Episode 106: Gregory of Tours, Part 2

Merovingian History and Books 6-10 of the Historia Francorum

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 106: Gregory of Tours, Part Two. In this episode we will read the second half of the History of the Franks, a chronicle of some of the earliest kings of what is today France, written by bishop Gregory of Tours and completed around 591. Books 6-10 of this foundational work of medieval history tell us all about the third generation of Merovingian kings – not Clovis, nor Clovis’ sons, but Clovis’ grandsons, and eventually their heirs, as well. And while the first five books of the History of the Franks – the ones we read last time – rocket through centuries and centuries of history, in the final five, Gregory spends an incredible 350 pages chronicling the events of just ten years – the decade between 581 and 591.

During this decade, Gregory himself had become a fixture of the Frankish world. A wealthy churchman from a family of wealthy churchmen, as the bishop of Tours, Gregory found himself squarely in the middle of various Merovingian intrigues and squabbles for power. His bishopric was at one of the main junctions of the Merovingian world, and it held the church and relics of the great Saint Martin, attracting goodly pilgrims and reprobate refugees and criminals alike over the course of Gregory’s career. During the years between 581 and 591, Gregory observed some of the worst, and the best, of human nature. The many heinous acts of violence in Gregory’s book have left posterity with a somber picture of sixth-century Gaul – a picture of a place where the powerful used torture, mutilation and murder readily for personal advancement, and servants and peasants were especially vulnerable to the ready brutality of kings, queens and nobles. At the same time, though, Gregory shows us a world in which an intelligent and literate clergy could, and often did step in to arbitrate with the aristocracy in order to bring peace and stability to a fraught civilization. As a churchman and middleweight politician, then, Gregory of Tours was well-positioned to offer eyewitness history to posterity, and he does so in a vivid, meandering, episodic style distinct from many of the more detached and impersonal classical historians who preceded him.

The Historia Francorum, to use its Latin title, is thus one of the most important works of Late Antiquity. But as we learned last time, it’s also a dense, meandering, and difficult book. Gregory expects not only a geographical familiarity with dozens and dozens of named places in post-Roman Gaul. He also wields a large cast of characters that includes seventeen Merovingian kings and a number of queens, and a sizable array of named dukes, counts, bishops, priests, nuns, prioresses, saints, and foreign leaders, as well. In the hundreds of short episodes that fill the text, we might read a paragraph about a scheming queen, then a page long miracle story, then a paragraph about the weather that year, then a short account of a dissipated duke, then a half a page on two kings feuding, and another section of the same length on another king’s campaigns abroad in one of a dozen different theaters of war, and then a section about Gregory himself. We might charitably call the book’s style spontaneous, and less charitably call it erratic and undisciplined – a fragmentary record of an already turbulent time. But whether we give Gregory’s style a thumbs up or a thumbs down, his book is one that any newcomer to the early Middle Ages must read. At its outset, we are in Gaul after the fall of the Roman west, where several leagues of barbarian-Roman hybrids are salvaging territory and booty out of the ashes of collapsed provincial administrations. At its end, we are in a Medieval kingdom, complete with an indigenous landed gentry and various evolving partnerships between church and state – a world where Latin is growing rusty, news from abroad comes slowly or not at all, and the Byzantine empire is mostly an irrelevant tangle of far-off Greeks.

So let’s begin by doing a bit of review. I know we read the last five books in the previous show, but because Merovingian history is so complex, and Gregory’s organization often doesn’t make it any easier, a quick jaunt through the most salient points in Frankish history so far should really help us jump back into Book 6 in the year 581. [music]

Review

From Clovis to His Grandsons

The Merovingian dynasty – the main subject of Gregory’s book, began in the 470s in the western part of modern-day Belgium, through the efforts of a northern Frankish warlord named Childeric. When Childeric died in 481, he passed his kingdom down to his son Clovis. Clovis, who ruled from 481-511, was the founder of the Merovingian dynasty. In addition to cutting his way westward and seizing control of territories around Paris and Reims all the way to Brittany, later in his career, Clovis marched down into the southwestern territory of Aquitaine, seizing this territory from Visigothic rivals all the way to Bordeaux and Toulouse. Clovis also punched eastward over the Rhine and conquered a large section of what is today south-central Germany. A capable and ruthless warlord, Clovis is just as famous for having converted to Catholicism, under the influence of his wife Clotilde, an event that took place some time between 496 and 508 – sources conflict on the exact date of the conversion, as we discussed last time.

When Clovis died in 511, he made the exceedingly questionable decision of passing his hard-won territory not to his oldest son Theuderic, but instead, to all four of his sons. The doings of these four sons took up much of what we read in the previous program. Theuderic, and his brothers Chlodomer, Childebert, and Chlothar crossed swords with foreign enemies and with one another, their ruthlessness and the intrinsic dangers of their positions trimming the Merovingian family tree with numerous casualties. By the year 555, only the sons of King Chlothar survived, and by the year 581, where we’re about to pick up, only two of these sons remained. These two sons, along with their nephew through a dead brother, are the main characters of what we’re going to read today. The second half of the History of the Franks focuses on just three kings – a nephew, and his two uncles. The nephew is portrayed fairly positively. One of the uncles is also portrayed positively. And the other uncle is portrayed quite negatively. So let’s meet these three Merovingian kings – two grandsons of Clovis, and then one great grandson. The decent uncle’s name is Guntram. The bad uncle’s name is Chilperic. And the overall decent nephew is Childebert II.

Guntram, Chilperic, and Childeric II

Let’s start with the decent uncle, Guntram. King Guntram began his reign out of the city of Orleans in 561, and ended up ruling all the way until 592, his 31 years on the throne being the second longest of any Merovingian king in the 500s – second only to that of his father Chlothar.¹ Gregory of Tours calls Guntram “good King Guntram” at one point. And compared to some of his male relatives, Guntram was indeed a pretty upstanding guy. However, Guntram was also a Merovingian king, a group not distinguished by their compassionate or virtuous self-conduct.² We will hear much about Guntram from Gregory himself, but for now, the thing to keep in mind is that in the story you’re about to hear, Guntram is about to form allegiances and break allegiances with his nephew Childebert II and his brother Chilperic. Guntram, although he’s no thoroughgoing model of righteous behavior, eventually ended up doing more to stabilize Francia than to destabilize it. Guntram was also a steady patron of the church, and so in Gregory’s estimation, and by sixth-century Merovingian standards, Guntram was a good king. So we’ll remember that Guntram, whose name starts with “G” is loosely the good guy in the saga we’re about to go through. So that’s the good uncle, Guntram.

Then, there is the bad uncle, Chilperic. By the time we open Book 6 of the History of the Franks to the year 581, Chilperic and his good brother Guntram have already had a tempestuous past. From the time they rose to the throne twenty years before with their two other brothers, now deceased, Chilperic has generally been a force of destabilization in Francia, from the beginning aggressively pursuing more power and more territory. As we open the Historia Francorum to Book 6, there are two important things to remember about the bad uncle, Chilperic. The first is that by the year 581, Chilperic is married to Queen Fredegund. If there is an arch-villain in Gregory’s History of the Franks, it is Fredegund, a scheming, vicious, jealous queen who brings out the worst in her husband, and after his death, continues her plotting – a sort of unkillable Lady Macbeth, or endlessly vengeful Hera. The second thing to remember about Chilperic other than his wife Fredegund is that he had a long feud with his now departed brother Sigibert. The details are complicated, but the backstory is that Chilperic and Sigibert, already not fond of one another, ended up marrying Visigothic sisters named Galswintha and Brunhild. Chilperic, however, got tired of his Visigothic bride, and he may have had her killed so as to free himself up to marry his mistress, the aforementioned maniac Fredegund. This killing deepened the rift between Chilperic and his brother Sigibert, and Sigibert attacked Chilperic’s kingdom, and appeared positioned to execute his vicious troublemaker of a brother. But then, Sigibert was assassinated at the behest of Chilperic’s wife Fredegund. And that is the back story of the bad king Chilperic, still alive and kicking in the year 581 at the outset of Book 6. It is also, conveniently, the back story of our third main character for today, the nephew, Childebert II.

Childebert II was the son of King Sigibert, whom the bad uncle King Chilperic, together with the diabolical Queen Fredegund, assassinated. Childebert II ascended to the throne at only five years old, but he had help from his mother Brunhild and a capable court, and he ended up being successful in spite of a nasty feud with his uncle Chilperic and aunt Fredegund, who had killed his father and his mother’s sister. The names Childebert and Chilperic are inconveniently similar, so let’s just remember that the first five letters of Childebert’s name are “child,” and he came to the throne as a child, and Chilperic’s name contains the syllable “per,” and Chilperic was of Childebert’s parents’ age – Childebert, child, Chilperic, parent. So that is the back story behind good uncle Guntram, bad uncle Chilperic, and decent nephew Childebert, all of them kings in the year 581, at the outset of Book 6 of the Historia Francorum. There are tons of other characters, with the evil Queen Fredegund and the author Gregory of Tours himself foremost among them, but the heart of the story I’m about to recount is about two uncles, a nephew, and a whole lot of bad blood between them.

As we discussed last time, Gregory of Tours has his biases and distinct interests, and so every paragraph of the complex history that he offers us is up for discussion. And also as we discussed last time, Gregory’s narration is episodic and discursive. He never stays on one subject for long, but meanders back and forth between monarchical and military history, and then anecdotes about local happenings, more in the manner of a diarist, or collector rather than a systematic chronicler of transnational cause and effect.

The five books that I am about to summarize to you, in my opinion, constitute some of the most unintentionally funny historical writing ever set down by humankind – a weird achievement, but nonetheless an unforgettable one. Although I am deeply sympathetic to the privations faced by the inhabitants of what is today France during the sixth century, Gregory’s book is such a carnival of murder, miracles, moralizing, and madness that I hope you’ll join me in giggling about it from time to time. I’ve tried to write this summary in a way that, for good or for ill, is true to Gregory’s style, and at the end of the show, we’ll talk in detail about this style and how the Historia Francorum has been read over the centuries. But for now, let’s wrap up the book itself. Unless otherwise noted, I’m using the 1974 Lewis Thorpe translation, published by Penguin Classics. [music]

The History of the Franks, Book 6

Book 6 of the Historia Francorum picks up in the year 581 and takes us to 584. In this book, as I just mentioned, we encounter the volatile Chilperic, husband of the scheming Queen Fredegund, and one of Clovis’ two living grandsons. We meet good King Guntram, the other of Clovis’ two living grandsons. And we meet the child king Childebert II, great-grandson of Clovis, and ward of his mother, Queen Brunhild, the widow of the dead king Sigibert. And Childebert II, though only about eleven years old at this juncture, in the opening pages of Book 6, begins to carry on the Merovingian family tradition of scheming and backstabbing one’s family members. Little Childebert II’s machinations began by turning his allegiances from his uncle Guntram to his other uncle, the volatile Chilperic, in spite of the nasty history between them. This was a big deal, because uncle Guntram and uncle Chilperic were at war in 581. Chilperic, in 581, had just sealed an alliance with the Byzantine emperor Tiberius II.

