PART II
5
In 589 a group of the leading aristocrats of the kingdom of the Frankish king Childebert II (575-96), led by Duke Rauching, plotted Childebert’s assassination. They had long been opposed to Childebert’s mother Queen Brunhild (d. 613) and her supporters, and, even though Childebert was now an adult (he was probably nineteen), Brunhild was gaining in authority. But they were found out. Rauching, who may have had royal ambitions, was killed at once on Childebert’s orders at the king’s palace (probably at Reims), and his huge wealth was confiscated. His closest supporters, Ursio and Berthefried, had already mobilized an army, and they fled to a hill-top church in the wooded Woëvre region above Verdun, which overlooked Ursio’s estate-centre, and which had been a fortification in pre-Roman times. The king’s army besieged the church and Ursio was killed; Berthefried fled to Verdun cathedral, where he sought sanctuary, but he was killed there anyway, to the great distress of the local bishop.
This narrative, like almost all our evidence from sixth-century Gaul, is known to us because of the extensive writings of Gregory, bishop of Tours. Gregory, an active political bishop of Roman senatorial background, had been appointed in 573 by Brunhild and her husband Sigibert I (561-75), and there is no doubt of his support for the queen’s party. He detested Rauching for his sadism, and he retells the deaths of the conspirators with verve: Rauching tripped at the door of the king’s private room and cut about the head with swords, his naked body then thrown out of the window, Ursio overwhelmed by his enemies outside the church, Berthefried hit by tiles from the partly dismantled cathedral roof. Gregory’s partisanship goes with his narrative gifts to make him one of the most interesting and illuminating authors in this book, but we cannot avoid seeing sixth-century Gaul pretty much exclusively through his eyes. It is over-optimistic to take him on trust, and, in the last decade or so, the careful literary structuring of Gregory’s work has become widely accepted. But as we saw in Chapter 1, even if we do not believe everything he says, the density of his descriptions allows us to learn from the assumptions he makes. Whatever the accuracy of his account of this conspiracy, we can at least conclude that it was plausible to picture certain things: that a royal court could be riven by factions; that queen-mothers could have considerable political power (note that Gregory ascribes no political protagonism to Childebert’s wife Faileuba); that major aristocrats could be very rich, and could have what amounted to private armies, but that their political ambition was concentrated on royal courts; that such men did not base themselves on private fortifications, unlike in the world of castles of the central Middle Ages - for Ursio’s last stand was notably makeshift in Gregory’s account; and that people might expect sanctuary to be respected, even if this did not always happen. All these conclusions are amply borne out slightly later, by sources from seventh-century Francia; they made up some of the basic parameters of Merovingian political practice. This conspiracy was traditionally read by historians as a deliberate attempt to limit royal power; there is no evidence for that. But the image of the Merovingian political world as one in which kings consistently faced over-mighty subjects who had both character and resources would not be a false one. These points will be developed in this chapter. I shall give a political narrative first, and then set out some of the basic structures and patterns of political action of the Merovingian period as a whole.
The Merovingian dynasty ruled the Franks for two hundred and fifty years until 751; its hegemony was the work of Clovis (481-511). Clovis, son of a late Roman warlord and Frankish king based at Tournai, Childeric I, conquered the rival Frankish kings who had occupied separate sections of northern Gaul, and the surviving non-Frankish warlords of the north; he also established hegemony over the Alemans in the upper Rhine valley, and, as we saw in Chapter 4, in 507 conquered Visigothic Aquitaine as well. Clovis thus reunited three-quarters of Gaul after the confusions of the fifth century. He also converted to Catholicism, the first major ‘barbarian’ king to do so (perhaps after a brief period as an Arian), and his example, given his military success, would mark future choices in the other Romano-Germanic kingdoms too. By 550 or so, Frankish rule was fully established in the Burgundian kingdom and over the south German tribes who were crystallizing as the Bavarians; a looser Frankish hegemony was recognized in northern Italy, in central Germany, east to Thuringia, in Brittany (the only part of Gaul never fully conquered by the Franks), and maybe even in Kent. The core Frankish lands were always in the north of Gaul, and the major royal centres stretched from Paris and Orléans, through Reims and Metz, to Cologne: these were not exactly capitals in an administrative sense, but they were places where kings could frequently be found, and around which they moved their courts and administrators, from palace to palace, along the Oise valley near Paris or the Moselle near Metz. The kings seldom went to the south of Gaul; from these northern ‘royal landscapes’, the richer and more Roman south was ruled through networks of dukes, counts and bishops. Frankish hegemony east of the Rhine is less well documented, and was certainly less tight: the dukes of Bavaria and Thuringia usually had considerable freedom of action. But it existed nonetheless, and for a century the kings saw their eastern border as roughly that between modern Germany and the Czech Republic. The Merovingian Franks were thus both the people who created the political centrality of the Paris to Cologne region for the first time, a centrality it has never lost since, and the first people to rule on both sides of the Rhine frontier of the Roman empire. East of the Rhine was a simpler society, and it lacked the basic Roman infrastructure of roads and cities, or Latin as a language, but slowly, between 500 and 800, some of the contrasts between Gaul and Germany receded, and briefly, in the Carolingian period, they would have similar histories.
