The memory of political crises and attacks on Church property in Merovingian Gaul and Visigothic Hispania

• Grant number: 25/06477-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: September 01, 2025
• End date: August 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - Ancient and Medieval History
• Principal Investigator: Marcelo Cândido da Silva
• Grantee: Isabela Alves Silva
• Supervisor: Joye Sylvie Marie Danielle
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France
• Associated to the scholarship: 23/17486-5 - The disputes over church patrimony in barbarian Gaul and Hispania (6th-8th centuries), BP.DR

Abstract

This project is part of a doctoral research conducted in Brazil on the competition over Church property in barbarian Gaul and Hispania. Relying on mentions of plundering, invasion, or destruction of ecclesiastical property, I examine the conflicts related to these resources, both among clerics and with lay agents. During the research stay at the Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne, I intend to analyze why, in my research corpus, there is a concentration of mentions of attacks on Church property in the decades 570-580 in Gaul and between 569-587 in Hispania. This concentration appears to be linked to political crises: the dynastic wars among the successors of Chlothar I in Gaul and the political-confessional crisis under Leovigild in Hispania, which ended the peaceful coexistence between Arians and Nicenes. I aim to study the relationship between Church property and these crises in each society. To do so, I will analyze the geographical and economic importance of episcopal churches in the conflicts, the support of ecclesiastical communities for political factions, how political struggles could overlap with local patrimonial disputes among clerics, and how the construction of a negative memory of the civil war in Gaul, by Gregory of Tours, as well as of Leovigild's reign in Hispania, by Catholic authors, may have contributed to the concentration of mentions in the sources. In Gaul, I will examine the Histories (594) and the Glory of the Martyrs (590) by Gregory of Tours, the acts of the Third Council of Paris (561-564), the Second Council of Tours (567), and the Fifth Council of Paris (614), and the precept of Chlothar II (614). In Hispania, I will analyze the Histories (624) by Isidore of Seville, the Lives of the Fathers of Mérida (680), and the act of the Third Council of Toledo (589).