Hispania's lay culture under the Visigoths is not so highly developed as it had been under the Romans, and the task of maintaining formal education and government shifts decisively to the church because its Hispano-Roman clergy alone are qualified to manage higher administration.

As elsewhere in early medieval Europe, the church in Spain stands as society's most cohesive institution, and it embodies the continuity of Roman order.

Religion is the most persistent source of friction between the Roman Catholic Hispano-Romans and their Arian Visigoth overlords, whom they consider heretical.

At times this tension invites open rebellion, and restive factions within the Visigothic aristocracy exploite it to weaken the monarchy.

In 589 Recared, a Visigoth ruler, renounces his Arianism before the Council of Bishops at Toledo and accepts Catholicism, thus assuring an alliance between the Visigothic monarchy and the Hispano-Romans.

This alliance will not mark the last time in Spanish history that political unity is sought through religious unity.