Gone Medieval - The Merovingian Dynasty: France's First Kings

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

Long-haired rulers, dynastic bloodshed, secret letters, and a kingdom built in the aftermath of empire; Dr. Eleanor Janega and Dr. James Palmer dive into the wild, Roman-adjacent world of the Merovingians.What made the first kings of France so unforgettable, and why were they later written out of the story? From myth to murder, this is the family that helped shape medieval France.MOREWhy The Early Middle Ages MatterListen on AppleListen on SpotifyThe Destruction of Charlemagne's LegacyListen on AppleListen on SpotifyGone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Audio editor is Tim Arstall, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week plus ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianica and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes to the crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were. And how we got here.

When asked what to think about the history of medieval France, most people usually name check the big hits. The Normans. Joan of Arc. Perhaps even the towering exploits of the Emperor Charlemagne. But before all these legends of French history arrived onto the scene, there exists There existed a dynasty as dramatic, entertaining, and downright cutthroat as any medieval ruling family that succeeded them. They are called the Merovingians, the long-haired kings. And they were the first ruling dynasty of the people known as the Franks. They came to power in the mid-fifth century during the death throes of the Roman Empire and the barbarian explosion that followed. So, naturally, their origins are shrouded in early medieval mystery and myth-making.

But when that leads to a tale of a king being born to a supernatural seahorse, it makes the murky depths of the medieval deep time worth it. Over the space of 200 years, these Merovingian warlords gobbled up territories from the ruins of Roman Gaul, expanding west of the Rhine until the land itself bore their name. Frankia, France, the land of the Franks. This success had a lot to do with Warrior Kings waging brutal wars, adopting a new-fangled version of Christianity, and harking back to the might of their fallen Roman forebearers.

But as with many later medieval dynasties, success was never guaranteed. Almost as soon as this united Frankish kingdom had been assembled, it fell apart as brother turned on brother and mother turned on mother to birth a series of unrelenting civil wars, full to the brim with backstabbing, poison-lacing, and horse-ripping violence. And yet, despite this salacious Merovingian melodrama, France's first dynasty has been forgotten, destined to reside in the shadows of their better-known predecessors, the Carolingians, who were only too happy to cast them as indolent do-nobes. King's. So today, I'm joined once again by Dr. James Palmer, professor of history at St. Andrews

University and author of Merivengian Worlds, to do this dynasty the justice they deserve. Together we'll explore where the Franks came from, why their warlords became kings, and how they founded an unrivaled kingdom in the wake of Roman crisis, before discovering how the conniving exploits of queens and princes, bishops and mares, brought the Maryvind Gene world crashing down, eclipsed by a new dynamic dynasty who consigned their old Frankish predecessors to obscurity. James, welcome back to Gone Medieval. Hi, Eleanor. Thanks for having me back. It's the three Pete. He's a champion. He's a champion of Gone Medieval. Yeah. My mission to own all of the early Middle Ages. That's great. You know, I'm going to let you have

have. Matt and I are fine with that. We don't care. We only want to own late periods than I have. Yeah, exactly. So it's fine. It's like. But as the early Middle Ages go, we've got a bit of a cracker today because one of the more fun dynasties to talk about, I think. And in particular, I think we've got a lot of cool women in this one. So we're going to dive in. I'm going to dive in. Big question for you. Who are the Merivangians? Like, you know, it's Merivinjeans. That's one of those big name families. But what's their deal? Where are they from? What were they? ruling? Why are all of us obsessed? A lot of people are not obsessed. I will concede that from the beginning. Who are the Merivansansansans are a ruling dynasty who start in northern France and Germany and they very quickly build up a very large kingdom that basically looks quite a lot like modern France for the first time in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire with lots of the Rhineland Add is on its eastern side. And they reign for 300 years, which is very successful, makes them one of the most

successful dynasties of the Middle Ages. The Carol Engines, who everyone thinks is much better, only rule for not even half the time. So they're a huge success story. But they're also the kings who are in charge after the Roman Empire in the Dark Ages. So everyone thinks of them as brutal, nasty barbers. who were really stupid. Of course. You know, I think it's one of these things where, as you rightly point out, they get done a disservice just because they're in this period of time where we have few resources.

And there are all these assumptions that get made, you know. And, you know, indeed, because what I kind of always say, if I'm teaching students about this, I say, okay, well, these are like the first kings and queens of France. And there are people who will sort of push back against that and say, I don't know. know that they're really kings. They're more like proto kings. They're more like warlords. And I'm like, what's the difference between a warlord and a king, really, if you're being honest with yourself? And they are called kings. Yeah. What more do you need? Like if it looks like a king, quacks like a king. That's how that story goes, right? After the Merivinians, which we're not talking about, there are so many Vikings who look and sound like kings that every second one who turns up

is a king in the sources. And so at least these ones have things like a throne and coins with their heads on them. Proper things that you think about. What does a proper king look like? Well, he looks like the guy on the chair over there doing law and fighting and he has people gathered around him. It's not a warlord in the sense that he's like in a tent in a corner just going, I'm king, honest. I'm quite powerful. Yeah, they've actually, they have halls. You know, they have halls. An important thing about the Merovingians as kings is that they are very much the heirs to a Roman way of doing things. A lot of the places that they would have lived in were probably the old Roman villas around Paris, mostly to the north of Paris. So we can imagine that they still have mosaics.

