The Conversion of Europe

The narrators of these episodes of royal conversion were, of course, churchmen: Gregory of Tours, a bishop; Bede, a monk at Jarrow – what we might call ‘professional Christians’. Is it ever possible to shift the angle of vision and open up a different perspective? Is there, for example, any statement about conversion attributable to a king? By a happy chance there is. It takes the form of a letter from the Visigothic king of Spain, Sisebut, to the Lombard king of Italy, Adaloald, and it was written at much about the time that Ethelburga was travelling north to meet her bridegroom Edwin. The letter was not indeed about conversion from paganism to Christianity but about conversion from one form of Christianity to another. Sisebut was urging Adaloald to abandon Arianism and embrace orthodox Catholicism.16

Care is always needed in handling writings attributed to royalty. Kings have opportunities denied to others of availing themselves of literary assistance. Whose voice, whose style are we hearing? Not necessarily that of the king. There is a further difficulty. A letter such as this was a public document, a piece of diplomatic correspondence. Surely we should be correct in assuming that even though it ran in the king’s name it would have been drafted by officials. But Sisebut was no ordinary king. He had received an advanced education and was a friend of the polymath Isidore of Seville, who dedicated one of his books to him. It was in response to this gesture that Sisebut honoured Isidore with a Latin verse epistle on the subject of eclipses. Sisebut was also the author, most surprisingly, of a work of hagiography celebrating the life of Bishop Desiderius of Vienne, recently murdered at the instigation of Queen Brunhilde. (There were more sides to her character than the piety to which attention was drawn a few pages back.) Sisebut also wrote a number of letters which have survived and probably more which have not. They are on a variety of subjects ranging from diplomatic correspondence to counselling for a bewildered bishop. Tone and style are even and consistent. I think we may take it that this remarkable man’s letter to Adaloald was his own composition or, at least, expressed his own convictions.

Sisebut was clear about the advantages that had accrued to his people when they had moved from Arianism to Catholicism in 587–9. Before that they had suffered daily from calamity: frequent wars, famine and plague. However, ‘As soon as the orthodox faith had enlightened their darkened minds … God willing, the power of the Goths now thrives. Those who once were torn by the sickled cohorts of thorns, wounded by the barbed stings of scorpions, poisoned by the forked tongue of the serpent, to these atoned ones the Catholic church now devotes her motherly affection.’ It is a long letter, in high-flown diction of which this is a representative sample, and much of it is unsurprisingly taken up with theological argument and scriptural quotation. But at its heart lies the simple boast that ‘the power of the Goths now thrives’. King Sisebut believed that conversion to correctness of religious observance had made his kingdom more powerful. Crude we may think it, but it is consistent with what we have seen elsewhere.

The contemporary written sources bearing upon the conversion of kings prompt reflection on a number of themes. First, we observe the repeated assurance that acceptance of Christianity will bring victory, wide dominion, fame and riches. This was what Germanic kings wanted to hear, because their primary activity was war. It was the easier for the missionaries to preach this with conviction in the light of what the historical books of the Old Testament had to tell about the victorious wars of a godly Israelite king such as David. Not for them the scruples of Ulfila who, it may be recalled (above, p. 77), omitted the books of Kings from the Gothic Bible. Nor would it have profited them to dwell upon facets of Christian teaching which kings might have found unappealing. The injunction to turn the other cheek would surely have fallen on deaf ears if addressed to Clovis. Pope Honorius I urged King Edwin to employ himself ‘in frequent readings from the works of Gregory, your evangelist and my master’.17 One may wonder whether Paulinus, as he opened his copy of the Moralia or the Liber Regulae Pastoralis, would have thought this the most appropriate juncture to explain that Pope Gregory had taught that rulers should be humble. Bede could tackle the problem of a king, like Edwin, who became very powerful before his conversion to Christianity by claiming this as an augury; in the words of a modern scholar, Edwin got his power ‘on account so to say’.18 More problematic was the successful king who remained obstinately heathen. Such was Penda, king of the midland kingdom of Mercia, who defeated and killed Edwin in 633. Bede sidestepped the problem by saying as little as possible about him.

