PAUL FREEDMAN:Gregory
of Tours. Here we enter further into
a stranger world. As I told you at the outset of
the course, it begins fairly reasonably, as if it's another
history course with great powers, states, recognizable
theories of government, and practices of government. Now we're into what certainly
seems like a combination of thugs and miracles. And I hope that you'll see, if
you haven't seen already, that far from being contradictory,
thugs and miracles go together, historically. We've already entered
into a somewhat strange realm with Procopius. Procopius' Secret History
certainly is a strange story, with strange theories of
causality and a strange cast of characters. But it is narrated in a
high classical style. Insofar as the pieces are a bit
jumbled, it's because it wasn't completed. But as you will have seen, if
you think about Procopius, he is easy to read because
he's leading you on. He has several points to make,
and he makes them with great rhetorical power. His Secret History is
in the classical tradition of the invective. And in a way, we are better
able to understand this because our own political
discourse has gotten much more crude and extreme in the last
thirty years or so. So political invective,
historical invective, stylistically well - composed,
is not unfamiliar to us. But Gregory of Tours is. In a way, I've cheated by giving
you the assignment from this edition of Alexander
Murray, because he rearranges and excerpts things. The full work is much fatter,
and Murray tries to make the story fairly coherent with
headings, grouping things together, explaining a little
what's going on, to say nothing of the nice maps
and genealogical tables in the back. But that loses some of
the random quality-- or seemingly random quality-- that Gregory has. He has this funny way of seeming
to move from one thing to another without any
kind of transition or for no apparent purpose. So in one of the little sections
of Book 3 that's not in Murray, he's telling us
now we have a miracle. "There lived at the city of
Langres, Saint Gregory, that priest of God famed far and
wide for his miracles and virtuous deeds. While I am talking about this
bishop, I thought you would like me to tell you something of
the town of Dijon, where he spent his youth." Well,
wait a minute. Did I ask about Dijon? Do I even know where Dijon is? Weren't we talking about
Theuderic and Chlothar and their feud? How have we gotten into, first
of all, a story of a saint, and second, a little travelogue
about Dijon? So that is Gregory. You've got to like this. And I think we are better
equipped you, especially-- because we're not so linear
as we used to be. You know, magazines used to be
just a set of articles, and that was it. And then about twenty years
ago, they started just breaking up into these
miscellaneous things with little observations, and here's
what's happening in Wichita Falls. But, you know, I don't
live there. But so what? You know, food festival in
Colorado Springs, and what about this train trip
in New Zealand? Well, I'm not in New
Zealand, either. You know what I mean. This kind of little offers
from all over the place, little possibilities,
observations, wit and wisdom. This is the experience
of modern media. So I wouldn't say that Gregory
is ahead of his time, but I don't want you to
complain to me-- well, I mean, you can, but
I will not be incredibly sympathetic with, "Wait, I don't
know where this stops and begins." Or "Wait, are we
responsible for Theodebert versus Theuderic?" The answer to
that is "No." I'm not going to give you a short answer about
which of these names is best for your cat. PROFESSOR: Or, you
know, name at least five of Clovis' grandchildren. But the rhythm of this, the
power of these rulers, their thuggery or their violence,
their internecine violence, their respect for miracles,
Gregory's sense of God's intervention, is very
important to grasp. And we will talk about the
actual historical importance of this people that Gregory
chronicles, the Franks. The chief thing about the Franks
from Gregory's point of view is that they are
Catholic Christians. They never-- unlike almost all other of the
invaders of the Roman Empire-- they never go through a
period of Arianism. Clovis converts from paganism
to regular-guy Roman Christianity. And from Clovis' point of view,
that is what is of chief importance-- from Gregory's point of view. Gregory of Tours, the author,
is writing in the late sixth century. So around the same time,
a few decades later, perhaps, than Procopius. Gregory lived from 539 to 594. In his time, there was still a
distinction between Romans and barbarians, and Gregory
was very conscious of himself as a Roman. He was from a distinguished
Roman senatorial family. Note that he uses the word
"senatorial," a rank of the Roman Empire, even though the
Roman Empire, from our point of view, certainly hasn't
