The Frank chieftains intermarried with what remained of the Gallo-Roman senatorial class, and generated the aristocracy of France. It was in these centuries a nobility of force, relishing war, scorning letters, proud of its long beards and silken robes, and almost as polygamous as any Moslem save Mohammed. Seldom has an upper class shown such contempt for morality. Conversion to Christianity had no effect upon them; Christianity seemed to them merely an expensive agency of rule and popular pacification; and in “the triumph of barbarism and religion” barbarism dominated for five centuries. Assassination, patricide, fratricide, torture, mutilation, treachery, adultery, and incest mitigated the boredom of rule. Chilperic, we are told, ordered every joint in Sigila the Goth to be burned with white-hot irons, and each limb to be torn from its socket.54 Charibert had as mistresses two sisters, one a nun; Dagobert (628–39) had three wives at once. Sexual excesses perhaps accounted for the exceptional sterility of the Merovingian kings: of Clovis’ four sons only Chlotar had issue; of Chlotar’s four sons only one had a child. The kings married at fifteen, and were exhausted at thirty; many of them died before the age of twenty-eight.55 By 614 the Merovingian house had spent its energy, and was ready to be replaced.
Amid this chaos education barely survived. By 600 literacy had become a luxury of the clergy. Science was almost extinct. Medicine remained, for we hear of court physicians; but among the people magic and prayer seemed better than drugs. Gregory, Bishop of Tours (538?–94), denounced as sinful the use of medicine instead of religion as a means of curing illness. In his own sickness he sent for a physician, but soon dismissed him as ineffectual; then he drank a glass of water containing dust from St. Martin’s tomb, and was completely cured.56 Gregory himself was the chief prose writer of his time. He knew personally several Merovingian kings, and occasionally served as their emissaries; his History of the Franks is a crude, disorderly, prejudiced, superstitious, and vivid firsthand account of the later Merovingian age. His Latin is corrupt, vigorous, direct; he apologizes for his bad grammar, and hopes that sins of grammar will not be punished on Judgment Day.57 He accepts miracles and prodigies with the trustful imagination of a child or the genial shrewdness of a bishop; “we shall mingle together in our tale the miraculous doings of the saints and the slaughters of the nations.”58 In 587, he assures us, snakes fell from the sky, and a village with all its buildings and inhabitants suddenly disappeared.59 He denounces everything in anyone guilty of unbelief or of injury to the Church; but he accepts without flinching the barbarities, treacheries, and immoralities of the Church’s faithful sons. His prejudices are frank, and can be easily discounted. The final impression is one of engaging simplicity.
After him the literature of Gaul becomes predominantly religious in content, barbarous in language and form—with one shining exception. Venantius Fortunatus (c. 530–610) was born in Italy and educated at Ravenna; at thirty-five he moved to Gaul, wrote lauds for its bishops and queens, and developed a platonic affection for Radegunda, wife of the first Chlotar. When she founded a convent Fortunatus became a priest, her chaplain, and finally bishop of Poitiers. He wrote pretty poems in honor of potentates and saints; twenty-nine to Gregory of Tours; a life of St. Martin in heroic verse; above all, some sonorous hymns, of which one, Pange lingua, inspired Thomas Aquinas to a similar theme and still higher performance, while another, Vexilia regis, became a lasting part of Catholic liturgy. He mingled feeling admirably with poetic skill; reading his fresh and genial lines we discover the existence of kindliness, sincerity, and the tenderest sentiment amid the royal brutalities of the Merovingian age.
IV. VISIGOTHIC SPAIN: 456–711
In 420, as we have seen, the Visigoths of Gaul recaptured Spain from the Vandals, and returned it to Rome. But Rome could not defend it; eighteen years later the Suevi emerged from their hills in the northwest, and overran the peninsula. The Visigoths under Theodoric II (456) and Euric (466) came down again across the Pyrenees, reconquered most of Spain, and this time kept the country as their own. A Visigothic dynasty ruled Spain thereafter till the coming of the Moors.
At Toledo the new monarchy built a splendid capital and gathered an opulent court. Athanagild (564–7) and Leovigild (568–86) were strong rulers, who defeated Frank invaders in the north and Byzantine armies in the south; it was the wealth of Athanagild that won for his daughters the privilege of being murdered as Frank queens. In 589 King Recared changed his faith, and that of most Visigoths in Spain, from Arian to orthodox Christianity; perhaps he had read the history of Alaric II. The bishops now became the chief support of the monarchy, and the chief power in the state; by their superior education and organization they dominated the nobles who sat with them in the ruling councils of Toledo; and though the king’s authority was theoretically absolute, and he chose the bishops, these councils elected him, and exacted pledges of policy in advance. Under the guidance of the clergy a system of laws was promulgated (634) which was the most competent and least tolerant of all the barbarian codes. It improved procedure by weighing the evidence of witnesses rather than the character certificates of friends; it applied the same laws to Romans and Visigoths alike, and established the principle of equality before the law.60 But it rejected freedom of worship, demanded orthodox Christianity of all inhabitants, and sanctioned a long and bitter persecution of the Spanish Jews.
Through the influence of the Church, which retained Latin in her sermons and liturgy, the Visigoths, within a century after their conquest of Spain, forgot their Germanic speech, and corrupted the Latin of the peninsula into the masculine power and feminine beauty of the Spanish tongue. Monastic and episcopal schools provided education, mostly ecclesiastical but partly classical; and academies rose at Vaclara, Toledo, Saragossa, and Seville. Poetry was encouraged, drama was denounced as obscene—which it was. The only name surviving from the literature of Gothic Spain is that of Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636). An edifying legend tells how a Spanish lad, reproved for mental sluggishness, ran away from home, and, tired with wandering, sat down by a well. His eye was caught by the deep furrow in a stone at the edge; a passing maiden explained that the furrow was worn by the attrition of the rope that lowered and raised the bucket. “If,” said Isidore to himself, “by daily use the soft rope could penetrate the stone, surely perseverance could overcome the dullness of my brain.” He returned to his father’s house, and became the learned Bishop of Seville.61 Actually we know little of his life. Amid the chores of a conscientious cleric he found time to write half a dozen books. Perhaps as an aid to memory he compiled through many years a medley of passages, on all subjects, from pagan and Christian authors; his friend Braulio, Bishop of Saragossa, urged him to publish these excerpts; yielding, he transformed them into one of the most influential books of the Middle Ages—Etymologiarum sive originum libri xx (Twenty Books of Etymologies or Origins)—now a volume of 900 octavo pages. It is an encyclopedia, but not alphabetically arranged; it deals successively with grammar, rhetoric, and logic as the “trivium”; then with arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy as the “quadrivium”; then with medicine, law, chronology, theology, anatomy, physiology, zoology, cosmography, physical geography, architecture, surveying, mineralogy, agriculture, war, sports, ships, costumes, furniture, domestic utensils …; and under each topic it defines, and seeks the origin of, the basic terms. Man, we learn, is called homo because God made him from the earth (humus); the knees are genua because in the foetus they lie opposite the cheeks (genae).62 Isidore was an industrious, if indiscriminate, scholar; he knew considerable Greek, was familiar with Lucretius (rarely mentioned in the Middle Ages), and preserved in extracts many passages of pagan literature that would otherwise have been lost. His work is a farrago of weird etymologies, incredible miracles, fanciful allegorical interpretations of the Scriptures, science and history distorted to prove moral principles, and factual errors that a little observation would have set straight. His book stands as a lasting monument to the ignorance of his time.