The Thing About Research

When I was researching Clovis, one of the things I found frustrating about the lack of direct and contemporary sources was the fact that this led to an awful lot of echoes.  "Facts" about his life are picked up and reported frankly, without citation and without clarity.  And thus does common wisdom become history.

Your less deeply analytical sources will repeat the knowledge that Clovis' baptism, for example, took place immediately upon his conversion.

Reading Ax is going to irritate these people.  Because I chose to hearken to other sources.  Sources which analyzed everything from the extent of Clovis' Romanization (did he really convert from Roman paganism? or was he a Thor sort of fellow?) to his dalliance with Arian Christianity to the likelihood of his wife's thirst for blood against her own uncles.

Gregory of Tours said Clovis was a Roman pagan, and an awful lot of pearl-clutching has gone on over the past century and a half or so, regarding how this is a terrible assertion to take at face value.  Historical scholarship needs its pearl-clutching, and I am glad people are willing to think twice about the word of a somewhat less than contemporary cleric not writing history quite to the standard we might (for little reason, really) expect of a scholar today.  Greg had a character to create, a point to make, and either he or Clovis himself was interested in making our man a second Constantine.  The patterns can be drawn ... and so one must ask oneself - how much of this is fact?

I actually used that template - the recreation of Constantine in Clovis - as a choice on the monarch's own part.  And it was this which led me to separate the baptism from the conversion.  Constantine was converted for a LOT of years before he had himself moistened over the whole thing.  And so I took Clovis' Christmas consecration and removed it by many years, too, from his dramatic battlefield conversion experience.

Even if I didn't accept this removal (which, for the record, I wholeheartedly *do*), the fact is that, as an author, the separation of these events provides opportunity for drama.  I am able to build in the tension of a man who has always believed himself descended from a (pagan) god renouncing the tenet of ANY divine descent at all, and setting the standard for Europe of divine *right* ... which is, in fact, ongoing today.  If any of you thinks Elizabeth II considers her position as a simple inheritance, like you or I might inherit a painting or a gold pocket watch - think again.  She expects of herself adherence to a divine placement in her throne.  And it may not be she is alone in looking at her seat that way.  And if she didn't think it her right, G-d-given (and a responsibility to live up to) it's unlikely she'd keep sitting there.

Fifteen hundred years, divine right has been with the cultures extant and born of Clovis' time - and decision.  He had a thing or two to do with the way the world has developed, this guy.

And even so, what we know about him from anyone who ever met him even once:  absolutely nada.

The story about five thousand of his followers following him to the altar right after the battle of Zulpich becomes history, when nobody who was there has a voice we can hear.

The tales of SAINT Clotilde's cruel whispers, to kill those uncles (we also hear sometimes as if it were hard-history) who murdered her father and mother (a mother who, there is POSSIBLE evidence, lived into the sixth century!), are repeated as fact.  Even by those who acknowledge her a saint.

The stories are good, to be sure.  I won't pretend I didn't cherry pick the ones I found most intriguing.

But read with care, *any* history.

And read with joy, historical fiction ...