The Merovingian Franks

Introduction

The Merovingian kingdom was the most successful of the post-Roman states of the West. Founded in the late fifth century by a chieftain of the Salian Franks named Clovis, the dynasty ruled large parts of Gaul for nearly three hundred years, converted to Catholic Christianity within a generation of its founding, and bequeathed to its Carolingian successors a political inheritance so substantial that the new dynasty ruled in their place from 751 until well past the year 900. To understand the Merovingians is to understand the political and religious preconditions of the medieval West.

Origins and the Rise of Clovis

The Franks were a confederation of Germanic peoples — Salian, Ripuarian, Chamavi, and others — who had lived along the lower Rhine and the North Sea coast for centuries. From the third century they had served the Roman empire as allies, federates, and freebooting raiders, and by the early fifth century they had begun to settle in significant numbers in the northern provinces of Belgica and Germania Secunda. The Latin sources describe them as pagans, as skilled horsemen, and as politically fragmented into numerous petty kingdoms (regna) governed by long-haired kings drawn from a warrior aristocracy.

The decisive moment was the reign of Clovis (r. c. 481–511). Clovis inherited the small kingdom of Tournai from his father Childeric and within thirty years had united the Frankish peoples, defeated the last Roman governor of Gaul at the Battle of Soissons in 486, killed the rival Frankish king Ragnachar in 486, and broken the political power of the Alemanni, the Burgundians, and — by 507 — the Visigoths, whom he expelled from Aquitaine at the Battle of Vouillé. The political map of Gaul was, by his death in 511, almost entirely Frankish. The kingdom he left was divided among his four sons in the Frankish custom of partible inheritance, and would be divided and recombined many times over the following two centuries.

Conversion to Catholic Christianity

Clovis’s most consequential act was his conversion to Catholic Christianity, traditionally dated around 496–508 (most scholars favor 496 or 499, though the exact circumstances are debated). The story, told by Gregory of Tours a century later, is that Clovis, on the eve of the battle of Tolbiac against the Alemanni, called on the Christian God for victory and was so moved by his success that he accepted baptism, together with three thousand of his warriors, at Reims, traditionally on Christmas Day 496.

The historicity of the details is less important than the political significance. The Merovingians, alone among the major Germanic ruling dynasties of the fifth century, chose to be Catholic rather than Arian. This gave them the active cooperation of the Gallo-Roman episcopate and the Latin Christian population, who had been wary of Arian masters since the original Germanic settlements of the previous century. It set the Merovingian kingdom on a different path from the Visigothic, Ostrogothic, and Vandal kingdoms, all of which remained Arian for several more generations. The decision was to prove strategically important, especially in the seventh century, when the bishops of Gaul and the bishops of Rome repeatedly looked to the Frankish king for protection against Lombard, Arian, and pagan neighbors.

The Merovingian State

The Merovingian kingdom was, in its broad outlines, a successor to the Roman empire. Clovis and his successors inherited the basic Roman provincial framework, kept Roman cities as the seats of bishops, and continued to issue royal diplomas on Roman models. They did not, however, build a centralized bureaucratic state on the Roman pattern. The king ruled through a network of grafiones (counts, from the Latin graphio) appointed to the old Roman cities, and through a more diffuse class of royal agents, royal antrustiones (the sworn bodyguard who enjoyed triple the normal wergeld), and the leaders of the great landowning aristocratic families. Royal justice was itinerant: the king and his court moved from estate to estate, and great assemblies, the placita or mallus, were held in different places several times a year.

The legal system of the Merovingian kingdom was a hybrid. The Romanized populations of the south continued to live under a simplified version of Roman law, eventually codified for the Franks themselves in the Lex Salica (Salic Law) attributed to Clovis, and supplemented by codes for the Ripuarian Franks, the Burgundians, and the Alemanni. The Merovingians also issued a large body of royal legislation, much of it preserved in the formularies of Marculf and other eighth-century collections, dealing with church property, ecclesiastical immunities, judicial procedure, and the rights of the poor. The blend of Roman, Germanic, and Christian law would set the pattern for medieval legal thought in the West.

The Merovingian state was sustained, in significant part, by the wealth of the Frankish church. Bishops and abbots were substantial landowners; their estates provided food, draft animals, hospitality, and tax revenues for royal progresses. The kings in turn endowed the church and protected its property, but also used it as an extension of royal government: the bishop was often the most literate and the most diplomatically active man in his city, and a royal council would normally include several bishops alongside the lay nobility. The most politically active of these prelates — Desiderius of Vienne, Praetextatus of Rouen, Aunemund of Lyon — could sometimes dictate policy to kings, and sometimes paid for their influence with exile or death.

