Merovingian Kingdom

The Vase of Soissons

formationDrafted from Tours, History of the Franks (1916)

Clovis inherited a Frankish kingdom centred on Tournai in 481, at sixteen, from his father Childeric. Roman authority in northern Gaul had by then shrunk to a rump under Syagrius, son of the general Aegidius, who held Soissons in the old empire's name without any empire left behind him. In the fifth year of his own reign, Clovis marched against Syagrius, defeated his army in the field, and pursued him to King Alaric of the Visigoths' own court at Toulouse when Syagrius fled there for refuge.

Clovis warned Alaric that shielding the fugitive meant war; Alaric, Gregory of Tours records, was too frightened of Frankish retaliation to refuse, and handed Syagrius back in chains. Clovis had him quietly executed once the kingdom that had briefly outlived Rome in Gaul was fully his own.

Soissons, France · Tours, History of the Franks (1916) · Photograph: Diliff · CC BY-SA 3.0

A cup a soldier would not hand back

Clovis's own army, still following the old Frankish gods, plundered church property freely as it went, and among the loot taken from one church was a vase of striking size and beauty. When the church's bishop asked for its return, Clovis promised the messenger he would try to secure it as his own share once the spoils were divided at Soissons. There, in front of the assembled warriors, Clovis asked for the vase over and above his ordinary portion. Most of the men agreed at once - but one soldier, resenting what looked like a king reaching past the rules of fair division, swung his battle-axe into the vase and told Clovis he would get nothing but his rightful lot. Clovis said nothing and handed the damaged vase to the church's messenger anyway, but he did not forget the insult.

A debt collected a year later

At the following year's spring muster, where the whole army paraded its weapons for inspection, Clovis stopped in front of the same soldier and criticized the poor condition of his arms, then threw the man's own axe to the ground. When the soldier bent to retrieve it, Clovis split his skull with his own axe. "This," he said, "is what you did to the vase at Soissons." No one in the army mistook the lesson: a king's authority over his own warriors, not merely over the lands he had just conquered, was now Clovis's to enforce as he saw fit.

A stranger among kinsmen

formationDrafted from Tours, History of the Franks (1916)

Soissons gave Clovis a former Roman province; it did nothing about the other Frankish kings who ruled their own peoples alongside him, kinsmen he had no intention of sharing power with indefinitely. Over the course of his reign Clovis eliminated them one by one, often through manipulation rather than open battle. Chararic, a Frankish king who had refused to help him against Syagrius, was captured with his son, forcibly tonsured into the clergy, and later killed once Clovis judged the humiliation insufficient insurance against future rebellion.

A father turned against his own son

Against Sigebert, the one-legged king of Cologne, Clovis worked through Sigebert's own son Chloderic, persuading him that his father's death would leave him free to enjoy the old king's treasure and Clovis's own friendship. Chloderic had his father murdered while out walking in a forest, then sent envoys to Clovis to divide up the dead king's gold. Clovis's own messengers, sent in return to examine the treasure, struck Chloderic down with an axe while his own arm was in the coffer. Clovis then addressed the assembled people of Cologne, denying any part in the murders of either father or son and offering himself instead as their new king - an offer the crowd, whatever their private suspicions, accepted by acclamation.

Tours, History of the Franks (1916) · Jean-Jacques Chifflet, 1655 · Public domain

A ruse played on his own kin

Ragnachar, a Frankish king at Cambrai, and his brother Ricchar met a similar end after Clovis bribed Ragnachar's own retainers with gilded bronze passed off as gold to turn against him in battle. Captured and bound, Ragnachar was brought before Clovis, who rebuked him for the disgrace of having let himself be taken alive rather than die fighting, then split his skull with an axe - and did the same to Ricchar for failing to come to his brother's aid. A third brother, Rignomer, was killed on Clovis's orders at Le Mans. With every rival king of his own blood dead, Clovis is said to have gathered his people and lamented, in mock sorrow, that he had been left "a stranger among strangers" with no kinsmen left to help him in adversity - a performance Gregory of Tours states plainly was not grief but a ruse, meant to smoke out any relative still alive whom Clovis had somehow missed.

Gently bend your neck, Sigamber

expansionDrafted from Tours, History of the Franks (1916)

Clovis had married Clotilda, a Christian Burgundian princess, years before he shared her faith, and her private urging that he abandon the Frankish gods for her own had gone nowhere. What changed his mind, according to Gregory of Tours, was a battle against the Alamanni near Tolbiac in which Clovis's own army found itself losing ground. Hard pressed, Clovis raised his eyes to heaven and prayed to "Jesus Christ, whom Clotilda declares to be the son of the living God" for victory, promising to be baptized in return - admitting, in the same breath, that his own gods had failed him too often to trust any longer. The Alamanni broke and fled while he was still speaking.

