493(?) to 511
Today we are going to talk about Clovis’ conversion to Catholic Christianity. I also plan to use that subject as a way in to talk a bit about the whole process of conversion and the Christianization of Europe, which will be an ongoing theme of this podcast for the next, oh, four hundred years or so, so I thought it was high time we got started on that. It means of course that this episode will no longer be appropriate at a dinner party as it will contain both politics and religion, but sic biscuitus disintegrat.
Before we can do any of that though, there are some loose ends that need to be tied up. Because of my own poor time management, and because I was worried about boring you, I only brought the story of Clovis’ military victories up to the end of the Visigothic War. That was careless and unprofessional of me and I apologize. So today before we do any of the churchy stuff, we’ll spend the first ten minutes or so of today finishing off the fighty stuff. Sound good? Okay, let’s do that then.
Once the war was done in the south; once Toulouse had been sacked, the Visigoths driven beyond the mountains, and the whole of Aquetania subdued (he hadn’t wanted that strip along the coast anyway, really) Clovis received a welcome message from the emperor Anastasius. He had been granted the consulate, and according to Gregory “from that day forth he was called Consul, or Augustus.” The suggestion that Clovis was named an official Augustus, i.e. equal to the emperor in Constantinople, is patently absurd. The consulate so bestowed was also honorary, of a kind that had been offered to barbarian chieftains forever. That didn’t stop the king of the Franks from running with the symbolism, though. He entered Tours clad in purple, crowned himself at the church, and then rode through town scattering gold and silver, just as a real Roman consul would have. There was still plenty of power in that imperial luster, and Clovis was going to let it shine. He returned to Paris with his son and wife, and made it his capital for the remainder of his reign.
Clovis could turn to matters closer to home. Matters like those Franks across the River, the Ripuarian Franks. You know, the franks who had fought with him against the Visigothic heretics. The regulus of the Ripuarians was an elderly man called Sigibert the Lame. Full of concern for this man, and knowing how dangerous it was for those who were getting on in years, Clovis sent a message to his son, a young man named Chloderic. “Your father is old and lame. If he were to die, his kingdom would come to you, and my alliance would come with it.” Chloderic began to get ideas, and began to plot, and before too long he had set an ambush for his father, who was killed while walking in the forest outside of Cologne. Childebert ascended the throne, just as Clovis had predicted, and he sent a message to the man who he probably saw as his accomplice, in thought if not in deed. He invited Clovis to send ambassadors to come and select some worthy gift from his treasury, so that Childebert could be assured of Clovis’ friendship. Clovis did send ambassadors, though they declined to accept a gift. They did ask to see this treasure that Childebert had been so proud to display. Childebert had the chest brought in, and plunged his hand into the coins to show how deep it was. While he was thus engaged (with Scrooge McDuck-like glee), one of the ambassadors gave him the old Soissons treatment, and split the new king’s skull with his ax. They fled, apparently undetected.
When news of this second murder reached Clovis, he traveled to Cologne himself to “investigate”. Speaking to the assembled citizens, he presented his conclusions: “Chloderic plotted against his father, the king … and was putting it about that I wanted him killed. Chloderic himself set assassins on the king and murdered him. … He was in his turn killed by somebody or other. I take no responsibility for what has happened. It is not for me to shed the blood of one of my fellow kings, for that is a crime. But since things have turned out this way, I will give you my advice and you must make of it what you will. It is that you should turn to me and put yourselves under my protection.” The men of Cologne shouted and pounded their shields, and then raised Clovis up on one of them as their king.
That’s the story as Gregory tells it, and he’s very careful not to say that Clovis ordered the murder of Childebert, as well as phrasing the message to the prince in such a way as to ensure maximum deniability. But come on. That speech at the end might as well end with “If ya knows what’s good for youse, see?” Some have detected a hint of sardonic humor in the line with which Gregory ends this particular episode, see what you think. “Day in and day out God submitted the enemies of Clovis to his dominion and increased his power, for he walked before Him with an upright heart and did what was pleasing in his sight.”
