[139] STUDENTS of medieval Spanish political and religious history have long recognized the peculiar importance in the development of the Visigothic monarchy of the great national assemblies held in the capital city of Toledo during the sixth and seventh centuries. ⁽¹⁾ In origin purely ecclesiastical convocations at which the Spanish episcopate promulgated the famous series of Toletan canons, destined to exert so immense and abiding an influence upon the canonical literature of the medieval church,⁽²⁾ the councils of Toledo early took on an increasingly noticeable secular character: the king and the high officers of state became regular members; the legislation, in the manner of the Byzantine nomocanon , included secular along with ecclesiastical enactments; and from ca. 650, as the doomed monarchy grew steadily more feeble, the supreme political authority of the realm passed into the eager hands of the Toletan assemblies. From these powerful bodies, by a process probably much more broken and indirect than the easy generalizations of constitutional historians acknowledge, seem to derive the cortes of the Reconquista kingdoms, the earliest true parliaments developed in Western Europe during the medieval period. ⁽³⁾

[140] In the seventh century the Toletan councils were attended not only by members of the secular hierarchy and the aristocracy, by bishops and nobles, but also by abbots; and among the numerous problems associated with the assemblies not the least obscure is that of abbatial participation. Upon the indubitable fact of the attendance of abbots monastic historians and canonists have constructed a general theory of abbatial attendance at medieval church councils which, reduced to simplest terms, asserts: (1) that in Spain, much earlier than elsewhere in Europe, abbots succeeded in compelling the episcopate to grant them the privilege of conciliar attendance hitherto monopolized by the bishops; (2) that the Spanish practice, advertised in extra-peninsular regions by the inclusion of the Toletan canons in all the great Carolingian and post-Carolingian collections, furnished the direct precedent for the admission of abbots to church convocations in France, in Italy, and in "toute la chrétienté." ⁽⁴⁾ Neither of these sweeping generalizations, however, rests on more than hasty inference, for the phenomenon of abbatial attendance has never been given the thorough investigation it emphatically needs. The subject is not an unimportant one, though its implications have scarcely been realized; it involves an examination from the ecclesiastical standpoint, and no less from the political and economic, of the rising juridical authority of the proto-feudal abbatiate in the pre-Carolingian West and the abbatial conquest of quasi-episcopal powers in the government of the church, questions themselves closely linked with the origins of monastic emancipation from episcopal control as defined by the Chalcedonian formula.⁽⁵⁾

[141] The object of the present paper, however, is not to treat this broad problem of abbatial attendance at church councils in medieval Europe, but rather to test the accuracy of the first of the two generalizations that make up the current doctrine: to examine the alleged Spanish precedent itself, and to determine whether the documents corroborate the ascription of conciliar rights to the peninsular abbatiate of the Visigothic period.
 

For the attendance of abbots at the Toletan councils our chief, practically our sole, source of information consists of the lengthy lists of subscriptions of bishops, clerics, abbots, and nobles, given in the MSS immediately at the close of the formal acta of each council.⁽⁶⁾ From them can be ascertained the size and importance of the gathering, the relative proportions of churchmen and laymen present, the regions of the peninsula most heavily represented, and, more directly to our purpose, to what extent and upon what specific occasions Spanish abbots were admitted to the supreme deliberations of the Visigothic church. But in using them for these and other purposes historians and canonists alike have lost sight of one or two indispensable preliminary cautions, by ignoring which the entire testimony of the lists suffers serious misinterpretation.

[142] In the first place, the distinction between national councils of the peninsular church and local synods of the prouincia Carthaginensis, convoked and presided over by the metropolitan bishop of Toledo, while familiar to all students, has been consistently ignored in practice.⁽⁷⁾ For canonical purposes this equation of two very different sorts of council may be justified; the consecutive numbering of national and provincial assemblies as one series in the Hispana and the derivative collections proves that from an early date, even before the fall of the Visigothic monarchy, the canons of both types of council were regarded as of equal authority. For the historian, on the other hand, such procedure is utterly misleading, and the obscurities of abbatial attendance are only made the more impenetrable by the failure to discriminate between national and provincial evidence.