Miscellaneous Happenings

After this alliance was sealed, Gregory of Tours himself was in an audience with King Chilperic. In Chilperic’s service was a Jewish man who worked as a purchasing agent for the king, and Gregory and the Jewish man began debating about whose religion was the one true religion. This is one of those excursions that Gregory takes us on from time to time. The Jewish man saying that God had no need of a son, and that the idea of God being born from a human being and then suffering corporeal punishment and dying was incomprehensible. Gregory then recounts their subsequent debate, in which his opening remark to his opponent was “Just as we read that. . .old David slew Goliath, so will I pierce you with your own sword” (6.5). Picking through various Prophetic Book references to a coming messiah figure, Gregory wrapped up his argument, but the Jewish believer, not placing any stock in the Catholic doctrines of innate depravity, indicated that the idea that one third of God would settle itself into a fleshy body to be killed for no demonstrable purpose did not make sense to him. Gregory then wraps up his tale of his argument with the Jewish man with the words, “Despite all my arguments, this wretched Jew felt no remorse and showed no sign of believing me” (6.5).

Following this debate scene, Gregory tells us about how an ascetic holy man who lived near Nice predicted a Lombard invasion. The Lombards (these were a barbarian kingdom whose rule was anchored in northern Italy) then invaded. When they attacked the holy man, however, one of them spontaneously converted and the others lost their nerve. Later, the holy man also miraculously cured a dying parishioner, and exorcised three demons from a possessed woman. This ascetic holy man – his name was Hospicius, passed away, as did a learned bishop near Avignon, a reclusive worker of miracles from Angoulême, and a bishop from Le Mans. These normal passings were sad enough for their respective Catholic communities, but in Tours, something less ordinary happened. Thieves broke into Saint Martin’s church, and the saint, who is a sort of demigod figure in the pages of the Historia Francorum, caused them to lose control and later be apprehended. Gregory, knowing that Saint Martin himself always sought leniency for criminals, convinced King Chilperic to spare the lives of the thieves.

Chilperic’s leniency toward the criminals was an exception to the general rule of his ruthless power mongering. An incident involving a governor scheming against a bishop down in Marseilles ended up working to Chilperic’s advantage, because it estranged Chilperic’s nephew Childebert from Chilperic’s brother, Guntram. Chilperic had recently allied with his nephew, the eleven-year-old Childebert, against Chilperic’s brother Guntram, and Chilperic had some of his leading dukes march armies into Guntram’s territory and start conquering there.

The year passed from 581-582. The feuding grandsons of Clovis, King Guntram and King Chilperic, had each been on the throne for 21 years, and their nephew, the now twelve-year-old Childeric, had been ruling for seven. In January of 582, throughout Francia, torrential downpours gave way to unseasonable blooms in vegetation, after which there were strange lights in the sky, and in Paris, Gregory writes, it rained blood. There was a lunar eclipse, blood once again flowed from broken bread, wild wolves broke into the walls of Bordeaux, and another earthquake happened, as well. Also in 582, Gregory reports what sounds like another wave of the Bubonic Plague – especially around the city of Narbonne. The plague struck Felix, the bishop of Nantes, who gets mentioned fairly often in Gregory’s book, and the bishop died at the age of 70, being replaced by an appointee of the king.

Speaking of King Chilperic, the monarch that year ordered the forced baptism of an unspecified number of Jewish believers. Many of them underwent the ritual and continued to go to the synagogue and honor their old traditions. One Jewish man, Phatyr, who had genuinely converted, was incensed that his friend Priscus was still holding to the old Jewish ways. The Christian convert murdered the Jewish Priscus and his companions, and then took refuge in a church, along with his mob of murderous Christian converts. Eventually, all of the Christian mob who had murdered Priscus was killed. That’s the whole story, by the way, and a particularly good example of Gregory trailing off and jumping to a new narrative subject, which is as follows.

Chilperic and Guntram

King Chilperic’s volatile relationship with his brother Guntram continued through 582. Guntram attacked some of Chilperic’s fortifications near Paris, but the two made peace, with Chilperic leveling new taxes against the areas he’d annexed from Guntram. And as this brittle political situation tumbled into the year 583, more strange omens were seen. Gregory reports that in Tours, a gigantic fireball fell from the sky, but then disappeared behind a cloud, and the Seine and Marne around Paris rose in another great flood. Among the strange phenomena to transpire in 582 and 583 was that the volatile King Chilperic had a son, whom he had baptized on Easter of the year 583. King Chilperic at that point was also working on a diplomatic marriage between his daughter and a Visigothic prince – the Merovingians and Visigoths had been reasonably successful with peacekeeping via diplomatic marriages, but the Visigothic prince in question was away on a campaign at this point.

Other international events also had a ripple effect in the Frankish world. The Byzantine Emperor Tiberius II died – Gregory has had only positive things to say about Tiberius II, who had ruled from 574-582. Tiberius II and his wife picked out their reliable general Maurice as a successor, and betrothed Maurice to their daughter Constantina. Maurice, who would end up being the last member of the Justinian dynasty that had spanned Constantinople’s sixth century, would be on the throne from 582-602, outliving Gregory of Tours himself.

As the Byzantines enjoyed a smooth transition of power over to the east, in the west, in the year 583, the Merovingians fell into a full-scale civil war. If you’ll remember, the youthful Childebert had allied with his uncle Chilperic. Both of them decided in 583 that it was time to make a move against Guntram, Chilperic’s brother and Childebert’s other uncle. With no small amount of casualties, plundering and chaos, Guntram and Chilperic’s armies clashed, but in the end, the two perennially feuding brothers made peace. Even so, retreating armies looted and vandalized central Francia seemingly to no end, and an outbreak of disease also caused the deaths of a great deal of livestock.

Nobles, Queens, and Churchmen

Also in the year 583, Count Leudast returned to the city of Tours. Count Leudast was that nobleman whom we met at the end of the previous book – the guy who had it in for Gregory of Tours himself. Clever and wheedling, Leudast was able to talk his way back into the city of Tours. However, King Chilperic and Queen Fredegund remembered the count’s connivances. Count Leudast was first wounded, and then captured and allowed to heal. The reason that the count was allowed to heal, though, was so that King Chilperic could have him tortured to death properly. The torture proceeded at length, until the scheming count had his throat crushed with a block of wood.

The grim year of 583 passed into 584, with uneasy peace once again secured between the two grandsons of Clovis and their nephew. Another dynastic marriage between the Merovingians and Visigoths was sealed, but just as Chilperic successfully secured a marriage arrangement between his daughter and a Visigothic prince, his newborn son died. Chilperic’s wife Fredegund was heartbroken, then angry, and then in search of vengeance. Her wrath fell upon a prefect named Mummolus. Mummolus allegedly had a special herb that cured whatever disease had killed Fredegund’s baby son, but he had not offered it up to the baby. Fredegund went berserk at the news. She started torturing Parisian housewives who knew the prefect Mummolus, and under pain of torture, they admitted to being witches who’d killed the infant prince in order to protect Mummolus. Fredegund decapitated some, burned others alive, and broke others to pieces on a torture wheel. Then, she went after for Mummolus. The prefect was hung upside down, stretched on a rack, whipped and he had splinters driven under his fingernails and toenails. His life was spared, but he died soon thereafter.

Elsewhere, churchmen continued to serve out their tenures, some peacefully, and some not so. An abbot was seized by a count, beheaded, and tossed into a river. Ugly leadership squabbles followed the death of a different churchman – a respected bishop. After a different bishop passed away and wealthy men tried to bribe the king to influence who the next bishop would be, King Guntram refused their bribes and went with a man who had been the general clerical choice to begin with.

Now, as a narrator, Gregory never hesitates to treat us to debate scenes in which he, a Catholic with a correct Christological schema, triumphs over argumentative opponents – he’s already included scenes like this with Arians and a Jewish believer that we just heard. Toward the end of Book 6, where we are now, Gregory includes such a debate scene between himself and a Visigothic Catholic with a slightly different liturgical practice. In the scene, the two churchmen quibble over correct formulary. It isn’t long in this debate before Gregory is gnashing his teeth and calling the other man a heretic to his face due to disagreements on some of the finer points of Pauline theology, and the debate proves fruitless, the Visigothic envoy going to meet with King Chilperic, which had been his original intention.

Speaking of Chilperic, this volatile grandson of Clovis had yet another son in the year 584 – a boy who would be the only one of Chilperic’s five sons to survive to be a Merovingian king. Chilperic, that same year, invaded the Lombards, made war on them, and eventually reached a peace settlement. This peace settlement was disappointing to the Emperor Maurice over in Constantinople, who had given Chilperic a vast sum of gold with the understanding that Chilperic would expunge the Italian peninsula of Lombards. Chilperic, never one to stick to promises, refused to return the gold.

Once promise that Chilperic did stick to was marrying his daughter to a Visigothic prince. The time came for the young princess bride to depart, which necessitated many of her servants going along with her, along with a gigantic dowry. Some of her retinue, during the journey west to Spain, stole parts of the dowry and escaped, dashing off to various places in Francia. Meanwhile, either unperturbed or simply unaware, King Chilperic went out hunting. King Chilperic was in the midst of getting off of his horse, in the twilight of one evening in 584, when a lone assassin drove a knife into his armpit, and then into his stomach, and, in Gregory’s words, “that was the end of this wicked man” (6.46).

After narrating the death of Chilperic, Gregory enumerates the king’s considerable vices. Chilperic, Gregory writes, had destroyed and burned districts of Francia remorselessly. Chilperic had filled bishoprics with favorites and lackeys, rather than qualified churchmen. Chilperic had been a glutton. He had written terrible poetry and hymns. He’d dishonored the decrees of his father, the son of Clovis. And thus, in Gregory’s words, Chilperic was “the Nero and Herod of our time, [and] [w]hen his time came to die, he died deserted by all” (6.46). Chilperic was survived by one newborn male heir and his malevolent widow, Queen Fredegund. What happened next takes us into Book 7. [music]

The History of the Franks, Book 7

Book 7 of the Historia Francorum is exclusively devoted to the year 584, and the aftermath of King Chilperic’s death. After Chilperic died, his wife Fredegund served as regent for their newborn son, Chlothar II. As fragile as little baby Chlothar’s position was in the year 584, he would actually come of age, assume one of the Merovingian thrones, and eventually be the sole Merovingian monarch from 613 until his death in 629, although Gregory, who passed away in 594, did not know any of this. To return to the year 584, then, as Queen Fredegund watched over baby Chlothar II, another of Clovis’ great-grandsons was celebrating his 14th birthday – this was Childebert II, who’d been ruling with his mother Brunhild’s help since 575. And Childebert’s uncle, King Guntram, was also still alive and kicking.

