The writings of Gregory of Tours along with those of Venantius Fortunatus suggest that by the late sixth century a general situation of mutual cooperation between bishops and kings prevailed in Gaul. By then several generations of Frankish kings had become accustomed to filling prominent roles in ecclesiastical matters including convening and presiding over church councils and appointing bishops to their sees. Gregory's own relaxed acceptance of episcopal and royal cooperation was due in part to his family members long benefiting from the support of kings. Sacred literature contributed to his sensibility that kings and bishops should strive to coexist. In Scripture the writer could find as much divine justification for royal authority as for clerical if he desired. But Scripture also taught him that the best kings were those who minded their spiritual betters and advisers. As Martin Heinzelmann has addressed, Gregory gauged relationships of contemporary bishops and monarchs according to past interactions between Old Testament prophets and Israelite rulers. The bishop may have gathered from the Old Testament that for every Hezekiah, there was an Ahaz, a Manasseh, and an Amon.

As he did for numerous righteous and villainous characters throughout his corpus, Gregory scrutinized the actions of Frankish royal family members and estimated the eternal condition of their souls. He recorded their pious and shameful activities, frequently both, and detailed their demises. For some he provided concise character evaluations. Gregory ushered readers through a cognitive process akin to that which he underwent while he examined their activities in real time. Sometimes he communicated a royal's hereafter explicitly and other times through insinuation. A study of Gregory's thoughts on the fates of Frankish royalty adds depth to understanding how the writer expected readers to come to the same conclusions he did about certain people's hereafter and to take away moral lessons from their analysis. Undoubtedly the bishop expected Merovingian family members to number among those who would benefit most from studying his corpus, especially the Historiae, and adopting its teachings.

Gregory's willingness to offer written assessments on the fates of individual royals arose in a context of other litterateurs doing the same.