The history of the Visigothic monarchy, especially after its adoption of Catholicism in 587, is, therefore, as has already been remarked, closely interwoven with that of the Visigothic Church. The Crown possessed little real authority. The complete and universal municipal organization, instituted by the Romans, had disappeared with the Gothic occupation. Civil and judicial officers, although appointed by the Crown, were subject to ecclesiastical supervision; not only in the parish and the diocese, but in the tribunals of justice, in the most intimate relations of domestic life, in the determination and settlement of secular disputes, and even in the presence of the throne. The influence of the priest increased in the same ratio in which that of the soldier declined. It reached its climax at the time of the Saracen invasion, when, to all but the most discerning eye, the rule of the Church seemed destined to endure through many centuries, and its civil and political power appeared impregnable. The illusory character of this apparent greatness was soon to be exhibited. Two years after the last of the Gothic kings ascended the throne, the Moorish armies were in possession of the Spanish Peninsula. The enactments of the Visigothic Code, from their promulgation to the present day, have been never entirely abrogated by the legislative powers of Spain, and, as the foundation of the national judicature, many of its precepts and its rules still maintain their original force and power in the legal and ecclesiastical tribunals of the Spanish Peninsula. During the Moslem domination, their authority was unquestioned in the different Christian kingdoms of the North. The voluminous compilation, known as _Las Siete Partidas_, published by Alfonso el Sabio in 1348, was largely borrowed from the _Forum Judicum_. Charles III. in 1788, expressly declared that the provisions of the latter had never been repealed by subsequent statutes, and ordered that they should prevail in a contest involving the law of inheritance, where the property of a deceased monk was claimed both by his monastery and his relatives, in the royal chancery court of Granada. Not only are some of these laws still recognized as binding in the Peninsula, but they were long used in Southern France, and the capitularies of the early kings of that country bear unmistakable internal evidence of their derivation from this same source.