Clovis put his own family, called by 640 at the latest the Merovingians after his shadowy grandfather Merovech, firmly into the centre of politics: after 530 or so no one is documented claiming the Frankish kingship who did not also claim Merovingian parentage, until the Carolingian coup in 751. It is worth stressing how unusual this was: the Gothic and Lombard kingdoms never had dynasties that lasted more than three or four generations (usually less); only the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and, outside the Germanic world, those of the Welsh and Irish, were as committed to the legitimacy of single ruling families, and these were all tiny polities. Early on, the Merovingians associated kingship with wearing uncut hair; this became a family privilege, and hair-cutting was an at least temporary ritual of deposition. The Merovingians also saw ruling as a sufficiently family affair for the Frankish lands at the king’s death to be regularly divided between his sons; they did this first at Clovis’s death in 511, again at the death of his last surviving son Chlotar I in 561, and again at the death of Dagobert I in 639, whose father Chlotar II had reunited the kingdoms by force in 613. All in all, there were only twenty-two years of Frankish unity between 511 and 679, when the by now weakened family was reduced to a single line. The political history of the period can easily be reduced to rivalries, and perennial wars, between competing Merovingians. This would make for dull reading; what follows focuses on some of the major figures.
The half-century after Clovis was marked by fighting between his sons, but also by external conquests; this was the period in which the Franks gained serious international recognition, particularly from the eastern Roman empire, for the first time, and it must have been the period in which people in Gaul and Germany realized that Merovingian rule was there to stay. The king who best encapsulates that is Theudebert I (533-48), king of the north-eastern Frankish kingdom based on the Rhineland, which held hegemony over central and southern Germany from there. It was probably Theudebert who set up the powerful Franco-Burgundian Agilolfing family as dukes of Bavaria, to act both as the core of a developing Bavarian identity, and as a long-standing sign of Frankish overlordship; and it was certainly Theudebert who took advantage of the Gothic war in Italy and intervened there systematically, for the first time but not the last. The Constantinopolitan historian Agathias in the 560s claimed he was even planning to attack the eastern capital, that is, that he was part of a line of ‘barbarian’ invaders going back to Alaric and Attila. Theudebert’s international pretensions were also expressed by minting gold coins with his name and portrait on: these are the first ‘barbarian’ coins to claim this imperial prerogative, and the east Romans were greatly offended. It is interesting that, although Theudebert ruled the sector of the Frankish lands where civilian Roman traditions were weakest, the idiom of his rule was so often expressed in Roman terms; the stories Gregory tells about him are frequently expressed in terms of his fiscal policies - a tax remission for Clermont, an unpopular decision to tax the Franks themselves, a large loan to Verdun to kick-start the city’s commerce after a time of trouble. But the openness of the Franks to Roman traditions and imagery was there from the start; bishops wrote admonitory letters to kings from the beginning of Clovis’s reign onwards, councils of bishops were regularly held in the north of Gaul after 511, and the kings in 566 welcomed the Italian poet Venantius Fortunatus to their courts to write them all impeccably Roman praise-poems, which he did for kings, queens, aristocrats and bishops (including Gregory of Tours) for three decades.
The next generation of Merovingian kings is the best documented, for their rule forms the core of Gregory’s work. Chilperic (561-84) and his infant son Chlotar II (584-629) in the north-west, Sigibert I and his son Childebert II in the north-east (Theudebert’s former kingdom), and Guntram (561-93) in Burgundy make up an agonistic set, with Chilperic portrayed as the worst of these kings and Guntram as the best (Sigibert and Childebert, even though they were Gregory’s most direct patrons, are less clearly characterized). Gregory disliked Chilperic because he saw him as tyrannous, hostile to the church, and the fomenter of civil war; Chilperic had the smallest kingdom with the fewest external boundaries, which partly explains the fact that he fought his brothers, and he also conquered Tours and backed Gregory’s local rivals. Guntram’s virtues are, conversely, particularly stressed by Gregory after 584; he was then the only adult Merovingian king left alive, and he acted as patron to his two young nephews (the wars between them notably quietened down after a treaty in 587), alongside their queen-regent mothers, Brunhild for Childebert and Fredegund, Gregory’s other main enemy, for Chlotar. Gregory knew both kings well; his accounts of his meetings with Guntram are affectionate, but he was very formal and wary with Chilperic, who threatened him (Gregory threatened back). But what is really most striking about the kings is their similarity: they were all prone to violent anger (leading to injustice and cruelty) and equally violent repentance; they constantly sparred, taking city-territories from each other like chess pieces. And they cooperated when they had to, including against a claimant to the throne, Gundovald, who said he was Guntram’s brother and who gained quite a lot of support from aristocrats who were on the losing sides in court faction-fighting, in 583-5.
