Is the history of the Vase of Soissons a historical legend of the France of the Moyen-âge which one can summarize by “But who thus broke the Vase of Soissons”? This sentence shows well the doubt of the majority of the historians as for the historicity of this event. However, there is undoubtedly no franque anecdote more famous than that of the vase of Soissons and the school handbooks of the Third Republic, catholics as well as laic, illustrated it with abundance.

History of the vase according to Gregoire de Tours

The legendary anecdote of the vase of Soissons is told to us by Gregoire de Tours in chapter II, 27 of the Histoire of the Francs . It locates it about year 486, during the war delivered by Clovis I {{er}}, king of the Francs saliens with the Roman Syagrius and little time after the catch of Soissons its capital. “In this time, Gregoire writing, much of churches were plundered by the army of Clovis because it was still inserted in the errors of fanaticism” ( quia erat ille adhuc fanaticis erroribus involutus ).

Thus the soldiers removed from a church, with other liturgical ornaments, a vase of an extraordinary size and a beauty. The bishop of Rheims (Holy Rémy) sent an emissary to Clovis to require of him that in the absence of the other catches it restore at least this invaluable object to him to which it held preciously. The king invited the man to follow it until Soissons where was to take place the division of the spoils by it ensuring that as soon as the vase would have fallen to him, it would give satisfaction to the bishop ( dad ).

It is thus in Soissons, the city which has just been taken and whose Clovis already appears to have made if not its capital at least its principal camp, that is played the central scene. The army is gathered around the amoncelé spoils. The king asks the “very valorous warriors” to yield to him the vase in addition to his share. The men of good sense (illi quorum erat lie sanior) answer him: “All that we see here is with you, glorious king, and we ourselves are subjected to your authority (our ipsi tuo sumus dominio subjugati) . Acted now as you will like it, nobody can resist to you. ” But, everyone having spoken, a soldier - light, envieux and impulsive man (levis, invidus ac facilis) - with general amazement, strike the vase of its axe while exclaiming: “You will receive only what the fate will really allot to you! ”

The king swallowed the affront, tells us Gregoire, but “kept its wound hidden in its heart”. The bishop nevertheless recovered his vase, broken or dented. Undoubtedly - our sources do not specify it - Clovis it had to pay it by exchanging a share of its batch.

At the end of the year, having convened again the army with the Champ de Mars, Clovis, passing his warriors in review, the soldier recognized insolate. Noting that its behavior and its weapons left something to be desired, it took them to him and threw them to ground. The soldier bent down to collect them and Clovis benefitted from it to break to him cranium of a blow of axe, saying: Thus you made with the vase of Soissons!

History and exemplarity

Gregoire de Tours did not certainly invent the anecdote of the vase, it was to circulate in the ecclesiastical middle of its time. But it applies its usual processes of stylization to him to make an edifying history of it. According to Godefroid Kurth, “It fails only the marvellous element there to classify it in the category of the stories in the honor of the saints”. But the Belgian historian, not recognizing in this account any the criteria which seemed to him to sign a popular origin, was ready to accept his historicity; he even suggested that the original source could be the Vita lost Saint Remi that Gregoire in addition affirms to have had under the eyes and that the account could thus go back to a witness close and perhaps eyepiece to the événement
K.F. Werner underlines, as for him, the “analogy curious about the two acts” - the blow of axe which breaks the vase and the blow of axe which crashes to pieces the head of the soldier - literary process which would plead “for an invented history”

Louis Halphen, in an article which was a long time traditional, had already noticed that the punishment of the soldier, intervening one year after the crime, could be close to a topic hagiographic which meets elsewhere in Gregoire: in the Miracles of saint Julien, a count who extorted from the priests of Brioude thirty gold coins for ransom of one their servants wrongfully imprisoned, dies suddenly at the end of the year; elsewhere, a robber who carried the invaluable panes of the Yzeures-on-Hollow church of , dies misérablement, him also at the end of a year. Like the soldier of Clovis, these unjust holders of goods of church initially appear to be able to enjoy the good badly acquired, before succumbing to the revenge on an injured saint when the birthday of their misdeed arrives. All occurs as if Clovis, very laic pagan that it is, took model on these celestial revenges or was made their instrument. “Morality, concluded Godefroid Kurth, that the barbarians look there with twice before opposing so that justice is returned to a bishop and his church”.

