Encounters with the medieval past 1: The early middle ages in ten objects Part 1 (400 - 800)

 Hello everyone. As 2022 draws to a close, I thought I'd do something a little bit different. You see, most of my posts have focused overwhelmingly on textual sources because they're what I've mostly worked with and very rich and fascinating they are too. But they're only a fraction of what's out there in terms of the whole sum of what survives from the early medieval period. And since all societies across Europe, Asia and Africa in the early medieval period were at best partially literate, with only a minority (sometimes a very small one at that) being able to read and write documents, texts arguably provide quite a distorted view of how most early medieval people saw and experienced their world. And in all ages of human history, the way we have experienced the world has been, first and foremost, through some or all of the five senses - hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, tasting. Of all these, the visual is the most easy for us to access because a fairly substantial number (though not as large as we'd like) of buildings, images and objects do survive from the early medieval period. Though no landscape has remained unaltered since the early medieval period traces of it do nonetheless remain - from grand projects like Offa's Dyke on the border between England and Wales and the Nahrawan Canal in central Iraq to more mundane things like field boundaries and woodland clearings. Touching what early medieval people touched is also somewhat possible, though most museums, heritage sites, libraries and archives do not take kindly to random members of the public doing such things for good reasons. Hearing, smelling and tasting are a lot more difficult. That is very much the domain of experimental archaeologists, who will painstakingly try and reconstruct what an early medieval Latin mass would have sounded like, what a busy commercial street in tenth century Constantinople, Cairo or Cordoba would have smelt like (no one has done anything like that yet, to my knowledge, but maybe that'll be the new frontier of the future) or how Anglo-Saxon bread would have tasted (you can actually try this at home yourself).

I've decided on the visual, since that's probably the one I'm most qualified to talk about, though I'm sure those of you reading this who are actually cognisant in archaeology, art history and epigraphy will find plenty of fault in what I say. I've decided to try and do a foolhardy task - to tell the history of early medieval Afro-Eurasia (the Old World you might say) in ten objects. This is obviously going to be a very selective history - not all aspects of early medieval life will have justice done to them. Nor will all the regions of the Old World. The Iberian Peninsula, Eastern Europe (unless Byzantium counts), Iran, Central Asia, China, Japan and Sub-Saharan Africa are all going to be conspicuous by their absence here. Meanwhile, the very label early medieval is being stretched to its limits here as these objects span the whole period this blog produces posts on - the fifth to twelfth centuries. I don't want to get into a long discussion about periodisation, but 400 - 1200 is the most generous periodisation for the early medieval that still has some sense in it. And of course, for a lot of the regions that we will be talking about here, notably South and Southeast Asia, a lot of people would argue that the label "early medieval" is inappropriate no matter what the periodisation and that we should throw out all that Eurocentric baggage. I must say that I'm not in that camp, which strikes me as postcolonialism gone too far. All it really does is keep premodern African and Asian studies, which are themselves quite small self-contained fields in Europe and North America given that they require the mastery of some very difficult languages and source material, isolated from the mainstream of medieval history. Basically, just so long as we don't hold up Europe as the gold standard for historical development we're good, and by doing some comparisons we can see what's similar and shared and what's particular and unique about what we study. But now let's get on the exciting part - meet our ten objects!

Object number one: a child's tombstone from Trier, 400 - 500 AD (Trier Cathedral Museum, Germany, visited 11 May 2022)

The inscription on this Roman tombstone, found in the grounds of the abbey of Saint Maximin at Trier, in the Rhineland-Palatinate region of Germany, reads (according to my own faulty translation:

Valentina lies here in peace. She lived for three years, six months and five days. Her kinsmen placed this inscription here. 

Below it are two doves. The doves are an important Christian symbol - it was a dove carrying an olive branch that Noah saw when the Great Flood ended. The gospels of Matthew and Luke also claim that the Holy Spirit appeared as a dove at the Baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan. Because of this, doves symbolised peace, hope and the soul, and thus were more than appropriate to have on a tombstone - they became a very common motif on late Roman tombstones from Edict of Milan in 313, which officially made Christian worship legal in the Roman Empire, onwards. Indeed, there are plenty of tombstones just this one in Trier alone, to say nothing of other places where late Roman cemeteries have been found. 

The location of the cemetery this was found in is worth noting as well. This grave was found in the grounds of the Abbey of Saint Maximin in Trier, founded in the sixth century, destroyed by the Vikings in 882, rebuilt in the tenth century and again, after a fire, in the thirteenth. I passed by it when I was walking from Trier Hauptbahnhof to my accommodation in a village in the hills of the Moselle valley outside Trier. Before the abbey, there was an early Christian basilica and cemetery that had grown up around the tomb of Saint Maximin (d.346), one of the earliest known Christian bishops of Trier, a courtier at the courts of Constantine II and Constans (sons of Constantine the Great) and a renowned defender of the doctrine of the Trinity against the Arian heresy which we have talked about here briefly before. This cemetery was located in what was essentially a suburb of Trier, or Augusta Treverorum as it was then known. You see, Roman law forbade the dead from being buried inside the city walls. So the location of this burial is very much in keeping with ancient Roman tradition, going back at least to the days of the Early Republic. The Christian symbols, however, represent a more recently established tradition, as does the decision to have this toddler buried in close proximity to a saint - the cult of the saints itself being a very recent development. Saints were believed to be able to intercede for those who had recently departed to help them get to heaven, which was why as we get into the early middle ages proper, kings and aristocrats chose to be buried in monasteries. 

But above all, it reveals one of the few things that stayed completely same throughout our period (400 - 1200). That is, high infant mortality. We have no concrete statistics for it in this period, but in all ages before modern medicine almost a third of children did not live past the age of five. That's why life expectancy in this period was so low. Its not because everyone was dropping dead in their thirties (I've encountered more than enough early medieval octogenarians and nonagenarians to disprove that), but because more than 30% of all the people born in this period would have never lived to see adulthood at all. This continued to be more or less the case even into the Industrial Age. For example, in England and Wales in 1850, 16.2% of babies born died before their first birthday and approximately a further 11.2% did not live to see their fifth - cumulatively, that's about 27.4% of children dying before the age of five in early Victorian England. By contrast, in 2020, just 0.4% of children in England and Wales did not live to see their fifth birthday. For this we have to thank the huge quantum leaps in medicine and healthcare that were made in the twentieth century. Still, huge disparities remain around the world i.e. the infant mortality rate (deaths before the age of one) is still 1.1% in Ecuador, 4.7% in Mozambique and 5.7% in Pakistan. This tombstone really reminds us of how harsh life could be across this period. 

Of course, going on in the backdrop when this tombstone was placed there was indeed the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Trier had been an absolutely thriving place in the fourth century AD, when it was the de facto imperial capital in the West. Having the imperial court that far north is part of what explains why so many deluxe Roman villas survive from the fourth century in Britain. However, after the rebellion of Magnus Maximus in the 380s, who we've met a few times before, the western imperial court moved permanently back to Milan, and later Rome and Ravenna. In 406, the Roman magister militum (head of the armed forces) Stilicho, decided to remove all field armies from the Rhine frontier to deal with Radagaisus, an Ostrogothic leader who wanted to sack Rome and sacrifice all the senators to Odin and Thor. Radagaisus was defeated and executed near Fiesole in Tuscany, but in the winter the Rhine froze over and the Burgundians, Vandals, Swabians and Alans, who were all fleeing the coming of the Huns from Mongolia to the Great Hungarian Plain, crossed into Gaul. 

The countryside around Trier will have been ravaged a lot by the barbarians in 407, though the city itself doesn't seem to have been sacked that year - a fate that befell Metz and Rheims to the west. Shortly after this, half a dozen usurpers appeared in Gaul and one of them, Constantine III (later believed to be King Arthur's grandfather), withdrew all Roman field armies from Britain later in 407. The end of the Western Roman Empire was still far from inevitable at this point, and no one could have foreseen it then, but this can with some justification be called the beginning of the end. Trier and the Moselle valley still remained firmly under Roman imperial authority, though it was attacked by the Franks several times in the early fifth century, and was sacked by Attila the Hun during his invasion of Gaul in 451. 

After 461, the imperial centre lost control of Gaul north of the Loire. The emerging Visigothic kingdom in Aquitaine and the Burgundian kingdom in Savoy cut off the corridor between it and the still centrally controlled and very Roman Provence. To add to this, Aegidius, the commander of the Roman field armies in Gaul, whom we've met so many times before because our friend Adhemar of Chabannes remembered him almost 600 years later and talked a lot about him, refused to recognise the western emperor Libius Severus (r.461 - 465). But its unclear if Aegidius, who was based in Soissons, actually controlled Trier. 

Trier after 461 was under the control of Count Arbogast, a descendant of the Frankish leader by the same name who had served as magister militum for the western Roman Empire in the late fourth century. Count Arbogast himself, like many Roman generals of barbarian ancestry (Stilicho and Flavius Aetius to name a few) was thoroughly Roman himself and like any good Roman aristocrat he had received an excellent literary education. Our only sources for his life are his correspondence with the Gallo-Roman aristocrat and bishop Sidonius Apollinaris and with his cousin Bishop Auspicius of Toul, preserved in a ninth century Carolingian manuscript called the Austrasian Letters (once again, thank the Carolingians for preserving all our ancient sources). Count Arbogast relied on the surviving units of Roman limitanei (garrison and border defence troops) and Frankish mercenaries for military defence. We do not know when his rule ended, but it was sometime after 470. Adhemar of Chabannes, writing in the eleventh century but using much earlier sources (though from well after the time of the events themselves), claims that Childeric, the father of Clovis, took Trier for the Franks and sacked and burned the city to the ground sometime in the 470s. But there's no contemporary source that says this, and by Adhemar's day the all-out destructiveness of the barbarian invasions was already being played up in the standard histories - the cataclysmic vision of the fall of Rome didn't have to wait until the Renaissance. Some instead think that Arbogast simply gave his allegiance to Childeric, again without much foundation. At any rate, as far as the archaeology is concerned, Frankish style graves do not appear in the area around Trier until after 500. So, as this gravestone itself attests, Trier remained firmly Roman during the turbulent fifth century and, like in many other parts of the erstwhile Western Roman Empire, the early middle ages took a long while to arrive there. 

Object number two: socks from Roman Egypt, 400 - 500 AD (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visited 27 October 2022)

Lets now take a look at the other side of the Roman world, to the eastern Roman Empire. This pair of red woollen socks was knitted with needles in Egypt sometime in the fifth century, though they might actually be fourth century - like with a lot of archaeological material, dating is difficult (I shall resist any temptation to make awful puns). Their odd, cloven shape can be explained by the fact that they were meant to be worn with sandals - a hugely unfashionable look now, though I may be a little behind the curve on current cultural trends, but the height of fashion then. They were excavated in the 1890s in a burial ground in Oxyrhynchus, a town founded in the Ptolemaic Era (323 - 31 BC) by Hellenistic Greek settlers in the Middle Nile Valley. Many other finds from there are also displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as in other museums in Europe and North America.

Why does clothing survive so easily from Egypt but not from other parts of the Roman Empire? The answer to that is that all source material survives better in Egypt than in any other part of the Roman Empire. The extremely dry climate, except by the Nile itself which is incredibly fertile, means that most organic material doesn't perish so easily as it does in places with wetter, more temperate climates. Given that papyrus, which rots very easily in temperate climates, was the main writing material of the ancient Romans in Classical times and in Late Antiquity, we have more surviving documentation from Egypt than we do anywhere else in the Roman Empire, and thus we know more about ordinary provincial Egyptian society than for any other region of the Roman Empire. Indeed, its possible to say that we know more about ancient Roman life from Egyptian rubbish dumps, including those at Oxyrhynchus, than we do from all the works of Cicero, the Vindolanda Tablets or even the remains of Pompeii. Amidst these Egyptian rubbish dumps we have lots of ordinary documents which survive in quantities unparalleled anywhere else in the Roman Empire - soldiers' letters home, wills, land purchases, shopping lists, petitions etc. At Oxyrhynchus, even lost poems of Sappho and plays of Sophocles, and some of the earliest ever copies of the Gospels, have been found there. Thus, Roman Egypt has the potential to cast quite a distorting mirror on the Roman world, as the ancient historian Brett Devereaux explores here (I do highly recommend his excellent blog). 

