The South: Spain and Italy
It is just possible that the exemplar for the Franks Casket came from Spain, which
boasted an equally lively mix of cultures. Here, especially in the south and east, some
Roman cities had continued to flourish after the Visigothic invasions. Merchants from
Byzantium regularly visited Mérida, for example, and the sixth-century bishops there
constructed lavish churches and set up a system of regular food distribution. Under
King Leovigild (r.569–586), all of Spain came under Visigothic control. Under his son
Reccared (r.586–601), the monarchy converted from Arian to Catholic Christianity.
This event (587) cemented the ties between the king and the Hispano-Roman
population, which included the great landowners and leading bishops. Two years
later, at the Third Council of Toledo, most of the Arian bishops followed their king
by announcing their conversion to Catholicism, and the assembled churchmen
enacted decrees for a united church in Spain, starting with the provision “that the
statutes of the Councils and the decrees of the Roman Pontiffs be maintained.”^16
Here, as in England a few decades later, Rome and the papacy had become the
linchpins of the Christian religion.
The Roman inheritance in Spain was clear not only in the dominance of the
Hispano-Roman aristocracy and the adoption of its form of Christianity but also in
the legal and intellectual culture that prevailed there. Nowhere else in Europe were
church councils so regular or royal legislation so frequent. Nowhere else were the
traditions of classical learning so highly regarded. Only in seventh-century Spain
could a man like Isidore of Seville (c.560–636) draw on centuries of Latin learning to
write the encyclopedic Etymologies, in which the essence of things was explained by
their linguistic roots. “There are six stages in a lifetime:... The third age,
adolescence (adolescentia), is mature (adultus is the past participle of adolescere)
enough for procreating,”^17 he wrote, as if the very nature of adolescence was
revealed by the Latin word for it. The book was wildly popular.
The bishops and kings of Spain cooperated to a degree unprecedented in other
regions. While the king gave the churchmen free rein to set up their own hierarchy
(with the bishop of Toledo at the top) and to meet regularly at synods to regulate and
reform the church, the bishops in turn supported the king. They even anointed him,
daubing him with holy oil in a ritual that paralleled the ordination of priests and
echoed the anointment of kings in the Old Testament. While the bishops in this way
made the king’s cause their own, their lay counterparts, the great landowners, helped
supply the king with troops.
