Lecture 13

LECTURE XIII

THE REIGN OF CLOVIS

THE OVERTHROW OF SYAGRIUS---THE MARRAIGE OF CLOVIS AND CLOTILDA---THE CONQUEST OF THE ALAMANNI---THE CONVERSION OF CLOVIS---THE CONQUEST OF VISIGOTHIC GAUL---THE ABSORPTION OF THE RIPUARIAN FRANKS---RELATION OF CLOVIS TO THE ROMAN EMPIRE

THE OVERTHROW OF SYAGRIUS

In the last lecture I traced the first efforts of the Salian Franks to advance in north-eastern Gaul under their kings Chlodio and Childeric. Perhaps I should rather say indicated than traced, for the meagre notices of our sources amount to little more than an indication. We now come to the greatest of all the Merovingian kings, the creator of the Merovingian power, the man who stands out between Julius Caesar and Charles the Great as most powerfully moulding the destinies of Gaul. It is indeed only in the reflected light of what Clovis achieved that the small successes of his great-grandfather win their importance and significance.

Clovis, son of Childeric and Basina, succeeded his father in A.D. 481. Though darkness broods over his reign of thirty years, and though, considering the greatness of his work, we know little as to how he accomplished it, we have at all events some fixed chronological points for tracing his gradual advance. His first movement was against the imperial power which still maintained itself in a portion of northern Gaul, encompassed by barbarian kingdoms. Aegidius, the protector of Gaul, had been succeeded by Syagrius. We do not know what exactly was the official title under which Syagrius represented the Emperor in Gaul. Up to 480 the Emperor he represented was Julius Nepos, after 480 the Emperor whom he represented was Zeno; but Zeno at Constantinople could do nothing to help him. He was practically, though not formally, an independent ruler, and the Franks naturally came to regard the Roman province which Syagrius governed as his own kingdom. Hence he is called in their tradition "king of the Romans"; and, what is more, he is looked upon as son and successor of Aegidius, who again is considered the son of Aetius. In fact, in Frankish tradition, the last three defenders of imperial Gaul appear as a dynasty of Roman kings, and a pedigree, mounting higher, was made out for them. That is a very interesting illustration of the form in which popular tradition expresses historical facts. Syagrius resided at Soissons, and against Soissons Clovis moved in 486. A battle was fought; it is generally called the battle of Soissons, though I do not think it was necessarily fought just at that city. Syagrius was utterly defeated, and he fled to the court of the Visigothic king at Toulouse. Alaric II., son of Euric, was that king. He was not prepared to go to war with the Franks, and when Clovis sent a message peremptorily demanding that he should deliver up the fugitive, he complied.

A famous incident occured in connection with this conquest which is characteristic and instructive. There was found in the booty a beautiful vessel, a work of art, belonging to a certain bishop, and the bishop sent a particular entreaty to Clovis to restore it to him. Gregory does not mention the bishop's name, but it can be shown, almost to a certainty, that it was Remigius, bishop of Reims. The king desired to do this favour to the bishop, and he told him to come to Soissons where the spoils were to be divided. At the division of the spoils, the king requested his warriors to reserve this vessel for himself, and all consented except one, who declared that the king should not have more than his legal share, and followed up his protest by breaking the vessel with a stroke of his axe. The Frank was within his rights; the king was forced to suppress his wrath. But next year Clovis held a review of his army. Singling out the offender, he found fault with something in his equipment, and snatching a weapon from him threw it on the ground. The soldier bent down to take up the weapon, and Clovis split his skull with his axe, saying, "Thus didst thou to the vessel of Soissons." Probably this incident has an historical basis; it certainly is not a Frankish legend; it was rather derived from an ecclesiastical source, as the subject indicates; and it has been conjectured with much probability that Gregory's source was the Life of St. Remigius, the bishop concerned, for we know that this biography was consulted by Gregory. The instructive points in the incident are two: first, the policy of Clovis, though he was still a pagan, to conciliate the Gallo-Roman bishops; secondly, the limitation of the royal power at this period; the Frank warriors are all on an equality with the king at the division of the spoils; one of them fearlessly asserts this equality, and the king cannot resent it; he can only bide his time for revenge. Such an incident would hardly have happened a generation later. Now, in respect of this limited character of the kingly power, it is important to remark that there were other kings among the Salian Franks besides Clovis, though he was pre-eminent. There was a king called Ragnachar who reigned at Cambrai, and there was another, Chararic, both kinsmen of Clovis. It has been thought by some critics that these kings must have been suppressed, and all the Salians united under the sole authority of Clovis, before he conquered Syagrius and the Roman province. I believe that this criticism is wholly from the purpose. Gregory tells us, and his authority may very well be a notice in the Annals of Angers, that Ragnachar co-operated with Clovis in that expedition. And the tradition which records how Clovis marched against Chararic and destroyed him records this act just after the war against Syagrius, and accounts for it by the circumstance that Chararic held aloof from that war. The truth seems to be that it was his success in that war and the heightening of his prestige that enabled Clovis to take steps to make his own authority sole and undivided over the Salians, and to get rid of the other kings. As the stories of his dealings with these kings were derived by Gregory from native legends, and as legend could be taken for fact, Clovis's character would be established as that of a cruel and bloodthirsty tyrant. But an examination of them shows that no inference can reasonably be made; the means by which he is represented to have annexed the kingdoms of his kinsmen are certainly not historical; and national epics love a perfidious and successful hero.

