Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (21 page)

If the Franks had taken control of the south half a century earlier, they might well have based themselves there, just as the invading Visigoths in Spain had adopted Roman Toledo, the Ostrogoths in Italy had adopted Ravenna, and the Vandals, in what is now Tunisia, had adopted Carthage. But Frankish power began to extend to southern Gaul just half a dozen years before the plague began to wreck the lives and economies of the southern cities in the 540s.

In 543 Arles (and no doubt other southern cities) was decimated. In the 550s or 560s it is possible that plague hit the south again, as it broke out again in other parts of the Mediterranean, but no record has survived. In 571 it returned to devastate Clermont and the Auvergne region, Lyons, Bourges, Dijon, and Chalon-sur-Saône. Then in 581–584 the disease swept through Narbonne, Albi, Nantes, and other unnamed districts, while in 588–590 it decimated Marseilles, Avignon, and the Rhône Valley as far north as the Lyons area.

The plague, of course, affected not only Gaul but most other Mediterranean territories as well. Trade declined throughout the entire area, and by the end of the century the taxes and tolls that could be extracted from the southern ports had shrunk to a level that was no longer attractive to the Frankish political authorities. With trade reduced, population down, and wealth diminished, power evaporated from the former southern Gallo-Roman imperial seats of power. The differential way in which the plague had struck had simply made the south less politically and economically important than it had been, while conversely increasing the power of the north.

The decision by the Frankish kings to stay put in northern Gaul was, in retrospect, a momentous one. It ensured that the Paris basin became the political epicenter of the emerging French state. It probably also ensured that the Frankish kingdom evolved into modern France. A state based in Arles or even Lyons would eventually have had less interest in maintaining control over the north, fringed as it was in later medieval times by potentially aggressive powers in England, Scandinavia, and Germany. It was, by contrast, probably easier for the north to keep the south (flanked partly by the Mediterranean, rather than wall-to-wall rivals) than it would have been for the south to keep the north. In addition, the emergence of the north as the political epicenter of proto-France played a pivotal role in encouraging the development of a North Sea/Channel mercantile economy that helped lead to the eventual rise of Holland, England, and France, as Atlantic rather than Mediterranean powers. This provided them with outlooks that were ultimately global rather than purely Mediterranean- and European-oriented.

T
he plague also had consequences that were less geopolitical. As cities were faced with mass death, the phenomenon of the plague helped provoke a new public response. Instead of people praying or becoming pilgrims as individuals, entire urban populations embarked on mass pilgrimages. Pilgrimage became a corporate activity, a public exercise in the power of devotion and prayer.

These events—in which thousands of citizens would march in desperation for miles—were known as rogations. The concept had first been invented in the late fifth century in Vienne in southern Gaul in an attempt to solicit divine help in quelling an earthquake. The technique was then refined and became widespread in the mid– and late sixth century as entire urban communities tried to repel successive plague epidemics. (Gregory of Tours refers to the institution of a very large annual rogation near Clermont when the plague first reached France in 543.) In the end, the rogation tradition began to spread beyond the borders of the Frankish empire and gradually became popular all over western Europe.

In the fraught atmosphere of plague-ridden sixth-century France, two other religious phenomena also took hold. From at least the time of the 581–584 outbreak, there appears to have been an increase in official anti-Semitism. In 582 the Frankish king ordered the forcible baptism of a large number of Jews. And in 587 and 590 Gregory of Tours reported in his
History of the Franks
the emergence of false prophets and saints and even a false Christ. He wrote that as the plague was attacking Marseilles, a man from central France, dressed in animal skins, made his way south. On reaching Arles, he claimed to be Jesus Christ.

“Great crowds of people flocked to see him and brought out their sick,” begins Gregory’s account. “He laid hands upon them, to restore them to health. Those who gathered round him gave him clothes, and gifts of gold and silver. All this he handed over to the poor. He would lie on the ground saying prayer after prayer. Then he would rise to his feet and tell those who stood round to begin worshipping him again.

“He foretold the future, prophesying that some would fall ill and that others would suffer affliction, while to a few he promised good fortune. A great number of people were deceived by him, not only the uneducated, but even priests in orders. More than 3,000 people followed him where ever he went. Then he began to rob and despoil those whom he met on the road, giving to the poor and needy all that he took.

“He drew up a sort of battle line and made ready to attack Aurelius, who was at that time Bishop of the Diocese. He sent messengers ahead to announce his coming, men who danced naked and capered about.

“The Bishop was quite put out. He chose some of the toughest of his servants and told them to go and find what it all meant. One of them, the man in charge, bowed low as if to kiss the man’s knees and then held him tight. He ordered him to be seized and stripped. Then he himself drew his sword and cut him down where he stood. So fell and died this Christ, more worthy to be called an anti-Christ.”

T
he bubonic plague pandemic that impacted so heavily on France in the sixth century had, of course, originally been triggered by climatic disruption of the wild-rodent ecology of East Africa in the 530s.² But the worldwide climatic problems of that period had also affected French history more directly, with the bizarre behavior of the weather actually stopping a war and quite likely changing the course of French history.

At that time the Frankish world was divided into three kingdoms whose rulers—two brothers and a nephew—were at each other’s throats. Childebert, the king of Paris, and Theudebert, the king of Metz, were about to attack Lothar, king of Soissons. It was through Lothar that the entire Frankish (Merovingian) dynasty continued to flourish after the mid–sixth century, so his death in battle would probably have changed French history forever. There might well have been no Carolingians, no Charlemagne, and no medieval or modern state of France.

