What was history then?*

 

For our very first “from the sources” post, lets return to our old friend Gregory of Tours. He’s a real VIP of early medieval history Since the seventh century, his “History of the Franks”, which covers everything in Frankish history down to his death in 594, has been extensively used as a source for studying the early Frankish past. And since at least the sixteenth century he’s been held up as, in the words of the French renaissance humanist Claude Fauchet, “the father of French history” and “the oldest and most trustworthy author who spoke of the kings and the government of France.”

A statue of our friend Gregory wisely and kindly watches over the 9.6 million visitors who queue up to visit the Louvre every year. 

But did the venerable bishop of Tours see himself primarily as a historian of the Franks, that is to say, as a historian of them as an ethnic group or of their kings? The answer is almost certainly not. “The History of the Franks” as it’s been titled in all modern French, German and English translations of the text, is actually a misnomer. Gregory called his work the Libri Decem Historiarum – “the ten books of histories.” And his purpose was not to chronicle the deeds of one particular ethnic group (the Franks) – it was much broader than that. He wrote about contemporary events across the known world, including in places as far afield as Syria and Armenia. He gave just as much weight in his history to ecclesiastical affairs, saints and miracles as he did to the political intrigues and wars of the Merovingian kings. And he ultimately conceived of his project as a universal (or, as we’d now say, global) history, following the models given by the early Christian historians Eusebius (260 – 339), Jerome (342 – 420) and Orosius (385 – 420). He begins his history in Book One with the Creation and spends the rest of that book outlining the events from Old Testament history, the life of Jesus Christ, the spread of Christianity, the Roman imperial persecutions and early Christian martyrdoms, the conversion of Constantine the Great, the reigns of the first Christian Roman emperors and the early bishops of Clermont-Ferrand (Gregory’s home town), and finishes with the death of Saint Martin of Tours in 397. The Franks, the people who ruled supreme in Gaul in Gregory’s day but whom he did not himself identify with, only enter Gregory’s narrative in Book Two Chapter Nine. Here’s what he has to say about their origins:

Many people do not even know the name of the first King of the Franks. The “Historia” of Sulpicius Alexander gives many details about them, while Valentinus does not name their first King but says they were ruled by war-leaders. What Sulpicius Alexander says about the Franks seems to be worth quoting. He tells how Maximus gave up all hope of the imperial throne, lost his reason and went to live in Aquileia. Then he adds:

“At that time the Franks invaded the Roman province of Germania under their leaders Genobaud, Marcomer and Sunno. As the Franks crossed the frontier, many of the inhabitants were slaughtered and they ravaged the most fertile areas. The townsfolk of Cologne were terrified: and, when this news reached Trier, Nanninus and Quintinus, who commanded the Roman armies and to whom Maximus had entrusted the defence of Gaul, collected their troops together and marched to that city. The enemy, who were heavily laden with booty, for they had pillaged the richest parts of the province, crossed back over the Rhine, but left many of their men behind in Roman territory, where they were planning to continue their ravaging. The Romans found it easy to deal with these, and a great number of the Franks were cut down in the forest of Charbonniere. After this, the Roman leaders held a meeting to decide whether or not they should cross into Frankish territory. Nanninus refused to do so, for he knew that the Franks were waiting for them and that on their own soil they would undoubtedly be much the stronger. This did not meet the approval of Quintinus and the other military leaders, and so Nanninus retreated to Mainz. Quintinus crossed the Rhine somewhere near the fortress of Neuss with his army. After two days’ march away from the river, he attacked a number of dwellings abandoned by their inhabitants and a few townships of no mean size, which were, however, deserted. The Franks had pretended to retire in panic and had withdrawn into the remote woodland regions, all around which they had erected barricades of forest trees. The Roman soldiers burned down all the houses, imagining in their cowardly stupidity that by doing so they had gained a conclusive victory: then they spent an anxious night without daring to take off their heavy equipment. At first light they marched out into the woods, with Quintinus to lead them in battle. By about mid-day they had lost themselves completely in a maze of pathways and had no idea where they were. They ran up against an endless barricade solidly constructed from huge tree-trunks, and then they tried to break out over the marshy fields which bordered the forests. Here and there enemy troops showed themselves, standing on the boles of trees or climbing on the barricades as if on the ramparts of turrets. They kept shooting arrows as if from war-catapults, and these they smeared with poisons distilled from plants, so that wounds which did little more than graze the skin and touched no vital organ were followed by death against which there was no protection. Then the Roman army, now surrounded by the main force of the enemy, rushed desperately into the open meadows, which the Franks had left unoccupied. There the cavalry was bogged down in marshland and the bodies of men and animals, all mixed up together, were borne down into the ground in one common catastrophe. Such infantry as was not trodden under foot by the heavy horses was caught in thick mud from which the men had difficulty in lifting one foot after the other. With fear in their hearts they rushed back to hide in the very woodlands out of which they had marched only a short time before. As the legions were cut down the ranks were broken. Heraclius, tribune of the Jovinian legion, and almost all the other officers were wiped out. Darkness and the deepness of the forests offered safety and refuge to a few survivors.”