Whether Gregory was being sarcastic or not, Clovis’ enemies did indeed fall before him, both new and old. Remember Chararic from last episode? The trimming regulus who failed to deliver when Clovis took on Syagrius? Finally powerful enough to push around his fellow Franks, Clovis attacked him and quickly had him and his son in his hands. He ordered their hair cut, and they were forced to take holy orders. The rulers of the Franks are the “long-haired kings”, so this humiliation was not a minor deal. At some point later on, Chararic’s son was heard to say, “these leaves have been cut from wood which is still green. They will soon burst forth and be larger than ever, and may the man who has done this perish equally quickly.” That’s Gregory being poetic again, probably. I would guess that what the young prince actually said was a good deal more earthy. It made no difference either way, Clovis’ spies overheard their plotting, and he had them both beheaded.
Running out of enemies to fall before him, Clovis was forced to look harder. Ragnachar of Cambrai, remember him? He was the member of the coalition against Syagrius that didn’t leave Clovis high-and-dry/? Anyway, Ragnachar, according to Gregory, was sunk in debauchery of all kinds, and his subjects were embarrassed and offended by his behavior. (To be clear, we’re not talking bad table manners here, Ragnachar was apparently making quite free with the wives of the nobility.) So Clovis came up with an idea. He sent gifts to the leudes of Ragnachar. Leudes were the personal guard of the king. These men were not just hired muscle, you might remember that some of the highest placed men at Atilla’s court were his personal bodyguards. To these men Clovis sent sword belts and arm bands of gold, with messages along the lines of “I hear you’re having trouble with Ragnachar, I wish there was something I could do.” Thing is, those gifts were actually bronze gilded to look like gold. Because frugality is fortune’s left hand.
Clovis brought his army to attack Ragnachar, they fought, and Ragnachar’s forces were defeated. His leudes arrested him, along with his brother, and brought him before Clovis. Clovis asked his humbled enemy, “Why have you disgraced our Frankish people by allowing yourself to be bound? You should have died in battle.” Taking his trusty battle ax, he corrected this error of fate. He then turned to the king’s brother, and said, “If you had stood by your brother, he would not have ended up this way.” Thwack, splat. Having removed these two competitors – I mean degenerates – Clovis took their lands and their treasure.
The men who had betrayed Ragnachar eventually discovered that Clovis’ gifts were counterfeit – it was inevitable, of course. They complained to him, and pointed out the service they’d done for him. “This is the sort of gold that a man can expect when he deliberately lures his lord to his death.” He mused that really they should be tortured to death for such a betrayal, but he would let them live. Not only that, they could keep the belts and armbands.
I don’t think I mentioned that Ragnachar and his brother were relatives of Clovis – most of the petty kings of the Frankish homelands seem to have been descendents of Merovech in one way or another. There was a third brother, named Rignomer, who Clovis had executed at Le Mans, and Clovis spent the last years of his life finding and eliminating threats within his own extended family. He ferreted and winkled and schemed, until finally he was the last left standing, for he walked before God with an upright heart and did what was pleasing in His sight.
Clovis had sole mastery of all Gaul, and of considerable lands beyond the Rhine. I somehow failed to even mention his campaigns against the Thuringians, but he extracted territory and treasure from them too.
Coming back to the question of whether Gregory was being ironic with the “upright heart” stuff. I think there’s a bit of evidence in favor in the last incident he relates of Clovis’ life. I’ve been sprinkling quotes from Gregory in liberally, but here’s the full block quote:
“One day when he had called a general assembly of his subjects, he is said to have made the following remark about the relative whom he had destroyed, ‘How sad a think it is that I live among strangers like some solitary pilgrim, and that I have none of my own relations left to help me when disaster threatens’ He said this not because they grieved for their deaths, but because in his cunning way he hoped to find some relative still in the land of the living whom he could kill.”
