THE SEVENTH-CENTURY KINGDOM 117council of the Visigothic kingdom, that of XVIII Toledo held c. 702,
according to a reference in an eighth-century chronicle, has left us
no written acts at all. The Muslim invasion of 711 put an end to this
chain of canonical compilation.
Thus our knowledge of the existence of councils depends prin-
cipally upon the awareness of those, notably Isidore and Julian,
who incorporated their acts into collections. That some provincial
councils, particularly of the sixth century, were unknown to these
compilers and hence have left no trace of their existence, is con-
firmed by the case of a Baetican provincial synod, held probably in
Seville c. 625, known from the correspondence of Isidore and Braulio
of Zaragoza, but without extant acts.^50 Incidentally there is another
theoretical danger that may be raised here: that seventh century and
later compilers or copyists deliberately altered or falsified the acts of
the earlier councils in order to give an appearance of spurious antiq-
uity to relatively recently developed claims and regulations. There are
certain features about the acts of II Toledo of 527 that give rise to
such suspicions.
The canonical legislation of a particular council can often look
haphazard and erratic. An apparently random selection of topics may
be treated with little or no obvious connection between the consecu-
tive enactments. However, the nature of canon law was intended to
be cumulative. Thus the new legislation of councils supplemented
the existing body of law, at least in so far as it was known. Hence the
importance of such great canonical collections as the Hispana. What
was discussed 'at particular councils was determined by the discipli-
nary cases brought before the bishops or by the need to reform
prevalent local abuses, These issues might then be decided on the
basis of authoritative decisions of earlier councils or, if these were
lacking, new regulations propounded to deal with the circumstances
which in tum, when incorporated into collections, might serve as
precedents for the future. There is in this respect an unnoticed and
striking similarity between the functioning of canonical and royal
secular law codes of these centuries.
One common approach to this conciliar material which is unsound
is the taking of individual laws, removing them from the particular
context of the time and place in which they were promulgated and
treating them as having relevance to the history of the kingdom as a
whole. Thus, in condemning the supposed weaknesses of the Visigothic
state, some historians have taken laws or canons issued for example