The swirl of war and faction is encapsulated in the Rauching conspiracy of 589 which we started with, and this shows us the importance of the detail of court politics. By now it is clear that the royal courts, and their ruling kings and queens, were the foci for the rivalry of powerful aristocrats, who constantly sought office, at court or as the dukes (army leaders with a regional remit) of each kingdom. Kings when adult could dominate these factions, and had no scruples about killing losers, often in unpleasant ways. Queens-regent for younger kings often had a more difficult time of it, and both Brunhild and Fredegund had periods of considerable marginality when their sons were small. They were not respected as much as kings, and when they resorted to violence to make their point they were often met not so much by fear as by resentment; every powerful queen had at least one hostile chronicler. Royal wives during their husbands’ lifetimes had less power; for one thing, Merovingian kings frequently had several wives and concubines at once, who manoeuvred for the succession of their own sons. But the importance of Merovingian legitimacy was by now so great that royal mothers were allowed a substantial political space, even when their children were grown; nor did their social origins matter (Brunhild was a princess, but a Visigoth; Fredegund was of non-aristocratic birth). Brunhild built on this after Gregory’s Histories end in 591, for she remained influential throughout Childebert’s life, and then was regent for his two young sons after his death in 596, particularly Theuderic II in Burgundy, and even, briefly, for her great-grandson in 613. If Guntram dominated politics in 584-93, Brunhild did in 593-613: on and off, perhaps, but sometimes in effective control of virtually the whole Frankish world.
By 613, the seventy-year-old Brunhild had made too many enemies, particularly in the north-eastern kingdom, now known as Austrasia, which she had just taken back by force. Chlotar II, who had hitherto been confined to relatively few city-territories in Neustria, the north-west, got an aristocratic coalition together and overthrew Brunhild. He had her torn to pieces by a horse in public, in an act clearly designed to mark a new beginning, and he and his son Dagobert I (623-39) ruled a more or less unitary kingdom for a generation. Chlotar maintained the three courts of the previous period, however, as the foci for aristocratic politics, particularly Neustria and Austrasia (Burgundy tended to go with Neustria). These courts sometimes had sub-kings (as Dagobert was in Austrasia in 623-9, before his father’s death), but they also now each had a single aristocratic leader, a maior domus, ‘leader of the household’ (‘mayor of the palace’ is the traditional English translation). Aristocratic rivalries began to concentrate on obtaining the position ofmaior, or else on using that position to overthrow rivals, as with the confrontation between the maior Flaochad of Burgundy and the patricius Willibad in 643, a small war in which they both died; the events were written up dramatically in Gregory’s continuator, called by modern historians Fredegar, around 660. These rivalries became sharper after 639, when Dagobert was succeeded by children, Sigibert III (632-56) in Austrasia and Clovis II (639-57) in Neustria; both of the latter were succeeded by children too. It became ever more important to be a maior under these circumstances, and there was also often a clash between the maior and the queen-regent, who remained a powerful force in this period. The classic example of this is the stand-off between Balthild, regent for her and Clovis II’s sons in 657-65, and the Neustrian maior Ebroin (659-80, with interruptions); this is well documented above all because Balthild was forced into a monastery at Chelles near Paris in 664-5, and a saint’s life was written about her. By now, in fact, saints’ lives are our major sources for high politics, for many saints were aristocratic (see below, Chapter 8); this also means that the continuing violence of politics, already stressed by Gregory, was even more emphasized by writers for moralistic purposes.
The seventh century was a turning point for Merovingian royal power: by the early eighth, real authority was in the hands of maiores, who were after 687 almost all from a single Austrasian family, the Arnulfings-Pippinids, descended from two of the major Austrasian supporters of Chlotar II, Arnulf bishop of Metz and Pippin (I) of Landen. Historians have therefore devoted considerable attention to determining when it was that the Merovingians began to lose control: was it in 639, with the death of Dagobert? Or was it earlier, or later? An older generation of historians thought that Chlotar II marked the moment of change, arguing that he gave away too much to gain aristocratic support; he does seem, indeed, to have restricted his own taxation powers substantially, as we shall see, even if it is no longer thought that he also conceded local judicial power to the aristocracy. But Chlotar and Dagobert’s centrality is by now rarely doubted, and more recent historians have gone the other way, arguing that even late seventh-century kings like Childeric II (662-75) and Childebert III (694-711) had a good deal of power, at least once they gained adulthood, and that the royal courts never lost the importance for aristocratic politics that they had unarguably had a century earlier. This may indeed have been the case, in particular for Childeric II. But royal hegemony was not as automatic as it had been. Fredegar tells us with some gusto of Chlotar II’s killing of Godin, son of the Burgundian maior Warnachar, around 626, even after Godin had been persuaded to do a pilgrimage around the holy places of Gaul to swear loyalty, and the Liber Historiae Francorum is keen to recount the death by torture of the maior Grimoald, son of Pippin of Landen, on Clovis II’s orders in 657. But when Childeric had an aristocrat called Bodilo bound and beaten in 674, small beer for an earlier king, this was regarded as illegal behaviour, and Bodilo himself apparently had the king and queen killed in 675, precipitating a major crisis.