Amiens, France · Tours, History of the Franks (1916) · Musée de Picardie · Public domain

A bishop's welcome, and a warning

Clovis returned home converted in practice before he was converted in rite, and told Clotilda what had happened. Bishop Remigius of Reims prepared an elaborate baptismal ceremony, and as Clovis stepped toward the font the bishop is said to have greeted him with a line that stated plainly what the conversion cost him: "Gently bend your neck, Sigamber; worship what you burned, and burn what you worshipped." More than three thousand of Clovis's own warriors were baptized alongside him. The choice mattered beyond Clovis's own conscience: nearly every other Germanic king ruling former Roman territory in the west held to Arian Christianity, a creed the Gallo-Roman population and clergy under their rule regarded as heretical, while Clovis's own conversion to the same Catholic faith his new subjects already held gave him a religious legitimacy no other barbarian king in Gaul or Spain could claim.

A war fought as much for religion as for land

That legitimacy paid off within a decade. In 507 Clovis marched against Alaric II, the Arian Visigothic king who ruled most of Aquitaine and Spain, reportedly declaring that he found it intolerable that heretics held so much of Gaul. The two armies met near Poitiers; Alaric was killed in the fighting, and Clovis's own son Theuderic swept east to bring the cities between the Visigothic and Burgundian borders under Frankish rule while Clovis himself wintered at Bordeaux and took Alaric's treasury at Toulouse. The emperor at Constantinople recognized the victory with the honorary title of consul, which Clovis accepted in a ceremony at Tours before moving his own court definitively to Paris - by then master of nearly the whole of Gaul.

A kingdom cut into quarters

expansionDrafted from Tours, History of the Franks (1916)

Clovis died at Paris in 511, thirty years into his reign, and was buried in the church of the Apostles he and Clotilda had built together. Frankish custom treated a king's realm the way it treated any other inheritance: property to be divided among surviving sons rather than passed whole to a single heir. Clovis left four - Theuderic, an older son by a concubine, and Chlodomer, Childebert and Chlothar, his sons by Clotilda - and the kingdom he had spent thirty years assembling by conquest and murder was split between them into four separate courts, each with its own share of cities, revenues and armies.

Tours, History of the Franks (1916) · Sussex Archaeological Society · CC BY-SA 4.0

Division as an opportunity, not merely a hazard

The four brothers did not treat their inheritance as a fixed settlement. Chlodomer's own death in battle against the Burgundians left his young sons in their grandmother Clotilda's care, and their uncles Childebert and Chlothar wanted the boys' own share of the kingdom for themselves. Childebert's envoy came to Clotilda carrying scissors and a bare sword, asking whether she wished the boys shorn - stripped of the long hair that marked royal blood and put aside from the throne - or killed outright. Enraged and, by her own later grief, careless with her words, she said she would rather see them dead than shorn if they were not to reign; the envoy reported this as her considered wish, and Chlothar stabbed the elder boy to death on the spot. When the younger begged Childebert for his life, Childebert wavered and asked to spare him - only for Chlothar to threaten him with the same fate for breaking their agreement, and Childebert let the boy go to his brother's knife rather than die himself. Only a third grandson, hidden by loyal men, escaped to become a monk of his own choosing rather than a murdered rival. Across the following decades the brothers and their own heirs fought each other as readily as they fought outside enemies, campaigning against the Burgundians, the Ostrogoths and the Thuringians and periodically reannexing each other's territory whenever a childless death or a battlefield defeat made a share available.

A single kingdom in name only

By the time Clovis's last surviving son, Chlothar I, briefly reunited the whole Frankish realm under his own rule shortly before his own death in 561, the pattern had already set for everything that followed: the kingdom of the Franks would be, in practice, however many separate kingdoms its current generation of royal heirs numbered, reunited only by chance, war, or the extinction of rival lines, and never permanently settled into a single indivisible crown the way the old Roman provinces it now covered once had been.

