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.

End of the Merovingians

As I posted last week, medieval people could and did get rid of monarchs.  It was unusual, it was difficult, and it didn't always work.  The usual reason was that the monarch had become a tyrant.  Today I want to blog about the first known example of people getting rid of a monarch for incompetence.

Let's go back to the middle of the eighth century.  The Merovingian dynasty had ruled the Franks for three centuries, since the Frankish people (Germanic in origin) had come wandering west into the Roman Empire and settled down in what is now France to become Roman themselves.  These descendants of the Sea Serpent as the kings considered themselves wore their hair long as an apparent symbol of status—most Romans and Romanized peoples in the Empire had short hair.  They converted to Christianity in the late fifth century and were learned, cunning, and by all accounts ruthless.

The above is a modern reproduction of a Merovingian-era belt buckle.

By the middle of the eighth century the dynasty appears to have weakened, or at least run short of male heirs.  At least one monk had to be brought out of the cloister to become king, and at one point the mayor of the palace, who one might think of as chief of staff or even secretary of state, ruled without a king for several years, acting in the name of the last dead king.

In 751 this mayor of the palace's son, Pippin (called "the Short," his wife was called Bertha "Broadfoot," people tended to have nicknames for their rulers) decided he himself should be king.  But this was going to be complicated.  Pippin and his older brother, who had been co-mayor of the palace with him until deciding to go to Italy and become a monk, had found themselves a Merovingian king, Childeric III, probably a boy, and put him on the throne.  So how to get him off the throne?

The argument used was that Childeric was incompetent.  Pippin said that he wrote to the pope, Zacharias, asking if someone who actually wielded royal power, meaning himself, should in fact be the king.  According to Pippin, the pope agreed.  It is at any rate clear that Pippin was formally elected king by the great Frankish lords, which was standard, that the bishops anointed him as king, almost like baptizing him, which was not standard, and two years later he had Zacharias's successor as pope come and bless him and his sons.  This last wasn't standard at all.

So it appears that, in order not to look like a usurper, Pippin lined up the full force of secular and religious power to support his ascension to the throne.  But the story gets even more complicated.  What happened to Childeric?

Strangely, nobody at the time said anything about Childeric.  Contemporary accounts speak of how wonderful it was that Pippin should have been elected, crowned, anointed, and blessed, but without a whisper of how Childeric was removed.  Even the account of Pippin writing to Pope Zacharias shows up for the first time only forty years later, and the contemporary biography of Zacharias doesn't mention it, which would have to be considered odd, since the popes then were very close to the Frankish kings and mayors of the palace.  It may well have been so shocking to end the Merovingian dynasty after three centuries that no one at the time wanted to mention that aspect.

Well after the fact, it was said that Childeric had become a monk, which was indeed a common fate for Merovingian kings if a brother or cousin in the dynasty pushed someone off the throne.  But it is also possible that Childeric had just died, and Pippin and his successors needed the story of the removal of an incompetent to justify seizing the crown, rather than ruling in the name of a dead king or finding another Merovingian boy somewhere.  After all, the same account that says that Childeric had been shuffled off to a monastery says that he had a son who was shuffled off with him.

The story of the removal of an incompetent blossomed in the following years.  Some seventy years after the fact, Charlemagne's biographer Einhard gave a long and vivid portrait of how bad the Merovingians had become.  They were too feeble to ride a horse, he said, and had to be driven around in an ox-cart like some peasant.  They sat on the throne with a long beard dangling to their knees (but Childeric was a boy?), saying whatever the wise mayor of the palace told them to say.  Einhard mistakenly named not Zacharias but his successor (Pope Stephen), the one who actually came to Francia and blessed Pippin, as the one who agreed that Pippin should depose the last Merovingian.  In this account, it was a real kindness to the Merovingian kings and to the Franks to get them out of the way.

This tale of the fainéant (do-nothing) Merovingian kings was so compelling that historians believed it for 1200 years.  Lately, however, the Merovingians have seen something of a scholarly rehabilitation.  For more on the end of their dynasty, see the article, "Childeric III and the Emperors Drogo Magnus and Pippin the Pious," in the journal Medieval Prospography (volume 28, 2013).

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

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.  (Also in print!)