Church and Kingship in Merovingian Gaul

In the Frankish kingdom the bishop was not only a pastor but a civic ruler, a Gallo-Roman aristocrat holding a Roman city under a Frankish crown; and the cult of the saints was the connective tissue that bound church, city, and monarchy together. This file describes the office Gregory held and the church–kingship partnership within which he acted — the framework that made a bishop of Tours a power in the land.

Tradition: Western (pre-Schism Gaul; father of Western hagiography)

The Bishop as Civic Leader

By the sixth century the bishop had become the leading man of the Gallo-Roman city — the civitas — inheriting much of the authority that Roman magistrates and curial aristocracies had once exercised (Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul, Berkeley, 1985). As the Roman administration receded, the bishop remained: he administered the church’s often vast estates, fed the poor in famine, ransomed captives, sat in judgment on disputes, negotiated with kings and counts on behalf of his city, and defended his people against the exactions of royal agents. The bishop’s cathedral and the saints’ shrines were the monumental heart of the city; the bishop’s household was its most stable institution (Van Dam, Leadership and Community, 1985; Brown, The Cult of the Saints, Chicago, 1981).

This concentration of authority is why the episcopate was so coveted by the Gallo-Roman aristocracy and so contested by the kings. To be bishop of a great see like Tours was to hold real power — over property, patronage, justice, and the sacred — and Gregory exercised all of it (Van Dam, Leadership and Community, 1985; see Berny-Rivière and the Civic Bishop). His Histories are, among other things, the record of a bishop’s public life: the arbitration of quarrels, the protection of the church’s rights of asylum, the confrontation with counts and kings who threatened his city (Gregory, Hist. passim; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, trans. Carroll, Cambridge, 2001).

The Gallo-Roman Episcopate

The men who filled these sees were, overwhelmingly, drawn from the surviving senatorial aristocracy of Roman Gaul — the same families, Latin-speaking, classically educated, land-rich, that had furnished the province’s magistrates. In many cities the episcopate had become almost a hereditary preserve of a handful of great families, passed among kinsmen across generations (Van Dam, Leadership and Community, 1985; Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, Longman, 1994). Gregory is the supreme example: he came from precisely such a clan and could boast that all but five of the eighteen bishops of Tours before him had been his relatives (Gregory, Hist. V.49; see The Episcopal Aristocracy).

This Gallo-Roman episcopate formed a kind of Christian-Roman establishment persisting beneath the Frankish monarchy — a class conscious of its Roman past, its classical culture, and its distinctness from the Frankish military aristocracy, even as the two increasingly intermarried (Van Dam, Leadership and Community, 1985; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001). Gregory writes as a member and defender of this establishment: his heroes are holy bishops, his villains are often the counts and royal officials who trampled the church’s rights, and his instinctive standpoint is that of the civitas and its saint against the depredations of secular power (Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001).

The Cult of the Saints as the Bond of Society

What held this Christian Gaul together, in Gregory’s understanding and in social fact, was the cult of the saints. Every city had its patron saint, present at his tomb, whose virtus (power) protected the community, healed its sick, punished its oppressors, and gave sanctuary to the endangered (Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 1981; Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul, Princeton, 1993). The shrine was where heaven and earth met; the saint was the true patron of the city, more powerful than any count or king, and the bishop was the saint’s steward and spokesman (Brown, 1981). At Tours the patron was St. Martin, whose basilica outside the walls was a place of pilgrimage, healing, oath-taking, and asylum, and whose favor structured the religious and political life of the region (Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles, 1993; see The Shrine at Tours).

This is why Gregory’s historical and hagiographic works are not two separate enterprises but one: the saints and their shrines were, for him, the real powers governing Gaul, and the history of kings was in large part the history of how they honored or offended those powers (Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001; see The Eight Books of Miracles). The cult of the saints was at once a pastoral reality, a social institution, and Gregory’s interpretive key to the events of his century.

The Uneasy Partnership of Altar and Throne

The Frankish kings needed the church and the church needed the kings, and the relationship was correspondingly close and correspondingly fraught. Kings appointed — or approved — bishops, endowed and plundered churches, convened church councils, and sought the intercession of the saints; bishops crowned, counseled, admonished, and buried kings, and lent the monarchy the legitimacy of Nicene orthodoxy (Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms, 1994; Van Dam, Leadership and Community, 1985). Royal control over episcopal appointments was real, and the kings did not hesitate to intervene in the churches of their realms; yet the greatest bishops retained a moral authority the kings could not simply command, and Gregory portrays himself standing up to kings in the name of God and St. Martin (Gregory, Hist. V.18, V.49; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001).

Gregory’s ideal, expressed throughout the Histories, was a partnership in which the king ruled justly, protected the church, and heeded its bishops, while the bishop guided the king toward righteousness and defended the poor and the church against him when he strayed (Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001; Breukelaar, Historiography and Episcopal Authority in Sixth-Century Gaul, Göttingen, 1994). His good kings — Guntram above all — approach this ideal; his bad kings — Chilperic supremely — violate it, plundering churches and mocking bishops, and Gregory records their punishments as the judgment of God and the saints (Gregory, Hist. V.34, VI.46; see The Kings and the See). The drama of church and kingship, righteousness and sacrilege, is the moral engine of his whole account of Merovingian Gaul.

References

Van Dam, Raymond. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (The bishop as civic leader; the Gallo-Roman episcopate; the persistence of Roman civic structures.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (The cult of the saints and the shrine as social institution; Martin at Tours.)
Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. (The saint as patron; praesentia at the tomb; the shrine as the meeting of heaven and earth.)
Wood, Ian. The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–751. London: Longman, 1994. (Royal control of the church; councils; appointments.)
Heinzelmann, Martin. Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century. Trans. Christopher Carroll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. (Gregory’s ideal of episcopal authority and the church–kingship relation as the moral structure of the Histories.)
Breukelaar, Adriaan H. B. Historiography and Episcopal Authority in Sixth-Century Gaul: The Histories of Gregory of Tours Interpreted in Their Historical Context. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994. (Episcopal authority as the frame of Gregory’s history.)
Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. (V.18, V.49 Gregory before kings; V.34, VI.46 Chilperic and sacrilege.)