Metro Stop Paris

by Gregor Dallas

  In a sense, it was the Roman functionaries who turned out to be the winners in the initial conflict. By the middle of the fifth century nearly all of the warrior elite was Christian. They were Christian, but they were not Catholic—or rather, one should say, not Chalcedonian, after the Council of Chalcedon held in Greece in 425 which affirmed the doctrine of the Holy Trinity: "I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth. And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Saviour, Conceived by the Holy Spirit. . ."

  Three gods in one! All this was far too complicated for illiterate military commanders to understand, so they adopted the simpler message of the missionary German monk Ulfila, who borrowed his heretical ideas from the Egyptian priest Arius. Arius made the Christian doctrine so much more understandable: since there was only one God, Jesus Christ could not possibly be his equal. Most of the Germanic military caste became Arian, while virtually all the Gallo-Roman churchmen— who administered the provinces and cities of Gaul on behalf of these illiterate soldiers—remained steadfastly Chalcedonian, that is, Catholic.

  The whole future of Christianity in Europe stood on this division. Christianity swayed upon a delicate balance between the Trinitarian faith of the educated administrators and the simpler Arian heresy of the powerful warriors. Catholic, Gallo-Roman Lutetia was one of the keys to the plot.

  But we know tantalizingly little detail. There are virtually no contemporary documents on this critical moment of transition from the ancient Roman world to the medieval Christian world. Virtually all we do know was passed down to us byword of mouth, through myths, poetry and fables that were only written down centuries —and sometimes a millennium—later. Yet what powerful myths they were! The fifth century is the century of King Arthur, who was probably a Roman commander who stayed in Britain after the departure of the Roman army in 410, the year Rome was sacked by Alaric. The tragic tale of Tristan and Isolde has its origins in the fifth century. It was the fifth-century movements of the Burgundian court along the frontiers of the Empire that gave rise to the tales of Prince Siegfried, Brunhild, Krimhild and Hagen, which were eventually incorporated into the thirteenth-century German epic poem the Nibelungenlied. The fifth century was also the age of massive conversions to Christianity, eventually recounted centuries later in the medieval lives of saints. Over time, collective memory adorned these stories with dragons, sea-monsters, fairies, unicorns and angels. It is not reliable history.

  All the same, we know more about multicultural Gaul than any other part of the declining Western Roman Empire. The story one can trace reveals the way in which Europe, and Paris, turned Christian. Around Eastertide, 451, there occurred a second major invasion of Gaul, led by Attila the Hun, the "Scourge of God." The Huns, so often identified with the German aggressor in twentieth-century world wars, were not actually German. They have been traced to the Hunnic Empire, destroyed by the Chinese around 35 BC, and they may well have been the cause of the initial collision on the eastern end of Eurasia's train that would send the Germans tumbling into Gaul. Attila crossed the Roman frontier at Metz with an assorted collection of German tribesmen as allies. Metz was flattened, and from there the vast army of horsemen headed straight for Lutetia, where there was absolute panic. The Christian faith of the Parisians (the Parish) was put to the test—and they passed with flying colours. The year 451 is one of the most heroic moments in the city's history.

  The strong voice that united the Catholic Trinitarian Parisians was that of a woman, Geneviève, destined to become patron saint of the city. Geneviève had inherited an immense fortune from her Gallo-Roman father, an administrator of landed estates who lived in Nanterre. Her mother was a Frank. The story is told that as a child she had had a prophetic vision of her religious vocation; right through the second half of the fifth century she directed the military, pohtical and financial affairs of Lutetia, pouring her money into huge building projects, such as that of the basilica of Saint-Denis. She became one of the ablest negotiators of the age, playing one Germanic tribe off against the other. Paris under Geneviève was like an independent kingdom, a small, ordered, Trinitarian kernel of Christian life in a sea of chaos.

