The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (23 page)

24.1: The Division of the Bei Wei

Worried about Erzhu Rong’s ambitions (to be the figurehead for an ambitious soldier was not a secure position in either east or west), the new emperor, Wei Xiaozhuang, agreed to marry his daughter—which might keep Erzhu Rong from claiming the throne, since his grandchild would theoretically become emperor. But the distrust between the two men deepened. In 530, when Erzhu Rong came to the court of Luoyang to wait for his daughter to give birth to her first child, Wei Xiaozhuang had him assassinated.

This opened a civil war, with Erzhu Rong’s relatives and his field army on one side, and the emperor and the army of Luoyang on the other. In 531, Erzhu Rong’s nephew Erzhu Zhao captured the emperor in a battle near Luoyang. He broke into the city with his army, sacked it, murdered Wei Xiaozhuang’s infant son, and then had the emperor himself strangled. By 534, the ongoing civil war between the dead emperor’s clan, the dead general’s clan, and their various claimants to the imperial throne had split the Bei Wei empire into two separate kingdoms: the Eastern Wei and the Western Wei. Luoyang, the center of the conflict, was a ghost town, sacked and almost entirely deserted. The strongest general in each faction placed a puppet-king on each throne, and the two new kingdoms squared off against each other.
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Confucian order and Buddhist resignation were a thing of the past. In attempting to make his kingdom Chinese, the emperor Wei Xiaowen had woven into it a thread that, when pulled, ripped the entire construct apart.

A
FTER THE COSTLY DEFEAT
of Attila, the Salian Franks had straggled back westward to their lands west of the Rhine. The battle with the Huns had weakened them; but now they regathered their strength.

The semi-legendary Merovech died, probably around 457, and was succeeded as chief of the Salian Franks by his son Childeric. But although Childeric claimed the title “King of the Franks” and established his court at the northern city of Cambrai, he was merely one chief among many. The other Frankish tribes still kept their independence, even while acknowledging the long-haired Salians as leaders of the coalition. There were minor Frankish kings scattered across the landscape, and Roman kings too; after the Romans had given up full control of Gaul, renegade Roman warleaders had set up their own little domains in the land north of the Loire.

Childeric was forced to battle against these rival kings, against Odovacer of Italy, against Alemanni invaders to the east, and against Saxon pirates sailing into the Loire. When he died in 481, he was merely chief of the Salians despite his royal title.
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But he was succeeded by his fifteen-year-old son, Clovis. At twenty, Clovis attacked and defeated a neighboring Roman kingdom and folded its land into his own. This was the first major victory of his reign. Over the next ten years, he took land from the nearby Thuringii, Burgundians, and Alemanni, and his knack for leading the Franks to victory earned him greater and greater authority over the other tribal leaders.
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He made alliances by marriage as well, contracting a diplomatic match between himself and the daughter of the king of the Germanic tribe of Burgundy. This princess, Clotild, was a Christian, and the Frankish historian Gregory of Tours tells us that she began to evangelize her husband. “The gods whom you worship are no good,” Clotild insisted. “They haven’t even been able to help themselves, let alone others. What have Mars and Mercury ever done for anyone?”

It was a pragmatic argument, and in 496, Clovis found it politic to agree with his wife. In Gregory’s account, Clovis is on the battlefield, fighting a losing battle against the Alemanni, when he raises his eyes to heaven. “Jesus Christ,” he prays, “if you will give me victory over my enemies, I will believe in you. I have called upon my own gods, but, as I see only too clearly, they have no intention of helping me.” At once the Alemanni break their ranks and surrender. Clovis returns home a Christian, and he and Clotild summon the bishop of Reims to come and baptize him.
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For Gregory, Clovis is the Frankish Constantine. And Clovis was indeed following Constantine’s lead. Like Alaric’s Goths, the Franks were a confederacy, not a nation: they were held together by custom, by geography, and by necessity. They had lived within Roman boundaries for over a century, and their adoption of Roman practices—the worship of Mars and other Roman gods, the Romanized organization of their army—was the strongest bond holding them together.

But the Roman empire had crumbled in the west, and the bond of
Romanness
was crumbling with it. Like Constantine, Clovis saw that a stronger bond was needed to hold his people together (and to allow him to claim the right of kingship over them all). Christianity would serve as the new glue of the Frankish nation.

