Читать книгу The Conversion of Europe - Richard Fletcher - Страница 11

My heart is white with joy; your words are great and good. It is enough for me to see your clothing, your arms and the rolling houses in which you travel, to understand how much intelligence and strength you have … I have been told that you can help us … You shall instruct us. We will do all you wish. The country is at your disposal.

Moshoeshoe, king of Lesotho, to Eugène Casalis, 1833

THE ENTRY OF the Tervingi into the empire in 376, the victory of Fritigern at Adrianople two years later, and the settlement of his people under treaty arrangements in Moesia four years after that proved to be but the opening scenes in the political drama which ended with the collapse of the Roman empire in the west and its replacement by a number of barbarian successor-states. It is as well to be clear about what this process was not before we go any further. The empire did not disappear in the fifth century. It is true that there was no emperor in the west after 476, but no one at the time could have guessed that this was more than a temporary hiatus. Authority reverted, at least in theory, to the emperor in Constantinople, where the Roman empire would survive for another millennium. But the western provinces did effectively come under new masters. They arrived by a variety of means. Whenever and wherever possible, the imperial government tried to control, or at least to influence and shape, the process of arrival. As we have seen, the descendants of Fritigern’s Tervingi were settled in Aquitaine in 418. We may now call them, as they had begun to call themselves, the Visigoths. In the course of the next half-century they were sometimes used as military federates in the name of the emperor of the day. For example, it was the Visigoths who bore the main brunt of the fighting at the battle of Châlons in 451, in which Attila and the Huns were defeated. Another contingent of Germanic troops at this decisive battle was furnished by the Burgundians. They too had been settled under treaty, with primary responsibility for defending the entry into Gaul by way of the upper valleys of the Rhône system against yet another Germanic people, the Alamans, who were pressing into the sensitive gap between Rhine and Danube in the Black Forest region. In the course of the fifth century the Burgundian kingdom expanded to include much of the Rhône valley and what is now western Switzerland. Another group of Goths, descendants of the Greuthingi who had been defeated by the Huns in the 370s, emerged in the northern Balkans out of the wreckage left by the collapse of the Hun empire in the 450s. They entered Italy under their leader Theoderic on behalf of the authorities in Constantinople to fight the empire’s enemies. The Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy established by Theoderic in 493 was notable for the harmonious co-existence within it of Goths and Romans.

The Burgundians, Ostrogoths and Visigoths constituted three successor-states in the western provinces of the empire which were founded to some degree in obedience to imperial political initiatives. Other peoples seized initiatives for themselves. In the winter of 406–7 the Rhine frontier collapsed and was penetrated by numbers of barbarian peoples, among them the Sueves and the Vandals. They made their way through Gaul, then in 409 moved south across the Pyrenees and made themselves masters of the provinces of Roman Spain. The Vandals crossed the Straits of Gibraltar in 429 and set up a kingdom for themselves, governed from Carthage, in what had been the imperial provinces of north Africa. Their place in Spain was subsequently taken by the Visigoths, while the Sueves were confined to a kingdom in the north-west quarter of the peninsula. All these peoples had lived in more or less close proximity to the empire’s frontiers before they crossed them. We may think of them as being in general not unlike the Gothic peoples among whom Ulfila worked in the fourth century, already touched to varying degrees by Roman culture. The process of acculturation to Romano-Mediterranean ways and values became for all of them more intense after entry into the empire.

What is specially relevant for us is that migration and settlement upon imperial soil were accompanied by conversion to Christianity. This had been a part of the agreement worked out between Fritigern and Valens before the crossing of the Danube in 376. Here is the fifth-century church historian Sozomen: ‘As if to return thanks to Valens, and as a guarantee that he would be a friend to him in all things, he [Fritigern] adopted the emperor’s religion and persuaded all the barbarians under his rule to adopt the same belief.’¹ We should understand this conversion, it has been observed, not as ‘adherence body and soul to a new set of beliefs’ but rather as ‘a determination to change public practice’.² Official thinking appears to have been: we’ll take these people, but they must accept our empire’s faith. This was a pattern that repeated itself. Burgundians, Ostrogoths, Sueves and Vandals all accepted Christianity soon after their entry into the empire. It is a process that has to be inferred, because – remarkably enough – our sources do not mention it as such. Reasons for the reticence of the sources can be offered, some more convincing than others. However, modern scholars are agreed that the inference is a sound one. The other notable feature of the conversion of these barbarian peoples was that they all adopted the heretical, Arian form of Christianity as opposed to the orthodox or ‘Catholic’ credal formulations of Nicaea. (There were some temporary exceptions to this rule. One of the early Suevic kings in the middle years of the fifth century was a Catholic, but his successors were all Arians. The Burgundian rulers seem to have been Catholic in the middle years of the fifth century but went Arian towards its end.) The reasons for this Germanic preference for the creed of Arius remain elusive: we have simply to accept it as part of the overlapping pattern of religious allegiance in these years. On top of the world of rural pagans slowly being coaxed into some semblance of Christian belief and observance by activists like Martin of Tours, alongside the Catholic bishops in their cities, the Catholic suburban monasteries, the Catholic gentry and the Catholic middle class, we must now make mental room for an Arian clerical hierarchy, Arian kings and queens and warrior aristocrats, Arian churches with Arian liturgies being sung within them. This religious apartheid persisted in the kingdoms concerned until their governing circles decided to go over to Catholicism. This occurred in Burgundy during the reign of King Sigismund (516–23), in the Vandal kingdom when it was reconquered by Justinian’s armies and re-united to the empire in 533–4, in the Suevic kingdom in the 560s, and in the Visigothic kingdom in the years 587–9. The Ostrogothic realm had been destroyed in the course of Justinian’s attempts to reconquer Italy as he had reconquered Africa. Hardly were these long and costly campaigns over – they lasted almost without a break from 535 to 553 – than Italy was invaded by another group of migrating Germanic invaders, the Lombards, from 568 onwards. The religious affiliations of the Lombards are not easy to follow, but there was certainly an Arian presence in the Lombard kingdom until the middle years of the seventh century: the last Lombard king known to have been an Arian was Rothari (636–52).

The barbarian peoples mentioned hitherto had in common a previous experience at fairly close quarters of Romano-Mediterranean cultural values. A partial exception must be made of the Lombards, but even they had lived for two generations in the former Roman province of Pannonia – rather like the Goths in Dacia – before their invasion of Italy. They also had in common the fact that they founded their kingdoms in the most Romanized provinces of the former western empire – Italy, Africa, Spain and southern Gaul. If we make a mental journey in the second half of the fifth century northwards from the Burgundian or Aquitanian-Visigothic kingdom we find ourselves entering a world where the shading is subtly different. The northern provinces of Gaul and the offshore provinces of Britannia had been less influenced by Roman culture than, let us say, the Gallia Narbonensis of Caesarius of Arles. The barbarians who took over these northern regions had experienced less previous contact with Roman ways than, for instance, the Goths. They took longer to integrate themselves with the culture of the empire into which they had blundered. Most notably, they did not adopt Christianity at once; and when they did, it was not the Arian but the Catholic variety which they chose. Who were these people? It is time to have a closer look at them, for they will occupy us much in this and the following two chapters. We shall start with the Franks.

Franci, Franks, was the name given in Roman sources from the second half of the third century to a variety of tribes settled opposite the Gallic province of Germania Inferior; that is, east of the Rhine in the area between, approximately, Confluentes (Koblenz, where Mosel meets Rhine) and Noviomagus (Nijmegen). They took advantage of the troubles of the empire to launch devastating raids into Gaul. One such raid, as we saw in Chapter 1, even penetrated as far as Spain. As on the Danube frontier, so on the lower Rhine, the fourth century witnessed intermittent hostilities between Roman and barbarian with long periods of relative peace in between times. Pacification of the Frankish tribesmen under Constantine and Julian gave rise to peaceful crossings of the frontier by merchants going to and fro and by Franks enlisting in the Roman army for garrison service in northern Gaul. Some of their cemeteries have been identified by archaeologists. One fourth-century tombstone neatly sums up this phase of Franco-Roman co-existence: Francus ego civis, Romanus miles in armis, ‘I am a Frankish citizen, a Roman soldier under arms.’ In the 350s the Emperor Julian settled one group of Franks, the Salii or Salians, inside the empire in the boggy and unappealing territory called Toxandria just to the south of the estuary of the Rhine, in the region which is now traversed by the Belgian-Dutch border north of Antwerp. In the collapse of order following the breach of the Rhine frontier by Sueves and Vandals in 406–7 a Salian Frankish principality obscurely emerged in Toxandria and spread over the area to its south in what is now northern Belgium. Another group of Franks coalesced further east in the Rhineland round Cologne. The latter group are usually known as the Ripuarian Franks.