In fact, we have palaces that have mosaics in them. They're still quite Roman. They have people around them who speak Latin. Most of them speak Latin. So they're not some kind of like gruff German warlords who have just turned up. They are living the Roman life, probably not togas, but some wine as well as their beer, like a bit of poetry. And that's their kind of vibe.

They are very happy being in charge, doing admin. One of the big failings of the later meritans is they get so good at doing admin, they're not really doing any fighting. And people will just get bored of them. Oh, you're hearing more legal cases today. Have you thought about fighting a war? Oh no, yeah, effective law. It's a victim of what people want.

Yeah, exactly. And as kings, they have special things, really special stories that they like to tell. So one of the things about the Merovingians, everybody who's ever heard of the Merovingians knows first thing, is they have long hair. And they're not supposed to cut their hair while they're king. So they have this whole Sampson thing going on. You cut the hair, you lose power.

Which sometimes they do actually do when they're having little fights with each other. And they go, I cut your hair, you've got to go and live in a monastery until your hair's grown back. And they actually go and do it. Then they just grow their hair back in a monastery. My hair's on again. Now I can come back. I'm king now again.

Which is a very strange way of dealing with things. But I think the thing is then it has a look. You dress the right kind of way. You have the right kind of way. Oh, he must be king. He has long hair. And it's actually in law codes. It's illegal to do things to long haired people because they're special.

See, this is an important. point because really in a lot of ways the look of monasticism is specifically curated in opposition to the Merovingians because the kings have long hair and the monks have none, right? It's like that's how you can tell you've given up on the noble way of life in France at the time is because you've been tonsured. So everyone goes, ah, not a noble, right? Yeah. The very last Merovingian king, they don't just cut your hair.

They're just like, yeah, tonsor him and put him in a monastery. That'll do it. Okay, well, now speaking of monks and Latin and all of this jazz, how do we have sources on these guys? Because, you know, this is the point in time when sources are a little fewer on the ground. I mean, largely just because it's a very long time ago. But what are we working with when we're talking about? What are we working with?

Yeah. We have a series of chronicles and they're pretty lively chronicles. The best one people know about is Gregory Atoll's histories, sometimes called the history of the Franks, but he just called it histories. So Gregory O'Toole was a bishop who lived in Turf, funnily enough, right at the end of the 6th century. He writes a history, Gaul's history from the beginning of time, starts with Adam very quickly, comes up to his own day. And he was not just a bishop looking at what kings were doing. he was actively involved in a lot of what was going on. So these are often firsthand stories.

I met this king and I thought he was a bit of a jerk. I met this king and he was very learned and interesting. I met this queen and we will not say too much about her in case we get in trouble. It's quite gossipy and very interesting. And he starts off his chronicle by saying that the standards of Latin have become so poor that there was nobody around to record the history of his days apart from him. which is a very grand statement. And of course, also untrue, because we have lots of other little histories,

but nobody had set out to write a big literary history in the way that Gregory did. And Gregory's history is such a classic, and so literary is actually translated into the Penguin Classics series in English. But just to really stress just how important this is. But it is also fair to say that there were not other big-scale histories around. It's not like when you get to the 14th century, and every second nobleman and bishop with an education is writing an epic history. When he dies, his work is effectively then continued a couple of decades later by a different

person altogether, a guy called Fredegar. So then we have two chronicles. And then about another 50 years after Fradigar dies, somebody else extends Gregory again, but not with Fradigar. And so we have three chronicles. Brilliant. For the 300 years, three chronicles. Now, but it's not quite as bleak as that may sound,

because we have lots of saints lives. They like the hundreds of saints lives. We have lots of little bubbles of what saints and monks are up to. And these are often people at court getting into scrapes, hanging out on boats with merchants and telling us all kinds of exotic things that you wouldn't necessarily know about. So a lot of people are writing. Just because we have three chronicles doesn't mean people aren't interested in history. And there's a kind of background thing as well about we don't have many sources because it was a long time ago,

which it's quite clear from the stories that they're telling, there are loads and loads of stories in circulation. There are lots of books in circulation. There are lots of letters. We only have a couple of letter collections from the time. But the people in our chronicles and in our saints' lives are always sending each other's letters. Sometimes in secret there's a great story

about somebody who wants to send a very, one of the queens wants to send a secret political letter. And so writes it on a bit of parchment and then gets a wooden board that's on the wooden board, puts wax over the top so that you can't see there's a letter underneath

and then writes a different message over the top. So if anyone captures her or the letter, then they wouldn't be able to see what the actual message was. Now, you don't do that in an illiterate society when people aren't writing. Exactly.

You do that in a society when everybody can read and you're paranoid about how communication works in a written form. Okay, so given that, Given that clearly people are reading and writing, and we've got good old Greg over here saying that no one is as good at Latin as he is anymore. How much can we trust what he's writing right now? Is this just an exercise in self-aggrandizement?

It's not just an exercise in self-aggrandizement. Gregory says many things which are verifiable in other ways, shall we say. There was this turn of phrase once about Gregory's works, which said that he was writing satirically. Unfortunately, the author who said that he was writing satirically, decided to disown that statement. But I kind of liked it. So it's not that ever that he's lying. It's just that there's often a particular slant on things.