existed for a hundred years or so. He notes that eighteen bishops
of Tours, his see-- of the eighteen bishops of
Tours, all but five were related to him. That shows you that being a
bishop was a Roman office, an elite Roman office, even in
the barbarian period. And also you'll see that
Gregory's behavior shows us that the bishops, to some
extent, have inherited Roman offices and Roman
responsibilities. They are part of the government,
and in a sense, opposed to the more brutal
aspects of Merovingian, Frankish government. Gregory became bishop of Tours
in 573, and so he was bishop for twenty-one years. He probably began writing
this book-- which is actually just called
The Book of the Histories-- shortly after his election. So he's writing in the
570s to early 590s. He begins Book 1, which we
haven't read, with the story of creation and takes it to the
death of Saint Martin, the great patron of Tours. And then he begins, properly
speaking, with at least the legendary history of the dynasty
of the Frankish kings, the descendants of a certain
Merovech, hence Merovingians, the name for this dynasty. Gregory also wrote a
number of saints' lives and martyr stories. He was very attached
to Saint Martin. At one point, in one of those
episodes not in Murray, he says, "If you celebrate the
feast of Saint Martin faithfully, you will gain the
protection of the saintly bishop in this world
and the next." And indeed, that's very important. Remember when Clovis-- and this is in Murray,
on the page 17-- when Clovis decides he's going
to attack the Visigoths? Now, he says he's attacking them
because he can't stand to have Arians occupying Gaul,
which is on page 16. "Then Clovis said to his men,
'I take it very badly that these Arians hold
part of Gaul. With God's help, let's go and
conquer them, and bring the land under His authority." And
a soldier seizes hay from a poor peasant. This is just the way
soldiers are. They need that hay, the civilian
has the hay, they're on the march, he grabs it. But this peasant is on the lands
of Saint Martin, of land belonging to Tours. And the king, thug though he is,
has issued an order saying the troops were not
to take anything except fodder and water. And in fact, sort of
hay is fodder. Nevertheless, "the king, who
quicker than it takes to say it, had him put to the sword."
Guy, you've made a mistake. And he's killed. And Clovis says of this
incident, "How shall there be hope of victory, if we offend
the blessed Martin?" So you've got to take seriously,
if you want to call it superstition, fine. But the Frankish rulers are at
least amenable to influence from the priests, bishops,
guardians of the saints. And notice-- because we're going to come
back to this a lot. You're going to see it
everywhere in the early Middle Ages, post-Roman world-- the saint is not dead. It's not like Martin is some
just kind of presence, the way, you know, the happy dead
who are indifferent to us. Martin is an angry saint,
or potentially angry. In fact, all saints worth
anything in the early Middle Ages are very touchy. If you seize hay from land
belonging to their church, they'll strike you dead, or they
will see to it that you die in battle. And Gregory is indeed full of
incidents in which holy figures, alive or dead, have
this kind of ability to mobilize supernatural power. What is his historical model? I mean if Procopius, in The
Wars, models himself after Thucydides, and if in the
Secret History he models himself after a tradition
of invective, what is Gregory's model? We don't really know
his sources. One reason why he's so important
is that for an awful lot of the history of the
Merovingians, he's about all we have. And although
disorganized-- quote "disorganized"-- from our point of view,
he's very detailed. But he does have a model, and
that model is the Bible, the Hebrew Bible or the
Old Testament. If you read the Old Testament,
it is, as I think I've said before, full of violence
and full of miracles. And they are sort
of jumbled up. The hand of God is very
apparent in the Bible. And generally speaking, those
who disobey God are punished. The same is true in Gregory,
although the hand of God is a little more mediated by
those holy figures-- saints, hermits, bishops-- that we just discussed. There is a little bit more of
a priestly power, but then again, the Bible has figures
like Moses, who are able to-- Joshua, who's able
to stop the sun. Priestly figures, indeed. So from Gregory's point of view,
there is a continuity between biblical history and
the history of his times. He describes, in the prologue
to Book 2-- which is not in Murray-- that his plan is to describe the
holy deeds of the saints and the way in which
whole races of people were butchered. OK, you got a problem
with that? At least the second part
we all know is what history's about. It's the first that's a