Two poisoned blades

expansionDrafted from Tours, History of the Franks (1916)

By the 560s, the latest division of the Frankish inheritance had settled into four courts under Chlothar I's own sons, and two of their queens would dominate everything that followed for the rest of the century. Sigebert, king of the eastern kingdom later called Austrasia, disdained his brothers' practice of marrying their own slave women and instead sent to Spain for Brunhild, a Visigothic princess who converted from Arian to Catholic Christianity on her marriage. His half-brother Chilperic, ruling the western kingdom of Neustria and already married in all but name to a former servant, Fredegund, then asked for Brunhild's own elder sister Galswintha, promising to set his other women aside for her sake. Within a short time Chilperic tired of Galswintha's own complaints about his continued devotion to Fredegund and had her strangled in her bed by a slave, remarrying Fredegund within days. Brunhild never forgave her sister's murder, and the rivalry between the two queens' courts hardened into open war between their husbands' kingdoms.

Musée de Cluny, Paris · Tours, History of the Franks (1916) · Photograph: Cangadoba · CC BY-SA 4.0

A warning a king chose not to hear

Sigebert had the better of the fighting by 575, and after allying with his other brother Gunthram against Chilperic he found himself invited by Neustria's own disaffected nobles to take Chilperic's throne as well as his own. Bishop Germanus of Paris warned him plainly before he set out to claim it: if he intended no violence against his own brother he would return alive and victorious, but if his purpose was otherwise he would die, since scripture itself promised that whoever dug a pit for his brother would fall into it. Sigebert, Gregory of Tours writes, paid the warning no heed.

Raised on a shield, then struck down

At the village of Vitry, Neustria's own army gathered around Sigebert and raised him on a shield as their king in Chilperic's place. Before the acclamation could be completed, two of Fredegund's own men, armed with poisoned double-edged knives and said to have been placed under a charm for the purpose, approached him on some pretext and stabbed him from both sides at once. Sigebert cried out and died within moments, his own triumph over Chilperic complete only in the instant before Fredegund's own agents ended it. Brunhild, left a widow with a young son too small to rule alone, would spend the following decades enforcing her own regency across two kingdoms rather than surrendering the war her husband's death had not resolved.

The Nero and Herod of our time

expansionDrafted from Tours, History of the Franks (1916)

Sigebert's murder in 575 left his half-brother Chilperic and his queen Fredegund unrivalled in Neustria, and for the next nine years Chilperic ruled with a cruelty his own contemporary bishop, Gregory of Tours, recorded in blunt terms: he taxed his people ruinously, mutilated men on suspicion rather than proof, broke wills made in favor of the Church, and mocked bishops he considered inconvenient. Gregory calls him, without qualification, "the Nero and Herod of our time" - a Frankish king literate enough to write his own verse and theology, and cruel enough that Gregory judged both worthless.

Tours, History of the Franks (1916) · Grégoire de Tours, Historia Francorum · Public domain

A blade in the dusk

In the autumn of 584, while his own armies were still campaigning and plundering the countryside, Chilperic went hunting at his villa of Chelles outside Paris. Returning at dusk and dismounting with one hand resting on a servant's shoulder, he was stabbed under the arm by an unknown assailant, then stabbed again in the belly; he died within moments, blood flooding from his mouth and from the wounds themselves. Gregory names no killer with confidence, though he notes that Chilperic's own court immediately suspected the reach of enemies he had made in plenty. He had been loved by no one in life, Gregory writes, and was abandoned by nearly everyone the instant he was dead - it was left to a single loyal bishop, who had waited three days outside his tent hoping for an audience he never received alive, to wash the body, dress it properly, and see it buried by boat in the church of Saint-Vincent at Paris.

An infant king and an unfinished war

Chilperic's death left Fredegund regent for their infant son, Chlothar II, and did nothing to end the war with Austrasia: Brunhild, now regent in her own right for Sigebert's son Childebert II, remained Fredegund's sworn enemy, and the two queens would go on directing their kingdoms' rivalry through proxies, assassinations and shifting alliances for another three decades before either court's own line of succession settled the matter for good.

Ten dead kings

peakDrafted from Wallace-Hadrill, The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar with its Continuations (1960)

Brunhild outlived every rival of her own generation. Fredegund died in 597, Chilperic and Sigebert decades before her, and Brunhild continued to govern first through her son Childebert II and then, after his own early death, through her grandsons - ruling Austrasia and, for a time, Burgundy as regent for kings too young to rule themselves, and making enemies of the same Austrasian nobility whose support her regency depended on.

A grandmother's own great-grandsons turn against her

By 613 that Austrasian nobility had had enough. Led by figures who had once served her, they abandoned Brunhild's own great-grandsons and invited Fredegund's son, Chlothar II - by then the sole ruler of Neustria - to take Austrasia and Burgundy as well. Brunhild's own army would not fight for her; she and her great-grandsons were betrayed and handed over. Chlothar had two of the boys killed outright, sparing a third, Merovech, out of an old attachment as the child's godfather, and had him quietly placed under a trusted count's protection instead.

