THE SEVENTH-CENTURY KINGDOM 115king and those that he held temporarily and in trust by virtue of his
office, expounded by VIII Toledo (653) and enshrined in a contem-
porary civil law, may also have served to protect the interest of the
royal family, when dispossessed of the kingship.45 Again we cannot
know if this worked in practice, and it was not necessarily the primary
purpose of the legislation.
Thus it was not just the Church, as is so often thought, anxious for
the stability and protection that strong kingship could offer, but also
substantial sections of lay society that had a firm interest in ensuring
hereditary succession or at least the smooth transfer of royal power
with the minimum of upheaval. This can be illustrated by the letter
of Bishop Braulio of Zaragoza, written in conjunction with Celsus,
probably the local count, urging King Chindasuinth in 649 to make
his son. Reccesuinth co-ruler, and thus obviate the problems of suc-
cession.^46 They were probably not alone in their feelings, as this is
precisely what the king did. Political instability was not in the interests
of any except those suffering or excluded under the present regime.
Indeed a king who achieved power through usurpation could make
his own role as IlJler harder thereby. Thus when Sisenand deposed
Suinthila with Frankish aid in 631, he initiated, by exposing the
weaknesses of royal authority, over a decade of political insecurity
and upheaval. One of the consequences of this was that the monar-
chy came to lean more heavily on the Church, in a fashion unpre-
cedented since 589, and thereby initiated a period of intense conciliar
activity. It was the problems of this period, not the precedent of III
Toledo, that gave the church councils held in Toledo so special a
place in the political and judicial life of the kingdom in the seventh
century.
Royal interest in Church councils was made clear from III Toledo
onwards. The kings frequently attended in person those councils of
the whole Spanish Church held in Toledo, and some of the business
conducted there overlapped the borders between the secular and the
clerical. On occasion the ruler was armed with spiritual weapons to
use against his temporal enemies, as in the decreeing of excommun-
ication for those who conspired or rebelled against him.^47 To the
king, too, was reserved the right of pardoning such offenders. Certain
secular laws were also quickly paralleled by ecclesiastical legislation.
The practice developed whereby the king began the deliberations
of a council by delivering a tome, or written speech, which laid down
certain themes and issues that the monarch wished the bishops to