History of the FranksGregory, Bishop of Tours, Saint
History
History of the Franks
Gregory, Bishop of Tours, Saint
France -- Church history -- To 987; France -- History -- To 987; Franks -- History -- To 768
And in the fourth book, when he tells of the killing of Victor, son
of Maximus, the tyrant, he says: “At that time Carietto and Sirus who
had been appointed in place of Nanninus, were absent in the province
of Germany with the army opposed to the Franks.” And a little later
when the Franks had taken booty from Germany, he added: “Arbogastes,
wishing no further delay, warned Cæsar that the punishment due
must be exacted from the Franks, unless they speedily restored all
the plunder they had taken the previous year when the legions were
destroyed, and delivered up the instigators of the war to be punished
for their treachery in breaking the peace.” He related that this
had been done under the leadership of dukes and says further: “A
few days later he held a hasty conference with Marcomer and Sunno,
princes[48] of the Franks and required hostages of them as usual,
and then retired to Trèves to spend the winter.” But when he calls
them princes, we do not know whether they were kings or held in the
place of kings. Still the same writer, when he told of the hard
straits of the emperor Valentinian, added this: “While events of
various sorts were taking place in the East throughout Thrace, the
public order was disturbed in Gaul. Valentinian the emperor was shut
up in Vienne in the palace, and reduced almost below the position
of a private person, and the military command was given over to the
Frankish allies, and even the civil offices fell under the control
of Arbogast’s faction, and no one of all the oath-bound soldiery was
found to dare to heed the familiar speech or obey the command of
the emperor.” Then he says: “In the same year Arbogast pursued with
heathenish hate the princes of the Franks, Sunno and Marcomer, and
hastened to Cologne in the depth of winter, since he knew that all
the retreats of Francia could be safely penetrated and ravaged with
fire when the woods, left bare and dry by the fall of the leaves,
could not conceal men lying in ambush. And so he gathered an army and
crossed the Rhine, and devastated the country of the Brictori, near
the bank, and also the district which the Chamavi inhabit, and no
one met him anywhere, except that a few of the Ampsivarii and Chatti
appeared with Marcomer as duke on the ridges of distant hills.” At
another time this writer, no longer mentioning dukes and princes,
openly asserts that the Franks had a king, and without mentioning
his name he says: “Then the tyrant Eugenius undertook a military
expedition, and hastened to the Rhine to renew in the customary way
the old alliances with the kings of the Alemanni and the Franks and
to threaten the barbarian nations at that time with a great army.”
So much the historian mentioned above wrote about the Franks.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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