LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

to return thanks to Valens, and as a guarantee that he would be a friend to him in all things, he [Fritigern] adopted the emperor’s religion and persuaded all the barbarians under his rule to adopt the same belief.’¹ We should understand this conversion, it has been observed, not as ‘adherence body and soul to a new set of beliefs’ but rather as ‘a determination to change public practice’.² Official thinking appears to have been: we’ll take these people, but they must accept our empire’s faith. This was a pattern that repeated itself. Burgundians, Ostrogoths, Sueves and Vandals all accepted Christianity soon after their entry into the empire. It is a process that has to be inferred, because – remarkably enough – our sources do not mention it as such. Reasons for the reticence of the sources can be offered, some more convincing than others. However, modern scholars are agreed that the inference is a sound one. The other notable feature of the conversion of these barbarian peoples was that they all adopted the heretical, Arian form of Christianity as opposed to the orthodox or ‘Catholic’ credal formulations of Nicaea. (There were some temporary exceptions to this rule. One of the early Suevic kings in the middle years of the fifth century was a Catholic, but his successors were all Arians. The Burgundian rulers seem to have been Catholic in the middle years of the fifth century but went Arian towards its end.) The reasons for this Germanic preference for the creed of Arius remain elusive: we have simply to accept it as part of the overlapping pattern of religious allegiance in these years. On top of the world of rural pagans slowly being coaxed into some semblance of Christian belief and observance by activists like Martin of Tours, alongside the Catholic bishops in their cities, the Catholic suburban monasteries, the Catholic gentry and the Catholic middle class, we must now make mental room for an Arian clerical hierarchy, Arian kings and queens and warrior aristocrats, Arian churches with Arian liturgies being sung within them. This religious apartheid persisted in the kingdoms concerned until their governing circles decided to go over to Catholicism. This occurred in Burgundy during the reign of King Sigismund (516–23), in the Vandal kingdom when it was reconquered by Justinian’s armies and re-united to the empire in 533–4, in the Suevic kingdom in the 560s, and in the Visigothic kingdom in the years 587–9. The Ostrogothic realm had been destroyed in the course of Justinian’s attempts to reconquer Italy as he had reconquered Africa. Hardly were these long and costly campaigns over – they lasted almost without a break from 535 to 553 – than Italy was invaded by another group of migrating Germanic invaders, the Lombards, from 568 onwards. The religious affiliations of the Lombards are not easy to follow, but there was certainly an Arian presence in the Lombard kingdom until the middle years of the seventh century: the last Lombard king known to have been an Arian was Rothari (636–52).

      The barbarian peoples mentioned hitherto had in common a previous experience at fairly close quarters of Romano-Mediterranean cultural values. A partial exception must be made of the Lombards, but even they had lived for two generations in the former Roman province of Pannonia – rather like the Goths in Dacia – before their invasion of Italy. They also had in common the fact that they founded their kingdoms in the most Romanized provinces of the former western empire – Italy, Africa, Spain and southern Gaul. If we make a mental journey in the second half of the fifth century northwards from the Burgundian or Aquitanian-Visigothic kingdom we find ourselves entering a world where the shading is subtly different. The northern provinces of Gaul and the offshore provinces of Britannia had been less influenced by Roman culture than, let us say, the Gallia Narbonensis of Caesarius of Arles. The barbarians who took over these northern regions had experienced less previous contact with Roman ways than, for instance, the Goths. They took longer to integrate themselves with the culture of the empire into which they had blundered. Most notably, they did not adopt Christianity at once; and when they did, it was not the Arian but the Catholic variety which they chose. Who were these people? It is time to have a closer look at them, for they will occupy us much in this and the following two chapters. We shall start with the Franks.