Clovis died in Paris, either in 511 or 513, with 511 being the more generally accepted date as far as I can see. He was about 45 or 47, and I doubt he was ever bored. He had been king of his own Franks for thirty years, and king of all the Franks for thirty-two. He was buried in Paris, at the Abbey of Saints Peter and Paul, which he and Clotilde had founded together. It was renamed the Abbey of Sainte-Genvieve, and later Clovis’ body was moved to the great Basilica of Saint-Denis, where he rests still.
Clovis and Clotilde had four surviving children that we know of, four sons and a daughter. Don’t worry about remembering their names right now – I find Frankish names particularly hard to hold onto myself – but they were Chlododomer, Childebert, Chlothar, and Clotilde. There was also Clovis’ eldest son by his earlier relationship, Theuderic, who we’ve already heard a little about. Clovis’ estate planning was, from one perspective, fair and magnanimous, from another, a recipe for disaster in the long term. Each of his four sons was to receive a more or less equal part of his kingdom. They were to each rule their own patch, but the kingdom of the Merovingians was nonetheless to be considered a united entity. They each set up their own kingdoms centered on different cities; Paris, Soissons, Reims, and Orleans, all reasonably close together, presumably to allow for easy communications among them. (Little Clotilde was only 11 when her father died, and was eventually married to Amalaric, King of the Visigoths, and that’s another story.) The arrangement probably avoided a fratricidal war in the immediate aftermath of Clovis’ exit, but set a precedent of divided rule that would have serious consequences for the future unity and effectiveness of the Merovingian dynasty.
That concludes the overview of the life and military exploits of the man with the best claim to be the first king of France. But his conquests are even more significant than they appear in purely military terms, because of their religious implications. Clovis’ conversion to Catholicism was a significant, probably crucial step in the death of Arianism, and the coming dominance of Catholic Christianity in Western Europe for the next, oh, thousand years (almost exactly).
As far as Clovis was concerned in 508, the only possible explanation for his position, up on top of the world, looking down on creation, was the love that he’d found. Specifically the love of the Christian God to whom he has turned at a key moment back in … some year or other.
You wouldn’t know it from a surface reading of Gregory’s account, but there are many questions and much debate around the specifics of Clovis’ conversion. When and why did it happen? How much did queen Clotilde really have to do with it? What exactly does conversion mean in this context? And what was Clovis converting from? I suppose I should present the story before diving headlong into the nitpicking, shouldn’t I? Of course I should.
The essential facts as laid out by the Bishop of Tours (that’s Gregory, for those of you who may have nodded off) are as follows:
Emissaries from Clovis to the Burgundians met Clotilde and were impressed by her beauty and intelligence, and reported back to Clovis. Clotilde was Gundobad’s niece, daughter of a now-dead royal brother, and probably not having the best time at her uncle’s court. On the other side of the coin, Gundobad may have been looking to get rid of this potential kernel of resentment or competition by marrying her off, but he probably wasn’t looking to marry her off to the scary enfant terrible of the region. Clovis, however, had made a decision, maybe smitten by his ambassadors’ description, but more likely seeing an opportunity to curry some favor with the bishops of all his new territory. The marriage would have been around 493 or thereabouts.
Clotilde was Catholic, which set her apart from the mainstream of the Burgundian court. Or at least it set her apart from uncle Gundobad. Clovis may have thought that demonstrating his ability to be tolerant of religious differences might smooth his relationships with the bishops. What he probably didn’t anticipate is that it would lead to his own conversion. Now there was a voice there, at his ear all the time, nudging him in the direction of the Trinity. According to Gregory, things first became serious when Clovis and Clotilde’s first child was born. Clotilde was insistent that the infant should be baptized. Clovis resisted, but the queen ordered a chapel decked out and the ceremony performed. The boy was named Ingomer, but died shortly thereafter. Gregory claims it was so soon after the baptism that he was still in his white baptismal gown when he died.
