Pod Insights Gone Medieval The Merovingian Dynasty: France's First Kings About this episode Long-haired rulers, dynastic bloodshed, secret letters, and a kingdom built in the aftermath of empire; Dr. Eleanor Janega and Dr. James Palmer dive into the wild, Roman-adjacent world of the Merovingians.
What made the first kings of France so unforgettable, and why were they later written out of the story? From myth to murder, this is the family that helped shape medieval France.
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Why The Early Middle Ages Matter
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The Destruction of Charlemagne's Legacy
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Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/3AIz8betOfIH4sNk4SY2T0
Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Audio editor is Tim Arstall, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.
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Transcript 10,612 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Matt Lewis? From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Janiger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
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1:17 Eleanor Janega? Hello, I'm Dr Eleanor Janiger, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gob-smacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here.
1:54 Eleanor Janega? When asked what to think about... About the history of medieval France. Most people usually name check the big hits. The Normans, Joan of Arc, perhaps even the towering exploits of the Emperor Charlemagne. But before all these legends of French history arrived onto the scene, there existed a dynasty as dramatic, entertaining, and downright cutthroat as any medieval ruling family that succeeded them. They are called the Merovingians, the long-haired kings. And they were the first ruling dynasty of the people known as the Franks. They came to power in the mid-fifth century,
2:35 Eleanor Janega? during the death throes of the Roman Empire and the barbarian explosion that followed. So naturally, their origins are shrouded in early medieval mystery and myth-making. But when that leads to a tale of a king being born to a supernatural seahorse, it makes the murky depths of the medieval deep time worth it. Over the space of 200 years, these Merovingian warlords gobbled up territories from the ruins of Roman Gaul, expanding west of the Rhine until the land itself bore their name. Francia, France, the land of the Franks. This success had a lot to do with warrior kings waging brutal wars,
3:20 Eleanor Janega? adopting a new-fangled version of Christianity, and harking back to the might of their fallen Roman forbearers. But as with many later medieval dynasties, success was never guaranteed. Almost as soon as this united Frankish kingdom had been assembled, it fell apart as brother turned on brother and mother turned on mother to birth a series of unrelenting civil wars, full to the brim with backstabbing, poison lacing, and horse-ripping violence. And yet, despite this salacious Merovingian melodrama, France's first dynasty has been forgotten, destined to reside in the shadows of their better-known predecessors, the Carolingians.
4:05 Eleanor Janega? Who were only too happy to cast them as indolent do-nothing kings. So today, I'm joined once again by Dr. James Palmer, professor of history at St. Andrews University and author of Merovingian Worlds, to do this dynasty the justice they deserve. Together, we'll explore where the Franks came from, why their warlords became kings, and how they founded an unrivaled kingdom in the wake of Roman crisis, before discovering how the conniving exploits of queens and princes, bishops and mayors, brought the Merovingian world crashing down, eclipsed by a new, dynamic dynasty who consigned their old Frankish predecessors to obscurity.
4:50 Eleanor Janega? James, welcome back to Gone Medieval.
4:53 Speaker 03 Hi, Eleanor. Thanks for having me back.
4:55 Eleanor Janega? It's the three-peat. He's a champion. He's a champion of Gone Medieval. Yeah.
4:59 Speaker 03 My mission to own all of the early Middle Ages.
5:02 Eleanor Janega? That's great. You know, I'm gonna let you have it. Matt and I are fine with that. We don't care. We only want to own the late Middle Ages.
5:08 Speaker 03 You've got later periods than I have.
5:09 Eleanor Janega? Yeah, exactly. So it's fine. It's fine. But as the early Middle Ages go, we've got a bit of a cracker today because one of the more fun dynasties to talk about, I think, and in particular, I think we've got a lot of cool women in this one. So I'm gonna dive in. I'm gonna dive in. Big question for you. Who are the Merovingians? Like, you know, it's a Merovingians. That's one of those big-name families. But what's their deal? Where are they from? What were they ruling? Why are all of us obsessed?
5:42 Speaker 03 A lot of people are not obsessed. I will concede that from the beginning. Who are the Merovingians? The Merovingians are a ruling dynasty who start in northern France and Germany, and they very quickly build up a very large kingdom that basically looks quite a lot like modern France for the first time in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire, with lots of the Rhineland added on its eastern side.
6:10 Speaker 03 And they reign for 300 years, which is very successful, makes them one of the most successful dynasties of the Middle Ages. The Carolinians, who everyone thinks is much better, only rule for not even half the time. So they're a huge success story. But they're also the kings who are in charge after the Roman Empire in the Dark Ages. So everyone thinks of them as brutal, nasty barbarians who were really stupid.
6:38 Eleanor Janega? Of course, you know, that's, I think it's one of these things where, as you rightly point out, they get done a disservice just because they're in this period of time where we have few resources. And there are all these assumptions that get made, you know? And, you know, indeed, because what I kind of always say, if I'm teaching students about this, I say, okay, well, these are like the first kings and queens of France. And there are people who will sort of push back against that and say, mm, I don't know that they're really kings. They're more like proto-kings. They're more like warlords. And I'm like, what's the difference between a warlord and a king, really, if you're being honest with yourself?
7:16 Speaker 03 And they are called kings.
7:17 Eleanor Janega? Yeah.
7:18 Speaker 03 What more do you need?
7:19 Eleanor Janega? Like, if it looks like a king, quacks like a king, that's how that that story goes, right?
7:25 Speaker 03 After the Merovingians, which we're not talking about, there are so many Vikings who look and sound like kings, that every second one who turns up is a king in the sources. And so at least these ones have things like a throne and coins with their heads on them. Proper things that you think about. What's a proper king look like? Well, he looks like the guy on the chair over there doing law and fighting, and he has people gathered around him. It's not a warlord in the sense that he's like in a tent in a corner, just going, I'm king, honest, I'm quite powerful.
7:59 Eleanor Janega? Yeah, they've actually, they have halls, you know?