That is what Sulpicius Alexander had to say in Book III of his “Historia.”

In Book IV, when he is describing the murder of Victor, the son of the tyrant Maximus, he says:

“At that time Carietto and Sirus, appointed in the place of Nanninus, were stationed in the provinces of Germania with an army collected to oppose the Franks.”

A little further on, after stating that the Franks had gone home laden with booty from Germania, he goes on:

“Arbogast, who would brook no delay, urged the Emperor to inflict due punishment on the Franks unless they immediately restored all the plunder which they had seized the previous year when the legions were slaughtered, and unless they surrendered the warmongers who had been responsible for such a treacherous violation of the peace.”

He says that these events occurred at a time when the Franks were ruled by war-leaders. Then he continues:

“A few days later, there was a short parley with Marcomer and Sunno, the royal leaders of the Franks. Hostages were insisted upon, as was the custom, and then Arbogast retired into winter quarters in Trier.”

When he says “regales” or royal leaders, it is not clear if they were kings or if they merely exercised a kingly function. When he is recording the straits to which the Emperor Valentinian was reduced, he says:

“When these events were taking place in the East in Thrace, the government was in great difficulty in Gaul. The Emperor Valentinian was shut in the palace in Vienne and reduced almost to the status of a private citizen. The control of the army was handed over to Frankish mercenaries and the civil administration was in the control of Arbogast’s accomplices. There was not one among all of those who were bound by their military oath of obedience to him who dared obey the private orders let alone the public commands of the emperor.”

He goes on:

“That same year Arbogast, urged on by tribal hatred, went in search of Sunno and Marcomer, the kinglets of the Franks. He came to Cologne in the full blast of winter, for he knew well that all the retreats of Frankland could be penetrated and burned out now that the leaves were off the trees and that the bare and sapless forests could offer no concealment for an ambushed foe. He therefore collected an army together, crossed the River Rhine, and laid waste to the land nearest to the bank, where the Bructeri lived, and the region occupied by the Chamavi. He did this without meeting any opposition, except that a few Amsivarii and Chatti showed themselves on the far-distant ridges of the hills, with Marcomer as their war-leader.”

A few pages further on, having given up all talk of “duces” and “regales”, he states clearly that the Franks had a king, but he forgets to tell us what his name was.

“The next thing which happened was that the tyrant Eugenius led a military expedition as far as the frontier marked by the Rhine. He renewed the old tradition treaties with the kings of the Alamanni and the Franks, and he paraded his army, which was immense for that time, before their savage tribesmen.”

So much for the information which this chronicler Sulpicius Alexander has to give us about the Franks.

As for Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus, whom I mentioned above, when he comes to tell us how Rome was captured and destroyed by the Goths, he writes:

“Meanwhile Goar had gone over to the Romans, and Respendial, the king of the Alani, therefore withdrew his forces from the Rhine. The Vandals were hard-pressed in their war against the Franks, their King Godigisel was killed and about twenty-thousand of their frontline troops had been slaughtered, so that, if the army of the Alani had not come to their rescue in time, the entire nation of the Vandals would have been wiped out.”