Clovis, understandably, was furious. But Clotilde’s faith was unmoved. “I give thanks to Almighty God, the Creator of all things, who has not found me completely unworthy, for he has deigned to welcome to his kingdom a child conceived in my womb. I am not at all cast down because of what has happened, for I know that my child … will be nurtured in the sight of God”
A second son was born, and Clotilde insisted that he also be baptized, and named him Chlodomer. This baby began to sicken too, and Clovis grumbled that it wasn’t surprising, but Clotilde prayed for divine help and the baby recovered. She prayed as well that her husband should give up his stubbornness and come to the faith. It finally happened in that battle against the Alamanni, traditionally the battle of Tolbiac. Things weren’t going well for the Franks; Clovis felt a change in his heart, and according to Gregory, “raised his eyes to heaven … felt compunction in his heart and was moved to tears. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said, ‘you who Clotilde maintains to be the Son of the living God, you who deign to give help to those in travail and victory to those who trust in you, in faith I beg the glory of your help. If you will give me victory over my enemies and if I may have evidence of that miraculous power which the people dedicated to your name say they have experienced, then I will believe in you and I will be baptized in your name. I have called upon my own gods, but, as I can see clearly, they have no intention of helping me…I want to believe in you but I must first be saved from my enemies.”
I assume you can guess what happened next. THe Alamanni turned and fled the field, their king was killed, and the survivors begged for peace and offered to submit to Clovis’ authority.
When word of all this came back to the queen, she was over the moon, and ordered Remigius, the bishop of Rheims, to come to the king and instruct him in the tennents of the faith. Clovis was willing to receive baptism, but worried about the effect it might have on his followers. Would they still follow him? There was no avoiding it, the conversion had to be public, there would be no hiding this light under any bushels or any other kind of archaic measuring devices. So Clovis did what you do when you’re planning an important meeting, he called a pre-meeting meeting to explain his thinking to the big men of his army. Gregory again: “But God in his power had preceded him, and before he could say a word all those present shouted in unison, “We will give up worshiping our mortal gods, pious king, and we are prepared to follow the immortal God about whom Remigius preaches.” And so king Clovis and all his people were baptized by Bishop Saint Remigius, and the Franks became Christians. Gloria in excelsis.
Okay, can I start nitpicking now?
It’s a nice story, and a story that echoes many other stories like it. Four primary themes emerge from Gregory’s account, which would be repeated in later stories of Royal conversion. There’s the queen’s role in bringing her pagan husband to the light, the Christian God’s intercession on the king’s behalf in battle, the king’s reluctance based on anxiety about his status with his followers, and finally the triumphant moment of baptism of not only him, but his family and many of his people. Let’s take these one at a time. There’s a kicker at the end too, which comes from a different source, which we’ll get to.
First, Clotilde, the catholic Burgundian princess. How did she come to be a single outlier in the Burgundian court? There’s a strong temptation to think in dichotomies about all of this, you know, all the Burgundians and Visigoths are Arian, all the Romans are Catholic, and all the Franks are pagans, but that’s not actually true. A close reading of the texts shows more heterogeneity among the barbarians than is immediately obvious. For one thing, it turns out that one of Clovis’ sisters was already a Christian, though an Arian one. Indeed, the Arian convictions of the Burgundian court, much emphasized by contemporary catholic sources, are primarily centered on Gundobad’s reign alone. Clotilde’s sister was catholic, and so was Gundobad’s wife Caratena. It’s hard to find clear evidence for Arianism in any of the Burgudians except for Gundobad, once you start looking for it. Clotilde may not have been such an outlier after all.
