"O Christ," he exclaims, according to Gregorius of Tours, "I invoke devoutly thine glorious help. If thou accord me victory over these enemies, I shall believe in thee and shall be baptized in thine name. I have invoked my gods, but they are not ready to aid me." After the victory, he loyally executed the promise he had made to the God of Clotilde, the queen perhaps taking good care that the vow should be fulfilled. Bishop Remigius, with that prudence and political wisdom which always guided the princes of the Church, proceeded very slowly in the matter until he was assured that the consent of the Franks had been obtained. Three thousand of them allowed themselves to be baptized with their king, an event of the greatest importance in the world's history, for thereby the advance of Arianism was checked and heathenism was cast down. Clotilde, a woman and a queen, thus inaugurates the Christianization of the Germans, for Clovis thus becomes a "new Constantine" and the precursor of Charlemagne, the unifier of the Germans, the founder of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The words of Bishop Remigius are fulfilled: "Bend thine head, proud Sigambrian: adore what thou hast burned heretofore; burn what thou hast adored heretofore." From this time on Clovis's life is but a chain of successes. It is true that all those successes of the most Christian king (_rex christianissimus_), a title bestowed upon him and his successors, were attained by atrocity and perfidy surpassed only in the later history of his own dynasty, and then by the female members of the royal line. The central point of his policy was the murder of the smaller Prankish kings so that he might be the sole chief of the entire people. He caused Sigebert of Cologne to be slain by his own son, whom he then assassinated, thereby securing for himself the kingship over the Ripuarian Franks. He dispossessed Chararic and his son and, later, killed both for the sake of greater security. He slew Racagnar, King of Cambrai, and the latter's brother, Richard, with his own hand, and, later on, murdered their brother, Rigomer; so that the tale of deaths is a long one. The manner in which the Christian religion aided Clovis in the execution of his ambitious plans, shows with terrible truth how deeply in the sixth century the ideal of Christianity had sunk from its lofty height. No one of his contemporaries ever reproached Clovis for his crimes; the Franks sang them in lays; and the pious Bishop Gregory of Tours having related the murder of Sigebert, adds naïvely: "Every day God thus felled his enemies to the ground and increased his kingdom because he walked with a pure heart before the Lord and did what was agreeable in his sight."