Second, we might care to notice the role of the Christian queen in bringing about the conversion of her pagan husband. Here too there was an apposite scriptural reference. ‘The heathen husband now belongs to God through his Christian wife’ (I Corinthians vii.14). St Paul’s words were quoted both by Bishop Nicetius in his letter to Chlodoswintha and by Pope Boniface V in his letter to Ethelburga. This was a role for the queen which was to have a distinguished future. Much later on, when coronation rituals were devised in Francia in the ninth century, it would be emphasized that it was the duty of a queen ‘to summon barbarous peoples to acknowledgement of the Truth’. One may wonder whether we have something of a topos here. How important really was Clotilde in bringing about the conversion of Clovis? We cannot answer this question, it need hardly be said. But there can be no doubting the fact that royal conversions did frequently follow the marriage of a pagan king to a Christian wife.

It was not always so. Here is Bede on the (unnamed) wife of King Redwald of East Anglia.

Redwald had been initiated into the mysteries of the Christian faith in Kent, but in vain. For on his return home he was seduced by his wife and by certain evil teachers and perverted from the sincerity of his faith, so that his last state was worse than his first. After the manner of the ancient Samaritans, he seemed to be serving both Christ and the gods whom he had previously served; in the same temple he had one altar for the Christian sacrifice and another small altar on which to offer victims to devils.

It is an interesting story. Another way of interpreting it would be to see Redwald’s acceptance of Christianity simply as the addition of a new god to his pantheon of deities. It may well have been that the exclusive claims of the Christian God were ill-understood at first by royal converts.

Royal hesitation, thirdly, is a notable feature of our narratives. Clovis, Ethelbert and Edwin all took their time. Abandonment of the old gods was no light matter. Consultation with counsellors was prudent. How would the pagan priesthood react? Coifi is the classic case of the poacher turned gamekeeper. Redwald’s men seem to have been less pliable. There are difficult questions here about the dynamics of a king’s authority over his kinsfolk, his realm and his vassal kingdoms. It is hard to judge whether conversion came about through individual choice or through pressure exerted by the solidarity of a group. Arguments can be marshalled in support of both propositions. For example, the interesting information preserved by Bede that eleven members of the royal entourage were baptized with the infant Eanflaed in June 626 – ten months before Edwin’s baptism – might suggest that in Northumbria at least there was scope for individual choice. Doubtless the truth is that both individual and group motivation co-existed side by side; even, at different times, in the same person. We can be sure that a royal lead for others to follow was effective, even though the conversions it prompted may have been less than wholly sincere, as Bede was aware. We must note too that giving a lead did not always work even within the royal family. Ethelbert’s son Eadbald remained a pagan throughout his father’s life; the heathen Penda’s son Peada became a Christian.

Finally, we may observe the manner in which conversion was accompanied or quickly followed by royal actions which marked entry into the orbit of Romanitas. This is not to say that Roman culture was not already to some extent familiar and in prospect before conversion – one need think only of Bishop Remigius and the young Clovis – though doubtless more for some kings than for others. Convert kings acquired, in their missionary churchmen, experts who could school them in what was expected of a Christian king. The results are to be seen in the Pactus Legis Salicae and the council of Orléans, in Canterbury cathedral and Ethelbert’s charters, in Edwin’s thuuf and the timber structure like a wedge of Roman amphitheatre revealed by the Yeavering excavations.

Is there an ‘archaeology of royal conversion’? Perhaps. The graves of some royal persons and of some who may have been royal persons in Frankish Gaul and early Anglo-Saxon England have been discovered. They range in date from 481/2 (Childeric) to 675 (his namesake Childeric II). In the past, archaeologists were confident that it was easy to distinguish a Christian from a pagan grave. Pagans cremated their dead and furnished them with grave-goods. Christians buried their dead on an east-west axis and did not deposit grave-goods in the tomb. Nowadays archaeologists are much more cautious. In northern Gaul and Anglo-Saxon England the shift from a predominant but not exclusive use of cremation to the custom of inhumation seems to have preceded the coming of Christianity. Orientation is no longer interpreted as a clue to belief: some apparently pagan graves are oriented and some certainly Christian ones are not. Neither is the presence or absence of grave-goods a sure indication of religious loyalties. Indeed, among the Frankish aristocracy the fashion for furnishing graves in this manner became widespread only after their conversion to Christianity. It follows that any inferences about changing beliefs founded on archaeological evidence of funerary practice are hazardous.

