Clovis I Converts to Christianity - Foundation of Christian France
Clovis was baptised at Reims around 496, and the Franks became the only Germanic people to adopt Catholic Christianity directly rather than through Arianism. That distinction is the whole significance of the event. The Visigoths in Spain, the Ostrogoths in Italy, the Vandals in Africa and the Burgundians had all been converted by Arian missionaries in the fourth century, which left them permanently separated from the Catholic populations they ruled — a ruling caste with a different church, unable to marry into or fully absorb their subjects. Clovis had no such problem. Gregory of Tours tells the story of a battle against the Alamanni going badly, a vow to Christ if he won, and the victory that followed; his Burgundian wife Clotilde had been working on him for years. Three thousand of his warriors were baptised with him. The practical consequences were immediate. The Gallo-Roman aristocracy and the bishops — who between them ran the towns, the courts and the schools of Gaul — could serve him without heresy, and did. He acquired an administrative class, a claim to fight his Arian neighbours as a champion of orthodoxy, and the recognition of the eastern emperor. He destroyed the Visigoths at Vouillé in 507 and took Aquitaine. The Merovingian dynasty he founded ruled for two and a half centuries, and the alliance between the Frankish monarchy and the papacy runs from here to Charlemagne's coronation in 800. France's kings were called Most Christian for it. Every Arian kingdom in the west was destroyed or converted within a century and a half.
- Year: 496 CE
- Category: Cultural