  The representative of Roman authority—very much on the wane at the time of Attila's invasion—was Aetius, Master of the Cavalry, an honorary title bestowed by Rome. Through Geneviève's good offices, Aetius was able to mount an alliance of Germanic tribesmen equal in strength to Attila's forces. Attila was thus turned back. Outside Chalons his army was cornered on the Catalaunian Plains. It was a battle of the nations, one of the bloodiest in late Roman times, where as many as fifty thousand men on either side fought to the death. Attila was the loser. He fled across the Rhine and led a new army into northern Italy, where, in bed with a piece of female loot, he burst an artery and died in 452. Jealous little Emperor Valentinian III in Rome had Aetius murdered the same year. Roman authority had never looked so petty: in 455 Rome was again sacked, this time by the Vandals. But during all this time the Trinitarian Parisians stood tall, proud of the stunning defeat they had inflicted on Attila at the Catalaunian Plains.

  The prestige of Paris and the weakness of Rome obviously had an effect on the balance of power in Gaul: the north, for the first time since Julius Caesar's conquests in the first century BC, had more power than the south. The vacuum left by helpless Rome had to be filled. The powers in the north shifted south. It was that shift south which determined the whole future structure of Christianity—even in the Byzantine east.

  The dominant people in northern Gaul were the Franks, who, during the preceding century, had been spreading into Belgium II. The Franks— Freie Ranken, literally "free men" but more frequently translated as "wild ferocious men"—gave their name to "France." They were a very special people. They seem to have been a confederation of different tribes. In the fifth century a distinction was still made between the Salian Franks of Belgium II and the Rhenish or Ripuarian Franks who had settled astride the Rhine in the area around Cologne. The Rhenish Franks had fought on the side of Attila on the Catalaunian Plains, and they paid the price; the Salian Franks fought for Aetius and Geneviève, and they reaped their reward.

  None of the Franks were Christian. It made them quite distinct from the other Germanic warriors. Even after the war against Attila they continued to worship the old German gods of Wotan and Thor. Would they convert? The question was critical. If the Franks had become, like their German brethren, Arian heretics, the religious history of monotheism in the Western world would have been very different. In all likelihood, the Catholic Trinitarian faith would have disappeared. Islam, a simplification of the theology of one God—reducing Christ incarnate to the status of a prophet—shows certain similarities to the old Arian heresy, which like Islam was tailor-made for a warrior caste. Without the concept of the Holy Trinity, the relationship of Christianity to Islam would have been very different; one can even posit the possibility that the rise of Islam would never have happened at all—for there would have been no need.

  But that, of course, is not what happened. The bishops of Gaul, vestiges of a Gallo-Roman aristocracy, far preferred to deal with a pagan power than with armies of Germanic Arian heretics. When Clovis was elected King of the Salian Franks at Tournai in 481, he found himself courted by all the bishops, from southern as well as northern Gaul. "The men who follow me do not wish to abandon their Gods," he is supposed to have stubbornly retorted to the saintly Bishop of Reims, Remi.

  All the kings of France trace their ancestry back to Clovis. There are enough books on him to fill a library. And yet we know very little about him. There are no more than half a dozen contemporary documents from his reign of thirty years (481-511). Nine tenths of what has been written about Clovis is derived from the History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours, who only began his work in 576, sixty-five years after Clovis's death. The six surviving documents contradict Gregory on several major points, such as the dates of battles and, most significantly, on the place and time of his Christian baptism,
which could have occurred at any moment between 496 and 508. In 1996 French Catholics organized a mammoth fifteenth centenary at Reims, attended by Pope John Paul II and the President of the Republic, Jacques Chirac. But nothing could be less certain than either the place or the timing. Those illiterate "Dark Ages" remain for us very dark.

  We know next to nothing of his origins. Most of the Arian kings had developed a fairly elaborate genealogy by the end of the fifth century, many of them claiming ancestors, through marriage, among the emperors of Rome. Poor pagan Clovis could pretend to none of this. His real name, in fact, was Chlodweg. Transcribing it into Latin was no simple task; it became Chlodovens, Clodovecus, Hlodevecus and Clotovecus; say these terms aloud and a rich variety of sounds flows forth, from which one may detect the roots of Hlodwig, Lhodovicus, Lodewijk, Ludovicus, Luduinus, Lodoys, Loys and Loés. It is doubtful that his murderous family ever referred to him as "Loulou," but it is certain that eighteen French kings and even more princes of the line were baptized "Louis" because they claimed the Christian convert Chlodweg to be their ancestor. Even Emperor Napoleon laid such a claim.