It is an extraordinary thing that, although he tells us about the kings of these various peoples, including the Franks, when he describes how Constantine, who had become a tyrant, summoned his son Constans to come from Spain to meet him, he goes on:

“The tyrant Constantine summoned his son Constans, who was also a tyrant, from Spain, so that they might confer together about affairs of state. As a result, Constans left his wife and the administrative affairs of his court in Saragossa, entrusted all his interests in Spain to Gerontius and hurried to meet his father by forced marches. They duly met. Quite a few days passed, but no news arrived from Italy to disturb Constantine. He therefore returned to his daily round of over-drinking and over-eating, and told his son that he might as well go back to Spain. No sooner had Constans sent his troops on ahead, while he himself lingered a little longer with his father, than messengers arrived from Spain to say that Gerontius had proclaimed Maximus, one of his own dependents, as Emperor. Maximus was supported by troops from a horde of barbarian tribes and was ready for any contingency. Constans and the Prefect Decimus Rusticus, one-time Master of Offices, were very frightened by the news. They sent Erdobech to contain the people of Germania and they themselves set out for Gaul, with the Franks, the Alamanni and a whole band of soldiery, intending to return to Constantine as soon as they could.”

Later on, when he describes how Constantine was besieged, he adds:

“Constantine had been beleaguered for about four months when messengers arrived all of a sudden from northern Gaul to announce that Jovinus had assumed the rank of Emperor and was about to attack the besieging forces with the Burgundes, the Alamanni, the Franks, the Alani and a large army. Things then moved very quickly. The city gates were opened and Constantine came out. He was immediately packed off to Italy, but the emperor sent a band of assassins to meet him and he was beheaded up on the River Mincio.”

After a few more sentences, Frigeridus goes on:

“At the same time, Decimus Rusticus, the Prefect of the tyrants, Agroetius, one-time Head of Chancery of Jovinus, and many other noblemen were captured by the army commanders of Honorius and cruelly put to death. The city of Trier was sacked and burned by the Franks in a second attack.”

He notes that Asterius was made a patrician by a patent signed by the emperor and then continues:

“At this time, Castinus, Master of the Imperial Household, was sent to Gaul, as a campaign had begun against the Franks.”

That concludes what these two historians have to say about the Franks.

In Book VII of his work the chronicler Orosius adds the following information:

“Stilicho took command of the army, crushed the Franks, crossed the Rhine, made his way across Gaul and came finally to the Pyrenees.”

The historians whose work we still have give us all this information about the Franks, but they never record the names of their kings. It is commonly said that the Franks came originally from Pannonia and first colonised the banks of the Rhine. Then they crossed the river, marched through Thuringia, and set up in each country district and in each city long-haired kings chosen from the foremost and most noble family of their race. As I shall show you later, this is proved by the victories won by Clovis. We read in the consular lists that Theudemer, King of the Franks, son of Richemer, and his mother Ascyla, were executed with the sword. They also say that Clodio, a man of high birth and marked ability among his people, was King of the Franks and that he lived in the castle of Duisburg in Thuringian territory. In those parts, that is towards the south, the Romans occupied the territory as far as the River Loire. Beyond the Loire the Goths were in command. The Burgundes, who believed in the Arian heresy, lived across the Rhone, which flows through the city of Lyons. Clodio sent spies to the town of Cambrai. When he had discovered all that they needed to know, he himself followed and crushed the Romans and captured the town. He lived there only a short time and then occupied the country up to the River Somme. Some say that Merovech, the father of Childeric, was descended from Clodio.

(“The History of the Franks” by Gregory of Tours, edited and translated by Lewis Thorpe, Penguin Classics, 1974, II.9, pp 120 – 125)

Now there is so much that is interesting about this chapter. Rather than talking about what it might tell us about late Roman warfare, the Germanic tribes or the imperial usurpers and civil wars of the 380s to 410s (the period covered by the sources Gregory is quoting), lets focus on what it tells us about Gregory as a historian.

One of the first things you’ll have noticed is that Gregory is quoting the Histories of Sulpicius Alexander and Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus at length and those of Orosius briefly. All of these men were Christian Roman historians writing in the first half of the fifth century AD. However, while Orosius’ work survives to us today in several manuscripts, and enjoyed widespread popularity in the Middle Ages, the more secular political-oriented Histories of Sulpicius Alexander and Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus have been lost. This is regrettable but shouldn’t be too surprising.