And there are often little jokes and little stories that don't go anywhere, but with almost kind of a wink to camera as he does it. And it's kind of fun. And while he says that there isn't anyone who has the stylish, polished Latin that the old writers used to have in the Roman Empire, what Gregory does have as a stylist is a style of Latin which is kind of direct. And what we often forget for this period, people have forever complained about the barbaric standards of Latin in the period, which proves that everybody was really stupid. And actually what they're really speaking is very, very old French. Because Latin becomes French and Italian and Spanish.

And it's just very at the beginning of this journey. It's not really Latin anymore, but it's not yet French either. It's in this kind of interesting no man's land. And so modern scholars in the 19th century would be very angry at this barbaric way of writing. But people at the time, it's just how they spoke. So it wasn't even written in Latin because it was a learned language. and so normal people couldn't get it. It's the language that normal people spoke as well.

So people were expected to read and engage and have fun with it. So in that sense, Gregory expected to have an audience and you can lie to your audience, but given that a lot of his audience were people at court that he was hanging around with, there's a kind of social network of truth. See, you can probably tell a few lies and half-truths and get away with it. But if you go too outrageous,

then everyone's go, Greg, that didn't actually happen. We were there. We remember this one. So there are some, he does tell stories about when he gets in trouble for various things and how he talks his way out of it. The law of the truthful historian is that you don't just say the things you approve of. You've also talked about the things you don't approve of and vice versa.

So all the bad characters or some of the bad characters, he tries to say something good about them as well and some of the good characters. entirely flawless. That's an interesting mix of characters. All right. Okay. So we're going to believe, Greg. We're going with it.

We're going to squint our eyes. Squint. While we're reading him. It's like reading a newspaper. As long as you remember which newspaper you're reading, you know the tone of voice. There you go. The facts are coming in.

Okay. So, all right, given that, we're going to use him. We're going to beginning at the beginning. So you've got the Meravenians, and they're coming out of the Franks, who are one of these Germanic tribes that we've heard so much about who have moved in during the Great Migration period.

Where did they come from? How did they be the ones who end up in what we now would think of as the French lands? The Franks themselves like to tell a variety of interesting stories because the very boring story is that they come from western side of Germany. they move into places like Trier, which is a very nice city,

old Roman city, old Roman capital. Then they move into Belgium, and they move from Belgium, into northern France. It's not a very big migration. You've seen those maps of barbarian migrations, arrows all over the place. They basically move down the road.

But they are Germanic. Archaeologically, people have tried to follow their metal work and their weapons. It doesn't really work, because what happens is when they get into Northern Gaul, They adopt the dress and the weapons of people in Northern Gaul. It's like migration sometimes involves integration. But the stories that Franks like to tell are a bit more exotic.

And some Franks, and Sir Gregory tells this story as well. But it says, some people say, you always know that Gregory is telling stories. Some people say that they are from Pannonia, basically Hungary. And they've kind of gone in this very long arc up beyond the Danube and the Rhine to reappear in northern history. And we think that he tells this story because he likes it because one of his heroes is an old Roman saint called St. Martin, the Tour, who wasn't actually from Tour. He was from that region of the old Roman Empire. And so maybe there's a bit of hero worship there. But other people, and Gregory doesn't even tell this story, as how other chronicles

tell this, say that they were actually descended from the Trojans and that after the Trojan Wars in ancient history. Some of their kings go on this kind of exciting jaunt and they spend some time hanging around in a swamp in what's now Ukraine. And then they get to Pannonia and then they head up north and back in. So this gives them an ancient pedigree. So they're not just the rough and tumble barbarians who have suddenly appeared from the north with an interesting way of pronouncing Latin words. They are people who have been involved in Roman history forever. And this is like one of these things that is very much the style at the time, right?

Like everyone invents for themselves a pedigree that goes back to the Trojan War. I mean, they do it in England as well. And I think that this is a really important point because there tends to be this way of looking at the early medieval period as though it is a giant breakaway from what was happening in Rome. But all of these people see themselves as these successors who are linked very much to the Roman world. Yeah. And some of it is often the secret story. the Roman historians forgot to tell this bit but there was this exciting group who came and fought with the Romans

and they were the best ones and they only won this war against them and now they are this kingdom and the Franks really like to lean into that that they're not there to replace the Romans they're there to succeed the Romans take everything that was good about them but better and we'll get rid of all the stuff

that was really bad and for what most people this means is that the Franks are committed to fighting bad guys and not taxing people. Well, how Roman can you be if you're not taxing people, though? Come on. That's the opposite of Roman. Well, it said that they are so wealthy that they don't need to tax people.

Oh, I see. Got you. I mean, okay. We've got these Franks. They are saying we are descended from the Trojans. They are up in these formerly Roman lands. They are telling you that they're reading and writing in Latin. They are dispensing law. They're living in old villas.

They have long hair though, which is not very Roman, and they're not wearing togas. What are we, what are we wearing? What's the fashion scene right? I want to know about that Merivincian drip, James. Trousers. Everyone's very excited about their trousers. Wow. Yeah.

They've probably got a proper tunic. They love brooches. One of the things that we have some difficulty with from an archaeological perspective is that the clothing doesn't last very well. either, just as well as some of their old manuscripts. But the broaches are great. So they often have nice things that go over their shoulder and with a nice big badge with nice decorations, some exotic stones on them.

