Race and Ethnicity: Canon 69

The attempt to limit contact with Jews in public and keep their public authority diminished forced them to wind up being more crucial than ever to society as the money-lenders for which they were reviled.

Canon 69 of the Fourth Lateran Council decreed that Jews should be prevented from exerting any kind of political authority:

Since it is absurd that a blasphemer of Christ exercise authority over Christians, we on account of the boldness of transgressors renew in this general council what the Synod of Toledo wisely enacted in this matter, prohibiting Jews from being given preference in the matter of public offices, since in such capacity they are most troublesome to the Christians. But if anyone should commit such an office to them, let him, after previous warning, be restrained by such punishment as seems proper by the provincial synod which we command to be celebrated every year. The official, however, shall be denied the commercial and other intercourse of the Christians, till in the judgment of the bishop all that he acquired from the Christians from the time he assumed office be restored for the needs of the Christian poor, and the office that he irreverently assumed let him lose with shame. The same we extend also to pagans.

The Third Synod of Toledo in 589CE was organized by Bishop Leander of Seville who had worked to convert the Visigoths and King Reccared from Arianism to Roman Catholicism. It resulted in Visigothic Spain officially becoming part of the Roman Catholic Church. Its14th Canon forbade Jews to take Christian wives or concubines or slaves. Children from such a union were to be baptized. Jews were disqualified from any position that would give them authority over Christians. Christian slaves forced into following Jewish practices were to be freed.

Note that anyone who does hire or appoint a Jew to a position of authority where they make decisions that affect Christians is himself guilty and deserving of punishment. The Jew will be forced to return any material gain he had from Christians during the time in office, the value to be used for poor Christians.

(I apologize for "getting political," but I cannot help thinking of a current situation in the United States where immigrants are castigated for "taking jobs" from Americans, when the "crime"—if there is one—was committed by the business owners who, knowing the law, hired non-citizens in the first place. The workers suffer and the folk responsible are untouched.)

Denied the opportunity for many positions for which a Jew might have plenty of knowledge and skill—was this a reason why some Jews turned to lending money? If this was one profession that you were allowed and  Christians did not generally go for, why not become a money-lender, which in some ways gave you more power over Christians than any public office? There were, of course, other options for employment, as in becoming a scribe as depicted in the illustration above, showing Jewish scribes from a 1283 Spanish work.

In the later Middle Ages, even as Jews were looked on with suspicion if not outright hostility, Jews were sometime valued for the skills they possessed. It was not unknown for the wealthy and nobility to retain Jews as physicians.

The final Canon of the Fourth Lateran, number 70, was concerned with apostasy. We'll wrap this up next time.

The Family of Saints: Leander

Severianus and Theodora were members of well-to-do Hispano-Roman families in the 6th century who bore four children, all of whom became saints. The family lived in Cartagena, or Carthago Nova ("New Carthage"), on the southeast coast of Spain. The family moved to Seville about 554 CE, but their parents died before the children were all grown up.

Leander (shown), the eldest, became a Benedictine monk about 576, and a few years later was appointed Bishop of Seville. The co-ruler of the Visigoths in Spain, Liuvigild, had arranged for his son Hermenegild to marry the 12-year-old Ingund, sister of the Merovingian Childebert II, who became King of Austrasia. While Ingund traveled through Gaul to Iberia, she met a Catholic bishop who warned her not to accept Arianism, the heresy still practiced by many Visigoths, such as her new husband and his family. Hermenegild's mother, Queen Goiswintha, tried to baptize Ingund into Arianism, but the girl refused. Gregory of Tours tells us what Goiswintha did next:

the Queen lost her temper completely ... seized the girl by her hair and threw her to the ground: then she kicked her until she was covered with blood, had her stripped naked and ordered her to be thrown into the baptismal pool.

Liuvigild sent the two to rule in Seville and get them away from his wife. In Seville, however, Ingund encountered Leander. Leander, like his parents and his siblings, was a powerful voice against Arianism. Seville had a strong catholic population. No doubt from the influence of his wife (no doubt "transitively" from Leander, although from 580-582 Leander was traveling to Constantinople and back), Hermenegild converted to Catholicism in 582.

Hermenegild's father was not pleased: he saw Catholicism as "Roman" and Arianism as part of the Visigothic identity. Liuvigild besieged Seville, capturing it in 584, along with his rebellious and (to Liuvigild) heretical son. Leander fled eastward to Constantinople. Hermenegild was imprisoned and urged to renounce Catholicism, which he steadfastly would not do, refusing the Eucharist from an Arian bishop at Easter. His father had him beheaded on 13 April, 585, making Hermenegild a martyr in the Catholic Church.

