THE IMPOSITION OF UNITY 43refers to the existence of other unspecified works by John, which,
however, he had not read and are not known today.
It is from John's Chronicle, supplemented by the brief biographical
notice on the king in Isidore's History of the Goths, that we know as
much as we do about Leovigild. There are also occasional references
to him in other sources, such as the contemporary History of Bishop
Gregory of Tours (573-594), and in hagiographical works, such as
the Life of St Aemilian and the Lives of the Fathers of Merida. The ac-
count of the king in the last of these works, probably written c. 630,
is composed out of direct borrowings from the Life of Desiderius by the
Visigothic king Sisebut (611/12-620), and as such intended as a
literary set piece description of an impious ruler.^26 By contrast, the
picture that emerges from the works of both John and Isidore is that
of a most able warrior, whom the writers admired for his achieve-
ments, despite the difficulties of his last years and the sufferings of
the Catholics at his hands.
The division of the kingship in 569 was a new development in
Visigothic history. There had never been other than a single king
ruling since the time of the first emergence of the institution under
Alaric I. But the division was sensible: in the north lay the threat of
resurgent Frankish aggression and the Basques and Cantabrians in
the upper Ebro valley were always open to the opportunities of raid-
ing the settled areas to the south of them, and at the other end of the
peninsula in Baetica were the Byzantines in their coastal fortresses.
Although after their initial seizure the Byzantines seem to have made
no effort to extend the region under their control, the possibility that
they might initiate a full-scale war of reconquest doubtless seemed a
real one to the Visigothic kings. As well as these external threats,
within the peninsula there were other areas that had either succeeded
in denying or had thrown off royal overlordship. Cordoba had not
been recovered since its revolt in 550. Most of the mountainous zones
of the northern coastal regions were beyond the king's control, and
perhaps had always been, even in the late fifth century. Also there was
still the kingdom of the Sueves up in the north-west.
This people, who disappear from historical view with the ending of
Hydatius's Chronicle in 469, re-emerge in the middle of the sixth cen-
tury. The small Galician realm had lapsed into Arianism in the mean-
while, but in c. 560 the kingdom formally reverted to Catholicism,
probably under Frankish influence, for miraculous intervention on
the part of Martin of Tours, the principal western Gallic saint is