Gregory insists on Clovis’s sincerity: “Like some new Constantine,” he writes, fulsomely, “he stepped forward to the baptismal pool, ready to wash away the sores of his old leprosy and to be cleansed in flowing water from the sordid stains which he had borne so long.” And then he adds, without a trace of irony, “More than three thousand of his army were baptized at the same time.” The mass conversion of the army was the necessary and politic counterpoint to Clovis’s own redemption: the Christian royal family and the Christianized army would be the attractive core of a newly united Christian nation of Franks.
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The benefits of conversion were not long in coming. By 507, Clovis, who had been baptized into orthodox Christianity, was confident enough to launch a concentrated attack on the Arian Visigoths of Hispania: “I find it hard to go on seeing these Arians occupy a part of Gaul,” he told his ministers. “With God’s help let us invade them. When we have beaten them, we will take over their territory.”

Reinforced by soldiers lent to him by his father-in-law, the king of Burgundy, Clovis marched towards the Loire river and the Visigothic frontier. The armies met at the city of Vouille, in Visigothic territory on the southwestern side of the Loire. The Visigoth king Alaric II was killed in battle, and the Visigoth army was scattered. The Franks stormed southward, invading the city of Toulouse itself, and the remnants of the Visigothic court fled into Hispania with Alaric II’s five-year-old son, Amalaric, in tow.
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25.1: Clovis and His Neighbors

This brought the armies of the Italian Ostrogoths into the fight. Theoderic the Great’s daughter had been married to Alaric II, so that young Amalaric—possibly the next king of the Visigoths—was a member of the Ostrogothic royal family. Ostrogothic armies arrived at the Rhône river, in the south, in 508, and forced Clovis to withdraw from the little patch of Gaulish land known as Septimania, right on the coast. But this was a tiny victory. It kept Clovis from establishing himself on the Mediterranean coast, but Toulouse remained in Frankish hands, and Septimania was now the only little patch of Visigothic land in all of Gaul. The Visigoths had been driven almost entirely into Hispania, where they would have to rebuild their shattered kingdom from the ground up.
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Returning from his victorious campaign with wagonloads of treasure from Toulouse, Clovis paused in the city of Tours to thank God for his victory. There he found a letter from Constantinople waiting for him. The eastern Roman emperor wanted to give Clovis, his fellow Christian monarch, an honorary title that would recognize him as a shining light in the barbarian west.

Clovis misinterpreted the gesture. He named himself “Augustus, Consul of the West,” and put on a purple tunic and a diadem. This is undoubtedly
not
what the eastern emperor had in mind. But he did not object: Clovis was far away; his power would check Theoderic the Great of Italy, who was a much greater problem; and there was no harm in letting him wear a purple cloak over there in the shabby little city of Cambrai.

Clovis did not remain in Cambrai. Now that he was Augustus, victorious Christian and Roman king, he needed a new capital. He settled on the old Roman town Lutetia Parisiorum, on the Seine, and began to reinforce its walls. He issued a set of Latin laws for his domain, the Pactus Legis Salicae; the laws were very specific in forbidding the old Germanic traditions of blood revenge, instead substituting fines and penalties for clan-based revenge killings.
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And he killed off the Frankish chiefs who might challenge him for sole power, one at a time. From 509 until his death, Clovis ruled from his new capital, Paris, as the first Christian king of the Franks, the first law-giving king of the Franks, the first king of
all
the Franks. His descendents, taking their name from the legendary warrior Merovech, would occupy the throne for the next two centuries as the Merovingian dynasty—the first royal dynasty of the Franks.

A
CROSS THE CHANNEL
, another king with a Roman past was struggling to save what was left of his native land. His name was Ambrosius Aurelianus, and his origins were obscure and vaguely royal. In 485, just as Clovis was beginning his decade of conquest, Ambrosius Aurelianus led the rulers of Britain in a great battle against the Saxon invaders.

