Gregory of Tours
Gregory of Tours was the bishop who wrote down what the Merovingian kings did, and nearly everything anyone knows about the Franks in the sixth century - Clovis's conversion, the murdered relatives, the queens who had each other's children killed - is known because he chose to record it and in the order he chose. He was born in 538 at Clermont in the Auvergne into a Gallo-Roman senatorial family that had been supplying bishops to the cities of Gaul for two centuries. Thirteen of the eighteen bishops of Tours before him were relatives. He was sickly, was cured at the tomb of St Martin, and was made bishop of Tours in 573 at thirty-four, which put him in charge of the most important shrine in Gaul and in the path of every king who wanted it. He governed the city for twenty-one years through the wars of Clovis's grandsons, sheltered fugitives in the basilica against the wishes of King Chilperic, whom he called the Nero and Herod of the age. He was tried for slandering Chilperic's queen Fredegund and acquitted on his oath at three altars, and got on rather better with Chilperic's brother Guntram and the young Childebert II, for whom he acted as an envoy. The Ten Books of Histories were written through all of this, in a Latin he apologised for, beginning with the Creation and reaching his own diocese by the fifth book. The account of Clovis vowing to the God of Clotilde on a losing battlefield against the Alamanni, and of the king lamenting that he had no relatives left after killing them, is his. He wrote seven more books on the miracles of the saints, which he thought the more important. He died in 594 and was made a saint himself. Later ages called the work the History of the Franks, which is not what he called it, and read it as the record of a barbarian age, which is not how he saw it: to him the Franks were the Catholic people God had chosen after the Arian Goths, and the sins he listed were the sins of Christians.
- Lived: 538 CE – 594 CE
- Nationality: Gallo-Roman
- Roles: bishop, historian