While the exact extent of the loss of ancient Greek and Roman literature is unknown, all reasonable estimates for the extent of literary survival between 800 BC and c.500 AD would place it somewhere in the ballpark of one percent. There are many ancient authors for whom none of their work survives at all. The reasons for this are various, but by far the most common one is simple neglect over the centuries. Ancient literary works were mostly written on papyrus. It was a fairly cheap material but not very durable, especially in the cold, damp climate of transalpine Europe. If a literary work was going to survive long term, it needed to be copied, and copying was a labour-intensive process that required professional scribes. Papyrus therefore ended up being supplanted by parchment, a process that had begun in the fourth century AD and was well underway in Gregory’s day, but very far off being complete – the papal chancery used papyrus until the eleventh century. Parchment was a much more durable medium of writing but much more expensive to produce – killing a cow as opposed to chopping down some reeds. And copying still remained labour intensive as ever. So, like with papyrus, choices had to be made about what to be preserved long term. The eighth and ninth centuries seem to have been the most critical period, in both Western Europe and Byzantium for the transition from papyrus to parchment and thereby deciding what to preserve long term – if an ancient text was written on a parchment codex by 900, then more likely than not it survives today.

Sulpicius Alexander and Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus clearly didn’t make the cut. But fortunately for us, Gregory chose to directly quote them at length, allowing us to read snippets of them. This is comparatively better than the situation for a lot of other lost classical histories. For example, the contemporary/ near-contemporary accounts of the campaigns of Alexander the Great by Callisthenes, Cleitarchus and Ptolemy can only be very speculatively reconstructed from the works of Diodorus Siculus, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Plutarch and Arrian, written several centuries later, which we know to have used them as sources. And all we know about histories of the Etruscans and Carthaginians written by the future emperor Claudius in the reign of Tiberius, is that they once existed because Suetonius briefly mentions them. But Gregory, following in the fashion of Eusebius, decided to be more transparent in his use of sources and thus preserve extracts from Roman histories which are otherwise lost.

Gregory himself also seems be very conscious of the limited and diminishing base of source material, hence why he says that Orosius, Sulpicius Alexander and Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus are “the historians whose work we still have.” This suggests that he knew of other sources which might have been relevant to his enquiry here, but which were already lost or otherwise inaccessible. And to acknowledge the limited nature of the evidence for the past is the most important sign of a mature and critical historian in any age.

The way in which Gregory handles the evidence provides further indication of how skilled he was at historical enquiry. In this chapter, he carefully analyses the language that each of this fifth century sources use to refer to the leaders of the Franks in the decades around 400, and checks them for internal consistency i.e., he notes that Sulpicius Alexander mostly speaks of Frankish “duces” (war-leaders) and “regales” (kinglets), but later on explicitly says that the Franks had a single king. He then brings together the inferences from the different sources and compares them. From there he comes to the conclusion, supported by the sources, that we cannot know who the first king of the Franks was, because while there clearly were Frankish kings c.400, their names are not provided by the Roman historians.

It is also worth noting, and this holds true throughout the Ten Books of Histories, that whenever Gregory uses oral accounts he acknowledges them, and that folk memory, rumour or commonly held opinion cannot by themselves be taken as authoritative. Thus, the last paragraph of this chapter contains phrases like “it is commonly said that”, “they also say that” and “some say that” when dealing with such sources on the earliest history of the Franks.

Stuff like this proves that, contrary to what is sometimes said, the historical method – making enquiries into the past through the critical study of the primary sources – was not a sui generis invention of Renaissance humanism or the professionalisation of history in the nineteenth century. But, to roughly paraphrase what Matthew Kempshall says at the beginning of the introduction to his Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400 – 1500 (2011), while a classicist can simply laugh at such ignorant claims from their modernist colleagues that “proper serious history writing” didn’t begin until c.1500 or c.1850 – “seriously, have those snot-nosed modernists not heard of Thucydides!” – medievalists fear that their only way to prove such claims wrong for their period is to write a book. Here a blogpost will have to do. This, I hope, shows that early medieval historians did indeed possess something we would recognise as the historical method. While undoubtedly source criticism and historical enquiry have become more advanced post the Middle Ages, especially thanks to the development of auxiliary disciplines like philology, archaeology, palaeography, diplomatic, numismatics, statistics, database management and, most recently, climate science, let’s not forget Isaac Newton’s analogy (actually first made by Bernard of Chartres in the twelfth century) about standing on the shoulders of giants.

*The title is a play on E.H Carr’s 1961 classic What is History?, which since its publication has been the entry point for many an undergraduate to the study of historiography and the historian’s craft.