Episode 105: Gregory of Tours, Part 1

The Historia Francorum and the Merovingian Dynasty

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 105: Gregory of Tours. In this program, we will read the first half of the History of the Franks, or Historia Francorum, written by Bishop Gregory of Tours, and completed in about 591 CE. The History of the Franks is about the founding and first five generations of the Merovingian Dynasty, a dynasty which ruled much of modern-day France from 481 until 751. Our author for today, again Gregory of Tours, died in the year 594, and so his history covers only the first 110 years of Merovingian leadership – the years between 481 and 591. But oh, what a 110-year period this was.

From 481 to 591, Roman Gaul definitely became Merovingian Francia. The collapse of Roman power gave way first to a failed state, in which shifting consortiums of barbarians destroyed the last bastions of Roman power while also vying for supremacy with one another. Out of this chaos in the late 400s, there arose King Childeric I and his son Clovis, the founders of the Merovingian dynasty, and ultimately some of the most influential figures in European history. When we read their story in the pages of Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks, and as we press on to read the stories of their children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, something extraordinary happens. We see, unmistakably, the world of the Middle Ages born on the page. It is a smaller, and more local world than the old Roman one. News travels more slowly there. Checkerboards of modestly sized kingdoms have replaced emperors ruling over swathes of continents. There are still wars, but they are smaller, and less decisive. An indigenous European aristocracy, complete with dozens and dozens of named dukes, counts, chamberlains and others, has replaced the old Roman nobility. Languages are evolving, as barbarian vernaculars meld with Rome’s ancient tongue, and Latin itself slowly becomes a liturgical language, separate from the everyday dialects of bishops and priests. The Catholic church has undergone stunning expansion and standardization, transforming the defunct old Roman administrative districts of civitates into dioceses and bishoprics.¹ Orthodoxy and canon law have solidified decisively since the time of the church fathers Jerome and Augustine, two centuries prior. As we read Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks, then, we witness all of this happening – the sudden genesis of the Middle Ages from the wreckage of Roman Gaul – a new world in which no one, seemingly, is in charge for very long.

There are very disquieting elements within the history that Gregory records. The violence of the Historia Francorum is extreme – tortures, mutilations, and maimings appear frequently, along with dissipated behavior from both churchmen and laity alike. To quote the great 20th-century scholar Erich Auerbach, in Gregory’s most famous book “There is a progressive and terrible brutalization. . .intrigue and policy have lost all formality, [they] have become primitive and coarse.”² Just as bleak as the violence and disorder were in post-Roman Gaul, though, was Europe’s first brush with the Bubonic Plague. Appearing first in Byzantine port cities in the year 541, the pandemic tore through the old Roman world until 549, although this was by no means the end of its time there. Gregory of Tours himself reports persistent outbreaks over the course of the second half of the 500s. And in addition to the plague, climatological instability seems to have pummeled an already vulnerable civilization in Merovingian Francia. The worst volcanic winter in the past two millennia happened in the year 536, when an eruption launched so much debris into the atmosphere that summer never came, and famines and crop failures occurred as a result, possibly for years afterward. As Gregory’s older contemporary Procopius wrote, in and shortly after the year 536, “the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year. . .And from the time when this happened men were free neither from war nor pestilence nor any other thing leading to death.”³ Living through a period that was quite literally dark, then, the first generations of Merovingian Franks endured an especially dreadful sequence of catastrophes – catastrophes rarely mitigated by organized and compassionate leadership on the parts of the Merovingian kings themselves.

While Gregory’s History of the Franks, then, offers us a glimpse of the Middle Ages coming into being, and while this glimpse is often a dismal one, the book also offers strange glimmers of hope and beauty. Wars in Gregory’s book, while frequent, never last long. The Byzantine Empire is far enough away that citizens are free of its taxes, its conscriptions, and its marauding provincial rulers. In scene after scene of the Historia Francorum, a citizenry deprived of a stable state system largely makes do in local worlds knit around parish churches and cathedrals. And while Gregory has no illusions about the moral spotlessness of his fellow clergymen, nonetheless, the hundreds Catholic officials we meet in Gregory’s book are largely literate, qualified professionals – a modest but diligent safeguard against famine, poverty and social breakdown. Though they might lash out at an Arian for heresy, or condemn a self-styled miracle worker for blasphemy, and though many of them are creeps and weirdos of various sorts, Gregory’s fellow clergymen are also more generally on the front lines in feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and administrating the sturdy little bureaucracies of their dioceses and parishes. In the book’s most inspiring moments, councils of bishops convene to sort out genuinely complex political and ecclesiastical controversies, and in doing so, they bring some measure of order and compassion to a turbulent time and place. And Gregory’s style, too, is remarkably unique for the period in which he writes. His sometimes lowbrow and colloquial Latin prose, and his digressive narration in the Historia, though not without their faults, nonetheless show a curious and sympathetic mind more interested in vivid scene painting than setting events within a grand and international framework of cause and effect. Gregory cares about Francia for its own sake – its quirks, its daily life, and its political microclimates, and he considers much of this worth setting down for posterity.

The History of the Franks, then, is required reading for anyone interested in the inception of the European Middle Ages. But it’s also a challenging book to go through from end to end. Gregory’s history sticks in one’s mind not because of the brio of its prose, or the effectiveness of its organization, but instead because of its sheer breadth and quantity of details. It is a book that one reads with a dynastic diagram on one side and a map on the other. The book’s rapid changes in subject between sacred and secular, and its frequent assumption that the reader is familiar with hundreds of named clergymen at work in sixth-century Francia, not to mention seventeen Merovingian monarchs, their children, and their aristocratic subordinates makes for slow and challenging reading. Gregory, according to scholar Alexander Murry, has for a long time been regarded as “a naïve and superstitious compiler of raw data, which he conveyed to his readers in disjointed narrative fragments that belied any deliberative reflective and selective perspective.”⁴ As flawed a chronicler as he was, though, as we lean down with Gregory over, in particular, the 570s, 580s and early 590s, the incredible abundance of information that he set down about the history he had lived through offers one of Late Antiquity’s broadest windows into how people lived, worked, and thought in the century after the western Roman empire collapsed. King Childeric I and his son Clovis, coming to power just as the last Roman emperor was deposed in the west, were the lynchpins between the Classical and Medieval worlds, and the dynasty that they established portended what was to come for a long time afterward.

Because of the size of the History of the Franks – more than 700 pages with notes in the edition we’ll be using – we will devote two full programs to this book. While we’ll learn plenty about early Merovingian history, we’ll also learn about Late Antique Catholic historiography – history writing as it would take place on the desks of bishops, priests and monks over the next thousand years – the norms of this history writing, and what they thought was worth setting down the most. We’ll also observe that while the immediate collapse of Roman power in Gaul was catastrophic in the instability that it unleashed, the societies that emerged in the wake of Rome continued, often, to look quite Roman. So let’s begin the story of the Franks by meeting our author for today, Gregory, Bishop of Tours. [music]

The Life of Gregory of Tours

Gregory of Tours was born in about 539 CE in a town called Avernus, today Clermont-Ferrand, in the central part of southern France, about 200 miles south-southeast of Paris. Gregory was born with both pedigree and wealth, the scion of senators, saints, and bishops. His father and grandfather were both of the old Roman senatorial rank, which still had plenty of cachet in Francia in the 500s. His mother’s grandfather and great-grandfather had both been bishops and saints, and uncles and cousins on his mother’s side of the family were also important churchmen and aristocrats. The apple that was Gregory’s life was, naturally, not likely to fall very far from this privileged churchman tree.

As a young man, likely due to the death of his father, Gregory went to live with his uncle Gallus, a bishop and saint, in Avernus. This uncle passed away, and so young Gregory remained in the household of an archdeacon named Avitus. During the formative years between the ages of 10 and 20, young Gregory lived in a thoroughly ecclesiastical world, the frequent guest of his great uncle, the bishop of the city of Lyons, and his cousin once removed, the bishop of the city of Tours, both of them canonized as saints. When Gregory was 25 years old, in 563, he took the cloth, being ordained as a deacon. Ten years later, church officials elected Gregory to replace his relative Eufronius as Bishop of Tours. With the approval of the Merovingian King Sigibert, whom we’ll meet later on, Gregory assumed the mantle of Bishop in 573, which he held for the next 21 years until his death in 594.

The city of Tours, then as now near the confluence of the Loire and Cher rivers, was home to an important bishopric. Located on the border of the Frankish territories of Neustria and Aquitaine in the west-central part of modern-day France, Tours had once been the seat of Saint Martin, whom we met a number of episodes ago, and it had been a pilgrimage site since the fourth century. The city of Tours, a hub in the fertile Loire valley with numerous Roman roads going through it, and one that connected different factions of Francia during Gregory’s lifetime, is the scene of many important events in the Historia Francorum that’s on our desk for today. Gregory’s position there was a high profile one. The Bishop of Tours, by the time Gregory was elected to the office, was responsible for eight dioceses. In addition to having the devastating prerogative of excommunication, Gregory was also seated in a tenured position somewhat insulated from the usurpations and civil wars of Late Antique Francia. And while the office of bishop came with special privileges, it also came with a lot of work. Gregory’s daily grind included overseeing tithe collection, managing reliquaries and tombs, superintending church landholdings, ecclesiastical building maintenance and construction, and paying visits to the monasteries and nunneries in his dioceses. While of course he, and other Late Antique bishops had subordinates to help with these considerable responsibilities, he was ultimately the executive in charge of a miniature state – a state with a complex system of incomes and expenses, accountability to both subjects and a central authority, and he also managed the tricky operations of diplomacy with secular monarchs and aristocrats, which sometimes included delicate errands as an envoy, a royal advocate, and an arbitrator. While he never did leave Gaul, to our knowledge, he certainly wore out a lot of shoes trekking all over modern-day France, Belgium and once or twice, the far west of Germany.

The bishopric of Tours, during Gregory’s episcopate, included even more responsibilities than these. The city’s main cathedral had burnt down during the tenure of Gregory’s precursor, and Gregory spent much of his time as a bishop rebuilding it.⁵ Additionally, he put a lot of effort into refurbishing Saint Martin’s church, which had also burnt down during his predecessor’s time as bishop. Saint Martin, who again had died back in 397, is never far from the story told in the Historia Francorum – the Catholic Holy Trinity in the book seems often to be a quaternity, with Saint Martin’s miracles, relics, and holy presence often working for the force of good in a disorderly world. Honoring this saint, then, through caring for Saint Martin’s church, was a major responsibility for Gregory. The church was not only a pilgrimage site. It also served as a sanctuary destination for fugitives fleeing justice, and Gregory had to occasionally serve as a bumper between prosecuting authorities and church laws offering criminals sanctuary.⁶ Gregory, then, was born into extreme privilege, and he was given an office that conferred even more power and prestige. At the same time, though, his episcopate was no nobleman’s sinecure, but instead a demanding and sometimes outright perilous occupation. Beyond the considerable duties mentioned above, Gregory also threw himself into work as a historian and hagiographer, ambitious even beyond the scope of his day job as one of Francia’s more important clergymen.

Much of what we’ve heard about Gregory so far would be true of any Late Antique bishop. The highest officeholders of the Catholic clergy had stringent demands placed on them, and far from sticking to a script, many of them had to alternately improvise and negotiate for the sake of their dioceses and sometimes their personal safety. A few more details – more personal details about Gregory of Tours, insofar as they are available to us 1,500 years later, will help bring him to life a bit more before we open the Historia Francorum.

Gregory of Tours’ Unique Style

Allegedly, Gregory was quite a small person. There’s a tenth century story about Gregory of Tours meeting Pope Gregory the Great – the Pope and the Bishop were about the same age, and the Pope saying something compassionate about the Bishop’s diminutive stature. Gregory of Tours also allegedly had a strange habit of mixing himself health tinctures made partly out of dust and bits of relics from Saintly tombs, which may have been part of the reason for his reportedly delicate health.⁷ In the Historia Francorum, while Gregory has plenty to say about recent history and is quite proud of his ecclesiastical relations for their own sake, his presence as a historical participant is often an unassuming one. Nonetheless, over the course of hundreds of pages, Gregory’s perspective on things becomes increasingly clear.

