On February 15, 495, despite previous warning from the pope, a group of Roman senators made sure that the annual purifying ceremony of the Lupercalia was performed at Rome. Once again, naked youths dashed through Rome, as they had done since archaic times. What shocked the pope was that the senators concerned were not pagans. They were good “sons of the Church.” But they were public figures. They knew what Rome needed after an anxious year of epidemics and bad harvests: in their rowdy runaround, the “Young Wolves” – the Luperci – would cleanse the city in preparation for another year. In the city with the longest Christian tradition in the Latin West, collective memory still looked back to the world of Romulus and Remus.1
Even if the gods and their ceremonies were banished from the city, they still hung above it in the heavens. We must remember that late antique persons, Christian as well as pagan, did not look up into an empty sky. The mundus, the physical universe as a whole, remained filled with numinous powers. To look up at the stars was to see “heavenly bodies” in the true sense. The stars were the radiant “bodies” of the gods. And the Sun was the most radiant of all. Sheathed in glory, the Sun demanded respect. In 440, pope Leo was shocked to learn that, when they reached the top of the flight of steps that led up to the shrine of Saint Peter, many good Catholic Christians would turn their backs to the saint’s basilica, to bow, with a reverential gesture, toward the rising sun.2
In many ways, Rome was exceptional. Even after they had become Christian, the senators of Rome remained fiercely loyal to the memories of their city. They continued to treat Rome as a gigantic “theme park” of the pre-Christian, Roman past.3 But the problems faced by the bishops of Rome were not unique. All over the Mediterranean world, the cities and the rural landscapes were thought of as nestling in the embrace of a natural world that was heavy with religious meaning. The natural world, the mundus, was shot through with unseen powers who had yet to take on Christian faces.
This then was the situation which confronted Christian preachers in the fifth and sixth centuries. The Christian Church had emerged, by A.D. 500, as the sole public religion of the Roman world. Paganism had been officially abolished. But the real battle with paganism in western Europe had only begun. For this battle was not fought out with the old gods of Rome in their clearly recognizable, classical form – with statues, temples, and ceremonies. It was, rather, a battle for the imaginative control of the mundus. The natural world, from the highest heavens to the humble earth in the fields, had to be “demystified,” because only when “demystified” in this way could the natural world be filled up again, but now with Christian figures, most especially with the figures of the Christian saints.
In Italy, Gaul, and Spain, Christianity had established itself only on the fringes of what remained a dauntingly wide world. Christianity had risen to prominence as a religion of the Roman towns.4 In the course of the fifth and sixth centuries, it came to penetrate the countryside. But what we call “the winning of the countryside” was a piecemeal matter. It was due to a variety of potentially conflicting initiatives. It should not be seen exclusively as a spreading outward of Christian belief and Christian organization, from the cities into the countryside, conducted under the aegis of urban bishops and clergy.
The bishops, certainly, played their part in the Christianization of the countryside. By 573, for example, the bishops of Tours, in Gaul, had placed some 24 churches in villages in the Touraine.5 But the bishops were not the only persons responsible for bringing churches to the peasantry. All over Europe, from southern Italy to Portugal, great landowners began to set up chapels, monasteries, even substantial basilicas, on their estates. Modern archaeology has revealed remarkable examples of a transplantation of Christianity from the cities into the countryside by this means.6 The history of the rural church is often the last act in the long history of the Roman villa. As with the Roman villa, the implantation of a church had economic and social effects. Local markets had always taken place at pagan country shrines on the estates of landowners. Now these shrines were replaced by a church. This was a time when local markets had become more important. The breakdown of wider trading networks made each region more dependent on its own, short-distance exchanges, which took place at rural markets marked by these new churches. The spread of Christianity in the countryside of western Europe is linked to processes of which we still know little, to the redistribution of trade and of patterns of settlement in a post-imperial age.7 In wilder areas of forest and mountain, Christianity had come, first, not from the cities, but from local monasteries and hermits.8
By the year A.D. 550, therefore, Christianity was present all over the countryside. But what was far from certain was what kind of Christianity this would be. The bishops of the city were seldom faced with stubborn rural paganism. Rather, they were faced with varieties of “home-grown” Christianity, which constantly threatened to slip beyond their control. The principal concern of articulate bishops in the sixth century was not how to suppress paganism. It was how to impose a “correct” interpretation on a bewildering range of religious practices, most of which claimed to be “Christian.” This was a major task, for western Europe was a profoundly rural society. It lived from the land. The natural world absorbed the energies of over 90 percent of the inhabitants of every region, as farmers and as pastoralists. They depended every year on the erratic fortunes of the weather and on the harvest. For such persons, the natural world was far from being a neutral space, as it is to us today. The stars and the planets still spoke of the ancient gods. The lower reaches of the universe were filled with angels and with demons. The clouds, in particular, were thought of as a perpetual zone of combat between demonic and angelic powers. In an agrarian world, human existence depended on the outcome of unseen struggles in the upper air. The power of the demons might be revealed, at any time, in the crash of thunder and in the violent hailstorms which scythed the vines and battered the crops.9
It was not enough to have placed a single, exclusive God at the head of the mundus. Nor was it enough, even, to have brought that God down to the lowest level of the universe, to move as a human being among other human beings in the person of Jesus Christ, in a manner which Christian theologians of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries struggled so hard and for so long to express (as we saw in chapter 4). Christianity had to make sense to populations who had always thought of themselves as embedded in the natural world, and who had always expected to be able to impinge upon that world, so as to elicit its generosity and to ward off its perils, by means of rites which reached back, in most parts of Europe, to prehistoric times.
We should not underestimate the sheer range and complexity of the pre-existent sacred landscape against which the Christian churches came to perch in western Europe. Remains of Roman paganism littered the countryside from Britain to southern Italy.
