A Rhineland people whose first kingdom was annihilated by Hunnic forces within a generation - the historical kernel behind the fall of the Nibelungs - who built a second kingdom whose kings served as Roman generals in Italy before ruling a stretch of the Rhône valley.
Conquest534Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
Languages of administration
Latin
Writing system: Latin
Core region
The Rhône valley and the Alpine approaches around Lake Geneva
How it was governed
3 of 4 coded
Army raised byHow the fighting force was recruited, not how it fought.
client levyContingents owed by subordinate chiefs or vassals under obligation
tribal levyContingents raised through kin or tribal structures the ruler did not create
Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
Revenue fromWhat the state lived on. The values are unranked: the field cannot express which mattered most.
No cited figure
Succession byThe rule in force, not the outcome. A rule repeatedly violated is still the rule.
appanagePatrimonial division among heirs
Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
Right to rule fromThe ground publicly asserted — on coins, in the khutba, in titles.
descentDescent from a house or lineage, publicly invoked
investiture
Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
Each line is drawn from a source that addresses the question directly. A line reads No cited figure where no source consulted does — never because the answer seemed obvious.
Turning points
11 hinges
412534
412
Guntiarius helps install the usurper JovinusRevolt
A Burgundian king joined the Alan leader Goar in raising a Roman aristocrat, Jovinus, to a rival emperorship - the first recorded act of an independent Burgundian kingdom in Gaul, and one that put the Burgundians on the losing side of an imperial civil war within their own kingdom's opening years.
Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
436
The Rhineland kingdom is destroyedCatastrophe
A Roman-sponsored assault wiped out Guntiarius's kingdom at Worms so thoroughly that a contemporary chronicler could describe the Burgundian people as destroyed along with their own king in a single entry - the seed a much later German epic would grow into a story of doomed treasure-holders and betrayed kinship.
Al-Tamimi, The Gallic Chronicle of 452 (452)
443
Sapaudia is granted to the survivorsTreaty
Rome settled what remained of the Burgundian people in Sapaudia, the Alpine country north of Geneva, to be divided with the region's existing inhabitants - the resettlement that gave the Burgundians a second kingdom and the territorial base from which they expanded down the Rhône for the following century.
Al-Tamimi, The Gallic Chronicle of 452 (452)
472
Gundobad kills the emperor AnthemiusCatastrophe
Decades before he became Burgundian king, Gundobad, acting as the Roman kingmaker Ricimer's own right-hand man in Italy, killed the western emperor Anthemius outright - a demonstration of how deep into Roman imperial politics a Burgundian prince's own ambitions already reached.
Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
500
Clovis and Godegisel invade BurgundyBattle
King Gundobad's own brother Godegisel allied secretly with the Frankish king Clovis against him; defeated and besieged at Avignon, Gundobad survived through his minister's cunning and bought peace as Clovis's tributary, then turned on Godegisel and killed him at Vienne once the Franks had gone home.
Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
516
Sigismund becomes king as a CatholicConversion
Gundobad's son succeeded him already converted from the Arian Christianity of his father's court to the Catholic faith of most of his own Gallo-Roman subjects - aligning the Burgundian crown with the same church the neighbouring Franks had claimed for themselves a generation before.
Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
517
The Liber Constitutionum is promulgatedReform
A synod of the kingdom's own bishops, meeting at Epaon, settled questions of church discipline and put the last of Gundobad's own Arian clergy on notice, in the same year Sigismund issued the law code - built in large part on his father's own work - that would govern Burgundian subjects long after the kingdom that wrote it had fallen.
Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
522
Sigismund strangles his own sonCatastrophe
Urged on, Gregory of Tours says, by a second wife, Sigismund had Sigistrix, his son by an earlier marriage, strangled - a killing he almost immediately treated as a sin requiring penance, setting off for his own monastic foundation to atone for it.
Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
523
Chlodomer captures and kills SigismundBattle
The Frankish king Chlodomer struck at once while the kingdom was still reeling from Sigistrix's killing, overran Burgundy in a swift campaign, and had Sigismund, his wife and his children thrown down a well after their capture - a death later tradition would treat as martyrdom once his remains were enshrined at his own foundation of Agaune.
Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
524
The Battle of VézeronceBattle
Sigismund's brother Godomar met Chlodomer's renewed invasion in the field and killed him, breaking the Frankish attack for a decade and keeping an independent Burgundian kingdom alive under his own rule even as the victory left Chlodomer's own Frankish throne to be split up among the brothers he left behind.
Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
534
Godomar is overthrownBattle
Chlodomer's own brothers, Childebert and Chlothar, picked up a conquest their brother had not lived to finish: they overran Burgundy, deposed Godomar, and absorbed his kingdom into Frankish territory, rounding out the borders the Merovingian realm would hold for the rest of the century.
Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
Chapters
10 in order · about 14 minutes
The kingdom the Nibelungs remembered
formationDrafted from Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
The Burgundians had been neighbours of Rome for centuries before they
had a kingdom of their own inside its borders - Pliny already knew of
them, and the emperor Valentinian I enlisted their warriors against the
Alamanni as early as 369. Like other peoples crossing into Roman Gaul in
the chaos after 406, some Burgundians took the opportunity that
collapsing frontier control offered. In 412 their king, Guntiarius,
joined Goar, a leader of the Alans, in raising a Gallo-Roman aristocrat
named Jovinus to a rival emperorship - a gamble on the losing side of a
Roman civil war that nonetheless left Guntiarius established, within a
few years, as king of a Burgundian settlement on the Rhine centred on the
city of Worms.
Worms, where Guntiarius had his kingdom on the Rhine. The cathedral is seven centuries later than he is; the place is what carries over.
Worms, Germany · Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0
An annihilation Rome itself arranged
That kingdom did not last a generation. By the mid-430s Roman policy in
Gaul, directed by the general Aetius, had turned against the Burgundians
on the Rhine, and around 436 an assault - one a contemporary chronicler
recorded simply as a war "in which almost the whole people with their
king were destroyed" - annihilated Guntiarius's kingdom outright.
Centuries later, German legend would transform this catastrophe into the
fall of the Nibelungs, the doomed treasure-holding dynasty whose
destruction became one of the great stories of the medieval Germanic
world - a memory of an actual kingdom's actual end, refracted through
generations of retelling into epic.
The opening of the Nibelungenlied, written down seven hundred years after the kingdom it half-remembers was destroyed on the Rhine.
Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994) · Nibelungenlied manuscript C · Public domain
Survivors, not survivors of nothing
What the destruction of 436 did not do was end the Burgundians as a
people. Enough of them survived - families, warriors, whatever
leadership structure could still function - to be resettled by Rome only
a few years later, in territory far to the south of the kingdom the Huns
had just erased. That resettlement, not the doomed foundation at Worms,
is where the Burgundian kingdom that would last for a century actually
began.
A second kingdom in Sapaudia
formationDrafted from Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
In 443 Rome settled the Burgundian survivors of the Rhineland
catastrophe in Sapaudia, the Alpine country lying north of Geneva -
territory to be divided between the newcomers and the Gallo-Roman
population already living there, on terms the sources describe only in
outline. Unlike the doomed foothold at Worms, this settlement held. Over
the following decades the Burgundians expanded their own reach down the
Rhône valley, absorbing territory around Lyon and Geneva and, by the
460s and 470s, functioning less as a tolerated enclave than as one of the
military powers Roman authorities in Gaul had to negotiate with directly.
Sapaudia, the Alpine country north of Geneva where Rome settled the survivors of the Rhineland catastrophe in 443. Unlike the foothold at Worms, this settlement held.
Lake Geneva, Switzerland · Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994) · Photograph: Giles Laurent · CC BY-SA 4.0
A family that ran an empire's armies from a Rhône-valley throne
The kingdom's own royal family, later called the Gibichungs, rose with
it. Gundioc, a Burgundian king with a marriage tie to the Roman
kingmaker Ricimer, held the rank of magister militum - the empire's
senior military command - in Gaul during the 460s, based in part around
Lyon and Geneva. His brother Chilperic I held the same office after him,
exercising real authority over the Rhône region even as the western
imperial throne itself changed hands repeatedly under Ricimer's own
influence in Italy. A Burgundian king, by this point, was as likely to be
found securing a Roman general's title as extending his own kingdom by
conquest - a pattern that would define the whole of the next generation's
politics under Gundioc's own son, Gundobad.