Only fragments of information survive about the activities of the Franks in the desperately confused politics of fifth-century Gaul. Heroic attempts have been made to construct a plausible narrative. All founder on the rock of the simple but compelling rule that bricks cannot be made without straw. But in the last quarter of the century straws begin to accumulate. The first ruler of the Salian Franks of whom we can form any impression is Childeric, who seems to have died in 481 or 482. A contemporary who must have know what he was talking about, Bishop Remigius, lets us know in a surviving letter that Childeric administered the province of Belgica Secunda. The capital city of the province was Rheims, which was also the seat of Remigius’ bishopric. Belgica Secunda embraced a vast area of northern Gaul bounded by the Channel, the Seine, the Vosges and the Ardennes. It is plain that by Childeric’s time – and possibly owing to his agency – Salian dominion had expanded well beyond its early bounds in Toxandria. Childeric was buried at Tournai, another of the towns of Belgica Secunda. We know this because his grave was discovered there in 1653. It could be identified as his because it contained his signet-ring, which portrayed the full-face bust of a long-haired warrior in late Roman military uniform bearing a lance and surmounted by the legend CHILDERICI REGIS, ‘[by order] of King Childeric’. The signet-ring with its Latin inscription hints at acquaintance with Roman governmental routine. It was not the only object among the gravegoods which could be interpreted in a quasi-official light. There was a shoulder-brooch of the sort worn as a badge of rank by late Roman officials of high status and there was an enormous amount of gold in both coin – minted in the eastern half of the empire – and ornaments.^* Some scholars have suggested that Childeric and his Franks might have been settled under treaty in northern Gaul, like the Visigoths in the south or the Burgundians in the east. Conceivably they had; in any case we should not rule out communications between them and the imperial government in Constantinople. These ‘Roman’ objects in Childeric’s funerary deposit must be balanced by others of different suggestiveness. There was jewellery of barbarian type, a throwing-axe, the severed head of his presumed favourite charger. Recent excavations at Tournai have revealed three pits close to the site of Childeric’s grave, each containing skeletons of about ten horses. Carbon-14 testing of these pits yielded a late-fifth-century date; and they were cut into by sixth-century burials. It cannot be demonstrated that these pits were connected with Childeric’s funeral rites but it looks extremely likely. Ritual slaughter of horses and the eating of their flesh were identified by early medieval missionaries as heathen customs. Childeric therefore (or those who buried him) looked both ways. Inside the Christian empire on its northern fringes, the Salian Franks yet maintained their ancestral observances. After all, Childeric’s gods had done very well by him. Who were his gods? It is a question to which no confident answer may be offered. Our ignorance of the Germanic paganisms of the early Middle Ages has already been lamented in Chapter 1. We must draw attention to it again here, with renewed lamentation. We can be reasonably sure, however, that for Childeric (as for Edwin of Northumbria) the cult of a god or gods of war, with the appropriate rituals, would have loomed large. There are hints too, in our early sources, that the veneration of ancestors was a part of the religious observance of the Frankish kings. The dynasty claimed a supernatural origin: Childeric’s father Merovech – whence the name Merovingian for the family – was held to have been the son of a sea-monster.

Childeric’s son Clovis succeeded his father as king of the Salian Franks in 481–2.^* Clovis was a great warlord who expanded Salian dominion in every direction and he was the first Christian king of the Franks. Not only was he a convert to Christianity, he was a convert to Catholic Christianity. These features made Clovis significant for the writer who is our principal source of information about him, Gregory, bishop of Tours from 573 to 594. We have already encountered Gregory. He it was who listed the foundation of churches in Touraine, who was the friend of Aredius, who told moral tales warning against the perils of rusticity. Gregory’s most famous work was his Ten Books of Histories (often inaccurately called the History of the Franks).³ Justly renowned as the most readable of all early medieval narratives, the Histories are vivid, chatty, unbuttoned. With what art the bishop coaxes his readers into accepting his stories in the same relaxed fashion as he tells them! But the Histories had a serious purpose too; or rather, several serious purposes. If we confine ourselves to what Gregory had to say about Clovis, we need to take account of three things. First, Gregory felt concern about the squabbling kings of his own day and their endless internecine wars: he wished to hold up their ancestor before them as an example of strenuous valour. Second, Gregory wanted to show how God had helped the Catholic Clovis in all his wars, not just in some of them: this affected his chronology of the king’s reign and conversion. Third, we must make a large allowance for ignorance: like every historian Gregory was at the mercy of his sources, which were meagre. Writing as he was a century later, Gregory of Tours did not know much about Clovis. Because he didn’t, we can’t either.

Gregory has, however, left us a great literary set piece on the conversion of Clovis. We must attend to it not because of its claims to tell us what really happened – they can be shown to be ill-founded – but because it shows us how Gregory thought it appropriate to present a king’s conversion, and because of its literary influence upon other descriptions of royal conversions. As Gregory tells it the story of the conversion of Clovis goes like this. Clovis’s queen, Clotilde, was a Burgundian princess and a Catholic Christian. She wished to have their first-born son baptized and nagged her husband to permit it. She chided him for his attachment to the pagan gods but he was firmly loyal to them. The queen had the infant baptized. He promptly died, whereupon the king rounded on her, seeing in his son’s death a demonstration of the impotence of her Christian God. Clotilde had another son, whom also she caused to be baptized. The baby began to ail and Clovis predicted a second death. But the queen prayed and the infant survived. She continued her pressure upon the king to bring about his conversion. Eventually there came a time when Clovis took the field against the Alamans. Finding himself hard-pressed in battle, Clovis called upon ‘Jesus Christ … Thou that art said to grant victory to those that hope in Thee’, promising to believe and to undergo baptism in return for victory. The Alamans were defeated. At the queen’s prompting Bishop Remigius of Rheims began to instruct Clovis; but secretly, because Clovis feared that his subjects would not permit their king to forsake the ancestral gods. But his apprehensions proved baseless, for his people spontaneously decided ‘to follow that immortal God whom Remigius preaches’. All was made ready, and Clovis ‘like a new Constantine’ was cleansed in the waters of baptism. Three thousand of his armed followers were also baptized; so too his sister Albofleda; and another sister Lantechildis, who had previously been an Arian.

There are four essentials in this account: the role of a Christian queen in converting her pagan husband; the power of the Christian God to give victory in battle; the king’s reluctance, springing from anxiety as to whether he could carry his people with him; and the happy conclusion in the baptism of the king, some members of his family and large numbers of his following. We shall encounter these themes again. If they seem, with repetition, to betray something of the character of a topos or conventional literary formula, we need not doubt their fundamental plausibility.

Gregory’s account was intended to be straightforward but it hints at complexities. It is of great interest to discover that one of Clovis’s sisters was already a Christian at the time of his baptism, albeit an Arian one. This snippet of information acquires more significance when considered alongside a strictly contemporary source. There survives a letter to Clovis from Bishop Avitus of Vienne in which the writer congratulated the king upon his conversion. Avitus wrote in a convoluted and rhetorical Latin, but what he seems plainly to say at one point is that the conversion of Clovis which he celebrates was not a conversion from paganism to Christianity but one from heresy to orthodox Catholicism. In the context, the heresy can only have been Arianism.

This complicates the picture considerably. It raises the near-certainty that Arian proselytizers were at work among the Frankish elite. Had they taken initiatives which their Catholic rivals had been sluggish to grasp? Another surviving letter, already referred to, is from no less a man than Bishop Remigius of Rheims.⁴ It seems to date from 4812, and it was written to welcome Clovis’s succession to the administration of Belgica Secunda in the wake of his father Childeric’s death. In it the bishop proffered advice as to how the young man should conduct himself as king. He should, among other things, endeavour to keep on good terms with the bishops of the province: sound advice, in view of the enhanced status of the episcopate in late-antique society at which we glanced in Chapter 2. What is conspicuously lacking from the letter is any suggestion that Clovis might care to become a Christian. Some find this surprising; but it neatly exemplifies one of the attitudes we investigated in Chapter 1. The letter of Remigius to Clovis is a late example of the traditional Roman view that Christianity was not for barbarians.