He was, above all else, an industrious, curious chronicler, setting the sacred and secular, the aristocrat and the bumpkin, and the saint and the scoundrel, all together in ten books subdivided into dozens of sections each. Gregory lays out Merovingian history, offering only occasional grimaces at the evil deeds of kings and queens. Alongside this royal history in the Historia Francorum, Gregory also takes endless excursions to offer local and ecclesiastical history, as well, telling us that this bishop was good and upright, and that other bishop was a scoundrel, and did we hear about the miracle healing that happened in this reliquary up in this small Frankish town? Or did we hear about the exorcism that happened in this other Frankish settlement? Gregory’s familiarity with the ecclesiastical world of Gaul is dizzyingly broad, and he assumes in his reader a shared Catholicism, a belief in saints, portents, and miracles, and fluency in nearly a century of recent church history. He was, then, a quintessential Late Antique bishop – a man of the cloth born into power and privilege, unselfconsciously partisan for his faith, at a remove from the discord of secular politics, but nonetheless overall campaigning on behalf of peace, stability, and the wellbeing of his congregation.

Like Boethius, born two generations before him, Gregory of Tours wrote far more than the one book for which he is most famous. In addition to the Historia Francorum, Gregory wrote nine other texts in the standard genres of Late Antique Christianity – these included biographies of Saints Martin, Julian, and Andrew the Apostle, a compendium of biographies of church fathers, two books of martyr tales, a commentary on the Psalms, and an additional book on astronomy. It’s worth noting for a moment here that, as we come into the sixth century, we begin to enter a phase of Late Antiquity at which we begin to have a deeper and deeper substrate of Latin texts written by Catholic clergymen – very often bishops – and successfully preserved ever since. While we might not find, for instance, Gregory of Tours’ biography of Saint Martin of Tours, or his surviving narrative about third century Ephesian martyrs, particularly essential reading, specialists on subjects like hagiography and Christian hermeneutics find a wealth of information in the obscurer pages of these Late Antique Christian texts.

So that’s a quick introduction to Gregory of Tours himself – again he lived from about 538-594, and for many of the key events of early Merovingian history that he chronicles, Gregory was in his 30s and 40s, and he personally knew the grandsons of old King Clovis who were on the throne during Gregory’s career as a bishop. Now that we’ve met Gregory and learned a bit about his world, let’s spend a moment talking about the book that we’re about to read – its architecture, its style, and its quirks. [music]

The Organization of the Historia Francorum

The History of the Franks is a 10-book long chronicle of, for the most part, Francia’s Merovingian rulers from 481-591. However, a famous idiosyncrasy of the book is that it actually begins at the beginning of time, when the Old Testament deity created the world. Book 1 thus covers the first 5,800 years of the world’s history – Gregory of Tours reckoned the world to be about 6,000 years old. Then, Book 2 of the History of the Franks covers the period from 397 (the year Saint Martin died) to the year 511 (the year Clovis died, Clovis being again the most important founder of the Merovingian dynasty under whom Gregory worked). And then Books 3-10 cover increasingly minute stretches of history, often just a year or two. The chronological organization of the History of the Franks, then, is odd, but after Gregory gets to Book 5, we settle down into the decades of the 570s and 580s and get to enjoy some extremely detailed accounts of old Clovis’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

If shifting chronology is one of the book’s famous idiosyncrasies, another is its perpetually changing focus. The 10 books of the Historia Francorum are themselves broken into numbered paragraphs. These paragraphs are often non-contiguous – in other words, paragraph one gives you an update on this Merovingian king, then paragraph two tells you about this wonderful bishop who lives down on the lower Rhône, then paragraph three informs you that heavy rains and strange lights in the sky happened up near Paris, and then paragraph four chronicles a depraved duke who lived up in the northeast, and eventually got what was coming to him. The book that we’re about to read, then, is an assorted history, offering a vision of Merovingian Gaul through the span of its accumulated details rather than a focused narrative that tries to tease out cause and effect. Gregory’s stylistic models for writing history were Jerome and Eusebius, rather than Polybius and Thucydides – to repeat what I said a moment ago, Gregory is more interested penning anecdotal and illustrative local history than writing a book analyzing international relations and exploring the greater flux of the late 500s CE.

With all that said, then, I think we’re ready to crack open one of the most famous history books of the Middle Ages. While the text we’re about to look at is a sprawling one, with a bewildering array of characters and scenes, and while we’re going to consider its reliability and contents in a lot of detail, the ultimate takeaway of this book is very simple. When we open to page one of the Historia Francorum, we’re still in the twilight of the Roman Empire. When we close the back cover, we are decisively in the Middle Ages. Gregory’s most famous work, while this may not have been his intention, demonstrates how this transition took place. [music]

Gregory of Tours’ Preface

Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks begins with a one-page preface. In this preface, Gregory writes that during the turbulent decades of the 570s and 580s, with kings feuding with one another, and Catholic churches still vulnerable to heresy and nonbelievers, “no writer has come to the fore who has been sufficiently skilled in setting things down in an orderly fashion to be able to describe these events in prose or verse. In fact in the towns of Gaul the writing of literature has declined to the point where it has virtually disappeared altogether.”⁸ Accordingly, writes Gregory, largely for the purpose of preserving facts for future generations, he undertook creating the History of the Franks. Gregory professes in the Preface that his style as a writer of prose isn’t very impressive, but all the same, that straightforward, simple prose is comprehensible to a larger audience than prose with a lot of filigree and polish. Gregory then announces that he’ll begin his story at the very beginning, with the creation of the world. And quotes in this episode, by the way, will come from the Lewis Thorpe translation, published by Penguin Classics in 1974. [music]

The History of the Franks, Book 1

Creation to the Birth of Christ

Gregory of Tours opens his history by first declaring his ardent faith as a Catholic, and emphasizing that Arianism is wrong – Gregory makes clear that he believes that those who do not share his exact doctrine of a coeternal and consubstantial Jesus are heretics. It’s fascinating to see how hard-wired Gregory’s generation of Catholics were to strike preemptively at Arian doctrines, as the first sentence proper of the History of the Franks is a sectarian retelling of the opening of Genesis. Gregory writes, “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth in His own Christ, that is in His own son, who is the origin of all things” (1.1). This was certainly Catholic orthodoxy by Gregory’s lifetime, but its placement front and center at the outset of the History of the Franks demonstrates how sixth century bishops continued to be as engaged with Arianism as their predecessors had been two centuries prior.

Following this opening, Gregory moves through the main events of Genesis pretty quickly, with a few curious side tracks. Gregory pauses, for instance, to insist that Noah’s grandson, a person named Cush, was actually Zoroaster, the inventor of idolatry and magic (1.5).⁹ Gregory creates a longer retelling of the Tower of Babel story, inventing details about how it was constructed. Gregory also offers a much longer retelling of the Biblical story of Moses parting the waters of the Red Sea, insisting that the tracks of the Pharaoh’s chariots can still be seen beneath the ocean, where the Egyptians were drowned. In addition to these moments of creative editorializing, Gregory goes back in time to what we could call the Iron Age to list which kings were ruling, for instance, Assyria, Latium, Sparta, and other regions during the tenure of the Biblical king Solomon. Skipping over 500 years of history between the Babylonian Captivity and the coming of Julius Caesar and Augustus, and Gregory speedily reaches the birth of Jesus.

From the Life of Jesus to Saint Martin’s Death in 397

Gregory summarizes Jesus’ many palpable miracles, and then, taking the Johannine perspective that Saint Augustine did, grouses that “making it most clear to the people that He was indeed God in person, the Jews became incensed and were roused to hatred against Him” (1.20).¹⁰ Embroidering the Gospel stories of Jesus with later apocryphal ones that had been folded into Catholic theology, including various fables that had sprung up about Pontius Pilate, Gregory offers a three-page summary of Christ’s life and its aftermath, and then he goes on to discuss the founding of the papacy in Rome under the Apostle Peter. This part of the history, too, makes liberal use of Late Antique Christian narrative traditions that likely had no basis in fact – Gregory informs us that the nefarious sorcerer Simon Magus, who shows up briefly in Acts, partnered with the Emperor Nero to persecute Christians in Rome, resulting in the deaths of the Apostles Peter and Paul.

Gregory then moves on to give a tour of each of the Flavian and Nerva-Antonine Roman emperors – Vespasian, skipping Titus, then Domitian, then Trajan, then Hadrian, paying attention exclusively to persecutions of Christians, and then skipping three quarters of a century to the reign of the Emperor Decius.¹¹

Recording a summary of various third century martyrs, Gregory pays especially close attention to third century Gaul, including his own hometown of Clermont-Ferrand, which was attacked by an Alamanni invasion in the year 260. Moving more speedily through the Diocletianic Persecution, Gregory reaches the reign of the first Christian emperor Constantine, covering it quite quickly, and then Constantine’s heirs, and the bishopric of Saint Martin of Tours. Seeming to lose interest in the greater history of the world, Gregory of Tours settles comfortably down into Gaul in the fourth century, taking his reader in some curious zigzags. Gregory expends nearly a whole page telling a lurid tale about a bishop from his hometown giving into having sex with his lusty wife (1.44). Then Gregory expends three pages telling the racy story of a bride in a marriage bed who tearily admitted to her groom that she wished to remain a virgin for Christ’s sake (1.47). The first book of the History of the Franks culminates with the end of the important reign of Saint Martin of Tours, Gregory’s own distinguished predecessor and the subject of an early and influential hagiography – closing with Saint Martin’s death in the year 397. And while Book 1 of the History of the Franks certainly moves us from the miracle of creation all the way down to the turf of Gaul in the year 397, the route that Gregory takes to get there offers an inauspicious preview of his methodology as a historian. Skipping greater geopolitical context for a potboiler about a lusty bishop’s wife; ignoring major emperors for the sake of a sexy – but chaste – yarn about some newlyweds, Gregory’s consuming passion for martyr tales and prurient stories derails the historical agenda of his book’s opening chapter, heralding the bumpy ride that is to come in the remainder of his most famous work. [music]

The History of the Franks, Book 2

Gregory opens the second book of his famous history by talking for a moment about his own methodology. Perhaps self-conscious that his first book was a bit meandering, Gregory writes in the Penguin Thorpe translation that:

It will not, I am sure, be held unreasonable of me if I describe the blessed lives of the Saints together with the disasters of the unfortunate: for it is the course of events which demands this and not my fantasy as a writer. . .Just as I have done myself, so Eusebius, Severus and Jerome mingled together in their chronicles the wars waged by kings and the holy deeds of martyrs. (103)

In other words, it is a standard practice in Christian works of history to allow oneself to be liberally sidetracked for the purposes of telling blood and thunder stories about saints and martyrs, so be advised that I will often leave aside my history of the Frankish people and their leaders in order to indulge myself as my predecessors did. The narrative, appropriately, then, opens with a brief miracle story about Saint Martin, and then a lurid tale about how Saint Martin’s successor, Bricius, was accused of having sexual intercourse with a washerwoman, and then miraculously acquitted himself by having the woman’s month-old baby exonerate him. This and other miracles did not convince Bricius’ subjects of his devoutness, though, and the population of Tours eventually threw him out. After two intermediary bishops, though, and following a stay in the see of Rome, Bishop Bricius returned to Tours and completed his term in office.

Gregory of Tours’ History of Gaul, 388-457

Our author Gregory of Tours writes that the decades after Saint Martin died in 397 were not serene ones for the Gallic provinces. The Vandal king Gunderic invaded Gaul in 406, only a few years later turning his forces southward into the Iberian Peninsula. Gregory’s interest in the Vandal invasion of Gaul, Hispania and North Africa arises predominantly because the Vandals were Arians, and the Arian Vandals, when in power, tended to persecute Nicene Catholics like Gregory himself and his predecessors. Retelling a story about a confrontation between a pious Catholic bishop and a wicked Arian bishop backed by the Vandals, Gregory applauds the faith of his Catholic precursor, who, in spite of his legitimate miracles, was eventually exiled by the Vandal King Gunderic. During the Vandal reign in North Africa, Gregory writes, many Catholics went astray, but eventually, the Vandal kingdom fell to the Byzantine Empire, having held sway in North Africa for roughly the century between 430 and 530. As a side note, Gregory’s history of the Vandals is light on facts – he doesn’t have his chronology of Vandal kings correct – but it is important to remember that the early years of Vandal Africa did see some very nasty persecutions of Nicene Christians, and these persecutions were what stuck in the mind of Gregory of Tours the most.