Gregory of Tours doesn’t start Book 7 with the Merovingians, though. Ever-inclined to little narrative excursions related to churchmen, Gregory opens the year 584 with the story of a reclusive ascetic. This ascetic name was Salvius, and after a long and selfless career, he passed away. Except that Salvius didn’t pass away – he actually came back to life on his own bier, and, having seen the world beyond, he offered everyone present at his funeral a description of the afterlife, and then, melancholy that he had come back to life, he returned to his role as an ascetic hermit, and eventually became a bishop.

Guntram, Childebert II, and Gundovald

While this miraculous occurrence in 584 heralded a divine presence in Francia, other events showed humanity going about its tumultuous business as usual. Factional violence broke out around Poitiers and Orleans. The bereaved queen Fredegund sought sanctuary in a cathedral in Paris, sending word to her brother-in-law King Guntram that Chilperic was gone, and that she vowed loyalty to Guntram. Chilperic’s death, to some extent, relieved Francia of one of its most erratic and violent leaders. But Chilperic’s death also brought to the surface bad blood between those Merovingian relatives who survived him. Most notably, 14-year-old Childeric and his uncle Guntram had no love lost between them, as Childeric had once allied with the dead Chilperic against uncle Guntram. Young Childeric also detested his aunt Fredegund, whom he believed had been responsible for the death of another of his aunts, and his father, and two of his cousins, as well. As for king Guntram, now the oldest of the Merovingians, Guntram told everyone that, aging and lacking a male heir, his goal was now to make sure his two nephews came of age to rule as kings. And, fortunately for Merovingian history, this was a resolution that good King Guntram seems to have stuck with.

Now, this moment – again 584 – marked a power vacuum for the Merovingians. They had one full-fledged king, one fourteen-year-old king, and one newborn who would be king, and the adult King Guntram and the 14-year-old King Childebert were, at that moment, distinctly at odds with one another. And into this power vacuum stepped a man named Gundovald, a usurper who wanted to try and break off a piece of Merovingian pie for himself. Backed by powerful dukes, Gundovald’s forces took Poitiers and Toulouse, and stomped into the district around Limoges, all in the southwest part of modern-day France. Gregory’s own see around Tours was in the warpath of the usurper, and so Gregory and his associates faced another very difficult dilemma. Some, as the crisis unfolded, wanted the powerbrokers of Gregory’s region to be loyal to the 14-year-old Childebert. Others expected loyalty to the older and more experienced Guntram.

Meanwhile, Queen Fredegund was still hiding out with her newborn son in a Parisian cathedral. Queen Fredegund learned that a nasty wrong had been done to her daughter. This daughter, the Merovingian princess bride who had been headed with her dowry to wed a Visigothic prince, had been robbed. Hearing of the robbery, Queen Fredegund was furious. Not long after this, she sent an assassin to go and kill her sister-in-law Brunhild, but the assassin was uncovered and made to confess, and then sent back to Queen Fredegund. She chopped off the assassin’s hands and feet due to his failure.

Part of Queen Fredegund’s ire at this point was that she didn’t know who was responsible for her husband Chilperic’s death. Fredegund suspected that a treasurer named Eberulf had been behind the deed. And Gregory of Tours himself had the unique displeasure of offering sanctuary to this treasurer and possible assassin. Eberulf, according to Gregory, was a rude, vicious, profligate person who planned to kill as many churchmen of Tours as he could if he ever lost his safe harbor in the church there, and Gregory tells us he’ll reveal what happened to Eberulf later.

Eventually, the roiling mess of Francia in 584 – Merovingian rulers with increasingly irreconcilable feuds, for one, for two, the usurper Gundovald having seized cities down by the Pyrenees, and for three, what feels like increasingly brutal and dishonest behavior in each scene that Gregory writes – eventually, 584 came to a climax, and King Guntram marshalled together an army to deal with the usurper Gundovald down by Pyrenees in the southwest. The usurper Gundovald scrambled. The usurper Gundovald tried to secure oaths of loyalty from cities in the southwest that had been loyal to young King Childebert. Gundovald’s claim to regnal power was his assertion that he was one of the sons of Clovis’ son Chlothar, and thus a grandson of the great king Clovis, just like his main rival, King Guntram.

As two power blocs gradually bunched around King Guntram and Gundovald the usurper, our author Gregory of Tours was still offering sanctuary to the repugnant treasurer Eberulf, who was possibly behind King Chilperic’s assassination the year prior. King Guntram sent an assassin against his dead brother’s killer Eberulf, and in a long and brutal scene, both Eberulf and his assassin died, spilling blood all over Saint Martin’s church in Tours, much to poor Gregory’s disconcertion.

The Rebellion at Comminges

Down in the southwest, the usurper Gundovald was looking for anyone who would rally to his cause. A bishop in Bordeaux decided to join Gundovald’s uprising, telling the usurper that there was a magical relic – a saint’s thumb bone – that could help Gundovald win battles. Gundovald wanted this talisman, and he sent some of his aristocratic henchmen after it, but in the process of recovering the thumb bone, it broke into several pieces. Undaunted by this saintly thumbs down, Gundovald experienced another failure in 584. He sent messengers to negotiate with the legitimate Merovingian King Guntram. Rather than honoring their status as emissaries, Guntram tortured them, and under pain of torture, they revealed one of Gundovald’s ugly secrets. This secret was that Gundovald had been behind the theft of the Merovingian princess’ dowry, and that Merovingian princess was King Guntram’s niece, who’d gone to marry a Visigothic prince.

In old King Guntram’s mind at that moment, this was an emergency beyond compare, and a fight for survival for the Merovingian kings. He summoned his now 14-year-old nephew Childeric to him. The two had had their differences, but in 584, formally and in front of an assembly, King Guntram, grandson of Clovis, named his nephew Childeric, the great-grandson of Clovis, as his sole heir, and the man who would inherit his power and all of his cities. A celebration was held to honor the new political solidarity. And the new political solidarity was bad news for the usurper Gundovald.

Gundovald holed up in Bordeaux, first, and then Comminges, a region south of Toulouse in the foothills of the Pyrenees. The usurper was intrepid but outmatched – he had money that he had stolen, and troops, but not the clout or military might of the newly consolidated Merovingians. The actual Merovingians, however, were also no model military force. King Guntram and King Childeric advanced, some of their forces, unfortunately, looting a large church on the way to Gundovald’s location, and, Gregory tells us, suffering burns and demonic possessions as a result. Even when the Merovingian army set out their military camp in Comminges, near where the usurper Gundovald had secured a position, many Merovingian soldiers wandered off to loot and were killed by locals who just wanted to defend their homes. We will come back to these almost slapstick military failures later, by the way – the Historia Francorum has a lot of them.

A siege began, and two weeks passed with the attacking army building siege equipment. Eventually, Gundovald’s allies – especially a count and a bishop, betrayed him, leading him out of the siege walls with a promise of a parley with the Merovingians, and then just locking the gates behind him. Good luck out there, Gundovald, we’re right behind you. [sound effect] Gundovald was caught soon enough, and killed near the Merovingian camp. And just in case you feel like the Merovingians, as they reassert control over their southwestern frontier, are the good guys in this story, Gregory offers you this anecdote about what happened when the town of Comminges opened its gates.

When day dawned the gates were flung open and the army was allowed in. All the common people were put to the sword, and all the priests of the Lord God, with those who served them, were murdered where they stood at the church altars. When [the Merovingian army] had killed every living soul, so that there remained not one. . .the troops burned the whole city, with all the churches and every single building, leaving nothing there but the bare earth. (7.38)

If accurate, it’s an especially vicious reprisal, even in the annals of Roman history and the early Middle Ages. Elsewhere, nobles and churchmen who had sided with Gundovald were also killed, with a turncoat bishop, at a climactic moment, being beheaded.

After this massacre, King Guntram was able to recover much of the treasure that the usurper Gundovald had amassed. Those who had refused to join the Merovingian military efforts during the rebellion were fined. Following the narrative of the rebellion, Gregory adds a few more anecdotes about the year 584 – a female prophet sought shelter in the home of Queen Fredegund, a general famine happened, a cruel master was killed by vengeful servants – before closing Book 7 with the story of an ugly clan feud that took place in Tours which resulted in several deaths and was only solved – imperfectly – through the arbitration of the church. Factional violence, it seems, plagued Merovingian society at both the macro, and micro level, during the grim months of 584 CE. [music]

The History of the Franks, Book 8

Book 8 of the Historia Francorum opens in the year 585, after the usurper Gundovald’s rebellion had been quelled. Old King Guntram was traveling across Francia to Paris, and he made a stop in Orleans. There, all of the citizens sang his praises – Guntram, after all, had consolidated relations with his nephew and he had ended a civil war, which was good news for everyone in Francia. Jewish citizens of Orleans also sang his praises, after which, a little later, Guntram said, “Woe to the Jewish people, evil, treacherous and full of deceit in all that they do! They sang my praises. . .in the hope that I should give an order that their synagogue. . .should be rebuilt from public funds. This I will never do” (8.1). On this proclamation by King Guntram, Gregory comments, “One cannot fail to wonder at the wisdom of the famous King” (8.1). Scenes like this are, needless to say, a grim reminder of the institutional antisemitism that had already become entrenched in much of Europe by the sixth century.

After the Uprising

King Guntram also stopped in Tours to see Gregory himself. There was no bad blood between the two of them, and King Guntram, riding high on his recent victories, was also clement with some of the churchmen who had supported the usurper Gundovald, offering the errant churchmen stern words rather than corporal punishments. Up in Paris, good King Guntram sought to meet his infant nephew Chlothar (this was the baby that Chilperic had had with Fredegund just before Chilperic died), and, with nephews and heirs on his mind, King Guntram mourned the fact that some of Chilperic’s older sons had been killed in squabbles with their father. King Guntram was able to ferret out where his dead nephews’ bodies were – these were the bodies of his nephews Merovech and Clovis – and Guntram saw to it that the young men had proper burials.

King Guntram, generally speaking, spent much of 585 trying to clean up the damage Francia had weathered during recent years. One person whom King Guntram was a bit less inclined to forgive was Theodore, the Bishop of Marseilles. Theodore had been the bishop in charge when the usurper Gundovald had landed in Marseilles with Byzantine backing. Theodore may have been under political pressure to welcome the usurper Gundovald, but whatever had happened, the bishop was in quite a difficult position, with a Byzantine-backed rebel king having come through his church, and with this rebel king now having lost. King Guntram arrested Theodore, Bishop of Marseilles, and the churchman was put in jail.

Theodore’s imprisonment threatened to cause a rift between King Guntram and his nephew, the now 15-year-old Childeric. Childeric, it seems, was strongly opposed to the Bishop Theodore’s imprisonment. Gregory pauses the narrative of this growing political crisis to tell us of how he met a man named Vulfolaic. Vulfolaic had been an aspiring stylite. What’s a stylite, you ask? A stylite is a very special kind of ascetic hermit who lives atop a pillar for a prolonged period of time. The stylite Vulfolaic, inspired by stories about how Saint Martin had destroyed and vandalized sacred pagan worship centers, had stood on a pillar opposite a statue of the Roman goddess Diana for a long time. Eventually, the statue of the goddess Diana was destroyed, but Vulfolaic didn’t get a lot of praise for it. Instead, some bishops had told the stylite Vulfolaic to cool it with the ascetic showmanship – who did he think he was? A fifth-century Syrian? This was sixth-century Francia, and stylites were no longer in style. Vulfolaic then obediently dismounted, and his own column was pulverized, and so tragically, he could no longer punish himself with long, barefoot stints in the freezing winter of the French countryside atop a mast of carved rock.