Secondly, not only must a sharp distinction be observed between two types of council, but no less between two types of abbot. Upon this the MSS themselves firmly insist in their classification of certain abbots as uicarii episcoporum and others as abbates . In the former instance the abbot's name and title are regularly coupled with the formula agens uicem, followed by the name and see of the bishop whose representative he is; in the latter, the abbot is placed under a special rubric, abbates, and is thus distinguished from the uicarii as a conciliar member in his own right. To disregard this distinction, as is commonly done, is to falsify the testimony of the MSS and to throw the whole question into utter confusion.

If now the conciliar lists are analyzed in the light of these two preliminary cautions, the information they contain as to abbatial attendance can be properly assessed. The abbots appearing as episcopal proctors or uicarii may be discussed first. From the Toletan as from other Spanish canons it is apparent that the Visigothic church experienced a certain difficulty in securing the attendance of bishops at ecclesiastical convocations. Signs of trouble in this quarter appear as early as the council of II Braga (571/3)⁽⁸⁾ and continue all through the seventh century. The [143] Lusitanian synod of Mérida in 666 denounced under threat of excommunication bishops absent from provincial assemblies; it permitted bishops, however, to send in their stead archpresbyters or presbyters, though not, be it noted, abbots. ⁽⁹⁾ In 675 another provincial synod, XI Toledo, repeated this warning to lax prelates and fixed one year as the term of excommunication to be imposed upon absentees lacking reasonable excuse.⁽¹⁰⁾ The subject received national attention for the first time in 683 when the national council of XIII Toledo vigorously demanded the attendance of all bishops at assemblies of the church.⁽¹¹⁾ These efforts, as the repeated warnings and the conciliar lists both show, attained only partial success; they did, however, compel bishops to be more cautious about absenting themselves from important councils and led them to make wider use of the convenient and recognized system of procuration, so that the councils of the latter half of the seventh century included numbers of episcopal deputies, presbyters, deacons, abbots, all acting uicem dominorum episcoporum.

The extent to which abbots serving in this way as episcopal uicarii represented bishops at the Toletan councils can be determined with exactness from the conciliar subscriptions. The earliest episcopal proctors appear at III Toledo in 589, but the first example of an abbot's acting in this capacity comes from the middle of the following century when the abbot Crispinus confirms the canons of VII Toledo (646) "agens uicem domini mei Neufredi episcopi Olysiponensis ecclesiae haec statuta definiens subscripsi." At VIII Toledo (653) Osdulgus acts in similar fashion for Riccimirus, bishop of Dumio. At IX Toledo (655) there were no vicarial abbots present; at X Toledo (656) there were two; at XI Toledo (675) and XII Toledo (681), none. Thus, over a period of thirty-five years, embracing six councils, of which three were national councils of the Spanish church, only four cases of episcopal representation by abbots occur; at all of these assemblies by far the greater number of episcopal proctors were presbyters or deacons.

Suddenly, with XIII Toledo (683), comes a sharp increase in the number of abbot-proctors. Twelve of them attend this important [144] national council in the stead of their bishops. ⁽¹²⁾ The reasons for this abrupt rise in number are not altogether clear, but the fact that eight of the twelve abbots represent sees in the provinces of Narbonnensis and Tarraconensis strongly suggests some connection with the great revolt against the crown which after six months of hard fighting King Wamba had at last succeeded in crushing on the eve of the council itself. ⁽¹³⁾ No doubt conditions were still too unsettled to permit the bishops of the disaffected areas to leave their dioceses on the long journey to the capital, and recourse was had therefore to the abbatial proctors. The number of abbots drops again at XIV Toledo, a provincial council held in the following year, to six. At the same time an innovation in the use of uicarii appears; three of the bishops send not one but two delegates. In one pair both men were abbots; in the other two only one of the pair was an abbot. There is no further trace of this interesting experiment in limiting an abbot's procuratorial powers by a device familiar to Spartan and Roman constitutional history, and at XV Toledo (688), the last council at which abbatial proctors are known to have been present, the old practice is continued, two bishops sending single proctors to represent them.