A kingdom built from land division rather than land tax
What made this second kingdom durable, where the first had not been,
was probably as much its terms of settlement as its military standing.
The kingdom's own later law code describes grants of land, dependents
and woodland made to Burgundian settlers in stages stretching back at
least two generations - evidence of an arrangement in which the
Burgundians took a real, permanent stake in the territory they held
rather than merely camping on tolerated Roman ground, the way Guntiarius's
doomed Rhineland settlement may have done.
A kingmaker in Italy
expansionDrafted from Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
Gundioc's son Gundobad did not begin his career as a Burgundian king at
all. He went to Italy as right-hand man to Ricimer, the Roman general
and kingmaker whose own marriage tie bound him to the Burgundian royal
house, and rose with his patron to the summit of Roman military politics
at exactly the moment the western empire's throne had become Ricimer's
own to dispose of. When Ricimer turned against the emperor he had himself helped install
some five years earlier, it was Gundobad, not Ricimer, who carried out
the killing: in 472 Gundobad killed the emperor Anthemius outright,
ending his reign and his life in the same act.
A gold solidus of the emperor Anthemius, recorded as a stray find. In 472 Gundobad killed him outright, ending his reign and his life in the same act.
Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994) · Portable Antiquities Scheme · CC BY 2.0
An emperor made, then unmade in turn
Ricimer's own death soon afterward left Gundobad his political heir in
Italy. It was Gundobad who arranged the elevation of Glycerius to the
western throne after Ricimer was gone - a Burgundian prince, born to a
kingdom on the Rhône, personally deciding who would wear the purple in
Rome. That authority did not survive a change of allegiance from
Constantinople: when the eastern court's own candidate, Julius Nepos,
displaced Glycerius in 474, Gundobad's own family split over whether to
accept him, and Gundobad himself withdrew from Italy back to Gaul rather
than serve an emperor imposed over his own choice.
A prince who came home to a throne
Gundobad's return to Burgundian territory in 474 was not a retirement.
His uncle Chilperic I still held real power in the Rhône valley, and
within Gundobad's own generation the kingdom's rule would pass, through
inheritance and internal rivalry among Gundioc's several sons, into
Gundobad's own hands - carrying into his kingship in Gaul the same
instinct for Roman office and Roman legitimacy that had made him,
however briefly, the man who decided which emperor Italy would obey.
A brother's betrayal
expansionDrafted from Tours, History of the Franks (1916)
By the 490s Gundobad shared the Burgundian throne with his own brother
Godegisel, ruling jointly over the country along the Rhône and the
Saône. The two brothers were, by then, already fighting each other, and
Godegisel saw his chance in the rising Frankish king to the north: he
sent Clovis a secret offer of yearly tribute in exchange for help killing
or expelling Gundobad. Clovis agreed, and when Gundobad - unaware of his
own brother's treachery - asked Godegisel to join him against the
advancing Franks, Godegisel marched to the appointed meeting point and
turned on him instead. The combined Frankish and Godegiselian armies
crushed Gundobad's own forces at Dijon, and Gundobad fled south along the
Rhône to Avignon while Godegisel entered Vienne as though he already
ruled the whole kingdom.
The Roman temple at Vienne. Godegisel entered the city as though he already ruled the kingdom, and his brother came back and besieged him in it.
Vienne, France · Tours, History of the Franks (1916) · Photograph: Tournasol7 · CC BY-SA 4.0
A siege talked away rather than fought
Clovis pursued Gundobad and settled in to besiege him at Avignon,
intending to drag him out and kill him. Gundobad, terrified, turned to
his own adviser Aridius, who proposed a ruse: he would pretend to
defect to Clovis's own service, worm his way into the Frankish king's
confidence, and then talk him out of the siege from the inside. Clovis
took the bait, valued Aridius as a wise and entertaining counsellor, and
was persuaded that ravaging Gundobad's own fields and vineyards gained
him nothing a yearly tribute would not gain more cheaply. Clovis took the
advice, accepted Gundobad's submission as a tributary, and led his army
home.
A debt collected through an aqueduct
Freed of the Franks, Gundobad soon stopped paying the tribute and turned
his own restored strength on Godegisel, besieging him in turn at Vienne.
