Now the aforementioned King Reccared, as we have said, took part in the holy council, recalling for our times how the princeps of old, Constantine the Great, enlightened the holy synod of Nicaea by his presence, as well as

Introduction

What distinguishes a kingdom from an empire? For a passing moment in the early fifth century Athaulf may have mused on converting Rome into a Gothic imperium, yet the realm ruled by his descendants from the late sixth to the early eighth called itself variously the ‘homeland’ or ‘kingdom of the Goths’ or the ‘kingdom of Hispania’, never an empire. Much about it was imperial, of course, in that capacious Roman sense: the provinces which its kings administered, the cities they founded, the laws they enacted as ‘prince’ and ‘Flavius’, their codes and coins, legations and letters, their votive crowns. As in the Donation of Constantine, where the emperor places a tiara upon the head of the pope to wear henceforth in all papal processions ‘in imitation of our imperial power’, Rome casts so long a shadow that too often what we mean by imitatio imperii is any such emulation of its symbols of authority. But can we go beyond—is there a beyond—symbolism?