Clovis I

Clovis I (born c. 466—died November 27, 511, Paris, France) was the king of the Franks and ruler of much of Gaul from 481 to 511, a key period during the transformation of the Roman Empire into Europe. His dynasty, the Merovingians, survived more than 200 years, until the rise of the Carolingians in the 8th century. While he was not the first Frankish king, he was the kingdom’s political and religious founder.

Clovis was the son of the pagan Frankish king Childeric and the Thuringian queen Basina. He succeeded his father in 481 as the ruler of the Salian Franks and other Frankish groups around Tournai (now in Belgium). Although the chronology of his reign is imprecise, it is certain that by the time of his death in 511 he had consolidated the Franks and expanded his influence and rule to include the Roman province of Belgica Secunda in 486 and the territories of the Alemanni (in 496), the Burgundians (in 500), and the Visigoths (in 507). Clovis’s kingdom began in the region encompassing modern Belgium and northeastern France, expanded south and west, and became the most powerful in Gaul. He was the most important Western ally of the Byzantine emperor Anastasius I. The Pactus Legis Salicae (Law of the Salian Franks), a written code combining customary law, Roman written law, Christian ideals, and royal edicts, likely originated during Clovis’s reign and had a long history of emendation and influence. Clovis married the Catholic Burgundian princess Clotilda and had five children with her. A son, Theuderic, was born prior to the marriage; his mother is unknown.

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Clovis, like his father, dealt politically and diplomatically with the Catholic bishops of Gaul. These powerful figures had no qualms about working with Germanic kings, as a letter to Clovis from Bishop Remigius of Reims, written early in the king’s reign, makes clear. The bishops saw themselves as the king’s natural advisers, and, even before his conversion to Catholic Christianity and his baptism at Reims (now in France) by Remigius, Clovis apparently recognized their rights and protected their property. In a letter written to Clovis at the time of his baptism, Avitus of Vienne (now in France) praises his faith, humility, and mercy. Significantly, in the year of his death, Clovis summoned the bishops to a church council at Orléans.

Much was written about Clovis by Gregory of Tours in his Histories (often called the History of the Franks), which appeared more than 50 years after Clovis’s death. Interpreting him from a Christian perspective, Gregory tells stirring stories about Clovis and portrays him as a single-minded warrior. He uses florid rhetoric to describe the arguments with which Clotilda attempted to persuade her husband to abandon paganism. When Clovis finally converted, he becomes for Gregory a “new Constantine,” the emperor who Christianized the Roman Empire in the early 4th century. In both cases, an unexpected victory in battle led a king to trust the power of the Christian God and to submit to baptism. Gregory places Clovis’s baptism in 496 and characterizes his subsequent battles as Christian victories, particularly the engagement with the Visigoths in 507 that has long been identified with Vouillé but now is believed to have occurred at Voulon near Poitiers, France. Gregory portrays the Visigothic war as a campaign against Arian heresy. His account indicates that prior to the battle, Clovis gave gifts to the church and made appeals to St. Martin of Tours, for which he was rewarded with victory, blessed with miracles, and honoured with an imperial consulship by Anastasius I.

Recent scholarship has revealed flaws in Gregory’s account of Clovis and raised questions about the ultimate purpose of the Histories. Gregory elevated the Franks to equivalency with the ancient Hebrews, the chosen people, and Clovis to the stature of their great king David. Even more important, he held Clovis up as a model for his own contemporary Frankish kings, Clovis’s grandsons. In Gregory’s estimation, unlike their grandfather, they did not maintain unity and peace within the kingdom nor adequately respect the advice of bishops. While the Histories provides broad background and engaging stories about the early Frankish world, the Clovis of the Histories is more a literary fiction than a historical reality.

However, Gregory and other contemporary authors were not wholly wrong in describing Clovis, a warrior king, as a religious figure. His life illustrates a crucial series of ideological and cultural transformations that took place throughout the Western Roman Empire as it gave way to Germanic kingdoms. Clovis’s father, Childeric, died a pagan and was buried in Tournai in a tomb surrounded by barbarian horse burials. Thirty years later Clovis was buried next to his contemporary St. Geneviève in the Church of the Holy Apostles that he built in Paris, and he was joined years later by his wife, St. Clotilda.

Over the centuries much has been made of Clovis’s conversion to Catholicism. One of the first Germanic kings to do so, he did, in fact, convert to Catholicism, but recent analysis of the contemporary sources that describe his reign—especially of a letter written by Avitus of Vienne congratulating him on his baptism—suggests that Clovis did not convert to Catholicism directly from paganism. Prior to accepting Catholicism, he was interested in the Christian heresy Arianism, sympathetic with it, and perhaps even leaning toward adopting it. According to Avitus, it is also likely that Clovis was baptized rather late in life, possibly at Christmas in 508, only three years before his death.

If this sequence of events is correct, it reflects the intellectual and religious climate of late 5th- and early 6th-century Gaul. The Arian heresy was the form of Christianity to which most Germanic peoples initially converted. It understood the godhead in hierarchical terms. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was a created being who did not share the eternal nature of God the Father but who was superior to God the Holy Spirit. Orthodox Catholicism understood the godhead as comprising three “coequal,” “coeternal” members. These two Christian belief systems represent a theological power struggle within the Christian community during the transformation period. The Catholics won by ecclesiastical and imperial decree in the 4th century, making Arianism a heresy, but Arianism remained an important force in parts of Europe as late as the 6th century.

Pagans, Arians, and Catholics shared the Gaul of Clovis and the Franks. Clovis personally illustrates the juxtaposition of these three belief systems. He was born into paganism, two of his sisters were Arians (one married the Arian Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great), and his wife, Clotilda, like her sister, was Catholic but from a Burgundian royal family that included Arians. His conversion to Catholicism was that of one man and not of his kingdom, but it can be seen as pivotal in Frankish history.

Clovis’s life as a religious man illustrates the challenges then faced by the Catholic bishops and illuminates their concerns with evangelism. They combatted paganism and the ancient traditions that it embodied, stamped out heresy, and attempted to convert Gaul’s Jewish communities. The powerful advocacy of Catholicism that resonates in Gregory’s Histories is, perhaps, a response to the difficulty of conversions of those like Clovis, who was not baptized until at least 15 years into his reign. This advocacy may also reflect a deep-seated communal memory of a religiously diverse kingdom and the daunting task of converting it.

Upon Clovis’s death, he divided his kingdom among his four surviving sons. Only Chlotar, who outlived his brothers, ruled a united kingdom, but he in turn divided it among his sons. It was not until the reign of Clovis’s great-grandson Chlotar II in the early 7th century that the Merovingians experienced long-lasting political unity. The kingdom which Clovis established, however, superseded its occasional individual parts and remained intact for centuries.

The historical Clovis remains a shadowy figure: a warrior who solidified a kingdom, corresponded with bishops, and converted to Catholic Christianity. Within decades of his death, he had become a hero and was held up as a model king. A millennium and a half later he remains significant. For the French, he was the founder of France, and a derivation of his name, Louis, became the principal name of its kings. His baptism is considered one of the formative dates in French history. For Catholics, he was the first major Germanic Catholic king, and Pope John Paul II celebrated a mass in Reims in 1996 in honour of the 15th centenary of his baptism.