Deserted temples with their time-worn idols still stood out as foreboding, uncanny presences: “stark as ever … outlines still ugly, faces still grim.”10 Pagan worship had been officially forbidden since the end of the fourth century. Nonetheless, shrines remained active in many remote regions all over the West. As late as the 690s, in parts of Spain, votive offerings were still being made to idols. Springs, crossroads, and hilltops continued to receive little piles of ex-votos. Trees continued to be draped with votive pieces of cloth.11
Each region had its own sacred landscape. Physical features, trees, and animals were bathed in imaginative associations which still owed nothing to Christianity. In Gaul, for instance, holiness still oozed from the earth. Even today, the region has some 6,000 holy springs.12 At the other end of the Mediterranean, in Egypt, we find a similar situation. The spectacular rise of the Christian Church at the expense of the pagan temples merely distracted attention from the humble day-to-day relation between humans and the sacred along the valley of the Nile.13 In that area, little had changed. In Egypt, the animal world retained its numinous association with the gods. Once, a raven alighted on a wall beside a group of Christian laymen, who had come to consult the great Christian abbot, Shenoute of Atripe (385–466). They instinctively turned to greet the bird: “Have you good news in your beak, raven?” For the raven was a prophetic bird. To lay Christians in fifth-century Egypt, the raven, with its prophetic cawing, meant as much as did the exhortations of a great Christian abbot.14 To Shenoute, the prospect seemed endless:
Even if I take away all your household idols, am I able to cover up the sun? Should I build walls all along the West [the Egyptian Amente, the land of the gods and the dead], so that you do not pray towards the sunset? Shall I stand watch on the banks of the Nile, and in every lagoon, lest you make libations on its waters?15
Different Christian regions faced the situation in very different ways. The Christians of the Greek East tended to see their world in terms of the triumphant narrative which had emerged in the age of Constantine. As we saw in chapter 3, they tended to treat the present as a bright new age. They were “Christian times.” The power of Christ on earth had brought about a mighty transformation. Christian writers pointed out that Christian holy men now perched on mountains once sacred to the gods; that Christian churches rose triumphantly from the foundations of levelled temples; and that the names of the gods were forgotten, while those of the saints and martyrs were on everyone’s lips.16 Even when churches were not built directly on top of temples, they were still spoken of, in self-confident inscriptions, as if they had been.
The dwelling place of demons has become a house of God.
The saving light has come to shine, where shadows covered all.
Where sacrifices once took place and idols stood, angelic choirs now dance.
Where God was angered once, now God is made content.17
The sense of a pagan past which had been irrevocably defeated led to a certain tolerance of legacies from the classical world. Pagan monuments had lost their power to disturb Christians. To take a small example: the statues of Augustus and Livia continued to stand in the civic center of Ephesus, but they now had the sign of the Cross discreetly carved on their foreheads. Thus “baptized” in retrospect, they looked down serenely on the Christian bishops assembled by Theodosius II – a most orthodox ruler, but also the direct successor of Augustus – at the momentous Council of Ephesus of 431.18
This did not mean, in fact, that many regions of the Eastern empire were Christianized any more rapidly than were those of the West. The Greek intelligentsia continued to include distinguished pagans: Christians called them “Hellenes.” They were the proud upholders of the culture and the gods of the Greeks. Athens remained a university city, in which known “Hellenes” taught Christians with full public support until A.D. 529.19 Nor was the countryside entirely Christianized. Perched at a safe distance from major cities, in the prosperous mountain valleys of Anatolia, Lebanon, and northern Mesopotamia, pagan villages looked down, largely untroubled, on the disciplined plains, where the new religion had been declared to have triumphed – at least, officially.20 Yet Eastern Christians were undisturbed by the existence in their midst of considerable pockets of paganism. The fact that they lived in a successful and stridently Christian empire was enough to persuade them that theirs was a basically Christian world.
In western Europe, by contrast, different attitudes prevailed. The collapse of the Roman empire in the West seriously weakened the Constantinian myth of a Christian empire, whose manifest destiny had been to banish all paganism from the face of the earth. The rulers of the barbarian kingdoms were sincere Christians. They maintained and reissued the laws of the Christian emperors against paganism in every form.21 But they ruled an increasingly localized society, in which the power of the state was weak. As a result, the burden of making the world appear Christian fell on the shoulders of the local bishops and their clergy. City by city, region by region, it was conscientious bishops who set the pace in grappling with the pagan past. It was up to them to declare which practices were “pagan” and which were not, which should be abolished and which could be treated as innocent survivals, devoid of religious meaning.
We must remember that we are dealing with the history of a singularly silent process. All over Europe, local bishops and individual households made up their own minds about what to do with the pagan past. The Latin bishops whose views have come down to us (largely because their writings were copied out and circulated) are interesting because they had one thing in common. They tended to take their cue from the more inward-looking and pessimistic streak in the thought of Augustine of Hippo.
As we saw in chapter 3, Augustine’s victory over the views of Pelagius ensured that the Catholic Church in the West would not think of itself as a body of “saints” – a Church made up of heroic converts who had totally abandoned their pagan past. Human beings were too weak for that ever to happen. Rather, each believer had to continue, even after conversion and baptism, to battle with the tenacity of evil customs within himself or herself. And these “evil customs” inevitably included parts of the pagan past. Tell-tale traces of habits picked up in a society which had only recently become Christian marked the behavior of many Christians. It was worse for educated persons. The gods continued to linger in their minds, for the Roman history and the Latin literature that they learned at school were saturated with mentions of a glorious pagan past.
