Brunhilda

 Nobody names their daughter Brunhilda anymore.  Yet the name is familiar, perhaps as the cartoon witch "Broomhilda," or more likely a fat lady opera singer in a winged Viking helmet wailing away in some parody of Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelungen."

 

 

But the real Brunhilda was a formidable personage, a queen of Francia in the early Middle Ages who not only ruled beside her husband but was regent for her son, grandson, and great-grandson over the following decades.  She became a symbol of great cruelty (at least to her enemies) and was said to have been responsible for the deaths of ten Frankish kings and lots of ordinary folks.

Brunhilda was a Visigothic princess, growing up in the sixth century in what is now Spain. At that time Spain was Christian (this predates the rise of Islam), but Arian Christian, that is Arians did not believe in the Trinity.  There was only one God, they believed, and Jesus was divinely inspired but not God Himself.  However, in 567 Brunhilda married Sigibert, king of Burgundy and Austrasia (that is, the eastern part of what's now France, going into Switzerland) and converted to trinitarian (Catholic) Christianity, her new husband's religion.

Marrying a princess was a new experience for the line of Merovingian kings (of which Sigibert was one).  The kings had mostly taken low-born women as their wives and given them little authority, which has proven very irritating to modern historians of medieval women, as we often have very little information on these wives.  But not long after Sigibert married Brunhilda, Sigibert's brother Chilperic decided to marry a princess himself and chose Brunhilda's sister.

For reasons that, after 1450 years, aren't exactly clear, Chilperic soon tired of his Visigothic bride, and he and his mistress Fredegund decided to kill her. Fredegund, who had started life as a slave, was now crowned queen of Neustria (basically western France).  Brunhilda was distraught over her sister's murder for reasons that are quite clear, and she and Fredegund immediately became sworn enemies.  Their rivalry went on for decades.

The next forty or fifty years of Brunhilda's life were filled with plots, treachery, betrayals, and murders that put A Game of Thrones to shame. You can read all the thrilling details in the Historia by the sixth-century author Gregory of Tours.  She did manage to outlive Fredegund as well as establishing a number of monasteries (and having a few bishops killed).  But in her early 70s she was finally captured by her enemies and put to death by being dragged and pulled apart by wild horses.  (The Merovingians, like the Romans before them, thought "cruel and unusual punishment" was a swell idea.)

But Brunhilda was not forgotten.  Memory of her lingered for six centuries, until around 1200 she appeared in two different though clearly related epic tales, the Volsung Saga of Scandinavia and the Nibelungenlied of Germany.  In the first she was a daughter of Odin, served as a Valkyrie, and she had an affair with Siegfried the Dragonslayer (notice the Sig-) before he married someone else.  In the latter she was queen of Iceland and a real athlete, whom Siegfried defeated in a sporting competition before she married someone else.  Soon Attila the Hun appears (let's just say it's complicated).  In both versions of the story Brunhilda was responsible for lots of betrayals and dead bodies.  Wagner loved it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval queens and kings, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

 

Alaric the Goth

Medievalists have embraced Late Antiquity.  This is the period, roughly third or fourth century AD to the seventh or eighth century, that might be seen as lying between Antiquity and the Middle Ages.  Classicists, those who study ancient Greece and Rome, cover lots of fields, language and literature, art, and archaeology, as well as ancient history.  Usually they lose interest around the fourth century, once the Roman Empire's capital moved from Rome to Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and the Empire became officially Christian.  So medievalists have taken up Late Antiquity and reconceptualized it, not as the era of the "fall of Rome" but rather as the beginning of the Middle Ages.

After all, medieval society is generally seen as developing from a mix of Roman culture, Germanic culture, and Christianity, so we might as well embrace the centuries where those got all mixed together.

One of the major figures in Late Antiquity was Alaric the Goth.  The Goths were a Germanic people who had lived at the eastern edges of the Roman Empire and had been wandering in during the fourth century.  The Romans had recruited a number of their young men into their armies.  The Goths were not an organized "tribe" but rather a large group of people who shared a lot of language and culture.  There were two main subgroups, the Visigoths (meaning western Goths) and Ostrogoths (meaning, as you probably already guessed, eastern Goths.)  In the late fourth century, the Visigoths lived in the Balkans.

(And no, the Goths did not wear heavy eye makeup and black fingernail polish.  They also had nothing to do with Gothic architecture.  One word, many meanings.)

And here we meet Alaric of the Visigoths (c. 375-411).  He was recruited into the Roman army as a young man and helped the Romans defeat the Franks, another Germanic tribe (which eventually settled in the Empire, in what is now called France for them, but that's another story).  He did not receive the accolades and rewards he felt he had been promised and left the army.  But he gained a high position nonetheless in becoming king of the Visigoths in 395.  (Guess Rome was showed!)  (You note he's still only about twenty.  This is a world of young men.)

 The above is a nineteenth-century German picture of what Alaric might have looked like.  Because he was Germanic, the nineteenth-century Germans liked him, as they tried to assemble a national identity.

He and his people were recognized by Rome but not given much respect.  A recent author has tried to draw parallels between the Goths being treated as second-class by Italians, and modern African-Americans being discriminated against by mainstream American culture, but I think he's overdoing it (though I'm glad he's concerned about modern African-Americans).  The leaders of the Roman Empire treated everybody like that.  They were a slave society.  Anyone who wasn't them was considered a lower being.

So I wouldn't call Alaric's concern a desire for his civil rights.  After all, he spent most of his years as king plundering Roman territory.  He had seen how wealthy the Romans were, and he went from plundering Greece to plundering Italy.  It's an incredibly complicated story, involving rival emperors, imperial usurpers, treaties made and broken, ransoms promised and reneged on.  It puts Game of Thrones to shame.  It didn't help the Romans in the long run that they captured and killed a lot of the wives and children of the Goths during some of the wars' twists and turns.

In 410 Alaric and his Goths decided to sack the city of Rome itself.  This was as you can imagine a shock to the citizens of Rome.  The city had not been effectively attacked for half a millennium.  But the Goths came through and seized everything that wasn't nailed down.  One of the prizes Alaric took with him was the emperor's sister (who eventually married Alaric's brother, but that's another story.)

 Above is a nineteenth-century French depiction of the sack of Rome.  Visigoths are preparing to topple a Roman statue.  It's unclear why they've decided to do so in the nude.

Now this was not the "fall of Rome."  Several years later the city had rebuilt so successfully that Romans boasted you could hardly tell anything had happened.  There continued to be, at least intermittently, Roman emperors in Rome, as well as the main emperors in Constantinople, for several more generations.

Alaric himself did not survive a year after the sack of Rome, dying probably of a fever.  The story is that a stream was diverted from its course, and he was buried in the stream bed with suitable amounts of loot, and then the stream was allowed back into its banks, to conceal his final resting spot.  To be sure, the slaves who had done the digging were all executed.

But the Visigoths, carrying lots of excellent loot, headed west, eventually settling in southern France and the Spanish peninsula, which was also part of the Roman Empire.  They had picked up a variant of Christianity, Arianism (officially a heresy, it denies the divinity of Christ, calling Jesus just an inspired teacher).  There they ruled until the rise of Islam two centuries later.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval social and political history, see my book, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available on Amazon and other e-tailers, either as an ebook or in print.