They particularly like garnets. They're really into their garnet stones. The thing that does survive archaeologically is we have lots of adornment, so the kind of badges that hold the tunics together, which have lovely exotic garnet stones. very intricate interlace gold designs, they like their bloom. It's a very showy culture. So if the Romans are going through this period of being quite austere, the Franks are there

to be a little bit more exciting and visually announced that they're not Roman, which is then an interesting thing. We're here to do law and justice and read Latin poetry and all the ways that you would expect, but we're going to dress different and never forget where we came from. I think that's a kind of interesting thing about that never forget where we came from while doing all these Roman things. So we're going to play along but be different at the same time. Okay, but speaking of where they came from, can we talk about my favorite thing about the Merovingians, which is this story that they are descended from a sea monster? Mm-hmm.

I love it. I'm sorry, I do. Are the Mera Vincians descended from a sea monster? So there is this story that one day a queen is swimming in a lake. and she encounters a sea beast. And it's like a queen atore, a five-horned beast. And then the chronic, this is not Gregory the chronicler, this is Fradigar, the second chronicler.

He says, and shortly after she encountered the beast, she gave birth to the king Meravec. Some said that he was the son of the king, and some said that he was the son of the sea monster. See, this is the thing. They're trying to silence Fredegar for truth, James. Yeah. Or she came home and said, I'm pregnant.

And it was a sea monster, definitely. The thing about the sea monster story is if you would have a lot of people say, well, this is because the Franks at the beginning of this period are pagan. They convert under their very scary king, Clovis, who kills a lot of people. they are pagan and so being descended from sea monsters is clearly a pagan thing to do yes

but they never make any political capital about it there aren't lots of images of sea monsters they don't keep going on about we are descended from sea monsters there's just this one story and one chronicle and there's a weird thing about this as well so this is the birth of the king Meravec

the name Merovec possibly means sea cow so horrifically this might actually just be a joke about his name means sea monster. And so he descended from a sea monster because they like really bad dad jokes. Puns are everywhere. All right. Okay.

Well, now you've mentioned the household name Meravengian though. We got to talk about Clovis, my friend and yours. Listen, Clovis, thank goodness for him because he's one of these ones that has helped me teach armies of undergrad. Oh, yes. About the Meravengians. He is kind of like our Merovingian par excellence, right? Can we tell us a little bit about him? Oh, yeah.

Clovis is one of those classic Merovingian dynastic figures who he is so successful, he sets the scene. He's like a proto-Shalemagne in that sense. He's just so amazingly successful. Everybody thinks that he's brilliant. The ways in which he is brilliant are slightly odd at times, But the headline is that he starts off basically in charge of the area north of Paris, not including Paris. And by the end of his reign, he rules the whole of France.

He has defeated the great Gothic kingdom of Toulouse, which was the major barbarian success of state to the Romans that everybody thought was the best and most sophisticated of all the Roman success of states until then. but he smashes them. He beats up various other barbarian people. He fights heretics. He allies with the church when he converts. He's pagan at the beginning. But then his wife is Christian and has a long series of words with him until one day he's in a battle against the Alamani, who are different Germanic people. And again, he just has this battlefield vision.

And it was kind of, if I could fight under the sign of Christ, I will win. And so does this. But he doesn't make a big deal about this, but then afterwards, then he talks to a bishop and said, you know, I pray to God and I won. Does that mean I'm Christian now? And eventually, we should have a word with your men. And he goes and has a word with 3,000 of his men and guys, I'm thinking about converting. And they'll go, hooray. And so they all convert on mass. Storytelling and its compliance. I'm sure this is exactly how armies are very, well, actually armies are very concerned with theological issues. But on spur of the moment, mass. conversion was maybe not normally what they would go for. But this means that Clovis is not just a very violent warlike king. He's a very pious Christian king at the same time, which leads to some very strange imagery. And the story is of Gregory of Toore, talking about how he has an interesting sense of humor and is often winking to camera. A lot of his stories end with Clovis or one of Clovis's allies, smashing in the skull of one of Clovis's enemies. And there's even a story at one point

that Clovis runs out of people to fight against brutally and murder. So he has this public assembly where he announces this fact just to see if anybody will secretly announce that they're a dynastic rival to him and he just missed them. I have so many cousins. Where have they all gone? Are they all dead? Anybody? But this is Gregory's great Christian hero is somebody who goes around smashing in his rival skulls on a regular basis. But, you know, Gregory is all for righteousness. But at the same time, Gregory clearly also is playing a kind of funny little game because he makes these really important comparisons to the Emperor Constantine.

The Emperor Constantine is the first Christian Roman Emperor. And a lot of red at face value, you go, oh, this must mean the Clovis is being built up to be just as important as the first Christian Roman emperor. that this is a great honour until if you read carefully through Gregory's works the only story that Gregory tells about Constantine

is that he had his wife murdered in the bath after his son of so basically Constantine we would think oh yeah Christian hero Gregory thinks

murdering psychopath warlord who's to say Gregory is the answer I guess clearly there is some respect here because from Gregory

at least that guy got stuff done and in his own day he's living in the days of the grandchildren of Clovis and they are constantly at war with each other I think he finds them yes warlike but at least Clovis fought external

enemies rather than internal enemies and it's like you're fighting civil wars he at least fought heretics well okay speaking of this you know in terms of the conversion of Clovis. One of the things that's actually really important about him is that he converts to the kind of Christianity that we now consider to be, you know, correct, like the Trinitarian

model of Catholic Christianity, which is sort of a big deal because a lot of people at the time are Aryan, right? And so, Aryanism, let me see if I've got this right, But Aryanism, that's where you believe that there is a hierarchy within the Trinity. It goes God, the Father, Jesus, and then the Holy Spirit. And it's like a top-down thing as opposed to Orthodox Catholicism. I know that's confusing phrase, but it is correct. Where you're like, there's the Trinity. It's all the same thing, right?

