legislators, that of the Visigothic
kingdom starts with a whole book devoted to the nature and pur-
poses of law and the duties of the law-maker. This has occasionally
been denigrated or neglected by modern commentators, wrongly so,
as it was of fundamental importance to the minds of the devisers of
the code. Although in practice the king's power was very great and
often unchecked, the evidence of the Liber Iudiciorum indicates that
the law was greater than the king, and that he was seen as the custo-
dian of an office to be exercised on behalf of the gens and the patria,
answerable at least to God.
The linked terms of gens and patria make frequent appearances in
the civil and ecclesiastical texts of the later Visigothic period. Their