Clovis takes to the stage and the end of Roman Gaul (481 - 486)

As we get to this point in  Adhemar's narrative., we've got to deal with a thorny (though pretty minor to non-specialists in late Roman and Merovingian history) historiographical question, one for which we're not much better informed about than Adhemar and his eleventh century contemporaries were - what was this entity that Aegidius, and his son Syagrius who appears centre stage in this chapter, were in charge of. 

The one thing we can be fairly sure about is that any effective control from the West Roman imperial centre (the imperial court at Ravenna in Italy, that is to say) over Gaul north of the Loire ended in the late 450s. In Aquitaine (the south western third of Gaul between the Loire, Rhone and Pyrenees) Roman rule had already ended, as the Visigoths had established themselves a kingdom based at Toulouse and the local senatorial aristocracy and other provincial Roman elites had agreed to co-operate with them - one of such figures, Sidonius Apollinaris (d.489) recounts in his letters playing backgammon with the Visigothic king Theodoric II (d.466) and tactically losing to win his patronage. But a string of events between 454 and 460 would lead to the one corridor linking northern Gaul to Italy (the modern day French regions of Burgundy, the Rhone-Alpes and Provence) being lost. In September 454 Valentinian III, the incompetent, child-like emperor Western Roman Emperor (a bit like an overgrown Joffrey Baratheon, to give a rough analogy to any Game of Thrones fans among you), had his effective second in command and right hand man, the magister militum (head of the armed forces) Flavius Aetius, who was responsible for cutting short Attila the Hun's invasion of Gaul in 451, murdered in his own presence. Valentinian III was then himself assassinated by a eunuch the following year. At this stage it was pretty clear that the Western Roman empire was going up schitt's creek without a paddle - the Rhineland, Britain, Aquitaine, Africa and Sicily had all either been abandoned or lost for good, the centre was becoming starved of tax revenues to pay the armed forces and the time-honoured ancient Roman political traditions of factionalism, assassination, military coups and usurpation were as alive as ever. The new emperor, Petronius Maximus, dispatched his confidant Avitus in order to establish friendly relations with the Visigoths, knowing that the Western Roman Empire could not militarily defend itself on its own steam. However, the Visigoths proclaimed Avitus emperor and as he returned via Provence the Gallo-Roman senators at Arles proclaimed him as such too. Petronius Maximus meanwhile had been deposed after the Vandal fleet sailed from their newly established kingdom in Africa and sacked Rome. The Burgundians also got behind Avitus, but the Roman legions in Italy under the command of a Romanised-Germanic general called Ricimer resisted Avitus, and he was defeated by 457. The new emperor, Marjorian, got the Burgundians and Visigoths to help him out in dealing with the Suebi, a Germanic tribe that had taken over much of Spain, but in the end the Visigoths further consolidated their holdings in Aquitaine by taking the area around Narbonne (Septimania) as well and the Burgundians took over Burgundy (the region of course gets its name from them), Provence and Savoy, sharing the lands there with the local senators. Northern Gaul was thus by the time of Marjorian's overthrow in 461, completely cut off from the remaining West Roman imperial territories in Italy and Dalmatia and, given the nature of communications at that time, had to basically be run on its steam (my source here is Peter Heather, "The Huns and the End of the Roman Empire in Western Europe", English Historical Review, 1994, pp 31 - 35).

(Above: Modern reconstruction of what Roman legionaries would have looked like in the mid-5th century)

So with this necessary context established, what kind of regime existed in northern Gaul in the 460s to 480s? The first theory is the most straightforward. Aegidius, the commander of the Roman legions in Gaul, kept the Roman imperial government structures (the legions, the tax system, the bureaucracy, the coinage) going at provincial level there and established himself as a "king" or as a contender for the imperial throne (as Steven Fanning has suggested, to counter those who suggest that this is implausible because the Romans had been ideologically opposed to kingship since Tarquin the Proud) with his base at Soissons in the modern day Picardy region of northeast France. His son Syagrius then succeeded him after his death and kept going until, well, we'll see in the upcoming translated chapter. However, there's a problem with this. Its all based on a passage in the Ten Books of Histories of Bishop Gregory of Tours (535 - 594). Since Gregory was writing about a century after all this was supposed to have happened, historians have argued that he is therefore not reliable, that either he got confused over what went on in the 460s and so decided to oversimplify things thus, or that for some reason or other he made a purposeful distortion. This goes with the feeling that the idea of a Roman rump-state holding out in northern Gaul is too romantic to be true, and doesn't gel well with what we know about how things worked out between Romans and barbarians elsewhere in the Roman west during the second half of the fifth century. 

