The World After Clovis

Gregory of Tours lived and wrote in the Frankish kingdom that Clovis had forged out of Roman Gaul and that Clovis’s descendants had torn into feuding fragments. This file describes that world — the conquest and conversion of the Franks, the partitions of 511 and 561 into Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy, and the violent dynastic wars that fill Gregory’s pages — as the indispensable backdrop to his life and his book.

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

From Roman Gaul to Frankish Kingdom

The Gaul into which Gregory was born around 538 was a land in the middle of a long transformation from Roman province to Frankish kingdom (Gregory of Tours, Hist. I–II; Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–751, Longman, 1994). The western Roman administration had dissolved over the fifth century, and by the time Gregory wrote, the Frankish dynasty of the Merovingians ruled most of what had been Roman Gaul. The founder of that dominance was Clovis (Chlodovech, r. c. 481/482–511), the king of the Salian Franks who, in a single generation, defeated the last Roman commander in Gaul (Syagrius, at Soissons, c. 486), subdued the Alamanni, and in 507 broke the Visigoths at the battle of Vouillé, driving them south of the Pyrenees and making the Franks masters of most of Gaul (Gregory, Hist. II.27, II.30, II.37; Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms, 1994). Gregory tells this story at length in Book II of his Histories, and it is very largely from him that later ages have known it (see What Rests on Gregory).

The decisive turn, for Gregory, was Clovis’s conversion. The Franks were pagans; the other Germanic peoples who had settled the western provinces — Goths, Burgundians, Vandals — were, for the most part, Arian Christians, holding the subordinationist theology condemned at Nicaea. Clovis, on Gregory’s telling, was baptized a Catholic (that is, Nicene) Christian by Bishop Remigius of Reims, and this made him uniquely acceptable to the Gallo-Roman, Nicene episcopate of Gaul (Gregory, Hist. II.30–31; Wood, “Gregory of Tours and Clovis,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 63, 1985). Gregory casts Clovis as a new Constantine, converting after a battlefield vow and carrying his people with him into the orthodox faith — a framing that is itself part of Gregory’s theological purpose and must be read as such (Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century, trans. Carroll, Cambridge, 2001; on the disputed date of the baptism, see What Rests on Gregory). Whatever its precise date, the alliance of the Frankish monarchy with the Nicene church of Gaul was the hinge on which Gregory’s whole world turned: it made the Frankish kings the protectors, patrons, and frequent plunderers of a church staffed by the old Gallo-Roman aristocracy — Gregory’s own class.

The Partitions: Austrasia, Neustria, Burgundy

The single fact that most shapes Gregory’s narrative is that the Frankish kingdom was not one kingdom but several. By Merovingian custom the realm was treated as a patrimony to be divided among a king’s sons, and so at Clovis’s death in 511 his kingdom was partitioned among his four sons (Gregory, Hist. III, prol. and III.1; Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms, 1994). A brief reunification under the last surviving son, Chlothar I, in 558 was followed by a second and more consequential partition at Chlothar’s death in 561, when the realm was divided among his four sons — Charibert, Guntram, Sigibert I, and Chilperic I (Gregory, Hist. IV.22; Wood, 1994). It is this 561 settlement, and the wars that grew out of it, that dominate the second half of Gregory’s Histories.

The divisions crystallized, over Gregory’s lifetime, into three durable blocs whose names became standard: Austrasia, the eastern Frankish kingdom centered on the Rhine and the Moselle (Reims, Metz), ruled by Sigibert I and then his son Childebert II; Neustria, the western kingdom of the Seine and the Channel coast (Soissons, later Paris), ruled by Chilperic I and then his son Chlothar II; and Burgundy in the south-east (Orléans, Chalon), ruled by Guntram (Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms, 1994; Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul, Berkeley, 1985). Tours itself sat on a fault line between these realms, and changed hands more than once during Gregory’s episcopate — a fact of the first importance for his career (see The Kings and the See).

The Feud of Brunhild and Fredegund

The partitions were not a stable federal arrangement but the fuel of a decades-long dynastic bloodbath, and it is Gregory’s unflinching record of that violence that has given his book its lurid reputation. At the center stood the rivalry of two queens. Sigibert I of Austrasia married Brunhild, a Visigothic princess; his brother Chilperic I of Neustria, in emulation, married her sister Galswintha — and then, on Gregory’s account, had Galswintha strangled at the instigation of his mistress Fredegund, whom he made queen in her place (Gregory, Hist. IV.27–28; Wood, 1994). The murder ignited a feud between the Austrasian and Neustrian courts — Brunhild against Fredegund — that ran for the rest of the century and beyond, punctuated by assassinations (Sigibert I himself was murdered by Fredegund’s agents in 575, Hist. IV.51), civil wars, and shifting alliances (Gregory, Hist. IV–IX, passim; Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms, 1994).

Gregory was not a distant observer of these events but a subject and sometimes a participant, caught among the kings whose quarrels swept over his city. His own great crisis — the trial of 580 — grew directly out of this world of court intrigue and the fear of Fredegund’s reach (see Berny-Rivière and the Civic Bishop). The “miracles and slaughters” that alternate through his pages (in Walter Goffart’s phrase) are not literary invention but the texture of Merovingian politics as Gregory lived it — though how he arranged and interpreted them is precisely what modern scholarship disputes (Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, Princeton, 1988; see Goffart versus Heinzelmann).

A Christian Society Under Warlord Kings

For all its violence, the Frankish Gaul Gregory describes was a thoroughly Christian society. The kings were baptized Catholics who founded monasteries, endowed shrines, sought the intercession of saints, and submitted — at least intermittently — to the moral judgment of bishops. Chilperic I, whom Gregory loathed, nonetheless built churches and dabbled in theology; Guntram of Burgundy was remembered by Gregory as a genuinely pious king and is himself venerated as a saint (Gregory, Hist. V.44, IX.21; Wood, 1994). The framework of Roman civic life persisted in the cities — with their bishops, their cathedrals, and their saints’ shrines — beneath and alongside the Frankish military aristocracy (Van Dam, Leadership and Community, 1985).

This is the paradox at the heart of Gregory’s world and his book: a society of deep and genuine Christian devotion, organized around the cult of the saints, governed by kings capable of appalling cruelty. Gregory did not experience this as a contradiction so much as a drama — the drama of divine providence and human sin working themselves out in the affairs of Gaul, which is the true subject of his Histories (Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001; see The Decem Libri Historiarum). To understand Gregory the bishop and Gregory the writer, one must first grasp that he saw the Frankish kingdom not as a political system to be analyzed but as a stage on which God and the saints contended with the sins of kings — and that he wrote to show it.

References

Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks (Decem Libri Historiarum). Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. (Books I–IX for the conquest, conversion, partitions, and dynastic wars; II.27–37 Clovis; IV.22–28 the partition of 561 and the murder of Galswintha; IV.51 the death of Sigibert.)
Wood, Ian. The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–751. London: Longman, 1994. (The standard modern political history: Clovis, the partitions, Austrasia/Neustria/Burgundy, the Brunhild–Fredegund feud.)
Wood, Ian. “Gregory of Tours and Clovis.” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 63 (1985): 249–272. (Clovis’s conversion and its treatment by Gregory.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (The persistence of Roman civic and episcopal structures under Frankish rule.)
Heinzelmann, Martin. Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century. Trans. Christopher Carroll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. (The providential and theological framing of Gregory’s political narrative.)
Goffart, Walter. The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. (“Miracles and slaughters”; the reading of Gregory’s violent narrative.)