BOOK NINE

IN THE TWELFTH YEAR OF KING CHILDEBERT

[1. Richared, the new king of Spain, sends legates to Gunthram and Childebert; they are not received by Gunthram. 2. Death of Radegunda.]

3. Meantime the festival of Saint Marcellus came, which is celebrated in the seventh month in the city of Chalon, and king Gunthram was present. And when the ceremony was over and he had approached the holy altar for the communion, a certain man came as if to say something. And as he hastened to the king a knife fell from his hand; he was seized at once and they found another knife unsheathed in his hand. He was immediately led from the holy church and put in fetters and subjected to torture, and he confessed that he had been sent to kill the king, saying, “This was the purpose of the man who sent me.” Since the king knew that the hatred of many men was united on him and he feared that he would be stabbed, he had given orders to his men to guard him well and no opportunity could be found to get at him with swords unless he was attacked in the church, where he was known to stand without care or fear. Now the men who had been named were seized and many were executed, but he let this man go alive, though severely beaten, because he thought it a crime that a man should be led out of church and beheaded.

[4. A second son, Theodoric, is born to Childebert. 5. Prodigies. Among others a village with cottages and men disappeared suddenly.]

6. There was in that year in the city of Tours a man named Desiderius who claimed to be great and said he could do many miracles. He boasted too that messengers were kept busy going to and fro between him and the apostles Peter and Paul. And as I was not at home, the common folk thronged to him bringing the blind and lame but he did not attempt to cure them by holiness but to fool them with the delusion of necromancy.[EN] For he ordered paralytics and other cripples to be vigorously stretched as if he were going to cure by taking pains those whose limbs he could not straighten by the blessing of the divine virtue. And so his attendants would lay hold of a man’s hands and others his feet, and pull in opposite directions so that one would think their sinews would be broken, and when they were not cured they would be sent off half-dead. And the result was that many died under this torture. And the wretch was so presumptuous that he said he was blessed Martin the younger and put himself on a par with the apostles. And it is no wonder that he compared himself with the apostles when that author of wickedness from whom such things proceed is going to assert toward the end of the world that he is Christ. Now it was known from the following fact that he was versed in the wicked art of necromancy as we have said above, because, as they say who observed him, when any one said any evil of him far away and secretly he would rebuke them publicly and say: “You said so and so about me and it was not right to say such things of a holy man like me.” Now how else could he have learned of it except that demons were his messen