The Rest Is History - 521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

Following the death of the legendary Frankish King Clovis, his son Clothar I divided the mighty realm his father had hacked out from the warring warlords of Europe between his four sons. But peace was not to reign…the most ambitious of his brood - Chilperic - seized Paris, his brother’s domain, following his death. Drawn to his swelling power, a seemingly humble yet beautiful slave girl, Fredegund, rose up from obscurity to become Chilperic’s mistress. Little did he know what a ruthless force of nature he had invited into his bed. Before long, she had persuaded him to cast aside his first wife, Audovera. His second, Galswintha, was not so lucky. Soon after their marriage she was found strangled to death, and Fredegund - her probable murderer - was crowned queen in her place. Meanwhile, Galswintha’s equally merciless sister, the intelligent Queen Brunhilda of Austrasia was plotting the gruesome downfall of her sister’s killer, hungry for revenge. The terrible and enduring feud between these two remarkable women had begun… Join Tom and Dominic for this most unbelievable of stories in the second instalment of their series on the rise of the Franks, as they unveil the clash of two indomitable warrior queens, drenched in blood, violence, vengeance, scheming, and witchcraft. The outcome of their civil war would reshape the face of the West.  _______ 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

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or go to HyundaiEVLeader.ca to learn how war keeps you going. Queen Fredegund was very depressed, for she had been stripped of much of her power by her great rival, Queen Brunhilde, and yet she considered herself a much better woman than Brunhilde. In secret then, she sent a cleric of her household, who was to gain Brunhilde's confidence by trickery and then assassinate her. If only he could, on some pretense or other, be accepted as one of her retainers and so gain her confidence, she could then be dispatched when no one was about. The cleric went off to Brunhilde, and by the lies which he told made his way into her good graces.

I am a fugitive from Greenfredegund, he said, and I seek your protection. He began by behaving in a most humble manner to everyone, and so gave himself out as the obedient and trusty servant of the Queen. But not long afterwards, they realized on what a treacherous errand he had been sent. He was bound and flogged until he confessed his secret plan. Then he was permitted to return to the Queen who had sent him. When he told Fredegund what had happened and confessed that he had failed in his mission, she punished him by having his hands and feet cut off.

So that was Gregory of Tours in his History of the Franks, which is a great chronicle, often an eyewitness account in fact, of what happened in Merovingian Gaul in the late 6th century. So Gregory of Ator, Tom, I studied him at university. He was a great Gallo-Roman writer, descended from the kind of senatorial classes. It's a wonderful book. I know you're a big fan of the first line of that book, the greatest first line in all history. Yeah, I think it's my favourite ever written. Do you want to tell everyone what it is? It's so accurate. A great many things keep happening. Some of them good, some of them bad.

I mean that's the whole of history there, isn't it? Yeah. Well this is one of the bad things. Definitely. So the rivalry between Fredegund and Brunhilde, which is the subject of today's episode, this extraordinary feud between these two formidable queens of the Franks. Yes. So let's start with Fredegund. Fredegund is the granddaughter-in-law of Clovis, who is the bloke we talked about last time,

the founder of the Merovingian dynasty, master of what's becoming, was once Gaul, but is becoming under Frankish rule, or is going to become, France. And so actually is Brunhilde. But there's no question that Gregory of Tor, on whose account we chiefly depend for the lives of Fredegund and Brunhilde, he is absolutely team Brunhilde. She is never really accused of anything bad, whereas Fredegund, to Gregory, she is an absolute monster. So he accuses her of terrible crimes, multiple assassinations, witchcraft. He even accuses her of having murdered a bishop in his own cathedral and he has the bishop turn to Fredigan as he's

dying. He's been struck down by daggers, his blood is spilling out over the floor. As long as you live you will be accursed for God will avenge my blood upon your head. And does Fredigan care? She does not care at all. She just stands there and gloats. So I guess in Gregory's account, she is a baggage, but she might also seem what I believe Americans call a badass. Right. I mean, you could be both at once, surely. Or possibly just been badly misrepresented by a guy who just doesn't like her. Misunderstood. Yeah.

So we will discuss that. But I think two things are absolutely clear, even from Gregory's account of her, that her life is dominated by two things. And really important to keep these two goals in mind. One is she wants to see one of her sons rule as king and to see the end of her sister-in-law, Brunhilde. Right. And the feud between Fredegund and Brunhilde is not widely known, certainly in English speaking countries, but it absolutely bears comparison with that between Elizabeth

I and Mary, Queen of Scots. I mean, in all kinds of ways, it's much more bloody and ferocious. And even though neither of them ruled as queen in her own right, though both are hailed by their admirers as queens. Their role is as wives and mothers of kings who, I mean, pretty much without exception, are vastly their inferiors in terms of ability. And the measure of that is the length of their rule. So Fredegund is queen, in inverted commas, for 29 29 years and Brünnhilde rules for an astonishing 46 years. Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah.

