ABSTRACT
Civil war was the spectre which haunted much of sixth-century Gaul, or so it seemed to Gregory of Tours as he wrote the preface to the fifth book of his Histories. In certain respects this preface is misleading. Book Five of the Histories covers the period from the murder of Sigibert in 575 until Gregory's own trial at Berny-Riviere in 580. These five years were a particularly disruptive time for the city of Tours, not least because of the presence of Chilperic's son Merovech, who sought asylum in St Martin's in 577. 1 Book Seven enhances the impression of a century of civil war, but again allowance must be made for the fact that this one book covers scarcely more than twelve months of 584/5, and that it is concerned largely with the attempt by the 'pretender' Gundovald to establish his claim to the Frankish throne. The crisis surrounding Gundovald casts a disproportionate shadow across Gregory's Histories. Indeed, it is difficult to estimate the scale of any civil war from Gregory's account.