It seems to me that the late seventh century does indeed mark a considerable diminution of a specifically royal centrality. Perhaps the turning point was less Dagobert’s death than those of his sons, for the dominance of maiores over the courts became routinized once it was clearly going to last for another generation, and renewed royal protagonism under Childeric II would be more resented. It was, anyway, after the death of Dagobert’s sons that maiores began for the first time not only to control kings but to choose them. Grimoald, as maior of Austrasia (641-57), exiled Sigibert III’s son Dagobert to Ireland, and had his own son Childebert made king instead (656-62?); Childebert was Sigibert’s adopted son, so Merovingian paternity was theoretically maintained. This odd and ill-documented affair ended badly for Grimoald, who was killed as a direct result, although Childebert somehow seems to have lasted a few years more. Later, at Childeric II’s death, Ebroin did the same, temporarily inventing a king in Austrasia to keep his hand in during that political crisis, before switching his support to the new Neustrian king Theuderic III (so says, at least, the saint’s life of his bitter enemy and victim, Leudegar bishop of Autun). Seen from this standpoint, Childeric II’s politics seem even more atypical by now. Kings still had a role as a rallying point for aristocratic factions, and their courts remained central to aristocratic political aspirations, but maiores and political bishops had become the major protagonists. Ebroin dominated his time, but he was always a controversial figure, and he did not establish a stable regime for himself. Pippin II in Austrasia was cannier; he was Grimoald’s nephew, and his family was eclipsed for two decades, but it remained very rich and influential around Liege on the Meuse, and by the late 670s he was maior in Austrasia again. In 687 the Austrasians defeated the Neustrians at the battle of Tertry, and Pippin became maior for all the Frankish lands. Pippin II lived to 714, and the civil disturbances of the thirty years after 656 ended at Tertry, although Neustria and Austrasia remained separate. That did not change until a briefer civil war, in 715-19, which pitched Pippin’s probably illegitimate son Charles (Martel) against his widow Plectrude, with Neustrian anti-Pippinids as a third force contending with them both. Charles defeated them all, and established himself as sole maior (717-41), with a firmly Austrasian base. The Neustrian court was abolished; Charles Martel became the only focus of rule, and his heirs, the Carolingians, would remain so for a long time. Charles’s victory in 719 thus changed the political scene much more completely than Pippin II did in 687, perhaps even more completely than Chlotar II had done in 613.
Another respect in which the later seventh century saw a real involution of Merovingian authority was its geographical scale. The wide hegemony of the sixth-century kings was still there under Dagobert I, who fought a war in 631-4 against Samo, a king who for a time united the Wends, Sclavenian tribes (see Chapter 20), in or around what is now the Czech Republic. Dagobert called Thuringians, Bavarians and even Lombards from Italy to fight for him there; he also legislated for the peoples east of the Rhine, and appointed bishops there too. But at his death Radulf duke of Thuringia revolted and established autonomy; and across the next generation both Bavaria and Alemannia slipped out of effective Frankish control. More striking still was Aquitaine: this was part of the core Frankish lands, and had in the sixth century been divided between the northern kings, but Dagobert in 629 briefly made his half-brother Charibert II (629-32) king of part of Aquitaine, and by the 650s it had a separate duke. In the political crisis of 675, Duke Lupus seems to have claimed royal status, and in the eighth century Duke Eudo (d. 735) was clearly an autonomous ally of Charles Martel; full-scale war was needed in the 760s to bring this large and rich region fully back into the Frankish fold. War was in fact in general needed to establish Carolingian control over the whole area of traditional Frankish hegemony in the eighth century; the peripheral principalities were keener on Merovingian legitimism than on Charles’s new political structure, and Charles found several quasi-autonomous princes even in his core lands whom he had to subdue by force, as well as, further south in Provence, the patricius Antenor and then the dux Maurontus, whom Charles fought in the 730s. Charles had a large central territory in Neustria, Austrasia and northern Burgundy which still looked to the court, and which he could draw on for the continuous border wars that marked his rule and that of his successors, but it was not until his sons took over Alemannia in 746 and then Aquitaine, and until his grandson Charlemagne took over Bavaria in 788-94, that Dagobert’s hegemony was re-established, in rather more solid form by now. This geographical retreat is a marker of the fact that the instability of the post-Dagobert generations did indeed do harm to Frankish authority. The later seventh century also saw a retreat in the internal activities of rulers, as we shall see at the end of this chapter.