The most famous, and certainly the most puzzling, among the apparently royal graves of this period is an English one: the deposit beneath the so-called Mound 1 in the cemetery at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. For nearly sixty years now, since its excavation just before the beginning of the Second World War, discussion has raged about this burial, unparalleled among early medieval graves for the number, richness and variety of its contents. It is widely accepted that this was the grave of a king of the East Angles and that it cannot have been dug earlier, or much later, than about 625. Regardless of which king might have been buried there – there are four principal candidates – this is exactly the period when the ruling dynasty passed in a formal sense from paganism to Christianity. Is this change of religious affiliation one that can be detected in the archaeology of Mound 1? (We could ask the same question of the cemetery as a whole but that is not my present purpose.) It is hard to claim with any conviction that such a change is detectable. The burial rite may have been traditional, but that does not make it pagan. There may have been objects in the grave decorated with Christian symbolism, but that does not make it Christian. The most promising, and not the least enigmatic, objects on which to base an affirmative answer to the question posed above are two silver spoons (illustrated in plate 10). They bear on their handles the names SAULOS and PAULOS in Greek characters, each name preceded by a small incised cross. The names not only have a clear Christian association but would seem, in their allusion to St Paul’s change of name, to refer to a conversion. It has been suggested that these were baptismal spoons which had been presented to the man buried beneath Mound 1 at the time of his conversion to Christianity. But the case is not clear-cut. The letters of the name SAULOS were so incompetently executed that it might have been no more than a blundered attempt to copy the name PAULOS on the other spoon by a craftsman who was illiterate. The spoons may have no reference at all to the conversion of an East Anglian king. They remain puzzling – as does the burial as a whole. Its latest investigator sees in it ‘an extravagant and defiant non-Christian gesture’.19 His judgements invite respect but need not command assent. I am more impressed by the religious neutrality of Mound 1. This very neutrality, or inconclusiveness, may in itself have something to hint to us about the hesitant process of royal conversion.

Moshoeshoe of Lesotho, whose words are quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, was far removed in time and space from the new Constantines of early medieval Gaul and Britain. His kingdom and its people were widely – but not unrecognizably – different from those of Clovis or Edwin. Yet his encounter with that Christian faith presented to him by the representatives of the Société des Missions Évangéliques de Paris echoes some of the themes that are sounded for us in the pages of Gregory of Tours and Bede.20

The most disruptive chain of events in the life of south-east Africa in the early nineteenth century was the rise of the Zulu empire under Shaka. It was aggressive and organized for war. Before Shaka’s death in 1828 his Zulus had had a destabilizing effect upon the neighbouring peoples, long remembered by them as the Faqane or the Mfecane, literally ‘forced migration’, by extension ‘the crushing of the peoples’. Roughly speaking, the rise of the Zulu empire had the same sort of effects upon nearby peoples such as the Sotho as the rise of the Hun empire had upon the German peoples in the fourth and fifth centuries. Moshoeshoe, often abbreviated to Moshesh, created a kingdom for some of these Sotho people which he ruled with skill and statesmanship for nearly fifty years until his death in 1870 at the age of about eightyfour. This kingdom was the nucleus of the state we know today as Lesotho.

