This is how Pisa writes of Dacian:—“Dacian, haughty, famished for blood, drunk with the blood of French martyrs, came to accomplish a like butchery in Spain. He inflicted terrible tortures on St Folia and St Cucufato and St Eulalia at Barcelona, and went like a mad lion through Zaragoza, with the blood of martyrs ever flowing behind him. This minister of Satan came to the town of Alcala, where he shed the blood of the children, Justo and Pastor, so young that their blood was yet partly milk. Then he came to this famous city of Toledo, where the people received him with honour. He sat on the tribune to receive recognizance and vassalage to the Emperor’s published edict, and commanded the public to adore the idols of his gods. He ordered an inquisition among the Toledan Christians to torture them and then destroy their bodies.” Good Dr Pisa had not humour enough to perceive the irony of Spanish history, since these are the very proceedings of the Castellian monarchs to heretics in later centuries. One wonders at the censorious use of the ominous word “inquisition” from a Spanish pen. “Tell me, young lady,” Dacian suavely enough addresses Leocadia summoned before him, “for such is the exceeding beauty of thy face that nobody born has ever beheld one more fair, and being well-born and of pure and noble lineage, how is it thou canst so lightly be deceived by such vanities, despising thus the ancient ceremonies and worship of our gods and preferring to follow the new sect of the Crucified.” Methinks, so might some urbane cardinal have addressed a pretty heretic some centuries later as much a martyr, albeit uncanonised, as Leocadia. And such a desperate wrath would the maiden’s answer have provoked as that which sent Leocadia to imprisonment and death. Certainly the early Christians were not courteous to the Pagans they defied. The gods Leocadia contemptuously called “miserable,” and the polite and flattering Dacian came in for a share of her impassioned vituperation with the consequences she naturally desired.
At so early a period dawns the celebrated hieratic fame of Toledo, which for centuries made it less subject to the sovereign than to the archbishop. Melancius was raised to the bishopric in the year 283, and after him, under the domination of Rome, may be said to have reigned over the Celtic citizens, ten important bishops, whose portraits can be studied in the Sala Capitular of the Cathedral. Gothic rule in Toledo is little else but the story and development of Gothic Christianity. More than on kings and their battles and doings does the town’s early fame rest upon those councils of the church in its midst. They send the name of Toledo as far as Rome in a warning note of independence and power. This primitive church had its own rite, its own customs, its emphatically racial way of viewing matters, and for centuries no high-handed effort of Rome could smooth the angles of its stubborn individuality, or Latinise the tone of its worship and faith. It remained for France and French influence to accomplish what Rome had vainly striven to achieve, and it is to be deplored that France should have succeeded in the defacing task.
The first of these councils took place in the year 396, and the second in 400, to consider the election of Dictinius to the bishopric of Astorga, one of the sect of Priscilianists. This deliberate battle waged by Toledo against the Priscilianists took place in September, and its minutes are preserved intact in the Toledan Collection. Nineteen bishops assisted at it, and the Bishop of Merida, Patriuno, presided over it, as the oldest present. The meeting took place in the church of Toledo, the bishops seated, and the deacons and congregation admitted, standing. In a long address the president exposed the scandals and vicissitudes of the times, and then discussed in ten different points various details connected with the church. Woman seems to have been the victim of austere episcopal reprobation. She must not presume to chaunt antiphones whether nun or widow, in the absence of the bishop, neither with her confessor nor his attendant. Such communion of the sexes under the banner of religion the Council held as pernicious and a snare. It fulminated against the frail sex, but for whose existence man were a sage and a saint. What a pity the Almighty did not consult the Fathers before casting this fatal and corrupting instrument of misfortune upon the world! However, woman must not complain. To quote one of the delightful and ironical sayings of Renan, the Fathers of the Church increased her power by making her a sin. As a mere woman she is only a human being, like her feeble and fugitive mate. But as a combustible engine requiring the reunion of hoary Fathers from time to time to drown and extinguish her beneath the founts of holy water set to play upon her wickedness and peril, she really becomes something diabolical and magnificent, a creature to inspire alarm and excite curiosity. It is not improbable that the saintly sages and modest deacons, as they issued from the church into the rocky and tortuous streets of Toledo, on the September day of the council in the year 400, gazed in a fresh instinct of fearful wonder and shuddering attraction at the first skirted fiend that crossed their path. However plain or beautiful she might be, they would be greatly more preoccupied with the thought of her sex than her looks. Yet the clergy still might marry, and they had full rights over their wife except death. They could beat her, tie and lock her up, give her all “salutary” punishment that was not mortal, deprive her of food, and forbid her to sit at table. Never mind, she had her revenge. She felt her power be sure, and was conscious that she was a sin.