      Franci, Franks, was the name given in Roman sources from the second half of the third century to a variety of tribes settled opposite the Gallic province of Germania Inferior; that is, east of the Rhine in the area between, approximately, Confluentes (Koblenz, where Mosel meets Rhine) and Noviomagus (Nijmegen). They took advantage of the troubles of the empire to launch devastating raids into Gaul. One such raid, as we saw in Chapter 1, even penetrated as far as Spain. As on the Danube frontier, so on the lower Rhine, the fourth century witnessed intermittent hostilities between Roman and barbarian with long periods of relative peace in between times. Pacification of the Frankish tribesmen under Constantine and Julian gave rise to peaceful crossings of the frontier by merchants going to and fro and by Franks enlisting in the Roman army for garrison service in northern Gaul. Some of their cemeteries have been identified by archaeologists. One fourth-century tombstone neatly sums up this phase of Franco-Roman co-existence: Francus ego civis, Romanus miles in armis, ‘I am a Frankish citizen, a Roman soldier under arms.’ In the 350s the Emperor Julian settled one group of Franks, the Salii or Salians, inside the empire in the boggy and unappealing territory called Toxandria just to the south of the estuary of the Rhine, in the region which is now traversed by the Belgian-Dutch border north of Antwerp. In the collapse of order following the breach of the Rhine frontier by Sueves and Vandals in 406–7 a Salian Frankish principality obscurely emerged in Toxandria and spread over the area to its south in what is now northern Belgium. Another group of Franks coalesced further east in the Rhineland round Cologne. The latter group are usually known as the Ripuarian Franks.

Only fragments of information survive about the activities of the Franks in the desperately confused politics of fifth-century Gaul. Heroic attempts have been made to construct a plausible narrative. All founder on the rock of the simple but compelling rule that bricks cannot be made without straw. But in the last quarter of the century straws begin to accumulate. The first ruler of the Salian Franks of whom we can form any impression is Childeric, who seems to have died in 481 or 482. A contemporary who must have know what he was talking about, Bishop Remigius, lets us know in a surviving letter that Childeric administered the province of Belgica Secunda. The capital city of the province was Rheims, which was also the seat of Remigius’ bishopric. Belgica Secunda embraced a vast area of northern Gaul bounded by the Channel, the Seine, the Vosges and the Ardennes. It is plain that by Childeric’s time – and possibly owing to his agency – Salian dominion had expanded well beyond its early bounds in Toxandria. Childeric was buried at Tournai, another of the towns of Belgica Secunda. We know this because his grave was discovered there in 1653. It could be identified as his because it contained his signet-ring, which portrayed the full-face bust of a long-haired warrior in late Roman military uniform bearing a lance and surmounted by the legend CHILDERICI REGIS, ‘[by order] of King Childeric’. The signet-ring with its Latin inscription hints at acquaintance with Roman governmental routine. It was not the only object among the gravegoods which could be interpreted in a quasi-official light. There was a shoulder-brooch of the sort worn as a badge of rank by late Roman officials of high status and there was an enormous amount of gold in both coin – minted in the eastern half of the empire – and ornaments.^* Some scholars have suggested that Childeric and his Franks might have been settled under treaty in northern Gaul, like the Visigoths in the south or the Burgundians in the east. Conceivably they had; in any case we should not rule out communications between them and the imperial government in Constantinople. These ‘Roman’ objects in Childeric’s funerary deposit must be balanced by others of different suggestiveness. There was jewellery of barbarian type, a throwing-axe, the severed head of his presumed favourite charger. Recent excavations at Tournai have revealed three pits close to the site of Childeric’s grave, each containing skeletons of about ten horses. Carbon-14 testing of these pits yielded a late-fifth-century date; and they were cut into by sixth-century burials. It cannot be demonstrated that these pits were connected with Childeric’s funeral rites but it looks extremely likely. Ritual slaughter of horses and the eating of their flesh were identified by early medieval missionaries as heathen customs. Childeric therefore (or those who buried him) looked both ways. Inside the Christian empire on its northern fringes, the Salian Franks yet maintained their ancestral observances. After all, Childeric’s gods had done very well by him. Who were his gods? It is a question

Скачать книгу