The Vandals weren’t the only barbarians to invade Gaul in the 400s. In 451, the Huns migrated into the territory, as well, and Gregory summarizes some events of the Hunnic invasion relevant to his own interests – an ancient oratory that survived the Hunnic destruction of the city of Metz, then a miraculous instance when the city of Orleans, under siege by the Huns, was rescued by the timely arrival of Ostrogothic forces in 451, a rescue, in Gregory’s opinion, which happened due to the ardent prayers of the besieged city’s bishop. Then, the rampaging Huns, as Gregory knew, were defeated by the combined forces of the Ostrogothic King Theoderic I and the great Roman general Flavius Aetius at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451. Gregory heaps praises on Aetius, who, in spite of all of the services he rendered to the western empire, was murdered by the Emperor Valentinian III in 454, which did little to stabilize the faltering Roman west.

Let’s pause for a moment, and zoom out. So far, what we’ve heard in Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks has been quite miscellaneous – a breakneck and scattershot dash through all of Christian history that, after the second century, pauses every page or two for a miracle story. It’s a bewildering beginning, and if you’re disoriented at this point in the episode, so am I, and so is everyone else. However, about a third of the way through Book II, Gregory’s History of the Franks finally gets to the titular Franks. The Franks are the anchor of the whole book – where they came from, their first kings, and their ups and downs over the course of, especially, the 500s. The way that Gregory introduces the Franks, however, is confusing. Let me therefore give you a very short, generic scholarly introduction to the Franks.

The Franks were a barbarian tribe from east of the Rhine and north of the Danube. Gregory himself acknowledges that many of his generation held the roots of the Franks to lie in the province of Pannonia, or roughly, modern-day Austria and Slovenia. As a named group, the Franks begin to show up on the historical record in Roman chronicles of the mid to late 200s CE. As students of Roman history know, the years between 238 and 284 bookend what we call the Crisis of the Third Century, and the Franks were one of a number of Germanic tribes that took advantage of this period of Roman weakness in order to invade and pillage provinces in present day France and Spain. Following this period of instability, the Roman Emperors Maximian and Constantius, in 288 and 292, respectively, had run-ins with Frankish armies. Two generations later, the Roman Emperor Julian, between 356 and 358, fought Frankish armies alongside those of other barbarians near present Cologne, Lyon, and Strasbourg. Like other barbarian groups in late imperial history, sometimes Franks served as Roman confederates, and at other times, they were enemies. And also as with other barbarian groups in late imperial history, some Franks ascended to positions of considerable political and military authority, like the Frankish magister militum Arbogast, who rose to power in the 380s and 390s. Prior to the Merovingian period, the Franks were often divided into two groups. The Salian Franks were from the upper Rhine and territories within what’s today the Netherlands. And the Ripuarian Franks, and likely other Frankish clans, were from the area around the middle Rhine.

Gregory dives into this Frankish history in about the year 388. Gregory was at work on the History of the Franks two hundred years after this, and it’s possible that, because he wanted to concentrate on the colorful sagas of Merovingian rulers, he didn’t think it was necessary to delve back into the murk of their earliest predecessors. Quoting extensively from a lost work of Latin history, Gregory retells the story of a group of three Frankish warlords leading armies over the Rhine River in 388, and how the usurper emperor Eugenius allied with the Roman-Frankish general Arbogast. The Franks, Gregory records, following some lumps and bumps as the 300s led into the 400s, managed to sack the important northern capital of Trier more than once in the first decades of the 400s, but, Gregory writes, unfortunately no one recorded the names of their earliest kings. If we’re looking for early Frankish kings, though, and moreover early European kings, the person who usually shows up for roll call is Childeric I. In French monarchical history, before the House of Bonaparte, before the House of Bourbon, prior to the Capetian and Carolingian Dynasties, at the very beginning of the Merovingians, there was Childeric I.

Gregory of Tours’ on Childeric I

Gregory doesn’t have much to say about Childeric I. Gregory offers a narrative about how Childeric ran afoul of his subjects by having sex with too many of their daughters, how Childeric was temporarily exiled, and how he came back and sired a son named Clovis with a queen named Basina. Just as Gregory finally reaches the subject of Childeric, however, he sidetracks into a series of stories centered on a decorated fifth century churchman named Sidonius Apollinaris – a bishop of the city that is today Clermont-Ferrand. Let’s bracket Sidonious and Gregory of Tours’ desultory history for a moment and once again lay down some basic historical facts, insofar as they’re available to us.

Childeric I lived from about 437-481. Childeric I himself himself had a legendary ancestry through a father called Merovech, hence the word “Merovingian,” but Gregory does not describe this ancestry. Modern historians are uncertain of how Childeric came to power. Before, during and after the defeat of the Huns in 451, Gaul was awash with Roman mercenary forces with barbarian backgrounds. The 500-year-old Roman territory had by this point been largely under the control of a patchwork of different barbarian tribes for a generation. Historian Guy Halsall theorizes that Childeric may have risen to prominence via a military career under the Roman general Flavius Aetius – this would have likely been some time before the general’s death in 454.¹² However exactly Childeric I emerged as a military leader, within the Gallic conflicts of the mid-400s, there were plenty of opportunities for a warlord to distinguish himself, and Childeric I evidently did so. Several other barbarian kings also emerged from the Roman military in the last decades of the western empire, like Odoacer, who’d been a foederati military commander, and Gundobad, a one-time Roman Master of the Soldiers who emerged as leader of the Burgundians in the 470s.¹³

To return to the subject of Childeric I, we know that he was a wealthy and powerful leader in part due to an archaeological discovery that happened in 1653 in the city of Tournai in western Belgium. This was the capital of the Salian Franks under Childeric I – again the Salian Franks were the northern band of Frankish tribes. And in Tornai in 1653, a stonemason doing repairs in a church discovered Childeric I’s tomb. Childeric, who had again died way back in 481, had been buried with a cache of gold and jewels. The discovery of this horde of treasure, though it was extracted and a couple of centuries later melted down, was an important milestone in French history. Childeric I’s grave goods, which were fortunately documented with meticulous illustrations before their destruction, conclusively proved that the Merovingian Dynasty’s founder was a leader with substantial financial resources. Hundreds of golden bees or cicadas were found in Childeric I’s tomb as decorations on the monarch’s cloak. And over 1,300 years after Childeric I died, when Napoleon decided he wanted to do away with the old fleur-de-lys of the Capetian monarchy, Napoleon decided he’d use golden bees, in the style of Childeric I’s golden bees, as symbolic of the ancient glory of the French monarchy.

So Childeric I died in 481, having had, according to Gregory of Tours, some dealings with two other important leaders during this catastrophic phase of the late western empire. The first of these leaders was the overlord of a short-lived rump state called the Kingdom of Soissons, with its center in the town of Parisius, or modern-day Paris. The second leader Gregory records Childeric I as having had dealings with was the barbarian king of Italy, Odoacer. Gregory tells us that Odoacer and Childeric I worked together to subdue another barbarian tribe that had invaded Odoacer’s new territory of Italy, which Odoacer had secured control of in 476 after deposing the final Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus.

Clovis’ Early Life in Gregory of Tours

When Childeric I died in 481, he left behind an heir. This heir was Clovis. Clovis, in the time of Gregory of Tours as well as ours today, was considered to be the founder of the Merovingian Dynasty. And while Clovis was the progenitor of the long line of monarchs who still held sway when Gregory of Tours was writing his history a century later, Clovis first appears in the Historia Francorum as quite a flawed hero. Clovis, Gregory tells us, marched over to the Kingdom of Soissons, defeated its decaying Roman regime on the battlefield, and then secured its monarch and executed him, expanding the kingdom of the Salian Franks westward. However, Clovis was at this time not a Catholic, and he saw Nicene churches as ripe for pillaging.

According to Gregory, Clovis’ early reign was marked by brutality, expansionism, and careful control over his troops. Clovis capped off his tenth year on the throne with a successful expedition into the territory of the Thuringians, a people who lived along the west bank of the Elbe in what is today Germany. The southern neighbors of the Franks at this juncture – say, 491 CE, were Burgundians, and out of a welter of Burgundian heirs, Clovis decided to marry a princess named Clotilde. And Princess Clotilde of the Burgundians proved quite an influential figure in European history.

In the evolving world of Clovis’ Gaul, there were Nicene Christians, or Catholics. Then there were Arians, these often being from barbarian backgrounds like the Visigoths or Burgundians. And then there were others – people who practiced traditional Roman religions, or indigenous religions from northern Europe, and so on. Clotilde was a Catholic. And when she and King Clovis had their first child in about 494, the baby was baptized as a Catholic. The boy unfortunately died in infancy.

Gregory of Tours narrates the early part of the royal marriage as a conversion narrative – pious Clotilde offers disquisitions on the correctness of Catholicism to her skeptical husband, and, in spite of the death of their first baptized child, and the illness of their second, Clovis eventually converted. In the Historia Francorum, the conversion is a battlefield conversion, like that of Constantine. Clovis was engaged in a military campaign against the Alamanni, a major barbarian tribe from the central part of modern-day Germany, and Gregory tells us up to this point,

Nothing [Clotilde] could [do could] persuade [Clovis] to accept Christianity. Finally war broke out against the Alamanni and in this conflict [Clovis] was forced by necessity to accept what he had refused of his own free will. It so turned out that when the two armies met on the battlefield there was great slaughter and the troops of Clovis were rapidly being annihilated. He raised his eyes to heaven when he saw this, felt compunction in his heart and was moved to tears. (II.30)

Clovis then prayed – again according to Gregory – that if the Catholic deity would help him win the battle, he would accept his wife’s religion. And straight away, the Alamanni fled, and their king was slaughtered. Clovis dashed home, and told his wife of how praying to her god had allowed him to smite his foes. And after this, according to Gregory, Clovis was baptized as a Catholic, along with 3,000 military men in his army.

However it actually happened, Clovis’ conversion was quite an important moment in European history – Gregory of Tours offers a dramatic baptism scene in which a decorated bishop performs the ceremony. In the early 490s, the territories of modern-day France and Germany might have swung Arian or Catholic or something else, and so considering the ultimate staying power of the Merovingian dynasty, their founder’s conversion to Catholicism is quite an important event to remember – it took place, according to tradition, on Christmas day of 508, though Gregory dates it substantially earlier – in the year 496, and we’ll discuss why a bit later in this show.¹⁴ As with other imperial and monarchical conversions in history, it’s possible that political machinations figured into Clovis’ decision to convert – there was likely much to be gained by allying with the powerful institution still headquartered in the old city of Rome. Whatever his motivations for converting were, right around the year 500, Clovis, King of the Salian Franks, became a Catholic in the twilight of his reign. This reign’s final years would not be peaceful ones. [music]

Clovis’ Later Life in the Historia Francorum

One of the first things Clovis did after his conversion was to help one of his uncles-in-law plot against the other. These two Burgundian rulers were Clovis’ neighbors to the south, and after a few hiccups, brother-in-law one, with whom Clovis had originally allied, ended up dying, and brother-in-law two ended up converting to Catholicism, after which relations between the Salian Franks and the Burgundians became stable once more.

It is at this point in the story that I need to introduce one of the key power players of Late Antiquity from about 500 to 700 CE. These power players are the Visigoths. The Visigoths were originally a barbarian tribe. As many of us know, the Visigoths came down out of what is today Hungary and Romania and into the Roman Empire in the late 300s. In the early 400s, under their famous leader Alaric I, they managed to sack the city of Rome in 410. By 410, like so many other barbarians, including the Franks, the Visigoths had widely adopted Roman cultural practices and Latin speech, and they had converted to Christianity, so they were more Roman than they were stinky dudes with battle axes. Their name, Visigoths, means “western Goths,” which is a little bit puzzling at first, as they came down out of Eastern Europe. The reason that they are called “Visigoths” is that after they sacked Rome, following their leader Alaric I’s death, they ended up migrating back up the Italian Peninsula, and then into southern France, setting up headquarters in Toulouse, and then spilling over the Pyrenees and into the Iberian Peninsula. The Visigoths are thus so named because they were over in the far west of Europe, ruling most of what is today Spain during the 500s and 600s, up until the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, which took place between 711 and 722. So, simply put, the Visigoths were the folks in the west, in Spain during the early Middle Ages.

