THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW ORDER 21The chronicler Hydatius was himself involved in 431 in an embassy to
the Master of the Soldiers, Aetius, in Gaul, to beg military assistance
for the Galician towns trying to keep free of Suevic control.^18 The
appeal was effectively rejected as Aetius only sent a single count as an
envoy to the Suevic king and to help the Galicians organise them-
selves. In 440, this count, Censorinus, fell into the hands of the Sueves
and was subsequently strangled in Seville. Although the imperial
government was prepared in the 440s to fight to retain Tarraconensis,
it was unwilling or unable to protect its subjects elsewhere in the
peninsula.
Whilst the evidence of Hydatius shows that the Galicians at least
were not prepared to submit their towns voluntarily to Suevic control,
perhaps too much has been made of the violence and disorder of this
period. Hydatius records Suevic ravaging in Galicia in the years 430,
431 and 433, but not subsequently. Attacks on the upper Ebro valley
and Lhida are only reported in 448 and 449, and the annexations of
Lusitania and Baetica appear to have occurred in 439 and 441 with-
out any recorded resistance.^19 Only in the confused years following
the removal of the Vandals, and in the campaigns of conquest, is
fighting and looting of towns recorded. Otherwise the existence, by
the late 430s, of unitary royal authority over the Sueves, exercised by
Hermeric and his two successors, must have prevented much of the
disorder created when the tribe was divided under rival war-leaders,
such as the ill-fated Hermigar. Little can be known of the exercise of
that royal authority. We hear nothing of Suevic counts, nor of the
existence at this period, or indeed later, of written codes of law,
produced either for the Sueves or their Roman subjects. But this does
not necessarily imply that the Suevic rule was no more than a military
domination. One interesting sign is that whilst King Rechila was a
pagan, his son and successor Rechiarius was a Catholic Christian.^20
He was indeed the first barbarian king to convert to Catholicism,
considerably preceding the Frankish Clovis (c. 507), whilst his Gothic
and Vandal peers were Arians. For the Suevic king and some of his
people to embrace the Catholic Christianity of their Roman subjects
must argue a substantial measure of co-operation and mutual accept-
ance between them.
What might have developed from this can be a matter for no more
than speculation, for the Suevic ascendance in the peninsula was
dramatically cut short in the middle of the century. Since the defeat
of its army in 422, the imperial government made no attempt to