We have no idea who these socks belonged to, though they most likely belonged to a peasant. The Egyptian peasantry in the late Roman period (third to seventh centuries in Egypt) were fairly prosperous and largely independent of aristocratic landlords, though they did have to pay high taxes to the Roman state. Surviving land registers from (surprise, surprise) Oxyrhynchus, show that taxes were paid routinely and proportionately in Egypt, even by the Apion family - one of the wealthiest families in the Eastern Roman Empire, whose home base was in Oxyrhynchus itself. They were also becoming more culturally Roman in this period - during fourth and fifth centuries, temple complexes to native Egyptian deities started to be abandoned (in part due to Christianisation), hieroglyphics ceased to be used for writing inscriptions and the Egyptians ditched their venerable taste for beer and started drinking Palestinian wine instead.

In Egypt the experience of the fifth century was very different to in Gaul, where we were for object one, and the other western provinces. In part that was because the Eastern Mediterranean had always been richer than the West, and had been urbanised for much longer (indeed by millennia). But it was also in part thanks to the imperial capital, Constantinople being supremely well-defended, the eastern frontier with Persia being largely peaceful as the two empires faced the Hunnic threat together, which meant that the most economically productive, tax-rich provinces of Anatolia, Syria, Cyprus, Palestine and Egypt were kept safe from external attack. The Eastern Roman Emperors pursued shrewd diplomacy, which kept potential barbarian invaders like Alaric the Visigoth, Atilla the Hun, Geiseric the Vandal and Theodoric the Ostrogoth from being too troublesome for them. Indeed, the Eastern Roman Empire experienced something of an economic boom in the fifth and early sixth centuries, which made Justinian's reconquest of Africa, Italy and Southern Spain for the Roman Empire in the mid-sixth century possible, as well as Constantinople growing to at least half a million inhabitants and architecturally ground-breaking churches like Hagia Sophia being built. Perhaps these socks are somehow reflective of this late antique prosperity in Egypt.

Notably, these socks are the only item in this group of ten objects I've chosen which are completely secular - they have nothing about them which relates to gods, myths, saints, worship or anything religious. They are also the only item which is at all representative of the lived experiences of 80 - 90% of the population of the early medieval world. In part that's due to biases of survival, in part due to my own personal choices and preferences. Much as I have respect for the work of the Annales school historians, especially Georges Duby (I'm not so fussed about Fernand Braudel), and the less dogmatic British and French Marxist historians like Pierre Bonnassie, Guy Bois and most of all Chris Wickham, elite culture really is my cup of tea. I just don't find peasants as interesting as aristocrats, clerics and scholars, which also links to the fact I've always preferred studying texts to archaeological material, though that's not to say I don't think peasants and agriculture boring and unimportant - my blogging record says otherwise. Thus I felt I had to bring them in there, somewhere, to remind us of the lived experiences of the great majority, even if in a token way.

Object number three: The Isola Rizza Dish, 550 - 600 AD (Castelvecchio Museum, Verona, Italy, visited 10 June 2022)

This magnificent silver dish was found amidst a late sixth century treasure hoard, excavated in a churchyard in Isola Rizza, a village near Verona in the Veneto region of Italy, in 1873. At the bottom of the bowl is an engraved relief medallion showing a clean-shaven cavalryman wearing a lamellar cuirass and a plumed Spangenhelm-type helmet and carrying a kontos spear charging over a fallen enemy soldier. Another who, like his fallen comrade, is bearded, wears no armour and carries an oval-shaped shield and a longsword called a spatha, appears to be fleeing the cavalryman. 

Where this was made, and for whom, is uncertain. Historians such as Neil Christie have thought on stylistic grounds that it is an East Roman work, produced in Italy shortly after the completion of Justinian's reconquest in 554. They assume that it commemorates the defeat of the Ostrogoths by the East Roman armies of Justinian,  and that the cavalryman is a Germanic (possibly a Goth or Gepid from Pannonia, modern day Hungary) or Steppe (possibly an Alan from the Caucasus) mercenary in Roman service. Meanwhile, the infantrymen are presumed to be Ostrogoths, though they could plausibly be Franks, who also tried to wrestle control of Northern Italy in the 550s but were repelled by the East Roman eunuch general, Narses. Their lack of armour indicates that they are fairly low-ranking free men serving their king as levies, not professional soldiers or aristocratic retainers. It is thus presumed that the dish was buried in 569, when another Germanic people, the Lombards, invaded Italy from across the Alps under their king, Alboin, and successfully took Verona after a siege. The assumption is that a worried local bigwig didn't want the Lombards getting their dirty hands on his nice shiny household silverware. But as is so often the case, the dating and provenance can be questioned. It could have been made by the Lombards and show an elite Lombard warrior on horseback running down some invading Franks or Slavs. Alternatively, a Lombard warrior may have acquired it in battle, with the East Romans. Or he might have been given it by the Avars, a Steppe nomad people from Central Asia who settled on the Great Hungarian Plain from the 560s and who definitely had mounted warriors that looked exactly like the one shown here - it was the Avars and Lombards who together destroyed the Gepid kingdom in Hungary in 566, before the Lombards invaded Italy. We will never have the answer.

Nonetheless, it does undoubtedly represent an even bigger sixth century change. That is the militarisation of society and the rise of warrior elites. Lots of silverwares from the fourth and fifth century Roman Empire survive, but they don't show scenes of contemporary warfare. Instead they overwhelmingly show scenes from classical mythology and literature and the pleasures of the imagination, and are overwhelmingly non-martial in nature. This reflects the educated and cultured civilian aristocracy, including senators, career bureaucrats in the imperial administration and local municipal officeholders, they were produced for. While it disappeared earlier in many other regions of the Empire, notably fifth century Britain which we discussed on this blog earlier this year, it survived in Italy into the first half of the sixth century under the Ostrogothic kings, where one would have been entirely forgiven for thinking the Western Roman Empire hadn't fallen at all. But Justinian's wars to recover Italy for the actual Roman Empire ended up being a messy and protracted affair, which resulted in the Italian economy being left in ruins, cities being depopulated and villas being abandoned for fortified hilltop villages (read: not proto-castles!). The invasion of the Lombards both took full advantage of this and made the situation worse. As elsewhere in the former Western Empire, economic and urban collapse combined with increased warfare and political instability led to the replacement of civilian aristocracies with warrior elites. In those circumstances, being able to quote Virgil from memory was less important than being able to wield a sword proficiently. And this new warrior elite, while they still loved luxury would have had a less of a taste for scenes of playful cupids, dancing girls, temples and bucolic dreamscapes and more of a taste for scenes of war and martial valour. None of this was to do with "Germanic influence." The rise of military aristocracies can be similarly seen in the areas of late sixth and seventh century Italy still under Roman control, just like it can be seen in both Anglo-Saxon England and Romano-British Wales as any comparison between Beowulf and Y Goddodin shows. In some ways all the different regions of the former Western Roman Empire were all headed down fairly similar cultural trajectories, whether they fell to Germanic invaders or not. Above all, the very uncertainties about this object's provenance are indicative of one thing about it - that it belonged to an unstable militarised frontier society. 

And that links to our final point. The burial of weapons, jewellery and luxury items like silver bowls, which is so common in the former Western Roman Empire the fifth to seventh centuries but so much less common after. A lot of historians used to think that had something to do with paganism or ancient Germanic customs. All except, as Chris Wickham and Guy Halsall amongst others have ably demonstrated, actually it doesn't. Getting rid of moveable property to prepare for death was common in Roman times, and not just pagans but also Christians did it. Rather, what it shows is aristocrats and elites who were uncertain about their local power and status. The later sixth and seventh centuries in Italy was undoubtedly a time for elites to feel thus, due to all the constant warfare and political instability and upheaval. Elites in Anglo-Saxon England, where politics and society were much more primitive and unstable than in Lombard Italy, basically tribal, would have felt the same, which is why we find such rich hoards there like Sutton Hoo, or indeed the Harpole treasure discovered less than a month ago. But once aristocrats felt much more secure in their positions, as they did in Francia and Visigothic Spain by around 650 and in Anglo-Saxon England and Lombard Italy after 700, they started investing in more permanent displays of their wealth and local power by building churches and donating to monasteries. Its from this point on that grave goods disappear and treasure hoards become increasingly scarce. So the Isola Rizza dish we've discussed here, like the macho man of Marlow we discussed back in February, reflects the transition away from the late Roman civilian aristocracy to the early medieval warrior elite. 

Object number four: a coin of Emperor Heraclius, 629 - 630 AD, Eastern Roman Empire (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visited 10 December 2022)

Moving east again, we at last have an item with a concrete, clearly identifiable date. This is the reverse of a gold solidus coin of the Roman emperor Heraclius (r.610 - 641), minted in Constantinople. The obverse of the coin, not shown here, has images of Heraclius and his two sons. But the reverse shows an image of the True Cross, believed to be the very cross on which Jesus Christ himself was crucified. Now coins are more than just items of monetary exchange, especially in late antique/ early medieval context. They could be a powerful vehicle for political propaganda. And this couldn't be clearer than in this case. In 628, as I've written about here in much more detail before, Heraclius had defeated Rome's eternal nemesis, Persia, and recovered the True Cross which the Persians had taken from Jerusalem in 614. The inclusion of the True Cross on a coin, a year later, was doubtless meant to celebrate Heraclius' triumph and portray him as a great Roman soldier emperor in the mould of Trajan and Constantine, as well as a defender of the Christian faith against the heathen Zoroastrian Persian foe. Alas, the euphoria was short-lived. Within the next decade Islam would spread out of the Arabian Peninsula and the Romans would lose Syria, Palestine and Egypt, which they had fought to hard to regain from the Persians, to the Arabs, and this time it would be forever. Nonetheless, Heraclius' victory immediately caught the attention of contemporaries not just in the Roman Empire but across the Christian world, and was a very well-known and celebrated moment in history for more than a thousand years after. Adhemar of Chabannes of course wrote about it in his Aquitanian monastic cell in the early eleventh century. And William Caxton wrote about it in Middle English in the late fifteenth century, and had Heraclius' story printed on his London printing press - his audiences in Yorkist and early Tudor England hugely enjoyed reading it. And a few decades earlier, the story of Heraclius and the True Cross had been immortalised in paint by the Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca in Arezzo. Linking to my first PGCE written assignment on teaching historical significance to schoolchildren, this is a nice illustration of how historical events can resonate both with people at the time and subsequently.

Object 5: a plaster cast of a relief showing a scene from the Gandavyuha Sutra, Borodbudur, Java, 700 - 800 AD (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visited 10 December 2022)

This plaster cast of a high stone relief from the temple complex of Borobudur near Yogyakarta in central Java in Indonesia shows a scene from the Gandavyuha Sutra, a Buddhist text written in sixth century India. It shows how a pilgrim, Prince Sudhana, achieved enlightenment with the help of several Buddhist holy men, known as bodhisattvas. On the left, the prince receives instruction from the bodhisattva Samantabhadra (the large seated figure), and on the centre-right of the picture with his palms put together in reverence the Prince meditates and comes close to achieving full nirvana. 

Now I must admit I know little about the history of Indonesia in this period. But there are many reasons why I chose it. Firstly, notice how, by showing the ascetic holy men Samantabhadra as a figure more than twice as large as Prince Sudhana, the artist is making him out as much more important. This image thus nicely illustrates how the universalising religions that emerged across Eurasia in  like Christianity, Buddhism and Islam could potentially challenge the prevailing social hierarchies with their new ideas about morals and spirituality, even if the established elites willingly embraced them. Pagan Roman writers sometimes accused Christianity of being a religion of women and slaves. And while so many early medieval saints, bishops, abbots and abbesses were of aristocratic and royal backgrounds, to the point that German scholars speak of adelsheilige (noble saintliness) like its a concrete phenomenon, all early medieval people knew that the poor peasant could go to heaven at least as easily as a rich count. Meanwhile, on the other side of Eurasia, the Chinese imperial authorities were often afraid of Buddhism as socially and politically subversive, and the Tang emperors cracked down on it with full-scale persecutions  It also reflects the power of holy men, especially those who practiced asceticism, to advise and educate rulers and even correct them for bad behaviours. A Carolingianist like myself can more than easily see the eighth and ninth century Frankish parallels here. Likewise, the importance of pilgrimage in this story would have resonated with people in the early medieval Christian West just as much as in the Buddhist world. 