From this doubtless entirely true and historically pivotal tale of some dude on a column, Gregory returns to the story of the Merovingians. Gregory writes that young King Childebert was in a bit of a pickle in the year 585. His uncle had taken quite a large sum of gold from the Byzantine Emperor Maurice with the understanding that old Chilperic would subdue the Lombards, who currently controlled the Italian peninsula. Uncle Chilperic had instead made peace with them. The Byzantine Emperor Maurice, naturally, wanted his gold back. Not wanting to relinquish all the Byzantine gold, young Childeric sent an army into Italy – we assume, either to placate Byzantine creditors, or actually to conquer Italy, or both. Meanwhile, King Guntram started shuffling around some noblemen who had previously been loyalty to King Chilperic.

These high-profile political details give way, in Gregory’s narrative in Book 8, to a story about an Abbot named Dagulf. We’ve talked about the clerical celibacy movement a lot in our show, and the story of Abbot Dagulf is certainly relevant to this movement. Abbot Dagulf was a dissipated churchman, in that he was engaged in a sexual relationship with a married woman who lived near his abbey. Dagulf was tricked, however, and one night, while he was having sex with the woman in her house, her husband came home and butchered them both with an ax. Gregory concludes, “Let this story be a warning to all clergy not to break the statutes of the canons by seeking the company of women” (8.19).

Guntram, Childebert II, and Fredegund

Also in 585, an ecclesiastical council unfolded in a city in Burgundy. King Guntram shuffled around some bishops according to who had been loyal to him, and elsewhere, an important nobleman who had backed the usurper Gundovald was questioned and had some of his wealth confiscated. In fact, Book 8 of the Historia Francorum becomes extremely miscellaneous for a long stretch of pages – a sentence about a new bishop here, an update about a new regal tutor there, and so on. One element of Gregory’s book that remains pretty consistent is that every ten or so pages he offers us a record of the natural disasters of the year. These little snippets, which Penguin translator Lewis Thorpe calls “Portents and Prodigies,” are generally as formulaic as they are ridiculous.³ In Book 8, for instance, we can believe Gregory’s report of heavy summer rains. But when he tells us that islands in the sea exploded in fire from the heavens, and that an island off the south coast of Brittany had a fishpond that turned to blood, we get the sense that Gregory had consumed an inordinate amount of apocalyptic literature and is offering us Medieval hearsay embroidered with his own poetic license.

At this juncture in Merovingian royal history, Queen Fredegund’s familiarly homicidal presence returns to the narrative. Although King Guntram and his nephew the younger King Childebert had made a sturdy peace with one another, and although Guntram had promised to raise his other – at that point infant – nephew Chlothar II, son of the dead Chilperic and his volatile wife Fredegund to the throne when the time came, Queen Fredegund still seemed to still want to kill everyone. Fredegund’s depiction in the History of the Franks is so consistently negative that her actions often feel incomprehensible, as in Book 8, when, at a moment of relative peace in Francia, she planned the assassination of young King Childebert and his mother, Brunhild.⁴ Giving a pair of assassins poisoned daggers, Fredegund shipped them off to do their murderous deeds. In the meantime, though, word of the plot had already reached King Guntram. Because Guntram and his nephew Childebert knew about the murderous plot, the assassins were apprehended, along with a messenger who went to confirm their success. After they were imprisoned, Gregory tells us, “they were submitted to a number of tortures, their hands, ears and noses were cut off, and they were put to death each in a different way” (8.29). Ancient Roman coliseums were one of antiquity’s most notorious locales for violence, but Merovingian France, as we’ve seen in the Historia Francorum, was no picnic either.

We might expect, at this point in the narrative, to hear that King Guntram and King Childebert converged on Fredegund and finally put the belligerent queen in jail. Instead, we learn that King Guntram mobilized an army to attack Visigothic Spain. Old King Guntram did this for two reasons. The first was that his niece, and young King Childebert’s sister Ingund, who’d been sent to marry a Visigothic prince, had ended up dying in North Africa, and some conspiratorial shadow lay over her demise. The second reason for the invasion was that the Visigoths were Arians, and it seemed to Frankish leaders like a perennially appealing idea to murder and pillage the Arians. The invasion, though, was a nearly complete failure.

The failure of the 585 invasion of Visigothic territory prompts Gregory to expand on something that any reader of the Historia Francorum will observe. This something is that Frankish armies under the Merovingians, at least as far as Gregory understood, were wildly undisciplined. Ever since the first generation of Merovingians fought with their Burgundian neighbors, whenever Gregory describes Merovingian armies in his book, Merovingian armies are like packs of rabid dogs, defecting to begin wild sprees of looting and murder. This was what happened in 585 with the attempted invasion of Spain – an army marched forth, failed, and then bands of militarized marauders, heading back into wherever they were from in Gaul, pillaged, burned, looted and destroyed churches, and often ate up all the local resources and then died of hunger. As soon as a Frankish army buckles on swords and shields in Gregory’s Historia Francorum, it’s only a matter of time before the army goes berserk and dissolves into globs of crazy marauders. The sheer repetitiousness of this pattern is almost funny when you read the book, although of course, to the Merovingian leaders and poor victimized commoners, none of it was funny. King Guntram, observing the abject failure of his invasion of Spain, lamented that his generation of Frankish soldiers knew nothing of discipline nor loyalty.

Vice and Violence in the Merovingian World, 585-6

585 led into 586, and in February of 586, Queen Fredegund, unpunished for her assassination attempt on a Merovingian king and his mother, decided again that it was time to kill. This time, her target was Bishop Praetextatus, whom we met back in Book 5 in the year 577. Fredegund loathed Bishop Praetextatus because the bishop had married Fredegund’s now-dead son Merovech to her sister-in-law, Brunhild. And so early in 586, Fredegund had Bishop Praetextatus stabbed. Dying, the poor bishop was taken to his bed in his cell, where Fredegund confronted him. She pretended that someone else was behind the mortal wound, but Praetextatus told her he knew that she, Fredegund, was responsible not only for his own killing, but for far more crimes in Francia, and following this condemnation, Praetextatus died. Later, as Praetextatus’ funeral arrangements were being made, a visiting bishop condemned Fredegund for her murderous ways. She poisoned him, and he died. Fredegund would not confess to the killings, and so it was impossible to arrest her.

After a short break in which Gregory tells us of a fire in Paris, and offers tales about two ascetic hermits, he resumes the saga of the Merovingians. Young King Childebert, at this point aged sixteen, had a baby with his concubine. Old King Guntram thought this was good news, and hoped that teenage Childebert could live a long time to bring up the baby, and that the baby would grow up to rule.

Gregory then offers us the story of a cruel Bishop of Le Mans, along with that bishop’s wife. Remember that at this point in Catholic history, it was permissible for a married man to join the clergy provided that he swore off carnal relations with his wife and lived with her as a sister.⁵ Both the Bishop of Le Mans and his wife were greedy, choleric people, and after the bishop died, his widow continued her evil ways. Gregory informs us that “On more than one occasion she cut off a man’s penis. . .and she burned the more secret parts of women’s bodies with metal plates which she had made white-hot” (8.39). We’ll talk a bit more about the extraordinary quantity and variety of violence in this book a little later – for now, let’s move on. Speaking of profligate people, Gregory himself had to deal with a really vile person of a similar ilk in his congregation in Tours. The man stole from him, Gregory banned him from communion, and the man died five months later.

Queen Fredegund, who had had the Bishop Praetextatus killed earlier in 586, was formally accused of doing so. She pinned the murder on one of her servants, who, under torture, admitted to the murder. The servant was afterward cut to pieces. And toward the end of Book 8, another incident occurs in which Fredegund seems to have committed a near catastrophic crime and escaped scot-free. This was, in the year 577, another an attempt on the life of good King Guntram. The attempt was unsuccessful, and torturing some of Fredegund’s servants also did not elicit confessions of a murderous plot. Additionally, Fredegund, from what we’ve heard so far, definitely seemed to have it in for young King Childeric, and Childeric’s mother Brunhild, but not really for King Guntram, so in all ways the attempted assassination of Guntram is an odd occurrence, though Gregory remarks that “It was quite obvious that [the assassins] had been sent by Fredegund” (8.44). As for King Guntram, the most powerful Merovingian King was negotiating fraught relations with Visigothic Spain. Their King had fallen ill back in 586, and after a smooth succession, a new Visigothic son took his place. [music]

The History of the Franks, Book 9

The second-to-last book in Gregory’s Historia Francorum picks up in the year 587. Over in Spain, a new Visigothic king had come to the throne, and this king reconciled with his stepmother. The stepmother in question was actually the grandmother of the now 17-year-old King Childeric, and so Childeric and the new Visigothic King, whose name was Recared, had plenty of reasons to make peace with one another. King Guntram, however, held the new Visigothic king at arm’s length due to anger about Visigothic treatment of Guntram’s niece, and so enmity arose between King Guntram of the Franks and King Recared of the Visigoths. As a result, that same year, the Visigoths attacked Arles on the southern coast of Francia in reprisal for King Guntram’s botched but destructive invasion of Spain back in 585.

More Assassination Attempts

King Guntram survived another assassination attempt that autumn, and the 17-year-old King Childeric had another son, this time with a different woman. That same autumn, Gregory reports more portents and presages – magical writing discovered on people’s pottery and glassware in the southwest, a rain of snakes, and a village that vanished into thin air. In Tours, in 587, there appeared a false worker of miracles, and Gregory tells the story of a similar charlatan having appeared back in the year 580. As 587 lengthened, a small cabal of powerful nobles sought to kill King Childeric and use his two infant sons as props to advance their own reigns as de facto kings. Their plot was uncovered, though, and their ringleader was killed.

The relentless attempts on the lives of King Guntram and King Childebert prompted Guntram to summon Childebert to him. The two had been closely allied for several years, and as we discussed, King Guntram had no heir, and thus old Guntram had every incentive to knit close ties with his young nephew. Childebert, though he’d been made a king at five years old, seems to have been a fairly competent person and a quick learner, and perhaps King Guntram saw some of his own staying power in the younger man. The two kings decided that a powerful duke and military commander – his name, confusingly, was Guntram Boso – who had been involved in one too many questionable plots under Merovingian rule, had to go, and the duke, though he fought to the last, was eventually killed by a mob. With this duke out of the way, King Guntram, King Childebert, and their queens all sealed a pact of friendship.