One letter is not much – indeed it’s precious little – to go on. But the historian of a dark age must be thankful for the smallest mercies. The letter of Remigius permits us to envisage a Catholic episcopate initially aloof from evangelizing their new Salian masters. Arian clergy took advantage of this. The king himself was in no hurry and was prepared at the very least to dally with heresy before entering the Catholic fold. This we may be sure he finally did; no one doubts that in the end it was Remigius who baptized Clovis. ‘Finally … in the end’: the implication that the king’s approach to the baptismal font was a slow and cautious one is there in Gregory’s narrative and finds confirmation in yet another episcopal letter. Bishop Nicetius of Trier composed a letter of advice to Clovis’s granddaughter Chlodoswintha (Clotsinda, Lucinda) in about 565, when she was on the point of leaving Gaul to be married to the Lombard Prince Alboin. Let her remember how her grandmother Clotilde ‘led the lord Clovis to the Catholic faith’, even though ‘because he was a very shrewd man he was unwilling to accept it until he knew it was true’.⁵ Clovis had taken his time. The assigning of precise dates remains problematical. Victory over the Alamans, traditionally placed in the year 496, may indeed have been regarded by the king as God-given. Good reasons have been advanced for placing his baptism quite late in the reign; a strong case for 508 has been made.

Royal conversion was a complicated business. A first stage might have been marked, as suggested here, by the prospective acceptance of a Christian deity – possibly without any very clear awareness of His exclusive claims upon the believer’s allegiance. The final stage was baptism itself, full entry into the Christian community. The journey from first to last stage could have taken up to a dozen years, and there were plenty of intermediate stages. Clovis would have needed to be watchful, especially of his warrior following. He would have wanted to be quite sure that a new God could deliver the goods he had been led to expect. Bishop Nicetius was clear about these in his letter to Chlodoswintha. Look how your grandfather defeated the Burgundians and the Visigoths – and, he might have added, the Alamans, the Thuringians, the Ripuarian Franks and not a few of his own kinsmen. Look how rich their plunder made him. Look at the miracles which so impressed him, worked at the shrines of the saints of Gaul, of Martin at Tours, of Germanus at Auxerre, of Hilary at Poitiers, of Lupus at Troyes. For Clovis it must all have been reassuring and perhaps awe-inspiring. We must allow time, too, for Remigius’ instruction.

There may have been other forces at work as well. The long arm of east Roman diplomacy reached as far as northern Gaul. After his victory over the Visigoths at Vouillé in 507 Clovis received letters from the Emperor Anastasius conferring the office of honorary consul, with its insignia and uniform, upon him. During the last years of his reign the ‘new Constantine’ performed actions which recalled the first Constantine; and surely not coincidentally. Like Constantine he established a new capital for himself, at Paris. Like Constantine he built there a church dedicated to the Holy Apostles. Like Constantine at Nicaea he presided over a church council, at Orléans in the year 511. Like Constantine he was generous to the Catholic church, and there is just a little evidence that like Constantine he was masterful in his government of it. Like another emperor, Theodosius II, Clovis issued a code of law, written in Latin, the so-called Pactus Legis Salicae, the first surviving version of the famous Lex Salica or Salic Law, the law of the Salian Franks. A newly arrived barbarian warlord had been patiently shepherded into the Christian fold and a start had been made in schooling him in the ways of Christian kingship.

One of the chapters of Clovis’s law code deals with runaway or stolen slaves. It considers the contingency that slaves might be carried off trans mare, ‘across the sea’, and lays down the procedure to be followed in foreign courts of law to effect their recovery. For a king who ruled in northern Gaul the nearest sea is the English Channel and the most obvious way of understanding the phrase ‘across the sea’ is as a reference to south-eastern England. Like the Frankish king we too must turn our attention across the sea.

The fifth and sixth centuries are the most obscure in British history. In 410 the Emperor Honorius had instructed the civitates, as we might say the local authorities, to look after themselves when the imperial army and administration were withdrawn. For a generation or so they appear to have managed reasonably well: the British church, which was visited by Germanus, which could despatch Ninian to Galloway and to which Patrick was answerable, was not the church of a society in collapse. But this fragile stability did not last. Britain had long been the target of predators, like any vulnerable part of the Roman world. Her attackers came from the west, the Scotti or Irish; from the north, the Picts from what is now Scotland; and from the east, the peoples of the north German coastlands from the mouth of the Rhine to Jutland. Since the days of Bede these latter have been pigeon-holed as Angles, Saxons and Jutes, but it can be shown that several other tribal groups were involved, such as Frisians or Danes. Here I follow time-honoured convention in referring to them generally as the AngloSaxons. These were barbarian peoples whose homelands were well beyond the frontiers of the Roman empire. They had been less exposed to Roman ways than their neighbours the Franks, let alone the Goths. This is not to say that they had had no contact with the empire at all: archaeology has shown that trading relations were widespread; the settlement excavated at Wijster, in Drenthe in the northern Netherlands, a substantial village of at least fifty dwellings by the fourth century, seems to have subsisted by production for the market provided by the garrison towns of the lower Rhine about sixty miles distant. Recent excavations on the Danish island of Fyn have yielded abundant artefacts indicative of trade with the empire. Roman coin circulated as freely in northern Germania as it did further south in Gothia. Nevertheless, due allowance being made for commerce, it remains true that of the barbarians who took over the western imperial provinces those from the North Sea littoral were the least touched by Roman influence, the most uncouth.

Their taking over of much of eastern Britain occurred in the period of deepest obscurity between about 450 and 550. Valiant attempts to pierce this darkness have been and are being made by historians, archaeologists and place-name scholars. We do not need to consider these very difficult and intricate matters here. It is enough to reckon with the emergence in eastern Britain by the latter part of the sixth century of a number of small kingdoms under Germanic royal dynasties and warrior aristocracies, a ruling class whose members were, of course, like the Franks, pagan in their religious observances. Our immediate concern will be with the most south-easterly of these, the kingdom of Kent.

The degree to which Christianity was obliterated in those parts of eastern Britain occupied by the Anglo-Saxons is a matter of debate. It is not impossible, indeed it is quite likely, that there was some considerable survival of the Romano-British population under English rule, a state of affairs which would have been congruent with the circumstances elsewhere in the western provinces of the former empire. What we do not know is how thoroughly Christianity had permeated British society before the Germanic takeover occurred. If the area of Kent – restricting ourselves at present to the south-east – was anything like the Touraine of St Martin we might expect to find, around the year 400, some urban Christianity, some rural Christianity at gentry level, and a lot of rustic paganism. The early Christian archaeology of Kent does indeed present this impression. There is evidence of Christianity in late Roman Canterbury and at a few rural sites, of which the best known is the villa at Lullingstone with its private chapel. It is difficult to gauge to what degree this Kentish Christianity survived the disruptions of the fifth and sixth centuries. The Roman town of Canterbury seems to have experienced severe if never complete depopulation. Urban life in any generally accepted sense of the phrase seems to have died. This need not mean that Christianity disappeared from Canterbury altogether but it could mean that its presence there was insubstantial. The Roman villa at Lullingstone was destroyed by fire early in the fifth century: accident? arson? barbarian raiders? We have no means of telling: but we do know that it was not rebuilt. It has long been a plausible hypothesis that the landowning classes of eastern Britain made themselves scarce as their province drifted into insecurity and disorder as the fifth century advanced. They withdrew westwards into Wales, Cumbria or the south-western peninsula, where Christian principalities would survive independently of the Anglo-Saxons, in some cases for centuries; or they emigrated to safer parts of what was left of the empire. However, this should not exclude the possibility that some of them stayed. Near Aylesford, and suggestively close to another Roman villa, there is a settlement named Eccles. This placename has been borrowed, via British, from the Latin ecclesia, ‘church’ or ‘Christian community’. A pocket of Christians must have survived there long enough for the name by which they were known to their (non-Christian?) neighbours to have been adopted into the Germanic speech of the new overlords.