And it's not surprising that ultimately both of them end up as kind of figures of myth. So Brünnhilde in Wagner's opera, The Valkyrie, she's essentially a compound of the pair of them. In Miss, these two inveterate rivals are joined and united. All right, so Tom, let's just remind ourselves where we are for people who perhaps missed the last episode. We're in the ruins of the Western Roman Empire. The empire is still going in Constantinople in the Eastern Mediterranean, but in the Western half, the authority structures

have broken down and power has passed to these warlords who are now crowning themselves as kings and in Gaul that means the Franks under Clovis. And so someone like Fredegund, do we have a sense of when she's born? We're not absolutely sure when she's born, 530s, early 540s perhaps. Right. So about two generations after the end of the Western Roman Empire, approximately. Two generations after Clovis has made himself king. And the reason essentially why we don't know when Fredegund is born, and this is the remarkable thing about this woman who becomes such a powerful figure in Gaul, is that she seems to have begun her life as a slave. So I will quote

from The Dark Queens by Shelley Puhak, which is a wonderful account of the rivalry between these two queens, the great narrative account in English. She writes, where exactly had she come from? This Fredegund, this strawberry blonde slave queen, was she left on a doorstep, sold to satisfy a debt, or more likely captured as a child? We just don't know because the early details of a slave's life are lost to oblivion. But what we do know is that she is born at a terrible time in history. So what Michael McCormick, the great historian of the economy of late antiquity and early medieval Europe, describes as one of the worst periods to be alive. And the reason for that, we've actually kind of touched on this before, the mid sixth century is buffeted by natural disasters. So there's a volcanic eruption in 536, which is probably the decade that Fredegund is born,

and that sees temperatures drop by as much as two and a half degrees. Then you get the great plague, the Justinianic Plague, because it originates in the reign of the emperor Justinian, which sweeps eastwards and westwards as well. And you also have other epidemics and particularly epidemics of dysentery and these just keep hitting gall and Gregory of Tor writes of one in very moving terms. It attacked young children first of all, he writes, and to them it was fatal and so we lost our little ones

who were so dear to us and sweet whom we had cherished in our bosoms and dandled in our arms, whom we had fed and nurtured with such loving care. As I write, I wipe away the tears." And any notion that people in the early middle ages didn't care about their children, I mean, I think that that absolutely demonstrates that's not the case. And it is absolutely the case as well that the deaths of children by dysentery will play a key part in this story, particularly in the life of Fredigan. And what is worse, perhaps not surprisingly given that it's an age of natural disasters, of pandemics, of the breakdown of authority, tremendous fear, no doubt, it is an age of

war, Tom, because the Franks are warriors above all. They came, they were working for the Roman army. That's what they do. That's what they're very good at. That's what they know to do. Yeah. And so I think people would have the sense, you know, this is the Dark Ages, the Roman Empire's collapse.

These are warlords. It's just endless violence and things. I mean, the thing to emphasise is that what you've just said, that it is a time of war, but it's quite a Roman style of war. The Frankish kings are really the heirs above all to Rome's military traditions and so the military tradition in Gaul was for the Romans to impose their power on the eastern banks of the Rhine and so that is what the Frankish kings do. So having conquered Gaul they then do as the Roman emperors had done throughout the course of Roman history, which is to send military expeditions into Germany.

And actually the Franks do it in a way more effectively than the Romans ever did. So for instance, in 531, Clovis' son, a guy called Clothar, conquers the region that will come to be known as Thuringia. So a great swathe of East Germany. And he brings back enormous quantities of slaves to Gaul. And Clothar is a king very much in the mould of Clovis. He is simultaneously Roman and barbarian. He's also very fecund and he has four sons, three of them by one sister, one by another. And when he dies, he divides the kingdom up four ways between them.

And I have to say that I always thought of this, this tendency of the Frankish kings to divide their kingdom up between their sons as being a barbarian practice. But then I read Patrick Geary, the great historian of this period on it, and he writes, the solution of dividing the kingdom among his four sons seems less a Frankish than a Roman one. So again, this idea that he's behaving like a Roman, not a barbarian. Clothar's territories were divided along roughly Roman political boundaries, and each brother was established with his own and Roman advisors centered in a major city. But of course, if you think about it, the Roman Empire was endlessly being divided up.

Yeah, never worked. And this fostered war. And the problem is that exactly the same thing happens, you know, this third generation on from Clovis, these four sons of Clothar, because they don't necessarily get on with each other very well. And there was one of them in particular, who's the kind of, if you like, the runt of the litter, who is particularly embittered, particularly resentful. And this is the youngest of Clothar's sons, a guy who is called Chilperic. And Chilperic is not just the youngest, but also the half brother of the other three. And so he's the only son of Clothar's second wife, who's the sister of the other wife who's given him the three sons. And I think what's also very

Game of Thrones, I mean, it's an absolute kind of trope from fantasy fiction is that the youngest son who's bitter and resentful is also the keenest to try and elbow his brothers out the way and grab everything. Always the most hungry and ruthless. Exactly. So when their father dies, Chilperic immediately moves to try and seize the entire kingdom. And he does this by grabbing both Paris, so the capital, and the royal treasury. And if you control the treasury, which is mobile, you know, it's a kind of great repository of gold and loot, then brilliant, you know, you can employ men to follow you. But he's foiled by his brothers. And in the division of Gaul, he's left with this kind of rump of territory in the northeast of the country and this had actually been the old Frankish heartland.

So Soissons was where Clovis had beaten Saagrius, the last Roman ruler in Gaul and Soissons becomes Chilpric's main base and there's Amiens where Saint Martin had cut his cloak and given half of it to the beggar, there's Torni where Chilpric was buried, but it is the smallest of the four kingdoms and it comes to be known by the Franks as Neustria, which translates from Frankish as the Western Lands. And this is because there's an Eastern territory which they have basically carved out of what's now Germany, which is called the Eastern Lands, which is Austrasia. So Neustria and Austrasia, they become great adversaries, don't they? They will. And at this point, Austrasia is much, much larger than Neustria,

centered on Reuss, on Metz, on Strasbourg, and that is ruled by the third of Clothal's four sons. And here's a guy called Sigabert. And Chilperic detests Sigurdbert and that may be partly because they are the closest in age, but it's also because they have a long 300 mile border and Chilperic is endlessly maneuvering against Sigurdbert, desperate to kind of drag him down. And this is the background to the emergence of Fredegund as a player in this great game of thrones. So we said she's a slave in his household. Right, in Chilprick's household. In Chilprick's household. She's absolutely at the bottom of the pile. We've said it's a dangerous, plague-swept, war-torn world.