Lombard and Visigothic Relations in 587

Young King Childebert, his position securer than ever, still had some housekeeping to do in 587. A recent plot to kill him had been unsuccessful, but some of its perpetrators were still out there, and though these nobles, too, fought to their last breath, they were overcome and killed. As the Merovingian kings continued to try and stabilize Gaul, down in Visigothic Spain, something interesting was happening. That something interesting was their new King Recared expressing interest in Catholicism, rather than the Arianism that had traditionally been a fixture in Visigothic Spain. Recared, according to the likely biased account of the Catholic Bishop Gregory of Tours, said it was quite strange that none of the Arian bishops of Spain could perform miracles, whereas the Catholic bishops of Gaul could perform all sorts of magic tricks. Once the Catholic notion of the Holy Trinity was explained to Recared, he promptly converted to Catholicism, and he announced to the people of a northeastern Visigothic province that he’d converted. The whole province, afterward, converted to Catholicism.

Even after King Recared’s conversion to Catholicism, King Guntram continued to treat him very coldly.⁶ Young King Childeric, on the other hand, welcomed friendly relations with the now Catholic Visigoths. Political differences between Kings Guntram and Childebert led to our author Gregory of Tours himself having to mediate between the two of them. Gregory was at an important meeting during which a possible diplomatic marriage was under discussion. This diplomatic marriage would be between a Merovingian princess named Chlodosind, the sister of the previous Merovingian princess who’d been sent to Spain, and then Recared, the new Visigothic King. Chlodosind was King Guntram’s niece, and King Childbert’s sister, and young King Childebert said he was fine with the marriage taking place. King Guntram was iffy about it, but he said that if King Childebert stuck to the pact that the two of them had made, then Princess Chlodosind could marry King Recared of the Visigoths. After this meeting, and the planning of a large convocation of Frankish bishops, King Guntram was in a very good mood.

King Guntram, writes Gregory in an aside, was a very charitable monarch – in the year 588, his donations helped the city of Marseilles weather an outbreak of the plague. Returning to the saga of the Merovingians, Gregory writes that young king Childebert soon promised his sister Chlodosind to King Recared of the Visigoths. But King Childebert also had something else he needed to take care of. Some time before, he’d promised the Byzantines to rid Italy of the Lombards. It’s a funny side plot, by the way, that young Childebert just keeps meaning to conquer Italy, but gets too busy with other stuff, and then once every couple of years the teenager remembers that conquering Italy is on his task list. Anyway, King Childebert’s uncle King Guntram didn’t want anything to do with this mission, and so King Childebert was on his own. Thus, Childebert announced his invasion of Italy to the Byzantines, he rallied an army, and he sent them in. Without giving a lot of detail, Gregory tells us “Our people were cut to pieces: quite a few were slain, some were captured, the remainder turned in flight and made their way home. . .The slaughter of the Frankish army was such that nothing like it could be remembered” (9.25). Two pages later, though, after Childeric had raised another invasion force, the Lombards and Childeric once again made peace with one another, rather than fighting again. In reading turnabouts like this one, we get the sense that Francia’s military expeditions were relatively small-scale affairs, thus readily correctible by a hasty peace treaty.

Meanwhile, Childeric’s relations with the Visigoths were far more positive. Young Childeric’s mother Brunhild was the step-aunt of the Visigothic king, and Brunhild sent presents to him. As for King Guntram, though, he was still prejudiced against the Visigoths. He sent an invasion force down to a region called Septimania – a stretch of the coast around Narbonne north of the modern-day border between France and Spain. The invasion failed, and Gregory reports 5,000 of King Guntram’s men being killed. Gregory also reports some erratic and paranoid behavior on Guntram’s part – the aging king seemed suspicious, in the year 589, that his nephew Childebert was going to try and seize his throne, and our author Gregory tells us this simply wasn’t true.

More familial strife was afoot with Merovingian queens. Queen Fredegund and her departed husband Chilperic had had a daughter. Her name was Rigunth, and she had begun asserting herself. Rigunth also, according to Gregory, enjoyed promiscuous sex. One day, when Rigunth was being especially rude, her mother Queen Fredegund tried to smash her neck in a treasure chest, but the attempted murder, as many of Fredegund’s attempted murders tended to be, was not successful. Nor was yet another conniving scheme against the now 19-year-old King Childebert – a plot by a group of palace servants to convince young Childebert to shun his mother Brunhild, remarry, and serve their interests. It is about the hundred thousandth failed conspiracy in the Historia Francorum – slight exaggeration, but anyway, King Childebert rooted out the colluders, tortured them, and then subjected them to various manglings and exiles.

A large part of the close of Book 9 of Historia Francorum is dedicated to a scandal that unfolded at an abbey in Poitiers. This church had been founded by Radegund, the first wife of one of the first generation of Merovingian kings, back in 552, and Radegund had been in charge there until her death in 587. By this time, two other Merovingian women were residents in the abbey – King Guntram’s daughter Clotild, and King Chilperic’s daughter Basina, both of them great-granddaughters of old King Clovis. In 589, a scandal broke out at the abbey. A group of nuns left the abbey, alleging mistreatment and misconduct by the abbess in charge. The rebel nuns saw to it that the cruel abbess was apprehended, and violence broke out around the church. Because of the high-profile nature of the rebellion, it was a big deal – Gregory includes nine pages of primary documents in blockquotes, and the end of the story of the Abbey of Poitiers doesn’t take place until midway through the next book. [music]

The History of the Franks, Book 10

Book 10 of the Historia Francorum takes us through a final two years of Merovingian history – in other words from 590-591. Gregory tells us in its opening that the winter of 590 was a rough one – heavy rains once again struck the northern Mediterranean, and a giant dragon was spotted down in the Tiber River. Over in Rome, the tenure of Pope Pelagius came to an end, and Pope Gregory (soon to be Gregory the Great) ascended to the throne, taking decisive control at a moment when Rome was suffering from grain shortages and a renewed wave of the Bubonic Plague.

Chaos Domestically and Abroad in 590

Throughout the Historia Francorum, our author Gregory has often made mention of Frankish relations with the Byzantines over in Constantinople. As of the year 590, the Byzantine Empire was still near the height of its all-time geographical expansion, holding much of the old Roman North African coast, in addition to territories all around the Aegean and Adriatic. Young King Childebert, now 20, had sent envoys to the Byzantine Emperor Maurice, and after a brief snafu in Carthage on the way back to Francia, during which some of the Frankish diplomatic party were murdered, the envoys returned to Childebert. Whatever they told him, it prompted Childebert to renew his occasional hobby of invading Italy and trying to take it from the Lombards – he’d accepted a large sum of Byzantine gold to do so and never managed to follow through.

As always seems to be the case in Gregory’s book, once Frankish armies were raised, they behaved with all the discipline of rabid wolves, murdering and pillaging within Frankish territories through which they passed on the way to the frontier. And once the Frankish army managed to reach northern Italy, the Franks found the Lombards an effective foe. The Lombards engaged effectively in guerilla warfare when they couldn’t hide behind siege walls. Warm weather plagued Frankish troops with dysentery. Byzantine reinforcements were promised, but never arrived. The Franks managed to take some Lombard territory, but the victory was irresolute. Frankish armies limped back home, having mostly exhausted their supplies. But whatever exactly had happened in northern Italy, it prompted the Lombards to sue for peace.

Domestically, a steady quantity of malfeasant noblemen and church scandals kept parts of Francia unstable. A Count around Tours was implicated in a property raid, and then later, an attempted rape, but ended up bribing his way out of trouble. A council of bishops had to intervene in an ugly aristocratic divorce. The small kingdom of Brittany was once again in revolt, and old King Guntram sent two powerful dukes to quell the insurrection. The dukes, however, were jealous of one another, and their armies, like seemingly all Frankish armies, once marshalled, began destroying and pillaging the Frankish territory through which they passed. The expedition’s dreadful start did not portend a smooth military invasion, and indeed, the punitive Frankish invasion of Brittany was poorly coordinated, with one of Guntram’s dukes waiting for the other to be killed in battle before getting his own army involved. Heavy casualties all around resulted in a peace treaty. But as the Frankish armies made their exit, they were nonetheless harried and captured by Bretons. The whole thing was such a mess that afterward a rumor spread that the single duke who had survived the affair had been bribed by the Bretons to deliberately fail, and the duke in question was reproached by old King Guntram, who by that time had been on his throne for twenty-nine years.

Problems continued to beset the Merovingians in 590. A chamberlain was caught hunting in King Guntram’s royal forest, and after a trial by combat, in which both participants were killed, Guntram had the chamberlain stoned to death at the stake. Little Chlothar, the son of the dead Chilperic and one of the presumptive heirs to a Merovingian throne, fell ill. The boy recovered, Gregory of Tours tells us, because his mother donated money to the church of Saint Martin. It wasn’t all good news at Saint Martin’s church, however. A Mother Superior was ailing, and she eventually passed away. She had not wanted her position to be inherited by her daughter, because the daughter was not a good person. The daughter, however, petitioned young King Childebert, who gave the position to her, and afterward, just as her departed mother had feared, the new Mother Superior looted the church and pilfered goods from local parishioners. Also in Tours at that time, Gregory got into a debate with one of his priests. The priest was arguing against the doctrine of bodily resurrection. As happens from time to time in the History of the Franks, Gregory pauses the narrative for several pages in order to offer us a debate scene in which he dominates his argumentative opponent on fine points of doctrine. Book 10, section 13 of Gregory’s tome contains an astonishing paragraph, nearly 6-pages in length, in which in true Socratic fashion, Gregory hammers his opponent with long, learned speeches, and his opponent departs from the discussion, humbled and contrite.

Clerical Adjudication at Poitiers and More Assassination Plots

Now, if you’ll recall, the previous book of Gregory’s history closed with a revolt happening in an abbey up in Poitiers. The Merovingian princess Clotilde, not to be confused with her great-grandmother Clotilde, was angry at the Abbess there for alleged mistreatment. The princess was so angry, in fact, that she summoned an armed band of ruffians, in Gregory’s words, “at the instigation of Satan” (10.14). These ruffians invaded and grabbed the wrong woman, but, returning to the abbey, they seized the Abbess, and imprisoned her. Events escalated such that a council of bishops met. The council included Gregory, and they decided that there was no choice but to resort to force in order to put down the ruffians who had usurped control of the abbey. The attack proceeded, and the impenitent Clotilde was subdued. She accused the Abbess of fornication, and then of keeping eunuchs, and in both cases the accusations were proved to be false. Gregory, who was a member of the ecclesiastical council that met to discuss the complex case at the Abbey of Poitiers, includes a long document in which the churchmen made their official evaluation. The decision was that while the Abbess hadn’t been a perfect model of behavior – for this they issued recommendations to her, by the way – while the Abbess hadn’t been a perfect model of behavior, the rebels had behaved much more egregiously, breaking into the abbey with violence, disrespecting both nuns and church property, and looting, to boot. The churchmen recommended reinstating the abused Abbess to her former position, and they suspended the Merovingian princesses behind the revolt from communion. Though the princesses continued their libel against the Abbess to King Childebert, he didn’t believe them. That was the end of the immediate affair, although some time later, King Childebert asked the church that both of the Merovingian princesses be allowed back into communion, which they were, one of them actually returning to the Abbey of Poitiers, and the other moving to a country estate.