In such a view, paganism could never be treated simply as a superstitio, as a bankrupt religious system which lay safely outside the Church. It had not been definitively overcome by the establishment of a Christian empire, as many Christians had believed in the triumphant mood of the fourth century. Rather, paganism was now seen to lie close to the heart of all baptized Christians. It was always ready to re-emerge in the form of “pagan survivals.” Such “survivals” attracted attention. For they were treated as evidence of the force of evil habits at work within the Church itself. As a result of this somber view of the Church, the master narrative of Christianization, as it came to be propounded from henceforth in the Latin West, was not one of definitive triumph. It was, rather, one in which an untranscended pagan past perpetually shadowed the advancing footsteps of the Christian present.
The Christian preacher who provided future generations with a classic statement of this distinctive mood was Caesarius, bishop of Arles from 502 to 542.22 Caesarius was devoted to Augustine. He even died, reassuringly, on the same day of the year as had the great bishop of Hippo.23 Caesarius adapted Augustine’s own sermons, preached a century before at Carthage and Hippo, to the townsfolk of Arles and the peasants of Provence.
A conscientious bishop of the early sixth century, Caesarius set little store by originality. To copy the sermons of a great predecessor was simply to equip oneself with timeless skills against a timeless enemy. When it came to the Devil’s long, sly siege of Christian souls, time stood still and distance did not matter. Sin and temptation did not change. What every preacher must learn were, as it were, the right chess-moves with which to check the eternal chess Grand Master, the Devil. These chess-moves did not vary from place to place or from time to time. They were always available in the form of standard admonitions to withstand particular temptations and to avoid particular practices. Hence there is nothing surprising in the fact that the sermons which Caesarius first copied from Augustine in Arles came to be copied out again, with equal zeal, three centuries later, to be applied in newly converted regions of central Germany (as we shall see in chapter 18). The paganism of Germany might be different from that of Provence. But the Grand Master who stood behind it, the Devil, had remained the same.24
What Caesarius accomplished by his sermons was a pastoral tour de force. He domesticated the daunting immensity of the pre-Christian spiritual landscape of Provence. Paganism, for him, was not a set of independent practices, endowed still with the allure of a physical world shot through with mysterious, non-Christian powers. Rather, he presented paganism as no more than a fragmented collection of “survivals.” It consisted of a set of “sacrilegious habits” and inert “evil customs.”25 In the words of a slightly later council of Gallic bishops, paganism was only so much “dirt from the gentiles” inadvertently tracked into the Church on the feet of heedless believers.26 It was not a religious system in its own right. For Caesarius, the only paganism that mattered was the paganism which lingered within the Christian congregations.
Caesarius did not mince words on those who indulged in such practices. In Arles, he was remembered for his “unceasing voice” as a preacher. On one occasion, he even closed the doors of his basilica, lest members of his congregation walk out before the sermon. He told them that when they stood before God at the Last Judgment, they would not be free to leave the room!27 Beneath the deliberate simplicity of his preaching style, Caesarius was very much a Gallo-Roman noble and a product of the austere monastic discipline instilled at Lérins. He had a strong sense of belonging to an elite. Paganism was not only repugnant to him. He thought of it as culturally inferior to his own well-groomed version of Christianity. To fall back into pagan ways was, quite frankly, to show lack of grooming. It was to behave like rustici, like boorish peasants, who, being devoid of reason and unamenable to culture, were driven by brute passion alone.28
In Caesarius’ opinion, one did not even have to be a pagan or a peasant to be a rusticus. Sophisticated urbanites were warned by him that failure to abide by the strict sexual codes upheld by their bishop betrayed rusticitas, lack of decorum. In bed anyone could behave like a rusticus. To make love on Sundays, or when one’s wife was menstruating, was to act no better than a peasant; and the results, he pointed out, appealing to a grim medical tradition, were children such as would befit indecorous tumblings – deformed children, lepers, epileptics.29 The pruning of rusticitas of every kind among baptized Christians, and not the eradication of paganism itself outside the Church, was the principal object of a bishop’s pastoral care.
To prune rusticitas in this way meant that Caesarius had to challenge an entire mentality. He had to dethrone the ancient image of the world. In his preaching, the mundus, the physical universe, was drained of its autonomy. It had no life of its own apart from that given to it by the will of God.
Caesarius approached this problem from many directions. Time, for instance, was detached from nature. Time no longer registered the organic throb of the natural world, as this was shown in the changing of the seasons. Instead, Christian time registered the great acts of God in history. Christian festivals celebrated the moments when God had brushed aside the mundus to deal directly with mankind. Hence his particular aversion to the feast of the Kalends of January. It was not simply the folkloristic junketing which upset him. The feast of the Kalends set a pagan notion of the swaggering birth of the year (a notion deeply rooted in ideas of the seasonal renewal of nature) against the divine humility of Christ’s birth at Christmas.30 He fastened with the same precise awareness of their “pagan,” cosmic message, on the names of the days of the week. Since imperial times, the days of the week had carried the names of the gods. They reminded humans of the gods who ruled the earth from their thrones on the ominous, unblinking orbs of the planets. Following Augustine, Caesarius urged Christians to count the days of the week from the Lord’s Day, as prima feria, secunda feria. (This manner of naming the days has been adopted only in Portugal. Elsewhere, as we know, the names of the days of the week still echo the names of the gods. By Caesarius’ high standards, Portugal must count as the only fully Christianized country in Europe!31)
Above all, human beings were denied the possibility of impinging on the workings of the mundus through their accustomed rituals. To think that human wills could intervene to change the course of nature in a material world where all events depended on the will of God was, in the opinion of Caesarius, the height of stupidity. During an eclipse of the moon, the citizens of Arles would join in, with loud hurrahs, to “help the moon in her distress.” Shouts of Vince luna, “Up with the moon,” encouraged the bright neighbor of the human race to shake off the engulfing powers of darkness. To Caesarius, this was nonsense. The moon hung above Provence, untouched by such “sacrilegious sounds.” It was as distant, as opaque to human hopes and as unaffected by human rituals, as it is to us today. Only its darkened face, at times of eclipse, might be read by Christians as a “sign,” given by God to warn mankind. The sudden darkness that fell across the moon was the frown of his anger.32
It would be a long time (perhaps not until the death of peasant Europe itself in the course of the nineteenth century) before the mentalities denounced by Caesarius changed irrevocably. The mysterious intimacy of man and nature, established since prehistoric times, could not be broken by a few sermons. What we find, rather, are scattered hints that a slow process of compromise was at work in Arles as elsewhere. Many Christians attempted to find some “fit” between their present religious practices and the patterns of an earlier time.