From this survey it may be concluded that with the single exception of XIII Toledo (683), where unusual circumstances account for abbatial procuration on a comparatively large scale, the attendance of abbots at Toletan councils as episcopal proctors was confined within rather narrow limits. A comparison of the number of abbots present with that of the presbyters and deacons also acting uicem episcopi brings out very clearly how relatively few the abbot-proctors were and how definitely the bishops preferred to use members of the secular clergy. Over a period of a century, from 589 to 688, with 14 councils held at Toledo, the signatory lists furnish these statistics: 24 abbots as against 36 presbyters and 36 deacons, or a total of 72 clerics. But more important for us than the scant use of abbot-proctors is the fact that these abbots were [145] admitted to the councils not as abbots sui juris but, like the presbyters and deacons, solely as episcopal deputies; they cannot, therefore, be used to support a supposed abbatial privilege of conciliar membership.
 

We may consider next those abbots who, as noted above, attended the assemblies of Toledo not as uicarii but as abbates. That they were full members in the same sense as the bishops themselves there seems no good reason to doubt; a review of the evidence will demonstrate how regularly such abbots took part in the deliberations. Magnin incorrectly concluded that the beginnings of this type of abbatial attendance could be found in 589 at III Toledo,⁽¹⁴⁾ where, as we learn from Ioannes Biclarensis, Eutropius, the abbot of the monasterium Seruitanum, then the leading monastic community of Spain, shared with the metropolitan bishop Leander of Seville the presidency of the great council.⁽¹⁵⁾ Eutropius, however, did not subscribe to the canons, which is proof enough that the bishops did not recognize him as anything more than an honorary member; in no sense can his presence be taken to fix any tradition of abbatial attendance. As a matter of fact no abbates can be discovered at Toledo for sixty years after III Toledo. John and Germanus of Dumio, who attended III and IV Toledo respectively, were abbots, it is true, but they were also bishops;⁽¹⁶⁾ and it is in their episcopal capacity that they enroll their names among those of the other Spanish bishops.

In short, no abbot qua abbot won the right of participation in a Toletan council until the middle of the seventh century. In 653 at the national council of VIII Toledo the admission of abbots to an episcopal assembly is for the first time formally effected. The list [146] of subscriptions for this body contains thirteen names under the rubric abbates, placed immediately after the list of bishops and just before that of the uicarii episcoporum. After 653 abbates can be found at nearly all the Toletan councils, whether national or provincial. Six national councils fall in this period, but of two the subscriptions are lost.⁽¹⁷⁾ At XII Toledo (681) there were four abbots present; at XIII (683), nine; at XV (688), eight; and at XVI (693), five. In addition, of four local synods of the prouincia Carthaginensis in the latter half of the seventh century, three included abbots: IX Toledo (655), eight; X (656), none; XI (675), eight; XIV (684), six.

It may be granted, then, that from 653 on Visigothic abbots possessed conciliar rights and were regular attendants of the Toletan assemblies; but one can hardly look at the figures just cited without being struck by the small number of abbots who participated in each case.⁽¹⁸⁾ Can it be that the great majority of abbots over all Spain deliberately neglected to exercise a right that must have been acquired only after a long struggle? Or is it rather that the struggle was never won by more than a handful of monastic governors, favorably situated in communities of exceptional importance?

Fortunately, we are not without some materials for answering these crucial questions. If the names of the abbots appearing at two of the national assemblies which met only five years apart, XIII Toledo (683) and XVToledo (688), are set down in parallel columns, it will be found that for the most part the abbots at the two councils were the same:
 

XIII Toledo (9 abbots)                                             XV Toledo (11 abbots)

Absalius                                                                                Absfalius

Faustinus                                                                               Felix⁽¹⁹⁾

Gerontius                                                                              Wisandus [147]

Castorius                                                                              Vincentius

Gabriel                                                                                 Gerontius

Sisebertus                                                                             Castorius

Felix                                                                                     Gabriel

Wisandus                                                                             Sisebertus

Vincentius                                                                            Eulalius