Less promising at the Merovingian executive level was yet another assassination attempt, according to Gregory, funded by the everlastingly murderous Queen Fredegund, on both adult Merovingian kings. Twelve assassins in total were dispatched, but were unsuccessful, instead being apprehended, tortured, and mutilated. There had been so many plots against the lives of Merovingian kings by this point that sometimes, when assassination attempts were foiled, old crimes were also uncovered. This was the case in the year 590, when one of Fredegund’s assassins, under torture, revealed that a Egidius, a bishop from Reims, had been involved in a plot some time ago to kill King Childebert. In the bishop’s trial, first, he was found culpable of conspiracy and attempted forgery, and then, accepting a large sum of money for treasonous purposes. The seditious bishop admitted his guilt himself. He was excommunicated and exiled.

The rainy autumn in 590, during which the bubonic plague was boiling along the lower Rhône, soon gave way to 591. That winter, Gregory learned of troubling news from abroad. The Sasanian empire had captured the city of Antioch back in 573, which Gregory and his colleagues had not known. This is an interesting tidbit of information in the book, by the way. Antioch had been one of the most important cities in the eastern Roman Empire, and certainly a powerhouse of eastern Christianity during the religion’s early centuries. That Gregory would have no idea of its capture for the entire eighteen years he’d spent as a bishop demonstrates the extent to which the Mediterranean world had become fragmented into Latin west and Greek east by the late 500s. News in the post-Roman west, as I said earlier, traveled very, very slowly.

Some time in 591, as the plague continued to harry the southern cities of Gaul, a man came to prominence who proclaimed himself the second coming of Christ. By luck or dark magic, Gregory writes, this man was able to foretell some events to come and effect some miraculous cures, and he thus developed a following. This false Christ assembled his band of followers, and prepared to attack a bishop in the southern part of Gaul. One of the bishop’s servants, though, was able to assassinate the rabble rouser, and so fell a false prophet of Francia in 591. The man’s death did not stop the enthusiasm he had stirred up, though, and numerous other self-proclaimed miracle workers arose. As Gregory writes, with appreciable restraint, “I saw quite a few of them myself. I did my best to argue with them and to make them give up their inane pretensions” (10.25).

Up in modern-day Belgium, where Queen Fredegund had influence, a dispute arose between two brothers-in-law. The dispute was on the grounds that the man who had married the other man’s sister was mistreating her and having affairs. The bride’s brother killed her husband, and then was himself killed in retaliation, and tit-for-tat killing reduced the ranks of each family. Eventually, Queen Fredegund had the three survivors of this quarreling family over for dinner. Unable to make them reconcile with each other, she got them intoxicated, and then in a very strange scene, she had three axmen stand behind them and issue them surprise decapitations all at once. Though Fredegund was accused of murder, she managed, as usual, to wriggle her way out of trouble.

The Close of the Historia Francorum

In fact, Fredegund not only stayed out of trouble. Queen Fredegund convinced old King Guntram to baptize her little son Chlothar II. As I mentioned earlier, this youngster, as ignominious as his beginning was, would end up outliving everyone in our present story and ruling until 629. Young King Childeric was not happy about this baptism – Queen Fredegund had tried to kill him almost annually over the past decade, but King Guntram didn’t think that performing the baptism infringed on the treaty he’d signed with King Childeric. Guntram and his very young nephew Chlothar II exchanged gifts, and good old King Guntram, as the Historia Francorum draws to a close, appears to have kept his promise to support both King Childeric, son of Guntram’s brother Sigibert, as well as little Chlothar, son of Guntram’s other brother, Chilperic. Though Gregory doesn’t go beyond the year 591, in the year 592, King Guntram passed away, having ruled for a very impressive 31 years, and generally speaking, having been a force of stability in Merovingian Gaul.

Gregory ends his book with a short bundle of miracle stories, and then an inventory of all the Bishops of Tours. Let’s go through the miracle stories very quickly – when you’ve heard perhaps half a dozen of these puppies, you’ve heard them all, but still, out of respect for the Historia Francorum, I’ll go through the highlights with you. A young man named Aredius, who eventually became an Abbot and a Saint, was shown to be a very special person by a dove that flew down from a cathedral ceiling, and eventually, Aredius could perform miracle cures faultlessly. Aredius could get water to come up out of dry ground. Once, during a storm, he prayed and clouds split so that they went around him. He cured a man’s toothache. Even after he died, as Aredius was buried, a possessed woman nearby was cured of her possession, and a mute woman was able to speak again.

More general miracles and omens followed in 591. An epidemic in Tours and Nantes was stopped through the chanting of saints’ names. Those who conducted business on a Sunday were spontaneously struck down by fire from heaven. A drought caused dreadful casualties in Francia’s livestock. And the History of the Franks closes with Gregory’s own inventory of all of the bishops of Tours, starting in the year 249. It’s not a very exciting passage in the book, but it is well organized and offered by a person very qualified to write it, and Gregory must have known it would be useful for these reasons. Gregory has mostly positive or neutral information to offer regarding his 18 clerical predecessors in Tours. About his own tenure, he writes that he took special charge of some local martyrs’ relics, and that he worked hard to help rebuild and augment Saint Martin’s church.

Gregory closes by saying that he has now completed quite a few books. He writes that “I know very well that my style in these books is lacking in polish” (10.31), but nonetheless that he hopes the Historia Francorum will be preserved in its entirety. In fact, in one of the more presumptuous portions of Gregory’s book, he writes that he wants his book kept intact as it is, and anyone who lets it be destroyed will face retribution on Judgment Day. [music]

Gregory and Classical Historiography

So that takes us to the end of the History of the Franks, a book that is absolutely worth reading in spite of its choppy narrative style and the intrinsic complexity of the events described therein. Last time, at the end of the show, we discussed the reliability of Gregory’s book. Though we barely scratched the surface of this important issue, we did learn that Gregory is iffy about old King Clovis’ religious background and the exact date of the monarch’s conversion to Catholicism. And we also learned that Gregory gives strangely short shrift to Clovis’ grandson Theudebert – a military powerhouse who helped secure the entire eastern and southeastern border of Francia. Now that we’ve finished the book, there are even more questions to ask about the reliability of the Historia Francorum. The paramount one for me has to do with Gregory’s astonishingly negative characterization of Queen Fredegund. It’s hard to understand how a standing monarch could make such countless assassination and murder attempts, some successful, on everyone from feuding subjects, to churchmen, to kings, to her own daughter, year after gory year, and forge onward with her murderous career – Fredegund died in about 597, by the way, of natural causes, outliving Guntram and Childebert and Gregory of Tours himself.

But rather than zooming in further to talk about one member of the Merovingian dynasty, I’d actually like to zoom out a bit, and discuss the long-term impacts of the Historia Francorum – how it’s been read and understood, and what we tend to take away from it today. Scholar Joaquín Pizarro, summarizing Gregory’s reputation over the centuries, writes that traditionally, “As a source of information on Frankish Gaul in the sixth century [Gregory of Tours] was irreplaceable, but the standards of taste created by an education based exclusively on the classics made perusal of his work a tedious occupation at best.”⁷ In other words, as we read Gregory of Tours, coming from Classics as we currently are in the podcast, we might expect a Thucydides-style analysis of international relations, or Polybius-style political history, or Tacitus-style detailed reportage from abroad. We open the pages of the Historia Francorum anticipating, perhaps, a chronicle like the old Roman ones that have come before it. We expect transoceanic political intrigues; sweeping battlefield narrations and confrontations between generals; an overall breadth that encompasses international affairs and the rumbling forward march of history. Instead, we discover a nearsighted focus – and a sequence of energetic but often disconnected episodes – tiles that only create a partial mosaic.

For a long time, Gregory’s fragmentary organizational style, not to mention his unpolished Latin, were held against him as further evidence of the decline and fall of the Roman empire from a time when historians wrote history with a more panoramic sense of its forward march. If you are looking for a violent and ramshackle juncture of the early Middle Ages, Gregory’s Merovingian saga has plenty of carnage and backstabbing, not to mention goofy superstitious accounts of water dragons and blood rains and spontaneous combustions. If we put him at the end of a long line of Greek and Roman historians, at best, Gregory is a Catholic apple next to pagan oranges, and at worst, he is indeed an often scatterbrained and self-indulgent writer. Gregory of Tours, in short, for the past millennium and a half, has long been criticized and held up as evidence of night falling on the Dark Ages after the luminous dawn of the classical world.

There is something to be said for this rather negative take on Gregory and the Merovingian century he describes. He wrote, discursively, about a world in which new major religious rifts had spurred armies into often fruitless wars. The Merovingian kingdom he describes cannot raise or command disciplined armies; it can’t sustainably collect taxes, nor even keep minor kingdoms at its borders subdued. A new, militarily formidable aristocracy rebels and schemes, and assassination attempts go unpunished, and minor client kingdoms along the borderland raid and rebel with relative impunity. The clergy is sometimes incredibly useful in the midst of all this bedlam, but it’s also held spellbound by a hidden world of magic, miracles, saints, and relics, sometimes to the deficit of more prudent work on behalf of Frankish commoners. And violence and torture are everywhere – dismemberments, stonings, burnings, genital mutilation, ears and noses cut off, and on and on.

As bad as all of this sounds, though, before we get too critical of Gregory and his world, it’s important to keep in mind that the supposedly golden dawn of classical antiquity contained almost every single thing I just described. The Roman empire, for its entire history, was really a large kingdom riven by succession disputes, oligarchic and military coups, and unending borderland squabbles. Romans, too, believed in omens, portents, soothsayers, and the ascension of prominent figures into the heavens. In works of Roman history, as well, we meet wicked stepmothers and queens, and villains who get accused, in particular, of sexual indiscretions. In Roman works of history we also hear of giant massacres and decimations, crucifixions and public executions of every imaginable sort. In Roman history, just as in Gregory, there are priests and priestesses, and harming them, or their sacred temples, is a non-normative transgression only committed by the most debauched. There are so many commonalities with what Gregory describes in the Historia Francorum and what we find in works of – in particular – imperial Roman history that it’s actually harder to think of differences between the Merovingian world and the Roman one that preceded it in Gaul. But there is one difference – a difference that I’ve mostly ignored as we’ve gone through Gregory’s book.

