Part 3 (1/2)
[1] So _Var._, i. 26, ed. Mommsen, p. 28.
[2] ii. 29, p. 63.
[3] _Italy and her Invaders_, vol. iii. p. 516.
[4] _Anonymus Valesii_.
[5] _Italy and her Invaders_, vol. vi. p. 528.
[6] Instances are collected by M. Diehl, _etudes sur l'administration byzantine dans l'exarchat de Ravenne_, p. 320.
[7] Et dum nou essent episcopi qui c.u.m ordinarent, inventi sunt duo episcopi, Johannes de Perusia et Bonus de Ferentino, et Andreas presbiter de Hostis, et ordinaverunt eum.--_Liber Pontificalis_, i. 303.
[8] Migne, Patr. Lat., tom. lxix. p. 402.
[9] _Revue des Questions Historiques_, Oct. 1884, p. 439.
{41}
CHAPTER IV
CHRISTIANITY IN GAUL FROM THE SIXTH TO THE EIGHTH CENTURY
A very special interest belongs to the history of Christianity in Gaul.
There is no more striking example of what the Church did to bridge over the gulf between the old culture and the barbarians.
[Sidenote: Roman Gaul.]
Among early Christian martyrs few are more renowned than those who died in Southern Gaul. Paganism lived on, concealed, in many country districts, but the life and power and thought of the people became by the time of Constantine, by the fourth century, entirely Christian. As the state organised so did the Church. Gaul had seventeen provincial governments; it came to have seventeen archbishops, and under them bishops for each great city. On the Roman empire and the Christian Church the foundations were laid; and they were laid firm.
[Sidenote: The barbarian invasions.]
At the beginning of the fifth century a terrible storm swept over the land. It was the storm of Teutonic invasion. Vandals, Burgundians, Alans, Suevi poured over the land; the Huns followed them, only to be beaten back by a union of the other tribes. Then, after the Battle of Chalons (451), there gradually rose out {42} of the Teutonic conquerors the conquering power of one tribe, that of the Franks.
[Sidenote: The Church in Gaul.]
By the first ten years of the sixth century Gaul was united again, under the rule of Chlodowech (Clovis), King of the Franks. Till well on in the Middle Ages it was that t.i.tle which the rulers of Gaul always bore, ”Rex Francorum,” King of the Franks. France to-day still dates her existence as a nation from the baptism of Clovis. It was that, his admission into the Catholic Christianity of the Gauls over whom he ruled, which enlisted on the side of the Frankish power all the culture and civilisation which had never died out since the Roman days. Under the fostering care of the Church it had survived. Brotherhood, charity, compa.s.sion, unity, all the great ideas which the Church cherished, were to work in long ages the transformation of the Frankish kings.h.i.+p. And when Chlodowech became king under the blessing of the Church, which had survived all through these centuries since it was planted under the Romans, the fusion of races soon followed. The French nation as we now know it is not merely Celtic, or Gaulish, but Roman too, and lastly Frankish--that is, Teutonic.
[Sidenote: The baptism of Chlodowech, 496.]
The history of the baptism of Chlodowech is one of the most dramatic in the annals of the early Middle Age. His wife, Chrotechild, was the niece of the Burgundian king, and she was a devout Catholic. Slowly she won her way to his heart. Never, said the chroniclers, did she cease to persuade him that he should serve the true G.o.d; and when in the crisis of a battle against the Alamanni he called her words to mind, he vowed to {43} be baptised if Christ should give him the victory. The legend adorns the historic fact that Chlodowech was baptised by S. Remigius at Rheims, on Christmas Day, 496, and that some three thousand of his warriors were baptised with him. ”Bow thy neck, O Sigambrian,” said the prelate, ”adore that which thou hast burned and burn that which thou hast adored.” Within a generation all races of the Franks had followed the Frankish king.
[Sidenote: The dark days of the Merwings.]
The years that followed were full of growth. But for long the Christianity which was nominally triumphant was imperfect indeed.
Chlodowech died in 511; his race went on ruling, Catholic in name but very far from obedient to the Church's laws. The tale of their successors, their wars and their crimes, is one which belongs to social or political history, not to the history of the Church. The Church's life was lived underground in the slow progress of Christian ideas.
Chlothochar, sole ruler of the Franks, died in 561. How little had the half-century accomplished. Then came an age of division, murders, horrors, in which the names of great ladies stand out as at least the equals of their lords in crime. Predegund, who became the wife of Chilperich of Neustria, and Brunichildis, the wife first of Sigebert of Austrasia, and then of Merovech, Chilperich's son, were rivals in wickedness. The horrors of those days are recorded in the history of Gregory, who ruled over the see of Tours from 573 to 595. It was an age in which, while the rulers were Christian in name, and the land was mapped out into sees ruled by Christian bishops, and monasteries were springing up to teach {44} the young and to set an example of religious life, the general atmosphere was almost avowedly pagan. Men said, tells Gregory, that ”if a man has to pa.s.s between pagan altars and G.o.d's church there is no harm in his paying homage to both,” and the lives of such men showed that it is impossible to serve G.o.d and Mammon.
Yet for a century and a half the Merwings, descendants of Chlodowech, had among them strong rulers, great conquerors, men of iron as well as men of blood. Early in the seventh century, from 628 to 638, there ruled in Gaul Dagobert, the greatest of the Merwing kings. His rule extended from the Pyrenees to the North Sea, from the ocean to the forests of Thuringia and Bohemia. He was ”ruler of all Gaul and the greater part of Germany, very influential in the affairs of Spain, victorious over Slavs and Bulgarians, and at home a great king, encouraging commerce and putting into better shape the law codes of his subjects.”
[Sidenote: Break up of their kingdom.]