In this slow process of adjustment, Christianity often held the initiative. The attention which Caesarius gave to paganism as, essentially, a set of inert “habits” which survived within his congregation gives us a seriously incomplete image of the religious life of the time. We tend to think only in terms of “pagan survivals” within the Church. We do not often give attention to the adaptation, by non-Christians, of Christian rituals.33 Yet non-Christians and Christians alike had remained intensely interested in exploring new ways of making contact with the mundus and the invisible powers within it. They needed these powers as much as they had before, and they were quite prepared, despite the disapproval of their bishop, to experiment with new combinations of rituals.
A lively process of the borrowing of rituals between pagans and Christians appears to have taken place in both directions. Pagan communities borrowed Christian signs and rites. The sign of the Cross would be made at sacrificial banquets. The names of Christian angels and saints would be shouted at the solemn toasts around the table.34 Above all, monks and clergymen came to offer services which non-Christian ritual specialists had previously provided. Caesarius disapproved; but there was nothing strange in their behavior. Many members of the clergy must have come from former pagan priestly families. They had always enjoyed a reputation for possessing special knowledge of the supernatural. Now it was they who used special blessings, special oils, and special passages from the Christian Scriptures so as to make amulets and remedies for the faithful.35
Around Arles, Christianity even lent its own distinctive flavor to fundamental agrarian rites. For instance, the ceremony of the splashing of the fields with sacred water, associated with seasonal lustration ceremonies, which had fortified the harvest in the drought-prone climates of North Africa and Provence, was postponed slightly, at this time, to coincide with the day of the baptism of Christ in the Jordan. By this small change, the ancient powers of water were reinforced by the vast new potency ascribed by Christians to the rite of baptism.36 Nor were all members of the clergy as inflexible in their stance toward seasonal festivals as was Caesarius. In late sixth-century Spain, an exuberant urban clergy were tempted to bless the fun: they were condemned by their bishops for chanting the Christian chant of Alleluia (the quintessential cry of joy associated with the Easter liturgy of the Resurrection) at the feast of the Kalends of January, thereby adding a Christian note to the euphoria of the birth of the new year.37
It would require a measure of poetry, such as the plain-spoken Caesarius did not possess, to bring about the imaginative Christianization of the mundus. The spread of the Christian cult of the saints in the course of the sixth century did more to place a Christian face upon the natural world than did the preaching of a man such as Caesarius. For the cult did not depend on the “ceaseless voice” of a sermonizer. It aimed, rather, at creating tenacious religious habits that could be observed by all members of the population.
These religious habits focused on the notion of reverentia. By reverentia sixth-century Latin Christians meant a reverential attention to the saints. This attention was directed primarily to major urban shrines, which had already become pilgrimage sites (as was the shrine of Saint Martin at Tours, whose origins we saw in chapter 4). But it was also brought to bear at any number of places and in all kinds of situation. Reverentia created “habits of the heart.” It assumed that the saints were still active and present on earth, and that good and bad fortune depended on the manner in which they were treated by their worshippers. Reverence of that kind – a readiness to see the hand of the saints in day-to-day affairs – was the one sure answer to rusticitas. The Christian saints dwelt in heaven, in the presence of God. But, when approached with reverentia by those who prayed to them on earth, the saints were expected to prevail on God to touch the mundus at every level. Their interventions met the daily needs of believers. A sense of their presence infused a natural world, in which people had always sought the sacred, with a new quality. The saints brought to their shrines and to the landscape a touch of Paradise.
The man whose vivid and abundant writings were devoted to maintaining this view was Gregory, bishop of Tours from 573 to 594.38 Born in 538 (a few years before the death of Caesarius), Georgius Florentius Gregorius came from a different region and from a very different generation from those of the bishop of Arles. Caesarius had been an old-world southerner. Roman emperors still ruled Provence when he was a child. Gregory’s family, by contrast, came from further north, from Langres, Lyons, and the Auvergne. He had known no other rulers than the Frankish kings of the Merovingian dynasty. His elevation to the bishopric of Tours took him yet closer to the northern heartland of the Merovingian kingdom, to Francia proper.
Much had happened in western Europe between the days of Caesarius and the time when Gregory became bishop of Tours. As we shall see in chapter 7, the emperor Justinian (527–565) had attempted to put the clock back in the western Mediterranean. He reconquered all North Africa for the Roman empire and nearly conquered all of Italy. He eventually ruined the Roman social order in Italy by his failure. Worse yet, between 542 and 570, bubonic plague burned out the heart of the once formidable eastern Roman empire and emptied the coastline of the western Mediterranean. Further inland, in Gaul, the plague struck the southern provinces with which Gregory was most familiar. By the end of Gregory’s life, power and, with it, cultural confidence had begun to tilt insensibly away from the Mediterranean and toward northwestern Europe.