Gregory of Tours and Warfare in the Historia Francorum

This difference has to do with warfare. Gregory was a partisan of the church, but he was not, in particular, partisan of Francia’s military endeavors. So many of Rome’s historians focus on the sweeping sagas of its generals, its army, and navy, that Gregory’s indifference toward Merovingian wars is actually quite novel by comparison. At the close of Book 3, Gregory tells us that Clovis’ grandson Theudebert marched an army into the Po Valley in the summer of 539, thus involving himself with a major and catastrophic war. Sparing any details, though, Gregory only writes that there were some battles, and there was an outbreak of dysentery in the army, and then the Frankish army went home. The omission of any further details here is fascinating, but, then, Gregory rarely has anything to say about Merovingian military endeavors. Gregory comments at a couple of junctures, as we saw today, on the wild and uncontrolled nature of Frankish armies that get mustered up by this or that Merovingian King, and how Clovis conquered much of Gaul with very little, unlike the latter-day Merovingians, who had far more resources. But this is the extent of Gregory’s interest in narrating Merovingian military activity.

This distinct de-emphasis on military activity is actually refreshing, if we open the pages of the Historia Francorum after reading the past seven hundred years of historical works written by Romans proper. In the pages of Julius Caesar, Sallust, Tacitus, Ammianus Marcellinus and more, lively battle narrations are the pith of the story, with this army flanking that army, and this navy outfoxing this other navy. Casualty statistics and numbers of troops involved are often exaggerated, massacres and enslavements of civilians are frequently related with frigid indifference, and an overall militaristic nationalism and Roman manifest destiny are the main themes. Contrastingly, Gregory of Tours could give a hoot about which cavalry feinted right and which archers had better bows. In the story that he tells, war is a nightmarish circus, where any army raised is likely to run rampant in a spree of murder, rape and theft, and peaceful clerics, their flocks, and their treasuries are never safe.

This feature of the Historia Francorum is one of its most arresting, then. War is no longer the justified practice of an ancient civilization to expand and defend its borders. War is a calamity on the vulnerable, spurred on by erratic and often malicious leaders, and carried out by berserk maniacs. Gregory’s background as a member of the landed clergy surely informed his indifference toward the nitty-gritty of warfare, as did his later responsibilities toward the porous and fragile world of his dioceses. The core tenets of his religion taught him to turn the other cheek, because the real battles were the tacit ones all around him between good and evil; orthodoxy and heterodoxy. But war itself had changed, as well, by Gregory’s life.

The scale of the many civil wars and border wars fought in and around Francia during Gregory’s lifetime was often small. Historian Guy Halsall describes the military confrontations in western Europe after the collapse of Rome as “smaller-scale, normative warfare,” or “well-understood normative warfare.”⁸ This is the warfare we see, for the most part, in Gregory of Tours. Merovingian heirs, or noblemen, or kings of borderlands raise armies. The armies, once raised, are intrinsically destructive, looting and pillaging everywhere they go. When armies engage one another in battle (and sometimes they don’t even make it to the battlefield), the result is often inconclusive, and casualty numbers are not severe enough to even be mentioned. Armies, quickly raised, are just as quickly dispatched, with Francia and its neighboring kingdoms returning to homeostasis. It’s little wonder that Gregory did not deem the details of these engagements worth recording. His duty toward the stability of his dioceses, his lack of familial military background, and his pacifism as a Christian all dissuaded him recording or glorifying the manifold squabbles between Francia’s overlords and their neighbors. Let me give you an example – a little passage from late in the book that really shows the full scope of Gregory’s apathy toward all subjects militaristic.

Throughout the second half of the Historia Francorum, King Childeric II invades the north of Italy a couple of times. He has a contract with the Byzantine emperor to fulfill, and has a large sum of gold from them that he refuses to return. In spite of Childeric’s obligations to the Byzantines, he ends up making peace with the Lombards in Italy on two separate occasions. However, finally, even though Childeric has made peace with them twice, and has engaged his sister with the Lombard King, in about 588, Childeric decides he’ll invade and subdue the Lombards at long last. Here’s how Gregory tells the entire story, in the Penguin Thorpe translation:

[King Childeric II] sent an embassy to the [Byzantine] Emperor, undertaking now what he had failed to do before, that is to attack the Longobards and, with the Emperor’s help, to drive them out of Italy. Next [Childeric] sent his troops to occupy their lands. His military leaders marched into Italy at the head of an army and engaged the enemy. Our people were cut to pieces: quite a few were slain, some were captured, the remainder turned in flight and made their way home, but not without difficulty. The slaughter of the Frankish army was such that nothing like it could be remembered. (9.25)

And that’s it. Four sentences sum up what may have been a pretty catastrophic military and diplomatic loss by Merovingian standards. Granted, Gregory had some ties to Childeric and his uncle Guntram, and it would have been indecorous to linger too long on a seated monarch’s military loss. But Gregory is just as terse when it comes to narrating victories and stalemates. Whatever it was that led soldiers to buckle on belts and don helmets and take to the battlefield, Gregory of Tours was just not that interested.

While Gregory says very little about Childeric II’s campaigns in Italy, then, we can make one final observation about Francia’s sputtering and halfhearted conflicts with Lombard Italy in the sixth century. These conflicts were funded by the Byzantine Empire. Over the 500s, the Byzantine Empire was still fighting the massive, intercontinental wars that Romans of old had been accustomed to. The Byzantines had retaken North Africa and Italy by 554, and in the same century they’d crossed swords with their Sasanian foes to the east. When Byzantine kings funded Merovingian invasions of Italy, then, they seemed to have expected a decisive, disciplined military invasion of Italy such as the ones they had executed earlier in the century. But this was not how the Merovingians fought wars. Merovingian wars in Gregory of Tours are short, irresolute, and disorganized affairs – skirmishes that briefly flare up until one side or other decides to call it quits and sign a peace treaty. Merovingian wars were no doubt horrific in their own right, and at a couple of junctures in the Historia Francorum, they appear as such. But over the sixth century, in western Europe, they became smaller in scope and duration, and frequently indecisive in outcome. Gregory’s portrait of Merovingian France is still a grim one. But his most famous book also shows us a new style of thinking about history – one in which wars are not the center of the story, but instead, ugly aberrations scarcely worth relating in detail at all. [music]

The Midcentury Reevaluation of Gregory of Tours

Gregory’s reputation, like the reputation of later Latin literature as a whole, has taken an increasingly positive turn over the past century. Initially, to quote scholar Alexander Murray, Gregory’s countless episodes were once “found by moderns difficult to weave into conventional patterns of historical exposition. . .attractive in their particularities but at an interpretive level. . .understood as the product of the author’s ad hoc piling up of events as they happened and a failure on his part to grasp the requirements of sophisticated and meaningful historical narrative.”⁹ More recently, though, readers have come to appreciate, rather than to fault Gregory for his departure from a classical historiographical style. We just considered, at some length, how Gregory is far less interested in warfare than many of his Roman predecessors. When readers, across the course of the 20th century, stopped searching for classical historiography in the History of the Franks, they began to reconsider what Gregory had actually accomplished with his book.

At the center of this reconsideration was the work of the Jewish-German literary historian Erich Auerbach. Erich Auerbach’s 1946 text Mimesis was one of the previous century’s greatest works of literary scholarship. When I read Mimesis for the first time – I was twenty – I decided I wanted to be like Erich Auerbach when I grew up. The book’s fourth chapter is a reevaluation of Gregory of Tours. We don’t do too much secondary scholarship in our podcast, but in this case, I’ll make an exception. Because when a tremendous scholar fundamentally changes the way that we look at a whole period of history, that’s something worth knowing about.

Auerbach – again in his 1946 study called Mimesis – spends most of Chapter 4 reading just two scenes (7.47 and 9.19) in the Historia Francorum, scenes that recount a connected series of events over about five pages in total. The events in question were ugly and violent ones, and they happened in Tours, where Gregory worked. A pair of wealthy and connected men, Sichar and Chramnesind, got into a feud late in 585. The original justification for the feud was the murder of a servant at a party, but as feuds tend to, it spiraled out of control. Innocent family members, along with more servants and slaves were killed, and thefts and property destruction added insult to injury. Gregory of Tours himself, with the help of other officials, was able to arbitrate the feud and bring it to a momentary hiatus. But some time later, although they pretended to be reconciled, discord once again broke out between the main parties, with Charmnesind murdering Sichar, stripping his enemy’s corpse, and hanging it from a fence post in revenge for killing Charmnesind’s relatives. At the narrative’s close, Charmnesind, having fled to the realm of a different Merovingian king, though he is temporary exiled and has his lands forfeited, eventually receives his lands back. And that’s the story.

It sounds, from what you just heard, like a forgettable blood and thunder tale, mixed into the greater Merovingian stew pot to add a bit of spice and excitement. But if you read it in Gregory of Tours – this account of a bloody feud in Tours – it is neither spicy nor exciting. It’s confusing and awkward in its narration. The administration of justice in it seems procedurally lumpy and plutocratic. The dialogue is klutzily theatrical. You finish reading the little tale, perhaps reading it again to try and sift through the confusing slush of details, and then you move on, because it is a cluttered back corner of an already challenging text. But Eric Auerbach, reading this little cubbyhole of the Historia Francorum, found it to be the key to understanding a lot about Medieval culture.

Gregory, Auerbach, and the Hierarchization of Historical Information

Auerbach notices, first of all, what we have already noticed. Gregory of Tours doesn’t sound like a classical historian. He’s all over the place. Gregory recounts wars in three sentences and then lavishes pages campily reconstructing local imbroglios. Considering the feud of Sichar and Charmnesind, Auerbach writes,

It goes without saying that a classical author would have arranged the material much more clearly – provided that he had treated it all. For if we ask ourselves how Caesar or Livy or Tacitus or even Ammianus would have told this story, it immediately becomes obvious that they would never have told it. For them and their public, such a story would not have had the slightest interest. Who are. . .[Sichar and Charmnesind]?. . .This observation shows how narrow Gregory’s horizon rally is, how little perspective he has with which to view a large, coherent whole, how little he is in a position to organize his subject matter in accordance with the points of view which had once [existed]. . .Gregory is no longer situated in a place where all the news from the [Roman world] is received, sorted, and arranged according to its significance for the state.¹⁰

Any reader who reaches Gregory after reading the historical works of Caesar and his successors would certainly agree. The question is, then, what are the advantages that we see in a style like Gregory’s – an episodic style that does not modulate or synthesize events according to a hierarchy of importance? What do we gain when an author commingles local history of relatively little significance with intercontinental political relationships and wars that decide national boundaries?

Erich Auerbach’s answer to these questions is fascinating. A qualified Latinist, Auerbach is especially attuned to the deficiencies of Gregory’s language and style. Gregory’s Latin prose, Auerbach writes is overall “clumsy” (87). Gregory’s readers knew this long before Auerbach, by the way. Back in 1916, translator Ernest Brehaut wrote “Judged by anything like a classical standard Gregory is guilty of almost every conceivable barbarity. He spells incorrectly, blunders in the use of the inflections, confuses genders, and often uses the wrong case with the preposition. In addition he is very awkward in handling the Latin verb: the different voices, tenses, and modes are apt to look alike to him.”¹¹ These Latin blunders, Gregory’s readers have long observed, are part of what makes him difficult to understand. Modern translators have often had to make judgment calls of where to smooth over grammatical and syntactical disclarities that were not intended on Gregory’s part. And to get to the point, finally, here, that Erich Auerbach made about Gregory in his 1946 reevaluation, Auerbach’s argument about Gregory is that Gregory’s distinctive style shows cultural evolution rather than decadence and decay – that indeed in the pages of Gregory of Tours, we can see the energy of European vernacular cultures rupturing through the stony logic of classical Latin.