Some time around 500, King Clovis also met with King Alaric II of the Visigoths. The Visigoths, in, say, 506, about a century after the earlier Alaric I’s famous sack of Rome, had come to control southwestern Gaul and the eastern two thirds of the Iberian Peninsula – quite a large swathe of territory. This meeting between the Visigothic King Alaric II, and the Frankish King Clovis a little after 500 was peaceful, and Clovis and Alaric II swore allegiance to one another. But King Clovis knew that his Visigothic neighbors were Arians, and this rankled the new convert. Thus, shortly after the diplomatic meeting, deciding that religious warfare was preferable to peaceful coexistence, Clovis marshalled his forces against the Visigoths. Gregory of Tours narrates the Frankish march westward across Gaul into Visigothic territory as a holy war, with a divinely assisted river crossing, and a magical pillar of fire witnessed in the distance. Eventually, near the city of Poitiers, in the year 507, the Franks under Clovis met the Visigoths under Alaric II. The ensuing battle, which we expect to be rather climactic from all the portentous miracles that lead up to it in Gregory’s book, was over quickly – the Visigoths fled, King Alaric II was killed, his son went to regroup in Spain, and the Franks under Clovis consequently expanded their landholdings in France all the way to Toulouse, Bordeaux and the feet of the Pyrenees. The battle was an important one, as it mostly erased the Visigothic presence in Gaul, and established Frankish control over the southwest of what we now call France.

This Frankish victory over the Visigoths in 507 had reverberations. The Byzantine Emperor Anastasius was pleased that nearly the entirety of Gaul was now stable under a single Catholic king, and Emperor Anastasius conferred a consulship onto King Clovis, whatever in the hell counted for in the year 508 – perhaps Clovis got a special headband. Clovis also, considering the recent expansion of the Frankish kingdom, moved the seat of his government to Paris. In Paris, Clovis continued efforts to bolster his power. As we’ve heard from time to time, Clovis was the King of the Salian Franks, there were other Frankish tribes. One of these again often gets called the Ripuarian Franks – their territory was traditionally the middle Rhine. Clovis convinced the son of the Ripuarian king to kill his father. Then, Clovis’ envoys killed the parricidal son with an ax to the head, just as the son showed off the father’s treasures. As Gregory writes, “This unworthy son thus shared the fate of his father” (2.40). Never mind, I suppose, the fact that the son was egged on by a powerful and ascendant rival king, who presently murdered him. Later, Clovis himself, confronting an assembly of Ripuarian Franks in one of their capitals, lied about what had happened, saying that the son had murdered the father according to his own whim, and then someone else had killed the son – um – Clovis had no idea, but the Ripuarian Franks might as well accept him, Clovis, as their king. However this happened, Gregory’s narration of the history sounds a little odd, through this deceitful maneuver, Clovis secured control over the Ripuarian Franks, afterward killing the leaders of the Salian Franks so as to rule over them, as well.

Even after all of this general butchery of rivals and potential rivals, Clovis singled out another foe within Frankish territory. This was a minor king called Ragnachar – according to Gregoy, a debauched warlord seated in the northeastern Gallic city of Cambrai. Clovis bribed some of Ragnachar’s allies with counterfeit gold, killed Ragnachar and his brother Ricchar, and then refused to give their betrayers real money, chastising them for accepting money for betraying their king. Later, Clovis murdered another brother of Ragnachar. And by way of concluding the bloody, tempestuous story told in Book 2, Gregory of Tours writes that “In the same way [Clovis] encompassed the death of many other kings and blood-relations of his whom he suspected of conspiring against his kingdom” (II.42). Clovis’ last recorded statement in the Historia Francorum is the aging king’s lamentation that he has no more relatives left to kill. The memorably ruthless monarch died, Gregory writes, after thirty years on the throne, at the age of 45. His wife Clotilde outlived him, spending her later years at the Abbey of Saint Martin in Tours, working to advance various Catholic construction projects and trying to lead a pious life as wars between her children quickly broke out. These wars will be the subject of the next part of Gregory’s book. [music]

The History of the Franks, Book 3

Book 3 of the History of the Franks takes us into the Merovingian Dynasty proper, telling us the story of Clovis’ male heirs – how they squabbled, and sometimes successfully worked together, and how kingship passed from Clovis’ sons to a third generation of heirs. Book 3 encompasses the timeframe between 511 and 548.

Let me say something upfront here, as we look at the first page of Book 3. When we study monarchical dynasties, we are confronted with challenges. First, there are the names. There’s Billy I, and then Billy the II and then, Billy II, Junior, and Billy Junior, and Billy Junior the II, and Billy III the II, and Billy Junior the II is often nicknamed Mr. Pumpkin, and Billy II Junior is often nicknamed Mr. Parsnip, and we get lost in far too many Billys, and their nicknames, so to speak. Some of the Billys are great, some of them are really bad people, some of them have lives that span multiple generations, and some bite the dust pretty quickly, and if you’re out there listening to history on headphones walking the dog or driving or hitting the gym, all of the Billys are going to blend together. Some of that may happen in this episode, so let me give you some advice upfront, as someone who also listens to history podcasts while jogging and making unprotected left turns. First, there is a diagram of all of the quote unquote Billies at the top of the present episode transcription available there in the podcast notes if you want it. Second, the early Merovingians aren’t too complicated, as far as medieval monarchical dynasties go – I hope you will be able to follow the power players, because I’m going to do my pedagogical best. Third, even if you don’t remember every succession dispute and fratricidal backstabbing that’s about to happen, you will remember the gist of the Merovingians, and moreover, how this dynasty was a flagship for so many others that followed in Europe after the 500s. So, let’s get started.

The Sons of Clovis: Theuderic, Chlodomer, Childebert I, and Chlothar I

Book 3 begins with a prefatory castigation on Gregory’s part of all non-Catholics. Then, Gregory begins the heart of his book. King Clovis had four surviving male heirs. At the time of his death in the year 511, these heirs would have been mostly in their teenage years, and one of them already had a child. These sons were Theuderic – that’s the one with the child, and then Chlodomer, Childebert I, and Chlothar I, who sometimes gets called Lothar. The four brothers had a sister named Clotilde – Clotilde shared her mother’s name. Sister Clotilde ended up marrying the Visigothic King Amalaric. Remember that at this point – 510 or 520 or thereabouts, the Visigoths controlled most of modern-day Spain, and the Franks most of modern-day France, and so this was a useful diplomatic marriage for the two kingdoms. As for the four boys, Theuderic, Chlodomer, Childebert I and Chlothar I, let’s learn about this first generation of Merovingian kings, and what happened to them.

The Frankish Empire from 481-814. Gregory of Tours was born in a new and radically changing Gaul. Map by Hel-hama.

The first major crisis the brothers weathered came from the north, when Danish invaders attacked by sea. Theuderic and his son Theudebert rebuffed their attack, however, and the Danish King was killed. Other problems soon flared up to the east. In Thuringia, or the east central part of modern-day Germany, strife broke out between the region’s two kings as a result of one of their wicked and scheming wives, and in Burgundy, a wicked and scheming stepmother prompted a king to murder his son. Burgundy was the homeland of Queen mother Clotilde – still alive at this point, and she gave her sons directives as to what to do about the situation down in Burgundy. Two of Queen mother Clotilde’s cousins were ruling in Burgundy at that point, one of whom had killed his son. And while Queen Clotilde’s motivations are very unclear in Gregory’s text, Clotilde dispatched one of her sons into Burgundy on a military mission.¹⁵ The son in question, Chlodomer, murdered his mother’s cousin – the one who’d killed his own son, along with this cousin’s family. Going all in in an effort to subdue Burgundy, as well, Queen mother Clotilde’s armies dispatched military forces into what is today eastern and southeastern France in pursuit of her cousin. Clovis’ son Chlodomer managed to scatter his cousin’s army, but in the process, Chlodomer was killed. This was Clovis’ eldest surviving son, and he died in 524. His death, while it was a steep price to pay, brought Burgundy temporarily to its knees, although its king – his name was Godomar and he was again the cousin of the first generation of Merovingians – the Burgundian king survived and after 524 was able to reassert himself in the kingdom of Burgundy.

The First of Many Family Murders

Soon thereafter, following a minor war with the kingdom of Thuringia in the east-central part of modern-day Germany, one of the surviving Merovingian heirs decided to kill his brother. In a very strange story, King Theuderic laid a trap for his brother, King Chlothar. King Theuderic hid assassins behind a tarp in King Chlothar’s courtyard. Chlothar, seeing the assassins’ feet sticking out from behind the tarp, went into his courtyard with the protection of his bodyguards. Theuderic, knowing that his plot to murder his brother was foiled, gave his brother Chlothar a nice silver dish. Then, regretting his offer of the gift, Theuderic sent his son Theudebert to get the dish back, and the young man retrieved the dish from his uncle. Sorry for trying to kill you, here’s a plate – hang on, give me the plate back. Someone had definitely raised these Merovingian kings to be good people.

Fortunately, not all of Clovis’ kids were so mean to one another. Another of his sons, Childebert, heard that his sister Clotilde, not to be confused with the Queen mother Clotilde, was being mistreated over in Visigothic Spain. Sister Clotilde was a Catholic, the Visigoths were Arians, and so she was having a hard time over there in present-day Spain. Brother Childebert went to rescue sister Clotilde. Her husband Amalaric, King of the Visigoths, was killed in the process, and poor sister Clotilde, though liberated from Visigothic Spain, died of illness on the way back to Frankish territory.

Frankish territory, around this time, had continued expanding. The Merovingians had been using Burgundy as a punching bag for a generation and a half, and in the early 530s, two Merovingian brothers Chlothar and Childebert invaded it once more and occupied it. Meanwhile, the third Merovingian brother Theuderic, whose territory was supposed to be in the northeast, stomped into the south-central part of modern-day France and started battering towns there – including our author Gregory’s hometown of Clermont-Ferrand. The territory of what was becoming Francia at this point was divided into an uneasy quartet of regions, with Theuderic holding ground up in the northeast, headquartered in Metz, Chlothar down in Aquitaine to the southwest, Childebert up in the northwest, ruling from Paris, and then the ailing Burgundian kingdom to the southeast. Chlodomer, who had once held control over the central west, was gone, though his offspring were technically in command of their father’s former region. Recent military campaigning, along with the intrinsic delicacy of the situation, led Theuderic, the northeast son, to sign a treaty with Childebert, the northwest son, and hostages and guarantees were exchanged to seal peace between them.

Unfortunately, greed and insecurity led to more infighting between the second generation of Merovingians. Childebert of the northwest, while his mom was visiting Paris, noticed that she was lavishing a lot of attention on the sons of the departed Chlodomer. Jealous Childebert, and his brother Chlothar gave their mother an ultimatum. The departed Chlodomer’s two surviving sons could either survive, and not ascend to their father’s throne. Or they could be murdered. The Queen mother Clotilde said she’d rather her grandsons be dead than to live the lives of commoners, and so Chlothar murdered his nephews, their attendants, and their tutors. The boys had been ages ten and seven. The children had a third brother, but he devoted himself to the church. Following the killings, Childebert and Chlothar divided the central eastern lands of their dead brother and his murdered sons between them. Old Queen Clotilde, understandably stricken by her children butchering her grandchildren, retired increasingly to the quiet and charitable work of a pious dowager. And as for the child-murdering Chlothar, his heirs – the four grandsons of King Clovis – would go on to be the most important Merovingian kings of the next generation.

Theuderic, Theudebert, and Childebert

Sticking with old King Clovis’ sons, rather than grandsons, for now, Clovis’ oldest son Theuderic, perhaps wincing at the murder of his nephews, worked to bolster the fortunes of one of his own kids, securing his son Theudebert a marriage with the princess of the Longobards, or Lombards, whose kingdom was seated in Northern Italy. With marriage came other responsibilities for young Theudebert, grandson of Clovis. All of the plotting and infighting up in Francia had led the Merovingian kings to neglect some of the Visigothic territories that their father Clovis had conquered. Theudebert, the son of Theuderic and grandson of Clovis, was dispatched to reclaim some territories to the southwest, and while down there, he became infatuated with a local woman and speedily impregnated her. Around this time – about 534, Theudebert received news that his father was dying. The young heir hurried up through Francia with his forces. He was intercepted by his uncle Childebert.

Childebert, rather than doing any violence to the young man, told Theudebert that he himself was childless, and he’d like to adopt his nephew as a son. Considerable gifts convinced young Theudebert that his uncle’s offer was genuine, and the adoption meant that Theudebert secured control over the whole northern block of Francia, his father’s capital in Metz, and his uncle and adopted father’s capital in Paris. Together, the two of them, for reasons that Gregory of Tours does not see fit to disclose, decided to make war on Uncle Chlothar down in Aquitaine. They marched their armies down into Chlothar’s territory and surrounded him in a forest, planning to kill him in the morning. Up in Tours, though, old Queen mother Clotilde wasn’t happy about the latest round of familial killings. She prayed for her son Chlothar to be spared, and sure enough, a major storm hobbled the efforts of the assailing armies, and peace was brokered. And so instead of trying to kill one another, the two surviving Merovingians of the first generation headed down into Spain in order to bully some Arian Visigoths, as they did from time to time.