(Above: A helpful yet somewhat controversial map)

The second theory, proposed by Edward James in "The Franks" (1988), argues that the Franks had already taken over northern Gaul by this point and had managed to accomodate themselves by allowing a lot of the imperial government structures to continue, provided they received shares in the tax revenue. Under this model, Aegidius was just a military commander and Syagrius was just a local count (a late Roman term for military governor, from which the medieval hereditary noble title eventually evolved by the eleventh century) of Soissons. The problem with it is that it doesn't explain why the Franks would have been fighting in Anjou and Orleans, supposedly areas under their control, as we saw in the last post. It doesn't properly account for Brittany, which the Franks didn't even begin to make moves towards conquering until well into the sixth century, and even in the areas near Brittany, Nantes and Vannes, the material culture remains thoroughly Gallo-Roman with no sign of Frankish influence until the late 500s. Gregory of Tours might have gotten things wrong, but since there's a complete gap in narrative histories for Gaul between the end of Prosper of Aquitaine's chronicle in 455 and when Gregory himself began writing his histories more than a century later, we can't dismiss him altogether. Indeed, some explanation needs to be made for why Soissons remained such an important political centre for Frankish kings up until the mid-tenth century (I get these critiques from Penny McGeorge's "Late Roman Warlords", Oxford University Press, 2002, pp 161 - 162).

A third theory favoured by McGeorge herself is to see northern Gaul as a "complex and shifting patchwork" (read massive clusterfuck) of competing powers, including Saxon, Alan and British settlements (as well as a Romano-British army led by a king), Frankish warlords, semi-autonomous Gallo-Roman bishops, municipal authorities, landowners and peasant communities and the remnants of the late Roman imperial administration all vying for power, with no one clearly on top (see Ibid, p 164). Yet another theory that I've heard going round on Historical discussion groups (but never seen a source cited for) suggests that Aegidius and the remnants of the Roman legions and Childeric and his Frankish warriors got together to form a joint Romano-Frankish kingdom. Perhaps there are some indications towards this concealed in the sources from Gregory of Tours on, after all if we recall correctly Adhemar, like Gregory, does describe Aegidius running Childeric's kingdom in his absence for 8 years. But I'm not sure if I buy it. As a a Carolingianist and post-Carolingianist, I ultimately sit on the fence on this matter. But what seems relatively uncontentious is that Syagrius's rule, even if it was just in Soissons, (Spoiler alert) came to an end and that Childeric's young son, Clovis, made himself top dog in northern Gaul. So without much further ado, let's hear what Adhemar had to say about all this - as always, I accept all faults in my translation.

"After this, King Childeric died; he had reigned for twenty-four years and his son, Clovis, manfully received the kingdom of the Franks. However, in the fifth year of Clovis’ reign, Syagrius, son of Aegidius, was residing in the city of Soissons, which his father had held, on which Clovis with Ragnachar, his kinsman, approached with an army, and they were fitted for war. Although they bravely fought with each other, decided to abandon his army in favour of fleeing to Alaric, king of the Visigoths, and he escaped to the city of Toulouse. Clovis directed his messengers to Alaric, in order that Syagrius would be returned to him; if, however, he [Alaric] was not willing to return him [Syagrius], they [the Franks] would prepare to do battle with him. But Alaric was afraid of the anger of the Franks, and he handed over Syagrius to the messengers of Clovis. When he [Syagrius] was presented to him, he [Clovis] ordered him to be executed, and he received all his kingdom and treasure"

(Above: what the gates of Soissons would have likely looked like at the time Clovis laid siege to them)

(Above: an early modern depiction of Syagrius being brought before Clovis, who is about to sentence him to death)

More on the origins of the Merovingian kingdom from Adhemar of Chabannes - Chapters 6 and 7 of the Historia Francorum (c.460 - 481)

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Last time, we left Adhemar of Chabannes' Historia Francorum on a bit of a cliff-hanger. King Childeric, intoxicated with power and hubris (as well as being a little bit horny, perhaps), has gotten up to antics of a certain nature with the daughters of many of his subjects, and so, facing an uprising of the Frankish people, has to go into exile in Thuringia. Before he leaves, however, he hatches a crafty plan with his best mate, Wiomad. Here, we see where this plan leads to. Expect lots of hacking and slashing and burning, and also a romance which, while its not exactly as star-crossed as Anthony and Cleopatra, Lancelot and Guinevere, Abelard and Heloise, Dante and Beatrice or Percy and Annabeth (kudos to you if you can get the last one), is still a better love story than Twilight, if that means anything these days (I'm a medievalist not a contemporary historian, so how should I know?)