When food ran short inside the city, Godegisel expelled the common
people to conserve it for his own household - among them the artisan who
maintained the city's aqueduct, who went straight to Gundobad in fury
and showed his men how to force the aqueduct's own sealed vent with iron
bars and enter the city from below. Gundobad's soldiers came up behind
the defenders on the walls, opened the gates from within, and took
Vienne in a single assault. Godegisel died with the city's own Arian
bishop in the church they had fled to for refuge; Gundobad spared
Godegisel's Frankish garrison but exiled them to the Visigothic court at
Toulouse, executed the Burgundian nobles who had backed his brother, and
took back the whole kingdom - after which, Gregory of Tours records, he
set about establishing milder laws for his own Burgundian subjects so
that they would not oppress the Romans living among them.
The same building. Gundobad took the city back, killed his brother, and bound himself and his Burgundians by an oath that they would not oppress the Romans living among them.
Vienne, France · Tours, History of the Franks (1916) · Photograph: Jsamwrites · CC BY-SA 4.0
Milder laws for a mixed kingdom
peakDrafted from Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
Gundobad's restored kingdom, once Godegisel was dead and the Franks paid
off, was the largest and most secure the Burgundians had held since the
Rhône settlement began. He spent his last years building the legal
foundation his son would finish: a code of law, later called the Liber
Constitutionum, that set out in detail how land, dependents and woodland
were to be divided between Burgundian settlers and the Gallo-Roman
population they lived among, and that aimed - as Gregory of Tours states
plainly - to keep the one people from oppressing the other under a single
crown.
A ninth-century book of barbarian laws and Frankish capitularies. The Burgundian code set out how land, dependents and woodland were to be divided between settlers and the population they lived among.
Bibliothèque nationale de France · Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994) · BnF · Public domain
A king out of step with his own family
Gundobad's own faith sat oddly against the kingdom he ruled. Nearly
every other Burgundian on record, from the fifth century onward, appears
as a Catholic Christian - including, by most accounts, Gundobad's own
niece Chlothild, who would go on to marry Clovis. Gundobad himself,
however, held to the Arian creed, the same faith as his uncle by
marriage, the Roman kingmaker Ricimer, in a kingdom whose Church was
otherwise overwhelmingly Catholic. He is recorded as having seriously
considered converting to the Catholic faith himself, a step his own son
would complete, but he died still formally Arian - a king whose own
personal religion had, by the end of his reign, become the exception
inside his own family and his own court rather than the rule.
A throne built to outlast one dynasty's own faith
What Gundobad left behind mattered more than which creed he personally
held. A law code addressed to both Burgundians and Romans, a Rhône valley
kingdom secure enough to survive a Frankish invasion with its throne
intact, and a son already positioned to align the crown with the
Catholic majority his own father had never quite joined - together, they
gave the Burgundian kingdom a stability at Gundobad's death in 516 that
neither the doomed foundation at Worms nor Godegisel's own rebellion had
ever come close to matching.
A Catholic king at last
peakDrafted from Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
Sigismund succeeded his father Gundobad in 516 already converted to the
Catholic faith his father had only flirted with - a change that aligned
the Burgundian throne, for the first time in a generation, with the
church most of his own kingdom's population and even his own extended
family already belonged to. The year before his accession he had founded
a monastery at Agaune, on the site associated with Saint Maurice and the
Theban Legion, organized around an unusual liturgical practice: monks
divided into shifts so that praise of God, the laus perennis, continued
without interruption day and night - an arrangement later ages would
treat as a model for royal monastic patronage generally.
The abbey at Agaune, founded by Sigismund the year before his accession, with monks in shifts so that praise of God continued day and night without interruption.
Saint-Maurice, Valais, Switzerland · Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994) · Photograph: Paul Bissegger · CC BY-SA 4.0
A council, and a code, in the same year
In 517 Sigismund brought two of his father's unfinished projects to
completion within months of each other. A council of the kingdom's
bishops met at Epaon to settle matters of church discipline and to
dismantle what remained of the Arian church structure his father had
tolerated - a plainly Catholic house-cleaning by a plainly Catholic king.
In the same year the law code Gundobad had begun, the Liber
Constitutionum, was formally promulgated, setting out in detail the
obligations and protections owed to Burgundian settlers and their
Gallo-Roman neighbours alike under one set of rules.
