Gregory of Tours

French bishop and historian

• Born: November 30, 0539
• Birthplace: Clermont, Auvergne (now in France)
• Died: November 17, 0594
• Place of death: Tours, Neustria (now in France)

Gregory provided historians with their prime source of information on Merovingian Gaul from 575 to 591. He also contributed to the Christian tradition an example of living in accord with the best principles of the Church.

Early Life

Georgius Florentius, who would become Gregory, bishop of Tours (tewr), was born in the capital city of Auvergne. In his De virtutibus sancti Martini (c. 593; The Miracles of Saint Martin, 1949), he wrote that he was born on Saint Andrew’s Day, thirty-four years before his installation in 573 as the nineteenth bishop of Tours. He was given the name of his father (Georgius) and of his father’s father (Florentius), each of whom was of senatorial rank. His mother, Armentaria, was a granddaughter of Saint Tetricus, bishop of Langres (539-572) and a great-granddaughter of Saint Gregorius, who preceded his son as bishop of Langres (507-539). Gregory’s lineage was clearly that of a noble family consistently influential in the Church.

His father apparently died when Gregory was a child, so he was reared by his uncle, Gallus, bishop of Clermont-Ferrand (525-551), and, after 551, he resided with the archdeacon Avitus, who became bishop of Clermont-Ferrand in the year 573. Gregory had a granduncle who was bishop of Lyon and a cousin, Eufronius, whom Gregory himself succeeded as bishop of Tours on August 20, 573.

At the age of twenty-five, he suffered a debilitating illness. He attributed his recovery to Saint Martin; it was at this time also that he was ordained a deacon. He obtained his bishopric nine years later. In the following year, 574, he suffered a deep personal loss: His brother Peter, a deacon, was murdered. Peter had been accused of murdering Silvester, bishop of Langres, who was one of their relatives. The case had been heard by Nicetius, bishop of Lyon and a maternal uncle of the accused, and Peter’s oath that he was innocent had been accepted by both clergy and diocesan laymen. Within two years, however, Silvester’s son attacked Peter in the street, running him through with a spear. Gregory relates the story movingly but objectively in Historia Francorum (late sixth century; The History of the Franks, 1927).

Life’s Work

Gregory remained bishop of Tours from the date of his consecration until his death at age fifty-five. His ability during this time to maintain the tenets and principles of the Church while being privy to the political activities and ambitions of the Merovingian rulers marks him as a person of considerable shrewdness. Considerable too was his industry as a man of letters.

It is best to begin a survey of Gregory’s achievements by noting his masterwork, The History of the Franks, as it is conventionally called; its full title is Historia Francorum libri decem (ten books of histories). In many of the events set down in this history, Gregory was himself a participant. The massive work in ten books opens with the author’s profession of his faith and begins its record, as many medieval works of history do, with the Creation and Adam. From the Creation to the year 594, according to Gregory, 6,063 years elapsed (the number of the tally appearing in the manuscript is 5,792, probably a scribal error: Gregory’s figures add up to 6,063, as noted). The first book summarizes the Old and New Testaments and moves from the death of Christ through some four centuries to the death of Martin, the patron saint of Tours and Gregory’s inspiration. The second book brings the history up through the death in 511 of Clovis, the founder of the dynasty that took its name from Merovech, an early king who died in 456. Clovis had brought most of Gaul into a cohesive monarchy. Books 3 and 4 chronicle the events centering on the sons of Clovis, particularly Chlotar I, who continued to unify Gaul under Frankish sovereignty and whose sons, after his death in 561, sustained the wars, conspiracies, and assassinations that determined much of the character of Merovingian history.

There appears at the end of book 3 a report on the harsh winter of 548; book 9 also concludes with a weather report. Books 5, 6, 8, 9, and 10 all include sections on signs and portents, many having to do with the weather. Books 7 and 8 include sections on the miracles of Martin. These and similar preoccupations constitute a rather substantial part of the text.