Yeah, it's horizontal. And then there's the concern that if you're saying that it's a hierarchy, Are you saying that Christ isn't as divine as God? And a lot of theologians in the 5th, 6th century will tell you, that's exactly what we're saying. There are huge fights about it. Yeah. And people get very animated because if you are, are you saying that Christ is a person? And some are like, yes.

I go, okay, so is he human and divine or human or divine? Does he have human will, a divine will? it's the kind of thing which if you're not religious and these people are fighting over this this looks very obscure but people at the time this is absolutely the most important thing that you can be arguing about they're not heresies in the sense that people might imagine that kind of lead off into like secret witchcraft cults they are having very hard theological discussions about what is the divine and human nature of christ and how do they yeah but a lot of the barbarian groups such as the Goths had converted to Christianity when that was the mainstream, Aryanism was the mainstream view in the Roman Empire. The Franks, as one of the last ones in, and they were pagan, go straight to Catholicism, which at that point is once again the default position of the Roman Empire. So there's a interesting timing issue. It has often been suggested that a lot of the Goths could have switched over, but they liked in the same way that they dressed differently to the Romans, they liked having a variation of Christianity, which wasn't the Romans either.

And this has lots of benefits. You don't have to do what the Pope tells you. Not that anybody does what the Pope tells them. Yeah, at this point, no. They could really, you may say that. Well, I think that this is, you know, one of these really interesting conversions because in many ways it is the classic, right? Because you get yourself a Christian wife. You resist it for a while.

There's sort of a battlefield conversion. But one of the things I get asked a lot about these things is people say, okay, well, how genuine is this? Or is it political? And I'm not sure we can untangle those two things here, especially in the person of Clovis. I mean, everything is political when you are the king, right? Yeah. I don't think there's a lot of space for personal beliefs which you take home with you. And that's just not how it works. religion is a community business

and so as long as everybody is broadly on the same page, it's about the rituals, everyone's in church to celebrate Easter to celebrate Christmas they have the same saints, they have some different local saints, there's a lot of that that goes with mutual respect.

There'll be some differences in what we believe but the core stuff is the same. The king is an important figure in this, not there's no divine right of kings or anything like that, which kind of gives him a kind of dispensation to do whatever he wants because he's God. If he does bad things, they are quite clear that God is going to strike him down or they can remove him on God's behalf,

because otherwise he's just being a tyrant. What Clovis's role is, is to help bring order to things. So where he really puts a lot of his effort with the church in the early days is that he summons church councils with more acts of politics. He's not intervening in theology so much as getting the bishops around and helping them to be able to legislate about how the church should be run and how they should do things. He brings order. So it's just an extension of his secular role. If you've murdered people, I'm going to make sure you're brought to justice. And in the church, shall we just make sure that bishops do things properly and people are baptized when they're supposed to be and those kind of things? Fundamentally, Clovis is one of the best to ever do it. You know, he really plays a blinder in terms of saying he is carrying on this kind of Roman legacy.

in a lot of ways. I think now there is kind of a resistance to this idea. But listen, he's got the bishops on side. He's promulgating law. He is marrying girls from the Roman sphere of influence. I mean, what more does a man have to do to prove to you that he understands the Romans? He's even sent presents from the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople. He sent a tunic, a nice purple tunic.

It's a symbol of effectively being a consul of the Roman Empire. He's basically going to be the local administrator on behalf of the empire. Gregory tells a little joke here as well that he then parades through the street being hailed, basically as Caesar Augustus, having misunderstood that he hadn't been actually made emperor of the West. He was just an admin official. Glovis was a great figure. However, he didn't always understand what was himself, what was good or bad about himself. But yeah, they are part, they're not the enemies of Rome, they are part of Rome,

and they celebrate that as much as possible. So what happens after Clovis dies, right? Because we've got a series of sons. He does a good job having a sons. Do they kind of have the same killer instinct for expanding territories? They do have the same killer instinct for expanding territories, but at the expense of each other. So when you built a kingdom for the first time, there is no tradition of how things should be divided. And what they decide to do, or what Clovis decides to do probably, is that they will each of

his four sons will have a kingdom based in a city. And rather than having a clearly defined territory, they will have cities. So you will have Paris plus these places. You will have Suason plus these places. So there's four sons and then they divide it up and they've got their capital. And then they start competing to win over different cities and then they're out fighting. There are some times when they do go and fight external enemies.