                                                                                            Inuiolatus

                                                                                            Adeodatus

Thus, only one of the abbots at XIII Toledo did not attend XV Toledo also, and only three of those at the later council had not attended the earlier. It seems, then, that at these two councils at least, the same monasteries were being represented. Now between the sessions of these two national councils occurred the provincial council of 684, XIV Toledo, to which, indeed, for special reasons, all the Spanish metropolitans sent uicarii, but which was fundamentally local and attended by no bishops except those attached to the metropolis of Toledo. There were six abbots at this council:
 

It will be perceived at once that all six of these abbots had already taken part in XIII Toledo the year before and were to sit in XV Toledo some four years later. It can be taken as proved, therefore, that the majority of the abbots at these two national councils came from the Toletan metropolitanate, and allowing for the slight difference in numbers and the possible change of abbots in one or two cases, the conclusion is certain that all of the abbots at the national councils came from dioceses subject to the capital, if not from the diocese of Toledo itself.

This is not the only suggestion of such a conclusion. Of the thirteen abbots subscribing to the canons of VIII Toledo in 653, seven, Eumerius, Fugitivus, Ioannes, Marcellinus, Siliculus, Ilde-phonsus, and Morarius, are found at IX Toledo in 656. The latter is a provincial, the former a national, council.

[148] Only once, in the case of XI Toledo (675), is any information given as to the specific abbeys represented, and then no more than the titular saints of the houses are listed. The abbots and their monasteries are cited there as follows:
 

Iulianus ecclesiae monasterii sancti Michaelis abbas

Valderedus ecclesiae monasterii sanctae Leocadiae abbas

Gratinidus ecclesiae monasterii sanctorum Cosmae et Damiani abbas

Absalio ecclesiae monasterii sanctae Crucis abbas

Florentius ecclesiae monasterii sanctae Eulaliae abbas

 
All of these monasteries, or, more properly, monastic churches, were situated either in or near the city of Toledo. The celebrated monasterium Agaliense, located in suburbio Toletano , was dedicated to Saints Cosmas and Damian.⁽²⁰⁾ The great basilica, also situated in the Toletan suburbium , in which at least three of the great councils met, bore the title of St. Leocadia.⁽²¹⁾ As for the other two, there is no Visigothic evidence, but we know that there were ancient Mozarabic churches of Santa Cruz and San Miguel at Toledo in the twelfth century,⁽²²⁾ and this fact, taken together with the express statement of Eulogius in the ninth century that after the conquest the Moslems forbade the construction of new ecclesiastical edifices,⁽²³⁾ indicates that both of these Mozarabic foundations had their origins in the Visigothic period.

The Visigothic abbots, then, who attended Toletan councils would seem to have come from houses located in close proximity to the capital.⁽²⁴⁾ How is their presence to be explained? The documentation is much too scant to afford us any adequate understanding of the precise manner in which this handful of abbots won the privilege of conciliar membership; all we can do is to conjecture along what general lines developments must have moved. Two main factors, at least, need to be taken into consideration. First, [149] the membership in the councils, as the inclusion of laymen shows, was fluid rather than fixed; it was natural enough for the councils to admit to their sessions the heads of what were no doubt the greatest and most powerful abbeys of the peninsula, already exercising by reason of their wealth and the royal favor wide influence upon the affairs of church and state. Secondly, the practice of admission might develop very easily from an analogous custom of abbatial attendance at local councils; the Visigothic church, like the Merovingian,⁽²⁵⁾ was not unacquainted with the convocation of abbots to local assemblies, for throughout the seventh century Spanish bishops were required by the canons to summon frequent synods of the abbots and clergy of their dioceses. ⁽²⁶⁾ We know from the equation of national and provincial canons in the Hispana MSS that the distinction between national councils and metropolitan synods of the Carthaginensis province, at both of which the bishop of Toledo was the ranking prelate, was soon blurred in practice. It seems possible that a similar tendency was at work obscuring the lines between metropolitan synods and local synods of the Toletan diocese, so that some, if not all, abbots called to attend diocesan synods secured, whether by custom or pressure, the right to appear at metropolitan synods, particularly in years when no special diocesan synod met at Toledo. Admittedly this hypothesis leaves much to be desired, but all things considered, it seems to explain as satisfactorily as any other the presence of abbots at the Visigothic assemblies.
 

