Morality is, after all, like criticism, only a matter of existing convention and national temperament. Believe the right thing, and one’s vices are a matter of small account. In the mediæval times, with a proper amount of faith, one might with impunity, boil one’s enemies or roast them before a fire, and be duly canonised and offered to posterity as a saint and a just man. But be as virtuous and as austere as Marcus Aurelius, believing the wrong thing, and the orthodox historian will manage to be blind to your virtues, and offer you for public contumely. So we have a legend of sanctity centred round this extremely unedifying prince, who took up arms against a father not convicted of any particular injustice or enormity, plotted with France to dethrone him, and after an unnatural career, died furious and unresigned, breathing curses upon his enemies. Behold him one of the glories of that curious medley of Pagan qualities and unchristian vices, Mediæval Catholicism. The historians will not even permit the poor father to grieve and regret his own harshness in peace. His sorrow and remorse are not accepted as the natural sentiments of a man whom a just anger had carried beyond the endurance of nature. We are forced to regard them as the tardy recognition of his own iniquity and error. We are told in triumph that the monarch died weeping and repentant in the arms of St Leander of Seville, the friend and uncle by marriage of his exiled son. Could anything be more natural than this touching and piteous picture of an old man, doubtful of himself, turning in his grief to the one great friend of his son? The action in its simple humanity is worth all the grandiloquent insolence of the saint and martyr Leovigildo mourned, in whose story virtue and sanctity are equally unevident.

Recaredo, his son and successor, solemnly abjured Arianism before the third Toledan Council, as the inscription on his statue outside the Alcázar records. We may imagine this unhappy son and brother weary for the moment of bloodshed and strife, and anxious to put an end to dissension in his kingdom. It would suffice to explain the wise and eloquent speech he addressed to his subjects, exhorting all to be of one faith, to enter the bosom of the Church, and accept its dogmas as he had done. His speech must have been miraculously persuasive, and his influence over his people almost magnetic, since nearly all to a man yielded to the earnest prayer of a tired and suffering heart, and consented to make his religion theirs. And thus it might be hoped, after the terrible domestic tragedy Recaredo had been obliged to witness, powerless to prevent it, the reign of violence, persecution, and discord was over, and the religious power of Toledo permanently established upon tolerant lines. But this was to count without the spirit of the times. After the first shock of misery and bereavement had passed, the turbulent sense of revolt on one side, and determination to crush it on the other, broke out in all its malignant force. The Arian bishops, goaded on by Leovigildo’s widow, hurled their vote of resistance to the establishment of Roman influence. Here we have another instance of the charming inconsistency of the prolix Spanish historians. Leovigildo was nothing less than a monster, because he punished conspiracy and rebellion, and his Catholic son, condemned justly by the laws of the day to death, was a haloed martyr. Recaredo remains a just and magnanimous sovereign when he cuts off the heads and hands of the Arian conspirators; and the premature death of the queen dowager, Gosvintha, is deeply lamented, because her step-son was thus deprived of the duty of cutting off her rebellious head. Why was she less of a saint, one asks, than Hermengildo? She, too, rebelled on behalf of principle, and surely a step-son is a more natural antagonist in the field than a father! But for the historian conspiracy against a legitimate heretical sovereign may be an article of faith and duty, whereas the heretic who conspires against the monarch of the right faith is a fiend. It is this hopeless lack of logic and sense that renders so dreary and unillumined a task the reading of Spanish history. The humorists, alas! wrote dramas and novels, and history was left to the terrible Mariana, the credulous Masdeu, and the one-sided Gamero.

At the next Toledan Council, Recaredo presided in all pomp, accompanied by his queen, Baddo. The sovereigns first, then all the converted Arians, bishops, priests, deacons, and lords and leaders, read aloud this act of allegiance to Rome. Recaredo was the first to swear: “I, Recaredo, King, maintaining with my heart, and affirming with my word, this true and holy confession, which alone the Catholic Church professes all over the globe, have subscribed with my right hand, God protecting me.” Baddo, his wife, then swore: “I, Baddo, glorious queen, have subscribed with my hand and all my heart to that faith I believe in and have admitted.” Followed the oath of each bishop and priest; and then came the turn of the nobles. Imagination readily enough evokes the scene from such dry details, and pictures one of exceptional solemnity, with a touch of barbarism, beginning to borrow undreamed of luxury from a departed civilisation, without taste or tact to render that luxury beautiful. We have only to visit the Musée de Cluny to form some notion of Gothic gold-work by inspection of the Gothic votive crowns discovered in Toledo, and it is easy to picture this rough humanity, from monarch to knight, in their flowing cloaks, grave, impressed, all in deadly earnest, and the mitred and mighty prelates forming an inner circle, in gold and silvered embroideries, bejewelled, and full of glory and contentment. The importance of the nobles we gather from a list of Gothic dignitaries. First came the dukes, counts, palatines of the royal house. Then came the first count, the count of the drinking-cup, Escansias; the chamberlain, Count Cubiculario; the chief groom, Count Estabulario; then the major domos, counts of the patrimony, the counters-in-chief, Count Numerario, the count of the viands, Count Silonario; knight of the youths, Count of the Espartarios, captain of the guard; Count of the Sagrarios, keeper of sacred things; Count of the Sargentarios, keeper of the treasure. The grandees or ricos hombres were governors of the territories and kingdoms.