  Since Clovis had no forebears he did what most kings do in such circumstances: he invented a descent from the gods. Clodion the Hairy— or Chlogion, or Chlodobed—is the first human being to be recorded in the Clovis genealogy, and that only went back to the 440s when Aetius, King of the Romans, referred to him as King of the Franks. The seventh-century group of monkish scribblers, known collectively as "Fredegar," elaborated on the story. They told how his wife used to go to the beach (possibly the Frankish resort of Le Touquet) and enjoy a roll in the sand with a man of her pick. One day a dragon emerged from the waves, cast an eye on this curvaceous young queen and, without so much as a flick of a serpent's tail, possessed her. From this union was born the legendary Mérovée, or Merovech, the grandfather of Clovis and father of all the Merovingian kings.

  Absolutely nothing is known about him. The medievalist Michel Rouche holds the plausible thesis that Clodion the Hairy died around 450, for which there is some evidence, and that it was over the division of the Frankish kingdom between brothers that Attila intervened, launching his terrible invasion on Metz in 451. As already noted, the Franks were divided at that time. Merovech could well have fought on the side of Aetius, and it seems that he died, possibly of the same gory cause, at the time the latter was murdered. His son and successor was Childeric, Clovis's father. In the 470s he got into a quarrel with Geneviève of Paris. In a demonstration of strength, he blockaded the city; Geneviève built her own fleet and sailed upriver to Troyes, where she loaded her boats with wheat and, at her own expense, brought the grain back safely to her city, ground it and made the flour into bread, which she distributed free to the Parisians. Geneviève was always the saint, and Childeric's son Clovis, very wisely, would always treat her as such. The link between Catholic Geneviève and pagan Clovis was forged in Frankish iron.

  We have no idea what Clovis looked like. His hair must have been long. Julius Caesar referred to the northern half of Gaul as Gallia Co-mata, "Hairy Gaul," because the military commanders of the Germanic tribesmen in those parts wore their hair long as a sign, like Samson, of their strength. Among the Franks the tradition never died. The greatest shame for a Frankish king or prince was to have his head shaven—a ritual Clovis frequently performed before having his rivals put to death, frequently by his own hand. His followers shaved the back and sides of their heads save the crest which they dyed red, like punk rockers. They wore neither moustaches nor beards. They passed on into history the scents of the forest—sweat, blood, onion and beer.

  Clovis, elected King in the area that is now Belgium, looked south to the sun and the warmth of the Mediterranean. All the northern kings looked without benevolence upon the power vacuum developing in the south. A game of diplomacy and war was launched at that time which, already, is recognizably European.

  Roman power in Gaul had been reduced to Paris and its surroundings—though there were legions of Roman administrators spread throughout Gaul, many of them now leading figures of the Trinitarian Church. Syagrius, the grandson of Aetius, called himself "King of the Romans," a title he justified through a series of campaigns he had fought against the Saxons and Bretons in the area around Angers; he kept a civilized court at Soissons, famous for its arms industry, while remaining on close terms with Geneviève and her Parisians. Paris itself was sandwiched between the pagan Franks to the north and, to the south, the extensive domain of King Euric's Arian Visigoths, who kept their royal court at Toulouse.

  The grandest court of the time—the envy of all in Germanic Europe—was that of the Burgundians. But, like many kingdoms in the south, their house was divided. When Chilperic was King the greatest writers of the age used to attend his court at Lyon, including the poet Archbishop Sidonius Apollinaris of Clermont and the future saint, Avit, bishop of Vienne (just south of Lyon). Chilperic may have been an Arian heretic, but his wife, Caretena, and her children, Clothild and Sedeleube, pronounced their creed in the Chalcedonian manner. Caretena, wrote Sidonius Apollinaris, "purged the ears of her husband when they were infected by the poison of insinuations"; her beautiful daughters burned with the faith of Catholic missionaries. Gregory of Tours tells us that it was Gondebaud in Vienne who had his brother Chilperic's throat slit and Caretena thrown down a well; the two pretty Catholic daughters were obhged to live in Gondebaud's new court in Lyon until they eventually moved to Geneva and the coutt of another murderous uncle, Godgiselus.

