106 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINsome of its members were terminated violently by Leovigild, during
the course of his campaigns in the north in the 570s.
Whilst the stories in the Life often refer to such local aristocrats and
their servants and, less frequently, to clerics and monks, they tell us
nothing of the lives of the country people, who led a largely
transhumant pastoral existence, and whose social organisation must
have been very different from that of the town dwellers, even in the
same region of the peninsula. A little more about them may be learnt
or guessed at from the early history of the Basques. In the pages of
Braulio's Life of St Aemilian these and other essentially tribal and
unassimilated peoples such as the Ruccones, do not appear, although
many of them must have lived in the area of the saint's activities in
the Rioja. This, however, probably reflects more on the author's in-
terests or those of the work's monastic recipients, as Aemilian, who,
apart from a brief and enforced period spent as a priest, lived most
of his life in the fastnesses of the countryside. At this time the Basques,
other than those living in towns, were almost certainly still pagan, and
others might well have been likewise. It has been conjectured most
sensibly that the real penetration of Christianity into this north-west
Pyrenean area only began with the establishment in it of ascetics like
Aemilian who lived and made churches in caves, and may in due
course have come to exercise considerable influence over the inhab-
itants of the surrounding mountainous countryside.^32 The wider repu-
tation of Aemilian and others like him, whose names are now lost,
meant that others would come after them and communities of monks
grow up around them in their lifetimes or develop in their former
dwelling places and around their relics. In this way, Aemilian having
died (c. 580), a monastic community had come into existence at the
site of his death at Berceo by the early seventh century.
The process of the penetration of the northern Spanish and
Pyrenean countryside continued from at least the late sixth century
throughout the seventh. Certain figures stand out, such as Aemilian,
Fructuosus of Braga (fl. c. 650/660) and Valerius of Bierzo (fl. c. 690/
700), either because of their own writings or because of what was
written about them. However, there were many other solitaries, monks
and monastic founders whose names are lost to us. These are the
men whose cumulative responsibility it was to have ensured the Chris-
tian penetration of the Rioja, Alava, the Bierzo and Montserrat, all
later to be the sites of important monasteries. It was in the monaster-
ies of the later Visigothic period, that such men founded or inspired,