History of the Franks

by Saint Bishop of Tours Gregory

[G][11. The Israelites spend forty years in the wilderness. 12. From the crossing of the Jordan to David. 13. Solomon. 14. Division of the kingdom into Judæa and Israel. 15. The captivity. 16. From the captivity to the birth of Christ.]

17. In order not to seem to have knowledge of the Hebrew race alone[43] we shall tell what the remaining kingdoms were in the time of the Israelites. In the time of Abraham Ninus ruled over the Assyrians; Eorops over the Sitiones; among the Egyptians it was the sixteenth government, which they call in their own tongue dynasty. In Moses’ time lived Trophas, seventh king of the Argives; Cecrops, first in Attica; Cencris, who was overwhelmed in the Red Sea, twelfth among the Egyptians; Agatadis, sixteenth among the Assyrians; Maratis was ruler of the Sicionii….[44]

[18. Beginning of the Roman empire; founding of Lyons, a city afterwards ennobled by the blood of martyrs. 19. Birth of Christ. 20. Christ’s crucifixion. 21. Joseph is imprisoned and escapes miraculously. 22. James fasts from the death of the Lord to the resurrection. 23. The day of the Lord’s resurrection is the first, not the seventh. 24. Pilate transmits an account of Christ to Tiberius. The end of Pilate and of Herod. 25. Peter and Paul are executed at Rome by order of Nero, who later kills himself. 26. The martyrs, Stephen, James and Mark; burning of Jerusalem by Vespasian; death of John. 27. Persecution under Trajan. 28. The rise of heresy. Further persecutions. 29. The martyrs of Lyons. Irenæus, second bishop, converts the whole city. His death and that of “vast numbers,” of whom Gregory knows of forty-eight.]

30. Under the emperor Decius many persecutions arose against the name of Christ, and there was such a slaughter of believers that they could not be numbered. Babillas, bishop of Antioch, with his three little sons, Urban, Prilidan and Epolon, and Xystus, bishop of Rome, Laurentius, an archdeacon, and Hyppolitus, were made perfect by martyrdom because they confessed the name of the Lord. Valentinian and Novatian were then the chief heretics and were active against our faith, the enemy urging them on. At this time seven men were ordained as bishops and sent into the Gauls to preach, as the history of the martyrdom of the holy martyr Saturninus relates. [H]For it says: “In the consulship of Decius and Gratus, as faithful memory recalls, the city of Toulouse received the holy Saturninus as its first and greatest bishop.” These bishops were sent: bishop Catianus to Tours; bishop Trophimus to Arles; bishop Paul to Narbonne; bishop Saturninus to Toulouse; bishop Dionisius to Paris; bishop Stremonius to Clermont; bishop Martial to Limoges.

[I]And of these the blessed Dionisius, bishop of Paris, after suffering divers pains in Christ’s name, ended the present life by the threatening sword. And Saturninus, already certain of martyrdom, said to his two priests: “Behold, I am now to be offered as a victim and the time of my death draws near. I ask you not to leave me at all before I come to the end.” But when he was seized and was being dragged to the capitol he was abandoned by them and was dragged alone. And so when he saw that he was abandoned he is said to have made this prayer; “Lord Jesus Christ, grant my request from holy heaven, that this church may never in all time have the merit to receive a bishop from among its citizens.” And we know that to the present it has been so in this city. And he was tied to the feet of a mad bull, and being sent headlong from the capitol he ended his life. Catianus, Trophimus, Stremonius, Paul and Marcial lived in the greatest sanctity, winning people to the church and spreading the faith of Christ among all, and died in peace, confessing the faith. And thus the former by martyrdom, as well as the latter by confession, left the earth and were united in the heavens.