Secondly, what makes it interesting is indeed the most obvious. That it shows the spread of Indian culture and religions across south and southeast Asia. As I mentioned before, the first millennium AD sees the momentous spread of the three great universalising world religions, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, across Afro-Eurasia. Buddhism had already reached southeast Asia in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, around the same time as the Christianisation of the Roman Empire. Around the time this temple was being built, Islam had reached Spain and Central Asia and Saint Boniface was converting Frisia and Central Germany on behalf of Charles Martel and Pippin the Short. Its possible to find many parallels between the establishment of Hindu and Buddhist temples in peninsular India, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia and the creation of Christian monasteries in Northwest Europe, not just in the religious changes they brought but also the social and economic ones. Comparing Borobudur with the bishopric of Wurzburg and the nearby abbey of Fulda, founded by St Boniface and his disciples around the same time it was built, would be intriguing indeed. Likewise, the spread of Indian culture to Southeast Asia would have meant the spread of literacy, of the Vedas and the Indian epic cycles like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and of the Sanskrit language. Similarly, the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century and of Central and Northern Germany in the eighth century brought Latin, the Bible and the Roman Classics, which transformed elite culture there too. I must confess that while I know so little about Southeast Asia, I find the potential parallels between it and the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon worlds in the seventh to tenth centuries so intriguing that I'd love to explore them more. 

Charles Martel and the battle of Tours: a turning point in world history? A four part series

 Greetings and salutations, friends of this blog and first time visitors. After another epic monster post on British history I think we need to get back to some Continental European history, and in particular, Carolingian content. I also wanted to showcase to you how my project on Adhemar of Chabannes has been getting along - now more than four fifths of Book 1 have been translated, so we've been through the main events of the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries and are now in the eighth century where things get super-exciting because, guess what, that's when the rise of the Carolingians (and as you have probably gathered, I am admittedly something of a Carolingian fanboy) happens. But, linking back to our previous post on King Arthur, what better way to go about this than by looking at an undoubtedly historical, but nonetheless quite mythologised, hero from the early middle ages - none other than the founder of the Carolingian dynasty, Charles Martel (c.688 - 741). 

The way I'll attempt to do this is in a four part series of posts. The first will consider the political world that Charles Martel was born into and grew up in by giving as best a short overview as I can of the previous 200 years of Frankish history. The second will give a very short overview of the Islamic conquests to 711. The third post will consider the career of Charles Martel, the events leading up to the battle of Tours and what we can know about the battle itself. The fourth will consider how historians have viewed the battle from almost as soon as it had happened through to the present day. 

Probably the most famous artistic depiction of Charles Martel and the battle of Tours, from the Hall of Battles at Versailles that King Louis Philippe (r.1830 - 1848) created to celebrate French military greatness. Photograph by yours truly (taken in April 2018).

The political background part 1: Gaul and the Franks to 714

So what was the world that Charles Martel was born into? Well, Charles Martel was most likely born at Herstal, in modern-day Belgium, sometime between 676 and 690. Like with a lot of famous figures from the early middle ages, our sources don't give us any precise information about Charles' date or place of birth. Paul Fouracre suggests that Charles was born sometime around 688 and I'm happy to go with that. 

Charles Martel was born in Gaul, in the kingdom of the Franks, and all its free inhabitants of Gaul north of the river Loire (corresponding to modern day northern France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the German Rhineland) identified themselves as Franks. But who really were the Franks and how did they come to be there? 

The origins of the Franks

The Franks were originally a bunch of West Germanic tribes who grouped together under a common leadership for military purposes, that first appear in the Roman sources in the late third century AD. We don't know what the name "Franks" meant exactly - scholars dispute whether it meant "the free men" or "the fierce ones." For the next century and a half, they keep cropping up in accounts written by Roman historians, sometimes fighting against the Romans, at other times fighting for them as foederati (armies of satellite tribes settled on the Roman frontier). After the Romans abandoned the Rhine frontier in 406, due to the worsening political situation in the Western Roman Empire, the Franks began to advance across the Rhine into Northeast Gaul. By the 460s, as it became abundantly clear that the Western Roman Empire was nearing its end, modern day Belgium, French Flanders and the German regions west of the Rhine were under the control of Frankish warlords that our sources refer to as "petty kings" (reguli in Latin). One of these "petty kings" was a chap called Childeric, who I've posted about here before because Adhemar tells a rather rollicking good story about him, and he had his base of operations at Tournai in Belgium.

Childeric was succeeded in 481 by his fifteen year old son, Clovis. Clovis' importance as a historical figure really cannot be understated, and to French nationalists for the last 200 years he's competed with Vercingetorix for the honour of being the primordial founding father of the French nation. By Clovis' day, Roman Gaul had now been essentially split into six power blocks:

1. The Frankish petty kings in the northeast.
2. In the north-central zone, a West Roman rump state ruled by a general called Syagrius and defended by the remnants of the Roman legions in Gaul, with its capital at Soissons.
3. British refugees in control of the far northwest corner of Gaul (Armorica) that would in time become known as Brittany.
4. In the southwest, the Visigothic kingdom controlling Aquitaine (the region bounded by the Loire to the north, the Rhone to the east and the Pyrenees to the south) with its capital at Toulouse. 
5. The Burgundian kingdom in the south east, consisting of the modern day French regions of Bourgogne et Franche Comte, Rhone-Alpes and Provence and with its capital at Lyon.
6. The Alemanni in the easternmost regions of Alsace and Lorraine.

Clovis and the conquest of Gaul

Now its very important for me to outline all of this, as this six-way division of Gaul c.481 would still leave significant legacies in Charles Martel's day. At the same time, it wasn't going to last for very long at all. In 486, Clovis invaded the Roman rump state in northern Gaul, defeated Syagrius in battle at Soissons and executed him after he attempted to seek refuge with the Visigoths - I've written about this before. By 493, having mopped up all resistance, Clovis had conquered all the former Roman territories between the Somme and Loire, and was starting to eye up the kingdom of the Burgundians. Later that year he married a Burgundian princess called Clotilde, the niece of the Burgundian king Gundobad. Gregory of Tours in his Ten Books of Histories and Adhemar of Chabannes (who used Gregory as his source) claim that Clovis married Clotilde for her beauty, dexterity and intelligence, as reported back to him by his Roman advisor and envoy Aredius when he visited the Burgundian court. There may be some truth in that but, as Gregory and Adhemar themselves hint at, there was also an element of political calculation and military involved - put it another way, the Burgundians were shit scared of getting invaded by Clovis and the Franks. 

The Franks at this time were Germanic pagans - that is to say that they worshipped gods like Odin, Thor and Tyr as their main deities, as well as a host of minor gods and ancestral spirits. But under the influence of Clotilde (the Burgundians were Christians, albeit of the heretical Arian sect), Clovis began to consider converting to Christianity. Sometime after he defeated and conquered the Alemanni at the battle of Tolbiac in 496 (later writers would claim it was this victory that finally persuaded him to convert), Clovis was baptised as a Christian by Archbishop Remigius of Rheims. Interestingly, and very significantly, he chose not to be baptised as an Arian but as a Catholic. The difference between Arians and Chalcedonians is that Arians believed that Jesus Christ was inferior and subordinate to God the Father because had to be created, whereas Chalcedonians believed that all three members of the Holy Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) were coequal. This all seems quite arcane and abstruse. But just think of how, in 1500 years time, historians will probably find it weird and very hard to understand that we ever got worked up over whether to say "women" or "people who menstruate" on an NHS advice leaflet, footballers taking the knee at the Eurocup or "Rule Britannia" not being sung at the last night of the Proms. Theological controversies were for late antiquity and the early middle ages what the so-called "culture wars" are for us in the twenty-first century.  

Now it must be said that, like with a lot of other key dates in early medieval history, there is significant controversy over when Clovis' baptism happened. Our source for him being baptised in 496 is Gregory of Tours' Ten Books of Histories. Gregory was writing two generations after Clovis, and some historians have raised serious doubts about his credibility for events that took place before his lifetime (538 - 594) - see my post linked above about Syagrius and the "kingdom of Soissons." Another, more contemporary source, a letter of Bishop Avitus of Vienne, seems to imply (rather obliquely) that Clovis wasn't baptised until 507, which as we'll see was another crucial year in his reign. I'm not going to take a position on this debate, though it does do well to illustrate a lot of the basic problems of studying this period.

A much remembered event: the baptism of Clovis (whenever that actually happened), from an ivory codex dating to c.875. Like the Treaty of Verdun in 843, Philip Augustus defeating King John of England and Emperor Otto IV at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, Joan of Arc lifting the siege of Orleans in 1429 or the storming of the Bastille in 1789, this one of many moments that people claim as the "birth of the French nation."

By Pethrus (talk) - File:Saint Remigius binding Medieval Picardie Museum.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90181350. 

Within about a generation of Clovis' baptism, all the Frankish elite and most of the free population had at least nominally accepted Chalcedonian Christianity. This was unique in the post-Roman west as the Burgundians, the Visigothic kingdom, the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy and the Vandal kingdom in Africa were Arian Christian, and the Anglo-Saxons wouldn't be converted until a century later. Because of this, the French have often claimed that. It has also has been a thing of national pride for French Catholics since at least the thirteenth century. The shift towards a more Christian culture, however, was much more gradual. The Roman historian Procopius claims in his History of the Wars that the Franks in the 530s still practised ritualistic human sacrifice on Gothic women and children captured in war. Of course one could say that Procopius was trying to make the Franks seem like barbarians, and thus support his master, Emperor Justinian, in his plan to reconquer the Western Roman Empire. At the same time, the Franks were allied to the Romans and Frankish envoys did visit the Roman imperial court in Constantinople. 

Another nineteenth century romantic painting, this time of Clovis, looking rather Asterix-like,  praying towards Heaven in the middle of the battle of Tolbiac in 496 as described by Gregory of Tours, the Book of the History of the Franks of 727 and Adhemar of Chabannes - the subsequent victory would then cause him to convert, so the story goes. The painting is located at the Pantheon (a "temple to the French nation"), in Paris, and an almost identical one can be found in the Hall of Battles at Versailles. Photo taken by the present author (April 2018).

After Clovis' conversion, he turned his attentions to the south again and in 507, at the battle of Vouille near Poitiers, he defeated and killed the Visigothic king Alaric II. The Franks rapidly conquered all of Aquitaine save for the Nimes-Narbonne coastal strip which the Visigoths barely held on to, and Visigothic royal court was forced to relocate to Spain. Clovis then spent the next few years eliminating all the other Frankish petty kings, men like his erstwhile allies Ragnachar of Cambrai and Sigebert of Cologne, and absorbing their kingdoms into his own. When Clovis died in 511, the Franks had come out on top as the dominant political and military power in Gaul, and they all accepted the authority of Clovis and his dynasty. 

The early Merovingians

That dynasty would of course come to be called the Merovingians, though not until the seventh century. Various origin myths developed about that dynasty. One, found in the seventh century chronicle of Fredegar, held that Clovis' grandfather was a chap called Merovech. Merovech was born, so the story went, after his mother eloped with a creature called a quinotaur, an aquatic creature that's half-bull, half-sea-serpent, she met while walking at the beach. Of course, none of this was too unusual in the post-Roman West. The West Saxon kings claimed Odin as an ancestor - if this were true, then Queen Elizabeth II would be the descendant of a Norse god. Yet its led Dan Brown to claim as "fact" in his bestselling airport bookshop classic The Da Vinci Code that the Merovingians were the direct descendants of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. I'd have sooner argued that Fredegar was describing Zeus up to his old tricks again, that Merovech was a demigod and that all Merovingians had Olympian blood in them - it would take a lot less by way of mental gymnastics, that's for sure. But hang on a minute. Fredegar says it was a "beast of Neptune" and, while Zeus likes to go on the pull in a lot of different places, the beach is the preferred haunt of his brother (when he's not trying to piss off Athena by getting some nookie in her temple!). I think it was Poseidon, in which case Merovech would be the half-brother of Percy Jackson and Clovis his grand-nephew! But before I damage my credibility as a historian by further indulging in Percy Jackson fanfiction in what is meant to be a serious blogpost, let me just say that this myth is not known to have existed before Fredegar. Nor did it catch on - The Book of the History of the Franks of 727, Einhard and Adhemar of Chabannes are completely silent about it.