Paris, France · Wallace-Hadrill, The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar with its Continuations (1960) · Photograph: Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0

A reckoning for ten kings

Brunhild herself was brought before Chlothar, who charged her to her face with the deaths of ten Frankish kings and princes across four decades of rivalry - a tally that included his own grandfather Chilperic and, by extension if not by her own hand, most of the royal generation her own feud with Fredegund had consumed. She was tortured for three days, paraded through the army's ranks on a camel, and finally tied by her hair, one arm and one leg to the tail of an unbroken horse, which tore her to pieces at a runaway pace. With her death the rival branches that had divided the Frankish inheritance since Chlothar I's own sons first split it reunited under a single king for the first time in more than two generations - the reunification that would let Chlothar's own son Dagobert rule, briefly, a Frankish kingdom whole enough to be worth calling one again.

The last king who ruled

peakDrafted from Wallace-Hadrill, The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar with its Continuations (1960)

Chlothar II made his son Dagobert sub-king of Austrasia in 623, and when father and son nearly came to war three days after Dagobert's own wedding over how much of that kingdom's territory should actually answer to him, twelve Frankish lords and the peacemaking bishop Arnulf of Metz talked them back from the brink rather than let the reunited realm splinter again so soon. When Chlothar died in 629, Dagobert moved fast: he mustered his Austrasian followers under arms and sent envoys ahead into Burgundy and Neustria to secure his own succession before any rival claim could take hold. Most of both kingdoms' bishops and magnates submitted before he had even finished the journey from Reims to Soissons; a half-hearted bid by his own brother Charibert came to little.

Musée de Cluny, Paris · Wallace-Hadrill, The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar with its Continuations (1960) · Photograph: Cangadoba · CC BY-SA 4.0

A conqueror who chose to share

Dagobert took the whole of his father's kingdom, Neustria and Burgundy together with their treasuries, becoming the first king since his grandfather Chlothar I to rule a genuinely united Frankish realm rather than merely the largest share of a divided one. He then had second thoughts about leaving his brother with nothing at all, and granted Charibert a sub-kingdom between the Loire and the Pyrenees - Toulouse, Cahors, Agen, Périgueux, Saintes and the country toward Gascony - enough to support a royal household without threatening Dagobert's own hold on the rest. Later generations would remember Dagobert's reign as the last moment a Merovingian king held real, personal command over the whole Frankish administration rather than leaving it to the mayors of his palace, and as a period of law, patronage and diplomacy substantial enough that the kingdom's own bishops and magnates had reason to prefer his rule to any rival's.

A death that changed nothing at first, and everything after

Dagobert fell ill with dysentery at his villa near Paris in his sixteenth year as sole king and was carried to the abbey of Saint-Denis, which his own patronage had filled with gold and precious ornament. Sensing death was near, he sent for his trusted adviser Aega and commended to him his queen Nantechild and his young son Clovis, judging Aega capable of governing the kingdom well in his name. He died within days and was buried at Saint-Denis among the riches he had given it. The arrangement he left behind - a child on the throne, a chosen minister running the kingdom in his name - would outlive Dagobert by a hundred years, long after the ministers in question stopped asking any Merovingian king's leave to do it.

A throne, and an ox-cart

contractionDrafted from Einhard, Life of Charlemagne (1880)

Dagobert's arrangement - a minor king, a trusted mayor of the palace running the government in his name - was meant as a temporary expedient. It became, over the following decades, the permanent shape of Frankish kingship. Dagobert's own son Clovis II succeeded him as a child, and the pattern repeated with nearly every king after him: short reigns, early successions, and mayors of the palace - the chief officers of each royal household - accumulating the actual work of government, the command of armies and the granting of land, while the kings whose names appeared on their charters grew up as figureheads before they could grow into anything else.

Saint-Denis, France · Einhard, Life of Charlemagne (1880) · Photograph: Thomas Clouet · CC BY-SA 4.0

A dynasty remembered for its hair and its oxen

Einhard, writing two generations later at the Carolingian court that replaced this arrangement outright, described what Merovingian kingship had become in withering terms: a family that had "long since been devoid of vital strength," with nothing left to a king but his title, his long hair and flowing beard - the traditional mark of Merovingian royal blood

• and a single country estate too small to support even a modest household. A Merovingian king's only real function, in Einhard's account, was ceremonial: to receive foreign ambassadors and dismiss them with answers written for him in advance, and once a year to be driven by ox-cart, peasant-fashion, to the general assembly of the Franks, preside over it in appearance, and be driven home again. The mayor of the palace managed everything else, at home and abroad, that a king's government actually required doing.