Anyway, enjoy the translations and, once again, all faults are my own.

Chapter 6: when King Childeric was raised to the kingdom

(Above: The Gold signet ring of King Childeric I - a classic example of the more abstract, Germanic/ sub-Roman artistic styles. Could it have been fashioned from the same half of the gold coin he gave to Wiomad in Adhemar of Chabannes' account?)

Indeed, the Franks, after Childeric had abandoned them, having followed bad advice, established Aegidius, prince of the Romans, to rule over the [Frankish] kingdom. When Aegidius had reigned over the Franks for eight years, Wiomad pretended to join in friendship with him; meanwhile what was known by him, was not known to Aegidius. Moreover, he encouraged Aegidius to deceitfully oppress the other Franks. Having heard that advice of his, Aegidius took to bitterly oppressing them. Indeed, they were turned from reverence to sedition; again, they desired advice from Wiomad as to what they must do. Yet to them, he said “why do you not remember how the Romans oppressed your people and ejected them from their land? Indeed, you ejected your useful and wise king, and raised over yourselves a servant of the Roman emperor, proud and conceited; you did not make a good resolution, but an exceedingly bad one.” And to Wiomad they replied “Indeed, he [Childeric] was ingenious to us. Due to the fact that he took advantage of your daughters wickedly and unlawfully, we became completely opposed to our king. If only we were rewarded to find him, and he would reign over us peacefully. Thereupon that friend [Wiomad] sent to the king the part of the gold coin which they had divided between themselves before, saying “return to the kingdom of the Franks because they are all pacified.” The king indeed, knowing this half of the gold coin to be the sign, understood it as a clear signal that he was desired by the Franks; and in response to their demands, returned to his kingdom. For while he was in Thuringia, with Queen Basina, the wife of King Bisinus, King Childeric committed adultery with her. Likewise, Basina, queen of Bisinus, king of the Thuringians, having left her man, came to Childeric. And when he questioned her what she was searching for, or else for what reason she had come to him from such a distant region, and she brought forth the response: “I altered your usefulness and handsomeness in order that you would be useful and wise, therefore I come in order to live with you. For if I were to have known, on the furthest limits of the sea, someone more useful than you, I would desire and beg for him to join together with me.” With rejoicing Basina was bound together with Childeric in marriage. Verily, receiving from him [Childeric], she gave birth to a son and he was named Clovis. This son was the great king over all the kings of the Franks and he was the bravest warrior.

 

(Above: Basina and Childeric depicted in a beautiful deluxe manuscript of the Grand Chroniques de France, produced in the 1330s for the future king of France, Jean II.)

Chapter Seven: In which the Franks cast out Aegidius, who they had instituted over themselves, and took back Childeric

(Above: seems like these chaps weren't just carving out kingdoms in lowland Britain and fighting battles with King Arthur, or whichever Romano-British warlord/s inspired the medieval legend. They were poking their noses round Gaul too).

In those days, the Franks captured the city of Agrippina over the Rhine, and they called it Cologne, as if tenant farmers lived there. They killed many of the Roman people from Aegidius’ part of Gaul there, and that same Aegidius escaped and fled. And they came to the city of Trier, over the river Moselle, and they laid waste to those lands and captured and set fire to that same city. Afterwards, King Childeric drove back a very large army of the enemies of the Franks and came through to the walls of the city of Orleans, and devastated the surrounding countryside. Adovagrius, leader of the Saxons, came through the sea with a fleet of ships up to the walls of the city of Angers, and he set that land ablaze, and thereupon great losses were inflicted on the city of Angers; afterwards, Adovagrius accepted hostages from Angers and from the other cities. Therefore, with Adovagrius having turned back from Angers, King Childeric of the Franks, having set in motion an army, came there; he killed Paulus, who was count there, and he captured that same city; and he burned down the city with fire, and from there he returned home.

(Below: a map of Europe in 481. Its the best I could find, though do exercise some caution in using it. The Kingdom of Syagrius will be making an important appearance next time, though do note that it refers to the territories in northern Gaul that remained under Roman rule even after 476).

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An eleventh century monk's take on the migration era and the origins of the Merovingian dynasty - the Historia Francorum of Adhemar of Chabannes chapters 2 - 5 (c.1200 BC - 460 AD)

More than a week has passed and progress has been made with the translation of Adhemar of Chabannes. I must say that I've been really enjoying it, even if Adhemar's generally straightforward and unpolished Latin has thrown up a few difficulties in places. Everything up to the beginning of chapter 6 has now been translated and is here for you to read at your leisure. 