Gregory was a loyal, if occasionally critical, subject of the Merovingian Frankish kings.39 He expected them to be powerful defenders of the Catholic Church. He urged them not to waste their energies on unnecessary family feuds.40 The Merovingian kingdom was not the Roman empire as the Roman empire had wished itself to be seen – a formidable, centralized, and bureaucratic state. But neither was it a society that had slipped into aimless barbarism. Rather, Gaul under Frankish rule was not all that different from what a provincial society had been like, in reality, in the last centuries of the Roman empire, once we take away the grandiose self-image with which the empire had invested its rule in the provinces. It was a confederation of regions. Each region was ruled, in a rough and ready manner, by its local aristocracies in the name of a distant court.41
What had changed was the texture of these aristocracies. They were no longer made up of civilians. Among the Franks, military men predominated. And the local “Romans” were quick to imitate their Frankish peers. The carrying of arms and the presence of armed retinues were features of everyday life, even within the walls of Christian churches. Violence was in the air. But, as in any other “medieval” society dominated by a weapon-bearing nobility, violence was carefully rationed. It was controlled by calculations of political advantage42 and by complex codes of honor.43 The Gaul which Gregory surveyed was an untidy society. But it was by no means a society ruled by the law of the jungle.
For the Frankish kings had brought order to Gaul. The rise of Clovis and the establishment of a strong monarchy in the former territories of the Roman limes in northern Gaul and along the Rhine (which we described in chapter 5) brought stability to the entire province after the desperate uncertainties of the fifth century. Gaul had not gone the way of post-imperial Britain. A strong enough state emerged, around which the local aristocracies could rally. Gaul was safe. Its frontiers were protected. An ancien régime which had barely weathered the storms of the previous century settled back to regroup itself, within a “low-pressure” but stable political system.
Foreigners were quick to notice the stability of Gaul. In 566/7, the Italian poet Venantius Fortunatus came to Francia from Treviso (in the Veneto, just south of the Alps).44 Educated in Ravenna, this ingenious Italian immediately presented himself as an Orpheus fallen among northern barbarians. He made much of his own self-image as a refined representative of southern grace among the harp-twanging leudes, the “strong men,” of the Frankish court. This, of course, was a literary pose. In reality, Venantius was happy to become the client of persons who were as secure in their own, Roman culture as he was. As he sailed along the Moselle and visited great bishops in their country estates, travelling across Gaul all the way from Trier to Bordeaux, he could observe that a larger measure of old-world solidity existed in Gaul than in his native Italy.45
For within the lifetime of Gregory of Tours, the accustomed map of Europe had turned upside down. It was Fortunatus’ Italy, and not Merovingian Gaul, that was “the sick man of Europe.” Italy had been ravaged by incessant wars. It was in the grip of an economic depression which threatened, in many areas, to bring urban life to an end in what had once been the most heavily urbanized region of western Europe. Except for a thin strip along the coastline, Mediterranean commerce had withdrawn from the peninsula. By contrast, the under-urbanized, agrarian world of northern Gaul had not been subject to such violent dislocation.46 In the regions which lay on the edge of Gregory’s diocese, around Paris in the Seine valley and further to the north and east, toward the old limes, a new, non-Mediterranean economy had begun to enable the Frankish aristocracy and their Roman collaborators to accumulate wealth in a manner that would prove decisive for the future position of Francia in western Europe. Venantius Fortunatus had come to the right place at the right time. He soon became a friend of Gregory of Tours. He was happy to end his life as bishop of Poitiers, dying a little after his friend, some time around A.D. 600.
Old “Roman” families had survived all over Gaul, from the Rhine to Aquitaine. In the course of the sixth century, they merged with the Franks to form a new class of potentes, of “men of power” of mixed Frankish and Roman descent. The lay members of this new aristocracy were united by a shared Catholicism and by a shared avarice. They were firmly in the saddle in every region. Those potentes who survived the occasional feuding frenzies of the great, as they circled around the courts of rival Merovingian brothers, could expect to thrive.
And in this new mixed nobility, made up of Frankish and Roman “men of power,” none throve more than did the Gallic bishops. The 110 bishops of Gaul had changed over the years. From being the upholders of the morale of beleaguered Roman populations, in the dangerous fifth century, they had settled down to become crucial figures within the new Frankish kingdom. The local aristocracies needed them. They were constantly appealed to as arbiters, as peacemakers, and as diplomats. Each, in his own city, was law and order personified. This was not simply because many bishops had been aristocrats. They were sincerely looked up to as the “high priests” of their region. When consecrated, the bishop would be carried into his city on a high sedan chair, in a ceremony once reserved for Roman consuls. His actions as judge and peacemaker were thought to make real on earth the justice of God and of the saints. He was responsible for orchestrating the solemn ceremonies which brought down the blessing of God on the community as a whole.47
Whether they came from old “Roman” families (as Gregory did) or had risen to the top as royal servants, many of these bishops were fabulously rich. To take one example: bishop Bertram of Le Mans was the bearer of a Frankish warrior name, “Glorious Raven,” from the great bird which pecked at the bodies of the dead on the battlefield. Bertram’s will shows that by the time he died he had amassed a private fortune of 300,000 hectares, scattered all over western Gaul.48