Still, the Merovingian kings had some charismatic, almost mystical qualities about them, above all their exceptionally luxurious long hair (short hair was the fashion for men at that time), which served to mark them out as special and uniquely qualified for kingship. Indeed, if you wanted to disqualify an individual Merovingian from the throne, a more humane alternative to killing them was to have them tonsured and thus politically emasculate them. Clovis and his sons also gave them a reputation for military success and crushing enemies who stood against them, a clear sign of God's favour. People definitely did think that there was something special about the Merovingian bloodline. From c.530, just one generation after Clovis, it seems to have been universally acknowledged that in order to be qualified to be a king you had to be a male-line descendant of a previous king from the Merovingian dynasty. For example, Gundovald, a usurper in Provence who rebelled in 584 - 585, had to claim that he was a forgotten bastard son of King Chlothar (d.561), the youngest son of Clovis. While aristocratic governors in the provinces often rebelled against the Merovingian kings, they never tried to seize the throne for themselves or set up their own breakaway kingdoms. This is such a big contrast to Merovingian Gaul's immediate neighbours, the Visigothic kingdom (418 - 721) and Lombard Italy (568 - 774), where no dynasty survived longer than four generations. Indeed, the Merovingians survived longer than any other of the royal dynasties of the post-Roman period on the Continent. The West Saxon royal house survived for longer, being a ruling dynasty in southern Britain all the way from the sixth century down to 1016/ 1066, but their territory was never as large as Merovingian Gaul. Keep all this in mind, for later on in this series we shall be confronted with a really important question. Why did Charles Martel not try and become king of the Franks himself, even though he had more than sufficient political power, material resources and military track record to do so? Indeed when (spoiler alert) Charles' son, Pepin the Short, got round to deposing the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, in 751, the Merovingians had ruled the Franks for a longer period of time than the United States of America has been in existence as of today. Its really not hard to see how much of a shock this must have been to people at the time.

A quinotaur depicted on a Roman mosaic from Eboracum, York, now displayed in the Yorkshire Museum, York. Photo by Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany - Ophiotaurus Mosaic, Yorkshire Museum, York (Eboracum)Uploaded by Marcus Cyron, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30143995

Clovis was succeeded by his four sons. Following Germanic custom, the kingdom was divided between the four of them. They proceeded to make further territorial conquests. In 534, the Burgundian kingdom was conquered and by c.550 all of what is now central and southern Germany had come under Frankish overlordship. They also attempted to conquer Northern Italy between 535 and 563 and regularly led campaigns into Spain. There is even evidence, albeit of a purely circumstantial kind, that the Merovingians exercised soft and possibly hard power in southern England. The kingdom of Kent (and possibly Sussex as well) appears to have been a Merovingian satellite state, and King Aethelbert of Kent (d.616) married Bertha (565 - 601), a great-granddaughter of Clovis who may have helped precipitate her husband's conversion to Christianity by St Augustine of Canterbury in 597. Its so interesting, and perhaps uncoincidental, how Bertha's story mirrors that of her great-grandmother, Clotilde.

The oldest church building in the UK still in operation: St Martin's church, Kent, built as a private chapel for Bertha before her husband's conversion to Christianity. By Oosoom - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7466978. The building, especially its interior, has been altered a lot over the centuries, but the original late sixth century brickwork and a decorative arch survive, as is shown here. Its patron saint is Martin of Tours (316 - 397), the founding father of monasticism in Roman Gaul and a highly celebrated figure in the Merovingian period. The monastery Martin founded at Marmoutier-sur-Loire, a suburb of Tours, was one of the richest and most prestigious religious foundations in Western Europe in the period c.500 - 750, and thus it played a crucially important role in the story of Charles Martel and the battle of Tours, as we shall see.

 

The youngest of Clovis' sons, Chlothar I (497 - 561), managed to reunify the Frankish kingdom by 558, having outlived all his brothers and murdered his nephew - Richard III isn't the only monarch with that charge to his name and, unlike in his case, no one holds Chlothar's guilt in doubt. After Chlothar's death the kingdom was divided again between his four surviving sons - Charibert, Chilperic, Sigebert and Guntram. A forty-five year long period of constant dynastic infighting ensued, in which the key players were two of the most extraordinary women of the early middle ages - Fredegund (d.597), a former slave-girl who became the wife of King Chilperic, and Brunhilda (543 - 613), a Visigothic princess from Spain and the wife of King Sigebert. I'll do a post on them and that whole saga sometime in the near future. To describe their story as "Game of Thrones but in real life" really would be about the sum of it. Though it must be said that Fredegund and Brunhilda would leave Cersei Lannister in the dust in terms of the lengths they were willing to go to in order to preserve their power in what was without a doubt a very macho and patriarchal society.

In the end, Chilperic and Fredegund's son Chlothar II (584 - 629) came out on top, after all the sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of Sigebert and Brunhilda had been eliminated (his other two uncles died without male issue), and in 613 was proclaimed king of a unified Frankish kingdom. However, by this point it was recognised that the Frankish kingdom consisted of three indivisible realms (regna), each with their own distinctive identity - Austrasia, Neustria  and Burgundy. Chlothar II recognised that these realms were going to continue to exist permanently in the edict of Paris issued on 18 October 614, issued at a church council in which bishops from all over the Frankish kingdom and from Kent attended. Each kingdom from now on was going to have its own separate royal court even when a single king reigned over all three kingdoms. The exact boundaries of these three realms are hard to describe and shifted a lot over time. But it suffices to say that Austrasia was the northeastern realm and gravitated around Metz in Lorraine, while Neustria was the northwestern realm and had its political heartland in the area around Paris and Burgundy, the southeastern realm, was centred in Lyon. In many ways these reflected the late fifth century divisions of Gaul. Austrasia consisted of where the Franks had been based, pre-Clovis, and the Alemannic territories, and was probably the most "Germanic" of the three realms. The Austrasian elite and most of the free population spoke Frankish, the language that would by the ninth century evolve into Old High German. Neustria essentially filled the same zone as the kingdom of Soissons had before 486, and its people were overwhelmingly Latin-speaking. Burgundy was likewise a Latin speaking realm to its core and essentially took the same boundaries as the old pre-534 kingdom of the Burgundians. All of these kingdoms had different legal systems - in Austrasia the law of the Ripaurian Franks, in Neustria the law of the Salian Franks and in Burgundy the law of the Burgundians. 

A gold coin (solidus) of King Chlothar II, portraying him like a late Roman emperor. 

Under Chlothar's son Dagobert I (r.629 - 639), who inherited an undivided kingdom from his father having co-ruled with him for the previous six years, the high watermark of Merovingian power and prestige was reached. Indeed, Dagobert was remembered as the model king for generations, indeed centuries, after his death. Adhemar of Chabannes wrote in the 1020s:

Fuitque ipse Dagobertus rex fortissimus nutritor Francorum, severissimus in judiciis, ecclesiarum largitor. Ipse enim elemosinarum copiam de fisco palatii per ecclesias sanctorum primus distribuere jussit. Pacem in cuncto regno suo statuit, et in multis gentibus rumor ejus personuit. Timorem et metum in universis regnis per circuitum incussit. Ipse pacificus, velut Salomon, quietus regnum obtinuit Francorum. 

My translation:

"That king Dagobert was the strongest guardian of the Franks, most severe in justice and a benefactor of churches. Indeed, the first thing he ordered was that plenty of alms from the public purse be distributed to the holy churches. He established peace in all his kingdom, and his reputation resounded among many peoples. He inspired awe and dread in all the surrounding kingdoms. Like Solomon, he obtained peace and tranquillity for the kingdom." 

A facsimile of the signature of Dagobert I

Government under the early Merovingians: continuity and change 

While the dynastic back and forth between partition and reunification of the Frankish kingdom under the early Merovingians, great and irreversible changes were taking place in Gaul in the sixth and early seventh centuries. 

Under the early Merovingians, it seems like much carried on as it had done before. While they didn't exactly have capitals in the modern sense, which to a certain degree was true even of the western Roman emperors, the Merovingian kings were not itinerant either. Rather, like the western Roman emperors, they ruled their kingdoms from a few select cities - Rheims, Metz and Cologne for the kings of Austrasia; Soissons, Rouen and Paris for the kings of Neustria; Orleans, Lyon and Vienne for the kings of Burgundy. 

In these cities they set up royal courts and central governments with a hierarchy of titles inherited from the Western Roman emperors. The maior domus (literally mayor of the palace) managed the royal household and acted as a kind of deputy. The referendarius managed the chancery/ central writing office that produced all official royal documents (diplomas) - these included written records of royal orders to the provinces, grants of land/ exemption from military service and taxation and royal judgements on legal disputes. While its debatable how organised and "bureaucratic" the chancery was, its clear that Merovingian royal administration was quite literate and even kept the medium of imperial Roman government documents - the papyrus scroll. The theasaurius or camerarius managed the royal treasury. There all of the king's income from taxation and royal landownership was stored in wooden chests, along with booty taken in wars and diplomatic gifts from neighbouring rulers. Gaining control of it was vital for anyone who wanted to hold supreme political power. Fredegar wrote that, after Chlothar II died, Dagobert took possession of his father's kingdom and "all of the treasure", and in mentioning the treasure he was simply repeating a standard formula that all Merovingians used for describing transfers of power from one ruler to another. Gregory of Tours noted that Brunhilda and Fredegund took control of the treasuries of their kingdoms after both of their husbands were assassinated in 575 and 584, a necessary step to protect their underage sons and prevent usurpation by rival Merovingians. The court was also where the high court of justice and the king's council convened, making it the backbone of the state. 

A Merovingian royal diploma of King Theuderic III, issued in 695. Couldn't find an earlier one - not many authentic Merovingian royal diplomas have survived, especially since papyrus is less durable than parchment. Its written in Merovingian chancery script which is an absolute nightmare to read (to put it mildly)! I remember when I first saw Merovingian chancery in palaeography classes for my masters' degree and thought "how the fuck am I supposed to read this?" We can all thank the Carolingians for discontinuing this script, and giving us the kind of handwriting we use today.

The court was a powerful centre of gravity. The aristocracy were drawn to it, either to obtain court offices, have their voice heard on matters of state, make petitions and seek favours from the king and socialise with each other. From the later sixth century, they also seem to have sent their sons to be educated at the court. The court of Dagobert was so renowned for the quality of education there, that Queen Aethelburh of Northumbria (605 - 647), the daughter of Aethelbert and Bertha and the second wife of King Edwin of Northumbria (d.633), sent her stepsons over to the Merovingian court. We do, however, know virtually nothing about the curriculum there, or what exactly the purpose of the education was. The friendships made through being educated at the royal court as boys and then a career in royal service as young men, made for quite a tight-knit ruling class. For example, St Audoin of Rouen (609 - 684), the son of a powerful Frankish aristocrat from Neustria, was sent to the court of King Chlothar to be educated. There he befriended a courtier called Desiderius (580 - 655), who came from an ancient Roman senatorial family from Aquitaine, and the future king Dagobert. Under King Dagobert, both attained two of the highest offices of state - Audoin became referendarius and Desiderius became camerarius. Then when each of them respectively entered middle-age, the two men were appointed to bishoprics - Desiderius to the see of Cahors in 630 and Audoin to the see of Rouen in 641. Even after they'd left court, the two men corresponded to each other by letters, being the last practitioners of a living ancient Roman tradition going back to Cicero, Seneca and Pliny the Younger. There is a very strong overtone of nostalgia in them for their youthful days at the court. In one letter (Epistulae 10), Desiderius remembers three of their friends - Bishop Paul of Verdun and Bishop Sulpicius of Bourges - who are now deceased and longs for when they can meet again in heaven. He also wrote to King Dagobert, reflecting on "the memory of the camraderie and sweetness of a youth passed under a cloudless sky" (Epistulae 5). The relationships between kings and the aristocracy were thus very intimate except in one respect - marriage. The early Merovingians down to Chlothar II did not marry the wives and daughters of their nobles, instead marrying either foreign princesses (like Brunhilda) or slave girls (like Fredegund), and in this way they kept the nobility at arm's length.