little tough, the holy deeds of the saints. And particularly as they're
not off on the side. The popular imagination loves
what might be called "holy deeds of the saints." If you
look at gossip magazines of the lower sort, or kind of
internet folklore, weird births, raining frogs, space
aliens all sorts of supernatural events clog them. Along with stars-- that is, movie stars or media
stars gossip, and a little bit of history, a little bit
of current events. This is not so dissimilar,
in that sense. Gregory is both a historian
and a political actor. He does not have either the
luxury or the irrelevance of most historians now, who
sit comfortably-- or in my case, not very
comfortably, since I'm in an unrenovated office-- but
comfortably enough. PROFESSOR: In universities and
maybe comment on what's going on. No. Gregory is very, very involved
with the Merovingian rulers. And he has to display courage. He refuses to surrender
fugitives who have sought asylum in his cathedral
when they are demanded by royal officials. He defends his fellow bishop,
Praetextatus, who was accused by the king of treason. You'll be reading about
this for next week. He'll have arguments, again in
your reading for next week, with the king himself about the
Trinity, and has to defend himself against the charge
of slandering the king's concubine-- really, here, the word
"concubine" isn't quite right, because these kings are
kind of polygamists-- against the king's favorite,
Fredegund. And Gregory is tried
for defaming her. He resists taxes. He seems to have been
a small man. He suffered ill health, or at
least he took an inordinate interest in his own health. He was a great believer in
potions made with dust from the relics and tombs
of holy men. A medicine prescribed as potio
de pulvere sepulchre, a potion made from sepulcher dust. But
it's got to be of the right kind of people. What is his attitude
towards the Franks? I've said he regards them
as thugs and barbarians. But at the same time, he regards
them as the people of Israel, reborn as a race
favored by God. The Franks claimed-- or at least their spokespersons,
their learned spokespersons-- claimed to be descended from
refugees of fallen Troy. Thus, like the Romans. In fact, we don't really know
anything about them until they appear in Roman sources
in the third century. We don't know what held
them together. We're back to this problem
of ethnogenesis. Do they speak a common
language? Do they just travel in
a pack together? Do they regard themselves
as a people having a common ancestor? Well, we don't really know. Constantine's father, at the
end of the third century, dealt with them and settled
them in what's now the Low Countries, Holland
and Belgium. They were federati, which you
remember means allied armies of the Empire. They served the Empire actually
fairly loyally in the early fourth century, and they
became rich doing so. We don't really know if the
supposed ancestors of Clovis-- Merovech himself,
for example-- were real or legendary. Supposedly, Merovech is
Clovis' grandfather. We don't know if he existed. But we do know something about
his father, Chilperic. Well, it's a chalkless day, so
the guy's name is Chilperic. C-H-I-L-P-E-R-I-C. We know about
him because his grave was dug up in the seventeenth
century. Unfortunately, all the stuff
that was in his grave, most of it was stolen in 1831. But drawings had been made
before that, and they show that he owned or was buried with
a cloak embroidered with cicadas, a crystal
globe, a gold bracelet, a Frankish amulet. His horse's--we assume it was
his horse's head buried with him, and it was covered
with precious metal. He was also buried with
100 gold coins and 200 silver ones. And a signet ring that shows
him with long hair, and the ring is inscribed-- in case we wondered
who this was-- King Chilperic. The long hair is important. It is a symbol of the power
of these rulers. It is a kind of dynastic
charisma. And indeed, one of the best
books about these rulers, by an English historian is called
Long Haired Kings. What is all this stuff? The stuff that's buried
with him? A lot of it comes
from Byzantium. A lot of this would have been
bribes or goodwill gestures by the emperors interested in
keeping some nominal loyalty on the part of the barbarian
tribes in the collapse of the Western Empire. Clovis succeeded Chilperic,
his father, as the head of this federated tribe of now
a nonexistent empire. All that remains of the Empire
is a Roman commander. Remember we mentioned, in the
life of Saint Antoninus of Noricum that an emissary was
sent from the Roman army to try to get paid and discovered
that the Empire no longer existed. That there was nobody
to pay them. Syagrius, S-Y-A-G-R-I-U-S, is
a little bit like this. He's a general in northern Gaul
of the Roman Empire, and now that the Roman