We are now in a position to summarize our conclusions. It has been shown, first, that in interpreting the phenomenon of abbatial attendance in Visigothic Spain, it is imperative to rule out of consideration the abbot-proctors who attended the councils only as episcopal delegates. Secondly, it has been proved that the few abbots who did participate qua abbots were not drawn from houses [150] scattered over the peninsula and that they cannot be used to posit a universal abbatial privilege; their presence is to be accounted for solely in terms of local conditions in the Toletan diocese and metropolitanate. The Carolingian assumption, therefore, that has dominated canonical thought and practice ever since, is thus seen to rest upon a misunderstanding of the MS evidence as to Spanish practice. Whether this fruitful error was the chief reason for the admission of Carolingian abbots to councils remains uncertain, though it may be guessed that the supposed Spanish precedent simply provided a further argument to an already advancing feudal abbatiate whose rights were strengthened, rather than suggested or determined, by the canons of Toledo. In any case the appeal to Spanish precedent, though sincere, was mistaken; the Spanish abbatiate of the Visigothic period never possessed the general privilege of conciliar attendance ascribed to it by the canonists and historians of a later age.
 

Corcoran School of History

Since the original publication in 1941 of the preceding Study V, the new although not definitive edition by José Vives of the acts of the Visigothic councils has appeared. ⁽²⁷⁾ This work, resting upon fresh examination of the MSS constitutes the most reliable guide in print to the subscriptions of abbots to the Toletan canons. Since, however, my own collation of these lists was made in Spain from the codices, no revision of the data supplied above seems to be required. As for the abbots themselves, whether acting as vicarii or jure proprio, they will now be found listed in the prosopographic monographs of Garcia Moreno and Kampers.⁽²⁸⁾

In recent decades there has been ever stronger recognition of the central role of the councils of Toledo in the political and social as well as the ecclesiastical formation of Visigothic Spain, and this has led to renewed interest in the composition of their membership. In the literature this has produced, the treatments by García Gallo, Moreno Casado and Abadal have little or nothing to say on the abbatial question. ⁽²⁹⁾ Fernández Alonso, however, in his well known volume on the clerical structures of the Visigothic Church, has a section devoted to the membership of the councils; here, in discussing the enrollment of abbots in the Toletan assemblies, he follows the conclusions presented above. ⁽³⁰⁾ So too Linage Conde, in his massive study of the context of Hispano-Benedictine beginnings, summarizes my views on the conciliar abbots. ⁽³¹⁾

Three works from British presses have contributed notably to our understanding of the Visigothic epoch. P. D. King's book, and the collection of international papers edited by E. James, although they make abundant use of the conciliar acta, confine themselves to the rich materials they contain for social history. ⁽³²⁾ On the other hand, the broad political survey by E. A. Thompson, which deals at some length with the composition of the ecclesiastical assemblies of the kingdom, accepts my general [152] conclusions but expresses a reservation regarding my hypothesis that the extraordinarily heavy attendance of abbot-proctors at XIII Toledo (683) would seem to be linked with King Wamba's suppression of the rebellion under Duke Paul in Narbonensis and Tarraconensis. ⁽³³⁾ At the same time Prof. Thompson acknowledges his inability to offer any more convincing solution.

