01 — Merovingian Gaul
The world Gregory inhabited and described: the Frankish kingdom of the sixth century, forged by Clovis and partitioned among his heirs, in which a Gallo-Roman episcopate held together the fabric of civic and Christian life beneath — and often against — the Merovingian kings.
Tradition: Western (pre-Schism Gaul; father of Western hagiography)
Gregory of Tours is unintelligible apart from his world, because he is very largely the man who tells us what that world was. This section sets the stage before the man: the Frankish kingdoms that succeeded Roman Gaul, their bloody partitions and reunions, and the position of the bishop — a Gallo-Roman aristocrat holding a Roman city for a Christian God amid Frankish warlords who were, by Gregory’s day, themselves baptized. The first file describes the political landscape after Clovis; the second treats the entanglement of church and kingship that made a bishop like Gregory a power as well as a pastor.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| the-world-after-clovis.md | The Frankish kingdom after Clovis: conquest, conversion, and the partitions of 511 and 561 that split Gaul into Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy; the violent world Gregory chronicled. |
| church-and-kingship.md | The Gallo-Roman church and the Merovingian monarchy: the bishop as civic leader, the cult of saints as the connective tissue of Christian Gaul, and the uneasy partnership of altar and throne. |
See Also
- The Kings and the See — the four kings under whom Gregory held Tours
- What Rests on Gregory — Clovis and his baptism as known through Gregory
- St. Martin of Tours — the patron-saint cult at the center of Gregory’s Gaul
- St. Columbanus — the Irish monasticism that would enter this same Frankish world a generation later
References
- Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks (Decem Libri Historiarum). Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
- Wood, Ian. The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–751. London: Longman, 1994.
- Van Dam, Raymond. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.