There's an exciting bit where their mother, Clottild's another one of these very determined women. And she gets them together and said, look, rather than fighting each other, let's go and kill the Burgundians, because she herself is Burgundian and her father had been murdered. And she said, let's go get vengeance. So you do that kind of thing. You go, rather than fighting each other, let's go this way. And we will fight other people. Works brilliantly. And there's a, there's a kind limit to how much expansion you want to do from there. The easy place that they can expand into is southern France, which they already sort of have and may be into Spain, because one of the last things that Clovis does is that he destroys the Gothic kingdom in the south of France and takes the

border of the Frankish kingdom basically all the way down to the Pyrenees. The Gothic kingdom has sort of collapsed. Really kind of what it does is the Goths all move into space. and then you get visit Gothic Spain. But to start off with, there's a very exciting bit where there's a big Gothic kingdom in Italy, and they keep part of Provence. So actually you have a united kingdom of Spain and Italy with Provence linking the two. And that's kind of nice. So the one really big expansion they managed to get during that period is that the Goths in Italy end up fighting this hugely complicated war,

against the Byzantine Empire because a different wonderful queen gets murdered in the bath. And Justinian swears vengeance and sends a big army and they have a big fight. So that the Goths don't have to fight the Franks and the Byzantine Empire at the same time, which would be way too much. She said, could you not fight us if you have Provence? And the Franks like, yeah, that sounds like a fair deal, sort of. Brokering. But even if they didn't really have to fight even for that, that was just a kind of nice presence that they got.

There is a very exciting bit when they also go and invade part of Western Germany called Turingia. And this is again in the spirit of destroying rival kingdoms. And that is how brings yet another one of the wonderful queens in because one of them kidnaps the princess of the king, a woman called Radagund. And then puts her in a monastery in the West of France. And then when she grows up, he marries her. It's very sinister. And then she doesn't like being married. And so she keeps running away and.

crying a lot as you would if you've been kidnapped and forced into marriage. And but then she becomes one of the great queens because eventually it's like, are you going to come back to be married with me? So of course not. I'm going to stay. She stays in Poitiers and she found a monastery there and becomes this kind of beacon for the spiritual life, a kind of a redigade of royal powers. And actually lots of queens end up either retiring there, young princesses hide out there,

becomes kind of nice little shelter for royal women who feel that their lot in life is in peril. Ah, women helping women. We love to see it. We absolutely do. So what happens then? We've got basically a bunch of sons of fighting with each other in varying cities after Clovis. And then we get to the last of Clovis' sons, Lothar, and he dies. So what happens then? They start all over again. Ah, boo. Lothar, like Clovis having point, Lothar has four sons. He had five sons, but he had one of them burned to death in a barn for allying with one of his rivals.

Oh, yeah, as you do. So with the four remaining sons, they each take one of the exact same cities that Clovis' sons had originally done. And then it all goes very gossipy and very exciting. one of them straight off the bat gets in a lot of trouble because he leaves his wife to run off with two shepherdesses not one

two two all right and then so he is excommunicated for not good moral behaviour and then he ends up dying but this kind of gives an opportunity for one of the the other brothers Siggybert and Siggyberg goes well if if we're at the kind of level

where our queens are going to be shepherdesses I'm going to marry a proper princess. So he approaches the Visigothic king of Spain. And have you got a beautiful daughter that I go to call my wife? Well, I'll send you my daughter Brunheld. They are Aryans. But Brunhild, part of the agreement, is that she will convert to Catholicism

and bring a lot of treasure. Very important in Gregory's telling of this story. And that way that Sigibert can say that he's the best brother because he's the one who married the brilliant, beautiful princess while the others were running around with Shepardesses. Well, then his half brother Chilprick decides that anything that Sigibert can do, he can do too. So he writes to the Visigotic King and says, have you got any other daughters? I do, actually.

And sends him Front Hill's sister, Galswinter, and a lot of treasure. It's quite clear that Chilprick is much more excited about the treasure than Galswinter. Not least because he was already married, or at least marriage is a bit spongy as a concept in this period. but he already had a very serious living relationship with a girl called Fredegund. And Fredegund was not very happy about being ousted for this princess with lots of money. So she convinces Chilprick to have her assassinated and obviously to keep all the money. Oh, that's expedient. This all goes, well, then Brunhild is like, this is outrageous.

Death to your lot. And Fredegans were like, well, I'd never really appreciated your family anyway. death to your lot. Civil war. The brothers hate each other because it's just one-upmanship. The wives hate each other. There are assassination attempts, left, right and center on everybody's life. Some of them quite successful. Brunhild's husband, Sigibert, is allegedly bumped off by assassins sent by Fredegund. And eventually Fredegund's husband is bumped off by assassins, allegedly sent by Brunhild. Although it is also said in a different source that what had actually happened is, is that she had her own husband bumped off because he found out that she was having an affair during a hunting trip.

Oh, oh, okay. See, it's just war-to-war gossip and scandal at this point. Listen, where is our really gossipy soap opera version of this? I'm talking to you producers of Night of the Seven Kingdoms. Let's get it done. Exactly. The Meriv Engines would make a great TV series. It really would.

Okay, so we got mess. We got queens at each other's throats. I mean, is it slightly ridiculous? Yes. Is it soap opera? Yes. But, I mean, I think it says a lot about society. I mean, it does show us that we have these women who certainly are able, at the very least, to command violence,

which is not something that we necessarily associate with queenship in the medieval period. I would argue wrongly. but we really do see some women here who are quite involved, no? Yeah, these are very important women. They are explicitly part of the royal infrastructure. We talk about kings and their law-giving and their warlike nature. Queens are counsellors. They are valued.

