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A Broken Fragment of the Spear of Lugh — Origin of the Witch Hunter's Power
The shield-raising ritual and Sigebert's assassination at Vitry in 575 are well-documented in Gregory of Tours, writing as a near-contemporary. Gregory's specific attribution of the assassination to Fredegund's orders is the traditional and most commonly repeated account, but, as with much of Gregory's reporting on Fredegund, modern historians treat it as plausible rather than fully verifiable given his open hostility toward her elsewhere in the Historia.
Vitry marks one of the sharpest turning points of the entire Merovingian civil war era — the moment Sigebert I stood on the verge of reunifying Francia under his own rule, undone within days by assassination, an event that reset the balance of power between Neustria and Austrasia for a generation.
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