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the community of the realm 449
Even persecuting non-Catholic kings were, on occasion, motivated by
the same ideological heritage; in their view, of course, they were the ‘orthodox’,
and so-called Catholics the heretics. In 484, the Vandal king Huneric
unleased a religious offensive which was quite unlike his father Geiseric’s
preceding moments of persecution. A council of all religious, Catholics
and non-Nicenes, was called in Carthage, a definition of faith pushed
through, and action taken to enforce adherence to that definition. As the
form of his royal edicts underlines, Huneric was acting in all this like those
fourth-century emperors who subscribed to and enforced a variety of religious
settlements in the aftermath of the Council of Nicaea. 40 The underlying
idea was that there should be a single definition of Christian faith for
the realm, and that state power should be used to enforce it. The policy of
the Visigothic king Leovigild in the 580s was very similar. It was designed
not to crack down on Catholics so much as to establish a uniform religious
settlement – in this case, based on a doctrinal compromise – for the entire
kingdom. 41
As these examples show, when pushed through against the wishes of a
critical mass of the population, or its religious leadership, policies designed
to promote religious unity could themselves create division, as they had
done in the fourth-century empire as a whole and were doing in the fifthand
sixth-century east. In papyri from Italy, however, the Arian religion is
referred to as lex Gothorum, and this may provide a key to the religious
harmony that largely prevailed outside the Vandal kingdom. Where
Arianism was treated by kings as the religion of the intruding conquerors
(Goths, Burgundians, etc.), then it was possible to have peace. Churchmen
such as Caesarius of Arles could respond by taking the ‘render unto Caesar’
passage to mean that all earthly rulers were appointed by God for some
reason and, wherever possible, should be honoured. 42
In the longer term, Arianism was destroyed by Byzantine or Frankish
conquest (respectively of the Vandals and Ostrogoths, and of the
Burgundians) or undermined by the conversions to Catholicism which followed
on from prolonged co-existence with Catholic, former Roman, populations.
43 By 600, therefore, Catholicism was almost universally accepted,
and the old Roman idea of the kingdom as a religious unit became even less
problematic. Kings and churchmen could get on with the business of generating
community through the regular religious ceremonial life of the
kingdom and the scramble for higher church appointments.
40 Vict. Vit. Hist. Pers. bks 2–3.
41 Thompson (1969) 78ff. argued that Leovigild was being deliberately divisive, but this seems mistaken;
cf. Collins (1983a) ch. 2.
42 Lex Gothorum: Tjäder (1982) 268 n. 3; cf. Klingshirn (1994) 88ff. Gregory of Tours, by contrast,
often vents his hatred of Arians, but if Gregory had lived under Arian kings, his opinions would probably
have been more moderate. 43 The case with the Visigoths; cf. Thompson (1960).
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