But that attack, though planned, never took place. From the account of Gregory of Tours:

“Childebert and Theudebert assembled an army and prepared to march against Lothar. When he heard of this, he realised that he was not strong enough to resist their combined forces.

“Lothar took to the woods, built a great circle of barricades among the trees, and put his trust in the mercy of God. Queen Clothilde [the mother of two of the kings] learned what had happened. She went to the tomb of Saint Martin [in Tours] where she knelt in supplication and spent the whole night praying that civil war might not break out.

“Childebert and Theudebert advanced with their troops, surrounded Lothar’s position and made plans to kill him in the morning. When day dawned, a great storm blew up over the spot where they were encamped. Their tents were blown down. Their equipment was scattered and everything was overturned. There was thunder and lightning and they were bombarded with hailstones.

“They threw themselves on their faces on the ground, where the hail already lay thick, and they were severely lashed by the hailstones which continued to fall. They had no protection except their shields, and they were afraid that they would be struck by the lightning. Their horses were scattered far and wide. The two kings were cut about by the hailstones as they lay on the ground.

“They did penance to God and begged him to forgive them for having attacked their own kith and kin. None can doubt that this miracle was wrought by Saint Martin through the intercession of the Queen.”

It might seem at first like a somewhat fanciful story, but there are similar accounts of giant hailstones from around the same time, all associated with the 530s climatic downturn, in Britain and in China.³

Certainly if Childebert and Theudebert had succeeded in killing Lothar, a massive war of succession would have broken out within a generation, because there would have been no obvious successors. The Frankish empire might well have disintegrated or been taken over by the Burgundian element within it. In either event, subsequent French history would no doubt have been quite different. Thus perhaps through hailstones, but more definitely through the plague, did the climatic crisis of the 530s change the history of France.

T H E  M A K I N G
O F  S P A I N

F
or Spain, as for so many other nations, the sixth century has a special significance, for in a sense it was then that modern Spain was born.

Spain had been the Roman Empire’s first major overseas province, and it remained an integral part of the empire for more than six hundred years, from the third century
B
.
C
. to the fifth century
A
.
D
. But during the fifth century, Rome lost control of the Iberian Peninsula.

The saga started in
A
.
D
. 375 when a German tribal confederation, that of the Visigoths (living in what is now southern Romania), was threatened by an Asiatic people, the Huns. The Visigoths asked for and were granted permission to enter the Roman Empire. They were allowed to settle in the Balkans but soon ended up at war with their Roman hosts. In 410 they captured and sacked Rome itself. Despite that, two years later they became allies of the empire and were given the job of subduing four other groups of German barbarians who had invaded the Empire in 406, marched across France, and occupied much of Spain.

The Visigoths succeeded in their Spanish mission and as a reward were granted land in southwest Gaul. However, the Germanic barbarians in Spain soon regrouped, and in 455 Rome asked the Visigoths to intervene again. The barbarians were defeated once more, but in 468 Rome switched sides and formed an alliance with one of the barbarian groups they had asked the Visigoths to subdue.

The Visigoths responded to this Roman treachery by seizing vast tracts of officially Roman territory, thus forming a virtual empire of half of Gaul (including their original territory) and three-quarters of Spain. Because of a parallel Germanic takeover in Italy, the Roman Empire in western Europe collapsed in 476, and like Spain, Italy became an independent Gothic kingdom by 493.

Roughly from 457, therefore, the Visigoths were the major power in Spain. In 508 they lost most of their territories north of the Pyrenees, so that their kingdom was from then on mainly confined to the Iberian Peninsula.

A
ccording to their own legends, the Germanic people called the Goths came originally (in or before the first century
B
.
C
.) from southern Scandinavia. However, Roman sources record that by the first century
A
.
D
. they were settled on the southeast coast of the Baltic Sea around the mouth of the river Vistula. But in the second half of the following century they migrated right across eastern Europe and settled along the north and northwest coast of the Black Sea, an area they then used as a base from which to attack the Roman province of Dacia (modern Romania). In the 270s the Goths forced the Roman Empire to abandon Dacia, and took the territory for themselves. These Gothic raiders became known as the Visigoths (valiant Goths), while those Goths farther east came to be known as Ostrogoths (eastern Goths).

Christianity was first introduced to a small number of Visigoths in the mid–third century
A
.
D
. by Christian prisoners who had been captured during raids on Roman Anatolia (modern Turkey). Just over a century later, in 376, the Visigoths were allowed to settle within the Roman Empire, in what is now Serbia. There they were converted to Christianity (as a condition of their admittance to the empire) by a priest of Visigothic origin called Ulfilas, who translated the Bible into Gothic. Ulfilas, however, espoused a non-Catholic form of Christianity known as moderate Arianism—a faith that had imperial backing in 376 but lost that support and became heretical after a Church council held in 381.

Although Christian, Arian theology was fundamentally different from Catholicism. Catholicism taught that Christ and God were both manifestations of the same Godhead—that although they are different and distinct “persons,” they are of the same nature. Arianism, on the other hand, believed that although God was eternal, Christ was not. He was simply the first thing created by God. Moderate Arians said Christ was a supernatural being, but not God in the same sense as God the Father. Radical Arians went further and held that Christ had no divinity at all, and that although an inspiration to humanity, he was merely one of God’s creations. Both these views were seen by Catholics as undermining the central Christian concept that Christ could save sinful humans from eternal damnation. If Christ were not God, that power would be in doubt. It was this Arian dimension that was to affect much of subsequent Visigothic Spanish history.