Then they turned their attention to the convent itself, seizing its lands before finally attempting to abduct Leubovera herself. ![]() Hilary, the princesses scrounged up a diverse cast of mercenaries that, according to Gregory, included "murderers, sorcerers, adulterers, runaway slaves and men guilty of all other crimes." Their little army's first task was to beat up the party sent to formally excommunicate the women. Establishing their base in the nearby church of St. ![]() The nuns decided to take matters into their own hands. He duly promised to send a royal commission to resolve their problems with the abbess, but the men never arrived. With 40 rebellious sisters in tow, the pair left the convent-an excommunicable act in and of itself-and decamped to Tours to throw themselves on the mercy of Gregory, with Clotilda appealing to her uncle, King Guntrum, to remove Leubovera. In fairness, the princesses did attempt a non-violent solution at first. In the Merovingian Age social insult was to be avenged with violence.” “They could not bear someone of lesser status having authority over them, even though they were nuns and that person was their abbess. “Basina and Clotilda were real princesses,” he explains. Professor Paul Fouracre, a professor of medieval history at Manchester University, believes that the roots in the rebellion lay in Basina and Clotilda’s desire to protect their rank and power. Several pregnant nuns and a local eunuch, albeit one who denied ever meeting the abbess, were produced to back up the fallen princesses. There may have been a grain of truth to their accusations. But they also made the more outlandish claim that their abbess, Leubovera, allowed strange men to enter the abbey and knock up their fellow nuns, and that she had castrated a man and kept him in the convent. Gregory of Tours, the bishop and chronicler who recorded their story, is keen to depict the princesses as spoiled brats, especially Clotilda, whom he described as “ swollen up with boastfulness.” Some of their complaints were reasonable they described their experience of convent life as one of “ starvation, nakedness, and above all of beating". I am treated not as the daughter of a king but as the spawn of filthy slave girls." She is thought to have announced her uprising at the convent with the declaration: "I am going to my royal kin so they will know of our indignity, for here we are abased. ![]() When she turned rebel leader, the daughter of King Charibert I and a peasant-born concubine lent heavily on her status as royal progeny. Her cousin Clotilda (also known as Clothild) seems to have had a less traumatic, or at least less noteworthy, entry into religious life. The only way her remaining family could mitigate the supposed shame of her abuse was to force her into a convent. In sixth century Gaul, this left her unmarriageable and therefore removed her claim on the family lands and wealth. Basina's brother and mother were killed, and Basina was raped. When this failed to kill them, she took the more direct route and sent soldiers to finish the job. Her stepmother Fredegund (wife number three) took advantage of an outbreak of disease to rid herself of her rival's children by sending them to the infected city. But even this cutthroat world had its limits, and a respect for the sanctity of the church was one of them-and it made the princesses Basina and Clotilda’s armed takeover of their convent an act that rocked the medieval world.īasina, daughter of Chilperic I and his first wife Audovera, was a survivor through and through.
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