THE UMAYYAD REGIME 209little controversy. The ninth-century writer Paul Alvar of Cordoba
asserted that a Bishop Teudula of Seville opposed the Toledan
bishop's doctrine, but his treatise is now lost, and a Bishop Ascaric,
author of an acrostic epitaph, was singled out by Pope Hadrian I for
condemnation as an Adoptionist.^59 The debate, at least on the part of
its Spanish protagonists, was frequently abusive, with Elipandus
denoucing Etherius as an ass and Beatus as the disciple of Antichrist
and stinking with the vices of the flesh.^60
It is possible that Elipandus received the general backing of the
Spanish episcopate, as manifested in their corporate letter to Charle-
magne, because of the peculiar pre-eminence of the see of Toledo
that had existed since Visigothic times. Thus similarly in 684 the
Christological views expounded by Julian of Toledo had been ac-
cepted by his colleagues as being those of the whole Spanish Church
in the fact of criticism from Rome.
The arguments used by Elipandus and his supporters drew heavily
on their native intellectual tradition, employing citations from Isidore
and Ildefonsus and also going back to such established mentors of
the Spanish Church as Augustine and Fulgentius. Some of this drew
abusive retorts from their opponents in 794 who claimed not to know
of Isidore, Fructuosus and Ildefonsus, and who depended instead
upon a battery of more widely accepted authorities.^61 This does not
seem to have impressed the Spanish bishops other than Felix ofUrgell,
and even he later changed his mind.
In fact the arguments of Elipandus involved a distortion of the
sense of the original passages on which he relied, and earlier use of
Adoptionist terminology in the peninsula, as for example in passages
in the liturgy, had different and unimpeachably orthodox intent. The
Spanish bishops of the late eighth century were not in reality defend-
ing the ancient theological traditions of their Church, but what matters
is that they thought they were. The barrage of criticism from across
the Pyrenees, linked to that from Rome, already compromised by its
involvement with Migetius, Egila and their followers, cannot but have
contributed to the self-isolation of the Church in Al-Andalus, which
left it uninfluenced by developments elsewhere and in its liturgy and
learning largely a fossil of the Visigothic past.
Within the peninsula Beatus' and Etherius's sharp but inexact criti-
cisms of Elipandus in 785 have been seen as marking an attempt by
the independent and self-confident Asturian kingdom to overthrow
the old pattern of ecclesiastical allegiances and to break free of the