The Dark Ages Podcast

486 to 508

Clovis and his army carve a new thing, called France, out of old Roman Gaul.

Hello and welcome to the dark ages podcast. In today’s episode, Clovis goes a-conquering.

Today’s episode does exactly what it says on the label. I thought it would be a good idea to get most of the military maneuver out of the way early. There are two reasons for this, one is that because Gregory’s chronology is so vague, it’s easiest to deal with Clovis’ time in power thematically, rather than try and weave it all together chronologically. Second is because we covered some of it already when we were talking about Theodoric the Great’s diplomatic life, so we can afford to skim and review the incidents a little bit here and there.

So for this episode, I’m going to focus mostly on the facts of Clovis’ military career, and we’ll just see how far we get with that. Then I’ll use the next episode or two to drill down on religion and law, because he’s important, even pivotal, in both those areas. When those come up today, I’ll just flag them and come back to them later. There’s not going to be a lot of dates in this episode (I hear your cries of distress, “no please, we love dates sooo much” and I have to say that sarcasm is a very immature literary device.) (I surely have never used it.) It’s because all the dates are arguable and uncertain, so we’ll just try to get things in roughly the right order and let it ride from there.

We left Clovis having just split the skull of one of his own men for defying him, and you might think from that he could afford to execute men willy and nilly. But the truth was, especially in the early days, he really couldn’t. Initially, Clovis’ territorial control was probably limited to the lands around his father’s power base at Tournai, which is today in western Belgium, near the French border.The force that let him keep that territory may have been as small as 500 fighting men. That’s about how many were at my son’s last Middle School band concert. We’ve gotten used to the large armies that the various flavors of Goths and Vandals were dragging all over the mediterranean. No matter how much the chroniclers may have exaggerated their numbers, those armies were certainly in the thousands, even tens of thousands. It was a much different story in the more atomized north. The word Warband is probably more accurately evocative than the world army. And really though, even the armies of the migrating Goths were more massive collections of war bands than coherent armies most of the time. 

 However big his band of fighters was, it was enough to maintain Clovis’s position and bully the native peasantry, but if he had greater ambitions, he would need to find some partners. 

And he did have greater ambitions. After five years getting his feet under the table and raiding the wealthy Roman towns around to enrich his men and ensure their loyalty, he called on the neighbors and put together a coalition. Or maybe he joined an already existing coalition, we have no idea who actually instigated the arrangement. Clovis’ partners were two other Frankish leaders – Gregory calls both of them regulus, usually translated “subking” or “petty king”. These were Ragnachar, ruling from Cambrai, and Chalaric, whose domain is unclear; maybe he had taken control of the old Roman fort at Mons. That’s pure guesswork on my part, based on geography and the presence of a fairly major fort at Mons. This kind of coalition was de rigueur, of course, warlords would join forces as expediency demanded, and part ways once the objective had been achieved and the booty divided. In this case, Clovis’ objectives were broader and deeper than the standard ones of raiding and plundering.

They may have been emboldened by the death of the powerful and expansionist king Euric of the Visigoths. In 485 or 486, Clovis and his allies began a campaign against the Roman rump state, centered on Soissons and led by Syagrius. There were plenty of Franks working with or for Syagrius, some of whom had once worked with or for Clovis’ father Childeric, and regaining control over them may have been one of Clovis’ motivations, but we can’t know for sure. Neither can we know for sure anything specific about the campaign, other than it appears it came down to a single battle in 486. Clovis and Ragnachar lined up against the motley collection of Roman, federate, and auxiliaries that Syagrius commanded. Chararic at the  last minute, refused to participate, apparently holding back to see who the winner would be, and intending to join them. This kind of thing happens a lot in these stories, coats are turned with reckless abandon, to the point where we’re forced to wonder if it’s another one of those historico-literary tropes. On the other hand, the more history you read, the less you’re shocked by human perfidy.

Even without Chalaric, the Franks crushed Syagrius’ army. Syagrius himself escaped the carnage wroght by throwing ax and spear, and fled to the court of the newly enthroned Alaric II of the Visigoths. Being newly enthroned, and probably thinking he didn’t need this kind of heat right off the bat, when Clovis growled in his direction, Alaric imprisoned Syagrius and eventually handed him over. Gregory of Tours takes a little shot at this apparent weakness, noting that “the Goths have always been a timorous race”. Don’t let the other Alaric hear that, Greg.