The lasting importance of the Merovingian royal courts was in large part due to the huge wealth that every king or maior could dispose of. Kings owned very large tracts of land; they had access to commercial tolls and judicial fines. They also for long controlled the surviving elements of the Roman land tax. These are described (and complained about) by Gregory of Tours, and they seem to have been most firmly rooted in the south-west, the Loire valley and Aquitaine. Even in Gregory’s time, as noted in Chapter 4, the tax system was not very systematically maintained: registers could go without updating for a generation, tax levels were far lower than under Rome, and royal cessions of tax immunity to whole city territories were beginning. Indeed, an organic fiscal structure of a Roman type could not still have existed if kings moved cities between each other so easily. By the mid-seventh century tax liabilities seem to have become fixed tributes, taken from smaller and smaller areas. In the north, this process may well have started earlier, and Chlotar II formally renounced the right to new taxes in 614; by 626-7 a church council at Clichy near Paris regarded taxpayers as an inferior category, to be excluded from the ranks of the clergy. It is likely that the tax system had already decayed so much that Chlotar could regard it as worth abandoning, for political effect; it only survived regionally after that (it is documented in the Loire valley into the 720s at least). This does not seem to have done Chlotar any harm, all the same; the vast landed resources of the Merovingians continued into the Carolingian period. The major immediate consequence may simply have been the sharp drop in the gold content of Merovingian coins, first visible around 640. The Merovingians could let tax lapse because they did not pay their army, which was by now based on the military obligations of the free: it was above all made up of aristocrats and their entourages, and also of contingents from city territories led by local counts. Their incomings were thus far greater than their structural outgoings, even after Chlotar’s reign, never mind before. The thesaurus, the treasure, of each king was enormous, and functioned above all as a resource for gifts to courtiers. Courts under powerful kings, queens and maiores were where any ambitious aristocrat might want to be in order to gain preferment and land, but, even when rulers were personally weak, the attraction of the thesaurus kept courts at the centre of political life. Every account of a coup against a king or an uprising by a rival in the seventh century hangs on the seizing of a thesaurus: it was the essential basis for gaining aristocratic support. Charles Martel still did this in the civil war of 715-19; the parameters of politics did not change here at all.
Merovingian government was quite complex; written records of royal orders were regularly made and archived (bishops and cities, and perhaps aristocrats, had archives too), quite apart from the more standard maintenance of tax accounts (until the late seventh century at least) and judicial records. The late seventh-century formulary of Marculf, a collection of templates for documents, preserves forty sample royal documents for copying. Among other matters, they concern the appointment of bishops and counts, the feeding of royal messengers, the confirmation of a marriage agreement, the division of private property, the demand that seized property be returned, a summons to a presumed robber, and the demand that all ‘Franks and Romans’ should swear fidelity to the king’s heir. When documents themselves begin to survive, either as originals or in later cartularies (which is above all from Chlotar II’s reign onwards), they show kings doing most of these things as well: besides cessions of land and court records, which are the main currency of all document collections in the early Middle Ages, Chlotar II confirmed the will of a Parisian merchant called John; Dagobert in 626 sent one of his courtiers to divide the land in the Limousin of one of the main aristocratic families of the period; Sigibert III in 644 wrote formally to his southern bishops to cancel a church council because he had not been informed of it; Theuderic III in 677 expelled the bishop of Embrun in the Alps for infidelity, though allowing him to keep his property; and so on. These show a dense set of relationships between kings and their secular and ecclesiastical magnates (even if seldom anyone else), as well as the fact that these relationships were systematically recorded.
