le members
of the royal line. The central point of his policy was the murder of the
smaller Prankish kings so that he might be the sole chief of the entire
people. He caused Sigebert of Cologne to be slain by his own son, whom
he then assassinated, thereby securing for himself the kingship over the
Ripuarian Franks. He dispossessed Chararic and his son and, later,
killed both for the sake of greater security. He slew Racagnar, King of
Cambrai, and the latter's brother, Richard, with his own hand, and,
later on, murdered their brother, Rigomer; so that the tale of deaths is
a long one. The manner in which the Christian religion aided Clovis in
the execution of his ambitious plans, shows with terrible truth how
deeply in the sixth century the ideal of Christianity had sunk from its
lofty height. No one of his contemporaries ever reproached Clovis for
his crimes; the Franks sang them in lays; and the pious Bishop Gregory
of Tours having related the murder of Sigebert, adds naively: "Every day
God thus felled his enemies to the ground and increased his kingdom
because he walked with a pure heart before the Lord and did what was
agreeable in his sight."

His four sons, when among them was divided the Prankish realm, soon
found a pretext to wage a religious war against the Arian Burgundians.
Their king, Sigismund, after the death of his first wife, Ostrogotha, a
daughter of the great Theodoric, took a second wife who, like a real
stepmother, ill-treated the young son of the king. When the youth once
bitterly reproached his stepmother for wearing the garments and jewels
of his mother, the wicked woman persuaded the king that his son aspired
to his throne. She attained her purpose: the youth was murdered. But
Nemesis soon overtook the murderer of his son: he lost his throne and
his life in battle against the Franks.

Besides Clotilde, the pious wife of Clovis, we meet, among the many
women of terrible moral depravity, with another saintly woman in the
Prankish dynasty. Chlotar, the youngest of Clevis's four sons, after
having conquered the Thuringians, though he had numberless wives and
concubines, took Radegundis, the daughter of the defeated Hermanfrid,
for a wife. But the saintly woman shrank from the touch of the immoral
king, and threw herself on the icy stone pavement, unmindful of the pain
it gave her body, for her soul was filled with the agitation of ardent
religious passion, and spent her time in prayer and devotion.