ABSTRACT
How to explain that late antique writers, despite the overwhelming homogeneity of their religious allegiance, depicted certain rulers who exiled bishops positively and approvingly, while they depicted other rulers who behaved essentially in similar fashion in a very negative light? This chapter analyzes the way Gregory of Tours’ depiction of Merovingian Gaul is striking for its absence of persecution. To be sure, bishops are often found victims of violence, exile, and even murder, in Gregory’s pages. But these are never the result of intentional targeting of undesirable bishops by Merovingian rulers; quite the opposite. Gregory presents the exiling of bishops by Frankish kings as the appropriate form of ecclesiastical discipline. This case provides a stark contrast to the previous chapter, to argue that depictions of exiled bishops in late antique sources are often highly rhetorical passages that tell us more about the author’s opinion of the ruler based on his treatment of bishops than what really happened. Thus, Gregory of Tours, because of his largely positive view of specific Merovingian rulers, depicted them as using exile in the appropriate way, in stark contrast to Victor of Vita, whose Vandal kings are depicted as persecutors despite their use of exile to displace undesirable bishops. Variations in the way Christian writers depicted the same treatment (exile) by different rulers seem to have been the product of different rhetorical uses of exile in the changing discourse on “persecution” and legitimacy in this period.