Before the Council of Nice, Toledo adopted the belief that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and Son, which doctrine only became universal several centuries later. This is the Toledan Credo of the fifth century: “We believe in one sole and true God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, maker of all things visible and invisible, by whom were created all things in heaven and on earth; that this sole God and this sole Trinity are of divine substance; that the Father is not the same as the Son, but has a Son who is not the Father; that, the Son is not the Father, but is the Son of God from the nature of the Father; that the Spirit is the Paraclete, and is neither the Father nor the Son, but proceeds from both. The Father was not engendered but the Son, but not the Paraclete which proceeds from the Father and Son. The Father is He who was heard from the heavens, crying: This is My Son in whom I am well pleased. Hearken to Him. The Son is He who said: I left the Father and came from God to this world; and the Paraclete it is of whom the Son said: If I went not to the Father, the Paraclete would not come to you. That this Trinity is distinct in three persons, and is a substance united by virtue and indivisible by power and majesty, beyond this we do not believe there is any divine nature, nor of angel, nor of spirit, nor of any virtue that believes itself God. This Son of God, born of God the Father, before all beginning, sanctified the womb of the Virgin Mary, and became real man in her, sine virili generatum semine; uniting both natures, that is divine and fleshly, in one sole person, who is our Lord, Jesus Christ; neither was His body imaginary or any phantasm, but solid and real; He ate, was thirsty, endured pain, wept and suffered the injuries of the body; ultimately was crucified by the Jews, and buried, rose again the third day; spoke afterwards with His disciples, and the day of quadragesimo, after the resurrection ascended to heaven. This Son of Man also called Himself Son of God, and the Son of God also called Himself God, Son of Man. We believe in the future resurrection of human flesh, and maintain that the soul of man is not a divine substance, or part of God, but a creature formed by divine will.”
Among the singular subjects of excommunication of this Toledan Council are three worthy of notice: Vegetarians are excommunicated, it being decided by the Fathers that birds and beasts were intended to be eaten by man. Mathematicians are excommunicated, unfortunately we are not told why. Those who execrate marriage are excommunicated. Surely this last sentence is inconsistent with the Fathers’ professed execration of the “frail sex”!
But the triumphs and severities of the Fathers were soon interrupted by the invasion of the terrible north barbarians. The Goths were pouring across the Pyrenees, soon to make Toledo their capital and “Royal city.” Fire, ruin, pillage, and death, Lafuente describes as the traces of their path. Fields, orchards, cities, and woods were swept by their ferocity. The horrors of famine and pest succeeded, calamity stalked the earth, and the Toledan sages sat and talked in the desert. The Vandals were already in the beautiful southern province of Betica, which they called Vandalusia. Rome had fallen, and the conquering Visigoth, unsettled in the north since Ataulfo’s assassination at Barcelona, turned his eyes upon the strong-walled city perched up above on its seven rocks. Toledo had successfully resisted the Vandals; it succumbed to the Goths, and Euric took it by force. She was momentarily extinguished after her first little hour of sacerdotal pride and power. Euric died at Arles, and the Gothic Court for a time drifted to Sevilla. But a brighter day dawned when Atanagildo was elected king. Married to Gosuinda, the bishop of Toledo’s sister, he had formed a liking for the place, and brought hither the Court, making Toledo the capital of his kingdom.