But I guess that where there is peril and upheaval, there is also opportunity, particularly if you are a woman of remarkable abilities, which I think even Gregory of Tull would acknowledge Fredegund was. So she's clearly very sexually attractive. I mean, that is probably the single most important attribute that she brings to the party at the beginning of her career. But she's also clearly very, very intelligent. So even though she's a slave, she seems to have taught herself letters and also to speak Latin as well as Frankish.

She's incredibly daring, she's incredibly determined. And she also has, so Shelley Puhak puts this, I think think wonderfully, the honing of small talents, the ability to slip in and out of a room unnoticed to intuit which cook or lackey was likely to let slip a choice bit of information. So throughout her career, her ability to read people, to manipulate them, to pick up secrets, this is a key part of how she keeps on top of all the two military events that will typify her life.

Well, talk about keeping on top of events. There's a story, isn't there, about how she actually makes her move, which is that she has been promoted from the kitchen to serve the Queen as her maid. The Queen's called Aldevere. And then basically she tricks the Queen, Aldevere, into into falling out into having a row with Chilperic. And then all the time she's kind of, you know, lurking in the background. The mail online say that she's flaunting her curves at Chilperic, who basically says, right, the Queen's got to go get her off to a convent, you know, you're with me tonight.

And that's exactly as she's planned it all along. Yes. The story about her being promoted from the kitchens, it's quite late and is maybe gilding the lily of the inherently kind of dramatic story of her rise. But I don't think there's any question that it is her curves, if you want to put it that way, that appeal to Chilperic and definitely that this queen out of error is packed off to a convent and Fredigan does become, you know, the kind become the chief royal concubine. But of course to be a concubine is absolutely not to be secure because you are very, very expendable.

And the problem for Fredegund is that Chilperic is not only resentful and ambitious, but he's also very, very willful. And he is absolutely determined to do whatever it takes to break out of this tiny corner of Gaul that he's been penned into and kind of strut his stuff in an authentically Roman way. And he clearly does have overtly Roman ambitions. So of all his brothers, he, so far as we know, is the only one who builds amphitheaters and stages spectacles in them like a Roman emperor. It's kind of amazing to think of this being carried on in sixth century Gaul, decades after the Roman Empire has fallen there. But it also means that he needs a queen who is

commensurate with the status that he thinks should be his. And clearly, a slave girl doesn't measure up at all. So not long after he's taken Fredegund into his bed, he's already looking around for a suitable bride to replace out of error and he fixes on a princess from the one kingdom that can rival that of the Merovingians and that's the kingdom of the Visigoths which is centered in Spain. Again a very powerful barbarian kingdom. And his chance to press for a Visigothic princess comes in 567 when the oldest of the four brothers, a guy called Charibert, dies of natural causes. And his lands are then divided up among the three surviving brothers. And the result is a kind of completely mad, unworkable patchwork of kind of territory. It's a bit like the Holy Roman Emperor. You know, bits of towns here,

chunks of land there. So Paris is left neutral. That's a kind of safe space between the three brothers. Sigurd Burt, who's the king of Australia, so that's the kind of the eastern chunk. He gets the Loire, which is obviously the opposite end from him, and that includes Tor. Oh, right. So he gets St Martin. Yeah. So very important. The eldest surviving brother, so this is a guy called Guntrum, his power base is in Burgundy. He gets Aquitaine, which again is on the opposite side of Gaul from him. But the key thing for Chilperic, you know, he's been penned in in the north and there's no way that the Visigoths would give him the time of day if that was all he had to offer.

His sway is extended all along the line of the channel as far as Brittany, which remains independent. But he also gets most of southwestern Gaul and that of course abuts the Pyrenees, which means Spain. And so that does make him a person of interest to the Physigoths. Initially, in the wake of Charibert's death and his getting all these new lands, he gets up to his normal tricks. He tries to grab Tor because with its tomb of St. Martin, it's so important, but Sigurd manages to beat him off. But then he opens marriage negotiations with the Visigoths and he gets what he wants. He gets a princess. And in 568, the eldest daughter of the king of the Visigoths, a princess called

Galzwintha, duly sets off from Spain northwards to Neustria and she arrives on the banks of the Seine. She's come up the river, a bit like Marie Antoinette did, and she steps out from the boat and she's greeted on bended knee by Chilperic and his entire army. He's brought them out as a gesture of honor. That's a very Game of Thrones scene isn't it? Very and Gregory of Tor describes this moving and romantic moment. King Chilperic loved her very dearly for she had brought a huge dowry with her. What's not to like? Money can buy him love. Yeah.

But what does Fredigan make of this? Because she's been sharing the royal beds. She can't be best pleased that this Visigothic princess has pitched up. It's very, very bad news for Fredigan because reports of Chilperic's enthusiasm for her have reached the Visigoths. And so it's become a specific clause in the marriage negotiations that Chilperic will chuck her out and not have any other woman other than Galswinter, the Visigothic princess. So Chilperic really wants this princess so he's chucked Fredegund out, you know, she loses

her status as the royal mistress and rather than kind of throw a hissy fit and risk her relationship with Chilperic, she goes back to her former duties. But as Shelley Puhak puts it, she made sure Chilperic caught glimpses of her in passageways and courtyards, enticing reminders of an easier and more blissful time. So she is still flaunting her curves. And it turns out, Chilperic can't resist her. You know, she is irresistible to him. And so a few months after the wedding, Galswinter finds Chilperic in bed with Fredegund and there's an absolutely massive row. Galswinter threatens to leave for Spain, which would obviously be mortifying for Chilperic. One morning, Gal-Swinther is found in her bed and she has been strangled. And Gregory

of Tor writes, King Chilperic wept for the death of his queen, but then a few days later, he goes to the church and there at the altar, dressed in splendid jewels in the robes of a royal partner is Fredegund and they get married. And the scandal of it echoes across Gaul, it echoes across Christendom. And everyone of course is thinking what Gregory of Tor puts into words, it was Chilperic who had ordered Galswina to be garroted by one of his servants. Craigie, so that is a shock. Bombshell. A real bombshell.