8:01 Speaker 03 They have halls. So an important thing about the Merovingians as kings is that they are very much the heirs to the Roman way of doing things. A lot of the places that they would have lived in were probably the old Roman villas around Paris, mostly to the north of Paris. So we can imagine that they still have mosaics. In fact, we have palaces that have mosaics in them. They're still quite Roman. They have people around them who speak Latin. They, most of them speak Latin. So they're not some kind of like gruff German warlords who have just turned up. They are living the Roman life, probably not togas, but some wine as well as their beer, like a bit of poetry.
8:44 Speaker 03 And that's, that's their kind of vibe. They are very happy being in charge, doing admin. One of the big failings of the later Merovingians is they get so good at doing admin, they're not really doing any fighting and people just get bored of them. So, oh, you're hearing more legal cases today. Have you thought about fighting a war?
9:03 Eleanor Janega? Oh, no. Yeah. Effective law. It's a, it's something they can be used to. Yeah, exactly.
9:08 Speaker 03 And as kings, they, they have special things, really special stories that they like to tell. So one of the things about the Merovingians, everybody who's ever heard of the Merovingians knows first thing is they have long hair and they're not supposed to cut their hair while they're king. So they have this whole Samson thing going on. You cut the hair, you lose power, which sometimes they do actually do when they're having little fights with each other and they go, I cut your hair. You've got to go and live in a monastery until your hair's grown back. And they actually go and do it. And then they just grow their hair back in a monastery. You go, my hair's on again now. I can come back. I'm king now again. Which is a very strange way of dealing with things, but I think the thing is then it has a look. You dress the right kind of way. You have the right kind of, oh, he must
9:51 Speaker 03 be king. He has long hair. And it's actually in law codes. It's illegal to do things to long haired people because they're special.
9:59 Eleanor Janega? See, this is an important point because really in a lot of ways, the look of monasticism is specifically curated in opposition to the Merovingians because like the kings have long hair and the monks have none, right? It's like, that's how you can tell you've given up on the noble way of life in France at the time is because you've been tortured. So everyone goes, ah, not a noble, right?
10:23 Speaker 03 Yeah. The very last Merovingian king. They don't just cut your hair, they just like, yeah, tons at him and put him in a monastery.
10:29 Eleanor Janega? That'll do it. Okay, well, now, speaking of monks and Latin and all of this jazz, how do we have sources on these guys? Because, you know, this is the point in time when sources are a little fewer on the ground. I mean, largely just because it's a very long time ago, but what are we working with? When we're talking about.
10:50 Speaker 03 What are we working with?
10:51 Eleanor Janega? Yeah.
10:51 Speaker 03 We have a series of chronicles, and they're pretty lively chronicles. The best one people know about is Gregory of Tours Histories, sometimes called the History of the Franks, but he just called it Histories.
11:08 Speaker 03 So Gregory of Tours was a bishop who lived in Tours, funnily enough, right at the end of the sixth century. And he writes a history, Gaul's history from the beginning of time, starting, it starts with Adam very quickly, comes up to his own day. And he was not just a bishop looking at what kings were doing, he was actively involved in a lot of what was going on. So these are often firsthand stories. I met this king and I thought he was a bit of a jerk. I met this king and he was very learned and interesting. I met this queen and we will not say too much about her in case we get in trouble. It's quite gossipy and very interesting. And it's, he starts off his chronicle by saying
11:48 Speaker 03 that the standards of Latin had become so poor that there was nobody around to record the history of his days apart from him. Which is a very grand statement. And of course, also untrue, because we have lots of other little histories, but nobody had set out to write a big literary history in the way that Gregory did. And Gregory's history is such a classic, and so literary is actually translated into the Penguin Classics series in English. But just to. Really stress just how important this is. But it is also fair to say that there were not other big scale histories around. It's not like when you get to the 14th century and every second nobleman and bishop with an education is writing an epic history.
12:30 Speaker 03 When he dies, his work is effectively then continued a couple of decades later by a different person altogether, a guy called Freitag. So then we have two chronicles. And then about another 50 years after Freitag dies, somebody else extends Gregory again, but not with Freitag. And so we have three chronicles. Brilliant. For the 300 years, three chronicles. Now, but it's not quite as bleak as that may sound because we have lots of saints' lives. They like the hundreds of saints' lives. We have lots of little bubbles of what saints and monks are up to. And these are often people at court, getting into scrapes, hanging out on boats with merchants and telling us a whole, all kinds of exotic things that you wouldn't necessarily know about. So a lot of people are writing.
13:14 Speaker 03 Just because we have three chronicles doesn't mean people aren't interested in history. And there's a kind of background thing as well about we don't have any sources because it was a long time ago, which it's quite clear from the stories that they're telling. There are loads and loads of stories in circulation. There are lots of books in circulation. There are lots of letters. We only have a couple of letter collections from the time, but the people in our chronicles and in our saints' lives are always sending each other's letters. And sometimes in secret, there's a great story about somebody who wants to send a very, one of the queens wants to send a secret political letter. And so writes it on a bit of parchment and then gets a wooden board, puts it on the wooden board, puts wax over the top so that you can't see there's a letter underneath
13:58 Speaker 03 and then writes a different message over the top. So if anyone captures her or the letter, then they wouldn't be able to see what the actual message was. Now, you don't do that in an illiterate society when people aren't writing.
14:13 Eleanor Janega? Exactly.
14:13 Speaker 03 You do that in a society when everybody can read and you're paranoid about how communication works in a written form.
14:19 Eleanor Janega? Okay, so given that, given that clearly people are reading and writing, and we've got good old Greg over here saying that no one is as good at Latin as he is anymore. How much can we trust what he's writing right now? Is this just an exercise in self-aggrandizement?