(Above: an image befitting the general theme of this post)

It is here that the content of Adhemar of Chabannes' History of the Franks moves from myth (see my last post) - though having revisited the Percy Jackson books this summer (one of my favourite series' of novels when I was a kid), which really rekindled my passion for all things Greek mythology, I say "myth" with just the slightest bit of disappointment - more towards what might be called history. Or maybe more accurately a kind of middle ground. Some of the figures who feature in these chapters definitely existed, like Emperor Valentinian I, Marcomer, Chlodio, Attila the Hun and Aegidius. Others such as the very early Frankish rulers with the very un-Germanic names of Priam and Antenor are definitely fictitious, and Faramund and Merovech are also shrouded in later legends - remember, though the contemporary documentary sources for fifth century Gaul are much better than those for post-Roman Britain (where they're almost non-existent save for that notorious sermon of Gildas'), we are still approaching the age of "King Arthur." Regarding the origins of the Franks, we can safely say that Adhemar's account of Frankish migration and ethnogenesis is wrong. There is absolutely no evidence, save for eighth century legend, to suggest that the Franks migrated from the sea of Azov in modern day Ukraine to the German Rhineland in the reign of the Roman emperor Valentinian I (r.364 - 375). The Franks seem to have originated instead as a confederation of West Germanic tribes in the modern day Franconia region of central Germany who first appear fighting the Romans during the Imperial Crisis/ "Military Anarchy" of the Third Century (235 - 284) - these tribes, including the Chamavi, the Chattuari, the Bructeri and the Salians, were all continued to have fairly distinct identities, but they banded together for military purposes and called themselves the Franks, meaning "the hardy", "the brave" or "the free", depending on who you asked. In the third century, the Franks were fairly successful in leading raids across the Rhine and devastating Roman Gaul, but Constantine the Great (r.306 - 337) defeated them, having their chieftains thrown to the wild beasts and the free men pressed into service in the Roman army. The Salian Franks were made Roman foederati (allies/ auxiliaries) and given a client state just over the Rhenish frontier in the south of what is now the Netherlands to rule and act as a buffer against the Frisians to the north, one of the barbarian tribes that could not be drawn in to the remit of imperial control by the gravitational pull of Roman civilisation but wanted some sweet, sweet Roman gold and other highly items that could be plundered. As the Western Empire began to be confronted with a new wave of barbarian invasions in the fifth century, the Franks provided them with some assistance against the Visigoths, Alans, and Burgundians early in the century and against Attila and the Huns at the battle of the Catalaunian fields near modern day Chalons-en-Champagne in 451. They also became increasingly more politically unified under Merovech (d.458) and Childeric (d.481) - I obtained all this information from Patrick Geary, "Before France and Germany: the Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World", Princeton (1988), pp 77 - 80, more than thirty years old yet still authoritative and by one of the foremost living experts on the migration era and early Frankish history, certainly as concerns Anglophone academia.

But, I hear you cry "aren't myths precisely the stuff of history? Positivism, in which historians preoccupy themselves with narrowly defined 'facts' and what happened, is dead. Aren't narratives and perspectives what historians mostly deal with these days?" And you'd be right, and my own academic work (especially my masters' thesis) would confirm it to some degree. What makes it interesting is not whether Adhemar got his facts about what went on in late antiquity right - though it is interesting to find out what things people in the eleventh century knew about that time period that are still factually accepted by modern scholars, especially to counteract the tired old enlightenment stereotypes of those ignorant medievals. Instead, what is interesting here is how Adhemar, and the late seventh and early eighth century sources he drew from, the Fourth Book of Fredegar and Liber Historiae Francorum, tried to make sense of their ethnic past, or rather how they helped construct one to help strengthen a sense of Frankish identity. Ethnic histories like this abounded in the early middle ages - the most famous ones including Bede's "Ecclesiastical History of the English People" (731), Paul the Deacon's "History of the Lombards" (796) or Nennius' "History of the Britons" (828), which was an important foundation for Geoffrey of Mounmouth's "History of the Kings of Britain" (1136), including in its account of King Arthur.  Undoubtedly identity, is something that is often defined negatively - "we are from group x because we are not like group y or group z": it really isn't hard to think up historical or contemporary exempla for this, if you've been following the news at all for the last five years. But it can also be defined positively - by what brings us together rather than what divides us - through the development of shared interests, cultural practices and traditions, symbols, history and myths, on which there has been a lot of work done by historians, including ones of much more modern ones than this blog concerns. The exempla of this kind of identity formation include not just nations, social classes and political movements/ parties but also urban and rural communities, corporate organisations, schools, universities, sports clubs, friendship groups and, perhaps above all else, families. One can wonder what being a Frank meant in the early decades of the eleventh century. The Carolingian empire was long-gone, having fragmented into multiple kingdoms, some of which (like Adhemar's West Francia) had further fragmented into duchies (like Adhemar's native Aquitaine), counties and secular and ecclesiastical lordships, so there was no political unity to give "Frankish identity" any intuitive coherence. Meanwhile, the First Crusade, which would breathe new life into Frankish identity, largely because the Byzantines and Muslims used it as an ethnic slur to refer to all Westerners, whom they saw as barbarians that were good at courageous fighting and nothing else, was still a good few generations away. So what I think was going on here is that Adhemar, looking back at earlier origin stories for the Franks from the Merovingian/ early Carolingian eras, when Frankish political unity and ethnic consciousness was an ongoing project, and incorporated them into his history in order to give the Franks a heroic past that people in the politically fragmented present would want to identify with.

