CHAPTER 6

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN THE EIGHTH CENTURY

Conciliar Continuity: Alaric to Clovis

In September 506, thirty-four Gallo-Roman clerics met in the city of Agde “with the permission of our most glorious, magnifi cent, and pious lord king.”1 Th e honored rex was Alaric II, an Arian Christian, who hoped that by authorizing a council of Catholic prelates, he would be able to rely on their loyalty in the ongoing fi ght for political domina- tion in Gaul.2 Alaric’s dream of a Visigothic-dominated Gaul would be crushed only a year later, when he was defeated and killed by Clovis at the Battle of Vouillé.3 But in 506, the king was still vigorously attempt- ing to hold together a unifi ed Visigothic realm. Th e same year that he convoked the Council of Agde, he also issued the Lex Romana Visig- othorum (or Breviarium), a compilation of Roman law whose infl uence would far outlive Alaric himself.4 Following Clovis’ victory, and the establishment of Merovingian dominance in Gaul, the Lex Romana Visigothorum continued to be copied and consulted frequently, even though manuscripts of the Codex Th eodosianus were still in circula- tion.5 For Alaric, however, the codifi cation project had a more imme- diate aim: uniting the Roman subjects of his kingdom under a single code of laws issued in his own name. Alaric’s unifi cation eff orts were

1 Agde (506), Preface. 2 Mathisen, “Th e Second Council of Arles,” 543, has suggested that Arles II (442/506) was convoked for the same reasons already postulated for the Council of Agde (506). 3 Th e Visigoths continued to control Septimania in the south, and held a synod there in 589. 4 Herwig Wolfram, Th e Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples, trans. Th omas Dunlap (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 156, emphasizes that we should not view Alaric’s convocation of Agde and his issuing of the Breviarium as acts independent of each other. 5 On the use of the Codex Th eodosianus in Merovingian Gaul, see Wood, “Th e Code in Merovingian Gaul,” 161–77; Arjava, “Th e Survival of Roman Family Law Aft er the Barbarian Settlements,” 38. Janet Nelson, “Th e Merovingian Church in Carolingian Perspective,” in Th e World of Gregory of Tours, ed. Kathleen Mitchell and Ian Wood (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 243, notes that the Carolingians followed the Merovingian clerics in their use of the Code. 186 chapter 6 paralleled by those of the president of the Council of Agde, Bishop Caesarius of Arles, whose interests were pastoral rather than political.6 For Caesarius, the standardization of Gallic ecclesiastical administra- tion was a project still to be accomplished, and the legislative program, whose composition he oversaw at Agde, was a motley mix of old standards, reworked canons, and new decrees. A recent biographer has observed that Caesarius’ canons “drew attention to the continuity of the church with its Gallo-Roman past and to its solidarity with the universal church.”7 But Caesarius’ hopes for ecclesiastical uniformity under the watchful eye of the episcopate of Arles would be dashed by the Frankish military victory, and he himself would be increasingly marginalized in the fi nal decades of his life.8 Th e canons of the Council of Agde, however, did not share the fate of either their author or their royal sponsor. Along with those canons issued by the Councils of Orléans (511) and Epaone (517), they would prove to be among the most infl uential precedents for subsequent Frankish conciliar decrees. Although Alaric’s name mysteriously dis- appeared from some manuscripts of Agde’s canonical record, and Caesarius stopped attending royally convoked synods altogether, many of the broad issues debated and discussed at the council of 506 did not lose their relevance for the Gallic church.9 And not simply legislation, but conciliar protocol, too, remained remarkably consistent in Gaul from the fi ft h through the eighth century. Certainly, important changes took place, but it is the continuities that are striking in the acts of the Frankish councils. But did these continuities extend to those synods held in the transitional decades linking the Merovingian era and the Carolingian era? Boniface’s councils of the 740s, for example, are cate- gorized almost universally in the scholarly literature as “Carolingian” councils.10 Th is is surprising, considering the trend in early medieval scholarship to recognize continuities on either side of the year 751, when Pippin III had himself crowned king of the Franks. Richard Sullivan famously observed that “recent scholarship in a variety of areas involving both pre-Carolingian and Carolingian history forces

6 On the pastoral focus of Agde’s legislative program, see Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles, 97–104. 7 Ibid., 98. 8 Ibid., 244–72. 9 R. A. Markus, Gregory the Great and His World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 169. On the disappearance of Alaric’s name from some manuscripts of the council, see Mathisen, “Between Arles, Rome, and Toledo,” 37. 10 Godding, Prêtres en gaule mérovingienne, vi.