14:37 Speaker 03 It's not just an exercise in self-aggrandizement. Gregory says many things which are verifiable in other ways, shall we say. There was this turn of phrase once about Gregory's works, which said that he was writing satirically. Unfortunately, the author who said that he was writing, a modern author who said he was writing satirically, decided to disown that statement, but I kind of liked it. So it's not that ever that he's lying, it's just that there's often a particular slant on things and there are often little jokes and little stories that don't go anywhere, but with almost kind of a wink to camera as he does it. And it's kind of fun. And while he says that there isn't anyone who has the stylish,
15:21 Speaker 03 polished Latin that the old writers used to have in the Roman Empire. What Gregory does have as a stylist is a style of Latin which is kind of direct. And what we often forget for this period, people have forever complained about the barbaric standards of Latin in the period, which proves that everybody was really stupid. And actually, what they're really speaking is very, very old French. Because Latin becomes French and Italian and Spanish. And it's just very at the beginning of its journey. It's not really Latin anymore, but it's not yet French either. It's in this kind of interesting no man's land. And so modern scholars in the 19th century would be very angry at this barbaric way of writing.
16:05 Speaker 03 For people at the time, it's just how they spoke. So it wasn't even written in Latin because it was a learned language and so normal people couldn't get it. It's the language that normal people spoke as well. So people were expected to read and engage and have fun with it. So in that sense, Gregory expected to have an audience. And you can lie to your audience, but given that a lot of his audience were people at court that he was hanging around with, there's a kind of social network of truth. See, you can probably tell a few lies and half truths and get away with it. But if you go too outrageous, then everyone's going, Greg, that didn't actually happen. Oh, we were there. We remember this one.
16:46 Speaker 03 So there were some, he does tell stories about when he gets in trouble for various things and how he talks his way out of it.
16:57 Speaker 03 The law of the truthful historian is that you don't just say the things you approve of. You also talk about the things you don't approve of and vice versa. So all the bad characters, or some of the bad characters, he tries to say something good about them as well. And some of the good characters are entirely flawless. That's an interesting mix of characters.
17:16 Eleanor Janega? All right. Okay. So we're gonna believe Greg. We're going with it. We're going to squint our eyes.
17:23 Speaker 03 Squint.
17:23 Eleanor Janega? While we're reading him.
17:24 Speaker 03 It's like reading a newspaper. As long as you remember which newspaper you're reading, you know the tone of voice.
17:29 Eleanor Janega? That, there you go.
17:30 Speaker 03 The facts are coming in.
17:31 Eleanor Janega? Okay. So, all right, given that, we're gonna use him. We're gonna begin at the beginning. So you've got the Merovingians and they're coming out of the Franks, who are one of these Germanic tribes that we've heard so much about, who have moved in during the Great Migration period. Where did they come from, right? How did they be the ones who end up in what we now would think of as the Frenchlands?
18:00 Speaker 03 The Franks themselves like to tell a variety of interesting stories. Because the very boring story is that they come from western side of Germany. They move into places like Trier, which is a very nice city, old Roman city, old Roman capital. Then they move into Belgium and they move from Belgium into northern France. It's not a very big migration. You've seen those maps of barbarian migrations, arrows all over, all over the place. They basically moved down the road. But they are German, and archaeologically, people have tried to follow their metalwork and their weapons. It doesn't really work, because what happens is when they get into northern Gaul, they adopt the dress and the weapons of people in northern Gaul. It's
18:42 Speaker 03 like, migration sometimes involves integration. But the stories the Franks like to tell are a bit more exotic. And some Franks, and so Gregory tells this story as well, but it says, "Some people say," you always know that Gregory is telling stories, "some people say," that they are from Pannonia, basically Hungary, and that they've kind of gone over this very long arc up beyond the Danube and the Rhine to reappear in northern history. And we think that he tells this story because he likes it, because one of his heroes is an old Roman saint called Saint Martin of Tours, who wasn't actually from Tours, he was from that region of the old Roman Empire. And so maybe there's a bit of hero worship
19:27 Speaker 03 there. But other people, and Gregory doesn't even tell this story, as other chronicles tell this, say that they were actually descended from the Trojans, and that after the Trojan Wars in ancient history, some of their kings go on this kind of exciting jaunt, and they spend some time hanging around in a swamp in what's now Ukraine. And then they get to Pannonia, and then they head up north and back in. So this gives them an ancient pedigree. So they're not just the rough-and-tumble barbarians who have suddenly appeared from the north with an interesting way of pronouncing Latin words. They are people who've been involved in Roman history forever.
20:02 Eleanor Janega? And that this is like, one of these things that is very much the style at the time, right? Like, everyone invents for themselves a pedigree that goes back to the Trojan War. I mean, they do it in England as well. And I think that this is a really important point, because there tends to be this way of looking at the early medieval period as though it is a giant breakaway from what was happening in Rome. But all of these people see themselves as these successors who are linked very much to the Roman world.
20:33 Speaker 03 Yeah. And some of it is often the secret story. The Roman historians forgot to tell this bit, but- There was this exciting group who came and fought with the Romans and they were the best ones and they only won this war because of them and now they are this kingdom. And the Franks really like to lean into that, that they're not there to replace the Romans, they're there to succeed the Romans. Take everything that was good about them, but better and we'll get rid of all the stuff that was really bad. And for what most people this means is that the Franks are committed to fighting bad guys and not taxing people.
21:08 Eleanor Janega? Well, how Roman can you be if you're not taxing people though? Come on, that's the, that's the opposite of Roman.
21:12 Speaker 03 Well, it's said that they are so wealthy that they don't need to tax people.
21:16 Eleanor Janega? Oh, I see. Got you. I mean, okay, we've got these Franks. They are saying we are descended from the Trojans, they are up in these formerly Roman lands. They are telling you that they're reading and writing Latin, they are dispensing law, they're living in old villas. They have long hair though, which is not very Roman and they're not wearing togas. What are we, what are we wearing? What's the, what's the fashion scene, right? I want to know about that Merovingian drip, James.
21:46 Speaker 03 Trousers. Everyone's very excited about their trousers.
21:49 Eleanor Janega? Wow.
21:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, they've probably got a proper tunic, they love brooches. One of the things that we have some difficulty with from an archaeological perspective is that the clothing doesn't last very well either. Just, just as well as some of their, their old manuscripts. But the brooches are great. So they often have nice things that go over their shoulder and with a nice big badge with nice decorations. Some exotic stones on them. They particularly like garnets, they're really into their garnet stones. The thing that does survive archaeologically is we have lots of adornment, so that the kind of badges that hold the tunics together, which have lovely exotic garnet stones, very intricate interlace gold designs.
