As the story of a conversion, it leaves something to be desired. We should not blame Adomnán for this: what he was interested in was (in his own words) ‘the manifestation of angels coming to meet the soul of Emchath’. For our purposes the tale is of interest in showing that Columba the monastic founder was also, on occasions, an evangelist.
From Jonas’ biography of Columbanus we may quote an episode of somewhat similar drift that occurred during his sojourn at Bregenz in or about the year 611.
And then they came to the place where they were going [i.e. Bregenz]. The man of God said that it did not really meet his requirements, but in order to sow the Christian faith in the heathen thereabouts he would stay there for a while. The peoples there were called the Suevi. And while he was there working among the inhabitants of that place he found them preparing to make a profane offering: and they placed a great barrel which in their language they called a cupa, which holds twenty measures or more of ale, in the midst of them. The man of God went up to them and asked what they proposed to do with it. And they said that they were going to sacrifice to their god Woden. He hearing their evil project blew on the cask and it burst with a mighty crack and the ale poured out. It was quite clear that there was a devil hidden in the barrel who by means of the evil drink took captive the souls of those who sacrificed. The barbarians saw this and were astonished and said that they had a great man of God among them who could thus dissolve a barrel fully bound with hoops as it was. He rebuked them and preached the word of God to them and urged them to refrain from these sacrifices. Many of them were persuaded by his words and turned to the Christian faith and accepted baptism. Others who had already been baptised but remained in the grip of pagan error heeded his admonitions as a good shepherd of the church and returned to the observance of gospel teaching.
Of course, we may again wonder – but did Jonas? – in what sense these Suevi had become Christians and what happened to their spiritual life after Columbanus had moved on to Bobbio in the following year. We do know that Columbanus’ disciple Gallus was left behind as a hermit beside Lake Constance and undertook evangelizing operations there. The site of his hermitage was to become one of the most celebrated of all medieval monasteries, taking its name from him – St Gallen.
We do not have to rely on his biographer to sense the apostolic impulse in Columbanus. It is attested in his own writings. In a letter written in 610 he spoke of ‘my vow to make my way to the heathen to preach the gospel to them’. Was Columbanus a monk or was he a missionary? The antithesis is misplaced. To be the kind of monk he was, in the age in which he lived, was also to be an evangelist.
* It should be borne in mind both here and in later chapters that clerical celibacy, though from a very early date regarded as praiseworthy, was not widely enforced within the western church before the twelfth century; and thereafter only with difficulty.
* It is tiresome that we have two near-contemporary saintly Irishmen with the same name, Columba, the Latin word for ‘dove’. The older of the two, Columba of Iona, is sometimes called Columba the Elder, sometimes by his Irish name Columcille, ‘Dove of the Church’. The younger is usually known by his Latin name in its masculine form, Columbanus, sometimes Englished as Columban. In this book I follow the convention of referring to the elder as Columba and to the younger as Columbanus.
My heart is white with joy; your words are great and good. It is enough for me to see your clothing, your arms and the rolling houses in which you travel, to understand how much intelligence and strength you have … I have been told that you can help us … You shall instruct us. We will do all you wish. The country is at your disposal.
Moshoeshoe, king of Lesotho, to Eugène Casalis, 1833
THE ENTRY OF the Tervingi into the empire in 376, the victory of Fritigern at Adrianople two years later, and the settlement of his people under treaty arrangements in Moesia four years after that proved to be but the opening scenes in the political drama which ended with the collapse of the Roman empire in the west and its replacement by a number of barbarian successor-states. It is as well to be clear about what this process was not before we go any further. The empire did not disappear in the fifth century. It is true that there was no emperor in the west after 476, but no one at the time could have guessed that this was more than a temporary hiatus. Authority reverted, at least in theory, to the emperor in Constantinople, where the Roman empire would survive for another millennium. But the western provinces did effectively come under new masters. They arrived by a variety of means. Whenever and wherever possible, the imperial government tried to control, or at least to influence and shape, the process of arrival. As we have seen, the descendants of Fritigern’s Tervingi were settled in Aquitaine in 418. We may now call them, as they had begun to call themselves, the Visigoths. In the course of the next half-century they were sometimes used as military federates in the name of the emperor of the day. For example, it was the Visigoths who bore the main brunt of the fighting at the battle of Châlons in 451, in which Attila and the Huns were defeated. Another contingent of Germanic troops at this decisive battle was furnished by the Burgundians. They too had been settled under treaty, with primary responsibility for defending the entry into Gaul by way of the upper valleys of the Rhône system against yet another Germanic people, the Alamans, who were pressing into the sensitive gap between Rhine and Danube in the Black Forest region. In the course of the fifth century the Burgundian kingdom expanded to include much of the Rhône valley and what is now western Switzerland. Another group of Goths, descendants of the Greuthingi who had been defeated by the Huns in the 370s, emerged in the northern Balkans out of the wreckage left by the collapse of the Hun empire in the 450s. They entered Italy under their leader Theoderic on behalf of the authorities in Constantinople to fight the empire’s enemies. The Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy established by Theoderic in 493 was notable for the harmonious co-existence within it of Goths and Romans.
The Burgundians, Ostrogoths and Visigoths constituted three successor-states in the western provinces of the empire which were founded to some degree in obedience to imperial political initiatives. Other peoples seized initiatives for themselves. In the winter of 406–7 the Rhine frontier collapsed and was penetrated by numbers of barbarian peoples, among them the Sueves and the Vandals. They made their way through Gaul, then in 409 moved south across the Pyrenees and made themselves masters of the provinces of Roman Spain. The Vandals crossed the Straits of Gibraltar in 429 and set up a kingdom for themselves, governed from Carthage, in what had been the imperial provinces of north Africa. Their place in Spain was subsequently taken by the Visigoths, while the Sueves were confined to a kingdom in the north-west quarter of the peninsula. All these peoples had lived in more or less close proximity to the empire’s frontiers before they crossed them. We may think of them as being in general not unlike the Gothic peoples among whom Ulfila worked in the fourth century, already touched to varying degrees by Roman culture. The process of acculturation to Romano-Mediterranean ways and values became for all of them more intense after entry into the empire.
What is specially relevant for us is that migration and settlement upon imperial soil were accompanied by conversion to Christianity. This had been a part of the agreement worked out between Fritigern and Valens before the crossing