It should come as no surprise that Clovis had no use for former rulers of Roman rump-states. He kept Syagrius in captivity until he had control of Soissons’ government apparatus, then had him secretly stabbed to death. He was probably in his fifties, had ruled his sort-of-Roman kingdom for twenty years, and with him died the last vestige of Roman Gaul. Interestingly, it seems that his family came through the change mostly okay, there are references to members of the Syagrii all the way into the middle of the eighth century. 

How much difference any of this made to anyone has kind of been the central theme of this whole show up to this point. Politics had shifted, certainly, but what about culture and society? That’s very hard to know, but I found historian Patrick Geary’s summary both pithy and harmonious with my own understanding: “Clovis’ absorption of the kingdom of Soissons was, from one perspective, merely a coup d’etat: the replacement of a barbarized Roman rex by a Romanized barbarian one.” The whole state structure passed intact into Clovis’ hands. He had access now to the administrative and clerical machine, and the territory under his control nearly doubled at a stroke, extending down to the Loire in the south, and to some less well-defined frontier to the west. Brittany remained beyond his reach. Along with that state structure, Clovis inherited a new role, as head of the Gallo-Roman government, the Frank became the protector of Romanitas. Clovis embraced the role, maybe not as completely or whole-heartedly as Theodoric would, but like other barbarian rulers, Clovis could see the benefits of the administrative know-how of the vanished empire, and sought to claim it for himself.

The takeover of the phantom kingdom wasn’t accomplished at a single stroke, resistance remained at various points, most significantly the Ancient City of Lutetia, though by that time it was more commonly known as Parisium. Paris held out for a long time, exactly how long is not clear, but once he was through the gates, Clovis made it the seat of his administration, and Paris began its Rise to Dominance over the lands of the Franks.

The resistance of Paris and the other towns made it clear that there were those not completely reconciled to the idea of rule by Pagan Franks. The Romanitas that had been delivered by Clovis’ coup was at its core Christian. The administrative apparatus remained the domain of the old gallo-Roman aristocracy, increasingly ecclesiastical. It was not only Christian, it was catholic, and set a hostile face against the Arianism of most of the Germanic rulers.  It’s possible that Clovis’ next move was calculated as an emollient to that element.

The way Gregory tells it, the royal family of the Burgundians were forever at each other’s throats. There seems to be a continuous procession of royal brothers competing for the top spot and ready to bump each other off. The daughter of one of these, Chilperic, was named Hrothildi, but today we call her Clotilde. Clotilde had been exiled by her uncle, Gundobad, a casualty of her father’s political ambition. We’ve met Gundobad before, he had been Ricimer’s protege back in the waning decades of empire, who abandoned his imperial responsibilities to seize the Burgundian crown.

Unlike her uncle and most of the Germanic royals around, Clotilde was a catholic. The religious character of the Burgundian court is a matter of some debate, but it is clear that Clotilde was at religious odds with her uncle, the king of the moment. Gregory has it that Clovis heard of her from one of his emissaries and sent a message to the king asking for her hand in marriage, and that Gundobad was afraid to refuse. That’s as may be, but Clotilde and Clovis were married around the year 500.  Clovis had been married, or at least had a relationship. But we know nothing at all about her. And she was clearly out of the picture well before any of this happened. He did have a son by this unnamed woman though, unhelpfully named Theuderic.

Looked at from the perspective of domestic politics, the marriage to Clotilde could be a sop to the Catholic majority Gallic aristocracy. Looked at through an international lens, Clovis’ choice of wife seems calculated to have the opposite effect entirely. Remember that web of marriages that Theodoric had carefully woven around himself, designed to bring the leaders of the west together in close relations and communication? Clovis’ own sister, Audofleda, had married the mighty king of the Ostrogoths. She probably converted to Arianism at the time of her marriage. And here was Clovis choosing a bride who was the scion of a rival branch of the Burgundian royal house, whose religious attitudes put her at odds with all the other heads of state that surrounded her. 

I’m going to do a little shimmy and feint here, because this traditionally would be the point where I would talk about Clotilde and her role in Clovis’ conversion of catholic Christianity. I’m not going to do that right now, because I want to spend more time on the subject of conversion than I have room for in this episode. This is one of those flaggable moments I mentioned in the intro. So for the moment, let’s just say that according to Gregory, Clotilde worked on her husband, and by a combination of her influence and a divine intervention in a key battle, Clovis was converted to Catholicism. That made him the first major Germanic leader to accept the majority faith of the former empire, and of most of his civilian subjects. We’ll come back to that next time, because it all does bear closer examination, but for now let’s move on.