Clovis may have calculated that a catholic bride may have meant something to the bishops, if nothing else it surely demonstrated his tolerance. He would not be setting up idols in the churches, or actively persecuting Catholics like various Vandal kings did. (We’ll get back to the Vandals eventually.) I doubt he expected Clotilde to lean on him so heavily, though if he was a little more historically aware, he might have been more wary. Women had an important role in the spread of the church, and for many centuries afterward, the arrival of a Christian wife was the crevice through which the Holy Spirit entered pagan kingdoms. It would happen famously in 619, when Ethelburga of Kent brought priests as part of her marriage agreement with king Edwin of Northumbria, and the king and most of the people were ultimately baptized.
All that’s great, but there’s a bigger question that needs to be answered. By my count, I’ve used the word “conversion” in one form or another, nine times so far in this episode. But what the heck does it actually mean? In the case of rulers like Clovis or Edwin, it was a multi-stage process, beginning with a private decision to acknowledge the Christian deity. In many stories of this type of conversion, it seems that the subjects aren’t even aware of the exclusivity implied by worship of the Christian God; they may simply be prepared to add Him to their existing pantheon. Instruction by a bishop or other holy man would clear that up, and once everything was clear, a public declaration of faith and baptism would complete a process which may ultimately take as long as a decade to complete.
Especially interesting to me is the transactional nature of Clovis’ decision. While hard pressed in battle, he calls out to God in a very business-like way. Having already gotten nowhere with his old gods, he offers a deal: You help me now, I’ll give you my devotion. It’s a common theme in these stories. Kinging is a demanding business, and conversion could be politically complicated, the prospective convert wanted to make sure he was getting value for spiritual money. In that context, it’s actually perfectly possible to accept Gregory’s account that a large contingent of Clovis’ army converted with him, whether the actual number of 3,000 he gives is accurate or not. What army wouldn’t want to enlist the aid of such a powerful victory-giver, with proven results?
But what about ordinary people? We will undoubtedly talk more about this in coming episodes, but early Christianity, both before and after it was made legal by Constantine, was a largely urban phenomenon. Churches mostly were built in towns, Bishops were based in cities. Bishops had been encouraging large landowners to build their own private chapels on their estates, for the use of the peasants who worked there. Great landowners usually owned a portfolio of estates, and may never have laid eyes on some of them, so the spread of such improvements, and their subsequent staffing and oversight, could be spotty at best. Most of this background information, by the way, comes from a book called The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity by Richard Fletcher. I usually don’t highlight specific books, but I also wanted to say thank you to Mark Anthony Terra-Thomas, wherever and whoever he is, who was the previous owner of the Barbarian Conversion and left a plethora of interesting and useful annotations in the margins.
Christianity had begun as a belief system for slaves, women, and the urban poor, but once it was brought out into the light by Constantine, and even more so as it was welded to the imperial infrastructure by his successors, its social profile changed completely. If you wanted to advance in society, you had better be seen in church, and so the ambitious classes, local elites, the well-educated senators and knights, flocked to services. Christian thinkers of the fourth century worried that conversions were happening for the wrong reason – ambition and fashion rather than genuine feeling, and it’s hard to say they were wrong.
Out in the country, the agricultural slaves and coloni – peasants who were not yet technically serfs but it’s a very fine distinction – were initially left out. Rusticus was the descriptor that would have come to the minds of the better off when they thought of the vast majority of the population, out there toiling in the field. Filthy, illiterate, living in squalid huts and following their own folk customs and speaking their own debased form of Latin, they barely qualified as Romans. Indeed, they barely qualified as humans to the people who wrote the books and ran the courts. At first, the task was to bring all the elites into the church, and then depend on them to push the faith out to the masses that lived and worked on their lands. Missionary work out in the country, as can be seen in the lives of Saint Martin, Saint Germanus, or Caesarius, often came down more to the destruction of old shrines and idols than careful theological education. Interest and concern for the common people’s spiritual health grew over time, and the spread of village churches bears that out, but it was still very much a work in progress in Gregory’s day. Gregory himself expresses concern for the spiritual and physical well-being of all the people under his pastoral care, but all the same, when he says that Clovis and all his people were converted, he means Clovis and all the people who mattered were converted.