31. One of their disciples went to the city of Bourges and carried to the people the news of Christ the lord as the saviour of all. A few of them believed and were ordained priests and learned the ritual of psalm-singing, and were instructed how to build a church and how they ought to observe the worship of the omnipotent God. But as they had small means for building as yet, the citizens asked for the house of a certain man to use for a church. But the senators and the rest of the better class of the place were at that time devoted to the heathen religion and the believers were of the poor, according to the word of the Lord with which he reproached the Jews saying; “Harlots and publicans go into the kingdom of God before you.” And they did not obtain the house from the person from whom they asked it, but they found a certain Leocadius,[45] the first senator of the Gauls, who was of the family of Vectius Epagatus, who, we have said above, suffered in Lyons in Christ’s name. And when they had made known to him at the same time their petition and their faith he answered, “If my own house in the city of Bourges were worthy of this work I would not refuse to offer it.” And when they heard this they fell at his feet and offered three hundred gold pieces on a silver dish and said the house was very worthy of this mystery. And he accepted three gold pieces from them for a blessing and kindly returned the rest, although he was yet entangled in the error of idolatry, and he became a Christian and made his house a church. This is now the first church in the city of Bourges, built with marvelous skill and made illustrious by the relics of Stephen, the first martyr.

32. Valerian and Gallienus received the Roman imperial power in the twenty-seventh place, and set on foot a cruel persecution of the Christians. At that time Cornelius brought fame to Rome by his happy death, and Cyprian to Carthage. In their time also Chrocus the famous king of the Alemanni raised an army and overran the Gauls. This Chrocus is said to have been very arrogant. And when he had committed a great many crimes he gathered the tribe of the Alemanni, as we have stated,—​by the advice, it is said, of his wicked mother,—​and overran the whole of the Gauls, and destroyed from their foundations all the temples which had been built in ancient times. And coming to Clermont he set on fire, overthrew and destroyed that shrine[J] which they call Vasso Galatæ in the Gallic tongue. It had been built and made strong with wonderful skill. And its wall was double, for on the inside it was built of small stone and on the outside of squared blocks. The wall had a thickness of thirty feet. It was adorned on the inside with marble and mosaics. The pavement of the temple was also of marble and its roof above was of lead.

[33. Martyrs of Clermont. 34. The bishop of Gévaudan is maltreated by the Alemanni.]

35. Under Diocletian, who was emperor of Rome in the thirty-third place, a cruel persecution of the Christians was kept up for four years, at one time in the course of which great numbers of Christians were put to death, on the sacred day of Easter, for worshiping the true God. At that time Quirinus, bishop of the church of Sissek,[46] endured glorious martyrdom in Christ’s name. The cruel pagans cast him into a river with a millstone tied to his neck, and when he had fallen into the waters he was long supported on the surface by a divine miracle, and the waters did not suck him down since the weight of crime did not press upon him. And a multitude of people standing around wondered at the thing, and despising the rage of the heathen they hastened to free the bishop. He saw this and did not permit himself to be deprived of martyrdom, and raising his eyes to heaven he said: “Jesus lord, who sittest in glory at the right hand of the Father, suffer me not to be taken from this course, but receive my soul and deign to unite me with thy martyrs in eternal peace.” With these words he gave up the ghost, and his body was taken up by the Christians and reverently buried.

36. Constantine was the thirty-fourth emperor of the Romans, and he reigned prosperously for thirty years. In the eleventh year of his reign, when peace had been granted to the churches after the death of Diocletian, our blessed patron Martin was born at Sabaria, a city of Pannonia, of heathen parents, who still were not of the lowest station. This Constantine in the twentieth year of his reign caused the death of his son Crispus by poison, and of his wife Fausta by means of a hot bath, because they had plotted to betray his rule. In his time the venerated wood of the Lord’s cross was found, through the zeal of his mother Helen on the information of Judas, a Hebrew who was called Quiriacus after baptism. [K]The historian Eusebius comes down to this period in his chronicle. The priest Jerome continues it from the twenty-first year of Constantine’s reign. He informs us that the priest Juvencus wrote the gospels in verse at the request of the emperor named above.