Classical and Merovingian Latin

Classical Latin, Auerbach writes – the Latin of Sallust, Caesar, and Livy 600 years before Gregory lived – classical Latin “is an almost excessively organizing language, in which the material and sensory side of the facts is rather viewed and ordered from above than vividly presented in its materiality and sensoriness. . .In the Roman prose of the golden age there is a predominant tendency simply to report matters of fact, if possible only to suggest them in very general terms, to allude to them, [and] to keep aloof from them” (89). Auerbach writes that classical prose of the Latin golden age is rich in the pliability of its syntax, with tense usage, word order, subordination, and a variety of rhetorical devices also allowing a wide range of expression, suggestion, and qualification of information according to an author’s needs, giving a classical Latin authors “a great variety of subjective expression, [but also] freedom. . .to suppress certain facts and to suggest doubtful details without assuming explicit responsibility” (89). Classical Latin, as we know from our podcast, was the product of an already ancient culture whose education had been grounded in rhetoric for a long time. Within its syntactical and grammatical framework, a great range of meaning and modulation could be offered to those equipped to understand it.

Gregory was born too late to enjoy the fruits of a classical education. And while his Latin has long been recognized as creaky and unsubtle, it’s still a priceless historical artifact unto itself. One of its more arresting features – other than its compositional roughness, is that Gregory’s prose is flecked with a Frankish patois of new words – Germanic, Hunnish, and Celtic words that show the cultural synthesis of the Merovingian world.¹² And what Gregory lacks in the crystalline nuances of classical Latin – according to Auerbach – Gregory makes up for with urgent and realistic scene painting, in which Frankish vernacular, whether Gregory knew it or not, was bubbling through the veneer of his old Roman prose. Auerbach writes that “Gregory’s language. . .is but imperfectly equipped to organize facts. . .His language organizes badly or not at all” (90). At the same time,

[Even though] Gregory’s work gives us a very imperfect idea of the connections of political events. . .reading it, we almost smell the atmosphere of the first century of Frankish rule in Gaul. . .In all [of Gregory’s] conversations and exclamations, brief, spontaneous passages between human beings are dramatized in a most concrete fashion: eye to eye, statement answering statement, the actors face one another breathing and alive. . .What he related he tried to make visual, palpable, perceptible through all the senses. . .to imitate the occurrence directly, as Roman historiography never sought to achieve. (90,88,86)

Classical historiography, certainly, imagined dialogues exchanged between historical personages. But these were prominent personages – generals, consuls, kings, and queens – and their dialogue rang with the formal cadences of the classical stage. Gregory, on the other hand, wrote dialogue in clumsy literary Latin prose, but the very clumsiness of this prose, in places that Auerbach observes, mimics the urgency and improvisation of living vernacular speech. In the many imaginative vignettes Gregory offers in his book, then, the grime and vitality of Merovingian Gaul seethe beneath a marble façade of classical Latin. The organizing impetuses of literary Latin and Roman imperial culture alike were too constricting to fit the polyglot Christian dioceses of Francia, where a newer and less standardized socioeconomic order were being born. Naturally, then, when Gregory wrote the Historia Francorum, he could not write in the reserved, universalizing tone of a Roman classical historian. His world was too messy, he had too much stake in it, and moreover, as a bishop, he was professionally bound to actually care.

This is the final part of Erich Auerbach’s famous 1946 reassessment of Gregory of Tours – to consider what it meant for a bishop to write contemporary history that involved his own community. The passage in the Historia Francorum that Auerbach wrote about in Mimesis was one in which Gregory played a direct hand. The cities of the Loire valley and just beyond its bounds come up often in Gregory’s book – Tours, Angres, Nantes, Orleans, and beyond them, Poitiers, Clermont-Ferrand, and Paris. These were the author’s world, and not some distant nebula of cities in a province from which he was receiving secondhand reportage. As a citizen there, and a church official, Gregory cared not only about central Francia’s overall wellbeing, but also the everyday practices and conduct of the citizens there. To quote Auerbach, when we read Gregory of Tours, “Here lies the difference between the Christian and the original Roman conquest: the agents of Christianity do not simply organize an administration from above, leaving everything else to its natural development; they are duty bound to take an interest in the specific detail of everyday incidents; Christianization is directly concerned with and concerns the individual person and individual event” (92). This is, obviously, a far more positive assessment of Gregory than previous generations of academic study had produced. Auerbach reads Gregory not as a bungling historian who tries to ape proper Latin, but instead as an involved eyewitness – one with dirt under his fingernails and sympathy in his heart.

This intimate concern for local events – not their geopolitical significance, but the events themselves, for their own sake – marks for Auerbach “a reawakening of the directly sensible. . .When Gregory writes, the catastrophe has occurred, the Empire has fallen, its organization has collapsed, the culture of antiquity has been destroyed. But the tension is over. . .and [Gregory is] no longer. . .forced. . .into the straightjacket of the elevated style. . .no longer laced into the apparatus of the Diocletian-Constantinian reform” (94). Gregory’s historical style was a style for a smaller world – a world with more minute moving parts. Christianity had its own logos and doctrine of providence and apocalypticism, but these were numinous ideas – optimistic clouds over the actual huts and houses of serfs, yeomen and merchants. The huts and houses – the serfs, the yeomen and merchants – these were precisely the concerns of Catholic clergymen when they clocked in each morning, and it’s no wonder that in sixth-century Merovingian Gaul we begin to see history becoming more bounded and parochial, just as contemporary vernacular begins to rust in diverse blooms through the chilly chrome of classical Latin.

None of this is to acquit Gregory of Tours of his considerable faults. The History of the Franks remains a slog to actually read from cover to cover, with Gregory dashing off like a child at an amusement park all the time to offer ridiculous narratives about necromancers and possessions and magical artifacts. He is, as his contemporary churchmen were, baldly antisemitic, and some of the original Latin of his chapters is so poorly composed that it is actually difficult to tell what is going on. All the same, meeting him on his own ground, his book’s style really does show a cultural shift in the wake of Rome’s extinction in the west. Catholic ecumenism itself had grown out of Rome’s desire to standardize, replicate, and dominate. But not all parishes were alike, nor all converts or cultures, and yet all of them needed attentive care and maintenance by their clergies. Early Medieval Catholicism had its papacy and major bishoprics, just as Rome had the eternal city, and then Milan, and then Ravenna. But Catholicism sponged up influences from below with every passing year, with each region producing gradual trickles of new saints, and new local legends, just as different laities required different vernaculars and cultural insiders to serve them best. The result, as readers of early Medieval texts have long observed, is a more fragmentary and nonstandard compositional style than the ones left behind by Greek and Roman empires. The glittering leviathan of classical Latin, just like the Roman empire itself, no longer had hegemony over the cultural energy of provinces not so long ago emancipated from Roman rule. Beneath the Merovingians and other new regimes, we begin to see this energy emerge on the written record for the first time. [music]

Moving on to Venantius Fortunatus

Well Literature and History listeners, now you know the Historia Francorum of Gregory of Tours, together with a bit about its reception history. Among the many reasons it’s an important book, we should remember that Gregory himself became an substantial influence on Medieval historiography. His meandering style, his widespread tendency to see supernatural influences at work on current events, and his willingness to engage lengthily with local and regional, as well as national history all impacted the works of Medieval historians who read him – historians who had never known a western Europe under a single imperial regime.

In the next program, to round out our time with the Merovingians, we’re going to do something we haven’t done for a little while, and that’s to read some literature. The Merovingian court poet Venantius Fortunatus, roughly a contemporary of Gregory of Tours, made a living for himself in a shifting landscape of throne rooms and churches, writing poetry for some of the very same monarchs and churchmen whose names we’ve heard in these past two programs, including Gregory himself. In some ways, Venantius, like Gregory, doesn’t have a lot going for him. He’s a fairly obscure figure from an inelegant juncture of early medieval history, known mostly for his panegyrics, or praise poems, and various verses composed in aristocratic settings for special occasions. He is not, in short, the towering, transcendent figure that we tend to think of today when we think of a great poet. However, Venantius’ story probably tells us a lot more about the real history of medieval art than we might expect. A traveling artist, and one who started in Italy before migrating permanently up into Francia, Venantius wrote lovely elegiac couplets in Latin five hundred years after the language’s golden age allegedly ended with Ovid in 18 CE. If Gregory’s History of the Franks shows us the Merovingian world from the windows of a rickety tour bus, Venantius presents us this world with vivid tableaus in verse – a royal wedding here, an aristocratic baptism there, the dedication of a cherished church here, and a coronation there. Venantius, as poets so often do, reminds us that literature is history, and the 270 poems that he left behind, today often orphaned between Classics and the Medieval period, should be read far more often than they are.

I have a small announcement to make. Patreon supporters, you are likely already aware of this, but for everybody, here is the announcement. All Patreon content producers like myself have been forced to switch to monthly subscriptions, rather than per-creation subscriptions. The reason that we have been forced to switch is that Apple and Patreon believe they will make more money off of our work if we use these monthly subscription models, and we have no choice. If you are listening to this episode, then my Patreon page has switched to a monthly subscription model, and I’ve updated it with all related details. If you are a current Patreon subscriber, then your previous per-creation pledge of, say, $6 per episode, will be switched to $6 per month. I will plan, henceforth, to put out at least one episode per month, on the 15th of the month, just like I have this month and last month. If for any reason I can’t, I’ll suspend Literature and History’s Patreon page, so that no one is paying me to just sit around. In short, as Patreon subscribers, you shouldn’t notice any difference, other than episodes coming out, henceforward, on the 15th of each month. If I need to put out two or three episodes during the same month, which I plan to do next summer during multi-episode sequences on Muhammad and the Qur’an, I’ll just take one for the team and release some shows for free.

There’s a quiz on this program in your podcast app if you want to check it out. For you Patreon supporters, I’ve recorded a story called “In the Moonlight,” by Guy de Maupassant, a tale, appropriately, about a French churchman, done in Maupassant’s characteristically vivid and laconic prose. For everybody, there’s a song coming up – you know the drill, keep listening if you want to hear it, and if not, see you next time.

Still listening? Look, I got to thinking, as I was re-reading this episode. I just kept giggling at my own summary of Gregory of Tours, and just how much breakneck history is mashed into his book, zinging back and forth between miracle stories and torture and halfassed military campaigns, assassination attempts, theological chest beating, sex, snake rains, dragons, and maniacal queens. I decided it was time to write the entire story of the History of the Franks in a three-minute song – one that covers the events of the early Merovingian dynasty at the same crazy velocity that Gregory does. So here’s the tune – it’s called “The Merovingians” – thanks for staying on until the end, and Venantius Fortunatus and I will see you next time.

[“The Merovingians” Song]

References

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