87 Arianism
reigned supreme in Spain, and John of Biclaro, Catholic bishop of
Gerona, writes as one crying in a wilderness. But Catholicism in Spain
was scotched, not killed, and when Reccared (586-601) called Arian and
Catholic bishop alike before him, and after two years definitely
accepted orthodoxy under the influence of his uncle Leander, Archbishop
of Seville, it was not long before the whole of Council of Spain
accepted his decision and followed his example. [Sidenote: Council of
Toledo, 589.] This was in 587, and an {76} inscription shows that the
cathedral church of Toledo was then consecrated in the Catholic faith.
With the Council of Toledo (third synod of Toledo), 589,[2] which
accepted the first four General Councils and the Procession of the Holy
Ghost from the Father and the Son, Spain returned to the unity of the
faith. From Reccared's reign, too, dates a civilisation distinctly
traceable to Constantinople and a recognition of absolute equality
between the different races in the peninsula. And to that golden age
belong also the great saint and preacher, Leander, who died in 603, and
S. Isidore of Seville, the encyclopaedic writer, who died thirty-three
years later. S. Leander had at Constantinople come to know Gregory the
Great. He was the chief theologian of Spain in his age, and his words
welcomed and ratified the conversion. Thus the modern history of Spain
and her most Catholic kings begins. The importance of the period
culminates in the compilation, almost final, of the great Wisigothic
Code, the Fuero Jusgo, at once civil and ecclesiastical, the result of
a union between Church and State even more perfect than that
represented in the English Witenagemot.

The concentration of Spanish interests on theological questions led
before long to new developments, but meanwhile it helped the happy
tendency to unity which Recceswinth (652-72) confirmed by allowing the
intermarriage which had long been forbidden--Recceswinth, whose
splendid gold crown, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, still remains
amongst the most striking memorials of the Christian art of the seventh
century. Wamba, his successor, established his supremacy in {77}
Septimania by the capture of Nimes from a traitorous vicegerent, and
lived to show the sincerity with which the Wisigoths had accepted the
idea of the sanctity of vows to God. During an illness, when he was
supposed to be incapable of recovery and remained in a stupor, he