One family's office by nearly hereditary right

The office of mayor was not, in law, hereditary, but by the time Einhard was writing it had belonged to one family, the Pippinids, for three generations running: Pepin the Elder, then his descendants after him, holding the position as though it passed by blood rather than by royal appointment. What had begun as Chlothar II and Dagobert's own practical solution to the problem of a child on the throne had become, within two generations of Dagobert's death, the actual constitution of the Frankish kingdom - a throne that conferred no power, and an office that conferred all of it, held more and more openly by men who answered to no Merovingian king in anything but name.

The Battle of Tertry

contractionDrafted from Wallace-Hadrill, The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar with its Continuations (1960)

By the 680s the mayoralty itself had split along the same old fault line that had once divided Frankish kings: Austrasia and Neustria each had their own mayor, and the two men's rivalry stood in for whatever authority the kings they served no longer exercised in their own right.

In Neustria, a small and hot-tempered man named Berchar held the office after his own predecessor's death, ignoring the advice of the Frankish nobles around him until enough of them abandoned him for Pepin of Herstal, the Austrasian mayor, to make Berchar's own position dangerously exposed.

Cleveland Museum of Art · Wallace-Hadrill, The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar with its Continuations (1960) · Cleveland Museum of Art · CC0

A battle whose winner never wore a crown

Pepin gathered his Austrasian warbands and marched swiftly against Berchar and the Neustrian king Theuderic III whose name Berchar governed in. The two forces met near Saint-Quentin at a place called Tertry, and Pepin's Austrasians won decisively; Theuderic and Berchar were both put to flight, and Berchar himself was murdered soon after by his own associates at his mother-in-law's instigation. Pepin pursued the victory rather than the crown: he took Theuderic's own person and treasury into his keeping, reorganized the government of the whole realm to his own satisfaction, and then returned to Austrasia without ever claiming the royal title Theuderic still nominally held.

One family, one office, the whole kingdom

Tertry did not end the Merovingian dynasty - Theuderic III kept his throne, and kings of his line would go on succeeding one another for another sixty years - but it ended any real contest over who governed in their name. From 687 onward the mayoralty of the palace, previously split between rival courts the way the kingship itself had once been, belonged to Pepin of Herstal and, after him, to his own descendants alone. Pepin's two sons by his wife Plectrudis, Drogo and Grimoald, were raised as the heirs to an office that had, in all but name, already become the thing that actually ruled the Franks.

A question sent to Rome

endDrafted from Einhard, Life of Charlemagne (1880)

Pepin of Herstal's own descendants held the mayoralty of the palace without serious challenge for two more generations. His son Charles Martel governed without even bothering to fill the throne for several years after one Merovingian king's death, and won lasting fame turning back a Muslim army at Poitiers and another at the River Berre near Narbonne, defending Frankish territory a king in name only could not have defended himself. When Charles Martel died in 741, his own sons Carloman and Pepin the Short divided the mayoralty between them, still governing, for a time, under a Merovingian figurehead the family had seen fit to install: Childeric III, raised to the throne in 743 after a gap of several years with no king at all.

Einhard, Life of Charlemagne (1880) · Bibliothèque nationale de France · Public domain

An answer that settled the question in advance

Carloman withdrew to a monastery in Rome not long after, leaving Pepin sole mayor of the entire Frankish realm - and, in practice, its sole ruler in everything but title. In 751 Pepin sent an embassy to Pope Zachary in Rome with a question whose answer he had every reason to expect: whether it was better for the man who held royal power, or the man who merely held the royal title, to be called king. Zachary's reply, delivered before his own death the following year, endorsed exactly the arrangement Pepin had asked him to endorse.

The end of a dynasty, disposed of with scissors

Childeric III was deposed, his hair - the mark of Merovingian royal blood the family had worn unshorn since Clovis's own day - was cut off, and he was shut away in a monastery for the rest of his life. Pepin was raised up as king in his place, the first of his own line to hold the title as well as the power his father and grandfather had exercised without it. Two and a half centuries after Clovis had eliminated every rival king of his own blood to make himself sole ruler of the Franks, the dynasty he founded ended not in battle or conquest but in a monastery cell, disposed of by the same instrument - a pair of scissors

• his own family had once used to remove rivals from the succession without shedding royal blood outright.