Amalasuntha and Gregory of Tours’ Fable about Her

Gregory of Tours, at this point in the narrative, breaks off to treat us to a completely fictitious account of a certain barbarian-Roman hybrid woman named Amalasuntha, one of the most remarkable people from Late Antiquity. Let me tell you the real story of Amalasuntha, or sometimes Amalasuintha, first, because it’s worth knowing. In the early 490s, around the time old Clovis and Clotilde had been married, Clovis’ sister Audofleda had married Theoderic the Great, King of the Ostrogoths, whom we met in a previous episode on Boethius. Audofleda and Theoderic had a daughter, Amalasuntha. Amalasuntha was a bridge between the Latin and Gothic world of the Italian peninsula to the west, and the Greek world of Constantinople to the east – a trilingual intellectual who, like so many other Ostrogoths, was an Arian Christian. Christian and Gothic though she was, Amalasuntha was a Roman to the core, and more importantly, a capable stateswoman, and when her father Theoderic died in 526, Amalasuntha’s son (the Ostrogothic King Theoderic’s grandson, obviously), was enthroned at the age of 10. Amalasuntha, acting as a reagent for the youngster, wielded a lot of power in the court, and the Ostrogothic aristocracy of Italy was unhappy about it. Amalasuntha was at this point corresponding with the Roman emperor Justinian, and considering extricating herself from Italy altogether and joining the more refined and Roman world of Constantinople. Her son Athalaric died, making her Queen, and although she tried to install her cousin as Ostrogothic king and work alongside him, Amalasuntha never managed to make it to Constantinople. Instead, while taking a bath, she was murdered. Her death in the year 535 was one of the things that prompted the Byzantine Emperor Justinian to make war on the Goths in Italy for the next two decades. And that is the actual story of Amalasuntha. Here’s the one that Gregory of Tours tells us.

Gregory did not know that when the great Theoderic died, his wife, and Clovis’ sister Audofleda had already passed away a long time before. Gregory writes that upon Theoderic’s death, Amalasuntha, ignoring the advice of her mother, married a slave in secret. This slave husband was murdered, though, at Amalasuntha’s behest, and in revenge, Amalasuntha poisoned her mother. As a result, the Ostrogoths – in Gregory’s fable – enthroned a new king, who closed Amalasuntha in a bath house and steamed her to death. That’s Gregory’s account – a cosmopolitan stateswoman turns into a licentious and matricidal heretic. Gregory, bred by two centuries of Catholic theologians to roar with fury at anything Arian, pins Amalasuntha’s moral degeneration on the basis of her wayward faith. Now, let’s leave Amalasuntha behind, but stay focused on the Italian Peninsula, where she spent most of her life.

In the background of the Historia Francorum is something historians call the Byzantine-Gothic War of 535-554. If you know anything about the early history of the Byzantine Empire, you probably know that during the 530s, 540s, and 550s, the Byzantines under Justinian sought to do nothing less than reconquering the entire Mediterranean. The Byzantines swept up Vandal Africa between 533 and 534. Then, the Byzantines turned their attention north, where they fought barbarian armies, mostly in Italy, and most often led by Ostrogoths, for nearly twenty years. The victory that they eventually won was an anticlimax. After twenty years of war, Italy wasn’t much of a prize to win back, and after two centuries of population migrations, even after the reconquest, Italy was surrounded by barbarian foes. And that’s a very short introduction to the Byzantine-Gothic War of 535-554 – Gregory doesn’t provide it, but it’s good to know for readers of the Historia Francorum.

With the beginning of the Byzantine-Gothic War of 535-554, Frankish troops were bound to get involved at some point. This was, once again, a major war between the full military might of the Byzantine Empire, and the Ostrogothic populations at that point headquartered in Italy and around the Adriatic rim – not existentially threatening to the Frankish kingdom, but offering occasional opportunities for gainful alliances. The first Frankish involvement was during the summer of 539, when Clovis’ grandson Theudebert marched armies into northern Italy. Theudebert attacked Goths, but his forces suffered from a dysentery outbreak. Other than the fact that Theudebert had a fruitful reconciliation with a bishop, this is about the last we hear of Theudebert, who fell ill and died in the year 548. Gregory writes that Theudebert, grandson of Clovis, had ruled for fourteen years, and left his kingdom to his son, Theudebald, and with this dispatch, we move from Book 3 to Book 4 of the History of the Franks. [music]

The History of the Franks, Book 4

Clotilde’s Passing and the Rise of the Third Generation

Book 3 of Gregory’s history – the one we just finished – told of events between the death of Clovis in 511 and the death of his grandson Theudebert in 548. Book 4 – our present one – is about to focus on events between 548 and 575 – most importantly, the deaths of old Clovis’ two surviving sons, Childebert and Chlothar, and then the rise of Chlothar’s four heirs. As we descend more deeply into the story of this tangled and tumultuous dynasty, complete with more feuds between kingly brothers who share often similar or identical names with previous generations, with a full 400 pages of the Historia Francorum still ahead of us, you will be glad to hear that you’ve already met many of the story’s key figures. King Clovis, again on the throne from 481-511 is its most important character and the one to keep in mind, even if you remember no more than him. We’ve been through the story of Clovis’ sons already. Book 4 introduces us to Clovis’ grandsons, and the grandsons are really the heart of the Historia Francorum. These were kings whom Gregory of Tours knew. The most successful of Clovis’ grandsons, King Guntram, who would rule for a surprising 31 years, is introduced in Book 4 for the first time, and it is King Guntram and his brothers – the grandsons of Clovis, who are central subjects of this book, more than the sons, or Clovis himself. With that said, then, let’s see off the first full generation of Merovingians – Clovis’ kids, and then move forward to meet Clovis’ grandkids.

Old Queen Clotilde passed away in 544, being one of the few powerful women in the Historia Francorum whom Gregory describes in exclusively positive terms. Upon her death, her son Chlothar announced that the churches in Francia would now have to pay a third of their revenues to the crown. A prominent bishop, shocked at both the novelty of this policy and the volume of taxation, urged Chlothar to back down, and the king did. Chlothar, by this time, had sired a lot of sons – seven of them, by three different women, as well as a daughter. In an unusual arrangement, Chlothar married a pair of sisters named Ingund and Aregund, siring children with both of them.

Now, if you know early Byzantine history, you know that in the 540s, when Queen Clotilde died, and as the Frankish kingdom tumbled from Clovis’ sons to his grandsons, something else was happening. This something else was the Justinian Plague, the first outbreak of the Black Plague in Europe, that awful disease caused by the bacterium Yesinia Pestes, and spread by fleas and rats. I mentioned it before, but it’s worth mentioning again. The Justinian Plague was the defining experience of a generation of Byzantines. Byzantine metropolises and port cities were especially ravaged by it, and the plague was one of the main reasons the Byzantine re-conquest of Italy was such a drawn-out affair. The plague, as pandemics tend to, was concentrated more in urban areas, and so it’s possible that in the more decentered civilization of Francia, the disease didn’t have as devastating an effect as it did in Constantinople. Even so, it’s still surprising just how little the subject comes up in the Historia Francorum during Gregory’s narration of the 540s – Gregory mentions an outbreak around Arles, but only in order to tell a formulaic miracle story about a bishop praying and thereby saving his congregation from the pandemic.¹⁶

As for the Merovingians, their checkered history continued forward into the 550s. Clovis’ grandson Theudebald, the son of Theuderic, was evidently a cruel and dissipated person, and he died of complications from a stroke in 555. This meant that that the sons of Clovis’ son Chlothar were the only scions of the Merovingian founder left alive to rule. Chlothar thus had great power and great responsibility. Having inherited his brother Theudebald’s territories along the upper and middle Rhine, he had also inherited a border with the Saxons. The Saxons were, in the year 555, already immigrating to Britannia, but they were also seated in their ancestral land of what often gets called Old Saxony, a region in what is today north central Germany. According to Gregory, in a series of one-sided negotiations, the Saxons just wanted to have peace, and the Frankish King Chlothar wanted peace, but Chlothar’s Frankish troops wanted war, and so the unruly Frankish troops invaded Old Saxony with great losses on both sides, and nothing came of the conflict other than a restoration of the status quo.

With Chlothar busy, reluctantly fighting a war with the Saxons, Clothar’s seven sons began machinations against him, and one another. An attempt of one son to ally with Chlothar’s brother Childebert was ultimately unsuccessful, as old Childebert, the second-to-last of Clovis’ living sons, died in 558. This left only Chlothar alive. As Clovis’ sole surviving son, Chlothar’s first act was to fight a war in Brittany, then as now that rugged peninsula at the far northwest of France. This was a small territory that remained a client kingdom throughout the Merovingian period, and Chlothar’s armies beat those of the Bretons, Chlothar afterward killing the first of his seven sons for conspiring against him. A year later, Chlothar died, having repented his considerable transgressions at Saint Martin’s church in Tours.

This was the end of the first full generation of Merovingian kings. To zoom out for a quick moment and consider what we’ve read so far, Theuderic, Chlodomer, Childebert I, and Chlothar I, when you read their stories in Books 3-4 of the Historia Francorum, are generic figures, their stories told at breakneck speed, with Gregory only once or twice pausing to tell us about the monarchs themselves. There is a memorably chilling scene in which King Chlothar butchers his two nephews, aged seven and ten, along with their retinues. And there is a contrastingly gentle scene when young Theudebert, hurrying to his father’s deathbed, meets his uncle, King Childebert, who seeks to name Theudebert his heir. However, Theudebert dies pretty quickly afterward, and King Clothar, who killed his brother’s children, ends up having seven sons, being the only one of Clovis’ sons to pass royal heirs onto posterity. Clovis’ four sons, then, impress Gregory’s reader as little more than despots and warlords – ones perhaps kept slightly at bay by the vigilance of a Catholic clergy and the directives of an aging mother, but despots and warlords, nevertheless. So, let’s move on.

Clovis’ Grandsons: Charibert, Guntram, Chilperic, and Sigibert

The second generation of Merovingian kings, who rose to power in the 560s, were, once again, all the sons of King Chlothar. Their names were Charibert, Guntram, Chilperic, and Sigibert. As their fathers had been, they were immediately tested by pressure from foreign invaders, and as their fathers had, they schemed and plotted against one another straight away. Case and point, when Sigibert went to ward off a Hunnish invasion (successfully, by the way), his brother Chilperic dashed into his territories and began capturing cities there. A civil war broke out between the two, its center northeast of Paris. Sigibert won, securing a treaty with his brother Chilperic. As these two brothers fought a civil war, their brother Charibert was busy having sex – first with a wife named Ingoberg, then two servants named Marcovefa and Merofled, and later with a shepherd’s daughter called Theudechild. These infidelities produced marital strife, divorce, polygamy, and excommunication, but no male heirs that survived. The polygamous Charibert’s fourth wife Theudechild, for some reason, left him, bringing treasures to Charibert’s brother Guntram in an effort to marry him. Guntram lost interest in her, took her money, and left her in a nunnery, where, after one escape attempt, Gregory tells us, she lived miserably for the rest of her life.

As all this happened, King Sigibert gradually rose to prominence over his brothers. He had beaten the Huns. He had beaten his brother Chilperic in a civil war. And he was disgusted that his brothers were marrying servants and peasants. Sigibert himself sought a proper princess as a wife, and he found one in Spain. Her name was Brunhild, and she was the daughter of the Visigothic king. Brunhild would prove to be the mother and grandmother of future Merovingian kings – a survivor and fixture in the Merovingian world who would outlive Gregory of Tours himself by almost twenty years.

Brunhild and Fredegund

During much of her long life, Brunhild would also feud with her sister-in-law. Let’s meet this sister-in-law. Her name was Fredegund, and she was the wife of King Chilperic. King Chilperic, following the example of his sturdier brother Sigibert, also married a Visigothic princess. No matter that Chilperic was already married – or at least in a sexual relationship, with the aforementioned Fredegund. Chilperic set Fredegund aside, and he married a Visigothic Princess. This Visigothic Princess was Brunhild’s sister. The marriage was miserable. Brunhild’s sister ended up dying, Gregory suggests, due to murder. Afterward, Chilperic went right back to having sex with his previous wife Fredegund. And so the two Queens, Brunhild and Fredegund, who would be the mothers of the next generation of Merovingian kings, had ample reason to hate one another from the beginning. Their husbands had fought a civil war against one another, and Fredegund may have been involved in a murderous plot against Brunhild’s sister. Fredegund, for hundreds of pages to come, is going to be a villain, her dastardliness as astounding as her longevity.

