During the era of Visigothic supremacy the influence of the Church was paramount in every department of the civil administration. Its councils regulated the succession, framed the laws, chose the sovereign. Its servants dictated every measure of national policy. Its sanction imparted a sacred character to the royal edicts. Eminent prelates, who even in trivial matters never permitted the pretensions of their order to be subordinated to the interests of the crown, constituted in reality the supreme power of the state. They negotiated treaties. They participated in campaigns. They imposed and collected taxes. In repeated contests with the nobility they generally emerged victorious. Their intellectual acquirements, superficial as they were, gave them a decided advantage over their illiterate and often brutal antagonists. The authority they obtained by superior knowledge, craft, and energy was in time confirmed by habit and strengthened by prescription. That authority, based upon public veneration and extending through countless generations, has often been shaken, but never abolished. The disastrous effects of its abuse are apparent in every period of Spanish history for more than a thousand years. At the time of the Arab invasion, the Visigothic hierarchy was at the summit of its importance and power. Its former adherence to the Arian heresy had engendered within it a spirit of independence, which was not relinquished with the return of the Spanish Church to the orthodox communion. The facility with which an entire people at the command of the monarch renounced the faith of their ancestors for unfamiliar and hitherto reprobated doctrines is one of the most extraordinary events in the annals of Christianity. Such a peaceful revolution, involving the most sacred interests of a numerous sect, affords incontestable proof of the slight hold possessed in those times by any religious dogma upon the popular mind. With the acceptance of the Athanasian creed was necessarily included the acknowledgment of Papal supremacy. The Gothic prelates, however, were never obsequious vassals of the Holy See. The Pope soon found that while he might solicit, he could not compel their obedience. His fulminations did not excite the terror in Spain which they did in other countries of Catholic Europe. Where he was not able to command, he was forced to flatter, to recommend, to temporize. A compact and powerful body of ecclesiastics, in whose hands were the government of their country and the election of its king, were naturally loath to submit to the arrogant dictation of a foreign potentate, whom their predecessors had regarded as a heretic, and whose faith they had adopted rather from policy than from sincere conviction.