Ruling Visigothic Hispania: The Role of the Bishops

Abstract

As a result of the decomposition process of the Empire and its government structures, the bishops began to assume the role of civic leadership once occupied by the Empire's delegated agents. This is the situation the Visigoths found themselves in when they settled in the Iberian Peninsula. Far from seeing the leadership position of the bishops as an obstacle to their authority, the new Gothic power saw in them a pillar on which to lean in order to legitimise and better project their influence over society. In this study we will analyse the functions of secular government that the bishops enjoyed in the Visigothic kingdom. As opposed to the static vision that prevails in historiography, which does not perceive substantial changes in the civil facet of the bishop since the time of Recared, we propose a dynamic vision of these functions, according to which, once the initial royal objectives have been achieved, the kings will try to limit and control. At this point it will be interesting to compare the resolutions of the Third Council of Toledo (589), where the royal authority first sanctioned the secular functions of the bishops, with the civil and ecclesiastical legislation of later reigns. Such movements will, however, clash with the interests of the episcopate, which will try to impose itself on the royal will when the political situation allows it, and the strategies they employed to do so are also the subject of our analysis. Also in contrast to the royal position, it will be interesting to analyse the role that the bishops themselves assumed ideologically in the government of the kingdom, with Isidoro de Sevilla's work being a good starting point here.