Leander of Seville (; ; 534 AD, in Cartagena – 13 March 600 or 601, in Seville) was the Bishop of Seville. He was instrumental in effecting the conversion of the Visigothic kings Hermengild and Reccared to Catholicism. His brother (and successor as bishop) was the encyclopedist St. Isidore of Seville. Life Leander, Isidore and their siblings belonged to an elite family of Hispano-Roman stock of Carthago Nova. Their father Severianus is claimed to have been a dux or governor of Cartagena, according to their hagiographers, though this seems more of a fanciful interpretation since Isidore simply states that he was a citizen. The family as a matter of course were staunch Catholics, as were most of the Romanized population; the Visigothic nobles and the kings were Arians. The family moved to Seville around 554. The children's subsequent public careers reflect their distinguished origin: Leander and Isidore both became bishops of Seville, and their sister Florentina was an abbess who directed forty convents and one thousand nuns. The third brother, Fulgentius, was appointed Bishop of Écija. All four siblings are considered saints of the Roman Catholic Church. There was less Visigothic persecution of Catholics than legend and hagiography have painted. From a modern standpoint, the dangers of Catholic Christianity were more political. The Catholic hierarchy were in collusion with the representatives of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine emperor, who had maintained a considerable territory in the far south of Hispania ever since his predecessor had been invited to the peninsula by the former Visigothic king several decades before. In the north, Liuvigild struggled to maintain his possessions on the far side of the Pyrenees, where his Merovingian cousins and brothers-in-law cast envious eyes on them. Leander, enjoying an elite position in the secure surroundings of tolerated Catholic culture in Seville, became, around 576, a Benedictine monk, and then in 579 he was appointed bishop of Seville. In the meantime he founded a celebrated school, which soon became a center of Catholic learning. As bishop he had access to the Catholic Merovingian princess Ingunthis, who had come as a bride for the kingdom's heir, and he assisted her to convert her husband Hermenegild, the eldest son of Liuvigild, an act that cannot honestly be divorced from a political context. Leander defended the new convert even when he went to war with his father "against his father's cruel reprisals". Pierre Suau puts