But royal courts weren't just places where the already powerful met, did essential business, got promoted and fraternised. It was also where powerful people could be made. Take the example of Bishop Eligius of Noyon (588 - 660). Born into a lower class family, he trained as a goldsmith but excelled at his craft so much that he caught the eye of Chlothar II, became employed at the royal mint and did so well there that King Dagobert made him one of his closest advisers. Eligius joined the friend group of Desiderius of Cahors and Audoin of Rouen and ended his life as Bishop of Noyon. Likewise, Bertharius, an attendant in the royal bedchamber, became a count and led armies for King Theudebert II (d.612), a grandson of Brunhilda. And Venantius Fortunatus (530 - 609), an Italian by birth, was most likely originally a spy for the East Roman (Byzantine) governmen. But when he stumbled across the wedding of King Sigebert and Queen Brunhilda in 566 and composed a panegyric for the newlyweds, he was instantly recruited for the royal court and ended up as Bishop of Poitiers. Thus what the Merovingians had down to the mid-seventh century was a governing class whose members, wherever they came from originally, were very much on the same page as one another, and they overwhelmingly owed their positions to royal power and patronage.

So, as we've established, the court provided a very strong link between the central power and the localities and between the king and elites. This was absolutely vital given just how goddamn massive the Merovingian kingdom was. Even when the Merovingian realm was ruled by three our four kings, their kingdoms were still bigger than most Roman imperial provinces. And the unified Merovingian realm, with all of its peripheral regions (Aquitaine, Alemannia, Bavaria and Thuringia), covered a landmass larger than the modern state of France. Remember this was an age in which information could travel as fast as a horse could carry it. A single courier, riding hell for leather, could travel at most 80km a day. And it could easily take three days to travel from, say, Paris to Rouen. 

But below the level of the royal court, how was such a large kingdom governed? We know that the Merovingians appointed individual aristocrats and courtiers as regional governors. At the top level were dukes (duces) who presided over a large administrative region. Below them were the counts (comites), who presided over a smaller district (pagus) that included a city (civitas). In Burgundy and Provence, you had patricians (patricii) instead of dukes. All of these titles were of ancient Roman origin. Counts dukes and patricians were based in cities and were responsible for supervising tax collection, justice, policing and military forces in the surrounding district/ region. To some extent, they shared their responsibilities with the bishops who, as we saw earlier, were very often royal nominees and former courtiers. Below the counts were subordinate officials known as tribunes and centenarii, tasked with tax collection and law enforcement. These officials were paid salaries by the royal treasury from government taxation, and this along with court patronage more generally seems to have been their main source of wealth. While these officials tended to be (but weren't always, as we saw earlier) landed aristocrats there is a lot of debate over how big their landed estates were in the sixth century. Chris Wickham thinks they were fabulously rich, whereas Guy Halsall thinks that most of them were little more than country squires. All said, the chain of command in Merovingian provincial government essentially took its inspiration from the chain of command in the late Roman army, which the Franks had served on various occasions during the fourth and fifth centuries. It was very much intended as a model that the native Gallo-Romans would find palatable. 


All this talk of Franks and Gallo-Romans is hugely important, because ethnicity was quite an important organising principle in early Merovingian government. The upper echelons of the regime were undoubtedly very mixed. The king was attended on at court by Franks and Romans,  a large number of the counts and dukes had Roman names in the sixth century and the overwhelming majority of the bishops did too. Bishop Gregory of Tours (full name: Georgius Florentius Gregorius) is demonstrative of this - he came from an ancient Gallo-Roman senatorial family and could trace his ancestors at least as far back as the second century AD. Yet when it came to the general population, crucial distinctions were made when it came to three of the most basic aspects of Merovingian government - the law, taxation and military service. 

The evidence we have for how the Merovingian military worked is extremely limited and difficult to interpret - all we can be 100% sure of is that Clovis and his successors  But it seems like in the sixth century, the Merovingians, like other post-Roman rulers, were able to maintain a sort of standing army on a still recognisably Roman model. Ethnic Franks (and in Burgundy, ethnic Burgundians) would be billeted on the estates of Roman landowners, with each individual soldier receiving a third in the tax revenue or rent from the estate (in lieu of tax). The regional dukes would be responsible for maintaining the troops, provisioning them and leading them on royal military campaigns. The dukes and counts would also have their own retinues of professional bodyguards, known variously as bucellarii, saiones and leudes, whom they maintained at their own expense. There was nothing particularly new, "Germanic" or "medieval" about this, as Roman generals and officials had done the same. And given that Dukes and counts were salaried officials, these bodyguard regiments  ultimately fell under state control. The king of course had his own palace bodyguard regiment - the antrustiones. Membership of the army was determined by ethnicity: soldiers had to be ethnic Franks and Frankish men were obliged to become soldiers. In return they got exemption from taxation and the right to speak in the annual assembly on 1 March, which also created a direct link between kings and the rank-and-file soldiers. Not all of them would have been ancestrally Frankish - many of the "Franks" would have been the descendants of the surviving Roman soldiers or of other barbarian groups in Gaul that had decided to take along with the conquerors.

Classic Merovingian military equipment from the sixth century. The Spangenhelm (above), made from riveted bands of metal hammered together, originated among the Sarmatians, an Iranian nomad living in roughly what is now Ukraine, no later than the second century AD (some spangenhelms can be seen on Trajan's column), and from 500 - 1000 it appears to have been the most widely used type of helmet across Europe. This particular example is sixth century and comes from a part of Germany that was under Merovingian control. The francisca (below) was a type of throwing axe used by the rank and file troops in sixth century Frankish armies. However it, along with the throwing spear ango (a descendant of the Roman legionary's pilum) fell out of use in the seventh century with the shift away from more fluid battle tactics towards the classic shield-wall slogging match, not too dissimilar to ancient Greek hoplite warfare, that the Anglo-Saxons still tried to pull off against the Normans at the battle of Hastings. This of course prioritised heavier weapons (stabbing spears and long broad one-edged cutting swords known as scramasaxes), large circular shields with spherical metal bosses and body armour (mostly mail shirts) at the expense of projectile weapons like bows and arrows, javelins and, yes, the francisca. Bear all of this closely in mind - this style of warfare goes a long way to explaining Charles Martel's success at Tours in 732. Grave goods are our friend in charting this military evolution. The objects displayed are from the Royal Armouries, Leeds, and the photographs are my own.

Meanwhile, ordinary Romans paid the taxes, above all the land tax, but were not expected to serve in the army. As stated before, taxation was a very important source of revenue to the early Merovingians, and was levied either in gold coin (modelled on the imperial Roman solidus) or in some less monetised regions in agricultural produce. There was a massive exception to this though, that being Aquitaine. There, Gallo-Roman landowners appear to have been obliged to serve in what were essentially militia forces grouped according to the city districts (civitates) in which they lived, that would be assembled and taken on military campaigns by royal officers. 

So the early Merovingian kings most definitely did have what sociologically-minded historians would prosaically call "an independent coercive force" under their control. This means that they could call on military forces to deal with whatever threats came their way without having to bargain or negotiate with aristocrats or local communities, as a lot of rulers later on the middle ages would have to do, because these troops were directly under the control of them or their officials. Combine that with the systematic taxation of the land, a gold coinage, a hierarchy of salaried officials and the powerful pull of the royal court and what you had was quite a powerful centralised state/s. 

But this set-up wasn't going to last forever. A huge transformation was in motion - one which the leading Merovingian historian and archaeologist Guy Halsall is currently arguing, was the real watershed between the ancient and medieval worlds. How exactly it worked we don't really know, not least because Halsall's book has yet to appear on our shelves, but we can point to a few potential motors of change that would disrupt all of this:

