| | I read the Penguin edition, translated by Lewis Thorpe.
"Gregory of Tours'" history of the Frankish people, beginning with Adam and ending in the twenty-first year after his consecration as Bishop of the city of Tours, makes for more interesting reading than one might suppose. Won't a bishop's History be dry and dusty, one would ask? These days, perhaps--but fortunately Gregory's Merovingian Gaul was a happening place in which bishops played very active roles.
The first book of the History, from Adam to the death of Saint Martin in 397 A.D., is admittedly a little dry, although some amusement can be had in Gregory's accounts of Biblical and ancient times--it is interesting to read what an educated man of Gregory's time understood of remote events.
Things start to pick up in the second and third books, as we approach Gregory's own time. The Merovingian kings of Gaul were in to some crazy stuff--big on torture, for one, and not very hesitant to scrap a rough army together and go after foreign kings or even each other.
The Merovingians had this problem with succession, you see: instead of making just the eldest son King, every son of a king became a King in his own right as soon as his father died, splitting the kingdom between them. So the Franks had times where they had about four kings all vying for control of the country (such as it was), and naturally engaging in all kinds of battles and intrigues--and their wives and children doing the same.
It was also a time of Saints--it seems like about half the bishops Gregory knew eventually turned in to Saints or some sort or other, and his own family numbered Saints, bishops, and a Martyr or two among its ancestors. While Gregory himself didn't have to deal with persecution of Christians, such goings-on were still in recent memory (Gaul having only become mainly Roman Catholic under the fourth Merovingian king Clovis, who died in 511--and then there were still Goths and Arians and other sorts of heretics running around in large numbers.
So the bulk of the History deals with the various Merovingian kings and their families of Gregory's time (mostly King Guntram and his cousin King Childebert), who they fought with and who they killed, and with the other Frankish bishops and the wide variety of sinners, heretics, false Christs, murderers, refugees, rebels, and other freaks with whom they had to deal--including some pretty bad boys among the bishops themselves. Gregory himself often takes an important role in his own account, as Kings call him in for advice or to act as judge in important trials of state, as various high-profile outlaws (some of royal descent) take refuge in his cathedral, and as armies, royal, rebel, friendly or otherwise, march through Tours.
You get a picture of a time quite different, in many ways, than our own. People were still people, of course, but living with very loose and arbitrary laws, without a real police force--rather, influencial people just gathered up groups of followers and went and assaulted whoever they pleased, often without having any larger, official force come along later to chastise them. And it was a time of miracles, in which relics of saints, demons, and the wrath of God seemed to occur in a frequent basis, at least as far as word of mouth went.
Not really many dull moments, then. Even his interlaced chapters on the various contemporary saints, bishops and other famous holy men and women often read quite briskly, and no doubt this can be attributed in many cases to Gregory having either known the person himself, or having heard detailed first-hand accounts of them. Sometimes he gets a little preachy, being a fairly hardcore, good old heretic-hating Roman Catholic, but he also gets in to lively debates with various unbelievers, of which he does not hesitate to give his own first-hand account.
He marches through the years, giving the highlights of Kings, plagues, holy persons, sinners, and weather (I mean stuff like the night sky lighting up bright as noon for fifty miles around--that kind of thing seems to have happened a lot back then...), occassionally pausing to give the history of this or that interesting person whom events of that year brought to prominence. Sinners beware and believers rejoice, God is active and much smiting takes place. This is about as lively as history gets, and it makes a darn fine read. |
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