A concord that did not survive its own king's temper
The alignment of throne and church did not make Sigismund's own reign
untroubled. Within a short time of the Epaon settlement, the kingdom's
bishops threatened to suspend Sigismund from communion over his defense
of a royal official implicated in a case of incest, and forced him,
under threat of their own mass withdrawal to a monastery, to accept
their judgment rather than his own. The same king who had aligned his
crown with the Catholic episcopate so completely could still find
himself disciplined by it - a warning, in hindsight, of how little his
own authority over his own household would prove to be worth only a few
years later.
A son strangled on a stepmother's word
contractionDrafted from Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
Sigismund had a son, Sigistrix, from an earlier marriage before his own
accession, and a second wife whose influence over the king Gregory of
Tours holds directly responsible for what followed. In 522, stirred up -
so the tradition goes - by that second wife, Sigismund had Sigistrix
strangled. No source used here records what specific grievance or fear
drove the killing, only that it was sudden, and that it was carried out
on the king's own order against his own firstborn son.
A piece from the abbey treasury at Saint-Maurice. Sigismund went there in penance after having his own firstborn son strangled.
Abbey of Saint-Maurice, Valais · Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994) · Photograph: Arkelin · CC BY 4.0
A penance that could not undo the killing
Sigismund's own reaction suggests he recognized immediately what he had
done. Rather than defend the killing as a political necessity, he
treated it as a sin demanding atonement, and set off for his own
foundation at Agaune to do penance there - the same monastery he had
built to sustain perpetual praise of God now serving as the place a king
went to answer for having murdered his own child. Whatever consolation
the penance offered Sigismund personally, it did nothing to steady a
kingdom whose own line of succession he had just thrown into open
question by killing the son who would otherwise have inherited it.
A crisis a neighbour was watching for
The killing of Sigistrix could not be contained within the Burgundian
court. Word of a kingdom in turmoil - a king doing penance for
infanticide, an heir gone, a dynasty visibly unsettled - reached
neighbouring courts within months, and at least one Frankish king was
already positioned to treat the crisis as an opportunity rather than a
Burgundian family tragedy that was none of his concern.
A well at the end of a swift campaign
contractionDrafted from Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
The Frankish king Chlodomer, one of Clovis's own sons ruling from
Orléans, moved against Burgundy in 523, within a year of Sigistrix's
killing. Gregory of Tours frames the invasion as the Franks finally
collecting on Chlothild's own decades-old grievance against the
Burgundian royal house, but the timing argues for a more opportunist
reading: a kingdom whose own king had just murdered his heir and gone
into penance for it was a far easier target than a Burgundian throne
secure in its own succession would have been.
Frankish gold of the period. Chlodomer moved against Burgundy in 523, within a year of the killing, and a kingdom whose king had murdered his heir and gone into penance was an easier target than a secure one.
Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994) · Portable Antiquities Scheme · CC BY 2.0
A campaign too fast for Burgundy to answer
Chlodomer's attack was swift rather than prolonged. Sigismund, still
reeling from the crisis he had created himself, was overrun, captured,
and handed over to the Franks along with his wife and remaining
children. Chlodomer had them all thrown down a well - a single brutal
disposal of an entire royal household rather than a negotiated
surrender or a formal execution, and a death that left the Burgundian
throne as unsettled by Frankish action as Sigismund's own killing of
Sigistrix had already left it unsettled from within.
A martyr's cult built on a murdered king's bones
Sigismund's remains did not stay in a Frankish well. They were recovered
and carried back to his own foundation at Agaune, where they became the
object of a cult that would make him, in time, the first royal saint of
the early medieval west - his murdered son's death and his own murder at
Frankish hands together transformed, within a generation, into the
story of a martyred king rather than the story of a dynasty that had
destroyed itself from the inside before a neighbour ever finished the
job.
Vézeronce
contractionDrafted from Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
Sigismund's brother Godomar took the Burgundian throne in the wreckage
Chlodomer's invasion had left behind, and within a year he faced the same
Frankish king again. Chlodomer renewed his attack on Burgundy in 524,
evidently expecting to finish what his first campaign had started.
Godomar met him in the field rather than retreating before him, and at
Vézeronce the two armies fought a battle that ended the Frankish threat
far more decisively than Sigismund's own death a year earlier had ended
the Burgundian kingdom.