Books 4 through 10 of The History of the Franks deal with events in Gregory’s own time, from 549 through 593, and the last five books in particular chronicle events coinciding with Gregory’s bishopric. These entail the bewildering rivalries and conspiracies of the sons of Chlotar I particularly Kings Charibert, Sigibert, Chilperic, and Guntram and the ambitions and schemes of Sigibert’s wife, Brunhild, and Chilperic’s third wife, Fredegunde. Plots, violence, bloodshed, murders, and assassinations are recounted matter-of-factly by Gregory and make for very interesting if occasionally disturbing reading.

Characteristic of his history are its amusing sidelights; Gregory has a sense of humor and tosses off many tongue-in-cheek comments. On a larger scale, there is, in the interstices of the narrative, the tale of the Falstaffian duke Guntram Boso, a thieving, conniving, but irresistible rogue for whom Gregory obviously has unwavering affection. He condemns Boso’s excesses but never Boso himself and offers him the protection of sanctuary, which not even royalty can persuade him to lift, and as much help and advice as his ecclesiastical position permits. His description of the killing of Guntram Boso, pierced by so many spears that his body, propped up by them, could not fall to the ground, is an example of the memorable detail of his prose.

Gregory’s Latin is anything but classical; nevertheless, it is not as bad as much other medieval Latin. He apologizes for its lack of polish in book 5 and in his preface but insists that his subject is too important to go unrecorded, however imperfect the language of record may be. History has vindicated him.

Gregory’s other works were composed more or less concurrently with The History of the Franks. The Miracles of Saint Martin, mentioned above, consists of four books on the acts of his favorite saint, with periodic entries of devotion, the last datable to July 4, 593. The Latin word virtus (manliness, courage, excellence, goodness) is Gregory’s word for “miracle.” For him, a miracle is evidence of the power of goodness, a power conferred on those who are worthy of it. Liber vitae patrum (late sixth century; Life of the Fathers, 1949) considers individually twenty-two abbots, bishops, or solitaries worthy of the adjective sanctus or sancta in the case of the nun Monegundis, the subject of section 19. Sanctus or sancta means “blessed” and refers to a person who has in some way produced a miracle. Gregory’s writing antedates the formulation of official canonization procedures by about five centuries. Six of his twenty-two subjects were not subsequently canonized officially; to Gregory, however, they were all blessed. The miracles that qualified them as such may be exemplified by those attributed to Gallus. According to his biographer, Gallus put out a fire by walking toward it with a work of Scripture open in his hands, and his bed cured the fever of a man who had napped in it; at his tomb, sufferers were cured of their ailments.

The Miracles of Saint Martin (four books) and Life of the Fathers (one book) constitute five of what Gregory called his eight books of miracles. The others are each single volumes Liber in gloria martyrum (book of the glories of the martyrs), Liber de passione et virtutibus sancti Juliani martyris (passion and miracles of Saint Julian, martyr), and Liber in gloria confessorum (Glory of the Confessors, 1988), all written between c. 575 and c. 593.

Gregory is as strong in his ridicule of Greek and Roman myths as he is firm in his belief in Christian miracles. One may dismiss him as naïve on this score, but it would be inadvisable to dismiss him as an unreliable observer because of his acceptance of miracles. This manifestation of his faith marks him as a practical churchman in his own time and in no way intrudes on the realism with which he describes the actual people, occurrences, and political movements of sixth century France.

Gregory also completed a short work on the miracles of the apostle Andrew, a translation into Latin of the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, and a book on astronomy that mentions a comet that preceded (or portended) the assassination of King Sigibert in 575. Two other short works, a commentary on the book of Psalms and a book on Sidonius Apollinaris’s masses, are not extant.

These, then, were the three directions taken by the life’s work of Gregory of Tours: his effective episcopate, his political dealings with the ruling and feuding principals of Merovingian France, and his historiography and hagiography. There was also a triad in Gregory’s personal life. The first important event was his recovery from serious illness a healing wrought, as he insists, by the intercession of Martin, to whose memory Gregory remained devoted for the last thirty years of his life. The second was his consecration as bishop. The third was the ascension to the papal throne in 590 of the deacon who was to become Gregory the Great. The historian’s deep satisfaction in the election of Gregory I is reflected in his beginning the tenth book of The History of the Franks with a laudatory biography of the new pope and a transcription of his inaugural address. Gregory of Tours saw his namesake’s elevation as a merited natural consequence of belonging to a great family of senatorial rank and ecclesiastical ambience; he had seen his own appointment to a bishopric in the same light. If pride was inherent in this attitude, so was a sense of profound responsibility.