Moreover, what Adhemar has to about the fourth and fifth centuries AD still resonates with the debates about the Migration Era and the Fall of the Western Roman Empire still going on among scholars today. Above all, he appears to stress confrontation between Romans and barbarians (and between other barbarian groups) and a great deal of violence and destruction, exemplified in Chlodio's rampages through north-eastern Gaul - indeed, what happens at Cambrai sounds eerily like ethnic-cleansing. Whether the collapse of the Western Roman Empire really was the result of exogenous shock created by migration and confrontation between Romans and barbarians and whether it was catastrophically violent and destructive - and here I shall respectfully disagree with my former tutor at Worcester College, Oxford, Conrad Leyser, who claims that such a view of the fall of Rome, indeed the notion that such an event had taken place at all, was the invention of Italian Renaissance writers traumatised by the new wave of barbarian invaders from north of the Alps in the Italian Wars (1494 - 1559) - has been a source of great controversy since the 1970s. You'll find such diametrically opposed views on this matter coming from, on the one hand, Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins (see the interview with them together by Oxford University Press) and, on the other hand, Walter Goffart and Guy Halsall - Bryan Ward Perkins himself provides a good, but undoubtedly partial, overview of it all here. These debates aren't only academic controversies par excellence, they've also seeped into popular political discourse and inevitably things have gotten quite nasty. Broadly speaking, those who try to minimise the role of barbarian migration in the fall of Rome (indeed come close to denying it altogether, like Goffart) and emphasise accommodation between Romans and barbarians and fluid cultural and ethnic identities have been unfairly accused of pushing a politically-correct (we might now say "woke") agenda, while those who emphasise the catastrophic impact of the migrations and violent confrontation between Romans and barbarians have been hysterically accused of enabling the alt-right. But let's not get too side-tracked. What is clear is that whatever happened in the western regions of the Roman world in the fifth century AD mattered to intellectuals in the eleventh century, and still matters to us today in the twenty first, in how they made sense of the world and how they saw themselves. But now, time to let Adhemar, or rather my best attempts to translate him (I accept all errors as my own), take over.

Chapter 2 – concerning how the race of Alans rebelled against Emperor Valentinian, the Franks defeated them and the Franks were given tribute

(Above: Second Century AD Roman relief of an Alannic warrior)

After that time, the race of Alans, a perverse and very bad people, rebelled against Valentinian, emperor of the Romans. Thereupon, a most huge army moved from Rome and proceeded against that enemy, initiated battle, and overcame and defeated them. Consequently, the defeated Alans fled over the river Danube, and entered into the sea of Azov. However, the emperor said “whoever will be able to enter into these swamps and eject this wicked race, I will give them tribute for ten years.” Then the Trojans gathered together and devised stratagems, just as they were learned and noted for, and entered into the sea of Azov with others from the Roman people, and thence drove out the Alans and pierced them through with the blades of their swords. Thenceforth, Emperor Valentinian called them “Franks” in the Attic language, on account of their ferocity, rigour and courageous hearts.

 

Chapter 3 – where the emperor sent tax collectors in order that the Franks would pay tribute

(Above: statue of Emperor Valentinian I)

Therefore, after the aforementioned tribute was sent for ten years, the emperor [Valentinian] sent tax collectors with a first-rank commander from the Roman senate, in order to levy customary tribute from the Frankish people. These men also, as it were, were cruel and very monstrous, and after they had accepted their worthless delegation, the Franks said to them in turn “the emperor with the Roman army was not able to cast out the Alans, the brave and rebellious people, from the refuge of the swamps; indeed, was it not us who overcame them, why do we pay tribute? We stand here, therefore, against the first-rank man or rather these tax collectors, and we will kill them, and we will carry off all that they have with themselves, and we will not give the Romans tribute, and we will be free men in perpetuity.” Indeed, having prepared an ambush, they killed the tax collectors.