And what's the reaction across the sort of Frankish world? So do people say, oh, good on you, this is reasonable behaviour or is this going to make Chilperic and Fredegund horriers? Well, the place where it particularly reverberates is in the court of Australia where Chilperic's brother Sigurdbert is king. And the reason for that, why it particularly reverberates there is partly because Sigurdbert and Chilperic really detest each other. But it's also because Sigurdbert is also married to a Visigothic queen.

And this queen is the younger sister of Galsmyntha, so the princess who's just been murdered. She had arrived in Austrasia the year before, so in 567. The name of this princess, this Visigothic princess married to Sykebert is Dominic Brunhilde. Okay, so now we've got the other great player in the drama, Brunhilde. We have. Now we can obviously understand why Brunhilde absolutely despises Fredegund and vice versa because Brunhilde clearly is never going to forgive her for the death of her sister. But we've talked about Fredegund.

Brunhilde herself is a pretty remarkable woman, isn't she? She's incredibly fashionable, she's very beautiful, she's very elegant and she's brilliant at politics. She really is, very like Fredagund. So she's in a difficult situation, she's a foreigner in a Frankish court, but she's already in the space of a year showed herself to be a very shrewd, a very tough political operator and she's made a point of forging alliances with the kind of, you know, the leading men at Sigabert's court. So that's

one thing that she's done. But the key thing she's done, and it's what basically queens are there for in the opinion of their husbands, is that she's fulfilled her prime duty, which is to give Sigabert a son. And Sigabert's son is called Childebert, and he is born at Easter. He's baptized at the great Christian Festival of Pentecost. And this seems to everyone in Australia an absolute marker of divine favor. So Brunhilde is very much in everyone's good books in Australia. And she works on Sigurdbert and says, look, my sister has been murdered by your brother's mistress who is now kind of posing around in my dead sister's robes and clothes.

And this is unsupportable. You know, you have to have vengeance. I think that's a reasonable position to be fair. I think it is. Yeah, I think it is. And so Sigurd Burt, he turns to his brother Guntrum, the king of Burgundy, so the elder brother, and he says, look, let's take this to trial. You should summon Chilperic to answer for what is clearly a terrible crime and we will try him so that everything will be above board. And Guntrim says, yeah, fair enough. Clearly something terrible has happened. We need to get to the bottom of this. So Guntrim summons to Chilperic to come and stand trial and Chilperic refuses.

So he's tried in absentia and found guilty. And this of course then provides Zygabert with the perfect legal religious sanction to invade Neustria and know that everyone in Gaul basically will be on his side. He's got Gunnström on his side, he's got all his own followers on his side, and he's got quite a lot of people in Neustria who are of course very anxious about the crime that their king might have committed. They are also very prone to go over to him. And so when he launches his campaign in 575, it's an absolute triumph.

Chilperic and Fredegund are forced to flee Soissons, their capital. They have to take all their treasure with them. You know, they can't risk losing that. They also abandoned Paris, which Chilperic had occupied. Sigurdbert moves into Paris, the place where Clovis, the founder of the Merovingian dynasty, is buried and he summons Brunhilde and his little boy Childebert and various daughters who Brunhilde has also given birth to by this point. And so the whole family, they move to Paris, they move into the great palace on the Yield to Paris and

the Bishop of Paris hails Brunhilde as praecellentissima regina, the most excellent queen. So she is being hailed as queen in the very heart of the Merovingian dynasty and this is looking brilliant. And meanwhile out in Noistria all the nobles are starting to defect to Sigurdbert and so Sigurdbert decides he will go north and meet them. He leaves Brunhilde and his children behind in Paris. He goes northwards. He goes to one of Chilperic's royal villas where all the nobility of Neustria have assembled.

The nobility of Austrasia join them. There's a massive great assembly. They hail Sigurd Berta's king, he's lifted up onto a shield, he's paraded through their ranks and it seems that Chilperic and Fredegund are absolutely doomed. But that, Dominic, is to reckon without Fredegund's determination and cunning. Right, because if this was Game of Thrones, it's like when Redley Baratheon looks like he's going to take over the kingdom and there's a great twist. So, you know, it's all looking too good. There would be some unexpected narrative

development that would slightly strain credulity but would nevertheless be true. And there's something like that just looming around the corner maybe. Well let's find out. So, Sigurd has been paraded around in his shield. All the nobles of the two kingdoms have hailed him. It's all looking brilliant. So he steps down from his shield. He's kind of wandering around his camp and he is approached by two young boys and they're very small. They look to be no threat whatsoever. They're clearly slaves. You can tell that from their dress. They have no armor, no real weapons, apart from pretty blunt hunting knives

that everyone, as a matter of course, in Gaul kind of wear on their belts. So they seem to be no threat at all. And they kneel before him and say that they have a message for him. And so Sigurdbert stops, waits to hear what they have to say, and they reach for their knives

and they strike him on both sides, Gregory of Tor tells us. But these are pretty blunt knives, it shouldn't be enough to kill him. But Sigurd, even though he's really only got a kind of scratch, within minutes he has collapsed onto the ground, starts to froth at the mouth and within hours he's dead. And it's clear the knives were poisoned and who in Gaul would have had the ability to know how to command poisons, the daring to come up with such a scheme, the powers of persuasion to get two boys to sacrifice themselves because of course they're immediately put to death. And the assumption is that there is only one person who fits that bill and that person Dominic is Fredigan.