22:39 Speaker 03 They like their blue. It's a very showy culture. So if the Romans are going through this period of being quite austere, the Franks are there to be a little bit more exciting and visually announce that they're not Roman, which is then an interesting thing. We're here to do law and justice and read Latin poetry in all the ways that you would expect, but we're going to dress different and never forget where we came from. I think that's kind of an interesting thing about it. Never forget where we came from while doing all these Roman things. So we're going to play along but be different at the same time.
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24:18 Eleanor Janega? Okay, but speaking of where they came from, can we talk about my favorite thing about the Merovingians, which is the story that they are descended from a sea monster?
24:26 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
24:29 Eleanor Janega? I love it. I'm sorry. I do.
24:30 Speaker 03 All of the Merovingians descended from a sea monster. So there is this story that one day, a queen is swimming in a lake and she encounters a sea beast.
24:42 Speaker 03 And it's like a quinotaur, a five-horned beast. And then the chronic, this is not Gregory, the chronicler, this is Fredegard, the second chronicler. He says, "And shortly after she encountered the beast, she gave birth to the King Meravec. Some said that he was the son of the king, and some said that he was the son of the sea monster."
25:08 Eleanor Janega? See, this is the thing, they're trying to silence Fredegard for truth, James.
25:13 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, or, you know, she came home and go, "I'm pregnant," and it was a sea monster, definitely.
25:21 Eleanor Janega? Oh.
25:22 Speaker 03 The thing about the sea monster story is if you would, a lot of people say, "Well, this is because the Franks at the beginning of this period are pagan. They convert under their very scary king Clovis, who kills a lot of people. They are pagan, and so they think being descended from sea monsters is clearly a pagan thing to do." Yes. But they never make any political capital about it. There aren't lots of images of sea monsters. They don't keep going on about, "We are descended from sea monsters." They, there's just this one story in one chronicle. And there's a weird thing about this as well. So this is the birth of the King Meravec. The name Meravec possibly means sea cow.
26:05 Speaker 03 So horrifically, this might actually just be a joke about his name means sea monster, and so he descended from a sea monster, because they like really bad dad jokes. Puns are everywhere.
26:18 Eleanor Janega? All right, okay, well, now you've mentioned the household name Merovingian, though. We gotta talk about Clovis, my friend and yours. Listen, Clovis, thank goodness for him, because he's one of these ones that's helped me teach armies of undergrads.
26:32 Speaker 03 Oh, yes.
26:33 Eleanor Janega? About the Merovingians. He is kind of like our Merovingian par excellence, right? Is it, can we tell us a little bit about him? Oh, yeah.
26:41 Speaker 03 Clovis is one of those classic Merovingian dynastic figures who, he is so successful, he sets the scene. He's like a proto Charlemagne in that sense. He's just so amazingly successful, everybody thinks that he's brilliant. The ways in which he is brilliant are slightly odd at times, but the headline is that he starts off basically in charge of the area north of Paris, not including Paris.
27:11 Speaker 03 And by the end of his reign, he rules the whole of France. He has defeated the great Gothic kingdom of Toulouse, which was the major barbarian successor state to the Romans that everybody thought was the best and most sophisticated of all the Roman successor states until then, but he smashes them. He beats up various other barbarian peoples. He fights heretics. He allies with the church when he converts. He's pagan at the beginning, but then his wife is Christian and has a long series of words with him. Until one day, he's in a battle against the Alamani, who are different Germanic people. And again, he just has this battlefield vision.
27:52 Speaker 03 And that it was kind of, if I could fight under the sign of Christ, I will win, and does this. But he doesn't make a big deal about this. But then afterwards, then he talks to a bishop and said, you know, I prayed to God and I won. Does that mean I'm Christian now? And eventually, and so we should have a word with your men. And he goes and has a word with 3,000 of his men. And go, lads, I'm thinking about converting. And they'll go, hooray. And so they all convert en masse. Storytelling and it's good for this. I'm sure this is exactly how armies are very, well, actually armies are very concerned with theological issues, but on spur of the moment, mass conversion was maybe not normally what they would go for.
28:31 Speaker 03 But this means that Clovis is not just a very violent warlike king. He's a very pious Christian king at the same time, which leads to some very strange imagery. And the story is of Gregory of Tours, talking about how he has an interesting sense of humor and is often winking to camera. A lot of his stories end with Clovis or one of Clovis's allies smashing in the skull of one of Clovis's enemies. And there's even a story at one point that Clovis runs out of people to fight against brutally a murder. So he has this public assembly where he announces this fact
29:13 Speaker 03 just to see if anybody will secretly announce that they're a dynastic rival to him and he just missed them, which it sounds just. I have so many cousins. Where have they all gone? Are they all dead? Anybody?
29:27 Speaker 03 But this is Gregory's great Christian hero, is somebody who goes around smashing in his rival's skulls on a regular basis. But Gregory is all for righteousness. But at the same time, Gregory clearly also is playing a kind of funny little game because he makes these really important comparisons to the Emperor Constantine. The Emperor Constantine is the first Christian Roman Emperor. And a lot of, read at face value, you go, oh, this must mean that Clovis is being built up to be just as important as the first Christian Roman Emperor, that this is a great honour. Until, if you read carefully through Gregory's works, the only story that Gregory tells about Constantine is that he had his wife murdered in the bath.
30:15 Speaker 03 So basically, Constantine, we would think, oh, yeah, Christian hero. Gregory thinks murdering psychopath, warlord.
30:23 Eleanor Janega? Who's to say? Gregory is the answer, I guess.
30:27 Speaker 03 Clearly, there is some respect here because, from Gregory, at least that guy got stuff done. And in his own day, he's living in the days of the grandchildren of Clovis, and they are constantly at war with each other. I think he finds them, yes, warlike, but at least Clovis fought external enemies rather than internal enemies. And it's like, you're fighting civil wars, he at least fought heretics.