The bishops presided over the distributive system connected with almsgiving and with pious donations. In this capacity, they “redeemed” the wealth of the laity by turning it into spectacular shrines and buildings. In a society where personal display was of the greatest importance for Romans and Franks alike, the bishops were expected to demonstrate the importance of their Church by stunning displays of wealth.49 In so doing, they performed nothing less than a kind of supernatural alchemy. In their hands, gold and precious objects were transformed. Flickering, flame-red gold, which stood in the imagination of Christian contemporaries for all that was most cruel, most labile, and, ultimately, most rigid and “dead” in this world, was “redeemed” and brought alive by being offered to the sacred.50
The altar vessels and the great gold-encased and jewel-studded shrines which covered the bodies of the saints in Gaul spoke of a magical transfer effected by the bishop. By lavishing wealth on the saints, the bishop had sent “treasure” on to heaven to benefit the souls of the donors. And this “treasure in heaven” was reflected back to earth in shrines which shone like frozen drops of supernatural splendor. The shimmer of the tomb was a guarantee of the further “blaze” of miraculous power which a saint, especially if he had been a famous bishop, was expected to show from beyond the grave. The tomb of Saint Eligius (Saint Éloi), bishop of Noyon from 641 to 660, throbbed with such splendor that it had to be covered with a linen cloth during Lent, throughout which time it sweated with veiled miraculous power!51
Merovingian Gaul was an intensely localized society. The bishop was identified with his city. Each city had its own galaxy of local saints. In the course of the sixth century, these cities changed. Many lost their Roman shape. They became, instead, ceremonial centers. Large areas in each city were kept by their bishops as carefully maintained oases of the holy in the midst of a profane and violent world. Bertram’s Le Mans had 18 churches, Paris as many as 35. Cities were no longer enclosed, organized spaces, as Roman towns had been. Some cities, such as Paris, had “evaporated.” Its principal residents had spilled out into the surrounding countryside. Paris was surrounded by a galaxy of shrines. Beyond the shrines lay the administrative villas and hunting lodges of a largely rural aristocracy. Yet even those towns which had lost their Roman shape remained “Roman” in that they acted as the center of their region. They were still dominated by the castle-like Roman walls of what had become the bishop’s “inner city.”52
Ever since Early Christian times, the bishop was supposed to act as the “lover of the poor.” But, in sixth-century Gaul, the bishop did not merely support the indigent. He poured wealth and energy into maintaining an entire urban community.53 The image of the good Catholic bishop as a “father” of his city was formed in this period. It became what was, perhaps, the most long-lasting institutional ideal in western Europe. It changed little until the very end of the ancien régime.
With all his social grace and his appearance of worldliness, [he] fulfilled his duties as a bishop as though he had no other cares to distract him. He visited hospitals, gave alms generously but judiciously, attended to his clergy and religious houses. He found time for everything yet never seemed busy. His open house and generous table gave the impression of the residence of a governor. Yet in everything it was becoming to the Church.54
This could be the description of any Merovingian saint-bishop. It is, in fact, the great spiritual writer, Fénelon, acting as bishop of Cambrai, in 1711, as he is described in the Memoirs of Saint-Simon! The criteria for a good bishop had changed so little in a thousand years.
Gregory came from a group of families who had helped to build up such a world in Gaul. He was the great-grandson, the grandnephew, and the nephew of bishops. He grew up a grave child, surrounded by grave relatives. Reverentia for the saints was a family tradition. His father always carried a gold medallion full of relics round his neck: they protected him from “the violence of bandits, the dangers of floods, the threats of turbulent men, and attacks from swords.”55 Gregory himself made his first religious “remedy” as soon as he could read. A good Catholic boy, he alleviated his father’s gout with a supernatural recipe described in the Book of Tobit. The codex of the Holy Scriptures, not the whispered, oral lore of rustici, was to be his guide. Not for him the fluid, homespun world of the magical healer, who “whispered chants, cast lots, tied amulets around the neck.”56
Gregory made plain that he was no rusticus. When struck by frequent illnesses, he knew how to approach Saint Martin as a friend and as a great patronus, a stern protector. His hopes and fears had been molded over the years by the vast ceremoniousness which characterized the relation of late Roman clients to their patrons. In every eventuality, Saint Martin was his “patron” – his lord and protector: “I approached the tomb, I knelt on the pavement, I wept.”57
Bishop of Tours by the age of 34, Gregory expected all Catholic Christians to show the same deep reverence for the saints as he did. It was, indeed, essential for his position as bishop that they should do so. Tours had all the disadvantages of being an “open city.” It was a pilgrimage center which lay at a crucial crossing of the Loire, linking Frankish northern Gaul to “Roman” Aquitaine. Tours also lay at the joining point of rival kingdoms. In the 20 years of Gregory’s episcopate, Tours wavered in and out of various kingdoms, ruled by conflicting members of the Merovingian dynasty. Gregory found himself being governed, in turn, from Metz, from Soissons, and from Burgundy. His diocese was ravaged by frequent punitive raids. At regular intervals, the basilica of Saint Martin was filled with high-placed persons, who had sought sanctuary at his tomb. As bishop of Tours and guardian of the shrine of Saint Martin, Gregory had the duty to protect and to intercede for many an unsavory character. He had a unique opportunity to watch the potentes of Gaul at their worst and at their most vulnerable. Dealing on a day-to-day basis with such persons was not calculated to increase his faith in human nature.
We must remember that it is from this viewpoint that Gregory wrote his History. He looked out on Gaul from the sanctuary of “his lord” Saint Martin. Though a friend and admirer of the elegant Venantius, he wrote in “rustic” Latin. But this was not so as to address peasants, nor because no one in Gaul was capable of doing anything better. Gregory deliberately chose to write a rough Latin for rough men. He wrote to warn the potentes of future ages, Frankish and Roman alike. For them, an unpolished Latin, well on the way to becoming French, was the language which they would have shared with Gregory and his clergy. It was in this language that they needed to be warned.