Picking up the story again, Gregory tells us that in the year 566, the Huns once more tried to fight their way into Gaul. Using an army of necromancers, (yes, you heard that correctly, necromancers), the Huns were able to defeat the sturdy King Sigibert’s forces, and he only escaped with his life through bribery, after which Sigibert managed to secure peace with the Huns that lasted until his death a decade later. Then, Sigibert began a war against his brother Guntram. He was unsuccessful, but following the assault, Guntram sued for peace and the status quo was restored.

The third generation of Merovingian kings soon developed more marriages with the Visigothic royal family in Spain. Over in Constantinople, the emperor Justinian died in 565. In 567, the Merovingian King Charibert died, meaning that only three of old Clovis’ grandsons survived as kings. Squabbling broke out between the three of them, in spite of the advice of a council of bishops in Paris. It came to a head with two brothers, Chilperic and Guntram, siding against Sigibert. Guntram backed out, though, and then Chilperic, realizing that a full-scale civil war would come at a great cost, backed off, but then the next year Chilperic allied with Guntram once more. Although an actual battle was fought this time, and Chilperic’s son was killed, again Guntram backed out of the alliance, and again the feisty King Chilperic was compelled to flee. At this point, it was becoming clear that Sigibert was the most competent of Clovis’ kingly grandsons, and some of the envoys and nobles in his brother Chilperic’s territories said they would abandon the feisty and warmongering Chilperic, and swear loyalty to sturdier Sigibert. Sigibert was ready, now, to overthrow his perfidious brother. Ignoring the advice of a bishop, Sigibert led his army to where Chilperic was entrenched. But before Sigibert could attack, though, sturdy Sigibert was set on by assassins, and was killed. The assassins, we are told, came at the behest of the wicked Fredegund, the wife of Chilperic. Sigibert was forty years old, and had been a king for fourteen of them. His son, Childebert II, was to inherit his kingship at this volatile moment. [music]

The History of the Franks, Book 5

In Book 5 of the Historia Francorum, the pace of events changes. Books 1-4 have taken us through a century of Merovingian Kings – 475 up to 575. And Books 5-10 only cover sixteen more years, or 575-591. During these sixteen years of Merovingian history, Gregory of Tours was a bishop in the heart of Merovingian territory at the crossroads city of Tours – he’d been elevated to the position of Bishop of Tours in 573. And as he served as a bishop from 575-591, roughly between the ages of 37 and 53, Gregory was in a very good position to tell the story of Merovingian history as he witnessed it. The remaining books of the Historia Francorum, much more granular and specific than the earlier ones, contain more eyewitness details than the earlier ones, because it was during these years that Gregory was often a part of the history that he chose to set down. The remaining books zoom in on a somewhat smaller and more manageable cast of regal characters, and due to the narrowed focus and Gregory’s own participation in key events, the second half of the History of the Franks is the portion of the book that gets taken a bit more seriously by historians. So, let’s jump right in.

Book 5 of Gregory’s History begins with a melancholy tone. He tells us, in the Penguin Thorpe translation, “It gives me no pleasure to write of all the different civil wars which afflicted the Frankish people and their rulers. . .The Franks ought, indeed, to have been warned by the sad fate of their earlier kings, who, through their inability ever to agree with each other, were killed by their enemies” (5.1). In Gregory’s estimation, old Clovis had conquered much of Gaul with a dearth of wealth and resources, while his grandsons and great-grandsons lived in luxury and engaged in fruitless wars with each other, in the process squandering some of their great inheritance.

The story of Book 5 picks up in earnest with the death of good King Sigibert. Sigibert had married the Visigothic princess Brunhild, and with Queen Brunhild, he had sired a boy. This boy’s name was Childebert II, and at the time of his father Sigibert’s death, he was only five years old. In spite of his youth, he was crowned king on Christmas of 575. But Queen mother Brunhild and young Childebert II did not get to enjoy any peace. Little Childebert II’s uncle Chilperic, and Chilperic’s wife Fredegund were likely behind the assassination of little Childebert II’s father, King Sigibert. Uncle Chilperic, when little Childebert II began his reign, hurried into Paris, banished Queen Brunhild, and imprisoned her daughters. Afterward, uncle Chilperic proceeded further with his assault on his dead brother’s territory and family. He sent his son, Merovech, to attack the cities of Poitiers, and then Tours. Prince Merovech pressed his attacks on the dead Sigibert’s territories, eventually coming to the city of Rouen, where Queen Brunhild had been exiled. And then, rather unexpectedly, Prince Merovech then married his aunt, Queen Brunhild. Merovech’s dad, the rampaging King Chilperic, was not happy about this, but he seemed willing to tolerate it for the present. King Chilperic swatted down a rebellion of some noblemen in his own land, and one of the new noblemen who came to power – his name was Rauching – was a particularly awful person.

Violence and Vice in the Merovingian 570s

Rauching, Gregory tells us in a little inset narrative, liked to torture his slaves over dinner by forcing them to burn their legs with candles. When two of Rauching’s servants married one another, he was incensed, but pretended to be perfectly fine with it. The young couple had sought sanctuary in a church, and Rauching went to talk to the priest there. The priest said Rauching could have his servants back, but only if he promised to not separate them. Rauching promised he wouldn’t do so, and, true to his word, when he got them back to his estate, he buried them alive. The young husband survived, but the young wife died. And that is the inset narrative of the sadistic nobleman Rauching, who lived near Soissons.

Unscrupulous noblemen weren’t the only destabilizing force in Francia in the late 570s. Some churchmen, as it turned out, were also behaving wickedly. The Bishop of Nantes, whose name was Felix, Gregory tells us, wanted some church land that was in Gregory’s see. He accused Gregory’s brother of murdering this brother’s bishop, and in order to set the record straight, Gregory offers us the actual story of how his brother had died, a convoluted three-page narrative that eventually reveals Gregory’s brother Peter was murdered by a bereaved bishop’s son who thought that Peter had killed his father. After setting the record straight about his brother, Gregory indulges himself in a few pages of miracle stories, and some antisemitic anecdotes. In one, a blind archdeacon had his sight miraculously restored through the magic of Saint Martin’s church. Afterward, though, the archdeacon went to a Jewish physician for follow-up treatment, and, following his treatment, he became blind again, which leads Gregory to conclude, “what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial?” (5.6).

Another narrative in Book 5 related to Jewish people chronicles a mass conversion that happened in Clermont-Ferrand, again Gregory’s hometown. A Jewish man there converted to Christianity, but, angry at his defection, one of his Jewish acquaintances dumped foul oil all over him. Later, the Catholics of Clermont-Ferrand smashed the city’s synagogue down to its foundations. Much of the Jewish population of the city – 500 of them, according to Gregory – afterward knelt before the city’s bishop. Gregory tells us that “the whole company of Jews lay prostrate before him, begging for baptism” (5.11). After this, the Jews converted to Christianity, with a few outliers remaining unconverted and opting instead to head down to Marseilles.

The Crisis with Merovech

Returning to his main subject – Merovingian kings, of course, Gregory tells us of the deeds of the volatile Chilperic’s sons – these are Clovis’ great grandsons, and none of them ever became king. One of these sons was the aforementioned Merovech – the youngster who’d married his aunt. This marriage, as it turned out, had been a bad move for Merovech. Merovech’s father Chilperic was probably mad at Merovech because Merovech had married Brunhild, the royal Visigothic wife of the well-liked King Childebert, and Chilperic didn’t like the idea of his son marrying his former sister-in-law. Around this juncture in the book, Chilperic, the grandson of Clovis and father of Merovech, emerges more and more as a central villain in the Historia Francorum – in the next book, Chilperic will be described as “the Nero and Herod of our time” (6.46), and Chilperic’s wife Fredegund, emerges as equally violent and vindictive.

This conflict between father and son directly affected our author Gregory of Tours. In the year 577, young Merovech stormed into Gregory’s church and demanded communion and sanctuary there. Gregory was hesitant, but to keep the peace, he allowed Merovech communion and sanctuary. But King Chilperic was angry at Gregory for having offered sanctuary to Chilperic’s son Merovech. In 577, volatile King Childebert marshalled troops to attack Gregory’s diocese. It was an extremely touchy situation for Gregory of Tours. On one hand, Gregory had ecclesiastical obligations to offer sanctuary to the vulnerable. On the other hand, Gregory had a vengeful king rampaging the communities under his care. Gregory decided that his sacred obligations to canon law trumped everything, and so he kept the vulnerable young Merovech sheltered. King Chilperic, enraged that he couldn’t punish his son, made a punitive attack on Tours afterward, taking the unthinkable step of burning and ravaging Saint Martin’s church and relics.

While this chaos was unfolding, over in the middle of modern-day Germany, a war broke out between the Saxons and their neighboring Swabians. And more strife arose as a result of Francia’s barbarian next-door neighbors. Over in Brittany, which was in the late 570s a client kingdom controlled by a chieftains whom Gregory sometimes calls counts, a small war broke out, as well. Some more positive events, though, occurred in the mid-570s, as well. The promising King Sigibert had been murdered back in 575, leaving behind his wife Brunhild and a 5-year-old heir. This child’s name was Childebert II, and in the year 577, his uncle Guntram said he would like to adopt Childebert II and share territories with his young nephew. The two agreed to do so, which was at least decent news for the troubled world of Francia under the grandsons and great-grandsons of Clovis. King Guntram, whom as I mentioned would eventually rule for 31 years, is the most important Merovingian monarch in Gregory’s book, other than Clovis, though we haven’t heard much about King Guntram yet.

Chilperic’s Ongoing Troublemaking

Unfortunately, in spite of the union fostered between King Guntram and his adopted heir, King Childebert II, Guntram’s brother, the volatile Chilperic, continued to cause tumult. Chilperic believed that the Bishop of Rouen, whose name was Praetextatus, was dead set against him, and angry Chilperic had assembled a sort of ecclesiastical kangaroo court to confront Praetextatus. Praetextatus was the guy who had performed the wedding when Chilperic’s estranged son Merovech had wed his own aunt Brunhild. The specific accusation that the volatile King Chilperic had against Bishop Praetextatus was that Praetextatus had accepted a huge payment from Brunhild in order to perform the wedding. In reality, Praetextatus did have a bunch of Brunhild’s money, but he had it because she’d left it with him for safekeeping, rather than in payment for services rendered. Gregory himself figured into the negotiations of the trial. Through a combination of wheedling, threats, and attempted bribery, King Chilperic and his wife Fredegund tried to get Gregory of Tours to turn on his colleague, the Bishop Praetextatus. Gregory’s resolution was to stick to canon law and let God sort out the rest. As for Praetextatus, he ended up acting on some sketchy legal advice.

This sketchy legal advice came from two bishops who were loyal, secretly or otherwise, to King Chilperic. These two – Gregory calls them “sycophants” (5.18) advised Praetextatus to admit his guilt to Chilperic, and then throw himself at the mercy of the king, who – the sycophants alleged – was a merciful person. Praetextatus did so, but, unsurprisingly, King Chilperic did not pardon him and give him a clean slate. Praetextatus was humiliated and imprisoned, and then later exiled.

This whole affair of Praetextatus’ trial had taken place because Chilperic was still furious at his son Merovech, since Merovech had married his aunt Brunhild. And as of 578, Merovech was still out there, evading his father’s forces. Eventually, though, young Merovech ran out of luck near Rheims. Young Merovech had a servant kill him, so that he wouldn’t fall into his father and stepmother’s hands. When Chilperic and Fredegund’s forces found Merovech dead, they exacted grisly retribution on those who had been with Merovech, torturing these servants to death.

As the Merovingians continued their ancestral traditions of savagely killing one another in Francia, over in far off Constantinople, there was a regime change in the autumn of 578. Justinian the Great had died back in 565, and his nephew Justin II had succeeded him for a perfectly decent thirteen-year reign, dying of natural causes after a decline due, most likely, from dementia. Next on Constantinople’s throne was the emperor Tiberius II – a man who only ruled for four years, but about whom Gregory has very kind words. Tiberius, who ruled in Constantinople from 578-582, was a Catholic ruler and very generous with the poor. Gregory offers a couple of genuinely charming stories about Tiberius. Once, due to a miracle, and on another occasion, due to a generous donation, the Emperor Tiberius happened upon hundreds of thousands of pounds of gold, which Tiberius afterward gave to the needy.