1. The Roman Emperor Justinian's attempt to conquer the former provinces of the Western Roman Empire: at the time of the death of Clovis in 511, an intelligent Gallo-Roman observer could have been forgiven for not knowing that the fall of Rome had happened 35 years ago. Barbarian leaders had been deposing emperors and putting their candidates on the throne long before Odoacer, a Germanic general in Roman service, deposed Romulus Augustulus in 476. As for military strongmen seizing political power the provinces, change the record! Living under Clovis and his sons may have felt, to many ordinary Gallo-Romans, no different to living under the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, just under new management. Indeed, Clovis had sort of acknowledged that he was an imperial subject when he accepted an honorary consulship from Anastasius, the Roman emperor in Constantinople, in 507. He also had his coins minted in Anastasius' name and with his image on them. But all that was going to change when, in the 530s, Justinian, the Roman Emperor in Constantinople, claimed that the Western provinces had, since 476, been completely lost to the "barbarians" and launched a series of wars to recover them. By 555, Africa, Sardinia, Sicily and Italy had been reconquered from the Vandals and Ostrogoths respectively, and Constantinople had gained a foothold in southern Spain against the Visigoths. The Franks had initially joined in these wars as allies of the East Romans, but after 539 relations between the Merovingians and the imperial court in Constantinople got rather tense - Justinian was not best pleased when Theudebert I told him that his kingdom stretched to the Danube too. It was a sign of the times that, after defeating the Ostrogoths at Pavia, Theudebert began to mint coins in his own name and with his own image - something that no previous Germanic ruler anywhere in the former Western Roman Empire had done. That's not to say that Roman ways were no longer politically correct in the Merovingian kingdoms - Theudebert held chariot races in the hippodrome at Arles, for goodness sakes! But for Romans living in the Merovingian kingdoms, it must have drastically changed their worldview and made them ask serious questions about who they were now and who did they owe their allegiances to?
2. Its the economy, stupid: historians generally agree that between c.400 and 650, Western Europe got poorer and trade and markets thinned out. Meanwhile the population plummeted and became more rural and dispersed. The exact reasons for this are unclear, but a combination of the long term consequences of the breakup of the Western Roman Empire, catastrophic global cooling and a bubonic plague pandemic beginning in the 540s are to blame. Climate crisis and pandemics, plus ca change! And yet people, including the Vice Chancellor of a fairly prestigious university in the UK, claim the sixth century has no relevance to us in the present day! The irony abounds. The consequences of all this were that it was harder to get the resources needed to support a strong state - there were less people to tax, they had less taxable wealth and they were too spread out. Attempts to try and remedy this were met with ...
3. Resistance to taxation: The Merovingians tried their best to shore up the tax system. Indeed, King Chilperic I (r.561 - 584) of Neustria and his queen, Fredegund, tried to both make their subjects pay more taxes and make tax collection more efficient. Gregory of Tours describes it vividly: "King Chilperic decreed that a new series of taxes should be levied throughout the kingdom, and these were extremely heavy. As a result, a great number of people emigrated from their native cities or from whatever bit of land they occupied and sought to go into exile elsewhere, for they preferred to go into exile rather than endure such punitive taxation. The new tax laws laid it down that landowner must pay five gallons of wine for every half acre which he possessed. Many other taxes were levied, not only land but also on the number of workmen employed, until it became quite impossible to meet them." Adhemar of Chabannes, writing in the eleventh century, a time when any kind of government taxation in the kingdom of the Franks had faded into ancient history, recounted this episode with complete horror: (My translation) Resulting from these evil tax surveys, many people, having abandoned their villas, and left behind their properties in the cities, made for other kingdoms, saying that it was better to go live in foreign parts than to be subjected to such ruin. For it was thus established that the landed proprietor would render to the tax collectors an amphora of wine for every acre. And thus, the entire wealth of the remaining lands were made taxable, and similarly they administered taxes on all the slaves. Verily, the people were intensely oppressed, and they called upon the Lord. (Original Latin: pro quibus descriptionibus malis, multi, reliquentes villas, civitates vel possesiones proprias, alia regna pecierunt, dicentes melius esse perigrinari quam tali periculo subiacere. Sic enim fuerat statuum ut possessor de propria terra  unam anforam vini per arpennum redderet. Sic et de reliquis terris ex universa substantia faciebant, similiter et de mancipiis cuncta agebant. Populus valde oppressus, vociferabatur ad Dominum). As Gregory of Tours would then describe, in Limoges (and presumably in other civitates, lynch mobs tried to kill tax collectors - Gregory of Tours' histories abound with accounts of tax collectors being lynched, especially immediately after the death of the king i.e. some decades earlier, Parthenius, Theudebert's treasurer and finance minister, was stoned to death by the citizens of Trier after the demise of his royal master. King Chilperic responded with sever repression, sending in his officials to torture and execute rebellious citizens, with some of them being impaled. But as Gregory of Tours and Adhemar then recount, Chilperic's oppressed Gallo-Roman subjects called on the wrath of the Almighty, and Chilperic and his sons became gravely ill. Following the advice of his Queen Fredegund, Chilperic publicly had all the tax registers burned and ordered that these methods of tax assessment never be used again- one reason why we sadly don't have a Merovingian Domesday Book! Taxation thus had to become lighter and less efficient. and Under Chilperic's son, Chlothar II, further limits were placed on government taxation in the Edict of Paris of 614, in order to help ensure smooth relations between him and his subjects in all the three realms.
4. Changes in ethnic identity: the KEY thing to remember about ethnicity in late antiquity and the early middle ages was that it WASN'T a fixed category based on biological descent. What it WAS was primarily a political and military grouping with common cultural symbols and origin myths. Indeed, as we saw, the Franks had begun as various smaller Germanic tribes, that had maintained distinct identities for centuries, banding together for political and military purposes. Over time, these older tribal identities became subsumed and disappeared into a "Frankish identity." It was therefore possible, as the Franks came to extend their rule over various territories and peoples, that other people could become Franks too. Becoming Frankish was immensely attractive to the Gallo-Romans - it meant a higher wergild (compensatory money for being the victim of a crime) under the laws of the Salian Franks in Neustria, exemption from most forms of taxation (especially the burdensome land tax) and the right to participate in the annual assembly that came with serving in the royal armies. Increasingly Gallo-Romans and Franks began to intermarry (Gregory of Tours had an uncle called Gundulf, a very un-Roman name) and Gallo-Romans came to adopt Frankish names i.e., whilst in the sixth century only one bishop in Gaul had a Frankish name, in the seventh century the majority of them had Frankish names. The Gallo-Roman aristocracy also came to adopt more and more of Frankish culture, which meant becoming more militarised - riding and skilled use of sword and spear increasingly took precedence over being able to write Latin hexameters and recite Virgil and Horace from memory in elite education. Gallo-Roman aristocrats who didn't like warrior culture increasingly became bishops, like Gregory of Tours and Desiderius of Cahors. And Justinian's wars of reconquest, which stalled after the 550s, showed that the Western Roman Empire had fallen and was never coming back, which meant it was time to adapt to a new world and take on new identities. Thus by c.650, Frankish identity was so universal among the free population north of the Loire that, in the Law of the Ripaurian Franks for Austrasia, "Romans" were essentially classified as half-free people who required a Frank to speak for them in the law courts. In Provence and Aquitaine, however, the aristocracy and the general population continued to identify as Romans and live by Roman law into the eighth century and later. The obvious knock-on effects of all this were that the system by which Romans paid taxes and Franks served in the army could no longer work. This was because with the overwhelming majority of people in northern and central Gaul claiming Frankish ethnicity by the early seventh century, there were too many people eligible to serve in the army and too few to pay taxes. A new system, therefore, had to be created.
5. Dynastic instability and civil war: obviously there's the predictably disruptive and destructive effects of political infighting and internecine strife on government and the economy. But besides that, the constant drawing and redrawing of the political map between 561 - 613 meant that individual Merovingian kings, when they gained control of kingdoms that had belonged to rival Merovingians, had to work hard to win the loyalty of aristocracies that had previously been loyal to rival Merovingians. This meant making some concessions to their authority, especially with regards to appointing royal officials.
6. The rise and rise of monasticism: monasticism (communities of Christian ascetics living simple lives of prayer and contemplation together and holding property in common) had already existed in late Roman and Merovingian Gaul. Some monasteries, like Saint Germain des Pres in Paris, Saint Medard in Soissons and Saint Martin near Tours, were by the 580s already very wealthy and famous. However, as the sixth century drew to a close, a new kind of monasticism took Gaul by force - one imported from Ireland. You see, Ireland had been converted to Christianity by the Romano-British missionary St Patrick in the fifth century. However, Irish Christians soon ran into a problem. Their new religion had grown up in the Roman Empire, where everything, including the church, was organised around cities. Ireland in 500 AD had nothing that could be called a city by any definition, and was an essentially tribal society. The way to get around this was, rather than have religious life be led by bishops based in cities as in the former provinces of the Roman Empire, instead base it around rural monasteries led by charismatic abbots. These Irish monasteries owned vast tracts of land and herds of cattle (early Irish agriculture was overwhelmingly pastoral) and attracted large communities of skilled craftsmen to settle around them, making them economic powerhouses. An Irish monk called Saint Columbanus brought this Irish model of monasticism over to Gaul when he came there in 590, founding the great monasteries of Luxeil and Annegray in Burgundy. Irish-style monasticism spread like wildfire in Gaul, with over 40 new monasteries being built in the Merovingian realms between c.600 and 675. Merovingian kings and queens enthusiastically founded monasteries - they provided valuable links between the royal court and the localities they were situated in, and the spiritual backing they offered to their patrons through communal prayer was invaluable. Kings throughout the seventh century would ensure that monasteries maintained cycles of "perpetual praise" for their royal patrons, as well as prayers granting them victory in battle and the stability of the kingdom. Thus they were more than willing to grant the monasteries and the tenants on their landed estates immunity from taxation, which helped further weaken the administrative system they'd inherited from the late Roman Empire. Monasteries were also a massive boost to aristocratic power. By donating large landed estates to monasteries aristocrats could protect their family lands from fragmentation - Frankish customary law required that a dead man's estates be shared among all his children. The monastery thus essentially acted as a land bank. And by installing a relative - a son, daughter, nephew, niece or widowed mother - as abbot/ abbess, one could ensure that other families didn't get effective control of those lands. Monasteries could also produce panegyrics and hagiographies glorifying their aristocratic patrons, as well as writings attacking their political opponents. They also provided aristocratic families with the same kind of spiritual support as they did kings, and as for them they served as private mausolea - being buried in a monastery close to a saint would aid your chances of getting to Heaven, as would the prayers and virtuous ways of the monastic community.
7. Land, land and more land: after 600, kings came to increasingly reward their aristocratic followers and courtiers not with the proceeds of taxation but with grants of land by charter that were legally irrevocable. While this kept the aristocracy drawn towards the royal court for patronage, it also gave them significantly less dependent on state service for their wealth and power and significantly more leverage. This would have important long term consequences. Meanwhile, since the last third of the sixth century, soldiers came to be increasingly rewarded not with the right to collect tax revenue at source on certain estates or shares in their rental income but with grants of land outright that were heritable. Late sixth century kings tried to tax these but, as we discussed earlier, the land tax was fiercely resisted. Landholding and patron client relationships thus started to factor into the raising and maintenance of armies in the seventh century, a very important development indeed.

All of these are linked to wider currents of change across the former Western Roman Empire. And what was going on in the Merovingian realm, as in a lot of the other parts of the former Western Roman Empire, in the half-centuries on either side of 600 truly was epoch-defining. Guy Halsall himself argues that 600 is basically when the ancient world gives way to the medieval one. I'll give you my own views on when antiquity ends and the middle ages begin in a subsequent post. But it suffices to say here that I'm somewhat sympathetic to his way of thinking. After 600, the Merovingian realm feels much less like a continuation of the Roman state in a slimmed down, localised form and appears to be doing something different and carving a path to its own. Perhaps it would be right to say that it was around 600 when the leap from West Roman successor state to early medieval kingdom was made.

The edict of Paris issued by Chlothar II in 614 definitely was a sign of the times. The edict itself was not as game-changing as some scholars have made it out to be in the past - to call it the "Magna Carta of the Frankish nobility" is ludicrous. But it definitely confirmed the way in which things were going. The kind of provisions it made were as follows:

1. The king would "respect the privileges and customs of the provinces."
2. Levy no new tax.
3. Only appoint as provincial officials men who already owned land in said province.
4. The policing of local society would be in local hands, with the "powerful" in the provinces being responsible for the apprehending of vagabonds and bandits.

This wasn't at all an act of capitulation for the Merovingian monarchy. At a subsequent church council, King Chlothar was proclaimed a latter day King David (reflecting a new, growing tendency to see kingship in Biblical rather than Classical terms), with any royal official who failed to comply by his laws being threatened with excommunication. He also managed to get the mint at Marseilles, where coins were still being issued in the name of the Roman emperor in Constantinople, to be issued in his own name and bearing his own image, completing what Theudebert I had started 80 years earlier. But what this did mean was that the Merovingians were moving towards a kind of regime that relied on a strong partnership between king and aristocracy and which worked with the grain of local society. After his accession in 629, Dagobert went on tours of Burgundy and Austrasia, distributing justice, holding audience and binding the magnates of each region to him before setting up his court and base of operations in the Paris region, in Neustria. Here he feels a lot less like a Roman emperor without the title, and more like a classic medieval king. Meanwhile, the coercive and fiscal power of the central government had definitely declined.  Standing armies had disappeared from Merovingian Gaul by the end of the sixth century - they were now, in theory raised as militias levied from the free adult male population, with non-attendance in the royal host being punished by a crippling fine (the haribannus). In practice, aristocrats, their dependents and the better-off free peasants served. The land tax became largely irrelevant after Chlothar II's reign, though it was still levied locally in some parts of the Loire valley as late as the 720s. The state-issued gold coinage failed after 640, losing most of its gold content and being minted by semi-private issuers all over Gaul. 

At the same time, the gravitational pull of the royal court on the aristocracy as strong as ever. Any move towards regionalism can easily be exaggerated. Aristocrats owned lands and had interests all over Merovingian Gaul i.e. the will of Bishop Bertram of Le Mans (d.616) reveals that he owned estates in places as far apart from each other as the Seine Valley, Lorraine, Burgundy, Provence and Bordeaux, and so they naturally saw politics on a pan-Gallic/ pan-Frankish level.  And through education and careers pursued at the royal court, intermarriage and increasingly shared martial culture and ethnic identities, what you had was a highly integrated aristocratic elite in the seventh century Merovingian kingdom. Thus the aristocracy were overwhelmingly committed to the Merovingian monarchy and political system. They were not interested in building up their local powerbases and feathering their nests. It would be RIDICULOUS to speak of "feudalism", with all the negative connotations that word tends to have, yet. There was nothing resembling a territorial lordship with attendant powers of jurisdiction in Merovingian times, or indeed for some centuries after Merovingians stopped reigning over the Franks. Nor were there any castles. While very few aristocratic residences from this period have been excavated, the written sources overwhelmingly point to them being unfortified - there was no need to mark and defend one's territory, because aristocratic power was not territorial yet. And the ability of kings and the royal court to reach into very local and seemingly trivial affairs was very strong. Chlothar II confirmed the will of a Parisian merchant called John in 626. Sometime in the 630s, Dagobert sent some of his courtiers into the Limousin to divide up the estates of one of the most important aristocratic families in the period. And in 644, Sigebert III ordered a church council in one of his distant southern realms to be cancelled because he had not been informed of it. Theuderic III in 677 deposed the bishop of Embrum in the Alps for marital infidelity, but allowed him to keep his property. Likewise, ordinary people in the provinces looked to kings to solve their problems. One of the reasons why Dagobert was regarded as a good king was because, as Fredegar recounts, he was a supremely approachable kind of guy with a warm and amiable personality - characteristics that would be much praised in kings in many later centuries (I'm reminded of how a chronicler whose name I've forgotten described King Edward IV). 

And lets not forget that the reigns of Chlothar II and Dagobert were the most successful in foreign policy terms. In 622 the attempt of the Saxon tribes of northern Germany to rebel against paying an annual tribute of 500 cows to the Franks, established back in the 540s during the reign of the first Chlothar, by rallying under a "duke" called Berthoald was utterly crushed by Chlothar II and Dagobert. The Saxons thereafter agreed to provide the Franks with military service, thereafter promising to act as a military buffer for the Merovingian realm against the Slavic tribes living in modern day eastern Germany and Poland. Chlothar II and Dagobert also managed to use military force to ensure that the Lombard kingdom in northern Italy paid regular tribute to them. He also successfully intervened militarily in Spanish politics in 631, deposing the reigning kings in the Visigothic kingdom and installing his own candidate from the Visigothic nobility (one also backed by his friend, the Roman Emperor Heraclius - more about him later).

Yet nonetheless, we do have to face up to the fact that at the end of the day, the power of the Merovingian kings did decline. By the time Charles Martel fought the battle of Tours in 732, all historians would agree that the power and authority of the Merovingian kings over their realm was as purely ceremonial and symbolic as that which Queen Elizabeth II has over the UK and the Commonwealth Realms today. Indeed, in some ways they were even more of a constitutional figurehead than she is. As Einhard would recount, all their actual functions as rulers were limited to being present at public ceremonies and receiving foreign ambassadors, never once deviating from a strict script. All effective control at the centre was exercised by the mayor of the palace, which by that point was held by Charles Martel, and by his aristocratic followers. Most of the time, the last Merovingian kings just sat around, letting their nails grow long and their iconic, luxurious long hair grow longer. How did things get there? Some traditionalist historians, taking a very long term view, have seen all of this as an inevitable result of the Edict of Paris, or indeed of earlier developments, which took royal authority on an inescapable downwards spiral. Indeed, pretty much every Merovingian king in the half-century after Dagobert has won the accolade of being called the first roi faineant (literally "do nothing king") by some French historian - as a quick glance at their Wikipedia articles shows. Others argue that they maintained at least some real political and authority until the death of Childebert IV in 711, and see the eclipse of Merovingian power purely as the result of some political accidents that happened in the subsequent ten years. I think the answer lies somewhere in between, which brings us to ...

Things really do go south: child-kings and aristocratic kingmakers (639 - 675)

Dagobert died in 639 and was succeeded by his two underage sons. The six-year-old Clovis II succeeded him in Neustria and Burgundy, and the nine-year-old Sigebert III was installed on the throne of Austrasia. That no ambitious persons to usurp the throne, nor did any of the regional dukes try and secede, confirms what we've said before. The aristocracy couldn't go without the monarchy and the royal courts (now emphatically in the plural), and no one could envisage a king who wasn't of the Merovingian bloodline. Thus the mayors of the palace of their respective kingdoms and the queen mother, Nanthild, ran affairs of state for them.

So it might seem like everything was actually all well and good. All except it wasn't. Without an effective adult king to act as a umpire and with the mayor of the palace, an aristocrat, controlling the court and a patronage system, a lot of aristocrats felt that they were at risk of losing out on the assumption that the mayors of the palace would just abuse the system to their own advantage. Erchinoald, the mayor of the palace for Clovis II in Neustria from 641 and in Burgundy from 642 until his death in 658, was praised in the Chronicle of Fredegar thus: "he lined his own pockets, to be sure, but quite moderately." In Austrasia, the situation was more tense. There, the mayor of the palace, Pepin of Landen (580 - 640), tried to nominate his son Grimoald to succeed him as mayor. But immediately following his death, this was thwarted by Uro, a court official and the guardian of the young king Sigebert, who instead ensured that his son, Otto, succeed Pepin as mayor. 

By 649, both Merovingian kings had come of age and seem to have been more than capable of independent political decision-making. Sigebert III doesn't seem to have been a particularly memorable ruler. But Clovis II seems to have been remembered as an emphatically bad king. Adhemar of Chabannes, writing in the eleventh century, said of him:

(Original Latin) Eo tempore, Clodoveus rex brachium Sancti Dionisii martyris, diabolo instigante, abscidit et per idem tempus regnum Francorum casibus pestiferis concidit. Fuit autem ipse Clodoveus omni spurciciae deditus, fornicarius et inlusor feminarum, gule et inebrietate contentus, hujus mortem et fine nihil dignum historie referunt, quia nequitie se subdidit.

(My translation) At that time, King Clovis II, at the instigation of the devil, cut off the arm of St Dionysius and during that same time the Frankish kingdom was stricken by outbreaks of plague. Indeed, Clovis gave himself over to all depravities; he was a fornicator and scoffer of women, predisposed to gluttony and drunkenness, whose death and end history did not deem noteworthy, because he demonstrated himself to be worthless.

Not a "do-nothing king" but a "good for nothing king": a gold coin of Clovis II, portraying him like a fourth century Roman emperor, housed in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. Photo credit: By Atelier de Paris - http://images.bnf.fr/jsp/index.jsp?destination=afficherListeCliches.jsp&origine=rechercherListeCliches.jsp&contexte=resultatRechercheAvancee, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11853935

But when they died - Clovis II died in 657 and his brother, Sigebert III, predeceased him in 656 - it was yet another round of royal minorities. In Neustria and Burgundy, the eldest of Clovis II's sons, the eight year old Chlothar III, ascended to the throne. His mother, Balthild, an Anglo-Saxon slave girl who had been owned by Nanthild before she married her son, Clovis II, led the regency there. Nanthild seems to have been a bit of a mother-in-law from hell to Balthild, as she allegedly liked to remind her of how she'd once owned her as a slave. In Austrasia, Sigebert III was succeeded by his son, called Dagobert. But very shortly afterwards, Grimoald, who had at last climbed the greasy pole and become mayor of the palace, deposed Dagobert by having him tonsured and exiled to a monastery in Ireland.

Grimoald then took a completely unprecedented step. He made his own son, who had been adopted by King Sigebert III and Queen Chimnechild, King Childebert III. Thus, for the first time, a king not of the Merovingian bloodline sat on the throne of one of the Merovingian realms. You might be saying "Hang on a minute ... I thought you said that it was unthinkable for the Frankish aristocracy to have a non-Merovingian on the throne." Not for Grimoald it was. And while the second half of the seventh century in Gaul is incredibly poor in terms of sources, we don't have any evidence that the Austrasian nobility tried to resist this. Clearly they were more scared of being annexed to Neustria. 

But Neustria wasn't having it. Grimoald himself was kidnapped, condemned to death in a kangaroo court and executed in some unspecified slow and painful manner by the Neustrian nobility. And by 661 at the latest, King Chlothar III and Balthild had defeated the usurper, Childebert III, and annexed Austrasia. Then in 662 Chlothar III had his younger brother, Childeric II installed on the throne of Austrasia. After Chlothar III came of age in 664, Balthild was forced into retirement by her son's courtiers and founded the monastery of Chelles where her biographer, an anonymous monk or nun, wrote that she was "the instrument of divinely ordained concord between the warring kingdoms." 

Until 658, Chlothar III's mayor of the palace had been Erchinoald, but he died was replaced by Ebroin. Ebroin seems to have been a very domineering man, and from most of the sources he appears as a borderline tyrannical figure. According to a hostile source, The Martyrdom of Saint Leudegar, Bishop of Autun, Ebroin firstly decreed that all Burgundian magnates who came to court give him large bribes, and then "issued this unlawful edict - that no one from the region of Burgundy was to come from the palace unless he had ordered them to come." No doubt in this way he intended to limit the access of non-Neustrian magnates, who were therefore not in his circle, to the king. Thus the flow of patronage from the teenaged King Chlothar III would go only to his circle. But its not just partisan Frankish sources that give us a negative impression of Ebroin. According to the Venerable Bede (673 - 735), in 668 Theodore of Tarsus (602 - 690), a Greek by birth from what is now Turkey, and Hadrian (637 - 710), an African possibly of Berber ethnicity, were journeyed through Francia to England to take up the positions of archbishop and abbot of Canterbury respectively. As Bede then relates, Ebroin held them up as they journeyed through Francia. He put them under close surveillance and initially forbade them from sailing over from the Port of Quentovic to England on the grounds he suspected that they were spies sent by the Roman Emperor, Constans II, who were then going to persuade the rulers of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to side against Neustria. At this time, Constans II was planning on moving his capital from Constantinople to Syracuse in Sicily. As we'll see next post, this was actually a defensive measure against a very serious threat, but Ebroin clearly thought the Romans were trying to reconquer their lost western provinces. 

When Chlothar III died aged only 23, Ebroin, playing kingmaker, chose Chlothar's youngest brother, Theuderic III, to be the new king. The nobles of Neustria and Burgundy were really pissed off at the supremely bossy and slimy Ebroin - he really does remind me quite a bit of the last manager I had at the pub I worked at until the end of March! The Martyrdom of Saint Leudegar recounts how "when the crowd of nobles who were hurrying to meet their new king received Ebroin's order to break off their journey, they took counsel together and, abandoning Theuderic, they all demanded his younger brother Childeric [II], who had been assigned the throne in Austrasia." 

The Neustrians shared the opinion of the Burgundians, and so in 673 they had a palace coup against Ebroin and Theuderic III. Both were tonsured, Ebroin was forced to become a monk at Luxeuil abbey in Burgundy, which St Columbanus had founded, and Theuderic was held under house arrest at Saint Denis, the royal abbey and mausoleum that his grandfather King Dagobert I had founded. Childeric II was invited over from Austrasia to become sole ruler over a united Frankish kingdom. Childeric II then issued a royal proclamation, which we know about from the Martyrdom of Saint Leudegar, which mostly repeated what was said in his great-grandfather's edict of Paris. But they explicitly justified it by the political experience of the last decade:

"Everyone demanded that he should issue the following edicts throughout the three kingdoms over which he gained sway: that as of old judges should maintain the law and custom of each kingdom and that rulers [mayors of the palace] from one [province] should not intrude in the others lest one of them should, as Ebroin had done, take up oppressive and unlawful rule and after his example should look down on his peers, for, as they acknowledged that access to the highest position should be open to all, nobody was to presume himself before another."

The paraphrasing of the edict of Childeric II in the Martyrdom of Saint Leudegar shows that people were very concerned about the kind of power a mayor of the palace could wield. Ebroin had shown how a mayor of the palace could monopolise access to the court and royal patronage for his faction, and there needed to be checks and balances to the system.

All hell breaks loose (675 - 687)

Yet two years later, factionalism nonetheless reared its ugly head again. Childeric II brought his Austrasian friends and followers over to the Neustrian court. No doubt there was already some residual bad blood between them and the Neustrians given that the Austrasian nobility had idly stood by while the mayor of the palace of their kingdom had appointed a non-Merovingian to the throne - Childebert III "the adopted." The Neustrians, on the other hand, would have seen themselves as resolutely loyal to the Merovingian bloodline and committed to Merovingian rule, and would have been remained shocked and appalled that just over a decade and half ago the Austrasians had faltered in this. But there was another source of distrust between them. According to the Martyrdom of Saint Leudegar, the king was: "corrupted by the advice he took from foolish and near pagan people."

The last part of that comment reflects how the Austrian nobility were starting to mix with the emerging aristocratic elites in the still-essentially tribal areas east of the Rhine. The Christian faith had, to at least some degree, had a permanent presence in Alemannia and Bavaria from Roman times. But what would become Franconia (the region of central Germany that includes Frankfurt), had never been part of the Roman Empire, whereas most of Bavaria and Alemannia had been until some point in the fifth century, as had all of Gaul (whose easternmost boundary was the Rhine). And the Merovingians, while their quasi-imperial overlordship in what is now Germany had been very extensive indeed, ruled those regions with a light touch and had made very little effort to culturally integrate them with their political heartlands in Gaul. It had thus fallen to Irish monks to convert Franconia to Christianity, and the efforts of Saints Kilian, Colman and Totnan were still ongoing in the 670s - indeed, their efforts would suffer a reversal after the three of them were martyred at Wurzburg in 689.