Yes, they are valued for being beautiful, but they're also valued for being wise. And not even just these queens, a number of queens are mentioned that what they do is that they're the ones who are taking the kings to one side to advise them on policy, which nobles are the ones that they should be listening to, how they should be dealing with diplomats. They're the people, it sounds quite in the old fashion to they're the ones running the household, but in the powerful sense of they're the ones running the household. You want to speak to the king, you're going to be nice to the queen.

That's how you get access. They are very much political figures who are controlling how the conversation works. That sense of queenship does get pushed away a little bit in the second half of the Merovingian reign. There's a variety of reasons for that. Partly, I think they're trying to keep away from the chaos of the Brunghild and Fredegund era. They want to return to civil war. Partly polygamy, the way that kings work through having lots of partners blunts the power that some of those women have. So the king Daggerbert, who's really the second king after that age of chaos, and he is a unifying king.

He rules the entire kingdom by himself. The chronicler, Frader de Gar says, and he had three wives and so many girlfriends that if we listed them all, the chronicle would become too long. All right, player. Okay. Yeah, I love it. Okay, well, all right, what brings this particular era of instability to an end then? How do we get out of this mess? brutally, as is often the way. There is a guy called Clotter the Second, Lothar the Second, and he is the son of Chilbrick,

and he's kind of the last man standing, as it were, because Brunhild, who, after an epic, nearly over 40 years of political activity, not just as Queen, but as regent for then her son and grandson, and it's tempting to be the Regent Fair great-grandson as well. The nobles of Burgundy fall out with, her and basically betray her to Plotter who had been, he had not even been born when his father was assassinated. So he never knew, never knew his father, but he's grown up. And finally,

this is the time right at the beginning of the 7th century when he is old enough to be king. So it's not with a war, but he marches his army down at the request of the Burgundians and says, Hi, Burgundians, I'm now reuniting the kingdom. I'll be the first unifying king since Lothar the first. Clovis' son. He then has Brunhild paraded naked on a camel, where one found the camel in Dijon. I was about to ask. I'm not entirely sure. Where are you getting camels from play? Come on, come on. What would be really weird, memorable? A camel. We'll get a camel. And then has her trampled to death by wild horses. That's a symbol of the decline of that end of the dynasty. That family is done.

And then he holds two big councils, big council of all his bishops, big council of all the nobles, and they swear that they're going to do things legally and peace. And fairly from thereon, there's a kind of big document which sometimes is dramatically called the Magna Carta of the Franks, the Council of Paris in 614, which is not really anything in the sort. They just agree to do things like make sure that judges, judge cases where they are. because if they judge cases from 200 miles away and they just do really bad things, there's not really much of a course to get justice properly done. Basically, judges have to be responsible

for what they say. Imagine. Imagine that. And so then the kingdom is unified again. And what you then get is a century in, there's still a little bit of civil war because there's always a little bit of civil war left to come. But not so much between brothers.

anymore. The tensions increasingly become between the kings and their nobles. This is almost like when it starts to become really medieval, who has more power, the nobles or the kings, and it's a kind of shoving power. And occasionally there's important bishops hanging around as well who are orchestrating things as well. I guess it gets a lot more complicated. But it just, it also becomes a lot more serious. You get a series of kings whose deeds are mostly that they heard legal cases, not civil war. Is this the period when we also start getting these guys the mayors of the palace crop up, is that correct?

This is exactly that period. Could you tell us about those guys? The rise of the nobles. I shouldn't really call it. The nobles are just always powerful. Kings are only ever kings with the consent of their people. They really are supposed to be elected people. And any king who decides that they're just going to

do whatever they feel like is a tyrant. There's this one king, Chauderick, the second. The nobles invite him to become king of the Western part of the Frankish kingdom at one point. And he does things like beat up noble people that he doesn't like. And so they kill him. Right, fair enough. There's another one, Dagobert II, who he's actually put in exile in Ireland for a while

because of a coup at his palace, but then he's invited back with the help of the machinations of the serial exiled English bishop, Wilfred of York. Dagabot II brings back his team of people who've been advising him back in Ireland, which means that the people who the nobles who are actually in charge of his kingdom don't have access to the king and they don't like it so they kill him. And this is kind of the vibe in the 660s the 670s. It's easy. You can get rid of a king if they're a tyrant and they're not listening to the people and they're not doing justice. That's quite traumatic. And interestingly, in almost all of those cases where kings get bumped off, they all get replaced by the same

young guy called Thudurik III, who is considered one of the do-nothing kings. mostly because all he's really ever invited to do is take over when everything is falling apart. Can you tell us more about this concept of the do nothing kings? Because that's one of the things that you hear all the time about the late Mayor of Ingeans. They're the Do Nothing Kings. Well, it's bound up with the rise of the mayor of the palace. The mayor of the palace is the senior noble who makes sure that courts run properly and helps deal with diplomats when they come visiting and make sure that armies are called when they need to be called. And is there a point then where they're basically doing all the thing you expect a king

should be doing? And you get a series of kings who are quite young. And so if you've had quite a long period of time when you only ever had young kings and then they die in their early 20s without having really done anything, where the mares at the palace are still going, so they become the wise old heads who hold everything together. In many respects, they'd be doing exactly what Brunhild had been doing in the previous century if she had all the experience and all the know-how. So they become, the mayor's become the trusted officials. They make everything actually happen. So what are the kings doing?

