A CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 59engage in open debate with the Arian bishops in the presence of
King Thrasamund (498-523), and he wrote an important treatise
outlining the Catholic position for the same monarch. It is not sur-
prising to find this work and some of his other controversial pieces,
and expositions of the Catholic doctrine on the Trinity and on pre-
destination, being available in the episcopal library in Seville. Isidore
refers to these and other works by Fulgentius in his On Famous Men,
and it is not unlikely that the books were available in Leander's time
too.^3
The writings of other Mricans also featured in the library at Seville.
Amongst others, Possidius, the biographer of Augustine and author
of a collection of homilies, the Christian poet Verecundus, the dea-
con Ferrandus, disciple and biographer of Fulgentius, Victor of
Tunnuna, the chronicler, and Facundus of Hermiane, the leading
opponent of the religious policies of the Emperor Justinian, were
represented.^4 In addition, manuscript evidence shows that some of
the short anonymous writings produced in Mrica during the Vandal
period, dealing with such important controversial issues as the nature
of the Trinity, were also circulating in Spain.^5 However, the strongest
evidence of the influence of Mrican theology on the Spanish Church
is to be found in the credal formulations of successive councils from
III Toledo onwards, and in the writings of the leading intellectual
figures of the Visigothic kingdom.
The Mrican debt was not the only one incurred by Seville, and
through that see the rest of the Spanish Church, in the late sixth
century. Sometime between 579 and 582, Leander of Seville went to
Constantinople where he encountered the resident papal envoy or
Apocrisiarius, Gregory. The mutual influence of the two men upon
each other was enormous. The encouragement of Leander contrib-
uted to Gregory's undertaking his exegetical exposition of the Book
of Job, which he later wrote up as his Moralia, one of the most sub-
stantial and most influential of all of his works. The lasting friendship
that developed between the two men, which persisted after Leander's
return to Spain and Gregory's to Rome, where he became Pope in
590, opened an important channel of communication. This meant
that most of Gregory's writings very quickly became available in the
Visigothic kingdom and they came to exercise, with the sole e?,cep-
tion of the thought of Augustine, the greatest single influence upon
the learning of the Spanish Church in the seventh century.6
Surprisingly little, by contrast, was to come during this period from