Gregory of Tours

Gregory was born around 538 at Clermont in the Auvergne into a senatorial Gallo-Roman family that had already given the church several bishops on both sides, including his mother's kinsman Gregory of Langres. Educated by clerical relatives after his father's early death, he was ordained deacon and served at Lyon before returning to the Auvergne, where family connections and a reputation for piety marked him for advancement.

In 573 Gregory was elected bishop of Tours, one of Gaul's most important sees because it held the shrine of Saint Martin, the fourth century soldier turned monk whose cult drew pilgrims and royal patronage from across the Frankish kingdoms. The city sat at a dangerous crossing point between the rival Merovingian kings who had divided Clovis's inheritance, and Gregory spent much of his episcopate negotiating between them, most perilously King Chilperic of Neustria, who put him on trial for slander in 580 at the council of Berny-Riviere, after Chilperic's own wife Fredegund was accused of adultery with a Frankish bishop and Gregory was charged with having spread the claim. Gregory faced Chilperic down and kept his see.

He devoted his later years chiefly to writing, completing the Ten Books of Histories alongside works on the miracles of Martin and other saints, and he continued revising his history until close to his death in 594. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church, with a feast day of 17 November, chiefly for the record he left rather than for any single act of his episcopate.

Gregory's Decem Libri Historiarum, usually known in English as the History of the Franks, opens with a rapid survey from creation to the birth of Christ before settling, from around the reign of Clovis onward, into a year by year account of the Frankish kings, their wars, their marriages and their murders, interwoven with church councils, plagues, portents and the miracles worked at the tombs of local saints. Gregory wrote as a participant as much as an observer, naming himself, his sources and his own doubts in a way few chroniclers of the period attempted, and modern historians treat that transparency as one of the work's chief values: it lets a reader see how a well informed sixth century bishop assembled and weighed conflicting reports rather than presenting history as settled fact.

For generations the Histories were read as a straightforward, if gossipy, chronicle. More recent scholarship, notably Ian Wood's study of the Merovingian kingdoms, has argued that Gregory wrote with a purpose, defending the authority of bishops such as himself against royal encroachment and shaping his portraits of individual kings, Chilperic above all, to make that case. Read either way, the Histories remain the fullest surviving witness to the conversion of the Franks under Clovis and to the workings of a post-Roman kingdom still finding its own institutions, and almost everything known of Gaul in the sixth century passes through Gregory's own telling of it.