Bad Bishops and Dastardly Dukes

Less generous in the late 570s were a pair of bishops named Salonis and Sagittarius. This pair had dioceses in the far southwest of modern-day France, in the rugged country southwest of Grenoble, and Gregory tells us that “They were no sooner raised to the episcopate than their new power went to their heads: with a sort of insane fury they began to disgrace themselves in peculation, physical assaults, murders, adultery and every crime in the calendar” (5.19). While the two wicked bishops were put on trial for their crimes, and reprimanded by Pope John III, afterward they hurried right back to their wicked ways, only stopped when the Frankish king of their region demanded their permanent imprisonment and isolation. However, the two corrupt bishops Salonis and Sagittarius were eventually released, and, predictably, they returned to their malfeasances. Their moral behavior was so abhorrent that at last the two were stripped of their bishoprics, and in 579, they disappeared from the Frankish ecclesiastical world.

Gregory briefly offers the story of two feuding dukes – Dragolen and Guntram Boso, in which Guntram killed Dragolen with a pike to the throat. I should note that the noblemen of the Historia Francorum are a nearly constant presence, some of them, like Dragolen, figuring into brief stories, and others, like Guntram Boso, showing up again and again and again. The quarrel between these two noblemen was a small thing in comparison to a sequence of events that unfolded in King Chilperic’s territories in 578 or 579. At this juncture, volatile Chilperic instituted a massive tax hike – one so severe that a tax collector was nearly killed in a protest. The protest failed, however, and Chilperic made the rebels pay punitive fines on top of their higher taxes. And while the last years of the 570s scraped through Francia with continued chaos at the monarchical level, in the year 580, the average citizen living under Merovingian rule had more still to contend with. Natural disasters ravaged Merovingian territories – first rain and flooding, especially of the Loire and Rhône, and then later, centered in Bordeaux, an earthquake. One can believe Gregory when he reports boulders tumbling down from the Pyrenees as a result of the quake, but when he alleges that spontaneous fires erupted in Orleans and in the suburbs around Bordeaux, and that blood gushed out of a broken loaf of bread in Chartres, one suspects that Gregory of Tours might have read a bit too much apocalyptic literature. Anecdotal accounts of natural disasters, mixed together with stories about supernatural phenomena, fill the later books of the Historia Francorum. In them, Francia is seemingly always plagued by floods, or earthquakes, in addition to rains of blood, spooky lights in the sky, and that kind of thing.

Ongoing Crises: Plague, Filicide, and Wicked Noblemen

In August of 580, in an already hard year, Gregory reports that a dysentery epidemic ravaged Gaul, though the symptoms he describes – pustulant tumors in particular, sound more like those of the bubonic plague that had torn through the urban Byzantine world four decades earlier. The family of the volatile King Chilperic was directly impacted, and the normally impenitent queen Fredegund, according to Gregory, felt extremely compunctious for all of the family’s greed and evil doings as she saw her young sons on death’s door. Gregory even invents a long and penitent monologue for her, the fruits of which were the royal couple’s decision to annul the harsh taxes they had recently instituted. The penitence of the queen and king, however, could not save their youngest children, who both passed away from the epidemic. Another Merovingian casualty of this 580 epidemic was King Guntram’s wife, who, just as wicked as several other powerful women in the Historia Francorum, took the bizarre and cruel step of ordering all of her doctors to be murdered after she died. Following the reports of these high-profile casualties, Gregory mentions several others, including a wicked count from the southwest of France.

Different troubles than these plagued Visigothic Spain in 580. The Arian regime there, helmed by a wicked widowed queen named Athanagild, had begun preying on Catholics, including a Merovingian princess who had married into the Visigothic royal line. This princess had convinced her husband to convert to Catholicism from Arianism, but the conversion ended up alienating him from his father and resulting in his exile.

Parents warring with and/or murdering children seemed quite the thing to do in the Christian world of sixth-century France and Spain, because soon the volatile King Chilperic, grandson of Clovis, decided to kill his own son, whose name also happened to be Clovis. (Remember that Chilperic had already managed to wipe out his other son Merovech – this was the second son Chilperic was going after.) Little Clovis II was excited that his brothers had died in the recent epidemic, because it meant that their kingdoms would fall to him. An animosity broke out between Clovis II and his stepmother, Queen Fredegund, who became convinced that Clovis II had been instrumental to her children’s deaths. Queen Fredegund believed that one of her servants was in love with Clovis II, and that this servant’s mother had been casting spells, and so she tortured them until they confessed, and although the confessions were doubtless just desperate measures taken to curtail physical agony, Queen Fredegund believed she had her evidence. She had Clovis II apprehended, and soon Clovis II had been murdered in prison – Gregory of Tours says it may have been Clovis II’s stepmother Fredegund who ordered the deed done, or King Chilperic. Clovis, II’s family was then murdered, excepting a sister who was put in a nunnery, and the poor servant girl who’d confessed to plotting against Queen Fredegund was burned alive.

While all of this was going on, Gregory of Tours himself had a visitor. The visitor in question was a man named Agilan, an Arian by faith and an envoy of the Visigothic King. And right in the middle of the events of Book 5, Gregory offers us a long, pedantic, Arian versus Catholic debate scene, in which he, Gregory, is naturally correct, and his argumentative adversary, Agilan the Arian, is not. In this debate, Agilan pointed out a moment in the Gospels at which Jesus described himself as the son of God and a lesser being than Yahweh (John 14:28), thus supporting Agilan’s Arianism. Then Gregory engaged in some interpretative acrobatics in order to countermand a literal meaning of the passage. The two theologians butted heads for four pages in a point-counterpoint that might be fairly interesting for historians of the Arian schism, but for the rest of us, is rather unappealing with its vicious and inflexible hairsplitting, up until Gregory simply insulted his Arian rival, and then informs us that the man grew sick when he returned to Spain, eventually converting to Catholicism there.

Now, in addition to the Merovingian Kings who are the main subject of Gregory’s book, the Historia Francorum has quite a few noblemen – mainly Counts and Dukes – peopling its pages. One of these is Count Leudast of Tours, a nobleman with whom, as a bishop, Gregory had a troubled relationship. Gregory reports that once, Count Leudast tried to slander him to King Chilperic, but Chilperic didn’t believe any of it. And Gregory then closes Book 5 with a long catalog of the misdeeds of Count Leudast of Tours. Gregory describes Count Leudast of Tours as lowborn, impious, and greedy – a man who rose to power by ingratiating a Merovingian Queen whom he thereafter stole from. Leudast was as unscrupulous as they came, and on several occasions, he escaped punishment by the skin of his teeth, according to Gregory. When Count Leudast of Tours plotted against Bishop Gregory of Tours, he created a legally complicated situation – one in which nobles, and churchmen, and the monarch Chilperic himself had to figure out how to proceed so as to not set any awful precedents. The accusations were serious – Count Leudast of Tours had alleged that Gregory was plotting against Queen Fredegund. But in the end, due to Gregory’s solid reputation, and many testifying that it was silly to think that Gregory would do such a thing, Gregory was allowed to make a sworn statement and perform Mass afterward. Gregory, perhaps more of a pragmatist than he often lets on, writes that “These conditions were contrary to the canons, but I fulfilled them out of consideration for the King’s feelings” (5.49). Eventually, though, a larger conspiracy came to light – Gregory was stricken to discover that churchmen had joined Count Leudast in plotting against him. The story of the conspiracy which ends Book 5 concludes with an anticlimax – Count Leudast escaped punishment again and again, and while Gregory had held onto his position in Tours, Merovingian history grinded onward as usual. It’s worth noting that Clovis had become king in 481, exactly a century before the year 581, the year with which Gregory of Tours closes Book 5 and opens Book 6, an excellent stopping point in the narrative for our purposes in today’s show.

Analysis: The Historical Accuracy of Gregory of Tours’ Historia Francorum

So that takes us precisely halfway through Gregory’s History of the Franks. You’ve heard enough thus far to understand a lot of the heft of Gregory’s most famous book – it’s the tale of a feuding dynasty, told with the occasional demonstrable inaccuracy and widespread poetic license, of Merovingian brothers, uncles, and nephews scheming against one another, with each generation also plagued with a helping of wicked wives and stepmothers, while on the sidelines a mostly beneficent Catholic clergy distracts Gregory into mini-hagiographies, miracle stories, theological debates, and tall tales about supernatural portents. We’ll talk a lot about Gregory’s style – especially in the episode to come, once we’ve finished the book. For now, I think that the most practical thing for us to do is to address what we might call the elephant in the room of Gregory of Tours. And this elephant is the question of how much of what we read in the Historia Francorum is accurate.

To even ask this question, we need to first consider the importance of Gregory’s book. For its size, its scope, and the wealth of its details, the History of the Franks is an anomaly within Late Antiquity. It is a large historical tome concerning events absolutely central to French, Belgian, and German history, over a stretch of decades about which we have very little other specific written information. The Historia Francorum is so long and detailed that for centuries, it’s been a resource for historians not only of France and Germany, but also of neighboring regions Gregory deals with in passing – Visigothic Spain, Italy under the Lombards, and even, for a brief sequence to come in Book 10, in which some Merovingian envoys get waylaid in Byzantine Carthage, for North Africa. We do not have, in other words, a comparably hefty history of any other region of post-Roman Europe, with the exception of the works of Procopius and his successor Agathias in the Byzantine east.¹⁷ The only other exception is the scholar and statesman Cassiodorus, roughly a contemporary of Gregory who lived in Ostrogothic Italy. Cassiodorus, around 530, completed a multivolume history of the Goths, but the text only survives in small fragments.¹⁸ Several other works of history existed by Gregory’s time, and he uses and quotes from them fairly extensively in Book 2, but these other works of history have otherwise been lost.¹⁹ Thus, Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks, because it is an oasis in a desert of historical information, is a book central to studies of the early Middle Ages. And the text’s accuracy, accordingly, is an important subject to consider, even to us nonspecialists who are just passing through.

There are two main biases that usually get considered in the Historia Francorum. The first is that its author is a moneyed Catholic bishop, and understandably a partisan on all religious subjects. The second is more complicated. As we read Gregory’s book, meeting so many kings, queens, bishops, counts, and dukes, it is with the undeniable sense that we’re not hearing the entire story. Some characters act with pure, unmotivated malice. Others appear consistently beneficent for reasons unknown. Some events which we would expect to be of tremendous importance to Merovingian history are speedily passed through, while at other moments, internecine scandals between nobles and fairly minor churchmen get copious treatment. And so the second main bias that readers often consider in Gregory’s famous book, either in sections or as a whole, is whether or not the History of the Franks had political motivations. In the violent world of Merovingian Gaul, and we’ll see it get worse next time, but anyway, in the brutal decades of the 570s and 580s, Gregory of Tours knew he had to watch himself. Though his pedigree and position insulated him from open assassination, some tactical considerations must have gone into what he wrote, and did not write in his history. Historian Alexander Murry describes Gregory aptly as “an apprehensive, expedient politician. . .looking over his shoulder, fearful that the wrong people might get a look at his thoughts and tailoring his narrative to the momentary political situation.”²⁰ So those, then, are the two main biases which often get considered when scholars look closely at the History of the Franks – the book’s thorough and undisguised Catholic partisanship on one hand, and then its subtler and more inscrutable political bent on the other.

When Clovis Actually Converted: The Anti-Arian Bias of Gregory of Tours

Let’s talk for a moment about Gregory’s thoroughgoing pro-Catholic tilt in the History of the Franks. It comes as no surprise, of course, that a dedicated Catholic bishop would take up staunchly pro-Catholic positions throughout his long book. You don’t open a box of Wheaties and expect to find Frosted Flakes. I want to quote a passage from Gregory for you from Book 2 of the History of the Franks – a passage that’s one of the first things Gregory offers us in regard to the Franks. After briefly introducing the Goths and the Burgundians, Gregory writes of the Franks that:

This particular race of people seems always to have followed idolatrous practices, for they did not recognize the true God. They fashioned idols for themselves out of the creatures of the woodlands and the waters, out of birds and beasts: these they worshipped in the place of God, and to these they made their sacrifices. If only the inner recesses of their hearts could have been moved by that awe-inspiring Voice which spoke to the people through Moses. (2.10)

Gregory’s perspective here is what we’d expect. Romans had long written of the backwardness of barbarian cultures. When Rome bit the dust, its Christian scions, often with barbarian blood themselves, replaced the superciliousness of the old Roman intelligentsia with the sanctimoniousness of the devoutly religious in regard to unconverted foreigners.

