210 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINprimatial authority of Toledo.^62 Such a view has little foundation.
Toledo remained the primatial see, although it was not to fall into
the hands of the heirs of the Asturian kings until 1085. No attempt
was made to elevate Oviedo or Leon into a metropolitan see -the
terms 'archbishop' and 'archbishopric' were not used formally in
the Spanish Church before the late eleventh century - and the transfer
of that of Merida to Santiago in the early twelfth century was the
product of quite different causes.6~ Nor can we assume that Beatus
and Etherius spoke for the whole of the Church in the Asturias, the
silence of whose bishops is marked.
The increasing detachment of the Church in Al-Andalus from
the influence of its peers in western Christendom and the general
freedom of movement and exchange of ideas that characterised the
Muslim world perhaps made it more receptive to communication
with other Christian communities living under Muslim domination.
This is a subject as yet little studied, but a number of interesting
pointers to such a conclusion may be found. A visitor to Cordoba in
the 850s, who allowed himself to be swept up into the martyr move-
ment that occurred in the city in that decade with fatal consequences
to himself, was a monk called George, an eastern Christian who had
spent twenty-seven years in the famous monastery of St Saba, near
Jerusalem, before making his way via Mrica to Spain.^64 In addition some
of the liturgical manuscripts found in the monastery of St Catherine
in Sinai display surprising Visigothic palaeographical features, and
even if their full significance cannot yet be understood, they may
prove indicative of some level of contact and exchange, as might the
existence of the veneration of martyrs, whose cults are of Spanish
origin, testified to in the same manuscripts.^65
Although the language of the Christian liturgy in Al-Andalus
remained Latin, the hold of Arabic in most other areas of daily life
clearly grew as the Umayyad period proceeded, and not only the
Bible but also the acts of the church councils of the Visigothic period
were translated into Arabic, probably in the tenth century. However
a spoken form of Latin, that increasingly deviated from the classic
grammatical rules of the language, continued to exist and developed
into early Spanish Romance.^66 If an ascription to the eleventh century
be correct, the first appearance of the latter in extant written form
was in an Arabic context, encapsulated in lines of verses called khmjas.^67
The Arabic of Al-Andalus, at least in spoken form, may well have
been influenced by the linguistic company that it had to keep. One