Empire ceases to exist, he's on his own. And he is a rival for Clovis,
and one of the first targets of his expansion. Gregory calls him "king of the
Romans." What does that mean? Rome didn't have king's. We don't really know
what title he used. We have no documents
from him, no coins. Probably Byzantium, the eastern
Roman Empire, didn't like him, and probably they
supported Clovis. At any rate, he was killed in
486, and Clovis' next target of expansion was the Visigoths,
those Arians that Gregory tells us about in the
passage that I mentioned to you just a little while ago. What kind of personality
does Clovis have? Have we met his type before? Is there any difference? Anybody have a sense of him? How does he strike you? Just another one of these
characters of the early Middle Ages, or is there's
something unusual? STUDENT: Killing off everybody,
including his family members? PROFESSOR: He kills off
everybody, including his family members. Yeah, yeah. This is, unfortunately,
not unusual. And why? STUDENT: He doesn't want
any family member to lay claim to-- PROFESSOR: Yeah,
wouldn't you think he'd be dynastically conscious? Constantius, the Emperor in the
fourth century, did the same thing. Only his nephews, Gallus and
Julian, survived, and indeed, Julian defeated him. Is he, then, just the same kind
of violent character, or randomly violent character? Is there a plan besides
expansion? At least in Gregory's
portrayal? STUDENT: Christianity. PROFESSOR: Sorry? STUDENT: Christianity,
forcing conversion. PROFESSOR: Yeah, yeah. He is Christian. Christianity. He doesn't force conversion, but
he himself converts, and his men with him. We know his piety even before
the conversion, because of this incident with the silver
liturgical bowl, or ewer. Right? On page seven and
eight, in 227? STUDENT: The story
seems dubious. PROFESSOR: The story
seems dubious. The story being that they
plundered this church, the Church of Rheims The bishop asks
Clovis for this silver bowl to be returned. Clovis says he's got to consult
his men, because they have a kind of booty
splitting muster. Notice that this shows a
certain leader/follower relationship, rather than
absolute ruler/follower relationship. Clovis says to his men something
on the order of "me hardies," or "my good men." "Me
hardies" maybe is a little too pirate-like. "So," he begins. "So I want that ewer to return
it to the Church in addition to my share of half." And one
soldier says, "No, you get half of that, just like
everything else. Takes out his axe, one of the
important weapons of the Franks, and splits the
silver thing in half. And Clovis doesn't do anything
immediately. In a later muster, he says to
the guy, recognizing him, your kit is a mess. "Your shield, you
call that a shield?" And he knocks something down, and as
the guy picks it up, Clovis takes up his own axe and
splits the guy's head. Saying as he does so, "Thus
you did to my ewer, or my basin, in Soissons." Yeah, dubious story, but
interesting because it shows both the power of the ruler and
some limitations, as well as his type of piety. Power-- actually, you know, the
president of the United States actually does have the
power to kill people. We've seen it in action. Though at a distance and under
certain, very special circumstances. But basically, it takes a
certain kind of ruler to be able to kill someone
outright like that. It still happens, but we're
talking about people like Qaddafi or despots. So certainly, as with killing
the guy who stole the hay from Saint Martin's land, Clovis is
following a certain set of leadership tips that basically
amounts to winning by maximum intimidation, I think
it's fair to say. But he's got to do this in a
careful way, because his followers are very important. They are powerful. He does depend on them, and he's
got to give at least the impression of being the leader
of a band and not the kind of ruler of the state that we might
be more familiar with. Leadership is personal but
there's a kind of tribal sense, or tribal sense
of democracy. The other thing about the story,
of course, is once again the controversy is over
piety towards things of the Church, even before Clovis has,
at least according to Gregory, officially converted. It's not that you should be
nice to the Church because it's good to be a nice person. It's that you've got to be nice
to the Church because the Church is in command of
supernatural weapons that will overcome the weapons
of this world. The supernatural interpenetrates
the physical or historical at every point
in Gregory's narrative. So the overwhelming fact for
Gregory, as I said before, is that he is orthodox, or Catholic
i.e., not Arian. Clovis is, in Gregory's eyes,
the new Constantine. Someone who has miraculously
been turned, thuggish though he is-- and Constantine
was, as well-- to advance God's work. Of course, Gregory regards him
