The twilight of the West, 518–568?

Abstract

Imperial attitudes to Clovis’s kingdom in Gaul and to Theoderic’s in Italy were markedly different. Although Gregory of Tours preserves only a rather enigmatic account of it, Clovis’s victory over the Goths in 507 resulted in some form of imperial recognition in the following year. According to Gregory this was the granting of an honorary consulship.¹ Clovis’s baptism, and thus his formal renunciation of Arianism, may have also taken place at this time. Although the emperor’s grant of some kind of honorific is often associated with the greater acceptability of Clovis once he had become a Catholic, this itself was perhaps little more than a symbol of his determination to break once and for all with the Arian Goths, hitherto the dominant powers in the West. It is hardly accidental that Clovis’s breach with the Visigoths followed the first period of overt hostilities between the Empire and the Ostrogoths, or that it should have led to the establishment of diplomatic ties between Constantinople and the Frankish kingdom.