26 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINwas superseded, first by a revised version issued by King Leovigild
(569-86) in the late sixth century, and then by the promulgation of
Reccesuinth's Lex Visigothorum in 654. This latter laid down the ruling
that all previous law books extant in the kingdom were henceforth
deprived of their validity. With this, Euric's Code lost any remaining
practical value, and would have ceased to be copied.^30
Unlike the later codes of Leovigild and Reccesuinth, that of Euric
was applied over a wider geographical area than the Iberian penin-
sula and Septimania: it had force in the Visigothic territories in Gaul,
and it was in all probability first promulgated at Toulouse. It also
clearly had influence over the thinking of other legislators: this is
indicated by the borrowings from it in the Code of another contem-
porary German king, the Burgundian ruler Gundobad (474-518),
who controlled parts of the Rhone valley and Switzerland. There is
also clear dependence upon Euric's Code in another 'barbarian' law
book, harder to date than that of Gundobad, and that is the Law of
the Bavarians. So clear is the relationship between Euric and the Ba-
varian law in areas where direct comparison is possible, that legal
historians have been able to use the latter for hypothetical recon-
structions of the missing parts of the former. 31 In fact, only those
parts of the sections of Euric's laws relating to boundaries, deposits,
sales, gifts and inheritances have survived, but on the basis of the Law
of the Bavarians, and an analysis of those parts of the Code of Leovigild
believed to have derived from that of Euric, it has been possible to
deduce the existence of titles on judges, accusations, sanctuary in
church, fugitives, thieves, woundings, doctors, violations of sepulchres,
foreign merchants, rape, fires (arson), various divisions of land-law
and much else beside. As well as the nature of the titles, it has also
proved possible for informed guesses to be made about some of the
lost laws that once went into them.
The Code of King Leovigild (569-86), which, as Bishop Isidore
of Seville in his History of the Goths (625/6) tells us, was intended
as a revision and expansion of Euric's work, has its own peculiar
problems.^32 For it too was superseded and rendered obsolete by
Reccesuinth's law book of 654. It was less fortunate than Euric's Code
in that it failed to survive, even partly intact, in any manuscript at all.
It is now extant only in the form of individual laws embedded in the
titles of Reccesuinth's Code, marked out by the epithet antiqua. An
attempt is currently being made to reconstruct Leovigild's Code as a
whole.^33