THE CHRISTIAN REALMS 229to return to being cleric. As has been previously suggested, this may
not have been an entirely voluntary act, coming as it did after a humi-
liating military defeat.
Now at last Alfonso II (791-842)obtained the throne, which, but
for the brevity of his predecessors' reigns, he might have lost all
chance of. He ruled for fifty-two years, but his hold on the throne was
not always secure. In his eleventh year as king (801/2) he was de-
posed by a revolt and relegated to a monastery, only to be restored
in a counter-coup by a noble faction. Early in the reign he moved the
site of the court once again, to its final resting place in the newly
founded town of Oviedo. Here the king deliberately set out to revive
the traditions of Visigothic Toledo. As the Albelda chronicle puts it:
' ... he established the order of the Goths as it had been in Toledo
in church and palace alike.,g The reign of Alfonso II has been seen,
not very sensibly, as marking a reaction against the indigenous tradi-
tions of the Asturias and an attempt to revive those of the lost Visigothic
kingdom. Certainly the surviving buildings in Oviedo from this
period, and the remarkable wall-paintings in one of them, the Church
of St Julian, are clearly the products of metropolitan rather than
provincial artistic styles.1O The probable influx of fugitives from the
Umayyad realm and particularly its frontier regions, which now in-
cluded Toledo, will have brought more of the art, law and learning
of the Visigothic past into the small Asturian kingdom, an area little
touched by them in the seventh century. However, there are no
grounds, other than an ambiguous phrase in a later chronicle, for
seeing this process as culminating in the reign of Alfonso II or as
representing a conflict with the indigenous culture of the Asturias.
Alfonso II did not just look to the south and to the departed king-
dom of the Goths for help in moulding his state. He also turned to
a new power that was starting to interest itself in the peninsula: the
Carolingian kingdom of the Franks, which by the reign of Charle-
magne (768-814) had extended itself southwards to the Pyrenees.
Although that monarch's attempt to intervene in the Ebro valley in
778 proved a fiasco, relations were subsequently opened between
Oviedo and the Frankish court. Spanish chronicles are uniformly
silent on this, but Einhard's Life of Charlemagne, written in the early
830s, refers to diplomatic exchanges between the two courts and to
Alfonso's referring to himself as being the Frankish Emperor's man.1I
A suspect and probably twelfth-century Spanish source purporting to
give the acts of an ecclesiastical council held in Oviedo during this