Rois fainéants

 The Merovingians have always held an ambiguous position in medieval history.  On the one hand they are considered the founders of France, because, after all, the Merovingian dynasty ruled the Franks, the people who essentially gave France its name, "land of the Franks," rather than Gaul, which is what the Romans had called it.

On the other hand, they are often derided as "do-nothing kings," rois fainéants, which if said in French in a sneering tone really sounds bad.  And not only did they "do nothing," the account goes, they were barbarians! ethnic Germans, part of the supposed fall of Rome (on which see more here).

So how do we reconcile this image, the glorious founders of France, those who first adopted Christianity, with the concept of crude barbarians who were probably half pagan as well as murderers, to say nothing of being weaklings who sat around not doing anything?  Well, we don't.  Let's break it down.

Clovis, considered first king of France (481-511), did indeed adopt Christianity, doubtless urged on by his Christian wife. He also surely realized that getting along with the bishops, who were major political figures in Gaul at the time, would be a whole lot easier if he were Christian.  Saint Remigius, bishop of Reims, baptized him, as commemorated in the ivory carving seen below, dating to somewhat later.  Clovis is seen here sitting in a baptismal font.  Note the dove coming down with an ampoule of holy oil (used to consecrate kings).

 

The bishops of Reims never forgot this glorious moment.  From the tenth century or so on, most French kings were crowned at Reims, in honor to Clovis and tradition.  If one visits the thirteenth-century cathedral of Reims today (well worth a visit), one can see a plaque marking the spot where the baptism supposedly happened.

The Merovingians were a lively bunch.  Clovis's descendants all had it firmly in their minds that anyone descended from him ought to be king, and if Brother stood in the way, well, that was too bad for Brother.  Accounts from the sixth and seventh centuries are full of murders, poisonings, people hustled off to join a monastery whether they wanted to or not, people sent off on pilgrimage whether they wanted to go or not, betrayals, plots, and lots of wicked women.  Someone should make a mini-series out of it.  It would put Game of Thrones to shame.

And yet abruptly the accounts change.  According to Einhard, writing in Charlemagne's court in the early ninth century, two generations after the Merovingian dynasty ended in 751, these active, blood-thirsty kings, who often had multiple wives and concubines (and who founded and supported monasteries), were instead rois fainéants, weaklings who were cognitively impaired and had lost all their wealth on top of it.

Einhard describes them as having long hair and dangly beards, sitting on the throne with no idea what was going on, repeating whatever they were told to say by the mayor of the palace, that is the head of palace activities (we would say "chief of staff").  By a bizarre coincidence, Charlemagne's ancestors were mayors of the palace.

The Merovingian kings, Einhard continued, were driven around in ox carts, like peasants, because they were too feeble to ride a horse.  All they had was a single manor to call their own.  If it weren't for the kindly mayors of the palace, he indicated, they would have perished long since.  And it was almost an act of mercy, he suggested, for Pippin, Charlemagne's father, last mayor of the palace, to depose the last Merovingian king and make himself king instead.

For almost 1200 years historians have believed Einhard.

All of a sudden his creating the image of weakling kings makes a lot more sense.  The Merovingians had been kings of the Franks for three centuries before 751, appreciably longer than the US has existed.  The dynasty of Pippin and Charlemagne, the Carolingians, had to find a justification for deposing them.  Indeed, during the two generations between Pippin taking the throne and Einhard writing about it, royal accounts did not mention the Merovingians at all.  The deposition was too horrible to talk about.  Although Einhard claimed the pope approved the deposition, papal accounts from the 750s record nothing of the kind.

It was a lot better to suggest a confused old man (the last Merovingian) being "put out of his misery" by being sent to a monastery, and the mayor of the palace patriotically stepping up to be crowned because somebody had to do it, than to admit that the Carolingians were usurpers who had staged a coup.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

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

Brother is the Enemy

 We tend to think of families as all getting along and supporting and protecting each other.  For most families in the Middle Ages, that was probably the norm as well.  But just as today siblings can become very competitive over such things as "who gets Grandma's gold coin collection," so among the medieval aristocracy there was often fierce competition between brothers.

This is to be anticipated, because even though there were no strict rules of primogeniture (that is, of the oldest son getting everything), oldest sons did tend to inherit more, and the younger sons thought this was Totally Unfair.  Throughout the medieval and early modern period there were plenty of tales about three brothers, where the oldest gets the big inheritance, the middle one gets some small thing, and the third is told, "Good luck, kid."  Of course in these stories the youngest heads off and finds something worth far more than the original inheritance, and even a princess to marry.  Take that, older brother!

