Before attacking the city, Leovigild set himself to make the Byzantines withdraw from their alliance with his son, and he ultimately succeeded. According to the chronicle of Gregory of Tours, his success was due partly to motives of political expedience and partly to a gift of 30,000 gold coins. When he had thus secured himself in this direction, Leovigild, in 583, marched on Seville. The first battle was fought before the Castle of Osset (San Juan de Alfarache), which he was not long in taking. Amongst the enemy, he found the Suevic king Miron, whom he compelled to return to Galicia.
The siege of Seville lasted for two years. Hermenegild was not in the city, seeing that he had left it shortly before to go in search of fresh help from the Byzantines. He cannot have been successful, since he took refuge in Cordova, whither Leovigild advanced with the army. Convinced that all resistance was in vain, Hermenegild surrendered and prostrated himself before his father, who stripped him of his royal vestments and banished him to Valencia. Shortly afterwards, for some unknown reason, he caused him to be transferred to Tarragona, and entrusted to Duke Sigisbert, whom he ordered to guard his son closely, for his escape might lead to a fresh civil war. Sigisbert confined the prince in a dungeon, and repeatedly urged him to abjure Catholicism. Hermenegild stubbornly resisted, and was finally killed by Sigisbert (13 April 585). Leovigild is accused of the crime by our earliest authority, the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, but the best opinion acquits him of it. Hermenegild was afterwards canonised by the Catholic Church.
Whilst the ambition of Hermenegild was thus ruthlessly cut short, his father's was realised in the destruction of the kingdom of the Sueves. He did not lack a pretext: a noble called Andeca who, since the death of Miron in 583, had usurped the crown, in the following year proclaimed himself king of that people, disputing the rights of Miron's son Eburic or Eboric, the ally of Leovigild, who at once invaded Suevic territory. As Isidore says, "with the utmost rapidity" he struck fear into the hearts of his enemies, completely vanquishing them at Portucale (Oporto) and Bracara (Braga), the only two battles fought during the campaign. Andeca was taken prisoner, forced to receive the tonsure, and banished to Pax Julia (Bejar). In 585, the Suevic kingdom was converted into a Visigothic province. Thus, it only remained for Leovigild to possess himself of the two districts held by the Byzantines — one in the south of Portugal and west of Andalusia, and the other in the province of Carthagena — and to make the political unity of the Peninsula an accomplished fact. But it was not given to him to effect this. He died in 586, at a time when his army, under the command of Recared, was fighting in Septimania against the Franks who had twice again made the murder of Hermenegild a pretext for invading this remnant of Visigothic land. Even during the lifetime of