Royal courts had, among other officials, referendarii, who supervised the production of documents, domestici, who were household administrators with a variety of roles, thesaurarii, who were financial officials, all of them presumably answering in some way to the maior domus. These positions also meant access to the ruler, and their holders were important political mediators as well: for the patronage networks of the Roman empire had their close analogues in the Frankish kingdoms. Being a conviva regis, that is to say having the right to eat with the king, was indeed a formal title, with privileges attached. German historians call this access Königsnähe, ‘closeness to the king’, a useful concept, with relevance both in this period and later. We must see royal courts as a permanent bustle: of greater aristocrats seeking Königsnähe and office, local élites seeking favours, abbots and bishops, among others, seeking justice in legal disputes, and everyone seeking gifts of land and money. Bishop Praejectus of Clermont had to go to Childeric II’s Austrasian court in 675 to defend a land dispute against Hector, patricius of Provence. Hector, himself a very powerful magnate, had enlisted the support of Leudegar, bishop of Autun, who was one of the king’s main advisers; Praejectus accordingly sought the patronage of Leudegar’s opponent, Childeric’s mother-in-law Chimnechild, who was also the widow of his uncle Sigibert III. Despite this shrewd move, Praejectus was an apparently unworldly figure; he refused to plead because it was Easter Saturday, and he only won his case because palace politics caused Hector and Leudegar to flee the court. (Hector was killed, Leudegar exiled; Praejectus was killed a year later, in the context of the crisis after Childeric’s death, probably by Hector’s allies.) But courts welcomed the unworldly as well as the worldly, together with ambassadors from abroad, preachers (such as Columbanus the Irish ascetic and monastic founder, d. 615, who had to flee Theuderic II’s court in 609 because he had denounced him for immorality), and beggars. To the average local notable, engaged in city-level politics over who was to be the next bishop, a royal court must have represented the same sort of temptation that Las Vegas represents to poker-players: in this case, almost limitless wealth and power for winners, inventive death for losers.
Kings were more widely visible than this may imply, too. There seems to have been an annual assembly for the king and his armed Frankish people in the spring; Childebert II’s laws from the 590s were promulgated on 1 March, for example. It was at this assembly that decisions were made to go to war, which were not entirely under royal control: Chlotar I in 556 was forced against his will by the Rhineland Franks to fight the Saxons, for example, according to Gregory (he lost). Exactly who came to such assemblies is not easy to tell; members of the king’s armed entourage, for certain (called leudes or antrustiones), who were largely from the élite; dukes and counts and their own followings, too. Whether there was a wider participation of free Franks of lesser status cannot easily be said; one has a sense that this was more a feature of the sixth century than the seventh. But the large-scale gathering together in assemblies of the politically active sections of society was a frequent event. It marked the accession of kings; Ebroin did not call an assembly of aristocrats in 673 to mark the accession of Theuderic III in Neustria, which led them to conclude that Ebroin intended to rule without consent, so they recognized Childeric II of Austrasia instead. And legal disputes were resolved in front of assemblies, placita, everywhere; they gave legitimacy to all such decisions. These gatherings represented a link between kings and their Frankish people which extended well beyond the habitual visitors to royal palaces and courts, even if it did not include many peasants. It should be repeated that the word ‘Frankish’ quickly ceased to have an exclusive ethnic connotation. North of the Loire, everyone seems to have been considered a Frank by the mid-seventh century at the latest; Romani were essentially the inhabitants of Aquitaine after that.
The Frankish attitude to legislation was more muted. Clovis’s basic Salic law, the Pactus Legis Salicae, for the ‘Salian’ (north-western) Franks, is unique among ‘barbarian’ law codes in that it does not actually mention a king, only a set of four mythical judgement-makers; and the idea of a grass-roots law-making persisted in the rachineburgii of local communities who were asked to ‘speak the Salic law’ at moments of conflict; indeed, it has been noted that the provisions of ‘Salic law’ that are cited in documents do not in most cases even appear in the Pactus. Clovis’s successors did legislate, but not often, and the collected laws of the period 511-614 (after which they ceased) only make up twenty-three pages of the standard edition. This aspect of traditional late Roman - and Romano-Germanic - politics was not taken up much in Francia in this period, then. All in all, the Merovingian kings seem to have preferred a relatively low-key ideological presence. Church councils existed (again, more in the sixth than the seventh centuries), but their surviving records mostly deal with internal church affairs, except under Chlotar II and his immediate successors. Royal morality was bound up with doing justice in public, certainly (this image recurs for kings like Dagobert, just as injustice is associated with Chilperic by Gregory of Tours), but not with changing the behaviour of their subjects. We lack the image of the king as a systematic political and moral reformer that is so much a feature of Visigothic Spain and indeed Carolingian-period Francia, as we shall see in later chapters.
