movers of the public power, and the oracles of the
court, the nobility, and the people. The Councils of Toledo, which were
true legislative bodies, better and more methodically constituted than
the assemblies of the great barons, not only legislated in religious and
ecclesiastical matters, but in all political branches of the
administration and of the government. To these celebrated assemblies is
owing the _Fuero-Juzgo_, the most ancient of the codes promulgated in the
new monarchies founded on the ruins of the empire. But what gave most
renown to these assemblies was the system which they embraced with
respect to the relations between the court of the Gothic kings and the
pontifical see. In no Catholic nation was the ecclesiastic independence
consolidated with greater vigour than in the Spanish church of those
times. In truth the Pope, as such, exercised no authority whatever,
directly or indirectly, either in the discipline or the administration of
that church. He was acknowledged as the first of its bishops, but only
as equal in power to each of them. Thus it was that the bishops of the
Spanish peninsula had formerly no need of recourse to Rome for the
presentation of candidates, the investiture of ecclesiastical dignities,
or for matrimonial and other dispensations. Spain presented, at that
time, an edifying spectacle of pure and evangelical Christianity,
resembling that which prevailed in the primitive ages of the church, when
neither councils nor traditions, nor the _motu propria_ of popes, had
corrupted the dogma and the ritual. In the fourth Eliberitan council,
celebrated in Granada, not only the worship but even the use of images,
pictures, and sculpture, was prohibited in the temples, a prohibition
before unheard of in the annals of that age,--an age in which the
practice of invoking saints had become familiar, and more importance was
beginning to be attached to the pomp of rites than to true piety and
sincere devotion. The Spanish clergy, it is true, were then powerful,
and could do much; but there is no reason to think that they abused such
power, or that their conduct was regulated, at that early period, with a
view to their temporal interests. That golden age, however, was of short
duration; at least there are strong grounds for believing that, under the
reign of Alfonso the Wise, the manners of the clergy had become greatly
corrupted, and still more so under that of John II. Their ambition had
s