Corporate Solidarity and its Limits Within the Gallo-Frankish Episcopate

This chapter examines the limits of episcopal corporate solidarity in Merovingian Gaul. While the Gallo-Frankish episcopate embraced consensus as one of its fundamental values, this ideal was not easily achieved. Interpersonal conflicts and, more seriously, the factionalizing of bishops along political lines consistently threatened the corporate integrity of the episcopate. Despite the regular convocation of ecclesiastical councils to address breakdowns in corporate solidarity, structural pressures, most significantly the systematic royal patronage of bishops and their churches, encouraged ecclesiopolitical collaboration at the expense of episcopal unity. These pressures are illustrated through a case study: episcopal support for the royal pretender Gundovald.