Kings were surrounded by aristocrats, who hoped for advantage; but aristocrats were themselves strikingly rich. The private wills we have for the Merovingian period show several people in possession of more than seventy-five estates; no equivalent property collections are known anywhere in the early Middle Ages outside Francia, and such owners, Bishop Bertram of Le Mans (d. after 616), Bishop Desiderius of Cahors (d. 650), patricius Abbo of Provence (d. c. 750), would only have been outstripped by the richest late Roman senators. The Pippinids, too, must have owned on at least this scale; and so also, above all, must the Agilolfings, the most powerful and wide-ranging aristocratic clan of the early seventh century, who owned land and founded monasteries around Meaux just east of Paris (the powerful Audoin, bishop of Rouen, d. 680, was linked to them), but also owned in the Rhineland, ruled in Bavaria, and even furnished the longest-lasting line of Lombard kings of Italy from 653 to 712. The Paris region, in particular, as we can see from the seventh-century Saint-Denis charters, was full of the properties not only of the Neustrian king, who was based there, but also of his principal aristocrats; the rivalries that ensued may explain some of the tenseness of Neustrian politics, particularly in Ebroin’s time, and also maybe back to Chilperic a century earlier. But throughout Francia the simple fact that major aristocrats could be hugely rich meant that politics would be more violent, for all secular aristocratic identity was military by now - even career administrators at court were regarded as having obligations to fight, and dressed in military fashion, with an elaborate belt of office - and what landed wealth could buy above all was an armed entourage, to make one’s ambition more clearly marked. It was the existence of such entourages that underpins the faction-fighting of, in particular, the later seventh century, but going back to Rauching and Ursio and earlier still. This aristocratic wealth is clearly visible in Gregory’s narratives and in seventh-century documents. In the south of Gaul, it had antecedents going back to the late empire, and some of the great late Roman families can be traced into the seventh century, in one case (the descendants of the emperor Avitus and of Sidonius Apollinaris) up to 700 and beyond. In the north, the evidence is less clear, but the balance of probabilities argues for at least some major families, whether Frankish or Roman (in the north the distinction was never great), surviving right through the confusion of the pre-Clovis period and the killings of rivals which accompanied the creation of Clovis’s united kingdom, into the world described by Gregory.
We shall look at aristocratic lifestyles in greater detail in Chapter 8, but the boisterous factional politics visible in Merovingian sources has some other implications. The first is that, early on, political ambition was seen as an aristocratic prerogative. Gregory did, still, confront some counts of low-born origin, like Leudast of Tours (d. 583), a Chilperic supporter and his own opponent; but by the mid-seventh century none can be seen. Even bishops, who did still include some people of relatively modest birth, like Eligius of Noyon (d. 660) or Praejectus of Clermont, were overwhelmingly aristocratic, and indeed increasingly often led a fully military lifestyle, including army leadership in some cases.
A second point is that politico-religious practice, as it affected the aristocracy, changed somewhat in the seventh century. Columbanus was the first important impresario of monasticism in the northern Merovingian heartland, and, after Chlotar’s reunification, kings, queens and aristocrats all founded monasteries, usually following the traditions of the main Columbanian monastery in Burgundy, Luxeuil. The shrine of Saint-Denis just outside Paris was also heavily patronized by Dagobert, who was buried there, as were most of his successors; Saint-Denis and the other major cult-centres of Gaul were turned into monasteries by Balthild around 660. Monasteries were closely associated with their founders and their families, and less dependent on the bishops in whose dioceses they lay; they marked a political and religious practice more clearly linked to aristocratic and royal identities and family strategies, which cut across diocesan boundaries. The church in the seventh century thus became more of a resource for factional rivalries, and contributes to our knowledge of them, too, for most of our Merovingian documents and saints’ lives are products of monastic archives and religious commemoration. Monastic patronage also contributed to a growing sense that the aristocracy was somehow religiously special; even sanctity took on an aristocratic tinge in many of our surviving lives. This fits with the steady aristocratic takeover of episcopal office, too, although bishops and monasteries were often in conflict.
A final crucial point is that aristocrats were overwhelmingly committed to the Merovingian political system. They had for the most part rural residences, and rural monastic religious centres too, but these were not real power centres in the sense that aristocrats sought to control their local areas as de facto local rulers. Indeed, although the surviving wills tend to show concentrations of estates in most cases, Desiderius of Cahors owning land around Cahors and neighbouring Albi for example, they shared their local territories with others, and most of the greatest owners also had outlying properties, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away. This was very different from the castle-based local aristocracy of the tenth century and onwards (see below, Chapter 21), and indeed, as we saw, Ursio’s main centre was not even fortified. Unfortunately, few or no élite residences from this period have been excavated, but the rest of our written documentation confirms that picture. Power was not local, and did not have to be defended by walls; it was seen as royal. That is to say, it came from office or from Königsnähe, and preferably both. All great landowners aimed at these, or at their ecclesiastical equivalents; their wealth and armed men were focused on these, not on local autonomy and domination. The most one can say is that some office-holders in the late seventh century were going their own way, in the period of royal involution. The outlying dukes and the patricius of Provence were instances, marking a general geographical fragmentation, as already noted; in the central Frankish lands, we might add the dukes of Alsace, for early eighth-century documents for Alsace conspicuously do not mention kings, until the ducal family was removed or died out around 740. Bishops, too, whose political remit was essentially their dioceses, sometimes developed local autonomies (‘episcopal republics’ in Eugen Ewig’s words) which Charles Martel and his sons had to move against, as in the case of Eucherius of Orléans (d. 738). But these were a minority, at least in the core Frankish lands; most aristocrats remained as focused on and as defined by court politics in the age of Ebroin, Pippin II and Charles Martel as they had been before.