In 1824 Moshoeshoe had established a new royal settlement at Thaba Bosiu, an isolated tableland protected by cliffs which rose above the upper waters of the river Caledon some hundred miles above its confluence with the Orange river. It was there that three members of the Paris Société approached him in 1833, and at the foot of this natural fortress that they established their first mission station. It was a proximity that echoes the close spatial association of royalty and mission so often found in early medieval Europe. Thus in 635 St Aidan would establish his monastic mission station at Lindisfarne, within sight of the royal rock-fortress of Bamburgh. Moshoeshoe had wanted the missionaries to come to his kingdom for reasons that arose from the Zulu Faqane. Its effects of destabilization and demoralization had led him, a thoughtful man (as Bede presents Edwin), to wonder about the efficacy of his traditional religious observances. How could the ancestors and spirits have let these things occur? – if they really were as powerful as he had been taught to believe. Second, the Faqane had pushed his people into closer proximity to the white man. The British government at the Cape was a long way off but the Afrikaners were close at hand, some of them even beginning to cross to the northern side of the Orange river in search of new pastures for their flocks. The missionaries were outsiders, neutrals. They might help Moshoeshoe to cope with this unfamiliar world which threatened to encroach upon his people. They were baruti, teachers, who might initiate him into the secrets of the white man’s power.

Circumstances were such, therefore, that a friendly rapport was established between king and missionaries at the outset. With one of the three in particular, Eugène Casalis, Moshoeshoe struck up a warm friendship. The king showed a keen interest in Christianity. He would discuss the faith for hours on end with Casalis, encouraged his people to listen to the missionaries’ teaching, and put no obstacles in the path of individual converts. Every Sunday Moshoeshoe would don European clothes and descend from Thaba Bosiu to attend divine service at the mission chapel which had been built by workmen supplied by him free of charge. At the end of the sermon he would add his own comments on it for the edification of the congregation. One of the missionaries recorded that these royal glosses ‘often conveyed the essence of what they had been saying in words that made it more intelligible to the rest of the congregation without distorting it’. After church the king would dine with Casalis and his Scottish wife at the mission house.

Clothes and dinners were not the only trappings of Christian civilization which appealed to Moshoeshoe. He developed a taste for European horses, saddlery, wagons, firearms, agricultural implements and household utensils. He employed a deserter from the British army to build him a house of stone. Another mason whom he employed, Josias Hoffmann, later became the first president (1854–5) of the Orange Free State. He planted wheat, fruit trees and vegetables under missionary guidance. He had the greatest respect for literacy, but though he struggled hard he never quite mastered the art of writing. He adopted the European habit of issuing written laws ‘with the advice and concurrence of the great men of our tribe’: these edicts were printed in the Sesotho vernacular on a missionary printing press.

The presence and skills of the missionaries enhanced Moshoeshoe’s prestige. Under his rule the kingdom found stability and began to enjoy prosperity. The king was convinced that this was the fruit of Christianity. ‘It is the Gospel that is the source of the prosperity and peace which you enjoy,’ he told his subjects in 1842. Trade prospered under royal encouragement, regulated in one of Moshoeshoe’s written ordinances. Coin began to replace barter as a means of exchange. Casalis and his colleagues encouraged the peaceful consolidation and expansion of Moshoeshoe’s power: both parties profited from it. The string of mission stations gradually founded as offspring of the original at Thaba Bosiu was rightly perceived as useful by the king. They helped to encourage peaceful nucleated settlement; they assisted to consolidate the royal hold upon new territory; they performed a defensive function for local people and livestock in troubled times. As for the outside world, Casalis acted as a kind of secretary for foreign affairs to Moshoeshoe. Surviving diplomatic correspondence is in Casalis’s hand, subscribed by the king with a cross. Everything looked as if it were going the missionaries’ way.

Casalis and his colleagues made many converts in Lesotho. But the king, finally and after much anxious hesitation, was not among them. In deference to missionary teaching Moshoeshoe decreed changes in some of the most intimate areas of Sotho life, affecting marriage customs, initiation rituals, resort to witches and burial practices. Some of these initiatives provoked opposition. Moshoeshoe had to restore the traditional initiation rituals in all their gruesomeness, and his attempts to change marriage customs met with resentment and resistance. One of the leaders of the opposition was Tsapi, Moshoeshoe’s chief diviner, a man respected and feared for his power to foretell the future and to communicate with the spirit world. In 1839 there was an epidemic of measles. Moshoeshoe’s ancestors appeared to Tsapi and told him that ‘the children of Thaba Bosiu die because Moshoeshoe is polluted and because the evening prayers offend the ancestral spirits’. The king’s son Molapo accepted Christianity and was baptized, but apostasized a few years later. Even though three of Moshoeshoe’s wives and two of his leading counsellors became Christians, there was strong opposition at court. Moshoeshoe realized that to commit himself to Christianity would be to split his kingdom. So he never did.