  "Fredegar" tells how Clothild, the elder of the girls, used to bend down and wash the feet of delighted pilgrims, among them ambassadors sent by Clovis. Their engaging tales, reported to their King, inspired Clovis to demand the hand of fair Clothild, though he was married at the time to a Thuringian princess. The deal was struck and an important alliance was forged in the wedding bed. The pagan king— married to a Catholic Christian and linked, through the good work of his diplomats, to the Catholic saint in Paris—now felt confident enough to begin his march south to sun and civilization.

  Besides Visigoths in Toulouse and Burgundians in Lyon, Clovis knew he also had to contend with Theodoric the Great's Ostrogoths, who extended across the whole of northern Italy. Theodoric had built up an alliance with all the other Arian kings in Western Europe. He also represented the crucial Christian link with the important Byzantine Empire to the east, with its emperors at Constantinople.

  For a German king, Theodoric was a most civilized man. He had enjoyed the benefit of being held hostage as a child by Zeno in Constantinople, where he learned the Greek and Roman classics, so that he would become one of the few German patrons of writers. Zeno had not appreciated the overthrow in 476 of the last Western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, and so let loose his hostage, learned Theodoric, in northern Italy A long war of attrition between the two German kings of Italy ended with Odoacer's defeat at Ravenna. How relieved Odoacer felt when he was thereupon invited with all his commanders to a great banquet held by Theodoric. The chance for a little collusion between the clans? Odoacer sat down next to the scholarly Theodoric, who pulled out a dagger and nimbly slit his neighbour's throat—a sign to his followers to slaughter all the other guests. Thus did Theodoric become Great, the new master of Italy and the wise man of Europe.

  Theodoric bears some resemblance to Napoleon. After murdering all of Odoacer's men, he arranged a network of conjugal alliances with his German cousins, all of them Arian Christians save pagan Clovis; Theodoric himself married Clovis's sister, Audofleda. Theodoric thus created a ring of Gothic heretics, from the Adriatic to the Atlantic, that left the Catholic bishops of Gaul and the lonely Emperor in Constantinople with the distressing impression that Arian Christianity was triumphant.

  Clovis bears a resemblance to Hitler. He was far too astute to arouse the fears of Theodoric's mighty marital network that could be arrayed against him with the snap of a Gothic dagger. He took careful note of the chaos developing in the two southern kingdoms of Gau
l— King Euric of the Visigoths died in Toulouse in 484 and his son, Alaric II, had his hands full defending his throne against other claimants; the Burgundians of Lyon were divided by the rivalry between Gondebaud and Godgiselus. In these southern realms, he leaned on the support he managed to get from the Catholic bishops. They were being harassed by their Arian kings, especially those under Alaric the Visigoth, who did not stop at murder. A long missive from Sidonius Apollinaris to the "Lord Pope Remi,"* the Catholic Bishop of Reims and adviser to Clovis, gives an idea of just how flattering these southern churchmen could be. Sidonius Apollinaris and his learned colleagues fell in love with Remi's Latin sermons. "We have learnt most of these works by heart and have transcribed them all" writes the Archbishop of Clermont. "The feeling is unanimous. It has been declared that there are few capable of writing thus. In effect, there are few authors like this, that is to say, none." This sort of praise was the early medieval equivalent of a Nobel Prize from a committee of judges swayed by politics. The glory reflected, naturally enough, upon the sovereign.

  Like Hitler, Clovis made his first move not against his main rivals, the Visigoths and the Burgundians to the south, but against his neighbour, the "King of the Romans," Syagrius in Soissons. Soissons, with its rich churches untouched by Attila and factories churning out siege bal-listas, shields, swords and axes, was too much of a temptation for a pagan warlord; Syagrius, a Roman without an emperor, was too weak to resist. The last Roman army in Gaul was swiftly crushed outside Sois­sons and Syagrius took political asylum in Toulouse. But he had overlooked the force behind Theodoric's grand marital alliance, to which Clovis loyally appealed. Honest King Alaric bowed his head and handed Syagrius over, his arms bound, at a checkpoint on the River Loire. Syagrius was promptly thrown into a dungeon where his throat was discreetly cut. Not a single Catholic bishop is recorded as having defended this last Catholic king in Gaul; they were all watching for Clovis's next move.