THE SEVENTH-CENTURY KINGDOM 107rather than in the few towns of these regions, that so much that was
to be found of importance for the future was developed. For their
Christian ising of those mountainous regions, virtually untouched by
Rome, prepared the way for their transformation from being the
most backwards parts of the peninsula into becoming the bastions of
resistance to Islam and the birth places of the new Spanish kingdoms
of the Reconquista.The Rulers of the People
ONE of the most disappointing features of the study of Visigothic
Spain is the lack of available detail on so many aspects of the history
of the kingdom. So little is known about the personalities of the
kings, their policies, the lives and preoccupations of the nobility, to
say nothing of the daily round of their social inferiors, that the whole
of the seventh century tends to look uniform and frustratingly intan-
gible. The only individuals who stand out are those few bishops who
are known from their writings, and the subjects that can be most
satisfactorily studied, from the relative abundance of their surviving
evidence are law, both civil and canon, and theology. The secular
activities of the Visigothic kingdom can best be seen as mirrored in
the law codes, but these are not necessarily accurate guides to prac-
tical reality. However, for all of the difficulties raised by the lack of
certain kinds of evidence, notably historical writing, some assessments
of the activities and interests of the Visigothic kings and their princi-
pal subjects can be made. The lower strata of society in this period
unfortunately hardly emerge from behind the impersonal legal clas-
sifications of the codes.
Visigothic kings and their successors in the Christian states of the
next three centuries in the peninsula never emancipated themselves
from being principally the war-leaders of their people. They were
hardly unique in this, for it is equally true of their fellow Germanic
kings and of most of their Roman and Byzantine imperial predeces-
sors and contemporaries. Thus the prime interest of the king was in
war: either in defending the frontiers of his realm from external
enemies, or in extending them at the expense of neighbours. Possibly
an even more important and frequent call upon the king's time and
energies was the conduct of military operations inside the kingdom
for the maintenance of internal order and the making effective of
royal authority over local subordinates. The threat of force was the