To call Gregory’s book a History of the Franks is seriously misleading. Sin and retribution for sin, not ethnicity, was Gregory’s all-consuming interest. In writing the history of his own times, Gregory ensured that the misfortunes of well-to-do sinners, Frankish and Roman alike, would be long remembered. He did not lack material: he describes, often in memorable detail, the violent deaths of some 30 politicians. He wrote of them because he was convinced, and needed to convince others, that those who came to a bad end did so because they had offended God and his saints. The Frankish general, Guntram Boso, for instance, died so stuck through with spears that he could not even keel over. Gregory knew why. Spasmodically pious, Guntram had also consulted a pagan prophetess. It had done him no good. Gregory made sure that contemporaries would remember Guntram for what he was:
an unprincipled sort of man, greedy and avaricious, coveting beyond measure the goods of others, giving his word to all, keeping it to none.58
But Celsus, the Roman, was no better:
a tall man, broad of shoulder, strong of arm, haughty in speech, quick in his reactions, and learned in law. He would often seize the possessions of the Church … One day in church he heard a passage being read from the prophet … Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field. He is said to have replied: “This is a poor look-out! Woe then to me and my children!”
He was right. His son died childless, “bequeathing the greater part of his possessions to the Church from which his father had stolen them.”59
As the guardians of a moral order represented on earth by the bishops, the saints drew themselves up to their full height in the cities of Gaul. The world of Gregory’s History is a largely urban world, which cried out for justice and peace. It was his duty as a bishop to provide this, and he was convinced that, in so doing, he was merely making plain, on earth, the intense sense of justice of his patron, Saint Martin. Yet Gregory also wrote further books of Wonders (of miracles). In them he described wonders at the tomb of Saint Martin and at the tomb of Saint Julian at Brioude. Further wonders made up the Glory of the Confessors, the Glory of the Martyrs, and a Life of the Fathers. He even wrote a treatise on the stars, which included a catalogue of the wonders of nature. These books of Wonders are as extensive as his History. Their sheer size and loving circumstantiality mark a new departure. It is as if Gregory had reached out with his pen to catch the infinitely varied spiritual landscape of his region in a fine web of Christian words.60
Gregory had good reason to write as he did. He was little concerned with the survival of paganism in Gaul.61 But he was deeply worried by the ease with which alternative versions of Christianity sprang up whenever he and his Catholic colleagues relaxed their vigilance. Wandering preachers, bearing relics and claiming to represent none other than Saint Peter himself, had even had the impudence to visit Tours when he was absent!62 Prophetesses emerged in country districts. They attracted large crowds and gathered much wealth by claiming to be able to seek out thieves and to divine the hidden sins of others.63 When bubonic plague struck Berry, in 571, the hermit Patroclus found himself faced by a formidable rival. A woman called Leubella claimed to have been visited “by the devil, falsely appearing to her as Saint Martin … He gave her objects which, so he said, would save the people.”64 Leubella’s imagination was as filled with the figure of Saint Martin as was that of Gregory.
What Gregory confronted, in the countryside of Gaul, was not tenacious paganism, surviving unchanged in a peasant world which was untouched by the Catholicism of the cities. What he found, rather, was a world characterized, in city and country alike, by fertile religious experimentation. Christian rituals and Christian holy figures were adapted by local religious experts to serve the needs of persons who would have considered themselves to be good Christians. It was important, therefore, for Gregory, that reverence for the saints, in its correct Catholic forms, should be seen to touch every aspect of the countryside of Gaul. The saints, as Gregory understood them (and not as persons such as Leubella claimed to know them), must be seen to have been able to meet every local emergency, to account for every local legend, and to be associated with every beneficent manifestation of the sacred.65
To ensure this, Gregory worked and wrote ceaselessly. As a result, the natural world regained some of its magic. Nature, of course, was not presented by Gregory as throbbing with a numinous life of its own, independent of God. But the natural world was seen by him as if it were a heavy, silken veil. Its rustling surface betrayed the presence, hidden close behind it, of the saints of Gaul. For Gregory, a “relic” was a physical fragment, an enduring “trace” that had been, as it were, left behind in the material world by a fully redeemed person, a saint, who now dwelt in God’s Paradise. A pious friend of Gregory’s once told him how the water brought from the spring of a martyr’s shrine changed into sweet-smelling balsam. Gregory was not surprised. “These are authentic relics, which the power of the martyr has picked out with a touch of Paradise.”66
Paradise stood very close to a sixth-century Christian such as Gregory. It was no abstract heaven, but rather a place of superabundant vegetation, jewel-like in its radiance and bright color. Gregory reported how a nun had once had a vision of this Paradise:
they came to a great spring. Its water shone like gold and the grass around it glowed as if with the sparkling light of myriad gems … “This is the well of living water, for which you have thirsted for so long.”67
Relics brought Paradise into the present. The churches of sixth-century Gaul made this plain. It is a sadness, for the historian, that so many of the great Early Christian basilicas of the cities of modern France have long been replaced by Gothic cathedrals. As a result, Merovingian Gaul seems a more depleted place than it was in reality. At the time, however, one only had to enter any shrine which housed a relic of the saints to find oneself in “a fragment of Paradise.”68 Incessantly lit, at great expense, with oil lamps made fragrant with aromatic substances, the basilicas of the saints in Gaul stood out in a dark, violent, and malodorous world as places where Paradise could be found on earth.69
If we go to Italy, we can still see mosaics of the sixth century similar to those which could have been seen in the basilicas of Gaul. They showed the saints standing in Paradise, on a bright green earth, dotted with scarlet flowers. But at times, so Gregory thought, the very flowers of that Paradise might drop to earth. The priest of the shrine of Saint Julian at Brioude (a sanctuary greatly favored by Gregory and his family) once entered the sanctuary in the depths of November, to find the tomb of Julian and the floor around it strewn with gigantic red roses:
their fragrance was overpowering. These roses were so fresh that you might think that they had been cut at that very moment from living stems.70
To come to the tomb of a major saint, such as Saint Martin at Tours, was to breathe in a little of the healing air of Paradise. The fragrance of incense and of scented oil filled the sanctuary around Martin’s tomb. But that fragrance was only a symbol of the real, healing breezes of Paradise which wafted from the tomb. To be healed at such a place was to experience a sudden flowering of the body. When he described cures performed at the tomb of Saint Martin, Gregory lingered, in gripping detail, as much on the physical rhythm of each cure as on its outcome. For the rhythm of the cure itself showed dried and ruined human flesh regaining the first, exuberant good health associated with Paradise and with the Garden of Eden. A withered hand changed: “like a sponge intensely soaking up liquid … the skin became red as a rose.” “You might see his pale countenance become rose red.” A child crippled by malnutrition “blossomed again.”71 He had been touched for a moment by the all-healing abundance of Paradise, from which Adam had been cast out and in which Saint Martin now lived.