So what exactly were Clovis and all of his men converting from?
Well, obviously, according to Gregory, they were converting from paganism. Okay, but what did that mean? And are we sure?
A lot of people are interested in the pre-Christian religions of Europe, and a lot of books have been written about them. But in spite of what those authors would like to tell you, we know very little at all about the religious practices of the tribes outside the empire, and to be honest, almost nothing specific about the ancestral religion of the Franks. Our ignorance is based on the old, old story; the only written sources come to us from the Romans, who, even if they weren’t being hostile or patronizing, passed everything through their own lens. It’s called the interpretatio romanum, and it was accepted practice in all Roman ethnology – when a new god was encountered, authors would decide on a Roman analogue, and use the name of the Roman God in place of the native German or Celtic deity. It was a tradition that went all the way back into Classical antiquity, to Herodotus. So Wotan was identified with Mercury, for example. Many of the Germanic pantheons are thus known to us only by inscriptions, which are rare, fragmentary, hard to interpret, and usually dated later than the period we’re looking at here. To add to the confusion, the religious environment of Late Antiquity was highly syncretic, with lots of Great Gods mixed up and worshiped alongside more local tutelary spirits and family guardians. So when Gregory tells us that Clovis had been worshiping Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, it may not have been a case of interpretatio strictly speaking; Clovis may indeed have worshiped his ancestral gods morphed and merged with the Roman and Gallic deities of the empire, along with family myths, like Merovech’s nautical parentage, thrown onto the pile for flavor.
While Gregory’s version of the story is that Clovis boarded a train in Pagantown and got off in Catholic City, with no stops in between, there is a suggestion that he may have made a whistle-stop in Arianville along the way. Evidence for the idea hinges on one of the few surviving sources for the time other than Gregory’s history. It’s a letter, written by Bishop Avitus of Vienne to Clovis, congratulating him on his baptism. The letter notes that the emperor would be delighted by the news, and notes that “the adherents of all sorts of schismatic sects have been seen to blind with obfuscation the sharpness of your intelligence through their opinions, which are various in conjecture, diverse in number, and empty of he truth of Christ’s name.” Late Latin rhetoric did not hold clarity or simplicity as virtues, but it seems to suggest that Clovis had, at minimum, been in communication with rival creeds (e.g. Arianism) and at least given their arguments consideration. Gregory himself notes that Clovis’ sister Lantechild, baptized at the same time as the king, was an Arian before she became a Catholic. It’s not surprising that the bishop of Tours would leave out any positive association between Clovis and the despised theology. Avitus’ letter also suggests, by mentioning Clovis’ mercy to “a formerly captive people”, that the baptism came after the victory over the Visigoths, placing it in 508, only three years before Clovis died. We’ve already talked about the possibility of a long gap between intellectual conversion and physical baptism, and it is possible that Clovis waited to undergo the ritual until he was completely secure in his position.
We can’t ever know for sure, of course, and ultimately it’s the long-term consequences of Clovis’ conversion that matters. To understand why, let’s compare the political situation in the Frankish realm toward the end of Clovis’ rule with the situation in the Ostrogothic realm toward the end of Theodoric’s.
In Theodoric’s Italy, Goth and Roman seem to have rumbled along together fairly well, thanks in no small part ato the efforts of Roman aristocrats like Liberius and Cassiodorus. But the two communities were just that, two separate communities. They each had their own sphere of influence, the Romans administering, the Goths fighting. Each followed their own laws and customs. Not in criminal law, thieving was theoretically illegal for everyone, but in areas of marriage, inheritance, and property, Roman and Goths maintained their own traditions, each siloed off from the other. Romans maintained their educational traditions, based on language, logic and rhetoric, while the Goths scorned such pursuits as unmanly and unworthy of a warlike people. Goths could not marry Romans, Romans could not serve in the army. And they never saw each other in church. The separation of the two communities probably did prevent a great deal of friction in day-to-day relations, but meant that no new identity was ever forged, Goth plus Roman did not come to equal Italian. Cracks were already beginning to appear in the 530s, and when the lynchpin of the system, in the person of Theodoric, was removed in 526, the consequences of the separation approach quickly became clear.
