Having summoned a council at Toledo, the twelfth held in that city (680), Ervigius had little difficulty in persuading the fathers to acknowledge the authenticity of the three instruments he produced; and, consequently, his claim to the Visigothic crown. They even showed a blind devotion to his will in other respects, not very honourable to their characters, nor respectful to the memory of an excellent prince. But, with all his wily contrivances, Ervigius had the mortification to see the bulk of the people still attached to their late sovereign. To make that sovereign appear tyrannical, and to attach to his interests all who now justly suffered for their participation in the rebellion of Paul, he summoned the thirteenth council of Toledo, and requested the assembled prelates to reverse the salutary measures of his predecessor. Accordingly, the first canon restored to their ranks, possessions, and rights, all who had ever taken arms against Wamba. Even yet Ervigius was apprehensive. He sent for Ergica, the nephew[15] of Wamba; and offered that prince the hand of his daughter, with the succession to the throne, on the condition that the latter would swear to protect his family when he should be no more. The proposal was eagerly accepted; the marriage was solemnised; and, on the death of Ervigius, the crown of the Goths fell on the brows of the son-in-law.
Gratitude is not always the virtue of princes. Scarcely was Ergica in possession of the envied dignity, than he showed his hostility to the memory of his benefactor. Resolving to use the same weapons as had been employed by that king, he convoked the fifteenth council of Toledo to aid his views of vengeance; he represented to the fathers the oath which he had taken to protect the family of Ervigius, and how difficult it was to be observed amidst the general complaints of his people against the rapacity of that family. The supple ecclesiastics, who had long lost sight of the independence of their vocation, and were become the mere ministers of the monarch (in fact, the bishops were, ex officio, ministers of the crown, in a state which has been truly called theocratic), immediately declared that an unjust oath was not binding; and that the king might punish or reward any of his subjects, the relatives of Ervigius among the rest, as justice or equity dictated. In consequence of this decree, Ergica is said to have punished with severity the enemies of Wamba and his house—in other words, the partisans of Ervigius; and even to have repudiated his wife, thus dissolving the only remaining bond which connected him with the rival family.
[687-709 A.D.]
In the sixth year of his reign Ergica was afflicted with a rebellion, which spread into Gothic Gaul. He had also engagements with the Franks—probably connected with the conspiracy of Sisebert; but in none did he obtain any advantage. A more formidable conspiracy was discovered the following year. Notwithstanding the severity of the penal laws against their nation, many Jews, though outwardly Christians, were retained in the peninsula by the attractions of a lucrative commerce; but their souls groaned within them under the oppressions they were made to endure; and they were naturally eager to engage in any undertaking which promised them toleration and revenge. On the present occasion they were said to have secretly conspired with their brethren of Africa; perhaps, too, with the Saracens, on whose arms they had long prayed for success. To avert the threatened explosion, the king convened the seventeenth council of Toledo, which decreed severe penalties against the guilty. The eighth canon (de Judæorum damnatione) not only reduced to perpetual slavery all the baptised Jews—and Spain had long suffered no other—who relapsed, or who conspired against the state, but ordered that, at seven years of age, their children should be taken from them, and educated under the direction of approved Christians.[16] In 698 this king associated with him his son Witiza, and caused that prince to be recognised as his successor. Witiza, to whom Galicia was confided, established his court at Tuy; and thenceforth, to the death of Ergica, the coins of the kingdom bore two royal heads, with the motto Concordia Regni. The father died at Toledo in 702, leaving behind him a doubtful reputation.[17]
WITIZA (702-709 A.D.)
Of Witiza we know little that is certain, but much that is apocryphal. Over his character, his actions, and even his death, there rests a cloud of uncertainty which will probably never be removed. It is, however, agreed that in the beginning of his reign he evinced many great qualities; that he redressed many grievances inflicted by his father; that he restored their possessions and liberty to many who had been unjustly deprived of both; and that he remitted the heavy arrears of taxes due at his accession—nay, that, to prevent the possibility of their being collected, he caused the books in which the names of the defaulters were contained to be publicly burned. On the other hand, we are told that he was addicted to the greatest luxury; that he took many concubines, with whom he lived openly, in defiance of church remonstrances; that in the indulgence of his brutal appetite he spared neither the high nor the low, neither wife nor maiden; and that, to stifle complaint, he published an edict by which he allowed all his subjects, ecclesiastics no less than laymen, as many concubines as they could obtain.
All this, however startling and improbable, may possibly be true. Though not a word of it is to be found in the continuator of Joannis Biclarensis,[ff] nor in the contemporary historian Isidorus Pacensis,[z] the brevity of those writers, who do no more than chronicle, in the most meagre terms, a few of the more striking facts, may perhaps account for the omission. The vices too of Witiza are mentioned by the monk of Moissiac,[hh] who wrote about one hundred years after the destruction of Spain, and are alluded to by Sebastian of Salamanca,[v] who finished his chronicle towards the close of the ninth century.[g]
The history of Witiza’s reputation is a model of the gentle art of blackening a character, especially in the interests of a religious cause, which can command the progressive aid of generations. Paquis[gg] tells the story briefly, noting that “the further the historians are from the time of Witiza, the more detailed become their recitals, and the more severe their reprobation.” A century after his death the foreign and anonymous writer of the Chronicle of Moissiac[hh] says that he was addicted to extreme luxury. Nearly a century more, and the Spanish Sebastian of Salamanca[v] broke out more strongly: “Witiza plunged into odious debauches, lived in a cloud of women and concubines, and finally to escape the censures of the priests dissolved the assemblies of the bishops and braved the canons of the church; he even ordered the bishops and priests to marry. His impieties caused the ruin of the Goths.”
Another chronicler[w] of the same time omits mention of the orgies and the attack on the church, but accuses Witiza of killing the father of the great Pelayo and of pursuing the famous hero himself. Two centuries more, and the monk of Silos[ii] adds that Witiza put out the eyes of a prince of whom he was jealous. Yet again two centuries, and Lucas Tudensis[jj] discovers that, in addition to previously recorded crimes, Witiza, fearing rebellion, disarmed every subject and tore down the walls of every city but three; and that he chased from Toledo the bishop Julian to place there his own son Oppas, besides mutilating the son of King Cindasuinto. In fact, there was no Bishop Julian at that time; Oppas was not Witiza’s son; and the son of Cindasuinto, of whom Witiza was said to be jealous, must have been over eighty years old at the time, even imagining him to have been the son.
About this time Roderic Ximenes,[kk] finding the old chronicles praising Witiza as virtuous and the later condemning him as vicious, combined the two by representing Witiza’s character as undergoing sudden degeneration from its high beginnings. This patchwork mantle was long worn by Witiza in the later histories of Morales,[u] Mariana,[q] Ferreras,[aa] and Aschbach.[ll] More recent authorities have, however, inclined to discard the evil side of Witiza’s reputation as a mere fiction of later writers who hated him because he spared the Jews and resisted the church in some things.