The distinguished Spanish authority who has done most to advance the study of the Toletan councils in recent years, Prof. José Orlandis, takes due note of my data regarding abbatial membership, but in his latest important studies published in Spain and Germany he clearly prefers a conceptual interpretation couched in terms of canonical jurisprudence. ⁽³⁴⁾ Agreeing fully with the basic distinction to be made between abbots serving as episcopal vicarii and others subscribing the acts as full participants in an assembly, Orlandis considers that the small numbers ofabbates in attendance from VIII Toledo (653) constitute an ordo abbatum. By this term he seems to mean that these subscribant abbots, although admittedly drawn from the monastery of Agali and a few other leading houses close to Toledo, appear as representatives of a corporate estate, the abbatiate of the Church throughout the Peninsula. This I do not find a defensible thesis; nor does Orlandis adduce any juridical or historical evidence to support such a concept. Certainly it is not discoverable (as might be expected) in the versions of the Ordo de celebrando concilio of 675-681 or in any other seventh-century source.⁽³⁵⁾ Nothing in the admission of abbates exclusively from the environs of the capital indicates an intention to assure canonical representation of the monastic ordo existing in all the Visigothic ecclesiastical provinces. On the contrary, the simultaneous innovation in 653 of subscription to conciliar acta by both abbots and the palatine magnates of the Aula Regia -- a coincidence Orlandis rightly emphasizes -- points directly to a pragmatic decision on the part of the reformist king Recceswinth to strengthen his position by enlisting the collaboration of powerful monastic and lay figures close to the royal capital. It should also be emphasized once more that closer study is needed on the antecedents of abbatial presence in diocesan and provincial synods convoked in the Carthaginensis and other provinces (particularly Galicia) of the Visigothic Church. ⁽³⁶⁾
 

1. The more important works dealing with the councils of Toledo are F. Dahn, Die Könige der Germanen, (Munich: Fleischmann, 1861-1909), VI, 501-504; E. Pérez Pujol, Historia de las instituciones sociales de la España goda, (Valencia : Vives Mora, 1896), III, 285-339; E. Magnin, L'Eglise wisigothique au VIIe siècle , (Paris : Picard, 1912), pp. 47-105; L. Duchesne, L'Eglise au VIe siècle , (Paris : Boccard, 1925), pp. 580-584; A. K. Ziegler, Church and State in Visigothic Spain, (Washington : Catholic University, 1930), pp. 32-43; Z. García Villada, Historia Eclesiástica de España , (Madrid : Fernando Fé, 1929- ), II, i, 107-130.

2. P. Séjourné, Saint Isidore de Séville: son rôle dans l'histoire du droit canonique , (Paris : Bcauchesne, 1929), pp. 367-493; P. Fournier and G. LeBras, Histoire des collections canoniques en Occident, (Paris : Sirey, 1931-1932), passim.

3. M. Colmeiro, Cortes de los antiguos reinos de León y de Castilla, (Madrid : Rivadeneyra, 1883-1884), I, introducción; V. Piskorski, Las cortes de Castilla , trans, into Spanish by C. Sánchez Albornoz, (Barcelona, 1930); R. B. Merriman, "The Cortes of the Spanish Kingdoms in the Later Middle Ages," Amer. Hist. Rev., XVI, (1910-1911), 476-495; idem, The Rise of the Spanish Empire in the Old World and the New, (New York : Macmillan, 1918-1934), I, 217-228; C. H. McIlwain, "Medieval Estates" in Cambridge Medieval History, (Cambridge: The University Press, 1911-1935), VII, 696; C. Sánchez Albornoz, La curia regia portuguesa, siglos XII y XIII, (Madrid : 1920).

4. Cf., inter alia, Fr. Chamard, "Les abbés au moyen áge," Revue des Questions historiques , XXXVIII, (1885), 71-108; Pérez Pujol, op. cit., III, 186-87; Magnin, op. cit., p. 59; Piskorski, op.cit., pp. 30-31; T. P. McLaughlin, "Le tres ancien droit monastique de l'Occident," Archives de la France monastique, XXXVIII, (Ligugé-Vienne : 1935), p. 145, and note 6.

5. Easily the best study along these lines is H. Barion, "Das fränkisch-deutsche Synod-alrecht des Frühmittelalters," Kammistische Studien und Texte, V-VI, (Bonn and Cologne: Róhrscheid, 1931), pp. 136-41. Barion is primarily interested in conditions of the eighth and ninth centuries, but he shows that in restricted numbers abbots attended Frankish councils of the earlier Merovingian period; he explains their presence in terms of (i) the growing religious and economic importance of the Frankish abbeys; (2) the influence of Irish monks upon the continental church. But as McLaughlin well remarks, loc. cit., these abbots were almost invariably delegates of absentee bishops and not abbots present in their own right. Thorough examination of the Merovingian data might help to determine whether established Frankish custom was not more effective an element than imported Spanish practice in the marked rise in abbatial attendance at councils of the Carolingian period.