Gregory’s installation as bishop of Tours was heralded in poetry by his contemporary churchman, Venantius Fortunatus (530-609), an illustrious poet, priest, hagiographer, devotee of Saint Martin, and, after Gregory’s death, bishop of Poitiers. The admiration of Fortunatus for Gregory is evidence of the esteem enjoyed by the nineteenth bishop of Tours in his lifetime. In all, two dozen poems by Fortunatus, author of the famous sixth century works Vexilla regis prodeunt (the royal banners forward go) and Pange lingua gloriosi praelium certaminis (sing my tongue the glorious battle) are directed to Gregory. Fortunatus was also a historian, but his contribution to historiography has proved to be insignificant in comparison with Gregory’. His versified life of Martin is superior in its Latinity, but not in its devotion, to Gregory’s prose account of the saint’s miracles. Fortunatus’s poetry, however, displays an artistry that lay well beyond the talents of Gregory. The juxtaposition of Fortunatus and Gregory supplies a reliable perspective from which to view and assess Gregory’s importance. He was not a literary master, but he was duly celebrated by one who was patently not as good a historian.

Significance

Gregory’s The History of the Franks stands well above all such efforts by his contemporaries. In literary quality, it may be inferior to the history written by the next century’s Saint Bede the Venerable, while it is decidedly superior in many respects to the universal history by the preceding century’s Paulus Orosius which Alfred the Great chose to translate into English. For its own century, The History of the Franks is without peer. Gregory’s diversions on weather, plant life, and bird migrations may not, despite their compelling accuracy, appeal to most students of history; his inside record of the Merovingian royalty and his objective observations of the political machinations, disasters, and triumphs of the sixth century in Frankish Gaul, however, are not likely ever to lose their value.

Bibliography

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. A classic study, first published in English in 1953, of reality, realism, and mimesis in literature. One chapter, “Sicharius and Chramnesindus,” presents a segment of The History and analyzes its language and style. The scholar Edward W. Said provides an introduction to this anniversary edition.

Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks. Translated by O. M. Dalton. 2 vols. Reprint. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1971. The first volume is an extensive introduction; the second is a translation of the work. An indispensable adjunct to the study of the life and writings of Gregory of Tours.

Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks. Translated by Lewis Thorpe. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974. An unpretentious translation of Gregory’s history, with an excellent introduction to his life and works.

Gregory of Tours. Life of the Fathers. 2d ed. Translated and edited by Edward James. Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press, 1991. A scholarly translation of an important hagiographical work by Gregory, with an informative introduction and helpful annotative materials.

Heinzelmann, Martin. Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century. Translated by Christopher Carroll. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. A shorter study of the history of Gregory as a saint and the history of Merovingian society. Includes a bibliography and index.

Lasko, Peter. The Kingdom of the Franks: North-West Europe Before Charlemagne. Edited by David Talbot Rice. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971. Part of the Library of Medieval Civilization series, this study is a concise summary of Frankish art, religion, and regal power. Includes 121 illustrations, many in color. An excellent companion to The History.

Mitchell, Kathleen, and Ian Wood, eds. The World of Gregory of Tours. Boston: Brill, 2002. A collection exploring facets of Gregory’s life and work, as well as his place in the historical and social context of his time. Includes bibliography and index.

Pfister, Christian. “Gaul Under the Merovingian Franks.” In The Rise of the Saracens and the Foundation of the Western Empire. Vol. 2 in The Cambridge Medieval History/Middle Ages. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1913. An excellent standard work, which, with the introduction by Dalton to The History of the Franks, gives a proper introduction to a detailed study of Gregory.

Wallace-Hadrill, J. M. The Barbarian West: 400-1000. Rev. ed. London: Hutchinson University Library, 1957. Chapters 4 and 5 concentrate on the Franks. This is a reliable, short introduction to Gregory’s milieu and to those who preceded and followed it. Helpful bibliography.

Wormald, P., ed. Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. This collection of articles includes Wood’s “The Ecclesiastical Politics of Merovingian Clermont,” an informative overview of that confluence of the religious and secular environments in which Gregory functioned.