A sixth-century helmet found at Vezeronce. Chlodomer was killed in the fighting here, and the Frankish threat to Burgundy stopped for a decade.
Musée de Cluny, Paris · Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994) · Photograph: Cangadoba · CC BY-SA 4.0
A Frankish king killed in his own moment of victory
Chlodomer was killed in the fighting at Vézeronce. His death threw the
Franks' own plans into disarray far more thoroughly than it settled
anything for Burgundy: rather than completing the conquest Sigismund's
capture had seemed to promise, Chlodomer's own kingdom of Orléans was
carved up among his surviving brothers, and Frankish pressure on Burgundy
eased for a decade in the resulting confusion.
A reprieve, not a recovery
Godomar's victory kept an independent Burgundian throne alive under his
own rule, but it did not restore the kingdom Gundobad had once built.
Burgundy in the years after Vézeronce was a kingdom governed by the last
of Sigismund's own brothers rather than a settled dynasty with an
uncontested line of succession, still recovering from a crisis - a
murdered heir, a captured and executed king, an invasion survived only
by killing the invader - that had unfolded within the span of two years
rather than being inflicted by any single catastrophic defeat.
The conquest completed
endDrafted from Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994)
Godomar held the Burgundian throne for a decade after Vézeronce, the
reprieve his own victory had won him - but the brothers who had divided
Chlodomer's kingdom rather than let it pass to him alone had not
forgotten the Rhône valley their brother died trying to take. Childebert
and Chlothar, two of Clovis's surviving sons, moved against Godomar in
534, finishing what Chlodomer's own death at Vézeronce had only
postponed.
The country the Franks absorbed in 534. The kingdom was divided between the conquerors rather than destroyed, and its name outlived it.
Burgundy, France · Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (1994) · Bibliothèque nationale de France · Public domain
A kingdom absorbed rather than destroyed
This second Frankish campaign succeeded where the first, cut short by
Chlodomer's own death, had failed. Godomar was overthrown, and his
kingdom was divided between his Frankish conquerors rather than left
under any Burgundian ruler of its own - the end of an independent
Burgundian crown that had, in one form or another, existed for over a
century since the Sapaudia settlement first gave the survivors of
Guntiarius's destroyed Rhineland kingdom a second chance at one.
A name that outlasted the throne that carried it
The kingdom's own institutions did not vanish with its last king. Frankish
rulers governing the former Burgundian territory continued to apply the
Liber Constitutionum to their Burgundian subjects for generations, the
same code Gundobad had begun and Sigismund had completed still
governing daily disputes over land and inheritance long after the crown
that issued it was gone. The region itself kept the Burgundian name into
the Merovingian kingdom's own internal geography and long after, a
linguistic afterlife the conquered kingdom's own royal line did not share.
A decade after Vézeronce had cost the Franks a king, two more of Clovis's own sons returned in force and took the whole kingdom. Its law code, the Liber Constitutionum, still governed the Burgundian population under Frankish rule for generations afterward, even once no Burgundian king remained to enforce it.
The shaded band is this polity’s span; the dark part of each bar is the stretch the two shared.
Derived from cited spans, not from a separate source. Where both spans are ranges and they meet only on the widest reading of each, the pair is listed as possible rather than resolved to one answer. Unlinked entries are here for scale and are not written up.
Extent
The historical-basemaps snapshots are world maps at fixed years, and none of the ones falling inside this polity's lifetime names it among the polities it draws.
Rating
Four axes, all computed from cited numbers and never from editorial judgement. Percentiles are against every polity written up here — 419 of them — plus 49 more included for scale. Absolute figures. A missing axis is excluded from the total rather than counted as zero.
Reach
No cited figure
Longevity
122 years
30th percentile
Demographic weight
No cited figure
Influence
Three separate counts. This site never publishes a single influence number of its own; the sliders on the rankings view fuse them only in your view.
Descendant scripts
No cited figure
Religions carried
No cited figure
Successor claims
No cited figure
Weighted total
30th percentile
computed from 1 of 4 axes, renormalised across the axes that have figures. A polity with two documented axes is not penalised against one with four.
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
_08.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
_minted_in_Trier_(FindID_1024452).jpg){kind=link}