All of which gives food for thought but does not greatly advance our understanding. We can at least say that we must not rule out the possibility that there were Christians among the subjects of the pagan Kentish kings of the sixth century. These kings also had Christian neighbours. It is well known that the Anglo-Saxon peoples were great seafarers; it is sometimes forgotten that the Franks were too. For seafaring folk the Channel unites rather than divides. It was the highway from the north German coastal homelands to the rich pickings of Gaul for the raiders of the third and fourth centuries and for the settlers of the fifth and sixth (as for the Vikings later on). Saxons settled on both sides of it. They settled the southern parts of Britain to which they gave their name – the East Saxons of Essex, the South Saxons of Sussex and the West Saxons of Wessex. On the opposite side of the Channel Saxons were settled in three known areas (and possibly in others as well) – round Boulogne, round Bayeux and near the mouth of the Loire. The Saxons of the Loire were converted to Christianity by Bishop Félix of Nantes, who died in 582, a change in their culture which their insular kinsfolk in Britain would surely have got wind of. Did Franks also settle on both sides of the Channel? It is practically certain that Frankish settlement did occur in Kent, Sussex and Hampshire, though in the last resort the evidence, mainly archaeological, is inconclusive. This evidence undoubtedly does show that there was a lively exchange of goods to and fro across the Channel at this period. Whether these things travelled as commodities of trade, as plunder, tribute, dowries, gifts, we do not know. All we know is that they travelled in abundance and that many of them were objects of high intrinsic value or status such as jewellery or glassware. We should take care to remember too the perishable commodities which leave no archaeological trace. What are we to suppose that the Anglo-Saxon nobility of Kent drank out of their handsome glass goblets imported from the Rhineland?

It would also appear that at least from time to time Frankish royal power was claimed – which is not to say that it was exercised – over parts of south-eastern England. The contemporary Greek historian Procopius tells of a Frankish embassy to Constantinople in about 553 which included Angles in it in order to demonstrate the Frankish king’s power over the island of Britain. A generation later Pope Gregory I could imply in correspondence with two Frankish kings that the kingdom of Kent was somehow within their range of influence. The one report may be explained away as misunderstanding, the other as diplomatic flattery – perhaps. What we cannot dismiss is sound evidence of dynastic contact, the marriage of a member of the heathen royal family of Kent to a Christian Frankish princess.

Ethelbert of Kent married Bertha, a bride ‘of the royal stock of the Franks’, in the words of Bede.⁶ His information can be supplemented from the Histories of Gregory of Tours, a strictly contemporary witness, and one who had probably met Bertha herself. He certainly knew her mother Ingoberga, whose piety, and generosity to the church of Tours, he warmly commended. Her father Charibert (d. 567) had been king of Neustria, that is the western portion of the Frankish realms with its capital in Paris (and including the Saxon settlements near Bayeux and Nantes). Unfortunately for us, Gregory has practically nothing to tell us about Bertha’s marriage. She was joined, he says, ‘to the son of a certain king in Kent’ – and that is all. Gregory stands at the beginning of a long and still-flourishing tradition of French historical scholarship which is wont to pay as little attention as possible to the history of the neighbouring island. He could have told us so much more. Was this the first such cross-Channel dynastic marriage, or had it been preceded by others? We do not know. When did it take place? We do not know, though it is possible to work out that it is unlikely to have been before the late 570s. What did the marriage mean for the relations between the two royal families? We do not know, though because Bertha as an orphan could not have ranked highly as a matrimonial catch and because Gregory seems to allude dismissively to the bridegroom we may suspect that Frankish royal circles would have looked down on Kentish ones.

We do know that Bertha’s kinsfolk had been able to insist that Ethelbert permit his wife to practise her religion. She came to Kent accompanied by a bishop named Liudhard (and presumably some subordinate clergy) whose role was to act, in Bede’s words, as her adiutor fidei, her ‘faith helper’ or private chaplain, not to attempt any wider evangelizing ministry. Her husband put at her disposal ‘a church built in ancient times while the Romans were still in Britain, next to the city of Canterbury on its eastern side’. There are two candidates for the identification, St Martin’s and St Pancras’, both extramural churches to the east of Roman Canterbury, beneath both of which excavation has revealed Roman brickwork and mortar. Near St Martin’s there was excavated in the nineteenth century a medallion attached to a late-sixth-century necklace: it was die-stamped with the name LEUDARDUS, presumably Bertha’s Bishop Liudhard. What is interesting, if Bede’s informants at Canterbury were correct, is that there were persons in Kent at the time of Bertha’s arrival who could identify a certain building as a Christian church. It suggests the presence of a Christian community at Canterbury.

Thus far, the antecedents of Ethelbert’s conversion are reminiscent of those of Clovis’s. A Germanic king, ruling a sub-Roman kingdom in which a little Christianity survives, enjoying close relations with Christian neighbours, married to a Christian wife, becomes a Christian. Yes, but with regard to Ethelbert there was an additional personage involved – Pope Gregory the Great, of whom we have already caught a fleeting glimpse offering robust advice to Sardinian landlords about how to convert their peasantry (above, p. 59).

Gregory was born into an aristocratic Roman family in about 540, into circles accustomed to wealth and authority. His relatives included two recent popes. An excellent traditional education was followed by a few years (c. 572–4) of high administrative experience as praefectus urbi, prefect of the city, the supreme civic official in Rome. Converted to the monastic life in 574–5, Gregory turned the family palazzo on the Caelian Hill into a monastery dedicated to St Andrew. He installed in it the magnificent library of Christian writers assembled by his kinsman Pope Agapetus I (535–6), who had envisaged founding a school of advanced Christian studies in Rome. Gregory also founded monasteries on some of the family estates in Sicily. In 579 he was sent by Pope Pelagius II to Constantinople as the papal apocrisarius, ambassador or nuncio, where he served until 585. It was a time of critical importance in the relations between Rome and Constantinople, during which the imperial government was striving to concert measures against the expansion of Lombard power in Italy. It was while he was en poste in Constantinople that Gregory met Leander of Seville, the elder brother of Isidore the etymologist, who was there on a diplomatic mission from the Catholics of Spain. From their discussions together there was born Gregory’s greatest work of biblical exegesis, the Moralia, a commentary on the book of Job. Returning to Rome he was retained as the pope’s secretary until Pelagius’ death in 590. To his dismay, Gregory was chosen to succeed him. He accepted with genuine reluctance and served as pope until his death in 604.

Rome, Constantinople, Seville: Gregory’s world was Roman, imperial, Mediterranean. Within that world Gregory’s career was, on a superficial view, a glittering one. He was one of those rare multitalented persons who are successful in all they undertake: administrator, diplomat, organizer, negotiator, writer. But Gregory would have been dismayed at the prospect of being remembered in this fashion. His priorities were different. He believed that God’s Day of Judgement was imminent. This conviction gave edge to his overmastering concerns, which were pastoral and evangelical. These concerns gust like a mighty wind of spiritual force through all his writings: the Moralia, the Dialogues, in which he commemorated St Benedict and other saints, his sermons, many of his 850-odd surviving letters, and the book he composed for the guidance of those who exercise the cure of souls, the Liber Regulae Pastoralis (Book of Pastoral Care). The pastoral impulse in Gregory surfaces in some unlikely places. It can be seen in some of his dealings with the Lombards, ‘that abominable people’ (in his own words) whose invasion of Italy had brought hardship which he devoted much time and energy to relieving. It even shines through his hard-headed instructions for the management of the papal estates. It can be glimpsed in his correspondence with Queen Brunhilde, the Spanish wife of Clovis’s grandson Sigibert (and aunt, by marriage, of Bertha).

Gregory’s pastoral impulse was translated most memorably into action in his sending of a mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. The earliest biography of Gregory, composed at Whitby about a century after his death, contains the first version of the story of his encounter with English boys in Rome before he became pope.⁷ The meeting moved Gregory to the most famous series of puns in English historical mythology. Of what nation were the boys? They replied that they were Angles. ‘Not Angles but angels.’ What was the name of their king? Alle. ‘Alleluia! God’s praise must be heard in his kingdom.’ What was their kingdom called? Deira [the southern half of Northumbria, roughly equivalent to the Yorkshire of today]. ‘They shall flee from the wrath [de ira] of God to the faith.’ According to the anonymous author Gregory himself tried to set out on this mission during the pontificate of Benedict I (575–9) but was prevented from going more than three days’ journey from Rome. It is highly unlikely that Gregory would have wished to leave Italy at that time, when he was busy founding and nurturing his monasteries. The story as told by the anonymous author and subsequently (in a slightly different form) by Bede was an oral tradition which had been circulating for some time among the Anglo-Saxons before it was committed to writing at Whitby in the early eighth century. The puns which Gregory is said to have made probably tell us more about the taste of the eighthcentury Anglo-Saxons for punning wordplay than they do about the gift for verbal repartee of a sixth-century Italian cleric.

