Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Toward the end of his life, in 633–34 he presided over a Church conference known as the Fourth Council of Toledo, which set policies that would have a lasting impact on the cultural and political spirit of Christian Iberia during the Middle Ages. It tightened discriminatory laws against Spanish Jews, and promised close ties between the Church in Spain and its secular Christian rulers. Perhaps most significantly for Isidore himself, the council also commanded that bishops should establish schools alongside their cathedrals, in imitation of the one that had set him along his path to scholarly and political prominence. In part this was an acknowledgment that all the good things in Isidore’s life had begun with education. But it also pointed the way ahead in a much broader sense: to a medieval western world in which the Catholic Church would exercise a monopoly over schooling, provide the institutional environment in which western intellectuals would exist, and dictate permissible—and forbidden—avenues of study.