The Kings and the See

Gregory was consecrated bishop of Tours in 573 and held the see for twenty-one years, until his death in 594 — a city on the frontier between the Frankish kingdoms, contested by four kings in turn: Sigibert I, Chilperic I, Guntram, and Childebert II. This file follows Gregory through those reigns, the guardianship of St. Martin’s shrine, and his unforgettable obituary verdict on Chilperic, “the Nero and Herod of our time.”

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

Consecration in 573

On the death of his kinsman Bishop Eufronius in 573, Gregory — then a deacon of about thirty-five, of the right family and already devoted to Martin’s shrine — was chosen bishop of Tours and consecrated (Gregory of Tours, Hist. IV.15, V.49; Wood, Gregory of Tours, Headstart History, 1994). At the time of his elevation Tours lay within the Austrasian kingdom of Sigibert I, and Gregory’s consecration was carried out with royal approval; the tradition that he was consecrated at Reims, the Austrasian metropolis, under the presidency of its bishop Egidius, reflects Tours’ place in Sigibert’s realm at that moment (Gregory, Hist. IV.15; Wood, Gregory of Tours, 1994; Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul, Berkeley, 1985). Gregory thus entered upon the see of Martin as a bishop of the Austrasian obedience — but the political ownership of Tours was about to become the great external drama of his episcopate.

A City on the Frontier

Tours sat on the Loire at a strategic and contested point between the Frankish kingdoms, and during Gregory’s episcopate it changed hands more than once as the kings warred over the middle Loire (Gregory, Hist. IV–VII, passim; Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, Longman, 1994). This exposed position is the reason Gregory had to reckon with, and record, so many kings: he was the bishop of a city that different Merovingian rulers claimed and occupied in turn, and his duty was to hold the see of Martin — its rights, its property, its sanctuary, its people — steady through the shifting sovereignties (Van Dam, Leadership and Community, 1985). The four kings who dominate his episcopate are the four who, at one time or another, ruled or fought over Tours.

Sigibert I of Austrasia (d. 575), under whom Gregory became bishop, until his assassination by Fredegund’s agents at Vitry threw the kingdom into crisis (Gregory, Hist. IV.51).
Chilperic I of Neustria (d. 584), who seized Tours for periods during the wars and under whom Gregory endured his greatest trial — the king Gregory came to detest above all others (Gregory, Hist. V–VI).
Guntram of Burgundy (d. 592), Gregory’s model of a pious and just king, with whom his relations were good and whom he portrays with real warmth (Gregory, Hist. V.44, VII–IX; venerated as a saint).
Childebert II of Austrasia (d. 595/596), Sigibert’s son, under whose eventual control of Tours Gregory spent his last years, and to whose reign the closing books of the Histories belong (Gregory, Hist. VIII–X).

Through all these changes Gregory’s constant was the shrine. Whoever ruled Tours, Gregory was the steward of Martin’s basilica — a place of pilgrimage, healing, oath, and asylum that every king wished to court and none could afford to offend (Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul, Princeton, 1993; see The Shrine at Tours). Gregory’s authority rested less on any king’s favor than on his guardianship of the saint whose patrocinium protected the city.

Guardian of Martin’s Shrine

The center of Gregory’s episcopate was the cult of St. Martin. He was the custodian of Martin’s basilica and tomb, and he understood his office as service to the saint whose successor he was in the see (Gregory, De virtutibus sancti Martini, prologues; Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles, 1993; see The Eight Books of Miracles). He records the shrine as a place of asylum that kings and counts violated at their peril, of oath-taking whose false swearers the saint punished, and of continual healing (Gregory, Hist. passim; De virtutibus sancti Martini 1–4). Much of his political weight as bishop derived from this guardianship: to deal with Gregory was to deal with the keeper of Martin’s power, and the kings knew it (Van Dam, Leadership and Community, 1985; see Berny-Rivière and the Civic Bishop).

Gregory also promoted the shrine and its cult actively — building, adorning, and above all documenting Martin’s continuing miracles, so that the four books of the Miracles of St. Martin are in large part the record of his own episcopate at the shrine (Gregory, De virtutibus sancti Martini 2–4; Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles, 1993). The guardianship of Martin was thus at once his pastoral duty, the source of his authority, and one of the great literary projects of his life.

“The Nero and Herod of Our Time”

Of the kings, one drew Gregory’s undying hatred: Chilperic I of Neustria. Chilperic seized Tours during the civil wars, quartered troops on the region, plundered churches, taxed harshly, meddled in theology (Gregory reports his attempt to revise the doctrine of the Trinity), and — most unforgivably, from Gregory’s standpoint — was the husband of Queen Fredegund, whose reach lay behind Gregory’s own trial (Gregory, Hist. V.44, VI.46; see Berny-Rivière and the Civic Bishop). When Chilperic was assassinated in 584, Gregory composed an obituary of extraordinary venom, summing the dead king up in a catalogue of vices and delivering the verdict that has become the most quoted sentence he ever wrote: Chilperic was “the Nero and Herod of our time” (Nero nostri temporis et Herodes), a persecutor and a destroyer of churches (Gregory, Hist. VI.46; trans. Thorpe, Penguin, 1974).

The verdict is characteristic of Gregory’s method and of the interpretive problem it poses. On one reading it is the honest, if partisan, judgment of a bishop on a king who had oppressed the church; on another it is a deliberate piece of rhetorical artistry, a set-piece invective built on biblical and classical models — Nero the persecutor of Christians, Herod the murderer of the innocents — through which Gregory shaped the memory of his enemy (Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, Princeton, 1988; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, trans. Carroll, Cambridge, 2001). That the obituary is composed, weighted, and theologically loaded is not in doubt; whether it is best read as satire, as prophetic denunciation, or as both is exactly the question of the modern debate (see Goffart versus Heinzelmann). What is certain is that Chilperic lives in history as Gregory painted him — proof, if any were needed, of the power a bishop with a pen held over the memory of kings.

The Good King: Guntram

Against Chilperic, Gregory set Guntram of Burgundy as the image of the king as he should be: pious, generous to the church, respectful of bishops, and given to prayer and almsgiving (Gregory, Hist. V.17, VII–IX, passim). Gregory records episodes of Guntram’s devotion and even his reputation for healing, and treats him throughout with a warmth he extends to no other king (Gregory, Hist. IX.21; Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms, 1994). Guntram is venerated as a saint, and Gregory’s portrait is a principal source for his cult. The contrast of Guntram and Chilperic is one of the structuring oppositions of the later Histories — the just king and the tyrant, the protector and the plunderer of the church — and it displays Gregory’s whole theology of kingship: that the king who honors God and the saints prospers, and the king who offends them is struck down (Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001; see Church and Kingship).

References

Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. (IV.15 consecration and Eufronius; IV.51 death of Sigibert; V.44 Chilperic and the church; VI.46 the Chilperic obituary, “Nero and Herod”; V.17, IX.21 Guntram; VIII–X Childebert II.)
Wood, Ian. Gregory of Tours. Bangor: Headstart History, 1994. (Gregory’s episcopate, consecration, and the political situation of Tours.)
Wood, Ian. The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–751. London: Longman, 1994. (The wars over the middle Loire; the four kings.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (Tours as a contested see; the bishop’s authority through the shrine.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (The shrine of Martin and Gregory’s guardianship; the Miracles of St. Martin.)
Goffart, Walter. The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. (The Chilperic obituary as rhetorical artistry.)
Heinzelmann, Martin. Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century. Trans. Christopher Carroll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. (The theology of kingship; Guntram and Chilperic as structuring opposites.)