Bede’s telling of the story sets it in the market-place of Rome and alleges that the English boys were up for sale as slaves. There is nothing intrinsically implausible about this. We need to remember that the slave trade was probably the most widespread business activity of the early medieval world. It is not inconceivable that some of the Frankish luxury objects excavated from the cemeteries of Ethelbert’s Kent were paid for with English slaves. In this connection it is of great interest to find that Pope Gregory wrote in September 595 to his agent Candidus, who was on his way to administer the papal estates in southern Gaul, ordering him ‘to buy English boys of seventeen or eighteen years of age in order that they may, dedicated to God, make progress in monasteries’.⁸ The context makes it clear that the pope had in mind his own or other monasteries in Italy, because he requests that the boys be sent to him: ‘and because they are pagans who are to be found there, I wish a priest to be sent with them so that, should illness strike in the course of the journey, he may baptise those whom he sees to be at the point of death.’ It is not easy to interpret this letter. Some have assumed that the pope’s intention was to train the boys as missionaries who could then be sent back to evangelize the Anglo-Saxons: but there is not a hint of this in the text. A commonsensical reading might suggest that the pope simply wanted Candidus to get a supply of domestic slaves for use in his monasteries, though this is not an interpretation that commends itself to the pope’s admirers. It is unwise to use this letter in support of the view that Gregory was planning a mission to the Anglo-Saxons as early as 595 – though he may have been. In a letter to Bishop Syagrius of Autun written in July 599 Gregory said that he had been thinking about the mission to England ‘for a long time’ (diu).⁹ At the least we may safely say that the letter shows that in the late summer of 595 the pope’s mind was busy with thoughts of the English and their paganism.

He will also have been aware that the Anglo-Saxons inhabited an island that had once been part of the empire. Gregory was a Roman through and through. He came from a family with a proud tradition of public service, he had respect for Roman order and administration, and – despite his strong Augustinian leanings – he had been trained to familiarity with ideas about the providential role of the empire in the divine scheme. His was a world in which it was inconceivable not to take the empire for granted. It is worth recalling that still in Gregory’s day and for much of the century to come Constantinople continued to cast long shadows of influence across the western provinces. We should remember too that after the Justinianic reconquests of Gregory’s childhood the empire still governed Sicily, north Africa as far as the Straits of Gibraltar and a sizeable chunk of south-eastern Spain. Furthermore, Gregory looked out upon a world in which, by the 590s, all the barbarian successor-states had adopted Christianity excepting only the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England.

Combine this with Gregory’s sense of pastoral urgency and we have a context, what could be termed a temperamental context, for the initiative he took with regard to England. That initiative was the despatch in 596 of a party of missionaries to the court of King Ethelbert of Kent. Bede, our prime narrative source, tells us that Gregory did this ‘on the prompting of divine inspiration’. It may have been so; but we must beware of ascribing the initiative solely to the pope or to God, even though this has been the received interpretation of the origins of the mission from Bede’s day onwards. But even Bede’s account is not without its difficulties. He tells us – and the information certainly came to him from Canterbury – that Ethelbert died twentyone years after he had received the faith. Now since Ethelbert died on 24 February 616 it is evident that this ‘reception’ (whatever it may have consisted of) occurred in the year 595; or, to be pedantically accurate, between 24 February 595 and 23 February 596. If this piece of information is accurate it may fittingly be considered alongside a remark made by the pope himself. Writing to the royal Frankish brothers Theudebert and Theuderic in July 596 – it is the letter in which he referred to Frankish influence in Kent – Gregory put it on record that ‘we have heard that the people of the English wishes to be converted to the Christian faith.’¹⁰ One could not ask for a more explicit, authoritative and of course strictly contemporary statement that some approach had been made from the English side. It looks as though Gregory was responding to an appeal rather than launching a mission into the unknown. We might care to cast our minds back – as perhaps Gregory did also – to earlier such responses: the sending of Ulfila to the Christian communities of Gothic Dacia, for example, or of Palladius to the Christians of Ireland.

If an approach was made to the pope in 595 or early 596 one must ask how it was transmitted, and our thoughts turn at once to Queen Bertha and Bishop Liudhard. Bertha would have known of her greatgrandmother’s part in the conversion of her husband Clovis. She may well have received a hortatory letter reminding her of it, like the one which Chlodoswintha got from Nicetius of Trier, when she went off as a bride to Kent. Her assistance in the conversion of Ethelbert was acknowledged by Pope Gregory in a letter he sent to her in 601. When something happened in 595 which made it clear to Bertha that the king was ripe for conversion – perhaps it was a victory in battle, as in the case of Clovis – she turned – to whom? Not to the pope directly, for surely we should have heard of this in Gregory’s correspondence. Most likely it was to her royal relatives in Francia. After all, it was in a letter to Theudebert and Theuderic that Gregory said that he had heard of the English desire to be converted.

Theudebert and Theuderic were children. The regent for them was their grandmother Brunhilde, the most powerful presence in Frankish Gaul in the 590s. Her ghastly end – torn apart by wild horses on the orders of her nephew-by-marriage King Chlothar II after a prolonged struggle for power – and the subsequent blackening of her reputation must not blind us to both her political skill and her piety. When Columbanus arrived in Gaul in about 590 it was Brunhilde and her son Childebert who gave him land and royal protection for his early monastic foundations in Burgundy. (Brunhilde later quarrelled with Columbanus, but that is another story.) Columbanus came from an Irish church where the memory of Patrick was kept green; he had his own vivid sense of mission. He touched the minds of his royal patrons. They in their turn were in contact with Pope Gregory. Childebert and the pope exchanged letters in the summer of 595. Gregory wrote to Brunhilde and Childebert again in September, commending to them his agent Candidus (to whom he was writing at the same time about purchasing English youths). They were again in touch in 596 when Brunhilde’s priest Leuparicus passed between them, bringing relics of St Peter and St Paul as a present from the pope for the queen on his return journey. In 597 she asked for a book which Gregory sent her. Brunhilde founded a monastery at Autun to which the pope granted privileges at her request in 602. The bishop of Autun, Syagrius, was close to the queen: Gregory rewarded his services to the English mission with a special mark of papal favour in 599. The scene was thus more complicated than Bede’s narrative suggests: there was an English king who wanted to become a Christian and a pope with an overwhelming desire to save souls. Linking them was the Frankish royal court, provider of information and later, through the bishops, of practical help.

We know very little of the earlier life of the man chosen by Gregory to head the mission of King Ethelbert. Augustine of Canterbury – named after the great Augustine of Hippo – was a monk and by 596 prior of the monastery founded by Gregory in Rome. Although the prior is formally second-in-command of a monastery after the abbot, in this instance he would have been effectively running the community because its abbot would have been too busy with his duties as pope to supervise the day-to-day life of the house. Gregory was a shrewd judge of men and we must assume that he thought very highly of Augustine to have appointed him to a position of considerable spiritual and administrative responsibility. Gregory commended Augustine’s knowledge of scripture in a letter to Ethelbert in 601. It is not surprising, given Gregory’s priorities, that he should have picked a man of distinguished intellect in that particular field of study to head the mission. That is all we know of Augustine before the departure of the mission in 596. We are left wondering what additional talents or experience he might have possessed which commended him to Gregory for the task of barbarian evangelization. Had he, for instance, assisted or advised the pope in his dealings with the Lombards? Possibly: as so often, we simply do not know. But we do know one thing for certain about the mission: it was big and it was well equipped. Canterbury tradition recalled that Augustine’s companions had numbered ‘about forty’ – a prodigious number. We do not know what they brought to England on the initial journey, but we do know that Gregory reinforced them in 601 with at least four more men, together with vestments, altar cloths, church plate and ornaments, relics and ‘numerous books’. Gregory could command resources well beyond the capabilities of, say, Patrick.

Augustine reached Kent in the spring or early summer of 597. Ethelbert was hesitant at first but did in time consent to be baptized. (We are as uncertain of the exact date of his baptism as we are of that of Clovis.) On 20 July 598 Gregory wrote to the patriarch of Alexandria: in his letter he reported, among other matters, that he had heard from Augustine that ‘at Christmas last more than 10,000 Englishmen had been baptised’.¹¹ Whether or not we wish to take the figure with a pinch of salt, we can surely accept that a large number of converts had been made. The scale of the thing is what is significant. It is incredible that so many could have been baptized had their king not given a lead. Therefore we may infer that Ethelbert had been baptized a Christian before 25 December 597. What did it mean for him as a king?

