The fratricidal and internecine wars of Clovis's four sons were yet surpassed during the next generation by crimes and atrocities which overstepped all the limits and bounds of nature. Of Chlotar's four sons, only Sigebert's character is praiseworthy. Gregory relates that Sigebert was greatly ashamed of the disgraceful alliances of his brothers, who married daughters of the people of the lowest strata of society and changed them as lust and caprice prompted. Sigebert, however, married the daughter of Athanagild, King of the Visigoths. Her name was Brunehild (_Brunehaut_), a woman of great beauty and excessive vices and passions, whose name is linked in history with those of the greatest female criminals of royal blood. Chilperic, Sigebert's degenerate brother, jealous of the latter's alliance, asked in marriage Galswintha, Brunehild's sister, but he soon sacrificed her to the ambition of Fredegond, one of his concubines, who had the queen strangled and then occupied her place. This blond-haired woman of low birth, with most alluring charms and versed in all the arts to arouse passion, soon reduced her royal paramour to such subjection that he had her crowned with great pomp in his capital of Soissons. Beginning with this marriage, atrocities do not cease until the entire family becomes extinct. But to this very day to quote the words of a French poet "The fair, the blonde, the terrible Fredegond is unforgotten and sung in lurid songs from Austrasia to Perigord." Brunehild undertook to avenge her sister; the terrible struggle began between the Prankish slave girl and the daughter of the King of the Visigoths, a dramatic strife which has left an enduring memory in the annals of the history of crime. A son of Chilperic joins his father's enemy, and, with his aid, Sigebert is victorious everywhere; but when, in his city of Vitry, he is on the point of being raised upon the shield as king over the land of his brother, Sigebert is assassinated by two emissaries of Fredegond, who thus once more saves her husband by crime. The widowed Brunehild was at the time in Paris with her five-year-old son Childebert, and, as it seemed, at the mercy of Chilperic. But upon the news of Sigebert's death, Gundovald, an Austrasian chief, brought Childebert from Paris and had him proclaimed king. Brunehild was exiled to the basilica of Saint Martin's Cathedral, at Rouen. The oath of Fredegond upon sacred relics that she will not harm the fugitives is violated at once. She murders two sons of Chilperic, also Bishop Tractesetatus, who had solemnized the marriage. Brunehild saved herself by flight, and an even more sanguinary civil war ensues, in the course of which Chilperic too is murdered. At last the flagitious murderess Fredegond, at the age of sixty, equally dreaded and abhorred by friend and foe, dies strange to say by a natural death.