Contrast that with the newly constituted Frankia. Clovis himself aside, the military men who now constituted the uppermost rung of society’s ladder were just as different from the Gallo-Romans as the Goths were from the Romano-Italians. With the conversion of a significant segment of the military forces controlling Gaul, the most important dividing line between German and Roman was erased. Now there was a point of commonality between the two. The family that once had been senators and lived by carefully managing their estates and finances, now would see and interact regularly with another family that lived by serving their war-leader with courage and loyalty. The two would listen to a priest, bishop, or deacon, who would teach them, and more importantly their children, a common story and value system. People would meet, men and women would get married. These three cultural threads, Catholic Christianity, classical Roman law and scholarship, and Germanic military strength, had been present in the Roman empire to varying degrees for almost two centuries by the time Clovis died in 511. For most of that time though, they had been like cheerios floating in a bowl of milk – sometimes they clung together, sometimes they were separate, but they were each distinct. From now on, though, they would be more like beads of oil, gradually merging into a single new whole, a supranational entity that would come to be known as Christendom.
As I suspected, Clovis’ story didn’t balloon out like Theodoric’s did. He has one more signal contribution to make to French history, in the realm of the law, but I think I’m going to save that for an upcoming episode on law codes in general. Clovis was undoubtedly energetic and effective, but I can’t bring myself to like or admire him. There was too much deception, too much random violence.I know that I perhaps have failed to keep an academic impartiality in these episodes, and I hope you’ll forgive me for it.
Next episode will instead be a round up and review. I now have several narrative threads left dangling in different places. I’m leaving the Franks hanging in 511, the Ostrogoths mourning Theodoric in 526, the Visigoths suddenly seem to have been reduced to everybody’s patsies, and we’ve barely heard from the Vandals in almost 40 years. So next time the plan is to quickly bring everyone more up to date, that date being 526. Big things are on the way for the west, and it would be best if we had everyone’s situation in mind when they kick off.
After that, I’m going on a family trip, and will be away for a while. Essentially that will be the end of Season Two. I didn’t do nearly as much as I had been hoping for, and it’s beginning to dawn on me that I may need to rethink and adjust my organizational system (insert hollow laugh here) and narrative approach. Most of the changes will hopefully be invisible to you in terms of content, other than another gap after the next episode, and I know you’re all used to that as it is. The show will go on though, be assured of that.
With that I must offer thanks from the bottom of my heart to monthly donators Paul, Scott, and Ellen. There was some debate a while back on the history of England podcast about the word Donator rather than Donor, and I think I have to side with David on this one, Donor sounds like someone is giving me bone marrow or something, so donator it shall be.
If you want to be a donator or I suppose a donor, you can do so at ko-fi.com/darkagespod, or click the link in the episode description. Also, transcripts for this and most other episodes are available at darkagespod.com, and I post a few relevant images for each episode on my instagram @darkagespod . I’ve been taking a bit of a social media break the last few weeks, so I haven’t been as active on the Gram as I had been, but I will be getting back into the swing of things soon. Questions, comments, corrections, and rants are all welcome in varying degrees – you can submit them through the contact page at the aforementioned darkagespod.com, or email directly to darkagespod@gmail.com.
Okay, that will do it. Until next time, take care.
References
Fletcher, Richard. 1998. Barbarian Conversion. N.p.: Henry Holt and Company.
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.
James, Edward. 1988. The Franks. N.p.: B. Blackwell.
Wood, Ian N. 1994. The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751. N.p.: Longman.
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