And they become increasingly unpopular. The tag the Do Nothing King, I think, is first attributed to them about the 17th century. But there are chronicles from the 9th century, which describe them as useless. But even that's from a propaganda point of view, because when the last mayor of Indian king is dethroned in 751. And that one does seem to be pretty useless. The only thing we know about him, even though he's king for eight years, is that he was dethroned. If that's the only thing you can do in eight years, that's not a good sign. Okay, well, if you're getting dethroned, though, if we're at this point in time where you can get toppled, who's doing it?

These are the palace mares that are doing it? The palace mares. But again, they don't want to be tyrants either. So in the case of 7.51, when it gets deposed, what's the mayor of the palace at that point, a guy called Pippin? What Pippin the third does is send some messengers to the Pope with this message saying, I basically have all the power, but I'm not king, and the king doesn't have any power, but is king, could I be king? And the Pope writes back, sure, that sounds sensible. Thanks, Pope.

But that itself doesn't. you can't just make yourself king because the Pope said, sure. So he has a proper election and they remove Childerick by cutting his hair and sending him off into a monastery. It's possible even that Childerick really kind of wanted that at this point. But it's difficult to we can imagine, but we don't know. Pippin then has to be elected by the nobles and so that they all get together and proclaim him to be king. And he is elected that that is what. It's not like there's another candidate, though.

It's like, do you want this guy or this guy? Maybe there was. The sources just say, and then he was chosen by all the people. And then the position was confirmed by all the bishops who get together on, say a little prayer. So that way he has the whole of the church and the whole of the nobility have given him permission to do this. And so if you want power, and this has really been the case ever since the beginning of the 7th century, if you want to have that kind of royal power, you need the backing of the nobles and the church. And if you've got that kind of backing, then you can hold power.

Then you can make a change. Because if you're just going around murdering kings, there's other words for that. But now we've got a palace mayor who's on the throne. Is that it? Like, is this how these wonderful sea monster Trojans meet their end? That's how they meet that end. There's a little bit more to it, of course, because it's history. There's always a little bit more to it.

It's not like there have been really good kings and then one day they had gone. It gets difficult to find Merovingian kings. There's something about the bloodline goes wrong. And dynasties are always a very complicated thing because how, okay, you have a great ruler like Clovis, but what if your son's an idiot? What if he's not very good at fighting? These things trouble dynasties the whole time.

It's often a sequence. You get the really good one, then you might get the great one, but then you have the one who's a bit rubbish, and then you have the one that's terrible, and it all falls apart. Very few medieval dynasties last a couple. of generations. So the last effective Merivinian king, this is a good early medievalist pub game,

which is the last effective one. Harsh people, the hardcore line is that there hadn't been an effective king since Lothar the second right at the beginning of the 7th century. Some people will say that his son, Daggerbert, the one with all the girlfriends, was pretty good. Very few people would vote for any of the kings thereafter from most of the 7th century. There's a guy right at the beginning of the 8th century. The only thing that it said about him in The Chronicles is that he was good and just. Well, listen, that's all you need to know, though. That's all you need.

Yeah. So he's a good and he's a just king. But after him, he seems to be quite young when he dies. His successor dies very young. His successor dies very young. It's just a whole group of, they get through a series of kings in quick succession. only one of them is older than a teenager or early 20s when they die. And even that one only becomes king, we think, in his early 40s because he'd been hiding in a monastery and was a priest.

It's kind of like the good effective members of the dynasty had already gone. So there is also kind of a vote here. Why are we sticking with this family who haven't given us a really good king for a century? But of course, the problem with this is be careful what you wish for because then the Carolingians take over. That's the dynasty that the Pippin the third basically. starts off, and exactly the thing happens to them, that they get through a number of kings in quick succession, dying early and being rubbish, and then the no balls are like, okay, so the last time this happened, we got rid of this thing.

Should we do that again? Well, I think that the mayor of indigenous are such an interesting test case, because I think a lot of what gets thrown around if people don't know about the medieval period and if they don't know about the early medieval period, is this idea that it is nothing but violence and everyone's an idiot and everything is accomplished simply through battle. But we do have this series of kings who are effective legal taskmasters, you know, people who can sort of rule a kingdom in a not sexy, non-violent way. And then when they do that, nobody likes it. It falls apart. In the middle of that, Clovis II and his wife, Bollettild, another one,

the classic strong queens, they are praised for bringing peace. And Bollettild is said to be so successful at bringing peace that after her husband dies, they invite her to go and live in a monastery where they don't have to deal with her. Too much peace, bad enough of that. Well, listen, this has been a met. Thank you. Always the marriage. I mean, I mean that in a good way. I absolutely love the drama that the Mervin genes bring. And I think that it is just a nice peek into a world where people act as though we don't really know. But, There is rather a lot to say about these guys. So much to say.

James, thank you for your time. Once again, I will not stop bringing you on. Thanks for gossiping with me. Thanks, Eleanor. Thank you so much to James once again for joining me. And thank you for listening to Gomden Evil from History Hit. If you were interested in some of the topics we mentioned in this episode, you might want to go back and check out our past episodes on Charlemagne

and the destruction of Charlemagne's legacy. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my recent film on The Trials of Joan of Arc, and add-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com forward slash subscription. You could follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions or wherever you get your podcasts. Until all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.