A CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 67Sisebut's other work in verse is a hymn, and there is also a corpus
of prose of considerable interest. The most remarkable of these pieces
is a Life of Bishop Desiderius of Vienne, who had recently (c. 605)
been murdered at the instigation of the Frankish king Theoderic II
(596-613) and his grandmother, the infamous Queen Brunechildis
(d. 613).20 It is surprising to find a king writing hagiography, and that
his subject should be a contemporary from a neighbouring kingdom
makes it more so. But Brunechildis, herself the daughter of the Span-
ish king Athanagild, had been an implacable foe ever since the over-
throw of the ephemeral kingdom of her son-in-law Hermenigild
in 584, and it has been thought that Sisebut's aim was to discredit
that Frankish regime most hostile to the Visigothic monarchy by
depicting its persecution and killing of a saintly bishop. However,
both Brunechildis and Theoderic II were probably dead and their
line ended by the time of the work's composition. Moreover, as can
be seen from its substantial use by the author of the Lives of the Fathers
of Merida, it was to be in Spain rather than in France, where another
Life of Saint Desiderius was already circulating, that the work became
best known. It is more probable that Sisebut's version was intended
rather as a consideration of the nature of the royal office in respect
of its obligations to the Church and in particular bishops and men of
proven sanctity. For in his portraits of Theoderic II and Brunechildis
he created literary models of tyrants and unjust rulers, directly bor-
rowed by the author of the Mhidan Lives for his description of
Leovigild. The principal influence on Sisebut's thinking in this re-
spect may well have been that of Isidore.
The king has also left us the remains of a collection of letters, that
must once have been more extensive. Those that survive, and they
are remarkable enough, were preserved together with a number of
other letters of roughly the same period in a single manuscript,
brought from Cordoba to the Asturian kingdom in the ninth century.
Other items in the collection include a letter from an otherwise
unknown monk called Tara to King Reccared, complaining about
conditions inside his monastery, and also part of the diplomatic cor-
respondence of a Count Bulgar who served on the frontiers with
Francia in the reign of King Gundemar (610-611/12), and played a
part in that monarch's unsuccessful attempt to create an alliance with
the Lombards and the weaker Frankish kings against Theoderic II
and Brunechildis. Sisebut's letters in the manuscript are especially
striking for their variety and their contents. There is a polite formal