 

Chapter 4 – from when the same emperor set in motion an army against the Franks and up to their arrival in the Rhineland and their first king

(Above: a modern illustration of a fourth - sixth century Frankish warrior)

Hearing of this, the emperor [Valentinian], set alight with fury and anger, ordered that Aristarcus, his foremost general, move with an army against the enemies of the Romans and other peoples, and they directed battle lines against the Franks. Although there was a great slaughter on both sides, it was greater on that of the [Frankish] people. Certainly, regarding this, the Franks, because they could not sustain so great an army, were killed and yielded. In that place Priam, the bravest of them all, fell and they fled [the battlefield]. They also fled from Sicambria and came to the furthest parts of the river Rhine, to the towns of the Germans, and there they settled with their princes, Marcomer, son of Priam, and Sunno, son of Antenor; and they lived there for many years. After the death of Sunno, they heard a judgement in order to designate a king for them, like the other peoples. Marchomiris also gave them this advice, and they elected Faramund, his son, and they elevated him, their long-haired king, above themselves. At that very time they obtained laws and they managed to possess the superior ones of those peoples whose names were foreign to them: Wisogast, Arogast, Salegast, in the town beyond the Rhine: Inbotagin, Salecagin and Widecagin.

 

Chapter 5 – concerning the death of King Faramund and [the reign of] his son Chlodio, even the Hunnic invasion of Gaul

(Above: the Roman walls of Tongeren, which though they clearly served their purpose over the grand scheme of history, could not withstand Chlodio's forces)

Naturally, following the death of King Faramund, Chlodio, his long-haired son, was elevated to the royal dignity of his father. During that time, they [the Franks] chose to have long-haired kings, and they shrewdly came to the borders of Thuringia, and resided there. And so, King Chlodio lived in the stronghold of Duigsberg on the borders of Thuringia. On account of the peoples of Germania, all the regions that were east of the Rhine were called German, because their bodies were mountainous, their nations most vast and savage and they were hardened and always indomitable and very, very ferocious; an ancient text recounts that there were a hundred clans of these people. At that time, the Romans lived in those regions between the Rhine and the Loire; the lands south of the Loire were also ruled by them. And thus, the Burgundians, most heathen in that they held to the wicked doctrines of Arianism, were living on the opposite side of the Rhine, next to the city of Lyon. Consequently, Chlodio sent scouts from Duigsberg, stronghold of the Thuringians, all the way to the city of Cambrai. After that he crossed the Rhine with a great army, and he killed many of the Roman people and forced them to flee. Having come in through the charcoal-grey wood, he occupied the city of Tournai. Next, he came back to Cambrai, and he resided there for a short period of time; the Romans which he found there, he killed. Then he came all the way to the river Somme and occupied all of it.

(Above: where all the drama takes place)

(Yeah, this bad boy makes an appearance)

Following the death of King Chlodio, Merovech, his descendant, received the kingdom. Chlodio had reigned for twenty years. From the time of that useful king Merovech, the kings of the Franks were called Merovingians. At that time the Huns crossed the Rhine. They set Metz ablaze, destroyed Trier, passed through Tongeren, and came through all the way to Orleans. At that same time, the famous holy bishop Anianus was illustrious with miracles, and Aegidius, patrician of the Romans, and Theodoric, king of the Visigoths, came to him, and with the help of the Lord, as the Huns came to that city, as soon as St Anianus had prayed, Attila, their king, was subdued and thrown to the ground. At that very time, Merovech begat a son named Childeric, who was the father of Clovis, an illustrious and most courageous king. Indeed, at that time the Franks were pagan and frenzied, worshipping idols and images, and they did not yet know of the Lord who created the heavens and the earth. It was also at that time that Aegidius was sent away from the emperor, and was king in accordance with the Romans in that part of Gaul. And so it came to pass that King Childeric, son of Merovech, when he was becoming overweening in his rule over the Franks, he seduced their daughters to humiliate and degrade them. But, on account of this, they were enraged with great fury, and the vowed to kill him and deprive him of the royal dignity. Childeric, having heard of this, spoke to his friend, prudent in his counsel, called Wiomad, and begged with him for advice as to how he could be able to calm the furious spirits of the Franks. Thereupon, they gave between themselves the sign by which they would indicate what they needed to learn if at some time or other if the peace were to be restored. Afterwards, they divided between themselves one golden thing for a sign. One half was carried by King Childeric himself, the other half was kept by Wiomad, and he said, “when I will give this part to you, you should know that the Franks are with you and have been pacified by me, and serene peace will be restored.” Therefore, Childeric left for Thuringia and took refuge with its king, named Bisinus.

