If, as we have reason to think, he came into France in 566 or 567, at the age of thirty-five or thirty-six, we must suppose him to have been born about 531. He was an Italian of Treviso, which is not far northwest of Venice and northeast of Padua. Of his parentage and early education (except the fact that he was trained at Ravenna) we are ignorant; but he is said to have been acquainted with Boethius, a thing hard to believe, for the philosopher perished in 524. We are left in some doubt whether he had set forth from Italy because the Lombards were about to invade his part of it, or whether religious motives were at the bottom of this “exile,” as he is very ready to call it.
Judging his unknown past by his better-known later history, he was a man of affable and genial character, who could pay for all favors in the small coin of panegyric, and whose pen filled his pocket and procured him the hospitality of the rich and the great of the earth. We know he could sing, for he says so himself; and he could also turn verses so sweet and mellow that even the poorest of them were learned by his admirers and recited again with much delight. Now it happened that his eyes were affected, and his friend Gregory of Tours sent him some of the blessed St. Martin’s holy lamp-oil. When this was rubbed upon them—and it was doubtless good oil, and therefore not an objectionable ointment—he was greatly helped. He consequently showed his gratitude in two ways: by making a pilgrimage to the blessed St. Martin’s own town, and by writing the blessed St. Martin’s biography. This last he accomplished to the extent of four books of verse, employing, without any apparent scruple, the much more classic and elaborate treatise of Sulpicius Severus as the groundwork of his own. It was this journey which raises the question whether he was avoiding the Lombards or performing a pious vow when he entered France. Perhaps in this, as in other events of his life, the religious garment covered the secular desire.
From his native country, then, he made his way into another and less cultivated region. There was a Gallo-Roman society at the time, very much as there now are groups of educated persons in Siberia, or in the seaboard cities of China. A certain freemasonry of intelligence passed a literary man along from castle to cloister and from cloister to court. It was a period when classic learning was at its lowest ebb, and when the Romance tongues, like the second growth of a forest, were thickly clustering in upon the few survivors of the ancient groves of literature. The sixth century was removed from the past, but had not attained to much on its own account.
Yet we must not think that this century was barren of beginnings. The Merving kings—Clovis, and Childebert, and Clotaire the First, and Charibert—had now given place to Chilperic on the throne of France. Indeed, some writers are inclined to make this sixth century the true commencement of the Middle Ages, and it is very certain that we can see a great deal in the story of Fortunatus which is mediaeval. Moreover, Mohammed was born in 570, at Mecca, while our future bishop was traversing Gaul. And nearly contemporary with our author’s birth—that is, in 533—comes the announcement of the supremacy of the Roman bishop, which culminated in 590 in the strong administration of Gregory the Great. Fortunatus lived, therefore, in days when Latin Christianity was taking shape, and when the most aggressive of false religions was springing up. We have indeed said, in effect, that the Western Empire was at an end, and that the Monarchy of France had begun in 476.
Thus, as he looked backward, the Italian refugee could recall the successive blows of barbarian swords—the swords of Alaric, and Genseric, and Attila, and Odoacer—under which Rome had fallen. When Alboin started his raid from Pannonia in 568, with Lombards (Longobardi) and Gepidae and twenty thousand Saxons, it was surely enough to make a troubadour take refuge at Tours.
Our materials for the biography of Fortunatus from this point in the story become more available. He kept an itinerary, which was lost; but he wrote often to Gregory of Tours, and this seems to be the only correspondence which he conducted in a natural and ordinary manner. From it we learn that he crossed the mountains in a “snowy July,” and had written either “on horseback or half asleep.” He passed some time at Metz and Rheims. His days and nights were spent in travelling and feasting and in preparing songs and odes, to the consternation of his modern biographer, Luchi, who does not find much evidence of piety in these proceedings.
Fortunatus is his own exponent, and his language, literally translated, gives us a vivid picture of the way in which he made friends with everybody. “Travelling among the barbarians” (he writes to Gregory), “on a long journey, either weary of the way or drunk beneath the icy chill, at the exhortation of the muse (I know not whether more cold or sober), a new Orpheus I gave voices to the wood, and the wood replied.” The sentence illustrates not merely his experience but also his style of composition, which is turgid and frequently obscure. His panegyrics, for example, abound in the most fulsome flattery, arrayed bombastically in a string of nouns, verbs, and adjectives half a page long. The real idea walks within much of his Latin, like a pigmy in a great court train, ridiculously small and ridiculously pretentious.
Sometimes these same expressions of our poet betoken a convivial familiarity with his friend Gregory of Tours, which is not precisely canonical. Many post-classical words appear, and phrases which no grammarian would easily justify. The man is full of sly hints of good eating and drinking, and has a high-flown style of compliment, as when he writes to Lupus, “As often as I put together the parts of your discourse, I thought that I reclined upon ambrosial roses.” To Sigismund and Aregesles, two brothers, he declares that, “This sweet letter reveals to me the names of friends. Here is the brilliant Sigismund, and here is the modest Aregesles. After Italy, O Rhine, thou givest me parents, and by the coming of these brothers I shall be no longer a stranger.” In fact, he picked up “brothers” and “parents” with charming facility, and had a dexterity in drawing a corner of the mantle of royal favor over him which any courtier might covet.
Thus he went—we cannot well detect in what order or by what method, but pretty conclusively as a troubadour might have done—all through France. Like Chamisso, he proposed to
“Take his harp in his hand