St Isidor has painted Recaredo as a model of all the Christian virtues, which is decidedly excessive praise in the face of such accentuated vices against the mild sublimity of that scarce practised creed as an inflexible spirit of vengeance and cruelty, and a bigotry in his new religion as hard and determined as that of his Arian fathers, once the early lesson in adversity had been learnt and forgotten. However, in spite of defects rather belonging to his barbarous times, few natures being able to resist the forces of environment and general feeling, than to the man himself perhaps, he remains unquestionably one of the wisest and strongest of Gothic kings, and his personality is all the more marked by contrast with that of his feeble son, Luiva II., who was dethroned by Viterico, a senseless usurper, shortly afterwards assassinated at table by his own servants and cast into the street, where the infuriated populace seized the corpse and dragged it up and down the hilly streets and lanes of Toledo, eventually flinging it into a filthy hole as unfit for decent burial.

Gundmar’s short reign furnished no reason to doubt his well-meaning intentions. He quelled a rising among the Vasco Navarrese and the Imperial troops, and convened a council at Toledo to decide in the town’s favour against the sacerdotal pretensions of Carthagena. But his successor is a figure worth noting, and in his reign takes place the first of those unfortunate outbreaks against the Jews, for which dismantled and impoverished Spain still pays so heavy a price. Before the Moors came, Toledo’s source of prosperity and wealth sprang from her Hebrew colony, and the anti-Semitic movement, started by Sisebuth, had probably no other object than the barbarians’ desire to appropriate Jewish gold. Sisebuth himself is spoken of in history as the father of the poor, and is extolled for his compassionate heart and his liberality. His horror of suffering and blood was so great that he sent his own doctors to tend the stricken enemy when he was compelled to go to war, and paid out of his own purse to his soldiers the ransom of their captives. Servitude and blood-shedding were equally abhorrent to him. The annalist Frêdégaire tells of him, as an example of exquisite sensibility in those rude times, which would be no less rare in our own, that in the thick of battle with the Imperial army, seeing the Greek soldiers fall in numbers under the savage blow of his men, he rushed into their midst, shouting: “Woe to me whose reign should see the flowing of so much human blood,” and frantically drove away his soldiers from the wounded Byzantines. The pity was such excellent sentiments were not cultivated on behalf of the Jews. Having twice defeated the Byzantine army, Cesario only procured a treaty of peace on condition the Jews were expelled from Spain. And in 616, Sisebuth published his famous edict against the children of Israel, offering them the harsh alternative, within the year, of professing the Christian faith, and accepting baptism, or being publicly flogged a hundred whip-strokes, shaven and shorn, robbed of their goods, and expelled from the kingdom. One hardly understands why the shaving and flogging should have been ordered, since appropriation and expulsion ought to have sufficed. Even the Fathers of the Church had the grace to protest against the needless inhumanity of this edict, though the Toledan bishops in a council upheld it. Yet history accepts him as a mild and upright judge, a magnificent prince, a valiant and humane captain, the friend of the poor, the protector of letters. He himself dabbled in literature, wrote in the swollen and exaggerated Gothic manner, composed several earnest and dogmatic letters in refutation of Arianism, which he addressed to the King and Queen of Lombardy, severely reprimanded Bishop Eusebius for the disorders of his existence, and commanded Bishop Caecilius to return to his diocese, which he had forsaken for the monastery. Clearly a monarch not to be trifled with even by the bishops, whom he kept in check, and whose public and private life he insisted on regulating. He conquered the Asturians and the Vascons, and overthrew the Byzantine power in Spain, seizing most of the Imperial towns and weakening the Imperial forces at Cadiz. At home he built the church of St Leocadia.

