Chapter 3 - Kingship in Isidore of Seville’s Historical Work: A Political Interpretation of the Two Versions

Summary

IN THE WAKE of several recent philological contributions, this paper proposes a reading of Isidore of Seville's historical works (the Chronica and Historia Gothorum Wandalorum et Sueborum) designed to illustrate the issue of the two versions from a political point of view. I aim to throw light on the cultural hinterland of certain famous legal solutions adopted at the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633.

A reading of this sort can potentially go beyond the tendency to attempt to retrace the characteristics of Isidore's political thought to the analogies between the theory of power illustrated by the third book of his Sententiae and the 75th canon of the Fourth Council of Toledo which has been taken to the extent of arguing that the radical change which took place in Isidore's thinking on the “Suintila abdication” (concerning the Visigothic king of Hispania, Septimania and Galicia from 621 to 631) between the Historia and the 75th canon represents a change in the Bishop of Sevilla's thought and approach, an inconsistency resulting from the political weakness of an Isidore obliged to go along with those who had removed Suintila.

Before going into the merits of the two versions of Isidore's histories it is worth pausing a moment to consider the contents of the Fourth Council of Toledo's 75th canon. Drawn up in the context of Suintila's forced abdication for the purposes of legitimizing the succession of usurper Sisenand, the canon preaches a succession of moral warnings designed to define what it meant to be a good prince and politically sanctifies election as the sole valid criterion in legitimate succession, a theme whose flipside involved criticisms of Suintila and the whole of his family, perhaps in a tacit condemnation of the dynastic solution.

Sanctioning elective kingship meant ensuring open political competition to the advantage of the aristocratic factions that periodically fought for the throne against the dynastic solution which Suintila had just attempted (in passing his throne to his son Ricimer). This accords special meaning to the fact that, in the context of the 75th canon, the political subject juxtaposed to kingship (in the election framework applicable to the condemnation of Suintila and his brother Geila) is an ill-defined gens who it would perhaps not be stretching a point to identify precisely with that aristocracy whose ambitions were safeguarded by the Council.