by David Keys
The wars of the second half of the sixth century were very much Uí Néill conflicts or the results of them—often battles in which Leinstermen or Meathmen or Ulstermen tried to repel or throw off the ever-expanding Uí Néill yoke. The period from the seventh century to the ninth was an era in which the Uí Néill family, originally from the remote northwest, increasingly brought most of Ireland under their direct or indirect control.
It was this loose hegemonic unification that paved the way for the gradual emergence in the ninth to eleventh centuries of a single united Irish kingdom. Uí Néill Ireland was thus the ultimate political ancestor of the modern Irish nation-state. As in England, the plague had been midwife to a nation.
But it was not simply in political terms that famine and plague forged the character and nature of Ireland. In religious terms the experience of the famine and the plague appear also to have had an effect, as the plague years and immediate post-plague period saw the founding of the first really important churches and monasteries in Ireland. Four are specifically mentioned in the various Irish annals: the monasteries of Derry (in 546), Clonmacnoise (sometime in the period 543–548), Bangor (in 557), and Clonfert (in 562). Although Ireland’s aristocracy had been officially Christian for two or three generations and there must have been many small churches already in existence, the churches founded in this era were the first to be recorded in the annals.
It is likely that the experience of the great famine and the three epidemics had created a strengthened demand for divine intervention. The traditional quasi-druidic gods and spirits of popular paganism had not produced a shield against starvation, disease, and death, and there must have been a sincere longing for more effective access to divine protection and an increased chance of life in the hereafter.
Major new churches and monasteries, run as they were by members of the ruling elite, were also important in political terms. If, through the Church, rulers—often Uí Néills—could have both God and people on their side, then vital political as well as religious objectives could be realized. Increasingly, the ecclesiastical expansion ran parallel to the political one. Uí Néill churchmen staged takeovers (probably of doubtful legality) of rival churches and monasteries, just as Uí Néill warriors took over rival territories and kingdoms. But the net long-term religious effect of the plague itself, and the related church-founding phenomenon, was to Christianize the mass of the population to a degree that had not been achieved before. Residual druidic influence must have withered on the vine as Christianity offered salvation to the afflicted and a helping hand to the emerging Uí Néill ruling elite.
The mid-sixth-century catastrophe also forced changes in lifestyle generally. As warfare became endemic (following the geopolitical destabilization), the general level of security seems to have dropped. From the mid–sixth century onward, even the lowest of farmers began to construct defenses around their relatively humble homesteads. Typically they would build small stone ramparts or earthwork enclosures around their farms, mainly in order to protect themselves and their livestock in troubled times. As warfare increased so, no doubt, did banditry and cattle rustling conducted by robber gangs and small armies living off the land. Between the mid–sixth and ninth centuries an estimated seventy thousand of these defensive farm enclosures (now known to archaeologists as ring forts) were built, and forty-five thousand still survive as deserted ruins.5
The chaos and disorder that followed the plague-induced geopolitical destabilization did more than create a security-conscious mentality. It also helped shape the nature of Irish linguistic and literary culture.
Modern Irish is essentially an evolved version of a form of Celtic that came into existence in the late sixth century. Prior to the great famine and the plague epidemics of the middle of that century, the Irish spoke a form of Common Celtic (the ancestor of all the surviving Celtic languages in the British Isles). Then, in the mid– to late sixth century, there was a very rapid linguistic landslide: Many word endings were dropped in a process known to linguists as apocope, and middle syllables were lost in many words in a parallel process known as syncope. What is more, the way words were pronounced changed. A new accent evolved (or an existing one spread more widely) in which very powerful stress was put on the beginnings of words while noninitial long vowels were shortened. Linguists have deduced this by studying the changes in surviving inscriptions and texts from the fourth to the seventh centuries and by applying an understanding of known mechanisms of linguistic change to those texts.
This virtual linguistic revolution took place because of alterations to the demographic balance caused by the mid-sixth-century plague disaster. The old establishment, based as it was in the more densely populated areas of southern and eastern Ireland, was decimated, and new accents from the periphery flowed into the linguistic vacuum as peripheral warlords took advantage of this demographic equalization. Furthermore, as the small traditional literate class was most likely severely reduced in size, there may have been a partial scribal discontinuity, after which new scribes would have been more open to nontraditional linguistic influences. Even the nature of Irish poetry changed, with the traditional long-line meters of ancient Ireland replaced by meters based on Latin Christian hymns.
Amid disaster and untold suffering, protomodern Ireland had been conceived, along with its language, popular religion, and even aspects of its literature. But the climatic events of the mid–sixth century and their epidemiological consequences were also forcing change on the mainland of western Europe.
