Gregory of Tours

The man later venerated as Saint Gregory of Tours was born Georgius Florentius around 538 in Clermont, the chief city of the Auvergne in central Gaul ^[1]. His family belonged to the Gallo-Roman senatorial aristocracy, a class that had survived the collapse of Roman rule in the West by transferring its energies into the leadership of the church. Bishops, not senators, now carried the prestige of old Roman families, and Gregory's relatives held an extraordinary number of episcopal seats ^[2].

Both sides of his family could point to bishops among their ancestors. His father, Florentius, died while Gregory was still a boy, and the child was raised in part by his uncle Gallus, bishop of Clermont, and later by Avitus, a priest who succeeded to the same see ^[1]. Gregory himself later claimed that all but five of the bishops of Tours before him had been his kinsmen. Whatever exaggeration lay in that boast, it reflected a real dynastic pattern in the sixth-century Gallic church ^[2].

A sickly childhood shaped his piety. Gregory wrote that a serious illness in his youth ended after a vow made at a saint's shrine, an experience that fixed his lifelong conviction that the holy dead intervened directly in human affairs ^[3]. He took the name Gregorius in honor of his mother's great-grandfather, Gregory of Langres, a bishop counted among the saints of the family.

Gregory's education was religious rather than classical. He studied scripture and the lives of saints under Avitus in Clermont, and he later apologized in his writings for his rough Latin, contrasting himself with the polished grammarians of an earlier age ^[2]. Modern scholars have argued that this self-deprecation was partly a rhetorical pose, since his prose, while unclassical, is vivid, controlled, and well suited to storytelling ^[4].

He was ordained a deacon, and his devotion to Saint Martin, the fourth-century soldier turned bishop whose tomb at Tours was the most famous shrine in Gaul, drew him repeatedly to that city. In 563 he traveled to Martin's tomb seeking a cure for illness, one of several healings he attributed to the saint's power ^[3].

In 573 the see of Tours fell vacant, and Gregory was chosen bishop with the backing of King Sigibert of Austrasia and Queen Brunhild, in whose territory Tours then lay ^[1]. He was consecrated at Reims rather than in his own city, a sign that royal favor, not local election alone, had secured his appointment. He was about thirty-five years old and would hold the office for the remaining twenty-one years of his life.

Tours was no quiet posting. The city sat on a contested frontier between rival Merovingian kingdoms, and it changed royal masters several times during Gregory's episcopate ^[5]. Within a few years of his consecration, Sigibert was assassinated and Tours passed to his brother Chilperic I, a king Gregory came to detest and famously described as the Nero and Herod of his age ^[1].

The most dangerous moment of Gregory's career came in 580 at the royal villa of Berny, where he was tried before a council of bishops on a charge of spreading slander against Chilperic's queen, Fredegund. Gregory cleared himself by oath, saying mass at three altars, and the accuser, a count named Leudast, was punished in his place ^[5]. The episode showed both the peril of episcopal office under suspicious kings and the standing Gregory had built among his fellow bishops.

His duties went far beyond politics. As bishop he administered church property, judged disputes, ransomed captives, fed the poor during epidemics, and defended the right of sanctuary at Saint Martin's shrine, where fugitives from royal anger regularly took refuge ^[3]. After Chilperic's murder in 584, Gregory found steadier relations with King Guntram of Burgundy and with the young Childebert II, and he served both as a negotiator in the treaty dealings between their courts ^[5].

Anyone asking what Gregory of Tours achievements amount to must begin with the Ten Books of Histories, the work later mislabeled the History of the Franks ^[4]. Gregory opened with the creation of the world, moved quickly through biblical and Roman history, and then slowed to a detailed, often eyewitness account of Gaul in his own lifetime. The later books record events almost as they happened, giving historians a running chronicle of Merovingian politics, plagues, church councils, and daily life that no other source matches ^[1].

The Histories are famous for their unforgettable scenes: Clovis weeping over his lack of kinsmen after arranging their deaths, Fredegund's ruthless intrigues, drunken feuds among the citizens of Tours. Gregory wrote as a moralist, sorting kings into those who protected churches and those who plundered them, yet he reported enough inconvenient detail that modern readers can often see past his judgments ^[4]. Walter Goffart and other scholars have shown that the work is carefully constructed satire and moral instruction, not the naive jotting it was once assumed to be ^[4].

His hagiographic output was just as large. Gregory composed the Glory of the Martyrs, the Glory of the Confessors, the Life of the Fathers, and four books on the miracles of Saint Martin, together forming eight books of miracle literature ^[3]. These collections, dismissed by earlier generations as credulous, are now mined by historians for evidence about disease, travel, agriculture, and the religious habits of ordinary people in sixth-century Gaul ^[3]. He also wrote a commentary on the Psalms, now mostly lost, and a treatise on calculating the church offices by the stars ^[2].

The final decade of Gregory's life was busy with building and diplomacy. He rebuilt the cathedral of Tours, which had burned before his episcopate, and restored churches associated with Saint Martin ^[1]. In 587 he was involved in the negotiations surrounding the Treaty of Andelot between Guntram and Childebert II, and his account of the agreement preserves its text ^[5].

He continued revising the Histories almost until his death, carrying the narrative down to 591 ^[4]. In a closing passage he listed his complete works and begged future clergy of Tours to keep his books intact and uncorrected, a plea that suggests how deliberately he thought about his legacy as an author ^[4].

Gregory died at Tours on 17 November 594, according to the traditional dating, at about fifty-six years of age ^[1]. He was buried in the basilica of Saint Martin, joining the patron he had served for two decades. The church soon counted him among its saints, and his feast is kept on 17 November ^[6].

Who was Gregory of Tours to later ages? For medieval readers he was chiefly a saint and a source of edifying miracle stories. For modern historians he is indispensable. Nearly everything known about the early Merovingian kings, the sons and grandsons of Clovis, comes through his pen, and the study of sixth-century Gaul is in large part the study of Gregory ^[5].

His reputation as a writer has risen sharply since the twentieth century. Where nineteenth-century scholars treated him as an artless witness to a barbarous age, historians such as Walter Goffart, Martin Heinzelmann, and Ian Wood have read him as a sophisticated author with theological designs, a narrator who arranged his material to argue that kingdoms prosper when rulers heed bishops and saints ^[4]. Heinzelmann in particular reconstructed how Gregory's family background and ecclesiology shaped the whole architecture of the Histories ^[2].

Among the durable Gregory of Tours facts is this: his books survived because the clergy of Tours and monastic copyists across Francia valued them, and more than fifty medieval manuscripts of the Histories still exist in whole or in part ^[4]. Translations, most widely Lewis Thorpe's English version for Penguin Classics, keep his stories of feuding queens, wonder-working tombs, and anxious bishops in the hands of general readers, fifteen centuries after he wrote them ^[7].