The Life and Times of Priscus, a Jewish Courtier of the Merovingians

Whether it’s a chance encounter with a Mormon missionary or an intimate conversation with a friend, most people have gone through one of the most awkward possible social interactions: proselytization. So, you can perhaps you can begin to imagine how intense an experience it was for a man in sixth-century Gaul named Priscus, who found himself being proselytized by no one other than his king, Chilperic. See, Chiperic was a Christian, and Priscus, who was a courtier and perhaps a nobleman at Chilperic’s court, was Jewish.

The life of Priscus was one of those tantalizing appetizers historians get in the records that never lead to a main course. The only proof left that Priscus lived at all lies solely in the pages of the Historia Francorum (“History of the Franks”), a book written by Bishop Gregory of Tours, a contemporary of Priscus'. In response to people’s concerns about the lack of learned men writing books in his own time, Gregory took it upon himself to take pen to parchment and start work on what would become the Historia Francorum, which begins as a typical Christian history of the world starting with Adam and Eve but turns into Gregory’s own record of seemingly everything he heard and experienced, from a saint’s deathbed vision of Heaven to a revolt by nuns that culminated in them locking up their own abbess and demanding an audience with the kings and bishops of the realm (incidentally, you can hear me talking about the mysterious man who dressed like a nun that got involved as a court witness in the aftermath of that revolt here). Luckily for modern historians, Gregory was around. Being a bishop living just after the collapse of the western half of the Roman Empire entailed more than just writing sermons and handling the accounts for the cathedral. Bishops were also administrators, counsellors of state, diplomats, architects, city planners, archivists, librarians, and occasionally leaders of armies (although this last one was occasionally frowned upon). It was while doing some bureaucratic errands for King Chilperic that Gregory, possibly for the first time, met Priscus, who walked in while Gregory was saying his formal goodbyes to the king.   

Gregory just describes Priscus as Chilperic’s “agent” who was on “familiar terms” with the king (Gregory of Tours, 330), but based on the fact that Gregory later describes Priscus as having his own band of retainers, it is quite possible Priscus was also a land-owning magnate. Judging from Priscus’ name, a Latin name that had belonged to philosophers and generals in the Roman Empire, he was, like Gregory himself, a Gallo-Roman, the native majority in Gaul. Although Germanic Franks like King Chilperic had swooped in, wiped out what little remained of Roman authority in the region, and become the new ruling class in Gaul (and would eventually give Gaul a new name, France), Gallo-Romans still were powerful landowners and high-ranking clergy whose influence could threaten even the kings. Behind Chilperic’s royal dynasty, the Merovingians, was a large retinue of Gallo-Roman dukes, counts, and bishops running the kingdom and leading armies. So Priscus’ family had likely enough lived in Gaul since before the Franks showed up, perhaps long before (Gregory’s own upper-class, Gallo-Roman family could trace itself as far back as the second century CE). Maybe Priscus was descended from one of the many Jewish migrants who left the large diaspora communities in Italy, Egypt, and the eastern Mediterranean during late antiquity, searching for new prospects and ending up in southern Gaul, especially the major coastal and trading centers like Marseilles, Narbonne, and Poitiers (another clue Gregory does leave us is a statement that Priscus’ son married a Jewish woman in Marseilles). Or his ancestors might have actually been converts to Judaism.

But unfortunately what Gregory finds interesting and relevant to posterity is not what modern historians would prefer to see, so we don’t have much else about Priscus’ actual life, his family history, and his place in the pecking order of early medieval Gaul. Instead, Gregory goes right to the crucial bits: theological debate. According to Gregory, Chilperic “put his hand on the Jew’s head in a kindly way.” He then asked Gregory to do the same, at which Priscus “drew back” (330). Chilperic then threw himself into a debate with Priscus over whether or not God would have a son. Apparently, though, Chilperic froze when Priscus countered, “How should God be made man, or be born of woman, or submit to stripes [be beaten], or be condemned to death?’” At this point, Gregory leapt in, saying God became human in the form of Jesus in order to redeem humanity. Then he fired off a number of quotes culled from the ancient Hebrew prophets, with Gregory spinning them into prophesies for the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Gregory considers himself the winner of the debate; he happens to always win the several theological debates that occur in his Historia Francorum. Nonetheless, Gregory also seethed, “Despite all my arguments, this wretched Jew felt no remorse and showed no sign of believing me” (332).

I can’t help but believe it wasn’t an accident that Priscus stumbled across Chilperic and Gregory. Nothing would please a medieval bishop like seeing a king personally try to save the soul of one of his Jewish vassals. I imagine Chilperic was trying to appease Gregory since he knew perfectly well the bishop didn’t much care for him. Throughout Historia Francorum Gregory makes no secret of the fact that he despised both Chilperic and his notorious queen Fredegund, the mastermind behind countless assassinations, at least if we go by Gregory. Chilperic might have been the only Merovingian king with intellectual pretensions, but that did not stop Gregory from mocking his poetry, deeming it a bad rip-off of the fifth-century poet Sedulius (we can’t judge for ourselves because all of Chilperic’s writings have been lost, but Gregory might have just been projecting his own insecurity over what he himself called his bad Latin). Nor was Gregory appreciative of Chilperic’s attempt to add a few Greek letters to the Latin alphabet through legislation. What really provoked Gregory’s ire, though, was naturally when Chilperic dabbled in theology. The king wrote a treatise arguing that the Trinity should be referred to as a single being called God rather than separate entities, which was so far a step that Gregory refused to let this document even reach his clerical subordinates. Elsewhere, Gregory accuses Chilperic as having “no fear of God” (272), even though he also describes an incident where Chilperic, at Fredegund’s urging, burned some of his tax rolls to try to appease God’s wrath after the deaths of their children from a plague.