Conversion made Clovis a Christian but it didn’t make him any less fighty. That key battle, according to Gregory, was against the Alamanni, who lived along the upper Rhine, and resulted in the submission of the Alamanni to Clovis. The reality is probably more complex, with the battle standing in for years of low-level conflict along the river borders. It certainly is true that around 500 Theodoric dealt with an influx of Alamanni in his northern territories, which probably was a knock-on effect from Clovis’ campaigns. 

Once he’d secured Paris and put the Alamanni in their place, Clovis established some kind of nominal sovereignty over Brittany, at least enough to cover his western flank. This seems to have been mainly a diplomatic rather than military victory. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, Brittany was protected by dense forests and rocky terrain, and would largely go its own way, politically and culturally, for several centuries.

More exciting were developments in Clotilde’s homeland, in the kingdom of the Burgundians.

Sometime after Clovis’ conversion, he received a message from one of his uncles-in-law, the Burgundian Godigisel. Gundobad and Godegisel were ruling their territory in partnership, because that always goes well for everyone. The territory in question, by the way, was along the Rhône and the Saône Rivers, from somewhere around Dijon all the way down to Marseilles.

When word reached them of Clovis’ victories over Syagrius and the Alamanni, Godigisel sent a message to him. He offered any amount of tribute Clovis cared to name, in return for the Frank’s help in driving out his brother Gundobad. Clovis, the good Christian king, accepted this offer without hesitation, and promised that he would indeed help Godigisel when the moment came.

Just to make sure the moment came at an opportune, um, moment, Clovis gathered his army and marched south toward the Burgundians’ territories. Gundobad responded with a message to his brother, calling for a united response. Godigisel, like a model of fraternal fidelity, marched with Gundobad until they met the Franks at Dijon. 

Clovis and Godigisel’s scheme played out exactly as they’d planned, Godigisel and his men turned on Gundobad, and Gundobad fled. Godigisel apparently decided that that was a good day’s work. He agreed with Clovis to hand over part of his newly won kingdom and withdrew to Vienne to drink some wine or something. 

But Clovis’ blood was up, and he pursued Gundobad all the way down to Avignon, which is kind of a long way, and laid siege to him there. Gundobad felt the pressure, according to Gregory, he summoned a local noble, a fellow named Aridius, with a reputation for good advice, and asked what he should do. The words that Gregory puts in Gundobad’s mouth at this audience are interesting: “I am surrounded by pitfalls and what to do I cannot tell. These barbarians have launched this attack against me. If they kill us two they will ravage the whole neighborhood.” 

Gregory seems to be acknowledging a hierarchy of Romanness among the Germanic kingdoms, with the Burgundian ruler claiming to be less barbarian than his Frankish attackers. He had a point. I’ve said before that the Burgundians could claim to be the most romanized of all the Germanic tribes that had made their way into the empire over the last hundred years. Gundobad and his successors would enjoy the direct support of the emperor in Constantinople at various times, which we’ve already heard about in episodes about Theodoric the Great. The difference between Gundobad and Clovis, as far as Gregory is concerned, at this point, is that Gundobad remains and Arian heretic, while Clovis has moved over to to the right side of the religious table, the more Roman side, the Catholic side, and that’s what makes all the difference.

Anyway, back to the story. This loyal Aridius suggested that he go to Clovis, pretending to turn traitor against Gundobad, and undermine Clovis’ efforts from within. I’m not sure if undermining is the right word for what Aridius did, actually. Aridius pointed out to Clovis that all he was doing by wasting the countryside around Avignon was assuring his own men’s eventual starvation, since Gundobad was well-provisioned inside the town. Wouldn’t it be better, Aridius suggested, that Clovis demand a tribute from Gundobad and settle the whole thing that way. Gundobad agreed to an appropriate amount and paid up for the current year (no word on whether it was the whole year or if it was prorated), and Clovis went home, satisfied for the moment.