But of the growth of the town we learn little. Literature in those days was more moral than descriptive, and the Gothic kings of Toledo, when not fighting the Byzantines and Vascons, seem chiefly to have been engaged in discovering elegant flowers of speech, and cultivating the very finest obscurity of expression. Suinthila, looking from the seven rocky hills of his martial town, could tell himself that the kings of Toledo ruled from Cadiz to the Pyrenees, from Atlantic to Mediterranean shores, while Chindasvinthe, in his semi-Roman palace, looked peacefully across the vega and along those foliaged banks of the quiet Tagus that had beguiled Pyrrhus and his mate from the East, and recreated himself with the art of letters. St Eugenius and St Braulion of Zaragoza were the honoured recipients of his royal epistles, in which he writes of “an eloquence adorned with the most flowery words and girdled with all the harmonies of fine language,” and plunging further into unlucid intricacies hymns an “eloquence suggesting a royal clemency, an observation wherein shines the zeal displayed in the travail of literary composition.” When he led his troops to battle, it is to be hoped that his military addresses to them revealed less fearfully the travail of literary composition. Surely the harmonies of fine language so admired by him were never more inappropriately “girdled” against the encroachments of ordinary sense. He speaks of someone “who will not succumb from a need of understanding” and “who is not meagre through poverty of spirit.” His successor, Recesvinthus, displayed the same Gothic tendencies and rhymed in the highest obscurity, in proof of the “fatness” of his wisdom, which verses he dedicated to the grateful Fathers of the VIIth Council, who being Gothic, probably understood and relished them. But Recesvinthus deserves the recognition of bibliophiles, for he had a passion for collecting old manuscripts, and was extremely particular about their authenticity and corrections. He too persecuted the Jews, and his morals were doubtful.

The most famous archbishop of Toledo under Gothic rule was San Ildephonso. His parents, Stephen and Lucy, were noble Goths of almost royal blood, distantly related to the King Atanagildo. Ildephonso was educated by his uncle, St Eugenius III. At an early age he developed a passion for learning, and was sent to Seville to the care of the famous Doctor St Isidor. It would be astonishing if breathing so much sanctified air the young Ildephonso did not become himself a saint, or the reverse. His saintly master grew so attached to his pupil that when Ildephonso expressed a wish to return to his parents at Toledo, St Isidor locked him up. After a considerable while he yielded to his disciple’s prayer, and allowed him to depart. The youth, after a short stay at his father’s house, left it for the monastery of Agalia outside Toledo. Stephen flew into a violent rage upon the discovery, and attacked the monastery with armed followers. The monks hid the lad, while Stephen and his band searched the building from roof to cellars, and departed swearing profusely. His mother was more reasonable, and besought St Eugenius to intervene and obtain her son’s permission to follow his vocation. Shortly before his death, St Eladio consecrated him and gave him holy orders (632). He was first abbot of the monastery of St Cosmos and St Damian, and on the death of Adeodato, became abbot of the monastery of Agalia where he had received orders. Inheriting from his parents, he devoted the inheritance to the foundation of a convent for nuns, and on his uncle’s death, 659, he was raised to the vacant archbishopric of Toledo. Heretics began to discuss the perpetual virginity of Our Lady, and Ildephonso wrote his first notable book, De Virginitate perpetua Sanctae Mariae adversus tres infideles, the three infidels being Elvidio, Theudio, and Eladio, natives of Narbonne. The saint’s triumph in polemics was immediate, and the infidels were pronounced as completely crushed. The whole court followed the King and the Archbishop to the church of Saint Leocadia to give loud thanks. Kneeling at the saint’s tomb, suddenly a group of angels appeared through clouds and sweet scents; the clouds fainting, the young martyr was revealed in the midst of the group, and smiling graciously upon Ildephonso, said, Ildephonse per te vivit domina mea. The astounded archbishop, rapidly recovering his bewilderment, held out his hand to grasp the saint’s veil, and the King Recesvinthus, kneeling beside him, passed him his knife, with which Ildephonso cut off a piece of the veil, which, together with the knife, is now kept among the Cathedral treasures. The mass of St Leocadia, composed by the archbishop, was then solemnly sung, and this was the first inauguration of a feast since adopted by the Church of Rome, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Thanks from heaven did not rest with Mary’s messenger, St Leocadia. Nine days after entering the church to recite matins, the archbishop saw a strange flame upon the wall. Approaching, he discovered the queen of heaven seated on his own marble chair enveloped in heavenly radiance, who thus addressed him: Propera, serva dei charissime, in occursum, et accipe munusculum de manu mea, quod de thesausus filii sevi attuli. The present she brought him from heaven was a splendid chasuble wrought by angels, in which the Virgin with her own hands vested him, while the celestial choir chanted around him. The vision faded in a faint smoke, and only the perfumes and the vague echo of remote music remained, while St Ildephonso lay prostrate in ecstasy, kissing the spot the Virgin’s feet had touched, ubi steterum pedes ejus. He was found in this attitude by the clergy and multitudes, and his fame, owing to this second miracle, spread far and wide, till Rome dispatched two legates to inquire into the legend. Thus it was that the Pope and the King of Spain came to be canons of the Cathedral of Toledo, which took precedence of all others in the land. In a few weeks St Ildephonso returned the Virgin’s visit in heaven, and he was buried in all pomp beside the patron of the city, St Leocadia.