Flattering letters arrived from the pope, skilful as ever in handling barbarians.¹² Ethelbert was numbered among the ‘good men raised up by almighty God to be a ruler over nations’. Gregory played on a Germanic king’s lust for fame. ‘For He whose honour you seek and maintain among the nations will also make your glorious name still more glorious even to posterity.’ (How right he was.) Let Ethelbert be zealous for the faith ‘like Constantine … [who] transcended in renown the reputation of former princes.’ In his letter to Bertha he compared her to Helena, mother of Constantine, and assured her that her fame had come even to the ears of ‘the most serene emperor’ in Constantinople.

Ethelbert gave Augustine a church in Canterbury – another survivor – to restore as his cathedral church, which it still is. He provided Augustine with land on which to found a monastery dedicated to the apostles Peter and Paul just outside the Roman walls. This was also to be the royal mausoleum wherein he and his queen would lie entombed, prayed for and remembered until the approaching Day of Judgement about which the pope had written to him. And something started to happen at Canterbury in the wake of Ethelbert’s conversion: a Roman city began to come back to life. Bede called it, rather grandly, ‘the metropolis of his [Ethelbert’s] whole empire’. It was now a Christian city and, in Bede’s words again, ‘a royal city’.

Ethelbert’s generous endowments of his churches may have been recorded in documents drafted in Latin according to the norms of Roman conveyancing. The matter is contentious because the surviving documents are copies of a much later date whose texts have evidently been tampered with: but genuine originals probably lie behind them, the first deeds of this sort ever issued by an English ruler. What is not in doubt is that Ethelbert promulgated a code of law. In Bede’s words, much discussed and therefore translated here as literally as possible, ‘following models of the Romans he established decrees of judgements for his people with the advice of his wise men which were written down in the language of the English’.¹³ These survive (in a late but reliable copy), the earliest piece of English prose. Ethelbert’s code of law is a simple tariff of offences and compensations: ‘If a man strike another on the nose with his fist, 3 shillings [shall be paid as compensation].’ There was little here that Justinian’s great jurist Tribonian would have recognized as Roman. But it was written down; it was in the king’s name; and it made new law as well as simply declaring existing custom – churchmen and church property, new arrivals on the Kentish scene, were woven into the social network of protection and compensation. The coming of Christianity gave the first impulse to the process by which the custom of the folk became the king’s law. The implications for royal authority were far-reaching.

Royal authority helped to diffuse Christianity both within Ethelbert’s kingdom of Kent and beyond it. Bede tells us that though the king did not compel any of his subjects to accept the faith, nevertheless he showed greater favour to those who did. Quite so. At another point in his narrative he let fall the information that some of Ethelbert’s subjects became Christians ‘through fear of the king or to win his favour’. A second Kentish bishopric was founded at Rochester and provided with endowments by the king. Ethelbert was also able to influence other Anglo-Saxon rulers. He might have appeared insignificant in Frankish eyes but in England Ethelbert was a considerable force, ‘a most powerful king whose supremacy reached as far as the river Humber’. Among his subject-kings was Saeberht, king of the East Saxons (i.e. Essex), who was also his nephew, the son of his sister Ricula. The East Saxons accepted Christianity and a bishopric was founded for them at London in 604. The next kingdom to the north was that of the East Angles. Its king, Redwald, was converted on a visit to Ethelbert’s court but on his return home was talked out of the sincerity of his faith by his wife. He tried to have the best of both worlds by putting up a Christian altar in his pagan temple. Ethelbert was able in addition to help the missionaries in their negotiations with the Christian clergy of neighbouring British kingdoms to the end of securing their collaboration in the work of evangelization; even though in the event these negotiations failed disastrously.

Our third princely barbarian convert was Edwin of Northumbria, baptized at York on Easter Day in the year 627, as we saw in the opening pages of this book. Here it is necessary only to emphasize that the background to Edwin’s conversion, and its aftermath, bore some likeness to the circumstances surrounding the conversions of Clovis and Ethelbert. Edwin knew something of the faith of his Christian bride before she reached him, accompanied by Paulinus – her Liudhard – in about 619. Before fighting his way to power in Northumbria in 616 Edwin had spent many years in exile; it is very probable that he had had encounters with Christians in the course of it. Later Welsh tradition claimed that part of that exile had been spent under the protection of the British King Cadfan of Gwynedd, or north-west Wales, ‘wisest and most renowned of all kings’, as his tombstone at Llangadwaladr in Anglesey described him, and certainly a Christian. Part of his exile had been spent with King Redwald of East Anglia, at whose court Edwin might have met Paulinus, as is related by the anonymous monk of Whitby in his life of Pope Gregory. Edwin’s subjects certainly included Christians, for at some date unknown he had conquered the British kingdom of Elmet, that area of south-west Yorkshire whose earlier history is still commemorated in the placenames Barwick-in-Elmet and Sherburn-in-Elmet. British tradition would claim that Edwin was actually baptized a Christian by a British bishop named Rhun, the son of King Urien of the northern British kingdom of Rheged, or Cumbria. This is unlikely. On the other hand it is highly probable that there would have been clerics among the delegations from Edwin’s sub-kingdoms who paid tributary visits to his court. Bishop Rhun could have been a not unfamiliar figure among the revellers at Edwin’s palace of, shall we say, Yeavering.

As in Ethelbert’s case there was also papal encouragement. There survive two letters from Pope Boniface V (619–25) addressed to Edwin and his consort.¹⁴ The king was urged to abandon paganism and embrace Christianity. The pope made the point early on that Christianity was the faith of ‘all the human race from the rising to the setting of the sun’ – with verbal reminiscence of a key missionary text in Malachi i.ll: because God has melted ‘by the fire of His Holy Spirit the frozen hearts of races even in the far corners of the earth’. Patently mendacious though the writer must have known these words to be – one need look no further than the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean world – the sort of effect that they were intended to have on Edwin is plain. The king was being encouraged to come in, literally, from the cold. Diplomatic presents of rich apparel, gold embroidered, cunningly hinted at the splendid trappings of Christian civilization. Queen Ethelburga was firmly reminded of her duty as wife and queen to bring about Edwin’s conversion. She was sent a silver mirror and an ivory comb ornamented with gold. Perhaps it looked somewhat like the silver-chased comb of her elder contemporary, Queen Theodelinda of the Lombards, now preserved at Monza.

The aftermath of Edwin’s baptism shows features with which the reader will by now be familiar. We see him assisting in the diffusion of Christianity in Northumbria, accompanying Paulinus as he taught and baptized at Yeavering, Catterick and the unidentified Campodunum. Royal ‘assistance’ did not just mean being present. Alcuin, the great eighth-century scholar, wrote of Edwin in his poem on The Bishops, Kings and Saints of York that ‘by gifts and threats he incited men to cherish the faith’.¹⁵ Edwin was active in pressing Christianity upon the rulers subject to him. He ‘persuaded’ (Bede’s word) Eorpwald, son and successor to Redwald of East Anglia, to become a Christian. One may suspect that Paulinus’ success in preaching the word in the kingdom of Lindscy (Lincolnshire) owed not a little to Edwin too. It is just possible that Edwin, like Ethelbert and Clovis, issued laws. This seems to be hinted at in some lines of Alcuin’s poem; but it should be stressed that Bede says nothing of any legislative activity and that no written lawcode attributable to Northumbria survives. Bede tells us something of the peace which Edwin maintained and of the royal state he kept. If historians have made heavy weather of the reference to ‘the standard which the Romans call a tufa and the English a thuuf the point surely for Bede was that there was now some ‘Roman’ quality about Edwin’s style of kingship.

