THE IMPOSITION OF UNITY 49The Suevic king Miro, who had died in 583 outside Seville, was suc-
ceeded by his son Eboric. The new king was probably lacking in
military experience and may have been a minor, for the next year he
was overthrown by a Suevic noble called Audeca and consigned to a
monastery. This deposition of the son of his ally gave Leovigild an
excuse to intervene in the Suevic kingdom, which had probably been
in large measure under Visigothic tutelage since 576. In 585 he de-
posed Audeca, having him ordained priest, to render him incapable
of holding the royal office, and exiled him to Beja. Leovigild seized
the Sueves' royal treasure and added their kingdom to his own. There
was a rebellion immediately after he left Galicia, led by one Malaric,
seeking to restore the Suevic realm, but this was easily suppressed by
Visigothic generals left in the province. With this, the Suevic king-
dom disappears from history forever. Whether the memory of it lin-
gered on throughout the seventh century, and whether its former
inhabitants and territory remained consciously Suevic in any sense
after its passing, cannot be determined. Certainly no attempts were
made to take advantage of the periodic weaknesses of the Visigothic
kings in subsequent decades to try to revive it. Even artistically it is
not possible from the scanty surviving remains of the region's ma-
terial culture to identify what may be distinctively Suevic styles and
traditions. But it is hard to believe that a kingdom that lasted for one
hundred and seventy-five years can have left no memories.^39
The conquest of the Suevic realm was Leovigild's last campaign.
Much still remained to be done: the Byzantines retained their hold
on most of the south-eastern coast and the Basques, if temporarily
quiescent, were by no means pacified. However, Leovigild had achieved
much in a relatively short time, ending the independence of most
areas of the peninsula from the Visigothic monarchy, and defeating
most of the external enemies of the kingdom. As well as by his mili-
tary conquests, the king had transformed the position of royal author-
ity in other ways. He was the first of the Visigothic kings to employ
Byzantine or late-Roman regalia in the form of a crown, a sceptre and
the use of a throne. He also began the process that was to transform
Toledo into the ceremonial centre of the kingdom. It was his reign,
too, that saw the introduction of a distinctive Visigothic coinage, styl-
istically different from the late-Roman and Byzantine ones that had
previously been imitated, and now bearing the king's name and title
and the place of minting. It has been argued that the first experimen-
tal versions of this coinage were initiated by Hermenigild, but even if