80 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINEmperor Justinian I's attempts to impose unacceptable theological
views on the Mrican Church in those decades. It is in this period that
we first hear of the Cauliana monastery at Merida, and then the
establishment of the Mrican hermit Nanctus near that city under the
patronage of Leovigild. At the same time the Mrican Donatus founded
his monastery of Servitanum, the exact whereabouts of which are
uncertain, but are believed to lie in the south-eastern region of the
peninsula. Donatus, we are told by Bishop Ildefonsus of Toledo (657-
667) in his continuation of Isidore's On Famous Men, was the first to
introduce the use of a monastic rule into the peninsula. If this be
true, and we possess no grounds for doubting Ildefonsus's word, this
is a relatively late date for such a development. Donatus's successor
as abbot of Servitanum, Eutropius, later bishop of Valencia, was to
playa distinguished part at III Toledo in 589.4R
The introduction of monasteries and of monastic rules in the south
<;>f the peninsula may well have been as slow as the evidence indicates,
but the picture from Tarraconensis is rather different. There contact
with the Mediterranean coast of Gaul was close and direct, and that
was an area of considerable monastic activity ever since the establish-
ment of Cassian at Marseille and the foundation of the island mon-
astery of Lerins, both c. 410-420. Later, too, the great sermon-writer
and monastic founder Bishop Caesarius of Aries (502-542) had close
contacts with various Spanish bishops, probably from the north-west.
As a result monastic influences were probably transmitted fairly rap-
idly from southern Gaul to Visigothic Septimania, the Catalan coast
and the Ebro valley.49 Unfortunately no evidence survives from the
fifth century but in 517 the Council of Gerona devoted some of its
time to the issuing of regulations concerning monks, something the
assembled bishops were unlikely to have done if there were not suf-
ficient monastic activity already underway in the region to warrant
their trying to bring it under their control.
Slightly fuller evidence for some aspects of monasticism in this
province in the sixth century has survived. Braulio, bishop of Zaragoza
(631-651) in his Life of Saint Aemilian has described the activities of
a monastic recluse of the upper Ebro valley, who lived in the second
half of the sixth century. There are likely to have been several others
like him whose lives have gone unchronicled, and the penetration of
Christianity into the still heathen Basque regions of the western Pyr-
enees has been attributed to their work. A number of cave churches
in the Cantabrian area have been dated to this period or to the early