The narrators of these episodes of royal conversion were, of course, churchmen: Gregory of Tours, a bishop; Bede, a monk at Jarrow – what we might call ‘professional Christians’. Is it ever possible to shift the angle of vision and open up a different perspective? Is there, for example, any statement about conversion attributable to a king? By a happy chance there is. It takes the form of a letter from the Visigothic king of Spain, Sisebut, to the Lombard king of Italy, Adaloald, and it was written at much about the time that Ethelburga was travelling north to meet her bridegroom Edwin. The letter was not indeed about conversion from paganism to Christianity but about conversion from one form of Christianity to another. Sisebut was urging Adaloald to abandon Arianism and embrace orthodox Catholicism.¹⁶

Care is always needed in handling writings attributed to royalty. Kings have opportunities denied to others of availing themselves of literary assistance. Whose voice, whose style are we hearing? Not necessarily that of the king. There is a further difficulty. A letter such as this was a public document, a piece of diplomatic correspondence. Surely we should be correct in assuming that even though it ran in the king’s name it would have been drafted by officials. But Sisebut was no ordinary king. He had received an advanced education and was a friend of the polymath Isidore of Seville, who dedicated one of his books to him. It was in response to this gesture that Sisebut honoured Isidore with a Latin verse epistle on the subject of eclipses. Sisebut was also the author, most surprisingly, of a work of hagiography celebrating the life of Bishop Desiderius of Vienne, recently murdered at the instigation of Queen Brunhilde. (There were more sides to her character than the piety to which attention was drawn a few pages back.) Sisebut also wrote a number of letters which have survived and probably more which have not. They are on a variety of subjects ranging from diplomatic correspondence to counselling for a bewildered bishop. Tone and style are even and consistent. I think we may take it that this remarkable man’s letter to Adaloald was his own composition or, at least, expressed his own convictions.

Sisebut was clear about the advantages that had accrued to his people when they had moved from Arianism to Catholicism in 587–9. Before that they had suffered daily from calamity: frequent wars, famine and plague. However, ‘As soon as the orthodox faith had enlightened their darkened minds … God willing, the power of the Goths now thrives. Those who once were torn by the sickled cohorts of thorns, wounded by the barbed stings of scorpions, poisoned by the forked tongue of the serpent, to these atoned ones the Catholic church now devotes her motherly affection.’ It is a long letter, in high-flown diction of which this is a representative sample, and much of it is unsurprisingly taken up with theological argument and scriptural quotation. But at its heart lies the simple boast that ‘the power of the Goths now thrives’. King Sisebut believed that conversion to correctness of religious observance had made his kingdom more powerful. Crude we may think it, but it is consistent with what we have seen elsewhere.

The contemporary written sources bearing upon the conversion of kings prompt reflection on a number of themes. First, we observe the repeated assurance that acceptance of Christianity will bring victory, wide dominion, fame and riches. This was what Germanic kings wanted to hear, because their primary activity was war. It was the easier for the missionaries to preach this with conviction in the light of what the historical books of the Old Testament had to tell about the victorious wars of a godly Israelite king such as David. Not for them the scruples of Ulfila who, it may be recalled (above, p. 77), omitted the books of Kings from the Gothic Bible. Nor would it have profited them to dwell upon facets of Christian teaching which kings might have found unappealing. The injunction to turn the other cheek would surely have fallen on deaf ears if addressed to Clovis. Pope Honorius I urged King Edwin to employ himself ‘in frequent readings from the works of Gregory, your evangelist and my master’.¹⁷ One may wonder whether Paulinus, as he opened his copy of the Moralia or the Liber Regulae Pastoralis, would have thought this the most appropriate juncture to explain that Pope Gregory had taught that rulers should be humble. Bede could tackle the problem of a king, like Edwin, who became very powerful before his conversion to Christianity by claiming this as an augury; in the words of a modern scholar, Edwin got his power ‘on account so to say’.¹⁸ More problematic was the successful king who remained obstinately heathen. Such was Penda, king of the midland kingdom of Mercia, who defeated and killed Edwin in 633. Bede sidestepped the problem by saying as little as possible about him.

Second, we might care to notice the role of the Christian queen in bringing about the conversion of her pagan husband. Here too there was an apposite scriptural reference. ‘The heathen husband now belongs to God through his Christian wife’ (I Corinthians vii.14). St Paul’s words were quoted both by Bishop Nicetius in his letter to Chlodoswintha and by Pope Boniface V in his letter to Ethelburga. This was a role for the queen which was to have a distinguished future. Much later on, when coronation rituals were devised in Francia in the ninth century, it would be emphasized that it was the duty of a queen ‘to summon barbarous peoples to acknowledgement of the Truth’. One may wonder whether we have something of a topos here. How important really was Clotilde in bringing about the conversion of Clovis? We cannot answer this question, it need hardly be said. But there can be no doubting the fact that royal conversions did frequently follow the marriage of a pagan king to a Christian wife.

It was not always so. Here is Bede on the (unnamed) wife of King Redwald of East Anglia.

Redwald had been initiated into the mysteries of the Christian faith in Kent, but in vain. For on his return home he was seduced by his wife and by certain evil teachers and perverted from the sincerity of his faith, so that his last state was worse than his first. After the manner of the ancient Samaritans, he seemed to be serving both Christ and the gods whom he had previously served; in the same temple he had one altar for the Christian sacrifice and another small altar on which to offer victims to devils.

It is an interesting story. Another way of interpreting it would be to see Redwald’s acceptance of Christianity simply as the addition of a new god to his pantheon of deities. It may well have been that the exclusive claims of the Christian God were ill-understood at first by royal converts.

Royal hesitation, thirdly, is a notable feature of our narratives. Clovis, Ethelbert and Edwin all took their time. Abandonment of the old gods was no light matter. Consultation with counsellors was prudent. How would the pagan priesthood react? Coifi is the classic case of the poacher turned gamekeeper. Redwald’s men seem to have been less pliable. There are difficult questions here about the dynamics of a king’s authority over his kinsfolk, his realm and his vassal kingdoms. It is hard to judge whether conversion came about through individual choice or through pressure exerted by the solidarity of a group. Arguments can be marshalled in support of both propositions. For example, the interesting information preserved by Bede that eleven members of the royal entourage were baptized with the infant Eanflaed in June 626 – ten months before Edwin’s baptism – might suggest that in Northumbria at least there was scope for individual choice. Doubtless the truth is that both individual and group motivation co-existed side by side; even, at different times, in the same person. We can be sure that a royal lead for others to follow was effective, even though the conversions it prompted may have been less than wholly sincere, as Bede was aware. We must note too that giving a lead did not always work even within the royal family. Ethelbert’s son Eadbald remained a pagan throughout his father’s life; the heathen Penda’s son Peada became a Christian.

Finally, we may observe the manner in which conversion was accompanied or quickly followed by royal actions which marked entry into the orbit of Romanitas. This is not to say that Roman culture was not already to some extent familiar and in prospect before conversion – one need think only of Bishop Remigius and the young Clovis – though doubtless more for some kings than for others. Convert kings acquired, in their missionary churchmen, experts who could school them in what was expected of a Christian king. The results are to be seen in the Pactus Legis Salicae and the council of Orléans, in Canterbury cathedral and Ethelbert’s charters, in Edwin’s thuuf and the timber structure like a wedge of Roman amphitheatre revealed by the Yeavering excavations.

Is there an ‘archaeology of royal conversion’? Perhaps. The graves of some royal persons and of some who may have been royal persons in Frankish Gaul and early Anglo-Saxon England have been discovered. They range in date from 481/2 (Childeric) to 675 (his namesake Childeric II). In the past, archaeologists were confident that it was easy to distinguish a Christian from a pagan grave. Pagans cremated their dead and furnished them with grave-goods. Christians buried their dead on an east-west axis and did not deposit grave-goods in the tomb. Nowadays archaeologists are much more cautious. In northern Gaul and Anglo-Saxon England the shift from a predominant but not exclusive use of cremation to the custom of inhumation seems to have preceded the coming of Christianity. Orientation is no longer interpreted as a clue to belief: some apparently pagan graves are oriented and some certainly Christian ones are not. Neither is the presence or absence of grave-goods a sure indication of religious loyalties. Indeed, among the Frankish aristocracy the fashion for furnishing graves in this manner became widespread only after their conversion to Christianity. It follows that any inferences about changing beliefs founded on archaeological evidence of funerary practice are hazardous.

