LITMIR.BIZ

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the early Middle Ages has already been lamented in Chapter 1. We must draw attention to it again here, with renewed lamentation. We can be reasonably sure, however, that for Childeric (as for Edwin of Northumbria) the cult of a god or gods of war, with the appropriate rituals, would have loomed large. There are hints too, in our early sources, that the veneration of ancestors was a part of the religious observance of the Frankish kings. The dynasty claimed a supernatural origin: Childeric’s father Merovech – whence the name Merovingian for the family – was held to have been the son of a sea-monster.

Childeric’s son Clovis succeeded his father as king of the Salian Franks in 481–2.^* Clovis was a great warlord who expanded Salian dominion in every direction and he was the first Christian king of the Franks. Not only was he a convert to Christianity, he was a convert to Catholic Christianity. These features made Clovis significant for the writer who is our principal source of information about him, Gregory, bishop of Tours from 573 to 594. We have already encountered Gregory. He it was who listed the foundation of churches in Touraine, who was the friend of Aredius, who told moral tales warning against the perils of rusticity. Gregory’s most famous work was his Ten Books of Histories (often inaccurately called the History of the Franks).³ Justly renowned as the most readable of all early medieval narratives, the Histories are vivid, chatty, unbuttoned. With what art the bishop coaxes his readers into accepting his stories in the same relaxed fashion as he tells them! But the Histories had a serious purpose too; or rather, several serious purposes. If we confine ourselves to what Gregory had to say about Clovis, we need to take account of three things. First, Gregory felt concern about the squabbling kings of his own day and their endless internecine wars: he wished to hold up their ancestor before them as an example of strenuous valour. Second, Gregory wanted to show how God had helped the Catholic Clovis in all his wars, not just in some of them: this affected his chronology of the king’s reign and conversion. Third, we must make a large allowance for ignorance: like every historian Gregory was at the mercy of his sources, which were meagre. Writing as he was a century later, Gregory of Tours did not know much about Clovis. Because he didn’t, we can’t either.

      Gregory has, however, left us a great literary set piece on the conversion of Clovis. We must attend to it not because of its claims to tell us what really happened – they can be shown to be ill-founded – but because it shows us how Gregory thought it appropriate to present a king’s conversion, and because of its literary influence upon other descriptions of royal conversions. As Gregory tells it the story of the conversion of Clovis goes like this. Clovis’s queen, Clotilde, was a Burgundian princess and a Catholic Christian. She wished to have their first-born son baptized and nagged her husband to permit it. She chided him for his attachment to the pagan gods but he was firmly loyal to them. The queen had the infant baptized. He promptly died, whereupon the king rounded on her, seeing in his son’s death a demonstration of the impotence of her Christian God. Clotilde had another son, whom also she caused to be baptized. The baby began to ail and Clovis predicted a second death. But the queen prayed and the infant survived. She continued her pressure upon the king to bring about his conversion. Eventually there came a time when Clovis took the field against the Alamans. Finding himself hard-pressed in battle, Clovis called upon ‘Jesus Christ … Thou that art said to grant victory to those that hope in Thee’, promising to believe and to undergo baptism in return for victory. The Alamans were defeated. At the queen’s prompting Bishop Remigius of Rheims began to instruct Clovis; but secretly, because Clovis feared that his subjects would not permit their king to forsake the ancestral gods. But his apprehensions proved baseless, for his people spontaneously decided ‘to follow that immortal God whom Remigius preaches’. All was made ready, and Clovis ‘like a new Constantine’ was cleansed in the waters of baptism. Three thousand of his armed followers were also baptized; so too his sister Albofleda; and another sister Lantechildis, who had previously been an Arian.

      There are four essentials in this account: the role of a Christian queen in converting her pagan husband; the power of the Christian God to give victory in battle; the king’s reluctance, springing from anxiety as to whether he could carry his people with him; and the happy conclusion in the baptism of the king, some members of his family and large numbers of his following. We shall encounter these themes again. If they seem, with repetition, to betray something of the character of a topos or conventional literary formula, we need not doubt their fundamental plausibility.

      Gregory’s account was intended to be straightforward but it hints at complexities. It is of great interest to discover that one of Clovis’s sisters was already a Christian at the time of his baptism, albeit an Arian one. This snippet of information acquires more significance when considered alongside a strictly contemporary source. There survives a letter to Clovis from Bishop Avitus of Vienne in which the writer congratulated the king upon his conversion. Avitus wrote in a convoluted and rhetorical Latin, but what he seems plainly to say at one point is that the conversion of Clovis which he celebrates was not a conversion from paganism to Christianity but one from heresy to orthodox Catholicism. In the context, the heresy can only have been Arianism.

      This complicates the picture considerably. It raises the near-certainty that Arian proselytizers were at work among the Frankish elite. Had they taken initiatives which their Catholic rivals had been sluggish to grasp? Another surviving letter, already referred to, is from no less a man than Bishop Remigius of Rheims.⁴ It seems to date from 4812, and it was written to welcome Clovis’s succession to the administration of Belgica Secunda in the wake of his father Childeric’s death. In it the bishop proffered advice as to how the young man should conduct himself as king. He should, among other things, endeavour to keep on good terms with the bishops of the province: sound advice, in view of the enhanced status of the episcopate in late-antique society at which we glanced in Chapter 2. What is conspicuously lacking from the letter is any suggestion that Clovis might care to become a Christian. Some find this surprising; but it neatly exemplifies one of the attitudes we investigated in Chapter 1. The letter of Remigius to Clovis is a late example of the traditional Roman view that Christianity was not for barbarians.

      One letter is not much – indeed it’s precious little – to go on. But the historian of a dark age must be thankful for the smallest mercies. The letter of Remigius permits us to envisage a Catholic episcopate initially aloof from evangelizing their new Salian masters. Arian clergy took advantage of this. The king himself was in no hurry and was prepared at the very least to dally with heresy before entering the Catholic fold. This we may be sure he finally did; no one doubts that in the end it was Remigius who baptized Clovis. ‘Finally … in the end’: the implication that the king’s approach to the baptismal font was a slow and cautious one is there in Gregory’s narrative and finds confirmation in yet another episcopal letter. Bishop Nicetius of Trier composed a letter of advice to Clovis’s granddaughter Chlodoswintha (Clotsinda, Lucinda) in about 565, when she was on the point of leaving Gaul to be married to the Lombard Prince Alboin. Let her remember how her grandmother Clotilde ‘led the lord Clovis to the Catholic faith’, even though ‘because he was a very shrewd man he was unwilling to accept it until he knew it was true’.⁵ Clovis had taken his time. The assigning of precise dates remains problematical. Victory over the Alamans, traditionally placed in the year 496, may indeed have been regarded by the king as God-given. Good reasons have been advanced for placing his baptism quite late in the reign; a strong case for 508 has been made.

      Royal conversion was a complicated business. A first stage might have been marked, as suggested here, by the prospective acceptance of a Christian deity – possibly without any very clear awareness of His exclusive claims upon the believer’s allegiance. The final stage was baptism itself, full entry into the Christian community. The journey from first to last stage could have taken up to a dozen years, and there were plenty of intermediate stages. Clovis would have needed to be watchful, especially of his warrior following. He would have wanted to be quite sure that a new God could deliver the goods he had been led to expect. Bishop Nicetius was clear about these in his letter to Chlodoswintha. Look how your grandfather defeated the Burgundians and the Visigoths – and, he might have added,

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