There is, however, one chronological indication of Clovis's authority over the Salians. We learn that at this time, 486, he attacked the Thuringians. Now, an aggression against the kingdom of Thuringia beyond the Rhine seems at this period of Clovis's reign highly improbable, in fact out of the question; and therefore we may take it that the Thuringian name here too refers to the land of the Salians, the Belgic Thuringia, and that this expedition of Clovis was one of the steps by which he became sole sovereign of the Salians.

With the conquest of Syagrius the power of Clovis, as I have said, reached to the Seine. It was followed by a further extension, of which we have no direct historical record and which we can only infer from subsequent events, an extension to the Loire. Here the people with whom Clovis had to do were partly men of our own race---the Saxons, against whom his father and the imperial generals had fought together.

THE MARRIAGE OF CLOVIS AND CLOTILDA

It was probably in the early 'nineties that Clovis celebrated his marriage with a Christian princess, Clotilda of Burgundy, the niece of King Gundobad, the lawgiver of Burgundy. About a generation after this espousal, a legend grew up about it---a legend of which I must speak, because it has been taken for serious history and it has thrown a shadow over the character of Clotilda, and a still darker shadow over the character of King Gundobad. The story is told in the usual abridged way by Gregory; its details have been more fully preserved by Fredegarius. Gundobad, king of Burgundy, according to the narrative, killed his brother Chilperic, and flung Chilperic's wife into the water with a stone round her neck. Chilperic had two daughters, Chrona and Clotilda. Gundobad expelled them from his court, and they lived at Geneva, where the elder became a nun. Now as Clovis often sent embassies into Burgundy, he heard about the young princess Clotilda, and he despatched a trusty Roman named Aurelian to discover and have sight of her, if by any means he could do so. At Geneva he was charitably received by the two sisters. Clotilda performed the pious duty of washing the beggar's feet, and Aurelian was able to whisper to her and arrange a private meeting. He showed Clovis's ring and told her that Clovis wished her to share his throne. Clotilda said that they must ask her hand of King Gundobad, and urged great haste, fearing the return from an embassy of Aridius, Gundobad's chief minister. "If the ambassadors do not come at once, I fear that the sage Aridius will return from Constantinople and defeat our purpose." Aurelian hurried back to Clovis, who immediately sent an embassy to the king of the Burgundians. Gundobad did not dare refuse the request of Clovis, and the envoys returned with Clotilda. They placed her and her treasure in a car, but she foresaw the arrival of the dreaded Aridius from Constantinople, and she said to the chief of the embassy, "If you wish me to reach your master, let me leave this car and set me on horseback; then let us ride with all speed. If I stay in the car, I shall never see the king". So they did, they left the car and the treasure behind, and reached the court of Clovis safely. They were barely in time. For Aridius had meanwhile landed at Marseilles, learned what was going on, and hurried to find Gundobad. "I have made a treaty of friendship with the Franks," said Gundobad, "by giving Clovis my niece". "That is no treaty of friendship," said Aridius, "but the seed of everlasting discord. Remember, my lord, that you killed Chilperic, Clotilda's father, drowned her mother, slew her two brothers. If she becomes powerful, she will avenge her kindred. Send an army in pursuit and overtake her". Such was the counsel of the wise Aridius, whose coming Clotilda had so greatly dreaded. Gundobad sent a host in pursuit, but it captured nothing save the car and the treasure. Clotilda, when she reached the frontier of Burgundy, had ordered her guides to devastate the country for twelve leagues round about, and when this was done she cried, "I thank thee, O God, for letting me begin my revenge for my parents and brethren".