The most famous, and certainly the most puzzling, among the apparently royal graves of this period is an English one: the deposit beneath the so-called Mound 1 in the cemetery at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. For nearly sixty years now, since its excavation just before the beginning of the Second World War, discussion has raged about this burial, unparalleled among early medieval graves for the number, richness and variety of its contents. It is widely accepted that this was the grave of a king of the East Angles and that it cannot have been dug earlier, or much later, than about 625. Regardless of which king might have been buried there – there are four principal candidates – this is exactly the period when the ruling dynasty passed in a formal sense from paganism to Christianity. Is this change of religious affiliation one that can be detected in the archaeology of Mound 1? (We could ask the same question of the cemetery as a whole but that is not my present purpose.) It is hard to claim with any conviction that such a change is detectable. The burial rite may have been traditional, but that does not make it pagan. There may have been objects in the grave decorated with Christian symbolism, but that does not make it Christian. The most promising, and not the least enigmatic, objects on which to base an affirmative answer to the question posed above are two silver spoons (illustrated in plate 10). They bear on their handles the names SAULOS and PAULOS in Greek characters, each name preceded by a small incised cross. The names not only have a clear Christian association but would seem, in their allusion to St Paul’s change of name, to refer to a conversion. It has been suggested that these were baptismal spoons which had been presented to the man buried beneath Mound 1 at the time of his conversion to Christianity. But the case is not clear-cut. The letters of the name SAULOS were so incompetently executed that it might have been no more than a blundered attempt to copy the name PAULOS on the other spoon by a craftsman who was illiterate. The spoons may have no reference at all to the conversion of an East Anglian king. They remain puzzling – as does the burial as a whole. Its latest investigator sees in it ‘an extravagant and defiant non-Christian gesture’.¹⁹ His judgements invite respect but need not command assent. I am more impressed by the religious neutrality of Mound 1. This very neutrality, or inconclusiveness, may in itself have something to hint to us about the hesitant process of royal conversion.

Moshoeshoe of Lesotho, whose words are quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, was far removed in time and space from the new Constantines of early medieval Gaul and Britain. His kingdom and its people were widely – but not unrecognizably – different from those of Clovis or Edwin. Yet his encounter with that Christian faith presented to him by the representatives of the Société des Missions Évangéliques de Paris echoes some of the themes that are sounded for us in the pages of Gregory of Tours and Bede.²⁰

The most disruptive chain of events in the life of south-east Africa in the early nineteenth century was the rise of the Zulu empire under Shaka. It was aggressive and organized for war. Before Shaka’s death in 1828 his Zulus had had a destabilizing effect upon the neighbouring peoples, long remembered by them as the Faqane or the Mfecane, literally ‘forced migration’, by extension ‘the crushing of the peoples’. Roughly speaking, the rise of the Zulu empire had the same sort of effects upon nearby peoples such as the Sotho as the rise of the Hun empire had upon the German peoples in the fourth and fifth centuries. Moshoeshoe, often abbreviated to Moshesh, created a kingdom for some of these Sotho people which he ruled with skill and statesmanship for nearly fifty years until his death in 1870 at the age of about eightyfour. This kingdom was the nucleus of the state we know today as Lesotho.

In 1824 Moshoeshoe had established a new royal settlement at Thaba Bosiu, an isolated tableland protected by cliffs which rose above the upper waters of the river Caledon some hundred miles above its confluence with the Orange river. It was there that three members of the Paris Société approached him in 1833, and at the foot of this natural fortress that they established their first mission station. It was a proximity that echoes the close spatial association of royalty and mission so often found in early medieval Europe. Thus in 635 St Aidan would establish his monastic mission station at Lindisfarne, within sight of the royal rock-fortress of Bamburgh. Moshoeshoe had wanted the missionaries to come to his kingdom for reasons that arose from the Zulu Faqane. Its effects of destabilization and demoralization had led him, a thoughtful man (as Bede presents Edwin), to wonder about the efficacy of his traditional religious observances. How could the ancestors and spirits have let these things occur? – if they really were as powerful as he had been taught to believe. Second, the Faqane had pushed his people into closer proximity to the white man. The British government at the Cape was a long way off but the Afrikaners were close at hand, some of them even beginning to cross to the northern side of the Orange river in search of new pastures for their flocks. The missionaries were outsiders, neutrals. They might help Moshoeshoe to cope with this unfamiliar world which threatened to encroach upon his people. They were baruti, teachers, who might initiate him into the secrets of the white man’s power.

Circumstances were such, therefore, that a friendly rapport was established between king and missionaries at the outset. With one of the three in particular, Eugène Casalis, Moshoeshoe struck up a warm friendship. The king showed a keen interest in Christianity. He would discuss the faith for hours on end with Casalis, encouraged his people to listen to the missionaries’ teaching, and put no obstacles in the path of individual converts. Every Sunday Moshoeshoe would don European clothes and descend from Thaba Bosiu to attend divine service at the mission chapel which had been built by workmen supplied by him free of charge. At the end of the sermon he would add his own comments on it for the edification of the congregation. One of the missionaries recorded that these royal glosses ‘often conveyed the essence of what they had been saying in words that made it more intelligible to the rest of the congregation without distorting it’. After church the king would dine with Casalis and his Scottish wife at the mission house.

Clothes and dinners were not the only trappings of Christian civilization which appealed to Moshoeshoe. He developed a taste for European horses, saddlery, wagons, firearms, agricultural implements and household utensils. He employed a deserter from the British army to build him a house of stone. Another mason whom he employed, Josias Hoffmann, later became the first president (1854–5) of the Orange Free State. He planted wheat, fruit trees and vegetables under missionary guidance. He had the greatest respect for literacy, but though he struggled hard he never quite mastered the art of writing. He adopted the European habit of issuing written laws ‘with the advice and concurrence of the great men of our tribe’: these edicts were printed in the Sesotho vernacular on a missionary printing press.

The presence and skills of the missionaries enhanced Moshoeshoe’s prestige. Under his rule the kingdom found stability and began to enjoy prosperity. The king was convinced that this was the fruit of Christianity. ‘It is the Gospel that is the source of the prosperity and peace which you enjoy,’ he told his subjects in 1842. Trade prospered under royal encouragement, regulated in one of Moshoeshoe’s written ordinances. Coin began to replace barter as a means of exchange. Casalis and his colleagues encouraged the peaceful consolidation and expansion of Moshoeshoe’s power: both parties profited from it. The string of mission stations gradually founded as offspring of the original at Thaba Bosiu was rightly perceived as useful by the king. They helped to encourage peaceful nucleated settlement; they assisted to consolidate the royal hold upon new territory; they performed a defensive function for local people and livestock in troubled times. As for the outside world, Casalis acted as a kind of secretary for foreign affairs to Moshoeshoe. Surviving diplomatic correspondence is in Casalis’s hand, subscribed by the king with a cross. Everything looked as if it were going the missionaries’ way.

Casalis and his colleagues made many converts in Lesotho. But the king, finally and after much anxious hesitation, was not among them. In deference to missionary teaching Moshoeshoe decreed changes in some of the most intimate areas of Sotho life, affecting marriage customs, initiation rituals, resort to witches and burial practices. Some of these initiatives provoked opposition. Moshoeshoe had to restore the traditional initiation rituals in all their gruesomeness, and his attempts to change marriage customs met with resentment and resistance. One of the leaders of the opposition was Tsapi, Moshoeshoe’s chief diviner, a man respected and feared for his power to foretell the future and to communicate with the spirit world. In 1839 there was an epidemic of measles. Moshoeshoe’s ancestors appeared to Tsapi and told him that ‘the children of Thaba Bosiu die because Moshoeshoe is polluted and because the evening prayers offend the ancestral spirits’. The king’s son Molapo accepted Christianity and was baptized, but apostasized a few years later. Even though three of Moshoeshoe’s wives and two of his leading counsellors became Christians, there was strong opposition at court. Moshoeshoe realized that to commit himself to Christianity would be to split his kingdom. So he never did.

There is much for the early medievalist to ponder in the story of the coming of Christianity to Lesotho. How much more we might learn could we but eavesdrop on some heavenly conversation between Casalis and Augustine, or Moshoeshoe and Ethelbert. Whimsical fancies aside, all we need note here is that early medieval missionaries were in general successful in persuading kings to declare themselves adherents of Christianity. However, as they were well aware, this was just a first step. Round and behind these new Constantines were ranked their warrior aristocracies. How were these men, and their often formidable womenfolk, to be brought to the faith? Some answers will be suggested in the next two chapters.

* The ornaments included some 300 golden bees, later to be interpreted as a symbol of French royalty and adopted as part of his imperial insignia by Napoleon I.

* A momentary digression on his name, usually rendered Chlodovechus in our Latin sources, representing a vernacular Chlodovech, with two strong gutturals. In the course of time the gutturals softened, to give something like Lodovec, which could be Latinized as Lodovecus, Ludovicus. From this descend the names Ludwig, Ludovic and Louis, all synonyms of Clovis.