You may have noticed that actually nothing between Gundobad and Godigisel was settled in all of that to and fro. Gregory finishes the story for us, and so will I, though it does count as a digression. Some time after his confrontation with Clovis, Gundobad regenerates his manna and marches against his treacherous brother. He seems to have caught Godigisel napping, and trapped him in the city of Vienne. When it became clear that the city wasn’t provisioned for a long siege, Godigisel made the harsh but common decision to throw all the non-combatants out of the city, to take their chances. Now, if you’re planning on doing something like this, withstanding a long siege or, say, taking over a large social media organization, you want to be sure that you don’t accidentally throw out all the important engineers. One of the folks unceremoniously turfed out of Vienne was the engineer in charge of the aqueduct. And he wasn’t happy about being unceremoniously let go. And they hadn’t invented NDA’s yet, so this engineer stormed straight over to Gundobad and showed him where he could access the aqueduct, and through it, the city.  Gundobad’s men caught Godigisel’s by surprise from behind and chased him into a church. That went as well as it usually seems to, and Godigisel was killed along with the bishop he was with. It was an Arian church and an Arian bishop, though, so that’s okay, as far as Gregory is concerned. Gundobad finally became sole king of the Burgundians, and eventually, as a little bonus, converted to Catholicism.

To re-cap quickly, since I feel like we’ve covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time; Clovis has covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time. By removing Syagrius from the Soissons, he’s set himself up as the power in Northern Gaul, and barely paused for breath before projecting that power. The Alamanni have been forced to submit, the Armoricans, aka the Bretons, also acknowledge his authority in some vague way. That gives him control of pretty much all of Gaul north of the Loire. Just like his neighbors, the Visigoths and Burgundians, he has access to the infrastructure and leadership of the old Roman aristocracy, but unlike them, he shares the religious views of that old aristocracy. It means that his reign rests on more than just the brute force of his loyal warriors, there is also a moral component now.  Clovis’ conversion became a destabilizing influence on his neighbors. According to Gregory, some of the Roman subjects of the Visigoths in particular began to wonder if they might not prefer rule by the Franks.

Alaric II, the king of the Visigoths who had surrendered Syagrius without much hesitation, asked Clovis for a meeting. As the two premier powers in Gaul, they should probably get the terms of their relationship clear, and Alaric no doubt had heard the rumblings of his own catholic subjects. Clovis agreed, and the two met on an island in the Loire, near Tours. Gregory was possibly reporting local tradition here. The two broke bread together, swore eternal friendship, and then each returned to their own territory. It should not surprise you that eternal friendship would turn out to actually be very brief indeed.

Gregory wants to present Clovis’ war against the Visigoths as a straightforward crusade, entirely religiously motivated. He gathers his men and tells them “I find it hard to go on seeing these Arians occupying a part of Gaul.” Sure, yeah, right. The actual causes of the war between them, the war that Theodoric and Cassiodorus put so much effort into trying to prevent, are probably ultimately unknowable. 

Cassiodorus’ letters give the strong impression that the causes were seen as trivial, maybe even personal. My own personal impression (and that’s all it is, so keep that in mind) is that the causes were simple. Clovis, having been so quickly successful, and acquired so much, wanted to go on succeeding, and acquiring more. The crocodile in the goldfish pond syndrome. It’s likely, under these circumstances, that no amount of diplomacy, marriage alliance, or water clocks from Theodoric, could have stopped the ravenous Frankish king. I have to admit of course being swayed more than a bit in my own preconceived image of the Frankish king.

Among the leaders Clovis brought with him was at least one prince of the Ripuarian Franks, the Franks from across the River, so Clovis had at minimum convinced his cousins that fighting with him held some advantage, and may have held some sway across the Rhine by now as well.

When he launched his campaign against Alaric II, Clovis and his army passed through Tours. That was, of course, Gregory’s hood. The fact that the events he described took place 30 years before his birth is irrelevant, Gregory bends over backward at this point to present Clovis as the ideal Christian king, solicitous of Gregory’s favorite saint and Tours’ patron, Saint Martin. Clovis forbids his men from raiding the area for anything other than fodder, then kills a soldier for gathering said fodder too roughly. He sends valuable gifts to the cathedral church (some of which were probably still there during Gregory’s tenure).  Signs and portents followed. A doe showed the army where to ford the swollen river near Vienne (not the Vienne in Burgundy, this is a different one), and a Pillar of Fire rose near the church of Saint Hilary to demonstrate divine approval for Clovis, just like the ones that guided the Israelites in the Book of Exodus. 

