In the beginning of the eighth century the kingdom of the Visigoths presented every appearance of prosperity and power. Its inherent weakness was imperfectly disguised by the pomp of its hierarchy and the luxury of its court, which veiled the defects of its constitution and the abuses of its government with a false and delusive splendor. Its licentious sovereign retained none of the primitive virtues of his ancestors, whose intrepid spirit and resistless valor had sustained them on a hundred fields of battle, and had borne their arms in a long succession of triumphs from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. The successor of Reccared and Wamba had degenerated into a feeble tyrant, who reigned by a disputed title, and in whose sensual nature neither the rites of hospitality, the obligations of friendship, the dignity of the regal office, nor the infirmities of age, interposed any obstacle to the indulgence of his unbridled passions. A haughty nobility decimated by the sanguinary feuds promoted by a contested succession, and divided into factions whose members hated each other with far greater intensity than that which they bore to a common enemy; unaccustomed to the exercise of arms; destitute of faith and honor; concealing treasonable sentiments under the semblance of enthusiastic loyalty, endeavored to sustain, by vainglorious boasts and barbaric ostentation, the dignity of their order and the majesty of the throne. The martial ardor of the legions which had for centuries upheld the greatness and the renown of the Roman name had been supplanted by the zeal and avarice of the monastic hordes, who defended by every expedient of fraud and violence the rising cause of the church militant. The crosier, in the hands of an arrogant caste which monopolized the learning of the age, had become far more potent than the sword or the sceptre, and the origin of all political measures of national importance was to be sought not in the palace but in the cathedral. The wise, tolerant, and judicious policy of the early ecclesiastics, that had animated and directed the councils of the Church, which by its humanizing influence had softened the prevailing rudeness of the age, and framed laws whose equitable maxims have served as models for succeeding legislators, had been abandoned for the degrading but profitable occupation of hunting down and plundering heretics. The proud and exclusive hierarchy of the Visigoths refused to acknowledge the supremacy, or respect the edicts, of the See of Rome. When the Pope interfered in the spiritual affairs of the Peninsula--an occurrence, however, that rarely took place--he did so rather in the capacity of a mediator, or even a suppliant, than as a mighty ruler, the head of Christendom, and the Vicar of God. His titles were assumed and his prerogatives usurped by the Spanish prelates; his infallibility was questioned, not only by the higher clergy, whose ministrations were