For thirty years, the native British had been fighting against this invasion. Keeping the Saxons and Angles away had become a way of life for two generations. Vortigern, who had managed to kill one of the original Saxon generals back in 455, had led the resistance for another fifteen years before dying, with the enemy still on his doorstep. Later British historians would charge him with all sorts of imaginary crimes, from killing the rightful king of all Britain and taking his place (even though there was nothing close to a “rightful king of all Britain” in existence in the fifth century) to inviting the Saxons in and handing the country over to them so that he could sleep with the Saxon women. Despite a lifetime of battling the invaders, Vortigern had failed to drive them off, and the bitter memory of his ultimate failure lingered.
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At Vortigern’s death, Ambrosius had taken up the position of chief British warlord. Ambrosius’s background is lost; Gildas’s history, the oldest account, calls him a “Roman gentleman” whose parents had “worn the purple” and had been slaughtered by the invaders. William of Malmesbury refers to him as the “sole surviving Roman,” while Bede says, mysteriously, that his “parents bore a royal and famous name” he also calls Ambrosius a
viro modesto
, a discreet, or reticent, man.
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What we are to make of this is uncertain, but Ambrosius was likely the son of one of the last Roman soldiers left in Britain, perhaps even a descendent of one of the Roman generals who had claimed the title of emperor in the dying days of the western empire. Whatever his birth (which he did not trumpet), he had inherited the traditions of the Roman army, and he rallied the petty kings of Britain behind him once more.

His initial forays against the Anglo-Saxon invaders were no more successful than Vortigern’s; he was badly defeated in 473, and his cause suffered another setback in 477, when yet more Saxon troops landed on the southern coast, near the British fortress of Anderida. They were under the command of a general named Aelle, who claimed the southern land nearby as his own kingdom: the Kingdom of the South Saxons, later shortened to Sussex. He was among the very first Saxons to claim kingship in Britain; the Saxon foothold on Britain was working its way more deeply into the soil.
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But in 485, the British struck back. On a hilltop known as Mount Badon (perhaps Solsbury Hill in southeast England, although its exact location is unknown), the British under Ambrosius Aurelianus won a great victory over the Saxons. The stories surrounding the Battle of Mount Badon are varied, confused, and filled with later interpolations. Famous names swirl through them. Ambrosius’s brother Uther Pendragon fought by his side; Gorlois, duke of Cornwall, led a wing of the attack; Ambrosius’s right-hand general was a soldier named Arthur; Vortigern himself (somehow alive again) joined with the Saxons to fight against his own people. The tales contradict each other, and even the date is not entirely certain. The only constant is British victory. Thousands of Saxons were killed; hundreds more were driven out of England, back into Gaul and the surrounding areas. A score of legends grew around Aurelianus himself, the last Roman, the last defender of civilization in the face of seemingly unstoppable destruction and death.
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The victory at Mount Badon did not end the Saxon takeover. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
records an ongoing round of battles between the British and the Saxons who remained. In 491, the South Saxon leader Aelle strengthened his grasp on his own kingdom by capturing Anderida, the British fortress meant to guard the southern shore, and massacring all of its inhabitants. “There was not even one Briton left there,” the
Chronicle
says.
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For a time, though, the Battle of Mount Badon ended the influx of
new
armies into the island. For a time, as Irish folklorist Daithi O Hogain puts it, the “erosion of native Britain was checked.”
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But “native Britain” was weak, welded together as it was only by the necessity of keeping Saxons out. There was no British kingdom and no British high king, no shared religion, no idea of nationhood. At the beginning of the sixth century, to be British was to be
not
Saxon, and the independent kings and tribal leaders were jealous of their power, no matter who threatened it. In 511, twenty-six years after saving Britain, Ambrosius Aurelianus died in battle against another British king, one who previously had been his ally. The battle was at Camlann, near the southwestern coast, and the sword that killed the savior of Britain was British, not Saxon.
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Ambrosius became immortal as “Arthur, King of the Britons,” a man fighting for civilization and order in a world where neither was natural: always threatened by the power of other warleaders, brought down at the end of his life by the treachery of those he should have been able to trust. The mournful declension of the Arthur story, as it was embroidered by the Welsh bard Taliesin, the English historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, the French poet and crusader Robert De Boron, and ultimately by Thomas Malory, is a glimpse into a time when kingship ended with death. In the dark world of the British—as, indeed, in the world of most Germanic peoples, including the Saxons—the king did not inherit his power. He earned the right to rule through successful leadership of his tribe in battle; his power was given to him, by the men who followed him, because he deserved it. When he died, his power died with him, and his followers banded together to recognize another king.
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