Clovis I

Clovis I was king of the Franks from 481 until his death in 511 and the founder of the Merovingian dynasty. Beginning as one of several minor Frankish kings in what is now Belgium, he conquered most of Roman Gaul, eliminated his Frankish rivals, and converted to Catholic Christianity, a choice that bound his kingdom to the Church and to the Gallo-Roman population. He is often seen as the founder of France, though the kingdom he left was divided among his sons and differed greatly from the later French state.

Almost everything known about Clovis comes from the Histories of Gregory, bishop of Tours, written in the 580s and 590s, about seventy years after the king's death. Gregory presents Clovis as a new Constantine, a ruler chosen by God whose conversion justified his victories, and he arranges the reign in neat five-year intervals that historians regard as largely artificial. The few earlier sources, including letters written by bishops to Clovis and a life of Saint Genevieve, add valuable details and sometimes contradict Gregory. As a result many dates in Clovis's life, including that of his baptism, are uncertain, and some of the most famous stories may be later embellishments.

Clovis was born around 466, the son of Childeric I, king of the Salian Franks based around Tournai, in modern Belgium, and of Basina, said to have been a Thuringian queen. The dynasty took its name from Merovech, supposedly Childeric's father, about whom nothing reliable is known. Childeric had fought alongside Roman commanders in northern Gaul and probably held a Roman military post; his grave, discovered at Tournai in 1653, contained a seal ring with his name, gold jewellery and a Roman officer's brooch. The Franks were then divided among several kings, and Gaul was split between the Visigoths in the south-west, the Burgundians in the south-east, Frankish and Alamannic peoples in the north-east and a Roman enclave around Soissons, cut off from Italy after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

Clovis succeeded his father in 481, at about fifteen.

In 486 Clovis defeated Syagrius, the ruler of the Roman territory around Soissons, sometimes described as the last Roman outpost in northern Gaul. Syagrius fled to the Visigoths, who handed him over to be killed. Gregory tells how, after the victory, a Frankish warrior smashed a precious vase that Clovis wished to return to a bishop, and how the king later split the man's skull with an axe during an inspection of the troops, a story intended to show both his respect for the Church and his ruthless authority.

Clovis then expanded steadily. Around 493 he married Clotilde, a Catholic princess of the Burgundian royal house, and married his sister to Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogothic king of Italy. He defeated the Alamanni, a people of the upper Rhine, in a battle that Gregory dates to around 496 and places at Tolbiac, near Cologne, though the date and place are disputed. He intervened in a Burgundian civil war around 500, without lasting gain.

In 507 he attacked the Visigothic kingdom of Toulouse, presenting the war as a campaign against Arian heretics who held Catholic lands. At Vouillé, near Poitiers, the Franks defeated the Visigoths, and Clovis is said to have killed their king, Alaric II, with his own hand. The Visigoths lost almost all their territory north of the Pyrenees, keeping only a coastal strip around Narbonne, while Ostrogothic intervention prevented Clovis from reaching the Mediterranean. After the victory, the eastern Roman emperor Anastasius sent Clovis an honorary consulship or similar title, which he celebrated at Tours by riding in procession and distributing gold.

The Franks had remained pagan when most other Germanic rulers in the West, including the Goths, Vandals and Burgundian kings, had adopted Arian Christianity, a form of the faith that held the Son to be subordinate to the Father and was rejected as heresy by the Catholic bishops of the Roman population. According to Gregory, Clotilde urged Clovis to convert for years. When his army was close to defeat in battle against the Alamanni, he called on Clotilde's God for help and promised to be baptised if he won. He was baptised on Christmas Day by Remigius, bishop of Reims, together with, Gregory says, more than three thousand of his warriors.

Gregory implies a date around 496, but a letter from Bishop Avitus of Vienne congratulating Clovis on his baptism, and other evidence, have led many historians to place it later, somewhere between 498 and 508, and some think Clovis had seriously considered Arian Christianity before choosing the Catholic form. Whatever its timing and motives, the decision mattered. It gave the king the support of the Gallo-Roman bishops, who held great influence in the cities, and eased the merging of Franks and Romans under one ruler, while it set the Frankish kingdom apart from the Arian kingdoms around it. It also helped make Gaul a lasting centre of Latin Christianity.

In his last years Clovis made himself sole king of the Franks. Gregory recounts, with evident approval of the result if not the means, a series of murders: Clovis encouraged the son of Sigibert, king of the Franks at Cologne, to kill his father, then had the son killed and took the kingdom himself; he captured and executed the kings Chararic and Ragnachar and several of their relatives. Gregory adds that Clovis later lamented that he had no kinsmen left, not from grief but in the hope of discovering any survivor who might be disposed of.

Clovis made Paris his principal residence, and there he built a church dedicated to the Holy Apostles, later the abbey of Sainte-Geneviève. He is generally credited with the first written version of the law of the Salian Franks, the Pactus Legis Salicae, a code largely concerned with compensation payments for crimes, though its exact date is debated. In July 511 he summoned the bishops of his kingdom to a council at Orléans, which regulated church discipline and confirmed the close partnership between the king and the episcopate.

Clovis died in Paris, traditionally on 27 November 511, at about forty-five, and was buried in his church of the Holy Apostles; Clotilde was later buried beside him. His kingdom was divided among his four sons, based at Reims, Orléans, Paris and Soissons. This custom of partition caused repeated civil wars among his descendants, but the Frankish Kingdom as a whole endured, and Merovingian kings reigned until 751, when the Carolingian dynasty, the family of Charlemagne, took the throne with papal approval.

Later French monarchs treated Clovis as the first Christian king of France. The legend that a dove brought holy oil from heaven for his baptism, first recorded in the ninth century, made Reims the place where French kings were anointed for a thousand years, and the name Clovis, in its later form Louis, was borne by eighteen kings of France. Germans and Belgians have also claimed him as a forerunner. Modern historians see him as a warlord of the post-Roman age who built a powerful kingdom out of the remains of Roman Gaul, and whose choice of the Catholic faith shaped the religious map of western Europe.