• General Notes

  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  
  Saint Clotilde (475 - 545 in Tours), also spelled as Clotilda, Clotild, Clothilde, or Chlothilde, was the daughter of Burgundian king Chilperic. Her uncle was the Burgundian king and Roman general Gundobad. Clotilde was the wife of Clovis I and contributed to her husband's conversion to Catholic christianity.
  
  On the death of Gundioc, king of the Burgundians, in 473, his sons Gundobad, Godegesil and Chilperic divided his heritage between them; Chilperic apparently reigning at Lyons, Gundobald at Vienne and Godegesil at Geneva.
  
  According to Gregory of Tours, Chilperic was slain by Gundobad, his wife drowned, and of his two daughters, Chrona took the veil and Clotilde was exiled. This account, however, seems to have been a later invention, since an epitaph discovered at Lyons speaks of a Burgundian queen who died in 506. This was most probably the mother of Clotilde.
  
  In 493 Clotilde married Clovis, King of the Franks, who had just conquered northern Gaul. She was brought up in the Catholic faith and did not rest until her husband had abjured paganism and embraced the Catholic faith in 496. With him she built at Paris the church of the Holy Apostles, afterwards known as Sainte Geneviève. After the death of Clovis in 511 she retired to the abbey of St Martin at Tours.
  
  In 523 she incited her sons against her cousin Sigismund, the son of Gundobad and provoked the Burgundian war. In the following year she tried in vain to protect the rights of her grandsons, the children of Clodomer, against the claims of her sons Childebert I and Clotaire I, and was equally unsuccessful in her efforts to prevent the civil discords between her children. She died in 544 or 545, and was buried at her husband's side in the church of the Holy Apostles.

Details of St. Clotilde's family with Clovis I