Clovis I

Clovis I

Clovis ( ; c. 466 – 511) or Chlodowech (Latin Chlodovechus) was the first King of the Franks to unite all the Frankish tribes under one ruler, changing the leadership from a group of royal chieftains, to rule by kings, ensuring that the kingship was held by his heirs. He was also the first Catholic King to rule over Gaul, known today as France. He was the son of Childeric I and Basina. In 481, when he was fifteen, he succeeded his father. Clovis was not only a Frankish king, he was also a Roman official. The Salian Franks were one of two Frankish tribes who were then occupying the area west of the lower Rhine, with their center in an area known as Toxandria, between the Meuse and Scheldt (in what is now the Netherlands and Belgium). Clovis's power base was to the southwest of this, around Tournai and Cambrai along the modern frontier between France and Belgium. Clovis conquered the neighboring Salian Frankish kingdoms and established himself as sole king of the Salian Franks before his death. The small church in which he was baptized stood in the vicinity of the subsequent abbey of Saint-Remi in Reims, and a statue of his being baptized by Saint Remigius can be seen there. Clovis and his wife Clotilde were buried in the St. Genevieve church (St. Pierre) in Paris; the original name of the Church was the Church of the Holy Apostles. An important part of Clovis' legacy is that he locally succeeded to the power of the Romans in 486 by defeating the Gallo-Roman ruler Syagrius in the battle of Soissons.

Clovis converted to Catholicism at the instigation of his wife, Clotilde, a Burgundian Gothic princess who was a Catholic in spite of the Arianism which surrounded her at court. The followers of Catholicism believe that God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are three persons of one being (consubstantiality), as opposed to Arian Christianity, whose followers believed that Jesus, as a distinct and separate being, was both subordinate to and created by God. While the theology of the Arians was declared a heresy at the First Council of Nicea in 325 AD, the missionary work of the bishop Ulfilas converted the pagan Goths to Arian Christianity in the 4th Century. By the time of the ascension of Clovis, Gothic Arians dominated Christian Gaul where Catholics were the minority. In this context, Clovis was baptized at Rheims around 496 AD. In the 11th century the abbey's church was to become the Cathedral of Rheims, where most future French kings would be crowned. The king's Catholic baptism was of immense importance in the subsequent history of Western and Central Europe in general, for Clovis expanded his dominion over almost all of the old Roman province of Gaul (roughly modern France). He is considered the founder of the Merovingian dynasty which ruled the Franks for the next two centuries.