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F R E N C H G E N E S I S
“When the Plague finally began to rage, so many people were killed off throughout the whole region and the dead bodies were so numerous that it was not even possible to count them. There was such a shortage of coffins and tombstones that ten or more bodies were buried in the same grave. In [one] church alone on a single Sunday, 300 dead bodies were counted. Death came very quickly. An open sore like a snake’s bite appeared in the groin or the armpit, and the man who had it soon died of its poison, breathing his last on the second or third day.”¹
Thus wrote the great sixth-century Gallo-Roman bishop and historian Gregory of Tours in The History of the Franks, describing the depredations of the bubonic plague in the city of Clermont in central France. In Gregory’s century, the disease devastated parts of what is now France on at least four occasions: 543–544, 571–572, 581–584, and 588–590. And just as it helped shape Britain’s future, the pandemic appears to have had a substantial effect on the nature of subsequent French history.
During the first and second centuries B.C., Gaul (the old name for what is now France) was conquered by the Romans. As the centuries wore on, Roman culture and language became firmly established, but in the mid–third century A.D. Germanic peoples—including a group called the Franks—raided deep into Gaul. After several decades they were repulsed, but a century later further incursions took place, and this time the Frankish invaders could not be dislodged. They were allowed to remain as Roman allies on Gallo-Roman territory in what is now Belgium. Then in the fifth century, as the western Roman Empire began to disintegrate under pressure from a plethora of Germanic invaders, the Franks seized parts of northern Gaul and by 507 controlled all of what is now France, except Brittany, Burgundy, and the far south (including Provence). By 537 Burgundy and Provence had also fallen, and the Franks were beginning not only to build an empire but also to see themselves as the heirs of Rome in the west.
They adopted Roman law and language, Roman-style governmental practice and court protocol, the Roman Catholic religion, and even Roman titles. But in one vital and surprising respect, they did not follow Roman precedent: They did not base themselves in the traditional high-status seats of former Roman political power in the southern half of France. The great Roman palaces of Arles and Lyons remained unused—at least by Frankish monarchs.
The reason for this is that by the time the Franks had the opportunity to adopt a southern power base, in the m
id–sixth century, the key southern cities were experiencing a particularly savage decline at the hands of the plague. The pandemic did not affect all of Gaul equally; the more urban south appears to have been hit far worse than the less urban north. As a result (and as in Britain), there was a political and economic realignment, with the once gloriously imperial, once wealthy south losing its appeal from every conceivable point of view.
If the Franks had taken control of the south half a century earlier, they might well have based themselves there, just as the invading Visigoths in Spain had adopted Roman Toledo, the Ostrogoths in Italy had adopted Ravenna, and the Vandals, in what is now Tunisia, had adopted Carthage. But Frankish power began to extend to southern Gaul just half a dozen years before the plague began to wreck the lives and economies of the southern cities in the 540s.
In 543 Arles (and no doubt other southern cities) was decimated. In the 550s or 560s it is possible that plague hit the south again, as it broke out again in other parts of the Mediterranean, but no record has survived. In 571 it returned to devastate Clermont and the Auvergne region, Lyons, Bourges, Dijon, and Chalon-sur-Saône. Then in 581–584 the disease swept through Narbonne, Albi, Nantes, and other unnamed districts, while in 588–590 it decimated Marseilles, Avignon, and the Rhône Valley as far north as the Lyons area.
The plague, of course, affected not only Gaul but most other Mediterranean territories as well. Trade declined throughout the entire area, and by the end of the century the taxes and tolls that could be extracted from the southern ports had shrunk to a level that was no longer attractive to the Frankish political authorities. With trade reduced, population down, and wealth diminished, power evaporated from the former southern Gallo-Roman imperial seats of power. The differential way in which the plague had struck had simply made the south less politically and economically important than it had been, while conversely increasing the power of the north.
The decision by the Frankish kings to stay put in northern Gaul was, in retrospect, a momentous one. It ensured that the Paris basin became the political epicenter of the emerging French state. It probably also ensured that the Frankish kingdom evolved into modern France. A state based in Arles or even Lyons would eventually have had less interest in maintaining control over the north, fringed as it was in later medieval times by potentially aggressive powers in England, Scandinavia, and Germany. It was, by contrast, probably easier for the north to keep the south (flanked partly by the Mediterranean, rather than wall-to-wall rivals) than it would have been for the south to keep the north. In addition, the emergence of the north as the political epicenter of proto-France played a pivotal role in encouraging the development of a North Sea/Channel mercantile economy that helped lead to the eventual rise of Holland, England, and France, as Atlantic rather than Mediterranean powers. This provided them with outlooks that were ultimately global rather than purely Mediterranean- and European-oriented.
The plague also had consequences that were less geopolitical. As cities were faced with mass death, the phenomenon of the plague helped provoke a new public response. Instead of people praying or becoming pilgrims as individuals, entire urban populations embarked on mass pilgrimages. Pilgrimage became a corporate activity, a public exercise in the power of devotion and prayer.