In the History of the Francs , the anecdote of the vase appears in its chronological place, it also comes, could one say, in his ideological place. If one follows the plan hagiographic of the Life of Clovis such that Martin Heinzelmann proposes it, this one opens by a Messianic advertisement of its birth, then follow one another the outstanding facts of its pagan life: victory over Syagrius “which was not afraid to resist”, the episode of the vase which occupies us, the marriage with Clotilde, the doubts which attack the king with dead small Ingomer. Each one of these stages highlights the progression of the king towards safety and reveals it, by successive keys, like an instrument of God.

At the stage of the vase, the stylization of Gregoire seems to aim at a double goal: to vigorously oppose pagan Clovis which plunders the churches in converted Clovis which prohibits with its troops anything to take what belongs to them, would be this only fodder for the horses. But at the same time, this Clovis still plunged in “fanaticism” is distinguished already from its warriors by his respect of the clerks: it is an unquestionable harbinger of its conversion. Thus, according to Franck Collard, the history was already included/understood at the end of the Middle Ages in the historiographic tradition of Saint-Denis.

Vase of Soissons and the Remi bishop

Nothing in the text Gregoire makes it possible to identify the church and the bishop in question. At most the context of the war against Syagrius and the fact that the spoils are divided with Soissons locate them with any probability in old “the Gallo-Roman Domaine”, in the north of the Seine. But into the next century, the pseudo Frédégaire inserts the history in its chronicle; it has its source in Gregoire obviously, but the author introduced there an important deterioration, the bishop does not send any more one messenger but comes itself to beg Clovis to return the vase to him - and especially this bishop has from now on a name: it is Remi, bishop of Rheims, that one even which greeted Clovis at the time of its takeover and which, ten or twelve years later, baptized it in its cathedral.

Although the Liber Historiae imitates the silence of Gregoire, the tradition made its way and was so well anchored that today still historiography usually accommodates it.

We preserved the will of Remi saint. The bishop bequeaths to it “a money vase of eighteen books” to the church of Laon after having to have remelted it to make of them “Patène S and chalices”. Then it continues: “As for the other money vase which condescended to give me the lord king Clovis of famous memory that I received in the crowned fountain of the baptism so that I do of them what I wanted, you, my heiress the aforesaid church, I order that one manufactures of it a Encensoir and a engraved chalice of representations, which I would have done besides to him if I had had of it time during my life…” His Loup nephew, also bishop we do not know from where (perhaps of Soissons), is in charge of the execution of this wish.

Vase of Soissons and habits military

The history of the vase of Soissons has another interest: it constitutes a rare document, although extremely stylized, on the military life of the franques armies and, for this reason, it recently held the attention of the historians more “the novelists” of the franque time.

Under the Empire, the soldiers regularly touched a pay and a share of spoils which their chiefs redistributed to them according to their rank, their seniority or other criteria. In the armies of the Bas-Empire which did not exist any more that by their bodies of cruel auxiliaries, the rules surely had to adapt and, in many cases, to be negotiated. In the final analysis, the code Théodosien contains a law of Valentinien III, dating from the year 440, which concerns apparently” federate ““soldiers who must keep our province and their own goods” and in which the emperor issues: “Some is what a winner takes with the enemy, it automatically belongs to him”. This text which “privatize” plundering and covers with an modest legal coat a disorder which one could not prevent any more known of the interested soldiers (these “barrack' S room lawyers”, like known as Bachrach) and also surely little was surely appreciated last Roman generals… Clovis - which is those - by its authority, would have maintained in its army a use letic of “collectivization” of the whole of the spoils and of its integral division by the Sortes . The Visigoth S knew apparently an identical use which authorized the king has to take at the time of the division a seventh of the whole…

One can consequently to go further and to admit, by assumption, that the soldier of the history is that which found personally and carried the vase and which he is opposed, in the name of the occupatio bellica , with the rules enacted by his general. One would then include/understand better the value judgments of Gregoire than his Christian direction and its senatorial class consciousness roughcast against any disorder, it was established: the mass of the soldiers, described as lie sanior , adheres to the rules of use laid down by Clovis, discipline and a very Roman respect of sound dominium , and the “barrack' S room lawyer” - which is perhaps not a lète - although it can invite some with the imperial constitution to take advantage of its right, is condemned without call for its levitas and its invidia

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