St Isidor has painted Recaredo as a model of all the Christian virtues, which is decidedly excessive praise in the face of such accentuated vices against the mild sublimity of that scarce practised creed as an inflexible spirit of vengeance and cruelty, and a bigotry in his new religion as hard and determined as that of his Arian fathers, once the early lesson in adversity had been learnt and forgotten. However, in spite of defects rather belonging to his barbarous times, few natures being able to resist the forces of environment and general feeling, than to the man himself perhaps, he remains unquestionably one of the wisest and strongest of Gothic kings, and his personality is all the more marked by contrast with that of his feeble son, Luiva II., who was dethroned by Viterico, a senseless usurper, shortly afterwards assassinated at table by his own servants and cast into the street, where the infuriated populace seized the corpse and dragged it up and down the hilly streets and lanes of Toledo, eventually flinging it into a filthy hole as unfit for decent burial. Gundmar's short reign furnished no reason to doubt his well-meaning intentions. He quelled a rising among the Vasco Navarrese and the Imperial troops, and convened a council at Toledo to decide in the town's favour against the sacerdotal pretensions of Carthagena. But his successor is a figure worth noting, and in his reign takes place the first of those unfortunate outbreaks against the Jews, for which dismantled and impoverished Spain still pays so heavy a price. Before the Moors came, Toledo's source of prosperity and wealth sprang from her Hebrew colony, and the anti-Semitic movement, started by Sisebuth, had probably no other object than the barbarians' desire to appropriate Jewish gold. Sisebuth himself is spoken of in history as the father of the poor, and is extolled for his compassionate heart and his liberality. His horror of suffering and blood was so great that he sent his own doctors to tend the stricken enemy when he was compelled to go to war, and paid out of his own purse to his soldiers the ransom of their captives. Servitude and blood-shedding were equally abhorrent to him. The annalist Frêdégaire tells of him, as an example of exquisite sensibility in those rude times, which would be no less rare in our own, that in the thick of battle with the Imperial army, seeing the Greek soldiers fall in numbers under the savage blow of his men, he rushed into their midst, shouting: "Woe to me whose reign should see the flowing of so much human blood," and frantically drove away his soldiers from the wounded Byzantines. The pity was such excellent sentiments were not cultivated on behalf of the Jews. Having twice defeated the Byzantine army, Cesario only procured a treaty of peace on condition the Jews were expelled from Spain. And in 616, Sisebuth published his famous edict against the children of Israel, offering them the harsh