There is much for the early medievalist to ponder in the story of the coming of Christianity to Lesotho. How much more we might learn could we but eavesdrop on some heavenly conversation between Casalis and Augustine, or Moshoeshoe and Ethelbert. Whimsical fancies aside, all we need note here is that early medieval missionaries were in general successful in persuading kings to declare themselves adherents of Christianity. However, as they were well aware, this was just a first step. Round and behind these new Constantines were ranked their warrior aristocracies. How were these men, and their often formidable womenfolk, to be brought to the faith? Some answers will be suggested in the next two chapters.

* The ornaments included some 300 golden bees, later to be interpreted as a symbol of French royalty and adopted as part of his imperial insignia by Napoleon I.

* A momentary digression on his name, usually rendered Chlodovechus in our Latin sources, representing a vernacular Chlodovech, with two strong gutturals. In the course of time the gutturals softened, to give something like Lodovec, which could be Latinized as Lodovecus, Ludovicus. From this descend the names Ludwig, Ludovic and Louis, all synonyms of Clovis.

CHAPTER FIVE

An Abundance of Distinguished Patrimonies

Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life.

LORD MELBOURNE, 1800

BARBARIAN KINGS like Edwin might make judicious use of ‘gifts and threats’ to bring pressure to bear upon their leading subjects. But we should not suppose that these persons became Christians only ‘through fear of the king or to win his favour’. The acceptance of Christianity by the men and women of the barbarian aristocracies was critical in the making of Christendom because these were the people who had the local influence necessary to diffuse the faith among their dependants. John Chrysostom, Maximus of Turin and Augustine of Hippo had been correct in perceiving the pivotal role of local elites, and in this respect (if not in others) the seventh and eighth centuries were no different from the fourth and fifth. This chapter and the next will examine some aspects of the conversion of the barbarian aristocracies, first in Gaul and Spain in the seventh century, then in the British Isles in the seventh and eighth, and attempt to point up significant common features. One word of warning. Surviving sources tend to be more concerned with kings than with their nobilities. It is accordingly more difficult – even more difficult – to get to grips with aristocratic than with royal conversion.

Germanic settlement in what had been imperial Roman territory wrought changes in Europe’s linguistic boundaries. The eastern frontier of the empire on the continental mainland had been marked, roughly speaking, by the course of the rivers Rhine and Danube. Within that line the language of everyday speech for many, and of authority for all, had been Latin, the ancestor of the Romance languages of today. The influx of Germanic peoples in the fourth and fifth centuries pushed Latin westwards and southwards and substituted Germanic speech in a swathe of territory within what had once been the imperial frontiers. That is why Austrians and many Swiss speak varieties of German to this day. It need hardly be stressed that the pattern of linguistic change is neither neat nor simple. It therefore affords plentiful opportunity for lively academic debate. Philologists are a combative lot, and scholarly wrangling has been made the fiercer by the nationalistic dementia of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Particularly has this been so in relation to the area upon which we must first concentrate attention in this chapter, the valleys of the Rhine and its western tributary the Mosel (or Moselle – which neatly encapsulates the debate). The linguistic frontier was never static. However, as a very rough approximation the map facing page 136 shows the state of affairs in the latter part of the sixth century. It will be seen that Germanic speech was current as far west as Boulogne and as far southwest as Metz and Strasbourg, with outposts further to the west, for example among the Saxon settlers in the Bayeux region and near the mouth of the Loire. And there were enclaves of Latin/Romance further to the east, for example at the city of Trier.