6. For the purposes of this paper the conciliar lists, with variants, as published in J. P. Migne, Patrologíae Cursus Completas, Seríes Latina, (Paris : 1844-1864), LXXXIV, (cited henceforth as P.L. LXXXIV), have been carefully checked against the principal Spanish MSS of the Hispana collection, as follows: Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, MS. 1872; MS. 100 41; El Escorial, MS. d I l (Codex Aemilianensis); MS. d I 2 (Codex Vigilcmus, Codex Albeldensis); MS. e I 12; MS. e I 13. On these MSS, cf. G. Loewe-W. von Hartel, "Bibliotheca Patrum Latinorum Hispaniensis," Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaft zu Wien , phil.-hist. Classe, CXI-CXIII, (1885-1886), as follows: CXII, (1886), 734; CXI, (1885), 457-58, 460-61; C. U. Clark, "Collectanea Hispánica," Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, XXIV, (Paris : 1920), catalogue nos. 621, 519, 520-22; Z. Garcia Villada, Paleografía española , (Madrid: [Revista de filología española], 1923), cat. nos. 123, 22-25; A. Millares Cario, Tratado de paleografía española , 2nd ed. (Madrid: Hernando, 1932), cat. nos. 98, 116, 31--34; G. Antolín, Catálogo de los códices latinos del Escorial, (Madrid: 1910-1923), I, 320-404; II, 17--31. Examination of these MSS yielded only a few minor variations from the Migne text in P.L. LXXXIV; the lists may also be consulted, less confidently, in J. D. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio , (Florence-Venice: 1759-1798), IX-XII. For the Spanish canons, including the Toletan, the best edition is that of H. Bruns, Canones apostolorum et conciliorum , (Berlin: 1839), which, however, does not include the subscriptions.

7. For the classification of the councils as national or provincial, I accept the list drawn up by Magnin, L'Eglise wisigothique, pp. 48--50; for a somewhat different opinion, cf. Pérez Pujol, Instituciones sociales. III, 187--88, and the literature there cited; Ziegler, Church and State, pp. 35-36.

8. Capitula Martini, c. 19.

9. Cc. 5,7.

10. C. 15.

11. C. 8.

12. Note that in P.L. LXXXIV, col. 501, Ioannes abbas is designated proctor for Regineus Aucensis, but in col. 500 it appears that Stercorius is the bishop of Auca and present at the council. The error, to be found in the MSS listed, supra, n. 6, does not affect the present argument.

13. See the tract of Julian of Toledo, Historia Wambae regís, in Mon. Ger. Hist., Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum , V, 486-535; and cf. Dahn, Könige der Germanen , V, 207-212; 217-18; R. Altamira, Cambridge Medieval History , II, 179.

14. L'Eglise wisigothique, p. 59

15. Ioannes Biclarensis, Chronica, sub anno 584? : "Summa tamen synodalis negotii penes sanctum Leandrum Hispalensis ecclesiae episcopum et beatissimum Eutropium monasterii Seruitani abbatem fuit," (Man. Ger. Hist., Auctores antiquissimi, XI, 219); Isidore of Seville, De uiribus illustribus, cc. 42, 45.

16. The MSS read: "Iohannes Dumiensis monasterii episcopus," (not "ecclesiae" as in P.L. LXXXIV, col. 359); "Germanus ecclesiae monasterii Dumiensis episcopus." The Galician monasterium Dumiense , founded in the latter half of the 6th century by Martin of Braga, was a monastic bishopric long unique in the Spanish church; its character and far-reaching influence upon Spanish monastic history after 650 will be treated in the writer's forthcoming study of Spanish monasticism in the Visigothic period.

17. Those of XVII and XVIII Toledo. No abbots seem to have attended the important national council of III Saragossa in 691.

18. From this fact, indeed, Dom C. Butler, ( Cambridge Medieval History, I, 533), mistakenly deduced the general unimportance of monasticism in Visigothic Spain.