as a barbarian, and he shows him as a barbarian. He portrays him honestly, or
at least unflatteringly. As was said, he murdered
his family. And then moreover, if you
remember on pages 19 and 20, he pretends to be really sorry
that he can't find anybody that he's related to. He's searching findmyfamily.com
for a genealogy or high school
classmates. Anybody who could
be his friend. But in fact, he is
just searching them out to kill them. And he's got all sorts of tricks
to kill his relatives. Nevertheless, in the same
chapter that describes his trick on Cloderic, Gregory tells
us, "Having aquired the kingdom of Sigibert and its
treasury, he also received those people under
his dominion. For daily the Lord laid his
enemies low under his hand and increased his kingdom, because
he walked before Him with an upright heart and did what was
pleasing in His sight." Right? This is just after Clovis, after
the death of Sigibert, calls all the people together,
says, "I don't know what happened, but the sons of
Sigibert seem to have died as they were showing my
envoy's treasure. Here's my proposal, make me
king." And they say, "Oh, OK. Great, yeah. Step on the shield and we'll
lift you up, just like the Roman emperors." Is Gregory a comedian? Or is he saying-- and I think this is more
likely, although he is hilarious to read. I mean, I hope he's
amused you. I hope while you were cursing
me for giving you this assignment, or at least praying
to some saints to strike me dumb or erupt in boils
or probably not anything very strong, like you'll notice
that occasionally people lose their intestines
when they go to the bathroom. Probably not. The heretic Arias, for example,
and others who betray the saints. Anyway, whatever curses you
were summoning up to me, I hope you actually
found this fun. This course is fun, as I think
I told you way back in the beginning of September. So apart from the fun angle,
people are instruments of the Lord, and they walk in the sight
of the Lord even if they are not themselves
good people. The Lord makes use of
instruments, of people who are forceful. It's important to be forceful. If Clovis was a nice guy-- and
we'll see, and have already seen some examples of rulers
who were nice, often intellectual, and ineffectual. Gregory prefers effectual with
some violent touches to ineffectual, because being a
ruler is a hard job in a barbarian world, in
a fallen world. Gregory, in this sense,
is like Augustine. The world has fallen. The world is corrupt. There are no good
people in power. And if they are in power, it is
either unusual or they're not going to be in
power for long. Therefore, it is important
to be violent. It is important to be able to
intimidate your troops. It is important to seek out
those who would oppose you. And if they've got
to be killed, they've got to be killed. The reason for this is that the
work of the Lord has to be advanced, according to Gregory,
and the Church has to be protected. For Gregory is exemplifying what
I said would happen as predicted by Saint Augustine. The Empire might cease, but
the Church would not. The Church would deal with
whatever successors came up, be they Arian, or
preferably not. Be they cultivated, or more
likely barbarian. And as barbarian leaders
go, Clovis and his sons were not so bad. We're not really sure how
Clovis converted. Because Gregory is invested in
a story that likens Clovis to Constantine, we have the
same kind of thing. Before a battle, he makes a deal
with God that if he wins the battle, he will convert. We don't really know if he was
converted before this battle in 494, as Gregory reports, or
maybe in a battle against the Visigoths in 506. But it doesn't really matter. It's very important that
the Arians be defeated. He's got a story that's not in
Murray, in Book 2, Chapter 23, in which an Arian bishop
named Cryola. C-R-Y-O-L-A. Cryola,
not crayola. Cryola. Cryola is angry because he
sees the Catholic bishops performing miracles all
over the place. So he pays a guy to pretend to
be blind, and then to greet him as he comes to Church, and
beg him to heal his sight, and then to say, "Oh my gosh,
I've been healed. I can see. But God punishes this by making
him actually blind, at this point. And then the guy, very helpfully
from the Catholic point of view, said oh,
I wasn't blind. This evil bishop, Cryola, bribed
me in order to pretend to be blind, but now God and
his saints, Saint Martin in particular, have punished me."
And so that it takes a Catholic bishop to heal
him back to sight. So this is Gregory's attitudes
towards the Arians. On the other hand, he does
report that the Franks besieged Saragossa. This is on pages 41, 42. The Spanish city of Saragossa. They've gotten that
far in their attacks on the Visigoths. But the Arians were able
to fight them off. "They circled the walls carrying
the tunic of Saint Vincent and singing psalms.