The final straw for the Neustrians would come in 675. Adhemar of Chabannes, faithfully paraphrasing the Book of the History of the Franks written in 727, wrote:

(Original Latin): Nam unum Francum, nomine Bodilonem, ad stipitum tensum cedi valde sine lege precepit. Quod videntes Franci, in ira magni commoti, Ingobertus atque Amalbertus et reliqui majores natu Francorum, sedicionem contra ipsum Childericum concitant. Bodilonem cum reliquis super eum surrexit, insidiatus et regem interfecit una cum regina ejus pregnante, quod dici dolor est.

(My translation): For he [Childeric] had a Frank, called Bodlio, violently beaten with a stick till he yielded, without consulting the law. Once the Franks had seen that, they were moved to anger, that is to say that Ingobert, Amalbert and the remaining Frankish magnates incited a rebellion against Childeric II. Bodilo with those remaining above him rose up and treacherously killed the king and his pregnant queen, which is painful to speak of.

This episode really does show that the expectations on Merovingian monarchs had changed a lot from what they had been a century earlier. How Childeric treated Bodilo may seem like capricious and arbitrary behaviour, but it was pretty tame by comparison to what his great-great-grandfather, King Chilperic (d.584), or before him King Chlothar (d.561), had gotten away with. Meanwhile, the nobles had responded with such extreme brutality, which, however acceptable it may have been in the seventh century, eleventh century writers found completely beyond the pale. Unlike the author of the Book of the History of the Franks, Adhemar of Chabannes added in that the whole episode, especially the killing of a pregnant woman in cold blood, was "painful to speak of." Thus, for all that loyalty to the Merovingian dynasty may have been as strong as ever, even the most revisionist historians must acknowledge that by this point the authority of kings and the respect they could command from their subjects had fallen quite far.

After this, all shit was going to break loose. In 675, Ebroin escaped from the monastery of Luxeuil and assembled a band of warriors, while Theuderic III similarly broke free of his monastic prison and with the support of Bishop Leudegar of Autun, was restored to the throne. Leudesius, the son of the aforementioned Erchinoald, became Theuderic's mayor of the palace. But by 679, Ebroin had deviously clawed his way back to the mayoralty of Neustria by betraying and murdering Leudesius, and Theuderic III was now his puppet. In the meantime, he had had Saint Leudegar, whose biography, as we have seen, is such a crucial source for the politics of this period, martyred - under Ebroin's instigation, Leudegar was blinded, his tongue was cut out and, after being sent into monastic exile, he was subsequently beheaded.

The Martyrdom of Saint Leudegar as depicted in a manuscript from Northern France (c.1200)

But before that, Ebroin had tried to take control in Austrasia by installing on the throne there a child king, Clovis III, who he claimed was a son of Chlothar III, making him the nephew of the previous king, Childeric II. The Martyrdom of Saint Leudegar claims that this was all lie, though there isn't anything inherently implausible in it, and because the seventh century is so bad for sources we really can't know. None of this flew well at all, and Clovis III lasted less than a year on the throne. Once Ebroin got control of the Austrasian royal treasury - I told you the treasury was important - he declared he didn't need Clovis III any more, and declared himself for Theuderic III, but the Austrasians didn't want to be ruled by Theuderic. Ebroin was thus temporarily out of political luck. 

The Austrasians, including Wulfoald, who had been mayor of the palace under Childeric II, instead called for Dagobert II to be brought back from exile in Ireland. With the help of the Northumbrian Saint Wilfrid (633 - 710), the future bishop of York, Dagobert II was able to leave the British Isles for Gaul, and no later than 30 June 676 he finally received his birthright that he had been deprived of twenty years before. Indeed, Wilfrid visited King Dagobert II's court on his way to Rome in 679, and Dagobert offered him the bishopric of Strasbourg, which Wilfrid politely declined. Shortly afterwards, as the Life of Saint Wilfrid by Stephen of Ripon (but, interestingly, no other written source does) recounts, while Saint Wilfrid was in Italy, Dagobert II was assassinated by "treacherous dukes with the consent of the bishops." Wulfoald, who had been Dagobert II's mayor of the palace, died in the same year. By December 679, Austrasia had come under the control of Theuderic III and Ebroin, and a single Merovingian king ruled over all the realms once again - well, I say ruled in a largely theoretical sense, given that it was actually Ebroin who was pulling the strings. 

A relief depicting the assassination of King Dagobert II, once housed in his crypt in Stenay-sur-Meuse. 

But Ebroin could not sit back and enjoy his victory for long. In 680, the Austrasian magnates, resentful of the tyrannical Ebroin and being dominated by the Neustrians, rose up in revolt. They were led by two brothers, Martin of Laon and Pepin of Herstal. Through their mother, Begga, Martin and Pepin were the grandsons of Pepin of Landen (580 - 640) who, as you may well remember, was the first mayor of the palace of Austrasia to Sigebert III (r.639 - 656). Through their father, Ansegisel, they were the grandsons of Saint Arnulf, bishop of Metz. Martin and Pepin were thus nobles of the first rank and Austrasians to their core. The led an army of Austrasian troops to do battle with Ebroin at a place called Lucofao, somewhere in Burgundy. The Austrasians were utterly beaten. Pepin managed to successfully escape back to Austrasia, but Martin made the mistake of hiding in Laon. Ebroin then proceeded to trick Martin into leaving Laon, promising him reconciliation, only to have him and his companions judicially murdered when they came to the royal villa where they had agreed to meet. 

But, as they say, live by the sword, die by the sword. Less than a year after his crushing victory at Lucofao in 680, Ebroin was assassinated by a Neustrian nobleman called Ermenfrid in the dead of night. Its not easy to give an overall, balanced objective assessment of Ebroin, all our sources are so negative about him. But given that they include a hostile Burgundian source (The Martyrdom of Saint Leudegar), a hostile Neustrian source (The Liber Historiae Francorum) and neutral Anglo-Saxon sources (Bede's Ecclesiastical History and Stephen of Ripon's Life of Wilfrid) I think its fair to say that he's not just the victim of bad press. Much like with King John, who escapes rehabilitation by even the most revisionist historians, Ebroin really seems to have been an absolute rotter.

Warraton became the new mayor of the palace of Neustria, and a relative lull in relations between the Austrasians and Neustrians ensued.  But that was only to last less than six years. After Waratton died in 686, Berchar became mayor of the palace of Neustria. Berchar was aggressively anti-Austrasian, so he and Pepin of Herstal were on a collision course. The two mayors clashed with the armies at a place called Tertry on the Somme, the Neustrians were routed Pepin was victorious. Berchar was assassinated shortly afterwards, and Theuderic III was captured by Pepin's forces. Pepin of Herstal established himself as mayor of the palace of Neustria and took control of the Neustrian treasury. Peace and stability had been restored to the Merovingian realm once more, though by now it was smaller. In the midst of these royal minorities and factional turmoil, the peripheral regions of Aquitaine, Alamannia, Bavaria and Thuringia had basically decided "look, thes Merovingians are a shit show. Let's go our own way." While their elites hadn't completely distanced themselves from Frankish politics, they now did so completely on their own terms. Asserting Frankish suzerainty over them was going to be an uphill struggle.

Pepin the Prime Minister (687 - 714)

Pepin's mastery over the three Frankish realms (Neustria, Austrasia and Burgundy) was acknowledged from 687 on by the honorific title Dux et Princeps Francorum ("Duke and Prince of the Franks"). Pepin didn't press home his advantage too much. Instead he took a more conciliatory approach towards the Neustrians whilst keeping them at arms length. He stayed in Austrasia, being represented in Neustria by his close follower Nordebert. Pepin focused on building up his Austrasian powerbase by acquiring lands and clients and providing patronage to monasteries - he was probably richer and more powerful at regional level than any Merovingian magnate had been before. He also began a series of wars against the rebellious Alamanni and the pagan Frisians to help boost his family's martial renown, build up a stock of booty to give out as gifts to his followers and help promote Frankish unity against common enemies. 

Pepin's wife was called Plectrude, whom the Book of the History of the Franks and Adhemar of Chabannes describe as "most noble and wise." From Plectrude he had his first son Grimoald, whom he appointed mayor of the palace of Neustria in 695 - Drogo, his other son from Plectrude, was appointed Duke of Champagne.

Pepin also had a concubine called Alpaida, and she bore him a son who would grow up to become ... Charles Martel. This is where, at long last, he enters into the story. Now the marital and sexual practices of the Merovingian elite have been much debated. Did they (especially the Merovingian kings) practice outright polygamy, having multiple legitimate wives at once? Or were they just serial monogamists who had mistresses on the side? What we can be sure about, is that the idea that marriage was a lifelong, indissoluble union performed in the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ himself and that it was a Sacrament of the Church, was still more than a century away when Charles Martel was born. And while the overwhelming likelihood is that Charles Martel was Pepin's bastard son, that probably meant very little at the time and would have come with none of the legal disabilities that were in place for illegitimate children in Western Christendom by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Pepin of Herstal was thus the the great-grandfather of Charlemagne, the 11x great-grandfather of William the Conqueror and the I can't be bothered to say how many times great-grandfather of our queen, Elizabeth II.

Theuderic III died in 691, having reigned for 16 very chaotic years. He was succeeded by his son Clovis III, another boy-king. Clovis died after only three years on the throne and was succeeded by his brother, Childebert IV. While Pepin of Herstal can undoubtedly be called a prime minister (as indeed could mayors of the palace for the previous half century), rather than just a court official, and he exercised effective control over most affairs of state, its clear that the royal prerogative - to borrow terms from our modern constitutional monarchy - hadn't fallen entirely to him yet. When Childebert IV came of age, he would make various judgements of his own at the high court of justice, including ones against Pepin of Herstal and his family. He was also the last Merovingian king to have coins struck in his name and image at the royal mint in Marseille. And he would be remembered as a good ruler by historians writing less than a generation after his death - the anonymous author of the Book of the History of the Franks calls him the "just and gracious lord Childebert, of good memory."

Childebert IV died in 711, and was succeeded by his twelve-year-old son Dagobert III - yet again, another royal minority. Pepin and Grimoald thus governed all affairs of state for him on his behalf. In 714, however, Grimoald was killed by the Frisians at Liege in what is now Belgium. Pepin of Herstal was now 79 years old and his health was deteriorating. He had the Frankish nobles swear in the royal chamber to accept his grandson Theudoald (Grimoald's son from a concubine) as the next mayor of the palace of the kingdom of the Franks. On 16 December, Pepin of Herstal breathed his last.

So there you have it folks. The story of how the Frankish Gaul that Charles Martel was born into and grew up in came to be. I hope you enjoyed and found it interesting, and didn't find it all too confusing - part of the reason why I wrote it was to help myself get my head round late Merovingian politics. In the next post we'll be turning our attentions eastward to see how Charles Martel's opponents at Tours got to where they were. We'll then be picking back up where we left off here in the third post.

Sources used

Primary 

Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, translated by Lewis Thorpe, Penguin Classics (1974)

Adhemar of Chabannes, Historia Francorum, edited by Jules Chavanon, Collection de Textes pour servir a l'etude et l'enseignement de l'historie (1897)

Secondary 

Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 - 1000, Penguin (2008)

Guy Halsall, Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West, 450 - 900, Routledge (2003)

Peter Sarris, Empires of Faith: The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam, 500 - 700, Oxford (2013)

Yitzchak Hen, 'The Merovingian Polity: A Network of Courts and Courtiers', in Bonnie Effros and Isabel Moreira (eds), A Companion to the Merovingian World, Oxford (2020)

Alexander Callander Murray, 'From Roman to Frankish Gaul: "Centenarii" and "Centenae" in the Administration of the Merovingian kingdom', Traditio (1988)

Paul Fouracre, The Age of Charles Martel, Longman (2000)