What a twist. Come back after the break to find out what happens next. The wife of a merivision. Just 30 seconds left on the clock and the home team is moving forward confidently after securing the family with life insurance from Sun Life. Wow, what a play! Talk about a smooth transition, Gary. They clearly have their coverage in check. As the proud life insurance partner, the Toronto Raptors, we've seen a lot of support from Sun Life over the years, folks.

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King enjoyed a position both dependent and precarious, resting as it did on her personal sexual association with a husband whose interests or fancy could all too easily attach him to her supplanter. Even if the royal bride was, as occasionally in the 6th century, a foreign princess, her situation in practice might be little different from the ex-serving maids. Her dependence on her husband's generosity and favour, when her own kin were far away and her people reckoned perhaps the enemies of the Franks might be similarly complete. So Tom, that's a story called Janet L Nelson writing in an article, I assume, called Queens as Jezebels. Why do you like that reading? Well, I think it provides the academic perspective on all these shenanigans and it also sums

up why Fredegund and Brunhilde, one a slave girl, one a princess, are actually, you know, you can reckon them worthy adversaries because the princess, like the slave girl, faces incredibly daunting challenges. And that is what makes it so amazing that their feud, it endures decades. But their struggles, I guess, are not only against each other, but also the circumstances that both of them, as the most powerful woman in their respective kingdoms, are facing as women. And even though we can't follow every twist and turn of their rivalry, I think the details, the kind of the broad outline that we'll go through in the second half. I mean it's so extraordinary, so kind of jaw-dropping

at points that it will become clear just how remarkable both these figures are, both these women are. So let's go with Fredrigan first because we ended with her apparently assassinating Sigurdbert. So that is a tremendous coup. Like she's basically wiped out the bloke who was the single biggest threat to her and her husband. And now, you know, she was staring into the abyss and now everything is possible again. Yeah. I mean, we don't know for sure that she did it, but she definitely benefits from it. And as we will see, it does have her kind of fingerprints all over it. So she's clawed everything back, both for herself and for Chilperic because with Sigurdbert

gone his heir, Chilterbert, is, I mean, you know, is a little boy about five years old, so no conceivable threat. And all the Neustrian nobles who had pledged their loyalty to Sigurdbert, you know, they think, well, we're not going to pledge our loyalty to a foreign child. So they immediately swing back to Chilperic and actually some of the Australians do as well, so the nobles who'd been following Zigebert and the vast mass of the Australians, the nobility, the men-at-arms who've been following them, they all withdraw to home territory. They feel there's no point in carrying on this war. And I think one of the reasons for thinking that Fredegund is behind

this is that Chilperic from this point on seems to have treated her with an unusual degree of respect and devotion, almost as though he's kind of acknowledging what he owes her. And not only, I think, does he recognise that he's found in Fredegund a partner for his own ambitions, similarly kind of determined and ruthless. But also Fredegund, like Brunnhilde has done, has provided sons, so two in Fredegund's case. And so her position now seems completely secure. She's completely reversed the seeming abyss that she was about to fall into. She is now looking at kind of very solidly ensconced as the most powerful woman in Neustria,

which isn't to deny that the assassination of Sigurd comes with pretty high costs for her. So she is now seen not just as a slave, but as treacherous, as cowardly, as underhand. Actually for Franks, this is the epitome of what it is to be a slave and for what it is to be a woman. So Fredegund in that sense is the kind of the embodiment of everything that they most fear and despise. But Gregory of Tor, who is absolutely as we said, team Brunhilde, he goes further and accuses Fredegund of having practiced witchcraft. How else would she have known to apply the right amount of poison? How else would she have been able to suborn these two boys

who were clearly going to their deaths? And this is a very serious charge. So Shelley Puhack in her wonderful book, The Dark Queens, points out that the fine in Gaul for slandering a woman as a whore was 45 solidi. I'm not quite sure exactly what that is, but respectable amount, I guess. But if you falsely accuse a woman of witchcraft, then the fine you have to pay is 187 and a

half solidy. So, you know, that's quite an imbalance. Yeah, definitely four times more. So does Fredigan care? Fredigan does not seem to have cared and neither really does Chilprick at no point in their lives, so far as we know, do either of them ever deign to respond to the accusations that are levelled against them. They never deny having committed murder, they never deny having practiced witchcraft. And I guess Fredegund feels that it's better to be feared than to be loved and she certainly does become feared. And what about Brunhilde? Because she was looking great at the end of the first half.

She was left in Paris, all was good. And then her husband has been killed by these two boys. And all her hopes have crumbled away to nothing, right? She's suddenly stranded and alone. Yeah. So Fredegund has gone from zero to hero and Brunhilde has gone from hero to zero. She has been left stranded in Paris. She's surrounded by a hostile population. And her priority, of course, is to ensure the survival of her son, Childebert, because everything for her future depends on him living. According to tradition, she puts him into a bag and smuggles him out of the palace into a boat, crosses the Seine, and they manage to get him back to Australia.

And sure enough Childerbert even though he's kind of only five or whatever, he's crowned in Austrasia on Christmas Day 575 so he at least that's something that Brunhilde can cling on to. But for her things are looking very bad because she has fallen into Childerbert's hands and he does what he always does to unwanted women, which is to pack her off to a convent. And it's a very particular convent in Rouen, great masses of stone, very highly protected. So it's effectively a prison. And this is where he sent Al De Vera, his first wife, the one that Fredegund had supplanted. And it's a terrible place.

It's fully cloistered. you know, there are no servants, you have to wear rough coarse robes, you have a regulation pudding bowl haircut. It's not at all Brunhilde's scene in any way. And she's looking around for opportunities to escape. And so she starts talking to Aldebarra and they obviously swap notes about what a terrible person Fredegund is and talking to Auld of Ere gives Brunhilde an idea about how she can escape and this idea becomes manifest in the spring of the following year, so 576 and that spring the army of the Noistrians arrives in Rouen and it is led by Chilperic's eldest son who is called Merovitch, so as in the sea monster. And he is one of two surviving sons of Audevara and he has been ordered by his father Chilperic to march on the Australian holdings in the Loire, so that would

include Tours. But Merovitch has directly disobeyed these orders and instead has gone to Ruor. And he claims that it's to see his mother out of Ere, but it's clear that his real object is Brunhilde. And it's pretty clear that Brunhilde has written to him and said, look, why don't we get married? You know, we can have an alliance. Fredegund is clearly out to get you. You are a rival to her sons. She's going to want you out of the way. This is a person who is ready to practice poison at the drop of a hat. If we get married, I can go back to Australia and serve as regent for my son. You can get rid of Fredegund, establish yourself as Chilperik's heir, and then we can join the two kingdoms and rule effectively as king and queen. So let's just get our heads around this, Tom. So this guy is Merovec, and he is the son

of Chilperic. And Aodivera. And Aodivera, who's in the convent. We can forget about Aodivera, she's in the convent. He's an older son, and he doesn't like Fredegund, the new queen, and fears her. Well, I think more to the point, Fredegundund doesn't like him because Fredegund's power depends on her son becoming king rather than him. So he's now proposing to marry his uncle's ex-wife who is also the sister of his father's ex-wife.

Stepmother who's been murdered. Right. Okay. So it is very like a fantasy novel. Yeah, it's very clear. who's been murdered. Of his father's ex-wife, right. Okay. So it is very like a fantasy novel. Yeah, it's very clear. It's really clear. If you can't get your head around it, don't worry, because neither can I. Well, I think the key point there is that you're right that this is technically incest.

Right. And you would think that, for instance, holy bishops would not be keen to give their stamp to incest. But fortunately, the bishop of Rouen, who is, you know, a man of very holy reputation, very venerable Gallo-Roman aristocrat called Pritexartus, he thinks, okay, fair enough, I'll do it. And probably the reason that he does that is that he is the godfather of Merovich. And so he kind of feels obliged by that relationship. And so he goes ahead with the ceremony. Brünnhilde is sprung from this convent in which she's been imprisoned. She gets married and she is loose.

But there's another twist, isn't there? There's always a twist. So you think Merovich has got it all going for him now, but actually, no. No. Chilperic is too strong for him. Is that right? Overpowers him and captures him. Captures him, shaves off his long hair, which of course is the mark of his royal status. So he basically goes bald and this is a terrible humiliation, and sends him off to a monastery on the assumption that there he will be no harm. But Merovich, he's not taking that, so he grows his hair back, he escapes the monastery, tries to continue the fight,

but he ends up cornered in a village that actually isn't far from Agincourt, so right up in the northeast of France. And he knows that now, you know, he's rebelled twice. He can expect no mercy from his father. And so he gets his servant to kill him. And back in Australia, Brunhilde is now being left a widow for the second time in two years. That's bad. But on the plus side, she's no longer in the convent. She's escaped that. She's back in Australia where her son is the crowned king. And not only that, but she's managed to persuade King Gunthram of Burgundy, so the elder brother of Sigurdbert and Chilperic, to adopt her son, Chilperic, as king. And I'm aware that there are an enormous quantity of mad names. Yeah. But basically Brunhilde has got her son adopted by the King of Burgundy and

Fredegund has not managed to get her sons adopted. So she to that extent is one up. Right. And in fact, as Brunhilde's wheel of good fortune goes up, so Fredegund's starts to descend and you know, you may wonder, well, why would King Guntrum in Burgundy adopt his nephew as king? Hasn't he got sons of his own? Well, he did have, but they had died in one of these endless dysentery epidemics that is always sweeping gall at this time. And in 580, there is another dysentery epidemic and this claims the lives of Fredigan's two sons.

And this is devastating for her, it's devastating on a personal level and it's devastating because she has now lost the guarantees that she as Queen Mother would have when and if her husband dies. And she, if you trust Gregory of T's accounts, she seems to have been crazed either by grief or by frustrated ambition. I mean maybe both and according to Gregory of Taw, Fredegund accuses out of error his last surviving son Clovis, so that's the brother of Merovich who had married Brunhilde, of having conspired with one of Fredegund's own servants to kill her sons by means of witchcraft. And Clovis supposedly been having an affair with this servant girl, her mother was a witch, it's all a kind of very dark

conspiracy. So Fredegund goes to Chilperic, says look your son he's plotted against our two boys, he's engaged with a witch, this is terrible, you know you've got to sort him out. So Chilperic is obviously, I mean, it's a measure of if this story is true of how obsessed he is by Fredegund. He has Clovis stripped of his weapons. This is his own son. Stripped of all his finery, chained up, turned over to Fredegund. Fredegund then has him removed to a private estate. He's locked up there, chained and supposedly stabs himself to death. Although, as Shelley Puhuk points out, how he managed to do this while alone in a cell with his hands bound behind his back was never explained. So it's likely that, again, you know, Fredegund has struck. Fredegund strikes again. Yes. And so she also has the purported witch and her mother tortured and executed and she also has Aldevarra murdered as well.

So she has now destroyed both her rival as queen and her two step-sons. So to that extent she has managed to clear the decks. But obviously it's a problem. She needs to give Chilperic a son. I mean, everything depends on that. Unfortunately for her in 582, she manages to do that. So a third son and he dies of dysentery too. Oh no. Terrible. But she thinks this is not just a common death by dysentery, does it?

She thinks somebody has, again, poison has been involved, that somebody has been plotting this, right? Witchcraft. Witchcraft. I think by this point, both her and Chilperic, her husband, they keep having sons, the sons keep dying of dysentery. Yeah. They think it must be witchcraft. I think by this point, both her and Chilperic, her husband, they keep having sons, the sons keep dying of dysentery. They think it must be witchcraft. And so Fredegans accuses a local dignitary of having done it. He's tortured horribly. They take little shards

of wood and drive them beneath his nails, his fingernails and his toenails. And that's something that I would always give in to any torturer who threatens to do that to me on the spot. So really horrible. And she also, she rounds up various women who were probably midwives. And she has some of them beheaded, some of them burnt at the stake, others broken on the wheel. And then as a climactic demonstration of her grief and her despair and her anger. She does something that will reverberate down the centuries, and Jeffrey of Taw describes it. The Queen now collected together anything that had belonged to her dead son, and burnt

it, all his clothes, some of them silk, and others of fur, and all his other possessions, whatever she could find. It is said that all this filled four carts. Any object in gold or silver was melted down in a furnace, so that nothing whatsoever remained intact to remind her of how she had mourned for her boy. And Dominic, we talked about how Fredegund as well as Brunhilde feeds into the figure of Brunhilde in Wagner's great opera.

She immolates herself on a pyre. And I think that this is clearly kind of distorted echo of this great bonfire of everything that had reminded Fredegund of her son and so you know it's a devastating moment for her. But she doesn't burn herself on the pyre. In fact she has another child, she has another boy. She does so because she and Chilprick are so nervous of witchcraft when she gets pregnant she keeps a secret and when she gives birth to her son she keeps that secret as well. So this means that when in September 584, Chilperic, who's been out for a day's hunting, returns home to his villa, he gets down from his horse and he is greeted by a servant who rushes up to him and stabs him to death. No one knows that he has a male heir. Crikey. So how old is this boy? Do we know?

So this boy is at this point a few months old. Crikey. So now, Chilprick has been stabbed to death. Now, Fredigan is up against it, is she? Or did she actually have a hand in it, Tom? That would be a twist. Tom Well, there are people who accuse her of having murdered her own husband, because whenever a mysterious assassination happens, Fredigan always gets accused of it. But if you think about it, that would be mad, because for her,

everything depends on Chilperic staying alive. She needs him, at least until this baby boy that she's got has grown up and come of age, able to succeed his father. The loss of Chilperic leaves her fortunes hanging by a thread. So if you had to say, well, who's the likeliest person responsible, you would probably say Brunhilde, which isn't to say that Brunhilde did it, but I mean, she must be the chief suspect because she of course doesn't know that Chilperic has this male heir. And so she would assume that with Chilperic out of the way there isn't anyone to claim the Noistrian throne and so presumably she is now kind of plotting to take over Noistria.

But Fredegund has one last card to play so she writes to Guntrum, the King of Burgundy. She reveals the bombshell news that she has this baby boy. And she says, let my Lord come and take charge of his brother's kingdom. I have a tiny baby whom I long to place in his arms. At the same time, I shall declare myself his humble servant. So she's reading Guntrum like a book. She's being submissive. She's being subservient. She's saying, you know, you can have the rule of Neustria. You can look after this boy who is your nephew. And Guntrum is, you know, is charmed by this. And Brunnhilde doesn't dare go against Guntrum's wishes. And so she has to play quiet. And so Fredegund lives to fight another day. And so Fredegund has

played a blinder. She's plucked security from the jaws of danger, Dominic. And for the next eight years, until Guntrum dies in 692, Fredegund and her son, who she calls Clothar, essentially are secure from Brunhilde's vengeance. And in that time, Fredegund essentially rules Neustria as her son's regent. You know, this is remarkable for a former slave to be doing this. And it's a measure, I think, of how respected and feared she is by the Neustrian nobility that they allow her to do that. Simultaneously, Brunhilde is kept on a tight leash by Guntrum.

She has signed a treaty with him at a place called Ondelot. And this is the oldest surviving medieval treaty. We still have it. And it's signed on the 28th of November, 587, the oldest surviving medieval treaty, we still have it and it's signed on the 28th of November 587, the oldest surviving medieval treaty. And this confirms that Childerbert, who is Brunnhilde's son, will inherit Burgundy on Guntherm's death. So that's one up for Brunnhilde. So both of them have what they want. Brunnhilde has expanded her son's territories when Guntherm dies and Fredegund is secure from Brunhilde's revenge while Guntherum is alive.

Well, I mean, one day Guntherum will die, and then the feud will restart, presumably. Right. So Fredegund, all the while, is kind of practicing a kind of Putin-style dirty war in the background against Brunhilde. She incites a revolt against Brunhilde, which Brunhilde personally, you know, she marches out in armour to put down. In 586, this is

when Bishop Prytek Startus is murdered in the cathedral. So that was the one who'd married Brunhilde to Merovich. And this is the one we said at the beginning where Fredegant supposedly gloats over the bishop as he dies and the blood spills across his cathedral. But at the same time, she is brilliant at keeping justice herself. So just as she deals death from the shadows, so she deals justice from the shadows. And there's one extraordinary story that is told about this, that there's a vendetta has broken out in a particular family and they're all kind of killing each other and so she invites three of the leading members of this family, the kind of heads of the various factions in this blood feud to a great banquet and the three feuding members of this family are sat down in her great hall. They have to hand over their weapons, they have to be

