Remigius of Rheims

Remigius, Rémi in French, was born about 437 in the region of Laon, in northern Gaul, into a Gallo-Roman family of rank. He was made bishop of Rheims at about twenty-two, which was uncanonically young and was done, Gregory of Tours says, at the demand of the people. He held the see for over seventy years and died about 533, in his nineties.

His whole episcopate was lived in a country that had stopped being Roman. The imperial administration in northern Gaul collapsed during his youth; the Franks under Childeric and then his son Clovis took it over piece by piece. Remigius wrote to Clovis when he first came to power, a letter that survives, congratulating him on his accession and telling him bluntly how to rule: take counsel from your bishops, deal justly with the poor, defend widows, protect orphans, let your court be a place where no man is oppressed.

Clovis was a pagan. His wife Clotilde, a Burgundian princess, was a Nicene Christian and worked on him for years without result. Gregory of Tours tells the traditional story: at the battle of Tolbiac against the Alamanni, with his line breaking, Clovis called on the God of Clotilde and promised baptism if he won. He won.

Remigius instructed him and baptized him at Rheims, with three thousand of his warriors, on a Christmas Day, either 496 or, as many historians now argue, 508. Gregory records the bishop's words at the font: 'Bow thy head meekly, Sicambrian; adore what thou hast burnt, and burn what thou hast adored.'

What made that baptism different from every other royal conversion of the age is which Christianity it was. The Goths, the Vandals, the Burgundians, and the Lombards had all become Arian, and their kingdoms sat as hostile minorities on top of Nicene populations. Clovis went straight to the Nicene faith of his subjects. The Frankish kingdom therefore had no religious civil war built into it, the Gallo-Roman bishops became partners of the crown rather than a resistance, and the alliance of the Frankish monarchy with the church that would eventually produce Charlemagne began that day at Rheims.

Remigius spent the rest of his long life organising the church in the newly Frankish north, founding dioceses and, according to the sources, preaching to the pagan population himself.

Four of his letters survive and a short testament. Hincmar of Rheims wrote a full life of him in the ninth century, long after the fact and full of legend, including the story of the holy ampulla of oil brought by a dove, the flask used to anoint French kings at Rheims for the next thousand years.

Sources: Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, book 2; the Letters and Testament of Remigius (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae Austrasicae); Hincmar of Rheims, Vita Remigii (ninth century, for the later tradition); the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.