But of all these Gothic sovereigns, the most important for Toledo was Wamba, the only one now gloriously remembered. Wamba it was who built the great walls, traces of which to-day remain. Most of the Gothic inscriptions were in honour of Wamba, though these have nearly all disappeared. His defaced statue it is that greets you welcome to his ancient citadel and capital. One of these vanished inscriptions is preserved in the Chronique rimée des rois de Tolède by the anonymous writers of Cordova.[4] It was traced on Wamba’s famous walls: Erexit factore Deo rex inclitus urbem, Wamba suæ celebrem protendedens, gentis honorem. Vos sancti domini, quorum hic præsentia fulget. Hunc urbem et golebem solito salvate favore.

For the Toledans, Wamba remains a personage of fabulous virtue and merit. We first meet him at the funeral of Recesvinthus, when by general election he was proclaimed king. He was an old warrior, neither ambitious nor over-confident, it would appear, and he humbly declined an honour he did not feel fitted to accept. So frantic was the sense of disappointment that a duke walked up to him angrily and threatened to kill him on the spot if he persisted in his refusal, and confronted with a crown and a formidable Toledan blade, the humblest sage that ever drew breath would naturally choose the crown. Wamba bowed to spontaneous choice, and made his triumphal entry into the capital, Sep. 20, 672, nineteen days after his compulsory acceptance of the throne. It was no easy seat, and all his prowess, his undoubted genius and his popularity could not keep him thereon unmolested, though Bishop Quiricus had anointed him amid universal rejoicings. Lope de Vega assumes that this really remarkable man was of peasant origin, but later historians agree that he was of good blood, a much more likely fact, as the barbarous Goths were sticklers for aristocratic prestige, and the law kept very distinct the nobiles and the vilidies. However virtuous the man of obscure origin might be, it is doubtful if a fierce Gothic duke would have threatened to murder him if he declined so stupendous an honour as the right of ruling that duke and his fellow-nobles.

The start of Wamba’s brief but glorious reign was marked by treachery and revolt. His general, of Greek origin, Count Paul, in conspiracy with the Count of Nîmes and the Bishop of Maguelonne, rose against him in Narbonese Gaul. Wamba was then fighting the eternal Vascon, the hereditary enemy of the Kings of Toledo, but he left the Basque country and marched into Gaul, capturing the Pyrenean fortresses, attacking Narbonne by land and sea, and seizing Béziers, Agde, Maguelonne, and then he fell upon Nîmes. Never were French prisoners treated with greater courtesy and consideration. Not only did he free them but sent them off with splendid gifts. For Count Paul alone was he adamantine. He condemned the rebel to walk barefooted between two dukes on horseback, who led him in leash by the hair of his Greek head through the Gothic ranks at Nîmes. Then Wamba on horseback coldly surveyed the ignoble procession, while poor Paul was forced to prostrate himself before his outraged master. In public the King rebuked him, and then we are sorry to record of so great a man, publicly kicked him and ordered his head to be shaved. The shaving and the kick might fittingly have been suppressed with dignity added to the picture of stern Wamba on horseback. To see his enemy grovelling at his feet ought to have contented even a Goth. But no. When Wamba made his triumphal entry into Toledo, the unfortunate Paul and his accomplices walked behind—shaven, forlorn, barefooted, robed in camel’s hair, and instead of graceful, superfluous locks, Paul wore a mock crown of laurel. He was not without a certain grim humour King Wamba, you perceive, and one would like to have seen his Gothic visage as his glance fell upon the laurel crown. Not benignant of a surety, possibly sardonic.