19. At XIII Tol. Felix, though rubricked as abbas, is called archipresbyter in MS. Aemilianensis (P.L. LXXXIV, 500); at XIV and XV Tol. by all the MSS; so, too, Wisandus and Vincentius are archidiaconus and primiclerus, respectively, at XIII Tol. according to MS. Aemil.; and, according to all the MSS, at XIV Tol. There is no reason for doubting that all three were abbots, although clearly in orders and attached to monastic churches.

20. Cixilanus, Vita s. Hildefomi, c. i, (P.L. XCVI, 44): "In ecclesia sanctorum Cosmae et Damiani quae sita est in suburbio Toletano."

21. Concc. V, VI, and XVII Toledo; cf. P.L. LXXXIV, 389, 393, 551.

22. A. Martín Camero, Historia de la ciudad de Toledo, (Toledo: 1862), pp. 383-401.

23. Eulogius, Memorialis sanctorum , III, 3, (P. L. CXV, 801-802).

24. For a similar conclusion as to the scope of abbatial attendance, cf. the brief remarks of Pérez de Urbel, Los monjes españoles en la edad media, (Madrid: Maestre, 1933-1934), II, 56-57

25. McLaughlin, op. cit., p. 145, and note 6.

26. Conc. Oscense (598), c. i; XVI Toledo (693), c. 7. For the bearing on this whole subject of the extraordinary abbatial synods of the Galician metropolitanate, see Dom Ildefons Herwegen, "Das Pactum des heiligen Fruktuosus von Braga," Kirchenrechtliche Abhandlungen , ed. by U. Stutz, XL, (Stuttgart: 1907), 54-57; and the writer's general work referred to above (note 16).

27. José Vives, ed., Concilios visigóticos e hispano-rórnanos (Barcelona-Madrid, 1963).

28. L. A. García Moreno, Prosopografía del reino visigodo de Toledo (Salamanca, 1974); G. Kampers, Personengeschichtliche Studien zu Westgotenreich in Spanien (Münster, Westfalen, 1979), 40-62.

29. A. García Gallo, Manual de historia del derecho español, 6th ed. rev. (Madrid, 1975), I,545-6; J. Moreno Casado, "Los concilios nacionales visigodos: iniciación de una política concordataria," Bol. de la Univ. de Granada , XVIII (1946), 179-223; R. d'Abadal, "Els concilis de Toledo," Homenaje a Johannes Vincke (Madrid, 1962-1963), I, 21-45, reprinted in his Dels visigots als Catalans , I (Barcelona, 1969), 69-93.

30. Justo Fernández Alonso, La cura pastoral en la España romanovisigoda (Rome, 1955), 241-252.

31. A. Linage Conde, Los orígenes del monacato benedictino en la Península Ibérica (León, 1973), I, 228-9.

32. P. D. King, Law and Society in the Visigothic Kingdom (Cambridge, 1972); Edward James, ed., Visigothic Spain: New Approaches (Oxford, 1980).

33. E. A. Thompson, The Goths in Spain (Oxford, 1969), 275-96.

34. See his La Iglesia en la España visigótica y medieval (Pamplona, 1976), 151-181 (at 176-7); "La problemática conciliar en el reino visigodo de Toledo," Anuario de hist, del derecho español, XLVIII (1978), 277-306, especially 289-294; "Los laicos en los concilios visigodos," ibid., L (1980), 177-187; (with D. Ramos-Lissón) Die Synoden auj der Iberischen Halbinsel bis zum Einbruch des Islam (711) (Paderborn, 1981), 202, 234, 333-335.

35. C. Munier, "L'Ordo de celebrando concilio wisigothique" Rev. des sciences religieuses, XXXVII (1963), 250-271; I. da R. Pereira, "Um 'ordo' visigótico para a reuniã o do concilio provincial," Rev. portuguesa de historia, XIII (1971), 197-209.

36. Cf. A. Mundo, "Les anciens synodes abbatiaux et les 'Regulae SS. Patrum'," Studia Anselmiana, XLIV (1959), 107-125.