We hardly open Gregory’s book, then, expecting some anthropologically evenhanded respect for pre-Christian Frankish culture. But as we move through the remainder of Book 2, we do expect some basic accuracy about Childeric I and his son Clovis, accuracy which, on one key point, at least, may not be there. This point has to do with which religion the earliest Merovingians practiced prior to Clovis’ conversion, and when this conversion actually took place.

In the story that Gregory tells, King Clovis, a blood splattered pagan warlord from the Salian north, butchers foes and family members alike in a brisk and cryptic avalanche of conquests that eventually leads to a consolidated Francia under Catholic rule. Francia expands a bit, later in Gregory’s text, but it’s Clovis who emerges from the death knell of the Roman west – from a generation of barbarian-legionary crossbreeds – to establish the kingdom. Clovis then marries goodly Catholic queen Clotilde, and, mesmerized by her devoutness and her trinitarian Christology, dutifully converts in the year 496. After 496 in Gregory’s book, he is a Catholic, his campaigns, in particular, against the Visigoths having religious justification behind them. And as to the accuracy of these foundational events in the History of the Franks, historian Roger Collins writes “It is clear that Gregory’s information relating to that period is both slight in quantity and was handled by him in a selective and ideologically motivated way.”²¹

To be clear, Clovis’ conversion to Catholicism was one of the most consequential events of the sixth century, so it’s worth considering the nitty gritty of just this one event for a moment. Modern historians have most often dated Clovis’ conversion to Christmas day of 508. And modern historians have reason to suppose that Clovis converted from Arianism to Catholicism, rather than from paganism to Catholicism. A correspondence exists, dated to 486, between two bishops from Vienne and Reims, and in one of its surviving letters, addressed from Bishop Remigius of Reims to Clovis himself, the latter appears to have already been a Christian before he ever met Clotilde.²² None of this is to say that Clovis did not convert to Catholicism at some point. But Gregory may have antedated this conversion in order to lend an air of religious manifest destiny to the monarch’s early confrontations with the Visigoths in what is now the southwest of France. And Gregory also ignores Clovis and his father Childeric’s likely backgrounds as Arian Christians. For Gregory, writing in pre-Islamic Europe, Arianism was the most formidable of all of Catholicism’s theological boogeymen, and so it makes sense that he would elide the Merovingian founders’ Arian backgrounds, if he knew about those backgrounds at all. So, to repeat, there is an obvious, and natural partisanship in Gregory’s theological bias, and this bias impacts the way that he sets down the conversion of Clovis. Gregory also had a political bias, and one which we can see halfway through the book if we look just a little deeper.

In describing the lives and times of Childeric and Clovis, Gregory does his best to narrate highly complex events that took place a century prior, serving up the story with a Catholic bias, but also a healthy helping of other historians who’d come before him. As I mentioned there are extensive quotations in Book 2 from now-lost works by prior historians of Gaul. But when Gregory gets closer to his own times, telling the stories of Clovis’ children and then grandchildren, he seems vastly more interested in some Merovingian kings than others, overlooking the achievements of some, magnifying the faults of others, and more than anything focusing his attention on events that impacted his bishopric in Tours, his hometown of Clermont-Ferrand, and moreover the west-central part of modern-day France.

Theudebert and Gregory of Tours’ Political Tiptoeing

Now, we’re already a couple of hours into this program, and your brain may already be filled to capacity with the tangled world of the Merovingian dynasty, but to give you your money’s worth, here, I want to talk for just a moment about two important narrative decisions that Gregory of Tours makes in his book. The first has to do with King Theudebert. King Theudebert, in the words of historian Roger Collins, was “undoubtedly the greatest of the Frankish kings of the sixth century.”²³ I am guessing, though, that after listening to this show, that you don’t remember Theudebert. He is treated quiet quickly in the Historia Francorum. We learn that he helped his father ward off a Saxon invasion, that Theudebert married a Lombard princess, Theudebert enjoyed an unexpected alliance with his Uncle Childebert, and then, in 539, Theudebert led an unsuccessful invasion into northern Italy before eventually dying in 548. He appears at first glance as just another face in the Merovingian crowd in Gregory’s book. The question is that if modern historians see Theudebert as such an important king, then what is Gregory not telling us about him, and why isn’t he telling it?

Theudebert was the oldest son of Clovis’ oldest son. Had Clovis not divided his kingdom into four, and had his oldest son Theuderic, and Theuderic’s heir Theudebert had full control over the kingdom, Francia’s sixth-century history might have been far smoother and more prosperous. Theudebert seems to have been a farsighted leader like Clovis himself. Theudebert, before and after his father Theuderic’s death, secured control of the Rhineland frontier. His territories were in the eastern marchlands where Saxons and Thuringians were making incursions into Frankish territory, and by the time of Theudebert’s death in 548, these marchlands were stable. Theudebert had also, rather than warring with his brothers, extended Frankish territory down to the southeast, into northern Italy, creating a stable borderland that stretched from the mouth of the Rhône just west of Marseille, through a corridor of northeastern Italy and all the way up to the center of what is today the Netherlands.

Theudebert, again the oldest son of Clovis’ oldest son, who gets only brief coverage in Gregory’s book, was the first monarch in the west to begin minting gold coins. He created a Frankish solidus modeled on Byzantine coins, stamping his name where the emperor’s normally went. He appeared in many ways to model his career on that of his older contemporary Theoderic the Great, expecting to be taken seriously as protector of his own realm, a potential ally, and a formidable foe for the Byzantines. When Theudebert marched armies into the Byzantine-Gothic warzone in 539, he attacked Ostrogoths and Byzantines alike, though, as we learn at the close of Book 3, a dysentery outbreak curtailed military efforts there. When Theudebert died, his 13-year-old son Theudebald ascended to the throne. Theudebald’s forces could not maintain the southeastern frontier his father had carved out in Italy, and he died at twenty, his lands passing to his father’s uncle Chlothar. Afterward, Francia’s eastern borderlands would not see such steady rule for a long time, and the departed Theudebert’s cousins who would be the next Merovingian kings spent more time fighting one another than they did expanding Frankish territory abroad.

Theudebert’s cousins, though, were the people ruling when Gregory of Tours was writing the Historia Francorum. And these cousins – especially King Guntram, King Chilperic, and their nephew Childebert II, may not have been pleased at a work of history that glorified the bygone victories of Theudebert and his father Theuderic. One reason for this may have had to do with lineage. Theuderic was Clovis’ oldest son. But this oldest son was also the son of a concubine, and not the son of Clovis and Clotilde, and every other Merovingian king came from that original union of Clovis and Clotilde. Additionally, Theudebert’s father Theuderic had made at least one assassination attempt on the life of Chlothar, through whom all subsequent Merovingian kings descended, and Theuderic had also at one point invaded Gregory’s hometown of Clermont-Ferrand around the time Gregory himself was born. Gregory of Tours, then, had many reasons to sideline Theudebert, some political, and some personal. And Gregory also may simply not have known about the importance of Theudebert’s campaigns along the eastern border. Discussing international affairs, and moreover exploring the larger geopolitical implications of contemporary history were definitely not Gregory’s strong points as a writer.

Warmongers, Peacekeepers, and the Historia Francorum

One of the things that Greogory can do as a writer, though, is create memorable villains, and this takes us to the second and final point I want to make about the selectiveness of his Merovingian history. If there is an archvillain in the History of the Franks, other than perhaps Arianism or Judaism, it is Fredegund, the third wife of the volatile Chilperic, who, in the five books to come, will emerge as indefatigably malevolent. There are other villains in Gregory’s story – King Chilperic himself is no picnic, but Chilperic’s wife Fredegund, book after book, is bent on assassination, provocation, and vengeance. There are plenty of reasons why we can guess this to be the case, not the least of which is that Gregory’s allegiances appear to lie closer to steady old King Guntram than to Guntram’s vicious sister-in-law. But rather than trying to sort out all the specific reasons Gregory had to dislike Fredegund, I think I think we can see a very simple rule, throughout the History of the Franks, that Gregory uses to evaluate the goodness or wickedness of the many figures that people it. Gregory cares, most of all, about whether or not people disturb the peace. Perhaps his most pervasive bias is against agitators and firebrands, and against those who don’t weigh the long-term public costs against their short-term personal gains. As a bishop, he was actually responsible for the care and wellbeing of people in his diocese. He was not, like the Roman proconsuls of old, sucking tax revenue out of an administrative unit with icy indifference to the human cost there. He was a Gallic Christian, responsible for, and talking to, and providing alms for other Gallic Christians, and concerned with the history and happiness of his local world.

When we consider the sheer complexity of this world, it’s easy to cut Gregory some slack for his omissions and imprecisions as a historian. The Roman ship of state had wrecked, and flotsam and jetsam were swirling around with bewildering speed, and the old historiographical template of Rome versus the world was an anachronism. Gaul, by the year 500, when the Merovingians had wrested military control of the northeast, was not a single administrative unit the way that Italy still was by this late period. By 500, Gaul had come apart over the course of a full century, and thus there was no simple means for a bureaucracy, political or religious, to flip a toggle switch and begin a new period of tax-funded leadership. Gregory was dealing with a baffling world, and he had little in the way of an exemplar to follow as a chronicler of such a place and time. He wrote the most about what he cared about the most – the Loire Valley, his hometown to its southeast, and the busy churchmen who worked there. And while the Historia Francorum ultimately does provide a lot of history in the classical sense of geopolitics and international affairs, the idiosyncrasies of Gregory’s book, and the narrator we meet therein, with all of their peculiarities, are just as valuable. [music]

Moving on to Books 6-10 of the Historia Francorum

Well, I want to frank you – or thank you – couldn’t resist – for your interest in this part of Late Antique history. Gregory’s History of the Franks, and the historical accuracy of the History of the Franks, are not ideal topics for an audio show, and if I’ve left you rather bewildered, there’s once again a Merovingian dynastic diagram and a map of Frankish territories front and center on this episode’s transcription available, as usual in your podcast app. The early Merovingians are a tangled thicket to wander into if you’ve never met them before, and if you’re wrapping up this show still unable to recall your Childeberts from your Childerics from your Chilperics, don’t worry – I, and literally any other human being alive would be, as well.

Both times I’ve read Gregory’s book, the experience has been the same. It is a slow immersion into a world of many, many details, rather than a magisterial record of cause and effect. It has an accumulative effect, like the realist novels of Balzac and Flaubert would long after Gregory passed away. The dozens of kings and dukes and counts and bishops in the Historia Francorum build, as you read, into a dense aggregate of information, and even if you don’t remember who said what, and when, you still walk away with a surprisingly rich portrait of early Merovingian life – not only due to the characters in the painting, but also due to the painter himself.

In our next episode, we will wrap up this long book and really sink down into the 580s, in the process, becoming acquainted with Clovis’ grandchildren and their children. The nice thing about Books 6-10 of the Historia Francorum is that they cover a smaller cast of characters, a more contained set of events, and by the time we get to them, we know Gregory’s style and predilections pretty well, and aren’t as surprised when he gallivants off for a few pages to tell a tale about an enchanted relic or an especially kickass priest. Reading Gregory’s works has sometimes been considered, in one historian’s description, “a tedious occupation at best,” but as we’ll consider a bit more extensively next time, his desultory style also has a certain charm – a charm that started being taken more seriously over the course of critical reevaluations during the mid-twentieth century.²⁴

There’s a quiz on this show in your podcast app – feel free to cheat on it and use that dynastic diagram on the episode transcription to review what you’ve learned. For you Patreon supporters, I’ve recorded Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Necklace,” published in 1884. It’s one of the most famous short stories in nineteenth-century literature, and since we’ve been hanging on in France all day and your host loves French literature, I thought I’d send one your way. For everyone, there’s a song coming up. If you want to hear it, stick around, and if not, I’ll see you next time.

Still listening? I got to thinking about the Medieval world and the Classical world, and how they have traditionally been periodized. And I thought that in this program, in a lot of ways really the first program on the Middle Ages in our show, that it was time to ask a question. The question is, which was better – Greco-Roman Antiquity, or the Middle Ages? Needless to say, this is a silly question, but still one that inspired me to write and record the following song, in which two groups of singers debate the merits of the Classical period, and the merits of the Medieval period. The following tune is called “Medassical Times” – I hope you like it, and Gregory and I will be back soon to wrap up the Historia Francorum.

[“Medassical Times” Song]

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