While I have no doubt that Chilperic orchestrated his friendly little ambush of Priscus, Chilperic seemed genuinely angry that Priscus dared to keep the faith he was raised in. The issue of Priscus’ Judaism arose when Chilperic “ordered” (347) the baptism of a number of Jews, assisting them out of the baptismal pool himself. Gregory does not bother to dwell on just how voluntary, if at all, many of these baptisms were. Certainly it wasn’t in Priscus’ case, since he was imprisoned after he refused to show up. According to Gregory, Chilperic raged “that if he would not believe of his own free will he should be compelled to listen and to believe despite himself” (348). Even if the whole baptismal extravaganza was at least partially some political or public relations ploy (certainly, especially in a time and place like this, the border between heartfelt belief and realpolitik could be a thin one), Chilperic could not tolerate insubordination from who was apparently a high-profile courtier. This was especially true if Chilperic’s relations with the Church as  whole were as tense as his partnership with Gregory (348). Priscus had enough money and, I suspect, connections to get himself out of prison, although he put off Chilperic with vague and certainly (at least according to Gregory) insincere promises that he would convert.

We know how Priscus’ story ends, and unfortunately it’s not a happy ending. Priscus was in Paris, attending religious services at a synagogue. He was surrounded by his retainers but unarmed, out of respect for the holy occasion. Taking brutal advantage, he was ambushed by a man named Phatyr and his servants, who cut Priscus’ throat and murdered his retainers. Phatyr and his men tried to take refuge in the nearby church of Saint Julian since Chilperic had given orders that all of them were to be killed on the spot except Phatyr. Despairing of their chances, one of Phatyr's servants killed the others in a suicide pact. The survivor then tried to escape, only for a mob to get a hold of him and brutally kill him, either just out of the usual medieval vigilante urge to punish a crime in their midst or out of genuine sympathy for Priscus or the Jews of Paris (which is especially likely if the mob was mostly Jewish, a detail that is again lacking). Phatyr managed to escape in the chaos and tried to take refuge in his hometown which happened to lie within the territories of Chilperic’s brother and sometimes rival, King Guntram, only to meet his end via a revenge killing carried out by Priscus’ family.

I agree with the historian Ephraim Shoham-Steiner that this was likely not really an act of political fanaticism. Phatyr was also a courtier at King Chilperic's court, although very likely one not as powerful or prominent as Priscus (there’s a hint in how Gregory does specify that Priscus had retainers while Phatyr only had essentially goons). He had been one of the Jews baptized by Chilperic, which he perhaps agreed to in hopes of improving his status at court. When that didn’t quite happen and Chilperic actually kept giving Priscus the benefit of the doubt, Phatyr took matters into his own hands. If Phatyr hoped he would earn the king's favor by murdering a stubborn member of his former religion, the plan backfired badly, and Phatyr only got a self-imposed exile and a violent demise for his troubles.

The fact that Priscus rose high as a trusted courtier, a royal assistant, and likely a feudal patron in his own right and that he kept his place in royal favor (despite a brief spell of being kept behind locked doors) while remaining Jewish says so much – or, at least, it would if we weren’t missing so much of the story. Could Priscus have avoided converting forever? Maybe. If Chilperic was just feeling some kind of political pressure and was not really personally invested in the state of Priscus’ soul, then it’s likely. The so-called “Dark Ages” in Europe were not the worst time to be Jewish if you had to choose, depending on where you were. The Franks even after their conquests preserved Roman law, which recognized Jews as having certain basic citizenship rights. Pogroms of the kind that would bloody the era of the Crusades were practically unheard of. The first actual ghettos were still almost a thousand years from being established in Venice and Rome. However, the Byzantine Empire under Gregory’s contemporary Emperor Justinian strictly limited the religious freedom of Jews, and Jews within the empire were barred from civil service and most administrative jobs. Eyeing the wealth of the Jewish merchant communities in their midst, the Visigothic kings in modern-day Spain and Portugal by the early seventh century subjected their Jewish communities to harsher taxes, edicts that could take away their property or trading privileges, and periodic campaigns of forced exiles and conversions. In Gaul itself, Gregory writes approvingly of Bishop Avitus of Clermont-Ferrand, who forced the Jews of his city to choose between baptism or exile. Gregory describes that “joyous” (266) day in terms of religious ecstasy. I’d venture to guess the people who were so gently pushed out of their home city by Gregory’s saintly bishop recalled those days differently.

Historian Bernard Bachrach has pointed out that, before the centralization and political strengthening of the Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Jewish persecution tended to be sporadic and their rights actually protected from firebrand clergy. Until then, with exceptions like the Visigothic kings, bishops were usually disappointed by secular monarchs’ lack of enthusiasm for anti-Semitism. Still, Priscus emerges out of the obscurity as an example showing that it was still dangerous to be Jewish even for a king’s favorite. Priscus was remarkable in that he apparently carved out a comfortable place for himself in western Europe’s developing feudal system, but he would prove to be just among the first of many Jews whose safety in Europe would depend on the whims of the emperor or king or even just a local duke.

Sources

Bachrach, Bernard. Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977).

Benbassa, Esther. The Jews of France, trans. M.B. DeBevoisse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Shoham-Steiner, Ephraim. "Revisiting the Murder of the Jew Priscus in Sixth-Century Paris." The Medieval History Journal (2024).

Tours, Gregory of. History of the Franks, trans. Lewis Thorpe (New York: Penguin Books, 1974).