The Merovingians

Most Americans have never heard of the Merovingians.  French schoolchildren, however, can tell you that they were the first dynasty that ruled France, starting with Clovis at the end of the fifth century.

As I discussed in an earlier post on the so-called "fall of Rome,"a number of Germanic tribes settled in the Roman Empire, including the Franks, who settled in Roman Gaul--the territory now called France in their honor.  The Franks dropped their Germanic language like a hot potato, which is why modern French is a Latin-based ("Romance") language.  They also quickly abandoned their paganism for Christianity.

The Merovingians were the ruling family of the Franks, so called from Meroveus, son of the sea-serpent.  The story is that one of the early Frankish queens was out for a swim, got caught in a riptide, got rescued by a friendly sea monster, and decided he was totally hot.  One thing led to another.  Her husband the king, apparently, was cool with this.

The historical Merovingians really start with Clovis, first king of the line to convert to Christianity in 496.  His wife Clotilda, already a Christian, seems to have been the major influence, though Clovis also appeared to grasp that he would be a lot more successful if Gaul's bishops supported him.  There had been a lot of separate little kingdoms in what is now France, but he conquered them all.  This is why he gets to be "first king of France" (481-511; there is some debate about the exact dates).

The above image is a somewhat later ivory depicting Clovis's baptism.

Clovis's descendants ruled what is now France for almost three centuries, until the last king of the line, Childeric III, was deposed by Charlemagne's father in 751, who them became king of the Franks himself.  Charlemagne's court seem to have feared, after the fact, that maybe this wasn't quite as legitimate as one would have hoped.  They created a determined story of Merovingian weakness and decadence (to justify the deposition), which historians then tended to believe for the next 1200 years, although recently scholars have begun rehabilitating the Merovingians.

They were certainly a violent crew, but they were also highly literate--one of them tried to introduce new letters into the Roman alphabet for sounds the alphabet didn't cover (like th)--were very supportive of the church, and did their best to be Roman.  Clovis represented himself on his coins as looking like a Roman emperor and was intensely proud of being named a consul by the emperor in Constantinople.  He sponsored the writing down of ancient Frankish law (called Salic law) in Latin, in imitation of Roman law.

All Frankish kings divided their kingdoms between their sons, who then all decided that Brother was the enemy.  This wasn't just the Merovingians--the Carolingians, Charlemagne's dynasty, did the same thing.

Interestingly, although Charlemagne's court tried to denigrate the Merovingian dynasty, he himself named his son Louis for Clovis (take the C off Clovis and you'll see what I mean).  Louis then became the most common French royal name until the monarchy finally ended in the nineteenth century.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

For more on medieval monarchs and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Fall of the Roman Empire?

Everyone wants to know when and why the Roman Empire fell.  This would be a surprise to medieval people, who assumed it was still in existence.

Historians, who like to break events up into periods, generally take "antiquity," which included the Roman Empire, as lasting until about 500 AD, and the Middle Ages as lasting roughly 500 to 1500.  But of course no one woke up in 501 (anymore than they did in 1501) and discovered to their shock that everything had changed.

The year 500 is chosen because shortly before then (470s or 480s) there stopped being separate Roman emperors in Rome.  Now in fact the Roman emperors had moved their capital to Constantinople, in what is now Turkey, 150 years or so before, in the early fourth century.  (Sometimes after that there were two emperors, one in Rome and one in Constantinople, but usually just the one.)  Even though there were no longer separate emperors in Rome, the Constantinople one sometimes stopped by Italy.

The real date for the "end of the Roman Empire" is 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Turks, which is why the region is now Turkey and the city Istanbul.  Until then, there had been perfectly good Roman emperors.

But to get back to late antiquity, the other big change shortly before the year 500 was the establishment of new kingdoms within the Empire, made up of Germanic peoples, especially the Goths and the Franks.  One sometimes hears about "hordes of Germans" destroying the Empire, but this is not true.  These Germanic peoples wanted to be Roman.  Clovis, king of the Franks (d. 511), now considered the "first king of France," wore a toga, wrote away to Constantinople to get a special medal of recognition, converted to Christianity (a Roman religion), and had the traditional laws of his people written down in Latin, in imitation of Latin law codes.  France speaks French now, a language derived from Latin, because the Franks immediately jettisoned their native tongue for the language of the Empire.

The Empire had been having problems of its own for several centuries, primarily because its economy was based on constantly capturing new slaves in war and working them to death, and they had stopped winning their wars.  The Franks (as well as the Goths, doing basically the same things in Spain) provided a jolt of energy.  Pictured above is a reproduction of a Frankish belt buckle, depicting a rider (I wear it as a pendant).

The Empire received a nasty setback in the middle of the seventh century, with the rise of Islam, which took over much of the Middle East, all of north Africa, and Spain.  Most of Continental Europe, however, sought to maintain its Roman traditions.

Eventually a Frankish king, Charlemagne, was crowned Roman Emperor in 800, meaning there were two emperors once again, but that's a story for another post.

By the way, probably the reason one hears about Germans overpowering the Roman Empire like tides roaring into the Bay of Fundy is because something almost like that did happen in Britain, where Angles and Saxons overwhelmed the Romanized Celtic population.  But Britain and the Continent were and are different (ask any Brit).

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on Rome and the Middle Ages, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.