These events—in which thousands of citizens would march in desperation for miles—were known as rogations. The concept had first been invented in the late fifth century in Vienne in southern Gaul in an attempt to solicit divine help in quelling an earthquake. The technique was then refined and became widespread in the mid– and late sixth century as entire urban communities tried to repel successive plague epidemics. (Gregory of Tours refers to the institution of a very large annual rogation near Clermont when the plague first reached France in 543.) In the end, the rogation tradition began to spread beyond the borders of the Frankish empire and gradually became popular all over western Europe.
In the fraught atmosphere of plague-ridden sixth-century France, two other religious phenomena also took hold. From at least the time of the 581–584 outbreak, there appears to have been an increase in official anti-Semitism. In 582 the Frankish king ordered the forcible baptism of a large number of Jews. And in 587 and 590 Gregory of Tours reported in his History of the Franks the emergence of false prophets and saints and even a false Christ. He wrote that as the plague was attacking Marseilles, a man from central France, dressed in animal skins, made his way south. On reaching Arles, he claimed to be Jesus Christ.
“Great crowds of people flocked to see him and brought out their sick,” begins Gregory’s account. “He laid hands upon them, to restore them to health. Those who gathered round him gave him clothes, and gifts of gold and silver. All this he handed over to the poor. He would lie on the ground saying prayer after prayer. Then he would rise to his feet and tell those who stood round to begin worshipping him again.
“He foretold the future, prophesying that some would fall ill and that others would suffer affliction, while to a few he promised good fortune. A great number of people were deceived by him, not only the uneducated, but even priests in orders. More than 3,000 people followed him where ever he went. Then he began to rob and despoil those whom he met on the road, giving to the poor and needy all that he took.
“He drew up a sort of battle line and made ready to attack Aurelius, who was at that time Bishop of the Diocese. He sent messengers ahead to announce his coming, men who danced naked and capered about.
“The Bishop was quite put out. He chose some of the toughest of his servants and told them to go and find what it all meant. One of them, the man in charge, bowed low as if to kiss the man’s knees and then held him tight. He ordered him to be seized and stripped. Then he himself drew his sword and cut him down where he stood. So fell and died this Christ, more worthy to be called an anti-Christ.”
The bubonic plague pandemic that impacted so heavily on France in the sixth century had, of course, originally been triggered by climatic disruption of the wild-rodent ecology of East Africa in the 530s.² But the worldwide climatic problems of that period had also affected French history more directly, with the bizarre behavior of the weather actually stopping a war and quite likely changing the course of French history.
At that time the Frankish world was divided into three kingdoms whose rulers—two brothers and a nephew—were at each other’s throats. Childebert, the king of Paris, and Theudebert, the king of Metz, were about to attack Lothar, king of Soissons. It was through Lothar that the entire Frankish (Merovingian) dynasty continued to flourish after the mid–sixth century, so his death in battle would probably have changed French history forever. There might well have been no Carolingians, no Charlemagne, and no medieval or modern state of France.
But that attack, though planned, never took place. From the account of Gregory of Tours:
“Childebert and Theudebert assembled an army and prepared to march against Lothar. When he heard of this, he realised that he was not strong enough to resist their combined forces.
“Lothar took to the woods, built a great circle of barricades among the trees, and put his trust in the mercy of God. Queen Clothilde [the mother of two of the kings] learned what had happened. She went to the tomb of Saint Martin [in Tours] where she knelt in supplication and spent the whole night praying that civil war might not break out.
“Childebert and Theudebert advanced with their troops, surrounded Lothar’s position and made plans to kill him in the morning. When day dawned, a great storm blew up over the spot where they were encamped. Their tents were blown down. Their equipment was scattered and everything was overturned. There was thunder and lightning and they were bombarded with hailstones.
“They threw themselves on their faces on the ground, where the hail already lay thick, and they were severely lashed by the hailstones which continued to fall. They had no protection except their shields, and they were afraid that they would be struck by the lightning. Their horses were scattered far and wide. The two ki
ngs were cut about by the hailstones as they lay on the ground.
“They did penance to God and begged him to forgive them for having attacked their own kith and kin. None can doubt that this miracle was wrought by Saint Martin through the intercession of the Queen.”
It might seem at first like a somewhat fanciful story, but there are similar accounts of giant hailstones from around the same time, all associated with the 530s climatic downturn, in Britain and in China.³
Certainly if Childebert and Theudebert had succeeded in killing Lothar, a massive war of succession would have broken out within a generation, because there would have been no obvious successors. The Frankish empire might well have disintegrated or been taken over by the Burgundian element within it. In either event, subsequent French history would no doubt have been quite different. Thus perhaps through hailstones, but more definitely through the plague, did the climatic crisis of the 530s change the history of France.
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T H E M A K I N G
O F S P A I N
For Spain, as for so many other nations, the sixth century has a special significance, for in a sense it was then that modern Spain was born.