30:52 Eleanor Janega? Well, okay, speaking of this, you know, in terms of the conversion of Clovis, one of the things that's actually really important about him is that he converts to the kind of Christianity that we now consider to be, you know, correct, like the Trinitarian model of Catholic Christianity, which is sort of a big deal because a lot of people at the time are Arian, right? And so,
31:19 Speaker 03 Yes.
31:20 Eleanor Janega? Arianism, let me see if I've got this right, Arianism, that's where you believe that there is a hierarchy within the Trinity. It goes God the Father. Jesus and then the Holy Spirit and it's like a top down thing as opposed to Orthodox Catholicism. I know that's confusing phrase, but it is correct, where you're like, there's the Trinity. It's all the same thing, right?
31:42 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's horizontal. And then there's the concern that if you're saying that it's a hierarchy, are you saying that Christ isn't as divine as God? And a lot of theologians in the fifth, sixth century will tell you that's exactly what we're saying. And there are huge fights about it.
32:00 Eleanor Janega? Yeah.
32:01 Speaker 03 And people get very animated because if you are, are you saying that Christ is a person? And somebody like, yes. I go, okay, so is he human and divine or human or divine? Does he have a human will or divine will? It's the kind of thing which if you're not religious and you're saying, these people are fighting over this. This looks very obscure, but people at the time, this is absolutely the most important thing that you can be arguing. But they're not heresies in the sense that people might imagine that kind of lead off into like secret witchcraft cults. They are having very hard theological discussions about what is the divine and human nature of Christ? And how do they, yeah?
32:45 Speaker 03 But a lot of the barbarian groups such as the Goths had converted to Christianity when that was the mainstream. Arianism was the mainstream view in the Roman Empire. The Franks as one of the last ones in, and they were pagan, go straight to Catholicism, which at that point is once again the default position of the Roman Empire. So there's an interesting timing issue. But it has often been suggested that a lot of the Goths could have switched over, but they liked, in the same way that they dressed differently to the Romans, they liked having a variation of Christianity, which wasn't the Romans either. And this has lots of benefits. You don't have to do what the Pope tells you, not that anybody does what the Pope tells them.
33:28 Eleanor Janega? Yeah, at this point, no.
33:30 Speaker 03 But they could really, you may say that, but.
33:33 Eleanor Janega? Well, I think that this is, you know, one of these really interesting conversions because in many ways it is the classic, right? Because you get yourself a Christian wife, you resist it for a while. There's sort of a battlefield conversion. But one of the things I get asked a lot about these things is people say, okay, well, how genuine is this? Or is it political?
33:55 Eleanor Janega? And I'm not sure we can untangle those two things here, especially in the person of Clovis. I mean, everything is political when you are the king, right? Yeah.
34:05 Speaker 03 I don't think there's a lot of space for personal beliefs which you take home with you. And that's just not how it works. Religion is a community business. And so as long as everybody is broadly on the same page, it's about the rituals. Everyone's in church to celebrate Easter, to celebrate Christmas. They have the same saints, they have some different local saints. There's a lot of that that goes with mutual respect. There'll be some differences in what we believe, but the core stuff is the same. The king is an important figure in this, not, there's no divine right of kings or anything like that, which kind of gives him a kind of dispensation to do whatever he wants because he's God. If he does bad things, they are quite clear that God is going to strike him down
34:50 Speaker 03 or they can remove him on God's behalf, because otherwise he's just being a tyrant. What Clovis's role is, is to help bring order to things. So where he really puts a lot of his effort with the church in the early days is that he summons church councils with more acts of politics. He's not intervening in theology so much as getting the bishops around and helping them to be able to legislate about how the church should be run and how they should do things. He brings order, so it's just an extension of his secular role. If you've murdered people, I'm going to make sure you're brought to justice. And in the church, shall we just make sure that bishops do things properly and people are baptized when they're supposed to be and those kind of things.
35:29 Eleanor Janega? Fundamentally, Clovis is one of the best to ever do it. You know, he really plays a blinder in terms of saying he is carrying on this kind of Roman legacy in a lot of ways. And I think now there is kind of a resistance to this idea. But listen, he's got the bishops on side. He's promulgating law. He is marrying girls from the Roman sphere of influence. I mean, what more does a man have to do to prove to you that he understands the Romans?
35:55 Speaker 03 He's even sent presents from the Byzantine Empire, I mean Constantinople. He sent a tunic, a nice purple tunic as a symbol. Of effectively being a consul of the the Roman Empire. He's basically going to be the local administrator on behalf of the the empire. Gregory tells a little joke here as well, that he then parades through the street being hailed basically as Caesar Augustus, having misunderstood that he hadn't been actually made emperor of of the West. He was just a an admin official. Clovis was a great figure, however, he didn't always understand what was himself, what was good or bad about himself. But yeah, they are part, they're not the enemies of Rome, they are part of Rome and they they celebrate that as much as possible.
36:39 Eleanor Janega? So what happens after Clovis dies, right? Because we've got a series of sons, he does a good job having his sons. Do they kind of have the same killer instinct for expanding territories?
36:52 Speaker 03 They do have the same killer instinct for expanding territories, but at the expense of each other. So when you built a kingdom for the first time, there is no tradition of how things should be divided. And what they decide to do, or what Clovis decides to do probably, is that they will, each of his four sons will have a kingdom based in a city. And rather than having a clearly defined territory, they will have cities. So you you will have Paris plus these places and you will have Swas on plus these places. So there's there's four sons and then they divide it up and they've got their their capital. And then they start competing to win over different cities and then they start fighting. There are some times when they do go and fight external enemies.
37:34 Speaker 03 There's there's an exciting bit where their their mother, Clotilde, Clotilde's another one of these very determined women. And she gets them together and said, look, rather than fighting each other, let's go and kill the Burgundians. Because she herself is Burgundian and and her father had been murdered. Uh, let's go get vengeance. So you do that kind of thing, you go, rather than fighting each other, let's go this way and we will fight other people. Works brilliantly. And there's a, there's kind of a limit to how much expansion you want to do from there. The the easy place that they can expand into is southern France, which they already sort of have and maybe into Spain.