It was important for Gregory that these experiences were not limited only to his own city and to the tomb of Saint Martin. His faith in the multitude of the saints and in the closeness of Paradise led him to embrace, in a single, untroubled vision, the countryside of Gaul. As we have seen, his experience as a bishop, responsible for the sanctuary of Saint Martin at Tours, had not led him to expect many saints among his average contemporaries, the well-to-do and the powerful of Merovingian Gaul. Our impression of the violence and instability of political life in Merovingian Gaul is due largely to the gusto with which Gregory recounted, in his History, the misfortunes of such people, as fitting punishments for their neglect of the saints.
By concentrating on such scenes of violence, as if they summed up all that we needed to know about Merovingian Gaul, we forget the other side of the story as Gregory tells it to us. Notorious sinners were not the only people whom Gregory chose to describe. Looking back on the long history of Christian Gaul, Gregory allowed optimism to prevail. Over the centuries, the Christian churches of Gaul had produced, and still produced, in his opinion, a number of persons, of both sexes and of every class, race, and region, who now lived in Paradise. Their relics were everywhere, scattered throughout the entire Christian world. In every region, there were specks of dust unlike all other specks of dust, fragments of bone unlike other fragments, tombs unlike other tombs. Some were already clearly visible: among the late Roman sarcophagi piled up in a ruined hilltop villa, one might be covered by a silk-embroidered veil, with a lamp burning before it – it was a tomb whose miraculous powers proved that it housed a holy person.72 Other hints of the continued presence of the saints were more discreet. A fragment bound in a silken ribbon emerged unscathed from a bonfire.73 Sweet voices could be heard singing among the dark lanes of tombs outside Autun.74 An intermittent glow and a whiff of heavenly fragrance among the brambles of a deserted hilltop in Touraine betrayed the presence of a “place of Christians,” long deserted and taken over by secondary forest after the raids of A.D. 406.75 These unearthly events were intimations that innumerable holy men and women, dwellers of Paradise, stood ready, in all places, and even in the most out-of-the-way areas, to help Catholic worshippers in their everyday needs. They peopled a landscape that had once seemed opaque to Christianity.
Through these many saints, Paradise itself came to ooze into the world. Nature itself was redeemed. Because of his faith in the proximity of Paradise, Gregory allowed sacrality to seep back into the landscape of Gaul. The countryside found its voice again, to speak, in an ancient spiritual vernacular, of the presence of the saints. Water became holy again. The hoof-print of his donkey could be seen beside a healing spring, which Saint Martin had caused to gush from the earth at Nieul-les-Saintes.76 Trees also regained some of their majesty. The tree that Martin had blessed beside the road at Neuillé-le-Lierre, in Touraine, was still standing, though now dead; for its bark had been entirely stripped away for medicinal remedies.77 All over Gaul, great trees bloomed profusely over the graves of saints. Gregory looked on such trees with happy eyes. They no longer spoke to him of pagan rites – of bright rags fluttering from branches which drew their strength from the dark and questionable powers of the earth. Rather, they brought down from heaven to earth a touch of the unshackled, vegetable energy of God’s own paradise. They showed that the soul of the holy person buried nearby “now flourishes like a palm-tree in God’s paradise.”78
Gregory’s unflagging pace as a raconteur tends to lull us into believing that he has told us everything that we ever need to know about Frankish Gaul. This is not so. He was fiercely regional in his interests. He looked back, by preference, into the past of the small Roman towns of southern Gaul. He tells us very little about the spreading northern territories of the Frankish kingdom and nothing whatsoever about Britain and Ireland. He took for granted that he belonged to a wider, older Christendom, defined by Roman cities and their saints. He saw Tours as one Christian city among many, placed at the northwestern corner of a wider Christian world, which stretched southward as far as Volubilis, on the Atlantic coast of modern Morocco, and eastward, across Italy and North Africa, to the territories of the eastern empire, and, beyond the eastern empire, to Persian Mesopotamia and the Zagros mountains. Gregory still felt part of the international Christian culture of the Mediterranean and the Middle East with which we began this book, in the time of Bardaisan. What happened in distant Edessa, and even in Persia, was quite as important to him as what was happening in northern Gaul and in the Frankish Rhineland. By the time that Gregory died, in 594, however, the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East world had undergone decisive changes. Let us, therefore, follow in our next chapter the destinies of the eastern Roman empire in the sixth century – a century dominated by the reign of the great emperor Justinian (from 527 to 565). Then (in chapters 8 and 11) we will return, once again, to the West, to deal with men who, although they were roughly the same age as Gregory of Tours, came from very different worlds from his own and left a very different imprint than he had done upon the Christianity of western Europe – to the Roman pope, Gregory the Great (540–604), and to the Irishman, Columbanus (540–615).