Getting acquainted with Adhemar of Chabannes, in which I also discover an eleventh century monk's take on the Trojan war

Yesterday, I started on a project I'd been resolved to do for a good few months now. After I translated, as part of my undergraduate thesis, the "Carmen ad Robertum Regem (Poem to King Robert the Pious)" by Bishop Adalbero of Laon (c.940 - 1031) - at once, one of the most satisfying and most frustrating things I've ever done in my life so far - I felt I had a mission to help make French history between the late ninth and mid-eleventh centuries more accessible by translating important sources that have never been translated into English before. I don't want to oversell my abilities as a medieval Latinist - despite both my parents being classicists, I never took a GCSE (14 - 16) or A level (16 - 18) in Latin, though I think I've just about compensated for that by subsequently going on a Latin course at UCL and doing medieval Latin as a component of my masters' degree. Instead, I simply figured that someone's got to do it, so it might as well be me. And I figured who could not be better to start off with than Adhemar of Chabannes. After all, a quick look on the website of the brilliant After Empire Project showed that there's no existing English translation of Adhemar's Historia Francorum. That someone hadn't already gotten onto this decades before me sincerely surprised me. He's pretty much the only vaguely contemporary narrative history we have that covers the history of Aquitaine (roughly a quarter of the French kingdom at that time) from 930 to 1028 in any significant level of detail. And he covers a lot of things that historians working on post-Carolingian/ post-millennial France (and western Europe more generally) are interested in, such as the four highly interlinked issues of church reform, the emergence of popular religious enthusiasm, the Peace of God movement and the first significant reappearances of heresy in the West since the sixth century. Robert Moore, whose (now classic) interpretative synthesis the "First European Revolution, c.970 - 1215" (2000) has become a staple on undergraduate reading lists for papers covering Western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, regularly uses Adhemar to support his arguments on all these issues in chapter 3 of the book. A quick glance at Adhemar's wikipedia page shows that he has had two scholarly monographs in book-form written about him in the last thirty years. And he's even made it into the creme de la creme of popular history - both Tom Holland's (no, not Spiderman) "Millennium" (2009) and Robert Moore's own dramatically titled (with fairly obvious political allusions) "The War on Heresy" (2012). So by the standards of any eleventh century French author, Adhemar of Chabannes is not obscure, so the fact he hasn't merited an English translation of his works is somewhat puzzling, given that English translations of medieval Latin primary sources generally are in high demand in universities for fairly obvious reasons (the decline of the study of classical languages in UK secondary schools). But those of you who haven't spent much time in eleventh century France may be wondering - who the hell is this guy anyway?

A bit of a colourful chap 

(Above) a drawing done in Adhemar's own hand 

For a medieval chronicler who lived a thousand years ago, we actually know a fair amount about Adhemar of Chabannes. He was born in 988, a year after the death of the last Carolingian king of West Francia and the accession of Hugh Capet (whose direct, male-line descendants would rule France for the next eight centuries), at the village of Chabannes in central-south-western France to what seems to have been a well-to-do family. He received his education as a novice monk at the Abbey of Saint-Martial de Limoges, where he was taught by his uncle Roger of Chabannes, who served as the abbey's music director from 1010 to 1025. Adhemar had a pretty interesting career after that. No doubt influenced by his uncle, he became a musical pioneer and, according to music historian James Grier, he made significant steps towards the development of modern musical literacy by developing a form of notation that used accurate heighting to present relative pitch information - while it still required the reader to already know the melody, the result was transformative (see James Grier "The Musical World of a Medieval Monk: Adhemar of Chabannes in Eleventh Century Aquitaine", Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp 325 - 326). Indeed you can see it in practice in Adhemar's own autograph hand from one of the hymns he composed ( see below, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, lat 909 fol. 151r-154r). He also wrote the Historia Francorum - a history of the Franks from their earliest origins to 1028 - which I am, of course, translating.