It is not that local politics did not matter at all. The cities described by Gregory of Tours and in some of the seventh-century saints’ lives, particularly in southern Gaul, seem to have had an active factional politics, focused on obtaining the offices of either bishop or count. That of Clermont is particularly well documented. Counts were royal appointees, but they tended to be local men; they ran the armies and law courts of city territories. Bishops were even more often of local origin, and could face trouble if they were not - as Gregory did in Tours, even though his predecessor was his uncle, for he was brought up in Clermont, and some people saw him as really from there. Episcopal choices were generally made by local élites and neighbouring bishops, as in Sidonius’ time, but by Gregory’s time and onwards the king had the last word, and could (as in Gregory’s own case) select his own candidate: bishops had the task of representing their cities politically, and so it mattered to kings who they were. In a sense, though, counts were most responsive to kings, and bishops were most responsive to their dioceses. Bishops who threw themselves too fully into central-government politics could be unpopular; Arnulf of Metz was nearly removed by his flock for spending too much time at the palace, and when Leudegar of Autun was finally destroyed by Ebroin in 676-8 it is clear that he got little support from Autun itself. These local communities were, nonetheless, connected to court politics by innumerable channels: kinship, marriage, patronage linked them to other communities and to the ambitions of the more powerful, and all bishops and counts had to go to royal courts, and deal with court politics, on a regular basis. ‘Episcopal republics’ were all the weaker for being isolated from that network.
A particularly good example of this balance between central and local politics is Desiderius of Cahors, for we have not only a saint’s life for him but also his letter collection; his experiences sum up much of the foregoing. Desiderius was a member of the remarkable set of administrators educated and trained in the court of Chlotar II and Dagobert I, along with, among others, Audoin of Rouen, who had been Dagobert’s referendarius before he became a bishop in 641, and Eligius of Noyon, made bishop in the same year, who had been Dagobert’s main financial official (we even have some of his coins). Desiderius himself, slightly older, had been thesaurarius for Chlotar, and later patricius of Provence, before returning to Cahors as bishop in 630. This talented group of men were friends, and, as Desiderius’ letters show, stayed so. Audoin and Eligius were bishops of sees close to the royal palaces of Neustria; Desiderius was not, and one gets a sense from the nostalgia of some of the letters that he felt rather cut off from the buzz of politics, for Cahors is more than 600 kilometres south of Paris and Metz. He was not so very isolated, all the same; we have patronage recommendations from the 640s to the maior of Austrasia, Grimoald, and to Arnulf of Metz’s son, and a letter from Sigibert III agreeing to some of Desiderius’ requests. The fact is that all these episcopal appointments, particularly well documented in this period but with plenty of parallels before and after, spread a court consciousness and a court culture across the whole of Frankish Gaul, as Dagobert surely knew. Desiderius got letters from his informants which told him exactly where the king was: he has moved from Verdun to Reims, then he will go to Laon then back to the Rhineland; he is now in Mainz - the bishop needed this constantly changing information, from hundreds of kilometres away, so as to keep abreast of affairs. And he did so even though he was from one of Cahors’ major families (he succeeded his brother as bishop), with huge local wealth, and devoted his later life to the city, repairing its water supply, building big stone buildings, defending episcopal lands against other local bishops, and helping along its citizens, not least in the king’s court. Desiderius was all the more effective in being a bishop because his heart was still at court, and all the more effective an ambassador for royal centrality because his wealth and office was in the south. Those were Merovingian norms, and they held the kingdoms together.
The troubles of the late seventh century shook this organic pattern, as we have already seen; the Merovingians lost their centrality as political actors between around 655 and 675, and, although their courts remained strong foci for political action, outlying principalities gained practical autonomy, and some other dukes and bishops looked less to Merovingian or Pippinid patronage. The period of instability stopped with Tertry in 687; but it is actually the period of Pippin II that may have seen the lowest level of royal, or, by now, mayoral protagonism. It is striking that the documentation for capillary royal actions of the type listed in Marculf’s formulary runs out in the late 670s; later royal or mayoral documents are restricted to the confirmations of rights, and to judicialplacita. No proceedings survive from any church councils between 675 and 742, either. It seems that Pippin’s regime was less organizationally ambitious than those of his predecessors, including Ebroin and Childeric II. This may indeed have contributed to the decisions by some political leaders to deal in local or regional rather than court politics more than they had done before, even in the period of the civil wars. But this localization had not got very far by the time of Charles Martel’s reunification. Charles did not reverse the relative inaction of central government just described - that was for the next Carolingian generation - but his overthrow of so many members of an older regime and, above all, the annual aggregation of aristocrats to take part in his wars, the most committed and consistent military mobilization in Francia since the sixth century, reversed any temptation to localization. Nor had it been so very hard; the Frankish political system, even if at times ramshackle, was not yet in poor shape.