With the women dressed in black, their hair
hanging loose, covered in ashes, lamented. Seeing the situation,
Theodebert returned. He gave up the siege." The
Arians may be heretics, but they've got the tunic
of Saint Vincent. And the power of that relic is
so great that even in the hands of miscreants, it's
not to be opposed. Saint Vincent, a very important
saint and the patron of Saragossa. So the Arians are fakes, but
they are not completely without spiritual
power, either. And this is a kind of universe
in which there are natural and supernatural forces. And it's not that one trumps the
other, exactly, but that they both have to be
taken into account. So, Clovis consolidates a large
kingdom in most of what would become France. Roman Gaul, medieval France. France named after this
group, the Franks. The Visigoths now were pushed
out into Spain and just that part of France bordering
on Spain. Clovis received the favor
of the Church because he was Catholic. His conversion, let's say around
500, is ninety years before the Visigoths
become Catholic. And this aids him greatly,
because the Church is in possession of learned people,
financial resources, and spiritual power. So we follow the Franks-- and we will follow them up
through Charlemagne and his successors-- because they are successful,
and because their own self-consciousness is as the
rightful rulers of the former Western Empire. A claim that in various
generations is more or less of a reality and that is by no
means inevitable, but is something that they will
eventually make good on. For the time being, Clovis
considers himself a representative of the Byzantine
Empire, but a representative who very
conveniently doesn't have to do anything. The Byzantine Emperor sends
him the title of consul. He's very pleased at this, but
it doesn't bind him, really. So much for Clovis. Establishment of Frankish
hegemony. The prominence of the Franks
in the post-Roman West. The first Catholic people among
the barbarian invaders. Now we turn briefly
to his sons. He divided his kingdom equally,
and you have a map in the back that shows the division
of the realm under Clovis' sons. Chlothar, Childebert, Chlodomer,
and Theuderic. This practice of division
is dangerous. It is usually a better idea to
give it to one son, because then you don't divide
the kingdom. On the other hand, if you have
four sons who are all militarily competent,
they're going to fight with each other. And in fact they fight with
each other, as Gregory describes in Book
3, even though they've been given divisions. The violence of Clovis' sons is
crude and even ludicrous. So for example, this awful
incident of Chlodomer's sons being protected by Clovis' queen
Chlothild And her sons, the boys' uncles, Chlothar and
Theodoric, invite the boys to come for a visit. And Clotilde, who seems rather
credulous, says, "Great idea!" Once they are in the power of
these two brothers, who of course like Clovis want to
kill their relatives, particularly their younger
relatives, they send a sword and a pair of scissors, right? "Which will it be," the
messenger asks the queen. "Cut off their hair or kill
them?" Cutting off their hair will symbolize that they're no
longer eligible for rulership. And it may lead to them being
put away in a monastery or something like that, but
they're taking early retirement. They're twelve, fourteen years
old, but they've had it. And Chlothild is so angry, at
least according to Gregory, that he says she'd rather
see them die. And then they kill them. They kill them in this ludicrous
way, because one of them gets cold feet, and the
other is furious and takes up the sword, and just
kills them. Even though they're begging. I mean, it's a rather
gruesome scene. Meanwhile, in a scene that we
haven't got in Murray's edition, Theuderic attempts
to kill Chlothar. He invites him, and he's got men
waiting to ambush him, but the cloth isn't low
enough down. They're sort of behind a
partition, a cloth partition, but Chlothar can
see their feet. And so he kind of turns
back and starts to walk out of the hall. And then Theuderic says, "No,
no, no, I just invited you to give you a gift." And he gives
him a silver goblet or something like that. So, Chlothar escapes from this,
but Theuderic is so angry at having been tricked
that he then sends a messenger saying it was a mistake to
give back the goblet. So, I mean, these guys,
what can I say? Yet beneath the barbarian acts
is a society that is still being governed fairly closely. There is a fairly sophisticated administration still. There's a gold coinage,
which takes a lot of resources to maintain. These rulers are collecting
taxes, and they are collecting taxes according to
written records. There's public land. There's revenue from land
belonging to the king. The kings are reasonably
conscientious about the appointment of bishops. What is Gregory's attitude
towards these sons of Clovis? He certainly portrays
them as fratricidal. Nevertheless, on page 26, he
tells us that the brothers were endowed with great courage
and had considerable military resources. Once again, their power
is directed more for good than for bad. And a lot of their power
for bad is merely directed at each other. He considers them, in other
words, appropriate rulers for savage times. At one point, two of
the brothers make war against a third. Specifically, Childebert and
Theuderic against Chlothar. Chlothar is the guy who has just
been depicted by Gregory as the tough one, the one who
killed the two nephews. He's also an adulterer. And yet, faced with
his brother's armies, he prays to God. And his mother, Queen
Chlothild, prays to Saint Martin. So powerful are these prayers
that the two brothers are unsuccessful. A hailstorm pelts their troops,
spares Chlothar, and Chlothar is victorious. The brothers do not succeed
in dislodging him. Here then, we have the power
of the Merovingians and the limitations on that power. The limitations are partly
military, partly that of fratricidal intrigue, of
people getting killed. But they're also partly
supernatural. And as you read further into
the grandsons of Clovis, people whom Gregory himself
has dealings with, particularly the wayward
Chilperic, you'll see rulers that Gregory considers to be
evil and rulers who are really falling away from the example. But what interests us in our
readings for next week is the nature of this society. What's holding it together if
it's rulers are so violent? Why is it not just falling
apart into fragments and shattering? How could this dynasty rule over
a polity for something on the order of 250 years? Have fun with the papers, have
fun with Gregory, and we'll talk next week. Thanks.