CHAPTER II
The Gothic Kings of Toledo
HERE may be said to begin the real history of Toledo, from this until the fatal battle of Guadalete, the capital of Spain, since it was the heart of Gothic rule. The backward pages of its story are blurred and insignificant, judged by their traces, though we may imagine, if it were possible to build up the effaced picture of Toledo under Roman power, we should find a very superior civilisation. Instead of a flourishing Roman colony, Atanagildo’s choice of this “strong place” was merely the establishment of a rough barbaric camp. It is doubtful if, until Wamba’s time, the Goths had the art of profiting by such heritage as the decadent vanquished had left them. As a race they inspire even less interest than their brethren east and north.
Family love was no strong element in the development of the Royal House, as the quaintly heartless story of San Hermengildo proves. Leovigildo was reigning then, and he, an Arian, committed the imprudence of marrying his eldest son, Hermengildo, to a French Goth, Ingundus, the niece of Saint Leander of Seville. With such powerful interests on the side of Rome, it is not surprising that the Arian prince speedily abjured his heresy, to the anger and dismay of his father. Unfortunately, his conversion did not imply the practice of any of the Christian virtues. Religion accomplishes the very thing we should have thought its mission to forbid: it arms the son against his father. The two sects, oddly enough representing the doctrine of peace and goodwill on earth, meet outside the walls of Seville in armed encounter. Hitherto the spectacle had been war and persecution and their attendant horrors on the side of Pagan against the noble and martyred Christian. From this we were to learn that Christian versus Christian could show quite as pretty a figure in atrocities as ever the persecuting worshipper of the gods. Here we have an infuriated father and a rebellious son ready to cut one another’s throat, and of the two it can hardly be said that the Catholic saint shows to better advantage. Indeed, in their correspondence both reason and dignity are on the side of Leovigildo, who writes to his son: “I associated you with my power from earliest years, not that you should arm strangers against me. Thou dost blunt thy conscience, and cover thyself with the veil of religion,” he acutely adds, while Hermengildo’s reply is an inflated and pragmatical attack on the baseness of his father’s creed and the superiority of his own.[3]
Hermengildo is beaten, his forces scattered, and thanks to the intercession of his brother, Recaredo, instead of the expected death sentence, his father sentences him to exile at Valencia. As a Christian, a martyr, and a canonised saint, Hermengildo presents an original figure. Even the harsh wisdom of Moses condemns him, and the worst Pagan would hardly condone his unprovoked assault on his father, by way of converting him to a belief in Christ’s divinity; while instead of quietly enduring the consequences of his abortive rebellion and his inappropriate expression of faith, he went about the coast, begging the assistance of the Greeks in another attempt to proselytise by the sword, and seize his father’s throne by the same stroke. The Spanish historians, to whom this method of conversion is particularly sympathetic and of unquestionable logic, disregard the side question of revolt, and delight in weighing upon Hermengildo’s lofty efforts in behalf of truth. His object they accept as the laudable extirpation of error. Indifferent to his natural relations to the king he desired to dethrone, Gamero says: “Perhaps, like Alaric, within his breast, a secret voice had commanded him to go forth and destroy the power of Arianism in Spain; to establish upon the ruins of paganism and false sects the immortal throne where the god of Sabahot is worshipped, and on which shines with eternal splendour the immaculate purity of Mary.” And so he complacently follows the unfilial prince on his bellicose mission through Estremadura, now occupying Merida, again attempting to take Seville and his former court, seeking support in France with the hope of arming his brother-in-law, Sigeric, against his father. All Gamero laments is his unsuccess. The Arian father did precisely what Hermengildo would have done in his place; he seized his son, flung him into a dungeon, first at Toledo, then at Tarragona, where he was beheaded after stoutly refusing to accept communion from the hands of an Arian bishop. His form of refusal is proudly recorded by St Gregory of Tours as an admirable one: “As a minister of the devil, only to hell couldst thou guide me. Away and go, coward, to the punishment prepared for thee, and which thou deservest.” We hardly detect the influence of Christian mildness and sweetness in this address. However, all saints cannot resemble St Francis of Assisi, and even St Fernando of Castille boiled his enemies alive in great pots of water over huge fires. This is Gamero’s admiring epitaph: “Thus on the 13th April, 584, ended with glorious martyrdom the life of this hero of the Spanish Church, whose blood effaced any faults as a man he may have committed, and was a perennial source of happiness and fortune to our country.”