38:16 Speaker 03 Because one of the last things that Clovis does is that he destroys the the Gothic kingdom in the south of France and takes the border of the Frankish kingdom, basically all the way down to the Pyrenees. The Gothic Kingdom has sort of collapsed. Really, kind of what it does is the Goths all move into Spain, and then you get this Gothic Spain. But to start off with, there's a very exciting bit where there's a big Gothic Kingdom in Italy, and they keep part of Provence. So actually, you have a United Kingdom of Spain and Italy with Provence linking the two.
38:54 Speaker 03 And that's kind of nice. So the one really big expansion they managed to get during that period is that the Goths in Italy end up fighting this hugely complicated war against the Byzantine Empire, because a different wonderful queen gets murdered in the bath. And Justinian swears vengeance and sends a big army and they have a big fight, so that the Goths don't have to fight the Franks and the Byzantine Empire at the same time, which would be way too much. He said, "Could you not fight us if you have Provence?" And the Franks are like, "Yeah, that sounds like a fair deal. Sorted."
39:26 Eleanor Janega? Brokerage.
39:27 Speaker 03 But they didn't really have to fight even for that. That was just a kind of nice presence that they got. There is a very exciting bit when they also go and invade part of Western Germany called Turingia. And again, this is again in the spirit of destroying rival kingdoms. And that is how it brings yet another one of the wonderful queens in, because one of them kidnaps the princess of the king, a woman called Radagund, and then puts her in a monastery in the west of France. And then when she grows up, he marries her. It's very sinister. And then she, and she doesn't like being married. And so she keeps running away and crying a lot, as you would if you'd been kidnapped and forced into marriage. And but then she becomes one of the great queens, because eventually it's like, "Are you going to come back to be married with me?"
40:12 Speaker 03 He said, "Of course not. I'm going to stay." She stays in Poitiers, and then she found a monastery there and becomes this kind of beacon for the spiritual life, a kind of a reticade of royal powers. And actually, lots of queens end up either retiring their young princesses, hide out there, becomes kind of a nice little shelter for royal women who feel that their lot in life is in peril.
40:38 Eleanor Janega? Ah, women helping women. We love to see it. We absolutely do. So what happens then? We've got basically a bunch of sons fighting with each other in varying cities after Clovis.
40:50 Eleanor Janega? And then we get to the last of Clovis's sons, Lothar, and he dies. So what happens then?
40:59 Speaker 03 They start all over again.
41:01 Eleanor Janega? Abu.
41:02 Speaker 03 Lothar, like Clovis, having Lothar has four sons. He had five sons, but he had one of them burned to death in a barn for allying with one of his rivals.
41:13 Eleanor Janega? Oh, yeah, as you do.
41:14 Speaker 03 So with the four remaining sons, they each take one of the exact same cities that Clovis's sons had originally done. And then it all goes very gossipy and very exciting. One of them straight off the bat gets in a lot of trouble because he leaves his wife to run off with two shepherdesses.
41:36 Eleanor Janega? Hmm.
41:37 Speaker 03 Um, not one, two.
41:39 Eleanor Janega? Two, alright.
41:41 Speaker 03 Uh, and then so he is excommunicated for not good moral behaviour. And then he ends up dying. But this kind of gives an opportunity for one of the other brothers, Sigebert. And Sigebert goes, well, if we're at the kind of level where our queens are going to be shepherdesses, I'm going to marry a proper princess. So he approaches the Visigothic king of Spain. And have you got a beautiful daughter that I could call my wife? Well, I'll send you my daughter Brunhilde. They are Arians, but Brunhilde, part of the agreement is that she will convert to Catholicism and bring a lot of treasure, very important in Gregory's telling of this story. And that way that Sigebert can say that he's the best brother because
42:22 Speaker 03 he's the one who married the brilliant, beautiful princess while the others were running around with shepherdesses. Well, then his half brother Chilprick decides that anything that Sigebert can do, he can do too. So he writes to the Visigothic king and says, have you got any other daughters? I do, actually. And sends Brunhilde's sister Galswinta and a lot of treasure. It's quite clear that Chilprick is much more excited about the treasure than Galswinta, not least because he was already married, or at least marriage is a bit spongy as a concept in this period. But he already had a very serious live-in relationship with a girl called Fredegund. And Fredegund- And was not very happy about being ousted for this, um, this princess with lots of money.
43:06 Speaker 03 So she convinces Chilprick to have her assassinated and obviously to keep all the money.
43:11 Eleanor Janega? Oh, that's expedient.
43:12 Speaker 03 This all goes well, then Brunhilde is like, this is outrageous. Um, death to your lot. Um, and Fredagans were like, well, I'd never really appreciated your family anyway. Death to your lot.
43:24 Speaker 03 Civil war. The brothers hate each other because they're just, it's just one upmanship. The wives hate each other. There are assassination attempts, left, right and centre on everybody's life, some of them quite successful. Brunhilde's husband Sigebert is, is allegedly bumped off by assassins sent by Fredagand. Um, eventually Fredagans' husband is bumped off by assassins allegedly sent by Brunhilde. Although it is also said in a different source that what had actually happened is that she had her own husband bumped off because he, um, found out that she was having an affair during a hunting trip.
44:00 Eleanor Janega? Ooh, oh, okay.
44:02 Speaker 03 See, it's just, it's just wall to wall gossip and scandal at this point.
44:05 Eleanor Janega? Listen, where is our really gossipy soap opera version of this? I'm, I'm talking to you, producers of, uh, Night of the Seven Kingdoms. Let's get it done.
44:17 Speaker 03 Exactly. The, the Mirror Vengeance would make a great TV series.
44:21 Eleanor Janega? It really would.
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45:56 Eleanor Janega? Okay, so we got mess. We got queens at each other's throats. I mean, this is, is it slightly ridiculous? Yes. Is it soap opera? Yes. But, I mean, I think it says a lot about society. I mean, it does show us that we have these women who certainly are able, at the very least, to command violence, which is not something that we necessarily associate with queenship in the medieval period. I would argue wrongly. But we really do see some women here who are quite involved, no?
46:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, these are very important women. They are explicitly part of the royal infrastructure. We talk about kings and their lawgiving and their warlike nature. Queens are councillors. They are valued. Yes, they are valued for being beautiful, but they're also valued for being wise. And not even just these queens. A number of queens are mentioned that what they do is that they're the ones who are taking the kings to one side to advise them on policy. Witch nobles are the ones that they should be listening to, how they should be dealing with diplomats. They're the people... It sounds quite in the old fashioned, they're the ones running the household. But in the powerful sense of they're the ones running the household. You want to speak to the king? You're going to be nice to the queen. That's how you get access.
47:11 Speaker 03 They are very much political figures who are controlling how the conversation works. That sense of queenship does get pushed away a little bit in the second half of the Merovingian reign. There's a variety of reasons for that. Partly, I think they're trying to keep away from the chaos of the Brunhild and Fredegans era. They don't want to return to civil war. Partly polygamy, the way that kings work through having lots of partners blunts the power that some of those women have. So the King Dagobert, who's really the second king after that age of chaos. And he's a unifying king. He rules the entire kingdom by himself. The Chronicle Afraidgar says, right?
47:55 Speaker 03 And he had three wives and so many girlfriends that if we listed them all, the Chronicle would become too long.
48:01 Eleanor Janega? All right, player. Okay. Yeah, I love it.
48:06 Eleanor Janega? Okay, well, all right. What brings this particular era of instability to an end then? How do we get out of this mess?
48:13 Speaker 03 Brutally. This is often the way. There is a guy called Clota II, Lothar II. And he is the son of Chilbric. And he's kind of the last man standing, as it were, because Brunhild, who after an epic, nearly over 40 years of political activity, not just as queen, but as regent for then her son and grandson. And as tempting to be the regent for her great grandson as well. The nobles of Burgundy fall out with her and basically betray her to Clota, who had been, he had not even been born when his father was assassinated. So he never knew, never knew his father, but he's grown up. And finally, this is the time, right at the beginning of the seventh century, when he is old enough to be.
48:59 Speaker 03 So it's not with a war, but he marches his army down at the request of the Burgundians and says, hi Burgundians, I'm now reuniting the kingdom. I'll be the first unifying king since Lothar the First, Clovis's son. He then has Brunhilde paraded naked on a camel, where one found the camel in Dijon.
49:19 Eleanor Janega? I was about to ask.
49:20 Speaker 03 I'm entirely sure.
49:22 Eleanor Janega? Where were you getting camels from, play? Come on, come on.
49:25 Speaker 03 What would be really weird, memorable, a camel, we'll get a camel. And then has her trampled to death by wild horses. That's a symbol of the decline of that end of the dynasty. That family is done. And then he holds two big councils, big council of all who's bishops, big council of all the nobles, and they swear that they're going to do things legally and peace and fairly from there on. There's a kind of big document, which sometimes is dramatically called the Magna Carta of the Franks, the Council of Paris in 614, which is not really anything of the sort. They just agreed to do things like make sure that judges judge cases where they are. Because if they judge cases from
50:07 Speaker 03 200 miles away and they just do really bad things, there's not really much recourse to get justice properly done. So basically, judges have to be responsible for what they say.
50:17 Eleanor Janega? Imagine.
50:18 Speaker 03 Imagine that. And so then the kingdom is unified again. And what you then get is a century in, there's still a little bit of civil war, because there's always a little bit of civil war left to come. But not so much between brothers anymore. The tensions increasingly become between the kings and their nobles. This is almost like when it starts to become really medieval. Who has more power, the nobles or the kings? And it's a kind of shoving power. And occasionally, there's important bishops hanging around as well, who are orchestrating things as well. It gets a lot more complicated. But it just, it also becomes a lot more serious. You get a series of kings whose deeds are mostly that they heard legal cases, not civil war.
51:01 Eleanor Janega? Is this the period when we also start getting these guys, the mayors of the palace, crop up? Is that correct?
51:08 Speaker 03 This is exactly that period.
51:10 Eleanor Janega? Who told us about those guys?
51:12 Speaker 03 The rise of the nobles. We shouldn't really call it. The nobles are just always powerful. Kings are only ever kings with the consent of their people. They really are supposed to be elected people. And any king who decides that they're just going to do whatever they feel like is a tyrant. There's this one king, Chaudric II. The nobles invite him to become king of the the western part of the Frankish kingdom. At one point, and he does things like beat up noble people that he doesn't like, and so they kill him.
51:40 Eleanor Janega? Right, fair enough.
51:41 Speaker 03 There's another one, Dagobert II, who he's actually put in exile in Ireland for a while because of a coup at his palace. But then he's invited back with the help of the machinations of the serial exiled English Bishop Wilfrid of York. Dagobert II brings back his team of people who've been advising him back in Ireland, which means that the people, the nobles who are actually in charge of his kingdom, don't have access to the king. They don't like it, so they kill him. And this is kind of the vibe in the six sixties, the six seventies. It's easy. You can get rid of a king if they are a tyrant and they're not listening to the people and they're not doing justice. That is quite traumatic. And interestingly, in almost all of those cases where kings get bumped off,
52:24 Speaker 03 they all get replaced by the same young guy, a guy called Suderic III, who is considered one of the do nothing kings, mostly because all he's really ever invited to do is take over when everything is falling apart.
52:37 Eleanor Janega? Can you tell us more about this concept of the do nothing kings? Right, because that's one of the things that you hear all the time about the late mere of Injans.
52:46 Speaker 03 They're the do nothing kings. Well, it's bound up with the rise of the mayor of the palace. The mayor of the palace is the the senior noble who makes sure that courts run properly and helps deal with diplomats when they come visiting and make sure that armies are called when they need to be called. And is there a point then where they're basically doing all the thing you expect a king should be doing? And you get a series of kings who are quite young. And so if you've had quite a long period of time, when you only ever had young kings, and then they die in their early twenties without having really done anything, but the mayors of the palace are still going, and so they become the wise old heads who hold everything together. In many respects, they'd be doing exactly what Bronhill had been doing in the previous century. She had all the experience and all the know-how.