The legendary character of the story is patent, but in this case the very basis of it is entirely fictitious. Clotilda had nothing to avenge; Gundobad had not committed the murders of which the story accuses him. His friendly relations with his brothers are, as it happens, attested in a letter which was written to him by Bishop St. Avitus to console him for a daughter's death. "On former occasions", says the saint, "you wept with unutterable emotion the loss of your brother, and your people sympathised in your grief". This passage does not refer to Godegrisil, another brother who strove with Gundobad and perished in the struggle; it must refer to Chilperic. The testimony seems definitely to exclude the hypothesis that Gundobad slew Chilperic, as the legend assumes. Besides this, the epitaph of Chilperic's wife, Clotilda's mother, has survived in a church at Lyons. Her name was Caretena, and she died in the year 506, many years after her daughter's marriage. This legend, then, of the wicked uncle is not in accordance with historical facts: how did it come to arise? It has been shown beyond question that it originated after the great war of A.D. 523 between the Burgundians and the Franks, in which King Sigismund of Burgundy and his family tragically perished. It was to explain the origin and reason of this later war, which seemed so tragic because the royal families of the two nations were so closely allied, that popular imagination invented the story. If Clotilda were not avenging some old wrong, how could she have permitted her sons to destroy her kinsmen? Thus was suggested the story of old wrongs, a former scene in a poetical drama of injury and revenge. The connection is manifested by the mode in which the crime is made in the legend to correspond to the revenge. King Sigismund and his wife were slain and thrown into a well; accordingly, Chilperic's wife must be slain along with him and thrown into the water; again, two sons of Sigismund perished with him; therefore two sons of Chilperic (who may have never existed) must perish with him. We can thus safely conclude that the true Gundobad was not the sanguinary tyrant of later tradition, nor was Clotilda the bearer of tragedy and doom to the Burgundian house as she appears in the story.

THE CONQUEST OF THE ALAMANNI

A war of far greater moment, a war decisive in the growth of the Merovingian dominion, broke out in the year A.D. 496. The kingdom of the Alamanni on the upper Rhine marched on its northern boundary with the territory of the Ripuarian Franks, and the Ripuarians had to suffer or resist Alamannic aggression. Thus we find the Ripuarian king Sigebert in a battle with this enemy, receiving a wound which lamed him for life. That battle was fought at Tolbiacum, now Zulpich, in the Duchy of Ulich, west of Bonn, which shows that the Alamanni had invaded Ripuarian territory. The existence of such hostilities could easily furnish the Salian king with a pretext for attacking the Alamanni, and he may well have posed as a protector of the Ripuarians. But his determination to attack them was a resolve of the highest consequence for the historical role of the Franks. It decided that their power was to be not only Gallic but Germanic. The conquest of 486 had been the great step leading to advance to the west; the conquest of 496 was the great step leading to advance to the east. The Frank power was to bestride the Rhine, and to lay the foundations of modern Germany as well as of modern France. In historical books, up to very recent times, you will find it stated that the battle in which Clovis overthrew the Alamannic power was fought at Tolbiacum. That is a serious error, and has no shadow of authority. There was, as I just mentioned, a fight at Tolbiacum, and it was a fight between the Alamanni and a Frank king, but the Frank king was Sigebert the Ripuarian, not Clovis the Salian. The great victory of Clovis was probably won in Alamannic territory; but we must not build on the untrustworthy Life of St. Vedastus, where, though no definite locality is given, it seems implied that the war was waged in Alsace.