The Merovingian kings of what is now France (fifth to eighth centuries) were described by contemporaries as ready to slay their brothers and cousins.  The various small kingdoms, into which what is now France and the Low Countries were divided, were parceled out between heirs, who then decided the best way to add to their holdings was to kill their rivals.  Gregory of Tours, chief historian of the Merovingian era, said that Clovis, first of the kings, complained loudly that he was alone in the world without any relatives, in the hopes of luring some relatives out of hiding so he could kill them.

The Carolingian kings were not much better (eighth to tenth centuries).  Charlemagne had a younger brother, named Carloman, whom Charlemagne's biographer Einhard said died of "some disease."  Einhard went on to say that he couldn't imagine why Carloman's widow then fled with her children.  (One can imagine just fine.)

Charlemagne's grandsons were each given a kingdom of their own, Germany for Louis, France for Charles, and the "Middle Kingdom" (including Italy) for Lothair.  Louis and Charles immediately ganged up on their brother, as perhaps should be expected.  In the confusion and disagreements over the next two generations, a kingdom of Burgundy was established within what Lothair had thought was his kingdom, and Boso declared himself king, only to be opposed by his brother Richard, who told the Carolingian kings that he was their little friend.

In England after the 1066 Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror designated Normandy, the family inheritance, for his oldest son, Robert Curthose, designated newly conquered England for his second son, William Rufus, and told Henry, the third son, "Sorry, kid."  When William Rufus died without heirs in 1100, Henry immediately took his brother's throne.  Robert Curthose was off on Crusade and was understandably shocked when he got home.  Extensive fighting then took place, and Henry eventually won, taking Normandy as well as England and locking up his brother for the rest of his life.

In France, it was often remarked in the thirteenth century, with some wonderment, that the younger brothers of the king didn't try to kill him, not even a little.  In part this was due to the kings parceling out large chunks of territory (appanages) to their younger brothers.

These examples are all of the most powerful (and there are plenty more examples of fraternal warfare).  Peasant families in contrast tended to act in solidarity.  After all, they could not call up armies or faithful followers (like Boso's brother Richard) to fight against their relatives.  Landlords were more likely than brothers to be seen as the enemy.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval political and social history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Polyptyques

Now there's a curious word.  Like Egypt, it looks like it has too many descenders (letters with tails that hang below the line).  But it's a perfectly good word.  Polyptyque means a survey of people and property on a manor.

Polyptyques were an invention of the ninth century, and although a few were created in later centuries, the ninth century was their golden era.  They appear to have begun with Charlemagne ordering inventories of property and payments both on his own lands and on the lands of the great monasteries of his realm.

That's an image of Charlemagne on one of his coins.  You'll note that he is portrayed like a Roman emperor.

Anyway, there is some thought that Charlemagne considered all the Frankish monasteries his property, which is why he wanted to know what was on their manors.  The royal polyptyques do not survive, but there are still maybe a dozen monastic ones, plus fragments of others.  They are a major source of information on the rural economy of the period.

For each manor (and a monastery would typically own dozens of manors), the polyptyque would list how much revenue was expected.  Often the names of the tenants would be given, but a polyptyque was not intended to be a a census of people, so one cannot determine total population of a manor.  The legal status of the tenants might be specified, using such terms as hospes, colonus, mancipius, or ingenuus.  Although those composing the polyptyques clearly knew what was meant by these terms, scholars today have had serious debates over their meaning, and the twelfth-century successors of those who composed them seem to have had even less idea.

The tenants were sometimes although not always listed by name.  The overwhelming majority of these names are male, which led a few decades ago to a scholar who should have known better claiming this showed that ninth-century peasant families killed baby girls.  Now one would have thought that something as serious as infanticide would be mentioned in other sources if it was indeed practiced—it isn't.  Even more basically, the lists of tenants just gave the name of the head of the household, not of spouse and children, and, as in the US through the twentieth century, the man was considered the natural head of household.  Thus there is no reason to use the polyptyques to argue for female infanticide.

Most polyptyques do not survive on their original ninth-century parchment, but only as copied into cartularies in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  Here's a picture of a cartulary, a collection of documents all carefully copied into a single book.

Enough had changed in the rural economy and manorial organization between the ninth century and the twelfth or thirteenth centuries that the cartulary scribes often had trouble figuring out what the polyptyques meant.  Sometimes property enumerated in them had been lost to the monastery for generations.  The ninth-century handwriting was clear enough three centuries later, but the vocabulary had changed.  Yet clearly these lists of manors and dues were an important part of a monastery's history.  The scribes abbreviated heavily and hoped for the best.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on monks, kings, and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback!