The Rest Is History - 520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

The Rise of the Franks - a mighty host of warlords; forefathers of the western world and forgers of medieval civilisation, under the totemic leadership of history’s most glorious King: Charlemagne. It is a tale rich in fantasy and myth, transporting us into a distant age and the dark debris of a crumbling Roman empire; landscapes scarred by ruins, clashing queens, poisonings, sorcery, bloody battles, ice castles, and axe-wielding warriors, more reminiscent of King Arthur, Game of Thrones and the Lord of the Rings than real life. Once insignificant, terrifying barbarians from the peripheries of Gaul, with flaming red hair and formidable moustaches, they would emerge from the ashes of the Roman Empire in the 4th century AD, and become the heirs of the Caesars. But how? The answer lies in warring barbarian strongmen, the collision of old gods and the new, a mighty Christian martyr, a mysterious ancient bloodline born of perhaps Jesus Christ himself, the emperors of old, and a sea monster; and a battle to determine dominion of the West…  Join Tom and Dominic as they launch into one of the greatest stories in all of European history: the rise the Franks. Europe’s mightiest warriors, warlords and kings, whose legacy would reshape the world forever.  _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is the restishistory.com. Zachary was still shaking his head. Welcome to Thailand. Now let me school you. What you and Sarai could do and get away with in Boulder can't be done here in Phuket. Not if she's going to save face and honor her father. She's a good girl. And here in Thailand, good girls don't fool around with

or get involved with farangs. What the hell is a farang? It's the Thai word for Europeans, or non-Thai men. It's mostly used to describe white guys. Since we're black, you and I are actually Ferang Dam." Alexander stared at his twin for a moment. Well, damn! he said, suddenly laughing. Laughing with him, Zachary shrugged. Ferang is also the word for guava fruit. Go figure! So that, Dominic, was Guilty Pleasures by Deborah Mello. I'm sure you'll have read it. It's a romance novel describing the rivalry between two American brothers,

both of them black as we heard, Alexander and Zachary, the Hammer Barrett. And they're both absolute fitness fanatics like me. And they're both obsessed by the beautiful Sarai Montrey, who is a personal trainer and the former Miss Thailand. So of all the introductory readings we've ever had on the rest of history, that's probably the weirdest. What's going on? Well, I'm sure what will have stuck out for you was the use of this phrase, Farang Dam, which literally means black Franks. And it was first used in the 60s to describe black American servicemen who were being stationed in Thailand during the Vietnam

War. And Thai is just one of a number of Asian languages that uses variation of this word Frank to describe Europeans and Americans. So the Turks for example they use the word Franks to mean foreigners or Westerners, outsiders, don't they? And lots of people do that. Yeah, so the Greeks used to, the Arabs still do. It's a word that's used in Urdu, in Hindi, in Chinese, in Malay. And you'll have noticed in that passage of Immortal Prose I just read the use of the word Farang to describe guava fruit and the reason for that is because

it was introduced to Thailand by the Portuguese in the 16th century. So it's basically a kind of a Frankish fruit. And similarly in Cambodia, I gather a turkey is a Frankish chicken. So essentially anything that comes from what today we might call the West is Frankish. And it's absolutely bizarre, because the Franks are a people who, you know, they take us back over a millennium and a half, back to an incredibly distant age and an incredibly distant part of the world. And the Franks today and for the next few weeks are going to be our great theme and it is an amazing, amazing story. Well, the story of The Franks is the story in history I think that's most reminiscent of the sort of fantasy novels of Tolkien and George R. R. Martin and whatnot. So it's a world

of crumbling empires, of landscapes kind of scarred with ruins of sorcerers and magic and men with massive axes and warrior queens and people plotting to poison each other and dragons and kind of mountain battles and citadels and it really has got it all hasn't it? The other comparison to fantasy novels is that everybody pretty much in the story has completely mad names. Right. Gunderbad. It's a good name. Wolfegund, I think my favourite

chimney child, a girl's name. So anyone out there looking for a name for a daughter, I think that's a brilliant name. But it is also a hugely significant period historically, because basically it's about how one age passes away, another is incubated. And you could say it's the great hinge moment in European history because it's the story of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West and the emergence of what will become medieval civilization. So at the beginning we are in Gaul and by the end of it we are in France and of course France it is the land of the Franks, Frankia, that's where the word France comes from.

Let's kick off at the beginning. So we are in the Roman Empire in the 4th France, it is the land of the Franks, Frankia, that's where the word France comes from. Let's kick off at the beginning. So we are in the Roman Empire in the fourth century AD, the middle of the fourth century, and Gaul is still part of the empire, but it's coming under increasing pressure, isn't it, on the frontiers from the movement of all kinds of Germanic peoples. And that's where this story begins. Yeah, so let's look at a particular moment. It's the winter of AD 357 going into 358. We are in the aftermath of Constantine, the great emperor who has reunited the empire after it had been kind of divided up. And in Constantinople we have Constantine's son, Constantius II, and he has sent his cousin, a man called Julian,

to stabilize the Rhine frontier, the frontier of Gaul. And the most menacing enemy that Julian faces is a great confederation of peoples called the Alemanni. And in the summer of 357, he has met with them outside Strasbourg in a great battle. Julian and his forces have been massively outnumbered. But as the Romans so often do, he has won a crushing victory over the barbarians. The king of the Alemanni has been captured, has been sent off to Constantius in Constantinople and it's all looking good. However, to the north of Strasbourg, so higher up the Rhine, another group of barbarians

have been taking advantage of Julian's distraction to pillage the line of the Meuse Valley. So that's through what's now Belgium. And these Dominic are the Franks. So this is their first appearance, right, in the sources as the named group. From this moment they're called the Franks, are they? So the Franks have been a kind of a constant on the Roman frontier since the third century. We'll look at exactly where they come from in a minute. Okay. But just for now this is a kind of particular instant which illustrates the Roman reactions to them and the kind of the relationship between these two people, the Roman superpower and this kind of, essentially

at this point, they're just an annoyance on the flank of the great Roman monster, the Beomoth. And these Franks, there are only about 600 of them. They've taken possession of a couple of abandoned fortresses on the line of the Myrs and Julian wants to nail them down. He doesn't want them to kind of cause trouble. So he lays them under siege, even though it's beyond the campaigning seasons, the snows are coming down. And in fact, as the winter comes on and there's the risk of the river freezing over, we know from a historian called Ammianus Marcellinus, who's a great fan of Julian, great historian

of this period. And he writes, anxious in case the savages should take advantage of some moonless night across the frozen river. Julian gave orders that all night from sunset to dawn soldiers should row up and downstream in scouting vessels, thereby breaking up the ice and denying the barbarians the chance to escape. And this is very effective. Finally the Franks have no choice to surrender and you might think that Julian would then put them to the sword but he doesn't. He settles them on

the northernmost line of the Roman Empire, so kind of by the mouth of the Rhine, to serve as allies of the Roman people, what the Romans called foi derati. And the following summer, so the summer of 358, there are more Frankish warbands who intrude. Julian defeats them again, and again he settles them in, you know, what are now the low countries. So some people might think that's very peculiar behaviour. This not unprecedented tactic that the Romans have of taking warlike peoples on their periphery and actually settling them and trying to sort of tame them and to use them. So I guess we'll get into that in a

second. Before we do that, what do we know of these people, the Franks? I read in your notes, appearance colon terrifying. Now is that just Roman propaganda or are they genuinely scary looking people? I think they are genuinely scary looking. You know, they want to kind of scarify. They make themselves look as intimidating as possible. So we have a record of how they looked to a Roman poet writing in the following century, so in the fifth. You might say it's propaganda, but I don't think so. This poet writes, These monsters have red hair which descends from the top of the skull in a knot, while the back of their head is shaved and shines baldly. So they look Scottish.

Yes, I suppose. They're clean shaven, this poet writes, except for locks of hair which descend from the nose and are combed. So again this is something we've talked about before on the podcast, the inability of the Romans to find a word for what we would call mustaches. A lock of hair which descends from the nose. Yeah. Surely the Romans must be aware that hair grows under your nose. No, they don't have a word for it.

And also the detail that they comb it. And then this brilliant detail detail the clothes they wear over their immense genitals are exceedingly tight. Right. So yeah, like a kind of like a prog rocker or something from the 1970s. Yes and also like prog rockers they have fearsome throwing axes. Right and massive mustaches so yeah it's very Genesis circa 1973. So the Franks are not, I guess, a tribe in the way that the Romans of earlier centuries would have recognised the tribe. They're a kind of confederation. That is a pattern that has been developing over the course of the centuries, because the impact of Roman gold, of Roman

military techniques, but also of the desire of the Romans to understand barbarian peoples in a way that corresponds to the Roman world vision has kind of been creating ever larger tribal entities across the Rhine. The Romans have basically invented these peoples in a way. I think the Germanic peoples start to recognize the Roman standards as the measure to which they should conform and so they start to mould themselves into people like the Romans, which of course makes them actually, ironically, much more menacing. So the Alemanni who we mentioned, I mean that is all the men, that's all the people who've been gathered together. They're a particularly large confederation. The Franks compared to the Alemanni are not as large, certainly not

as large as the most famous confederations of all. So the Goths, the Visigoths, the Western Goths, the Ostrogoths, the Eastern Goths, compared to them they're low rent. And I think that that is why Julian and other Roman emperors and generals are prepared to kind of install them along the frontier as foyer de rati, as allies. And as I said, this is a process that doesn't begin with Julian. It goes back to the third century. So from the late third century, we have a funerary inscription in which the buried warrior has written, I belong to the Frankish nation, but as a soldier under arms, I am a Roman.

So there you have this idea that you can be both a Frank and a Roman. Even under Constantine, a Frank is registered as having served as a general in the Roman army. And I think that reflects the fact that there is something in this trade off for both peoples, because just as the Franks get the benefits of Roman civilization, you know, wine and central heating and all that kind of stuff. So the Romans get these fearsome guys with their very tight pants and their throwing axes to fill a massive manpower shortage. There are a lack of people who want to serve in the Roman army and the Franks are kind of brilliant at that. And the broader question of who the Franks are, where they come from, this is one that the Franks themselves later will struggle to answer. So one story which will develop much later is that they come from a place called Pannonia, which is

basically the Great Plains of Hungary. But I think that's unlikely because it's telling that that's where the Goths come from. So basically the Franks are identifying themselves with the Goths. And then much later, there's an even more improbable claim that the Franks came from Troy, which of course is where the Romans also came from. Yeah, of course. So they're equating themselves to the Romans.

So basically, I think what that tells you is that the Franks are pretty low rent as a group of people. They don't have a distinguished ancestry. They can't really remember where they come from and even the name that they give themselves, so Franks means literally the brave ones, the war hungry ones, in due course they will say that the Franks means the free ones but that is actually under the Romans exactly what they are not. They're not free, they are subordinate. So it's a window, isn't it, into the Roman

world in this period where the empire has come under enormous pressure on the frontiers. And as a part of that, the army is becoming ever more the domain of – historians are a little bit wary of using these terms now, aren't they, like barbarians – basically Germanic peoples are now serving the army in large numbers. And the frontiers owns lots of Germanic peoples who have been settled, kind of slightly military settlements. A lot of the officers are Germanic backgrounds and more like the emperors by now are less and less your kind of pampered Italians and they're more and more your kind of Balkan strongmen and things. And it's a sort of story about the militarisation of the Roman Empire, isn't

it, I guess? I think there's a real kind of reversal story about the militarisation of the Roman Empire, isn't it, I guess? I think there's a real kind of reversal of what happened early in the Roman Empire, where the army which is stationed along the Rhine is basically the agent of turning these frontier regions Roman. Increasingly, in the third, the fourth, the fifth centuries, the army, because it is becoming more and more barbarian, is barbarianizing those frontier regions. But that doesn't mean that the Franks are the equivalent of the warriors in the Trojan Halls waiting to come out and destroy the Roman Empire.

So they're not the enemy within? They're not the enemy within. Because actually, by the end of the fourth century, they are clearly very loyal as foederati. By the end of the fourth century, they've been serving Rome for several generations. They are even willing to fight other Franks who lie beyond the Roman frontier. And I think they remain loyal basically because they're warlords, they're leaders remain loyal.

And these Frankish leaders, on the one hand, they are very, very Roman. They speak Latin, they read Virgil, they're highly cultured. The gods that they worship are the traditional Roman gods. But at the same time, their authority depends on the fact that they are Frankish warlords, that they are respected by their troops. And so you have this sense of a Romano-Frankish identity, which doesn't really require the warlords or indeed their soldiers to choose between the Franks or the Romans. In what way then are they not Roman? Because their lingua franca is a Germanic language? Because they have their mustaches? Because they have a mustache, they have their tiepans.

I think their leaders are able to kind of migrate between both worlds. I think the mass of the warriors are kind of more recognisably Germanic, but they are absolutely integrated into the Roman military system. And so that means that in the early fifth century, when basically the Rhine frontier collapses, the Franks are very implicated in the kind of the great catastrophe, the great drama of this story. So the highlights of this process, 406, you get large groups of barbarians crossing the Rhine. 410, the Visigoths sack Rome. The following year in 411, a great confederation called the Burgundians cross the Rhine, conquer stretches of the river, and they conquer all the regions that Julian had been defending

50 years previously, so including Strasbourg. And this is a situation in which the Franks have to play a crucial part because they have to decide where their loyalties lie. Does it lie with the imploding Roman Empire or does it lie with the Germanic peoples? Right, because when the institutions fall apart, the people with all the weapons and the military know-how are suddenly in an incredibly powerful position, aren't they? Absolutely. I mean, they will literally become the kingmakers in the post-Roman world. And indeed, in due course, become the kings. So they are going to play a key part in this process of transformation, which takes place through the fifth century. But before we get to that,

there is also another massive process of transformation that's been taking place in the Roman Empire in the fourth and into the fifth century. And this also will have a transformative impact on the Franks over the course of the succeeding centuries. And again, I think the best way to kind of introduce this great transformation is to go back to the 350s and the campaigns of Julian in Gaul because there is one particular soldier who is serving with Julian's armies

in that campaign and this is a man from Pannonia, so from the Hungarian plain, a man of pretty humble lineage, certainly not high class in any way, and he is called Martinus, or as we would call him today, Martin. And he is stationed one winter in Amiens, which is very much in the region where the Franks are being stationed as well, so kind of what's now northeastern France. Shall I read what happened to him, Tom? Would you enjoy that? I would, because I actually wrote it. It's in Dominion. I'll read it with the respect it deserves.

The cold that year was exceptionally better. A beggar in rags stood shivering by the gateway of the city. His fellow townsmen wrapped up warm as they crunched through the snow, gave him nothing. Then came Martin. Dressed for duty, he had no money, only his arms. As a soldier, though, he did have his heavy military cloak, and so taking out his sword, he cut it in two and gave half to the beggar. The following night Martin had a dream. He saw Christ dressed in the very portion of the cloak that he had given away that day. And the Lord said to him as he had done on earth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me."

That's how Jesus speaks, is it? Oh, that's such a moving story. And I bet that really happened. So a very dramatic moment, Christ appearing to the soldier Martin who's given away half of his cloak. And Martin is convinced by this appearance of Christ essentially to give up on his military career. So he's offered a donative by Julian along with all his other men and he refuses to accept it and he demands to be released from the army. And he supposedly tells Julian until now it is you I have served from this moment on, I am a servant of Christ.

I bet Julian didn't like that. That was a shocking display of laisse-majeste. The truth is Dominic, that it is Martin and not Julian who embodies the future, because Julian is better known as Julian the Apostate, the last emperor to worship the traditional Roman gods. Yeah. And Martin, of course, is a Christian and the future of the Roman Empire is a Christian one.

Oh, the irony. But the thing about Martin is that he is a Christian of a peculiarly radical kind, because even though Julian is very hostile to Christianity, Constantius, his cousin, he's a Christian. Most of the Roman elites are starting to kind of jump ship and become Christian. They can tell the way that the wind is blowing. And when they become Christian, they don't give up their wealth or their snobbery or their kind of contempt for the poor. Instead, they see the church as another opportunity for self-advancement. So whereas a previous generation of the elite might have become consuls or whatever, now

they might become bishops because to be a bishop is to be in the late Roman Empire, the Christianising Roman Empire, is to be a figure of immense authority and power. And they retain all the appurtenances of power. They keep their palaces, they keep their slaves, they keep their fine clothes. But Martin, that's not what he's into at all. He completely rejects this kind of conviction that you can be Christian and be rich. So an admirer of his, who is himself an aristocrat, who is converted to Martin's understanding of Christianity, writes of Martin, his looks were those of a peasant, his clothes shoddy, his hair a disgrace. And Martin's ambition is to become what the Greeks call

a monarchus, so literally one who lives alone, i.e. a monk. And he's one of the first monks in the western half of the empire because they kind of originate in the eastern half. And he settles on a grassy plain named Mamutie which is three miles downriver from the the Gallic town of Tor and he subjects himself to incredible austerity so as a soldier of course you know he'd gone through vigorous military training but now as a monk he's basically living on nothing, he's enduring extremes of cold and heat, living a very, very tough life. But this becomes a source of huge admiration for lots of people in Gaul.

So there are people in the elites who come to admire him not despite but because of his rejection of everything that they represent, all the kind of, you know, the worldly standards of greatness. And it wins him the ability to perform spectacular miracles that further kind of increases his fame. And so you start to get people of immensely wealthy backgrounds giving up the kind of traditional path to greatness and to rank and coming to join him and they camp out in caves or in wooden shacks. Just a question about the miracles. What are the miracles? He's healing the sick, people with twisted limbs, he's straightening them, he's giving sight to the blind,

he's giving voice to the mute. Wow, amazing. Absolutely happening and the proof of this Dominic, and I can see you looking skeptical, is that in 371 Martin is elected as the Bishop of Tor and this is absolutely stupefying because as we've been saying bishops are people from the absolute elite of society and it comes as a complete shock to the elites but it also comes as a shock to Martin who doesn't want to be a bishop at all and he runs away and hides himself in a barn and the geese go and tell the people who've elected him where he is and so he has to come out and become a bishop.

Are they? It's just a small thing but how do the geese communicate to those people? They honk. Okay, they just honk and people interpret it as they... Yeah, they honk. They honk and hiss. Okay. Yeah, they're not talking.

No. That would be too miraculous. Okay. So anyway, but the miracles continue and this means that Martin, you know, he has a source of power that does not derive from the traditional standards of Roman life. It's coming directly from heaven. And so that means that his person is charged with an incredible source of power. And it means that when he dies, his body, his relics will continue to be a source of

power. And so he dies in his cell and two groups of people, one from Tours and one from the neighbouring city of Poitiers, they both decide that they would like to have the body and so they all camp outside his cell and the people of Poitiers basically block off the entrance so that the people of Tours can't get in and stand guard over it. But they then all fall asleep and the people of Tours who've stayed awake, they sneak in through the window, grab the body, take it to Tours in great triumph and they keep it there. And so from that point on, the relics of Martin are kept at Tours.

Isn't it a funny thought that if that little confrontation worked out differently, the French might not have shamed themselves in 1356, the Battle of Pratier, because he would have been on their side. Well, Dominic, it's another example for French history of people falling asleep at Inoptitian times. It is, like the Marquis de Lafayette. Very sad. So Martin's body is taken in triumph to Tours. The people are thrilled to have it. The elites of Tours less so, the bishop, for instance, who succeeds Martin, he's very sniffy about it. You know, he builds a small shrine over Martin's tomb, but he doesn't do anything much more than that. And essentially to the elites for several generations, Martin remains an embarrassment,

but his relics do continue to perform miracles and his fame grows and grows and grows. And essentially he embodies a kind of source of power that is so uncanny, so unsettling that the Christian elites of Gaul don't quite know what to do with it. It's in excess of their ability to control. But a time is approaching when a new people will emerge as the Masters of Gaul and they will recognise in Martin exactly what they need. A celestial patron who has been despised by the traditional Masters of Gaul but is perfectly suited to their needs and those people of course are the Franks. What a cliffhanger. So return after the break to find out how the Franks continue their rise to become the Warlords of the West. Now Tom, we have something unbelievably exciting to share with our

listeners don't we? Absolutely we do Dominic. We are announcing the launch of the Rest is History merchandise. Yes, you can now own a piece of history. Literally. We've got shirts, mugs, phone cases, notebooks, so much just in time for Christmas. Unbelievable scenes Tom because these aren't just any shirts and mugs. Tom, these are exclusive Rest is History designs. That's right Dominic. And our new merch truly is the perfect gift for any history fan, whether they're a friend of the show or dare we say someone who's not yet a friend of the show. Yeah, I mean this is an unbelievably cunning wheeze isn't it? Really is.

Because if you're a loyal friend of the show, you can buy a t-shirt that proudly declares your allegiance. And if you still need convincing, then you can buy a not a friend of the show version as well. So truly, it's beyond a dream gift, isn't it? And we'll be sharing on social media our favourite pictures of you in your Restless History merch. So send these in over Christmas morning. So remember to head to www.goalhanger.shop to get your merch. Christ's lineage was in perpetual danger. The early church feared that if the lineage

were permitted to grow, the secret of Jesus and Magdalene would eventually surface and challenge the fundamental Catholic doctrine, that of a divine messiah who did not consort with women or engage in sexual union." He paused. Nonetheless, Christ's line grew quietly undercover in France until making a bold move in the 5th century, when it intermarried with French royal blood and created a lineage known as the Merovingian bloodline. So those are the unmistakable tones of Gandalf, aka Ian McKellen, playing Salih Tebing. And that is of course the unmistakable prose of very much a, I don't think friend is the right word, but he's an associate, isn't he? He's an associate to the rest of history. And that is the acclaimed novelist,

renowned novelist, Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code. And Salih Tee being there for people who are just absolutely baffled, he's explaining how Christ's descendants have intermarried with the Merovingian bloodline. And this is the royal dynasty that comes to rule the Franks and they're basically all descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene. And like so many things in this story, this absolutely definitely happened, didn't it Tom? So people who haven't read the Da Vinci Code or seen it or read the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which is the book purporting to be history on which the Da Vinci Code was based. The theory in this is that Jesus and Mary Magdalene get married, they have children, this is a holy

bloodline, sangrial, the holy blood, and that as Liti Bing says that it marries into Frankish royalty and they create this family called the Merovingians. And you may wonder where has this come from? And the answer is that there's a Frankish chronicle which is written in the seventh century, which claims that the Merovingians who are absolutely a historical dynasty will be looking at them, that they took their name from a guy called Merovech, who was a Frankish king whose mother had been out for swim in the ocean where she had encountered a mysterious sea creature that was part sea monster, part human and part bull. It's kind of hard to picture that, isn't it? Part bull. Which bit of him is bull? Which

bit of him is human and which is sea monster? I don't think that is explained. But according to the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which informs Dan Brown's novel, this sea creature was actually a fish and an early Christian symbol for Jesus was a fish. Yeah, still is. And so that proves that the Merovingians are actually... So this creature was Jesus. Yeah, it's said to be Jesus. That's a shock, isn't it, if that's what Jesus looks like. So that's the theory, but there is an alternative, and I would say likelier, explanation. Ah, that's disappointing. What's this alternative and no doubt very drab explanation? And the explanation probably is that Merovich, if he existed at all, was a Frankish leader

who was a Roman voiderati commander in the age of Attila and he fights with the Romans against Attila in the great battle that sees the Huns turn back. But equally, I mean, he may have been completely legendary. There's all kinds of debate about this among historians. But in either case, I mean, people may be wondering where on earth did this kind of mad story about the sea monster come from? and I think it comes from the fact that over the course of the fifth century and definitely into the sixth century these Frankish warlords who previously had proclaimed their power in Roman terms are having to find alternative sources to manifest their greatness and essentially they are looking for ways to market themselves as kingly and to have a kind of mad origin point, a third bull, a third human, a third sea monster. I mean

that's a great way to say that you belong to a dynasty that is somehow kind of out of the ordinary and we know that by the end of the fifth century Frankish warlords are starting to proclaim themselves kings. And the first person that we absolutely know did this is a guy called Childeric, who'd been a commander of Frankish Foederati. He may actually have been a son of Merovich, there are historians who argue this, and he is taking on himself all the symbols of royalty. So among the Franks, the particular symbol of royalty is to grow your hair longer than anyone else. So, you know, if you're the guy in the prog rock band, your hair is right the way down to the back of your knees. And so the Merovingian kings come

to be called the Reges Criniti, the long-haired kings. And the reason that we know that Childeric called himself a king is that his tomb was found near Tournai in Belgium in 1653 and it was kind of full of sumptuous grave goods. He had this cloak that was decorated with lots of golden bees and these golden bees actually provided Napoleon with the symbol for the French Empire that he wanted. So it was designed to kind of replace the fleur de lis, the royal symbol. And as well as all these golden bees, there was a ring that had the inscription – I belong to Childric the King. So just on this thing about being a king, Childric died in 481 and lots of people listening to this podcast will know that five years earlier, the Roman Empire in the West had

formally come to an end. And we always think of this as a massive moment, but actually at the time, probably a lot of people barely even noticed there was no longer an emperor in the West. But that's reflective of a general breakdown across the fifth century in the institutions and the authority of Rome in the Western half of the empire.

And so, as we said in the first half, when the institutions break down, basically power passes to those people who have weapons and then know how to use them. And I guess it's clearly only going to be a matter of time before some of these warlords or officers or captains or gangland mobsters or whatever image you want to use to describe them, before they start to say, well, you know, actually who needs an authority above me? I'll be the top dog and I'll make myself a king. So is that what's going on here that the Franks, they're part of a general pattern of warlords turning themselves into kings? Absolutely. So Jolderic is succeeded by his son who's

a guy called Clovis and Clovis, the great Frankish warlord, proclaimed himself as a king. He's only one of a number of would-be warlords who at this point are scrapping over the corpse of what had been Roman Gaul. The most formidable of these are the Visigoths, the Goths of the West who have conquered much of Spain but they also rule a huge swathe of southern Gaul. There are others as well. So there's the Burgundians who had crossed over the Rhine in 411 and conquered all the area around Strasbourg. There are our friends the Alemanni. They're also very much on the scene. And there is

also a Roman renegade, a guy called Siagrius, who calls himself King of the Romans, so Rex Romanarum. And he is Clovis's most immediate rival and neighbour, and the town that he has taken as his capital is a city that from early times in Roman Gaul had been called Lutetia Parisorum, so Lutetia of the Parisi, that's the local Gallic tribe, but which by this point has come to be known as Paris. And so it's unsurprising with Cyagrius right on his doorstep that the first person that Clovis targets is this so-called King of the Romans. And in 486 Clovis wins a great battle at Soissons, defeats Cyagrius, Cyagrius runs away, escapes, he turns up in Toulouse, which is the capital of the Visigoths

in southern Gaul. The Visigothic king returns him to Clovis, who imprisons him and then has him murdered. And you might say that actually, you know, we did a whole series, didn't we, on when the Roman Empire in the west ends. This might be an alternative point because Sagris had been ruling as a Roman and with him gone, there are no more people claiming to rule Gaul in a kind of Roman way. And Paris from now on will be the capital of the Franks. This is where Clovis puts down his own base. So he's conquered northern Gaul with the exception of a Morica of Brittany which he kind of leaves alone. He then decides he's going to advance southwards and try and conquer all these other peoples who are lurking in the south. So his first target are the Alamanni and he defeats them in a

great battle at a place called Tolbiac in the Rhineland. Very, very close run. At one point as we will see Clovis thinks that he's going to lose and he makes a vow that has a seismic impact on the future course of European history but we'll come to that in due course. He then turns on the Burgundians, he forces them to pay him tribute and then finally in 507 he's ready for the big one, the kind of heavyweight championship and that is to take on the Visigoths in the south of Gaul. So he marches southwards just by Poitiers, so very close to Tours, the shrine of St. Martin, to a place called Vouillet.

He meets the Visigoths under their king. The Visigoths are wiped out. The king is killed. Clovis continues southwards. He lays Toulouse, the Visigothic capital, under siege. 508, Toulouse falls and all that remains to the Visigoths of their former enormous swathes of territory in southern Gaul is a tiny strip of land. And it's an astonishing achievement because

the Franks, who in lots of ways had been the most inferior of all the kind of various Germanic confederations have emerged as the masters of Gaul, the most prosperous of all the provinces in the Western Empire. The lands that for 500 years pretty much had been ruled by the Caesars are now subject to a Germanic warlord who's got his long hair, he's got his enormous genitals bolting out of his tight pants, he's got his bees, he's got all this kind of stuff. And you know, it's quite the transformation. But the counter argument might run like this, that these guys have been serving in the Roman army now for generations. I mean, not talking about decades, we're talking about more than a century.

That perhaps to a lot of people, they would look pretty Romanized. That they know how the Roman Empire works because they've been in it for so long. That actually, they are not replacing Roman Roman authority but they're simply succeeding to it. And that possibly to a lot of people, provincial elites and whatnot, these just look like the Imperial Army or people who were once in the Imperial Army have basically moved in and reasserted control. Isn't that how it might look? Well, we know for a fact that it does because we have a letter that is written by the Bishop of Reims in northern Gaul, a guy called Remedius, who is clearly Roman, you can tell that from

his name, also very, very holy. He's a man who supposedly can raise the dead back to life. And he writes to Clovis when Clovis succeeds his father Childric, essentially hailing Clovis not as a king, but as the new governor of the Roman province of northeastern Gaul. And we have the letter that he writes to him. And he says, the bestowal of your favour must be pure and honest, you must honour your bishops and must always incline yourself to their advice. And this is exactly as he would have written to a Roman governor. Well, he says it's no surprise you've begun just as your forefathers had always done. Yes.

So there's no sense there of like, this is a huge rupture. Absolute continuity. This is just as things always are. You're the legitimate authority. You've moved in, you've taken power. Great. Everything continues as it always has. Yes. Now there is, of course, a complication here, which is that Clovis, like his forefathers,

he's not a Christian. He worships the Roman gods. And that is unlike the other barbarian kings who've seized power in Gaul, who have adopted Christianity, but tellingly a heretical form of Christianity. Arianism, right? Yeah. So God the Son, so Christ is not held to be of one essence with God the Father. He's subordinate to God the Father. And that enables them to kind of buy into the fabric of Christian civilisation but to be a part and, as they see it, superior to their Roman subjects. What will Clovis do? Because the more he advances southwards into Gaul. So in a way, the more pressing it is that he arrives

at an accommodation with the Christian elites of Roman Gaul. And you can see him over the course of his life kind of doing this in a gingerly way, like someone kind of inching his way into a very cold swimming pool. So he has married a Burgundian princess called Clotilda, who unlike Battle of Tolbiac, where son survives and Clovis is happy for that son to be baptised. And then comes the decisive moment according to tradition at the Battle of Tolbiac where he defeats the Alemannian. People remember that this is the moment where he thinks he's going to lose and he raises a vow and the vow is to the Christian God and Clovis says, if you allow me to win this battle I will turn to you, I will convert.' And he wins the battle and

he is true to his vow and not just Clovis but 3,000 of his followers it is said and we get that report from the great historian of 6th century Gaul, a guy called Gregory of Tor who's the bishop, writes this incredible history and we'll be drawing on it a lot in our next episode but Gregory does also write about Clovis and he reports that Clovis and his 3,000 followers are baptized on Christmas day by Remedius, this holy bishop who can raise the dead back to life in Raus and Gregory writes, like some new Constantine Clovis stepped forward to the baptismal pool ready to wash away the sores of his old leprosy and to be cleansed in flowing water from the sordid stains which he had borne so long. And this Dominic of course is why

we've been doing this series on the French Revolution. That's why Louis XVI was crowned and anointed in Reus. And it's actually why Louis is called Louis because Louis is a variant of Clovis. Just on Clovis' conversion, an alternative explanation for why he does it is not just because he thinks God has given him victory at Tobias, but it's also, I might not write in thinking that adopting Christianity is becoming increasingly high status. Yes, absolutely. It's a way of assimilating himself into the elite now that he's beaten his enemies, got the power, he's upgrading to a more high class religion that will ensure

his acceptance by the other provincial power brokers, right? I don't think they're mutually exclusive. No. You can feel that your own needs and those of God are compatible if you are the chosen one of God. So often the way. But of course the key thing is that the form of Christianity that Clovis has converted to, unlike that of the Visigothic or Burgundian or Alemannic kings, it is an Arianism. It's the orthodox form of Christianity, the Roman form of Christianity. And this means that Clovis can be acknowledged not just by his rival barbarian compadres but by the Roman emperor who still prevails and presides over

a Roman empire in Constantinople. And so the key indicator of this comes in 508 after he's captured Toulouse, the capital of the Gothic kingdom, and he's heading southwards tellingly to tour the shrine of Saint Martin and on his way he's met by emissaries of the Roman Emperor Anastasius who presents him with this official document that honours him and recognises him as a Consul of the Roman people. So this is official recognition from the new Rome and this is brilliant for Clovis because you know he's this barbarian war, but he's also now a Roman consul. And so he then heads to the shrine of St. Martin, this unbelievably potent saint of Roman Gaul. And he goes into the shrine and Gregory of Tor writes, he stood there clad in a purple

tunic and the cloak of a Roman general, and he crowned himself with a diadem. So again, I mean, very much as Napoleon in due course will do, so kind of providing a role model. And it's a sumptuous setting. So by this point, you've got a great complex of churches and courtyards and towers that have been built around the tomb of St. Martin and over the tomb itself, there's this glittering gilded dome. Clovis comes out from the shrine and he scatters gold and silver coins as he rides through the streets to the cathedral where

he's welcomed by the bishop and Gregory writes, from that day onwards he was hailed as Consul or Augustus. And it's such a genius move. I'll read you what Patrick Geary, who's one of the great historians of this whole process of how Gaul becomes France. Now no cult barrier separated the army from the indigenous inhabitants of Gaul. The peasants, artisans and most importantly the Gallo-Roman aristocracy and its leaders the bishops for whom religion was an essential element of their identity. Christianisation made possible not only the close cooperation between Gallo-Romans and Franks, but a real amalgamation of the two peoples, a process well underway at all levels by the sixth century. So a massively significant manoeuvre on the

part of Clovis with kind of epical consequences. But here's the thing, Clovis is not just turning himself into another Roman because the fact that he has gone to the shrine of Saint Martin, who is this guy who left the Roman army, who was an outsider, whose whole persona was based on his kind of monasticism, his rejection of wealth and all that kind of thing, who is somebody who's not an elite person, that's something new isn't it? That he is identifying himself with somebody who's very much on the fringe, on the periphery, and therefore creating a new kind of identity, a new kind of power base for himself. Yeah. And Martin is this guy who can perform incredible miracles, and that has given him

power. And power is kind of equivalent to lordship. And it's a lordship that stands outside the traditional power structures of the Gallo-Roman elite. And so it's brilliant for Clovis to identify himself with that. He can be Christian, he can be completely orthodox, it's all very Roman, but at the same time, it's outside the frameworks of snobbery and prestige of that kind of class of bishops who essentially remain the arbiters of power in all the various cities of Roman Gaul but Clovis by identifying himself with Saint Martin is kind of putting himself over and above them. It's an absolutely brilliant move and it's reflective of his absolute

determination to acknowledge no rivals let alone any equals. He is absolutely the superior and just as adopting Saint Martin enables him to put the bishops of Roman Gaul in the shade, so also does he spend the last years of his life, so in the wake of his conversion, basically going around like a kind of mafia boss and exterminating all the other Frankish chieftains. And again, Gregory of Tours has a very funny passage about this. So he describes Clovis one day when he had called a general assembly of his subjects. He is said to have made the following remark

about the relatives whom he had destroyed, so all the other Frankish chieftains. How sad a thing it is, he said, that I live among strangers like some solitary pilgrim and that I have none of my own relations left to help me when disaster threatens. But he said this not because he grieved for their deaths, Gregor Taurides, but because in his cunning way he hoped to find some relatives still in the land of the living whom he could kill. He's a ruthless man. He is. But you know, ruthlessness pays dividends in the troubled circumstances of the early

sixth century. Right. By 511 when he dies, he gets buried in Paris. So he's the first Frankish king to be buried in Paris. He has established the most formidable kingdom in what had been the Western Roman Empire. And his dynasty, the Merovingians, like Clovis, they will rule both as the sacred, long-haired descendants of a sea monster,

but also as the descendants of an Augustus, of a Roman consul. And of course they have in Saint Martin this patron of unbelievable potency. And even the Merovingian kings who follow Clovis will be a bit intimidated by Saint Martin so they actually they tend to avoid his tomb because they're nervous of him. They don't want their own charisma to be blotted out by the much greater charisma of the saint and in due course they obtain that cloak Dominic which Saint Martin had cut in half and given to the beggar and it becomes the kind of the great totem of Merovingian power, the badge of Frankish greatness and they set up a special class of

priest to look after this cloak, capella in Latin and these priests are called the capellani or chaplains and this cloak, this capella as it's called in Latin, comes to be guarded by a special class of priest who are called the capellani or chaplains. This is in due course where we get the word chapel from and these capellani, these chaplains will follow it when the Merovingian king rides into war and it bears stunning witness to the way in which Roman military power and Christian sacral power have been fused by this barbarian king to become a source of unbelievable potency. And it's that fusion of the Roman, the Christian, the barbarian that will typify the emergence of the Frankish kingdom in the sixth century. Okay, so it begins. Now the one thing we didn't talk

about in today's episode, it had sea monsters, it had magic cloaks, it had the works, but it didn't have many women. But the great news is that in the next episode we will be exploring the warrior queens of the Franks and their mad rivalries. It's unbelievable story. There will be all kinds of extremely, extremely bad behaviour. So that's a lot to look forward to. If you remember the Rest is History club, you can actually hear that episode right away. And by the way, you can sign up at therestorshistory.com. If you're not, however, you will have to wait until Thursday for the blood feud between Queen Fredegund and her great rival Queen Brunhilde. So we'll be back on Thursday with that story or indeed right away if you remember The Restors History Club and on that bombshell, merci et au revoir. Goodbye.