I know you may be thinking that I spent nearly a whole paragraph in the last episode singing the praises of Gregory as a historian, a man in command of the facts. So how does that square with all this stuff about pillars of flame and miraculous deer? The answer is there is no contradiction in Gregory’s mind. History, in his world view, was the unfolding of God’s divine plan. It was absolutely expected that the Lord should intervene, and that the progression of history today should rhyme with the sacred history of the scriptures. All of the contemporary sources, from Augustine to Bede, are full of miraculous occurrences, generally presented with absolute confidence in their self-evident reality, and accepting that the chroniclers believe them is absolutely necessary to understanding the mindset of the period.

All that said, the reality of Clovis’ progress south was probably much more prosaic. He most likely sought to limit the damage done by his army generally, as long as they were on his side of the Loire, and probably sent gifts and sought support from all the major bishops along the way. Whatever his real motivations in this largest of his campaigns, he certainly courted the religious leaders of both his own territories and those he hoped to conquer. It was just good business.

After all the miraculous buildup, the actual confrontation between Frank and Visigoth has the distinct whiff of anti-climax. It came in 507. Here’s the passage from Gregory: “King Clovis met Alaric II, king of the VIsigoths, on the battlefield of Vouille, near the tenth milestone outside Poitiers. Some of the soldiers engaged hurled their javelins from a distance, others fought hand to hand. The goths fled, as they were prone to do, and Clovis was the victor, for God was on his side.”

Alaric II, as we know by now, was killed. Clovis also may have been wounded. Gregory says he was attacked by two Goths with their spears, and that “it was his leather corslet that saved him and the sheer speed of his horse, but he was very near to death.” That may mean that it was just a close shave, the text is ambiguous. Also, just in passing, it’s interesting to me that the king of the Franks should be satisfied with simple leather armor. 

Details of the progression of the war from there are spotty. Theuderic, Clovis’ eldest son, was sent on an independent campaign eastward to secure the Auvergne, taking Clermont, Rodez, and finally Albi. Meanwhile Gundobad had been prevailed upon to take part, and the Burgundian marched down the Rhone to lay siege to Arles in support of the Franks. It was at this stage that Theodoric the Great finally intervened, and the forces of the Ostrogoths broke the siege and drove the Burgundians away from the city.

It was cold comfort to the Visigoths, whose losses continued. Clovis captured Bordeaux shortly after the battle of Vouille and spent the winter there. When the campaign season began again, he consolidated his gains, attacking and capturing Toulouse, along with the royal treasury, before finishing it off with the capture of Angouleme. The Franco-Visigothic war was over, with virtually all of Aquetainia in the hands of the Franks. The Visigoths were driven over the Pyrenees and forced to reconstitute themselves in what had been basically hinterlands. Thanks to Theodoric’s intervention, the Franks were prevented from capturing a Mediterranean port, but as we talked about in the episodes on theodoric, that was more to the benefit of the Ostrogothic king than the Visigoths.

Clovis’ achievement is undeniable. The map of his conquests is legitimately on a par with that of Julius Caesar’s Gallic wars. In the twenty six years since his accession as rex francorum, he’d increased his territory fourfold, at least, and created what was for all intents and purposes a new entity. It’s now appropriate for the first time to refer to Francia, the kingdom of the Franks, or France. It’s easy to dismiss all of this as just a military achievement, and lord knows that Clovis was a warleader first. Probably second and third as well, but there is more to it than that. There is also one act remaining in the drama of his reign, the slightly out-of-order securing of his power at home among his own people. 

I’m going to save that part for next time, though, as I’ve gone on long enough for now. Next time we’ll finish off the bare facts of Clovis’ reign, and then take a little harder look at that essential moment that I skated by earlier; the religious conversion.

I have a few shout-outs to make, the first one being to whoever came up with the section headings in Clovis’ Wikipedia article, seriously, go check it out. The truth is that there’s so little raw information about Clovis that it’s hard to write about him and offer much more than is already there in that article. Sometimes that’s just how it is.

Other, more important shout-outs go to Matyas, Ludger, Katrin, Sietse, Ryan, Frances and Frank, with apologies for any pronunciation bungling I may have committed along the way there. Bonus shout outs to monthly contributors Ellen and Scott. My gratitude is limitless.

That’s it for today’s episode. Until next time, take care.

Sources

Geary, Patrick J. 1988. Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World. N.p.: Oxford University Press.

Gregory of Tours. 1974. The History of the Franks. Translated by Lewis Thorpe. London: Penguin Books.

Wood, Ian N. 1994. The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751. N.p.: Longman.