ecclesiastical politics, passed into the legislation. The king was the chief of the army and the only legislative power. The last is clearly proved by the Councils of Toledo, concerning which there have been so many erroneous opinions.
It is therefore necessary to discuss in some detail the organisation and authority of these Councils. The kings alone were empowered to summon them, they had also the right to appoint the bishops, and to deprive them of their sees, thus exercising in the Catholic Church the power which, in these matters, they had been wont to exercise in the Arian. Their power to summon the Councils is acknowledged in the decrees passed by each of these, with the possible exception of the seventh, which seems to leave the question undecided. On the other hand, the decree of the ninth Council clearly states that the bishops have not the power to assemble except by command of the king. The latter did not issue his summons at regular intervals. The Council was formed of two elements, the clerical and the lay. The first consisted of the bishops, who in varying numbers were present at all the Councils; the vicars, who appeared for the first time at the third Council; the abbots, who began to attend at the eighth; and the archpriest, archdeacon, and precentor of Toledo. The lay element was composed of the officials or nobles of the palace (optimatibus et senioribus palatii, magnificentissimis ac nobilissimis viris, etc.), whose presence is attested by the signatures and prefaces to the decrees of all the Councils dealing with civil matters. From these we see that the lay element is absent from the Council held in 597 (which is not numbered), from that summoned by Gundemar, also known as "Gundemar's Ordinance," from the fourteenth and from the seventh, which merely confirmed or re-enacted a law already approved by the lay element at the Royal Council. We are left in doubt as to the presence of the lay element at the following Councils: — the tenth, where the signatures are probably incomplete; the eighteenth, of which there are no decrees in existence; and the third of Saragossa, from which the signatures are missing. As in the case of the ecclesiastics, the number of the nobles varied considerably. We see from the decrees of the twelfth and sixteenth Councils that they were chosen by the king, and we learn from those of the eighth Council that this was in accordance with an ancient custom. What part did the nobles take in the assemblies? Historians are by no means agreed; some hold that they had a voice in the discussion of lay matters only, others that they were nothing more than passive witnesses, or that their presence was a pure formality; again, others believe that they represented the king. Perez Pujol, the most recent historian of Visigothic Spain, has a convincing argument that, in matters wholly or partly lay, the nobles had the same rights to discuss and vote as the ecclesiastical members of the Council. This is the inference drawn from authentic texts of the eighth, tenth, twelfth, thirteenth, seventeenth Councils, and from the
