Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of The Fall of Rome. As always, I'm your host,

Patrick Weiman. Thank you for joining me today.

Some time in the turbulent 490s, as the story goes, the Frankish King Clovis was reviewing

his soldiers before they embarked on a yet another campaign of conquest. Clovis walked

up and down, checking weapons and armor, and then stopped in front of one man, a man he

remembered from an incident some years before. During a raiding expedition to Swassal

in Northern Gal, this man had taken a ure, a jug, that Clovis had wanted for himself,

and this man had split it in two with his axe. Within a warband that functioned on the

equitable distribution of plunder, this man was saying even the king didn't have the

right to take what he wanted. So Clovis steps in front of this fella and he grabs the man's

axe. It was in disgraceful condition, he said, and tossed it on the ground. When the man

bent down to pick it up, Clovis pulled out his own axe and split the man's skull in two.

This is what you did to my ure at Swassal in Clovis said. I suspect the rest of his soldiers

got the message.

Is the story true? Did this really happen? We have no idea. It comes to us from the later

historian Gregory of Tour, who was well informed about the events of his own day a century later,

but much less so about those events in Clovis' time.

What we know of Clovis during his actual lifetime is pretty limited, but there's no doubting

based on what we do know that he was savvy, politically astute, and utterly ruthless.

Whatever its origins, it stands to reason that this incident reflects the later understanding

of Clovis, a towering figure who took the Franks from a marginal group in war-torn, unstable

Northern Gal, to the rulers of almost all of the old Roman region during his reign.

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