So much to prove that the charge of luxury against the Toledan Goths is not unfounded. A people so enamoured of gold and jewels and embroidered silks as they at this time were, would naturally be disposed to forget the rude lessons of war and camp. Wamba had improved their town and made it a fair and comfortable place to dwell in, and the barbarians without the gates were quieted now by frequent defeat. And so, the wise and virtuous Wamba once deposed by trickery and smuggled off the throne in a cataleptic fit, garbed in the monk's gown of renouncement, the period of Gothic decadence set in. Its day of triumph and ordered rule had been a brief if brilliant one, and it had by patient effort evolved its own rude and unstable civilisation out of rough-shod conquest. From Ataulfo and his horde of barbarians, pouring, famished and athirst, across the Pyrenees, to lettered Recesvinthus and austere Wamba, who would make an effective figure even in our own times, the range in humanity is long, the dividing sea is wide and deep. But if swift had been the triumph, swifter still and more inexplicable was the decline. A more unhappy and reckless descent to oblivion history does not record. Towards the end of the seventh century, the glory of Toledo had so sensibly diminished that a haze lies upon its subsequent history to the lurid fame of the doomed day of Guadalete. We hear dimly of deplorable vices, of a demoralised clergy, of effaced and degraded sovereigns, of a people given up to every shameful pleasure and wrapped in effeminacy and indolence.