53:29 Speaker 03 So they become, the mayors become the trusted officials. They make everything actually happen. So what are the kings doing? And they become increasingly unpopular. The, the, the tag, the do-nothing king, I, I think is, is first attributed to them about the 17th century. It's, it's not a, but there are chronicles from the 9th century which describe them as useless. But even that's from a propaganda point of view, because when the last mayor of Injun King is dethroned in 751, and that one does seem to be pretty useless. The only thing we know about him, even though he's king for eight years, is that he was dethroned. If that's the only thing you can do in eight years, that's, it's not a good sign.
54:08 Eleanor Janega? Okay, well, if you're getting dethroned, though, if we're at this point in time where you can get toppled, who's doing it? These are the, the palace mayors that are doing it?
54:18 Speaker 03 The palace mayors, but again, they don't want to be tyrants either. So in the case of 751, when it gets deposed, what's the mayor of the palace at that point? A guy called Pippin. What Pippin III does is send some messengers to the pope with, with this message saying, "I'm basically have all the power, but I'm not king. And the king doesn't have any power, but is king. Could I be king?" And the pope writes back, "Sure, that sounds sensible."
54:48 Eleanor Janega? Thanks, Pope.
54:49 Speaker 03 But that itself doesn't, you, you can't just make yourself king because the pope said sure. So he has a proper election, and they remove Childeric by cutting his hair and sending him off into a monastery. It's possible even that Childeric really kind of wanted that at this point, but it's difficult to, we can imagine, but we don't know. Pippin then has to be elected by the nobles, and so that they all get together and proclaim him to be king. And so he is elected, that that is what, it's not like there's another candidate, though. It's like, do you want this guy or this guy? Maybe there was. The sources just say, "And then he was chosen by all the people." And then the position was confirmed by all the bishops, who get together and say a little prayer or something. So that way, he has the whole of the church and the whole of- The nobility have given him permission to do this.
55:34 Speaker 03 And so if you want power, and this has really been the case ever since the beginning of the seventh century. If you want to have that kind of royal power, you need the backing of the nobles and the church. And if you've got that kind of backing, then you can hold power, then you can make a change. Because if you're just going around murdering kings, that's the, there's other words for that.
55:55 Eleanor Janega? But now we've got a palace mayor who's on the throne. Is that it? Like, is this, is this how the, these wonderful sea monster Trojans meet their end?
56:05 Speaker 03 That's how they meet their end. There's a little bit more to it, of course, because it's history. There's always a little bit more to it. It's not like there have been really good kings and then one day they had gone. There's this, it gets difficult to find Merovingian kings. There's something about the bloodline goes wrong. And dynasties are always a very complicated thing because how, okay, you have a great ruler like Clovis. But what if your son's an idiot? What if he's not very good at fighting? These things trouble dynasties the whole time. It's often a sequence. You get the really good one, then you might get the great one, but then you have the one who's a bit rubbish. And then you have the one that's terrible and it all falls apart. Very few medieval dynasties last a couple of generations.
56:47 Speaker 03 So the last effective Merovingian king, this is a good early medievalist pub game, which is the last effective one. Harsh people, the hardcore line is that there hadn't been an effective king since Clothar II, right at the beginning of the seventh century. Some people will say that his son Dagobert, the one with all the girlfriends, was pretty good. Very few people would vote for any of the kings thereafter for most of the seventh century. There's a guy right at the beginning of the eighth century. The only thing that is said about him in the Chronicles is that he was good and just.
57:22 Eleanor Janega? Well, listen, that's all you need to know, though.
57:24 Speaker 03 That's all you need.
57:25 Eleanor Janega? Yeah.
57:26 Speaker 03 So he's a good and he's a just king. But after him, he seems to be quite young when he dies. His successor dies very young, his successor dies very young. His, it's just a whole group of, they get through a series of kings in quick succession. Only one of them. It is older than a teenager or early twenties when they die. And even that one only becomes king, we think, in his early 40s because he'd been hiding in a monastery and was a priest. It's kind of like the good, effective members of the dynasty had already gone. So there is also kind of a vote here, like, why are we sticking with this family who haven't given us a really good king for a century? But of course, the problem with this is be careful what you wish for, because then the Carolingians take over, that's the dynasty that the Pippin III basically starts off.
58:10 Speaker 03 And exactly the thing happens to them, that they get through a number of kings in quick succession, dying early and being rubbish. And then the nobles are like, okay, so the last time this happened, we got rid of this thing. Shall we do that again?
58:22 Eleanor Janega? Well, I think that the Merovingeneses are such an interesting test case, because I think a lot of what gets thrown around if people don't know about the medieval period and if they don't know about the early medieval period, is this idea that it is nothing but violence and everyone's an idiot and everything is accomplished simply through battle. But we do have this series of kings who are effective, legal taskmasters, you know, people who can sort of rule a kingdom in a not sexy, nonviolent way. And then when they do that, nobody likes it, it falls apart.
58:57 Speaker 03 In the middle of that, Clovis II and his wife Bolthild, another one of the classic strong queens, they are praised for bringing peace. And Bolthild is said to be so successful at bringing peace that after her husband dies, they invited to go and live in a monastery where they don't have to deal with.
59:15 Speaker 03 Too much peace, bad enough of that.
59:19 Eleanor Janega? Well, listen, this has been a mess. Thank you.
59:22 Speaker 03 Always the Merovingeneses.
59:25 Eleanor Janega? I mean, I mean that in a good way. I absolutely love the drama that the Merovingeneses bring. And I think that it is just a nice peek into a world where people act as though we don't really know, but there is rather a lot to say about these guys.
59:40 Speaker 03 So much to say.
59:41 Eleanor Janega? James, thank you for your time once again. I will not stop bringing you on. Thanks for gossiping with me.
59:49 Speaker 03 Thanks, Evinna.
59:54 Eleanor Janega? Thank you so much to James, once again, for joining me. And thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you were interested in some of the topics we mentioned in this episode, you might want to go back and check out our past episodes on Charlemagne and the destruction of Charlemagne's legacy. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my recent film on the Trials of Joan of Arc, and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com/subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts. And tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.
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