Adhemar's career also had a somewhat darker side to it. He embraced the developing tale that St Martial, the first Christian bishop of Limoges who initiated the conversion of Aquitaine, was actually born almost three centuries earlier, making him one of Jesus' original apostles. Knowing that the documentation for this was scanty at best, Adhemar decided to add to the evidence for Martial's "apostolicity" by forging a hagiography (saintly biography) of Martial, which he tried to present as having been written by Aurelian, the priest converted by the saint who succeeded him as bishop. He also composed an apostolic mass for Saint Martial, which the Bishop of Limoges and the Abbot of Saint-Martial had performed on 3 August 1029. However, a monk from Lombardy called Benedict of Chiusa sensed that something was amiss, and denounced the "Life of Martial" as a provincial forgery and the new liturgy as offensive to God. Adhemar's response was to splash-out even more on the forgeries, fabricating a church council of 1031 and a papal letter. This was a massive success - though doubted elsewhere, Martial's apostolicity became well-established in Aquitaine and it was only in 1920s that the Life of St Martial, the church council of 1031 and the papal letter were definitively proved to be forgeries by the Benedictine monk and historian Louis Saltet. At some other occasion, I will discuss the business of medieval forgery at greater length - its fascinating and crucially important for medievalists, especially those working (like I do) on the eighth to twelfth centuries, to understand. Perhaps to clear his conscience, Adhemar of Chabannes went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1034, where he died.

Adhemar the ancient historian

Adhemar begins his History of the Franks with, perhaps surprisingly for some, the Trojan war. Below is my translation of the first chapter (all faults with it are my own)

The beginning of the Frankish kingdom or rather the origin of that people, came forth from war. Indeed, it was in Asia, stronghold of the Trojans. There, there was a city that was called Troy, where Aeneas ruled. The Trojans were a brave and strong race of warriors, and they renewed wars excessively – restlessly exhorting themselves through their struggles, they went around conquering the lands that encircled them. However, the kings of the Greeks roused themselves to action and fought against Aeneas with an army, losing a great many men against him. Thither many of the Trojan people fell to the ground, and so Aeneas fled and hid himself away in the city of Troy. The Greeks fought against that city for ten years. Indeed, when the city had fallen, the tyrant Aeneas fled to Italy to contract peoples for fighting. Others also from amongst the princes, namely Priam and Antenor, boarded onto ships with the twelve thousand soldiers that were left of the Trojan army and departed from Troy, and they came all the way to the banks of the river Don. Having entered into the sea of Azov, they sailed and came through to the ends of Pannonia, adjoining the sea of Azov, and began to build a city. According to their memorial, they called it Sicambria, and they lived there for many years and greatly multiplied in population.

Adhemar's rather brief account of the siege of Troy obviously bears little relation to Homer's version of the events. The Iliad and the Odyssey were almost completely inaccessible to scholars in the Latin west until very late in the Middle Ages. Medieval scholars plenty about the Trojan war but they got their knowledge of it from works written in Latin like Virgil's Aeneid, the 1070-line "Ilias Latina" by the first century AD Roman senator Publius Baebius Italicus and the (pseudo)history purported to be written by at the time of the war itself by Dares Phrygius, a Trojan priest of Hephaestus (I must read Frederic Clark's brand new monograph on it someday). But Adhemar doesn't seem to be directly engaging with those authorities. Instead, as Adhemar's modern editor Jules Chavanon has pointed out, Adhemar looked to more recent sources than those to research his material early chapters of his histories, namely the seventh century chronicle of Fredegar and its continuation and the Liber Historiae Francorum, written in 727 by an anonymous layman (see Adhemar de Chabannes, "Chronique", edited by Jules Chavanon, Collection de textes pour servir a la etude et la enseignement de l'histoire, Paris, 1897, p xii). These sources also gave a similar account of the Trojan origins of the Franks. When exactly this legend of Trojan origins developed for the Franks developed is unknown, but it was certainly widespread under the later Merovingian kings in the seventh and early eighth centuries. The attractions it would have had at the time are fairly straightforward - it gave the Franks a venerable history and lineage, and as those who are familiar with Virgil will instantly deduce, it established their kinship with the Romans and by extension will have given them legitimate claims to a share in their former territories and their glorious legacy. Such legends were promoted as official history by the French monarchy and were still widely believed in the early modern period. Dissenting voices were not welcome - in 1714, the learned Nicolas Freret was arrested and imprisoned in the Bastille for claiming that the Franks were in fact Germans (see George Huppert, "The Trojan Franks and their Critics", Studies in the Renaissance Volume 12, 1965, p 227). Only with the French revolution of 1789 - 1794, when it became politically convenient to argue instead that the French royal family and aristocracy were the descendants of Germanic invaders who had imposed their alien and barbaric ways on civilised Gallo-Romans (the ancestors of the French people), was the myth of Trojan origins definitively abandoned.