The Decem Libri Historiarum

Gregory’s Ten Books of Histories runs from the Creation of the world to the Gaul of his own last years, but its heart is the sixth century — the conversion of Clovis, the feuds of his grandsons, the reigns of Chilperic, Guntram, and Childebert II — recorded by a bishop who was himself a witness and an actor. This file describes the work’s structure, scope, and great set-pieces, and Gregory’s own summary of his life’s writing in its final chapter.

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

Ten Books from Creation to Gaul

Gregory’s largest and most famous work is the Decem Libri Historiarum — the “Ten Books of Histories” (Gregory of Tours, Historiarum libri X, ed. Krusch and Levison, MGH SRM I.1, 2nd ed. 1951; trans. Thorpe, The History of the Franks, Penguin, 1974). It is not, despite its later title, a national history of the Franks but a universal Christian history that narrows progressively to Gregory’s own city and time. The ten books are unevenly weighted, and the weighting is itself revealing:

• Book I sweeps from the Creation and the Fall through Old Testament history, the Incarnation, the early Church, the martyrs, and the Christianization of Gaul, down to the death of St. Martin of Tours in 397 — the whole of sacred history compressed into a single book, ending pointedly with Martin (Gregory, Hist. I; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, trans. Carroll, Cambridge, 2001).
• Book II covers the fifth century in Gaul and culminates in the reign and conversion of Clovis — the baptism, the wars against the Alamanni and Visigoths, the founding of Frankish power (Gregory, Hist. II; Wood, “Gregory of Tours and Clovis,” RBPH 63, 1985).
• Books III–IV carry the story through the sons of Clovis, the partitions, and the reign of Chlothar I to the renewed division of 561 and its aftermath, down to the death of Sigibert I in 575 (Gregory, Hist. III–IV).
• Books V–X, by far the fullest, cover the years from 575 to 591 in dense, often year-by-year detail — the civil wars, Chilperic and Fredegund, Guntram, Childebert II, Gregory’s own trial, and the endless violence of the feud — the contemporary history Gregory lived through and largely witnessed (Gregory, Hist. V–X; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001).

The shape is that of a funnel: from the cosmos to Gaul, from sacred history to the streets of Tours, from Adam to the kings Gregory knew by name. This is not the design of a Frankish national historian but of a Christian bishop placing the affairs of his own violent age within the single story of God’s dealings with the world (Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001; see Purpose, Transmission, and the Misnomer).

The Great Set-Pieces

Whatever the disputes over how to read him, Gregory is an incomparable storyteller, and the Histories are studded with narrative set-pieces that have fixed the sixth century in the historical imagination. The conversion of Clovis — the battlefield vow, the baptism by Remigius at Reims, the “gentle Sigambrian” who must burn what he adored — is told with a drama that made it the founding legend of Christian France (Gregory, Hist. II.30–31; see What Rests on Gregory). The murderous unraveling of Clovis’s dynasty — the killing of the sons of Chlodomer, the treacheries recounted at the close of Book III — displays Gregory’s unflinching eye for dynastic cruelty (Gregory, Hist. III.18). The feud of Brunhild and Fredegund, the strangling of Galswintha, the assassination of Sigibert, the crimes and violent death of Chilperic, run through Books IV–VII as a single, terrible thread (Gregory, Hist. IV.28, IV.51, VI.46; Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, Longman, 1994).

Alongside the slaughters run the miracles, and their alternation is one of the most striking features of the book — the raid, the murder, the plague, followed by the healing at a shrine, the punishment of a sacrilege, the vindication of a saint (Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, Princeton, 1988). To Gregory this was not a jarring juxtaposition but the very structure of reality: the world is the arena in which divine power and human sin contend, and to record the one without the other would be to falsify it (Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001). Whether this alternation is best read as artless piety, deliberate irony, or theological design is the substance of the modern debate (see Goffart versus Heinzelmann).

Composition and Contemporaneity

The Histories were written over many years, in stages, during Gregory’s episcopate (573–594), and much of the later material has the immediacy of a contemporary record — events set down close to their occurrence, sometimes evidently as they unfolded, by a man who had spoken with the principals (Gregory, Hist. V–X; Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001; Wood, Gregory of Tours, Headstart History, 1994). This contemporaneity is the source of the work’s unique value: for the years of Gregory’s maturity we possess something rare in the early medieval West — a detailed, first-hand, year-by-year narrative by a well-placed eyewitness (see Value and Limits). It is also the source of its partiality: Gregory writes of men he loved and hated, of a trial he barely survived, of a church whose interests were his own, and the reader feels his presence on every page (Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001; see Goffart versus Heinzelmann).

Gregory’s Own Summary

At the very end of the tenth book Gregory pauses to take stock of his whole literary output, listing his works in a famous passage of self-accounting. He records that he has written, in all, ten books of Histories, seven books of Miracles (Miracula), one book on the Lives of the Fathers (Vita Patrum), a commentary on the Psalms, and a book on the offices of the church (De cursu stellarum) (Gregory, Hist. X.31; trans. Thorpe, Penguin, 1974). This colophon is important for two reasons. First, it fixes the shape of his corpus in his own words and in his own count — and note that Gregory himself distinguishes seven books of Miracles from the one book of the Lives of the Fathers, so that the common modern label “eight books of miracles” is a later collective grouping that counts the Vita Patrum among the Miracula (see The Eight Books of Miracles). Second, and famously, Gregory follows the list with an urgent plea to all future bishops of Tours: that they preserve his books whole and entire, neither destroying them nor rewriting them nor selecting parts and discarding the rest, on pain of the Last Judgment (Gregory, Hist. X.31). It was a plea that would, in the event, be disregarded (see Purpose, Transmission, and the Misnomer).

The list also reminds us that the Histories, for all their fame, were only one part — and perhaps not, in Gregory’s own valuation, the greatest part — of a corpus dominated numerically by the miracles of the saints. The man remembered as the father of Frankish history thought of himself, at least as much, as the chronicler of the virtus of the saints of Gaul (Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours, 2001; Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul, Princeton, 1993; see The Hagiographic Corpus).

See Also

• Purpose, Transmission, and the Misnomer — why “History of the Franks” misleads, and how the text survived
• The Eight Books of Miracles — the Miracula that Gregory counted alongside the Histories
• What Rests on Gregory — Clovis, the Franks, and what only the Histories preserve
• Goffart versus Heinzelmann — the debate over how to read the “miracles and slaughters”
• The World After Clovis — the events the Histories record

References

• Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks (Decem Libri Historiarum). Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. (Books I–X; I ending with Martin; II.30–31 Clovis; III.18 the sons of Chlodomer; IV.28 Galswintha; IV.51 Sigibert; VI.46 Chilperic; X.31 the summary of his works and the plea to copyists.)
• Gregory of Tours. Libri Historiarum X. Ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison. MGH Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum I.1, 2nd ed. Hannover, 1951. (The critical edition.)
• Heinzelmann, Martin. Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century. Trans. Christopher Carroll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. (The structure and purpose of the ten books; the funnel from Creation to Tours; the theology of the alternation of miracle and violence.)
• Goffart, Walter. The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. (The alternation of “miracles and slaughters.”)
• Wood, Ian. “Gregory of Tours and Clovis.” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 63 (1985): 249–272. (Book II and the Clovis narrative.)
• Wood, Ian. Gregory of Tours. Bangor: Headstart History, 1994. (Composition in stages; contemporaneity of Books V–X.)
• Van Dam, Raymond. Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (The place of the miracle-books in Gregory’s corpus.)