The Mayors of the Palace and the Rise of the Carolingians

The Merovingian kingdom was structurally prone to division. The Frankish custom of partible inheritance meant that the realm was, almost by default, partitioned among the king’s sons at his death, and then reunited or re-divided by warfare, assassination, and negotiation. By the late sixth century, the four great sub-kingdoms of Austrasia (the northeast), Neustria (the northwest), Burgundy, and Aquitaine were each governed by their own line of Merovingian kings, and the imperial title of rex Francorum had become almost honorific.

Real power drifted to the maior palatii, the chief officer of each royal household. In Austrasia, the Arnulfing and Pippinid families came to dominate the office, and their growing power was finally expressed in 687 when Pippin of Herstal, mayor of Austrasia, defeated the Neustrian mayor at the Battle of Tertry and established a single, Austrasian-dominated control of the Frankish heartland. Pippin’s grandson, Charles Martel, consolidated this power in the 720s and 730s, and his son, Pippin the Short, was crowned king by the pope in 751, deposing the last Merovingian king Childeric III and ending the dynasty that had ruled Gaul for nearly three centuries.

Religion and Culture

The Merovingian centuries saw a slow and often violent Christianization of the Frankish heartland. The Lex Salica and the other law codes are full of pagan survivals, and the bishops of the late sixth and seventh centuries still complained of rural populations practicing traditional cults of trees, springs, and stones. The Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries of the sixth and seventh centuries — Columbanus, Columban, Willibrord, and others — established monasteries in Burgundy, Austrasia, and Frisia that became centers of Christian learning and rural conversion. The synods of the period, especially the reforming councils of the 740s, the 750s, and the 760s associated with Boniface, imposed Roman forms of liturgy, scripture, and clerical discipline on the Frankish church.

The most extraordinary literary product of Merovingian Gaul is the History of the Franks by Gregory, bishop of Tours (r. 573–594), one of the most important narrative sources for the period. Gregory’s ten books, written in a late and simple Latin, are full of miracles, saints’ lives, political maneuvering, and the most appalling violence, and have been called by one modern historian “a masterpiece of grotesque”. Other important Merovingian authors include Venantius Fortunatus, the Italian poet who became bishop of Poitiers; Fredegar, whose chronicle covers the seventh century; and the anonymous authors of the great hagiographic vitae of Columbanus, Eligius, and Amandus.

The Enduring Significance

The Merovingian kingdom was, in the end, a Roman kingdom. It inherited Roman geography, Roman administrative categories, Roman law, and, decisively, the Roman Christian church. The bishops and counts of the Merovingian era were the same people, often literally, as the bishops and counts of the late Roman period; the conversion of the kings to Catholic Christianity gave the dynasty access to the resources of a Latin Christian civilization that no Arian Germanic dynasty could command. The political failure of the later Merovingians — their inability to control the great noble families, their murderous succession crises, their loss of fiscal and military control of the periphery — was the failure of an early medieval monarchy, not the failure of the civilization it inherited. When the last Merovingian was deposed in 751, the new Carolingian kings found a kingdom that was, in many of its essential features, already medieval.

Merovingian Society and Economy

The society that the Merovingian kings governed was overwhelmingly rural. The great estates of the Gallo-Roman senatorial class had survived the political upheavals of the fifth century, often under the same family names; to these the new Frankish aristocracy added their own fisc, the lands of the king, which were cultivated by coloni, slaves, and free tenants. The village of the early Middle Ages was, in many of its material features, the village of late antiquity: timber houses, the same grain crops and the same two-ox plow, the same Mediterranean imports restricted to a thin layer of the wealthy.

The sixth century saw a dramatic rise in the population of Gaul — a sign of recovery from the late Roman plagues and migrations — and a corresponding expansion of cultivated land. New settlements were carved out of the forests of the Massif Central, the Ardennes, and the central German uplands. Many of these settlements took their names from their Frankish founders and survive in the modern French toponymy: Villefranche, Franchevelle, Frênes. Coin circulation, which had been in steep decline in the fifth century, revived from the reign of Theodebert I (533–548) and produced a distinctive series of gold trientes and solidi that remained in use for the rest of the Merovingian period. Long-distance trade, especially in wine, oil, and Mediterranean pottery, continued to flow through the ports of Marseille, Bordeaux, and the Rhône valley.

The Queens of the Merovingians

A distinctive feature of Merovingian political life was the unusually prominent role of royal women. Queen Clotilde, the Christian Burgundian princess who according to tradition persuaded Clovis to convert, became a model for later Merovingian queens as a builder of churches, monasteries, and political alliances. Queen Radegund (d. 587), a Thuringian princess taken into Clovis’s household, founded the monastery of the Holy Cross in Poitiers and corresponded with the bishops of her time. Queens of the seventh century — Balthild, the Anglo-Saxon wife of Clovis II; Fredegund and Brunhild, the long-feuding wives of Chilperic and Sigebert; Plectrude, the wife of Pippin of Herstal — exercised political and territorial power on a scale rare in any early medieval dynasty. The exclusion of women from the royal succession in the new Carolingian order of 751 was, in part, a reaction against the political weight of the Merovingian queen.