Depending on the chronicle, Ingund had one of two different fates. One story from Gregory of Tours is that she fled to Constantinople with their son, Athanagild. She did not survive—at this time, plague was going around the Mediterranean—and was buried in Carthage, but Athanagild was delivered to Constantinople where he was raised by Emperor Maurice II. The other version is that she returned to her family in Gaul where Athanagild was raised by her and her mother, Brunhilda.

Leander remained in the East, preaching and writing against Arianism. After the death of Liuvigild in 589, Leander returned to Seville, where he remained bishop until his death in 600 or 601. In 589 he held the Third Council of Toledo, in which Visigothic Spain (or at least its representatives at the Council) renounced Arianism for good.

His younger brother Isidore said of him "This man of suave eloquence and eminent talent shone as brightly by his virtues as by his doctrine. By his faith and zeal the Gothic people have been converted from Arianism to the Catholic faith."

Two of his writings survive: one is an essay about his triumph of the church on the conversion of the Goths. The other is a monastic rule composed for his sister, Florentina, whom I shall talk about next.

Isidore of Seville

Isidore of Seville was probably born about 560, in Cartagena, Spain. His devout parents were both members of influential families that were involved in the conversion of the Visigoths to Catholicism from Arianism. The upbringing provided by his parents inspired Isidore and his siblings to enter the religious life, all of whom became saints.

He was educated at the liberal arts Cathedral school at Seville, learning the trivium and quadrivium. He mastered classical Latin and learned some Hebrew and Greek. Records are scarce about his early life and whether he ever joined a monastery, but in 619 he declared anathema harassing a monastery or monks. When his brother Leander, bishop of Seville, died in 600 or 601, Isidore was named his successor. He set about to eradicate any remaining traces of Arianism among the Visigoths, and was largely successful. He presided over a couple synods and a Council of Toledo.

His influence on the following centuries came more from his writings than his efforts against heresy. One was the De fide catholica contra Iudaeos, ("On the Catholic Faith against the Jews"). Like Augustine of Hippo, Isidore recognized the importance of the Jews because of their role in the Second Coming of Christ. In the Fourth Council of Toledo, however, he advocated removing children from the parents of "Crypto-Jews": Jews who were hiding their Judaism by acting as Christians. His argument was that the parents had probably had the children baptized as part of their subterfuge, and so educating the children as proper Christians was appropriate. (The Summa Theologica of Aquinas in the 13th century would state "it was never the custom of the Church to baptize the children of Jews against the will of their parents.")

He also wrote Historia de regibus Gothorum, Vandalorum et Suevorum ("History of the Kings of the Goths, Vandals and Suevi"), covering from 265 to 624.

He was the earliest Christian writer to try to summarize the knowledge of the world. His encyclopedic work, the Etymologiae, compiled his own thoughts with pieces from numerous Roman handbooks and miscellanies. It was so extensive (20 volumes with 448 chapters total)—one bishop described it as "practically everything that it is necessary to know"—that some of the works he drew from were no longer thought to be necessary to be copied and preserved.

The Etymologiae deserves its own treatment, which I will give it tomorrow.

Leander of Seville

Commentary on Job being given from
Pope Gregory to Bishop Leander of Seville

St. Isidore of Seville (c. 560 – 4 April 636) has been mentioned here before as the author of a popular encyclopedia of information and etymologies. He was not the only saint in the family, however. His brother, Leander (c. 534 – 13 March 600/601), was also made a saint.*

Leander was Bishop of Seville (a position later held by Isidore), using his authority in political ways: he tried to convert Hermengild, the son of the Arian Christian King of the Visigoths in Spain, to Roman Catholic Christianity. Hermengild converted, his father King Liuvigild got angry, and suddenly Leander was exiled.

He traveled to the other end of the Mediterranean, where he continued to oppose Arianism by writing treatises against it. Here he met and became friends with the man who would later become Pope Gregory the Great, (mentioned here). The two remained in contact, and letters that passed between them still exist.

Hermengild, the rebellious son, was put to death by his father (and therefore became a martyr in the Catholic Church). Luvigild died in 589, and sometime after that Leander returned to Spain, convoking the Third Council of Toledo that renounced Arianism. Bishop Leander spent the rest of his life fighting heresy in Spain. When he died, in 600/601, Isidore became bishop in his place.

*As were their siblings, Florentina and Fulgentius.