polite to each other for the length of the banquet. Lots of food is served, lots of drink. The ice starts to melt. By the end of the evening the three men are all kind of chatting away as though they've kind of buried the hatchet. And then Fredegund, who's been watching this from the high table, gives a signal. Three men, each one man holding an axe, comes up to the three feuding members, swish with swish, their heads are sent bouncing across the table. Fredagund stands up, walks

out of the room and everyone in her hall knows that she has literally executed justice. Will Barron So this I think is, you can see why she's respected and feared by people in Neustria. But all the while of course this isn't helping her against Brunhilde because she knows when Gunthram dies that Brunhilde is going to come on the attack. Right and so we get to 592, Gunthram dies and now the feud can restart in earnest. Fredericon knows that Brunhilde is about to attack right? Absolutely and this happens the year after Gunthram's death. Brunhilde orders her forces to capture Soissons, which is the main centre of Neustrian power. It's where the treasury is and everything. And this is very bad for Fredegund because Brunhilde now has the forces

of Burgundy as well as Australia at her back. So massively outnumbering anything that Fredegund could summon. And so Fredegund has been studying Roman military manuals and she has read there that the only way that an outnumbered force can hope to defeat a larger one is to take it by surprise. And so she decides to do exactly that to try and ambush the Australian forces before they can attack Soissons. So she leads her hugely outnumbered forces in person she is the war leader out from so and she finds that the Australian forces are camped out at a village called Boisi and Fredegund orders her troops to fasten bells to the bridles of their horses So that the Australians will think that they are their own horses who are out grazing because that's what you would do. You would have your horses belled so that

they won't wander off. So when they hear the Noistrian horsemen approaching, they think that's just our own horses kind of grazing. And the other thing that she does, she orders them to disguise themselves by carrying tree branches. And this is of course, very, very Burnham Wood. Yeah, very Macbeth. And there are theories that this is ultimately where the story in Macbeth comes from and it's a brilliantly successful strategy. The Austrasians are taken completely by surprise, they're put to the sword, massacred, Fredegun

then leads a raid deep into enemy territory and she returns to Soissons in triumph absolutely loaded down with booty. And this is the last great confrontation between the two rivals, between Fredegund and Brunhilde. And they've been enemies for so long that essentially by the end of their life, they have become the mirror image of the other. So this becomes even clearer in March 595 when King Childebert, so Brunhilde's son, King of Burgundy as well as of Australia, he's aged 25, he dies of dysentery. So yet again, and he leaves behind two sons and listeners will be thrilled to know that they also have mad names.

So they are called Theuderbert and Theuderic, very young, and Brunhilde now rules on their behalf as regents. And so both Fredegund and Brunhilde are now regents and Shelley Buhaque in her book, The Dark Queens, points out how extraordinary this is. So she writes, when Brunhilde assumed the regency for her two grandsons, she ushered in one of the most unusual periods of European history, one of dual female rule. She and Fredegund reigned as regents at exactly the same time and the empire they shared encompassed modern-day France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, western and southern Germany and parts of Switzerland.

Only Charlemagne would briefly control more territory than these two women. Amazing. I mean amazing they're not better known really. The remarkable thing is they never met. So they're implacable enemies but they never met. Fredigan died in 597. In her bed. Safely in her bed.

Yeah. Her son Clothar was 13 but he's inherited the feud with Brunhilde and he doesn't forget it does he? Yeah he does and you know he's still pretty young. He bides his time. So all the way through his teenage years into his twenties. And meanwhile, in Austrasia, Brunhilde's two grandsons, Sudebert and Theuderic have fallen out with each other.

Theuderic, the younger son, murders his elder brother. Of course he does. He then has a drink from a well and he gets dysentery. He dies. So he's out of the way. He leaves behind three sons and a daughter. They're all underage. And so Brunhilde now has to kind of step forward and become regent again. And by this point, she is 70. And essentially her nobles, the nobles in Australia, I mean,

they look at this and they say a 70 year old woman and, you know, an infant king, this is hopeless. You know, we can't have this. And so they turn to Clothar, Fredegund's son in Australia, and they say, look, this isn't good enough. And the two people who lead this approach are two of the leading figures in Australia. One of them is a nobleman called Pippin. And one of them is a bishop called Arnolf. He's the bishop of Metz. And these are significant figures in the subsequent history of the Franks. And they say, look, we will take Brunhilde and her great-grandchildren and we will secure them and we will hand them over to you. And that's what they do. And

they are Brunhilde and her great-grandchildren are taken in carts to the great camp that Clothar has set up in northern Australia. They're brought into his presence. The two eldest boys are beheaded. The girl is packed off to a convent. And the youngest boy, because Clothar is his godfather, is spared and is sent away to grow up

as an Austrian nobleman. And what does Clothar do to Brunnhilde? Brunnhilde, I think, would be expecting that she too would be sent to a convent. That's what had happened before when she was captured. But Cothar has inherited this vendetta from Fredegund, his mother, and he has not forgotten it. And so he has Brunhilde reigned on charges of murdering no less than 10 kings, including

Sigurd Merovich Clovis, her own two great grandsons, which is mad. I mean, it's clear Brunhilde hadn't killed any of those. Essentially, it's a way of kind of whitewashing Fredegund's reputation. Brunhilde unsurprisingly is found guilty and her punishment is an absolutely terrible one. So in front of all this kind of serid ranks of the Austrasian and Austrasian nobility, she's publicly stripped of her jewellery, her robes, all her finery. She's then beaten, she's tortured. This goes on for three days. She's then paraded on a camel facing backwards and led through the entire army. She's 70 at this point, just to remind everybody.

She's 70 and she's being paraded around on a camel. This isn't the old age that she was expecting. And then after she's been paraded around on the camel, she is bound to either a single wild horse or maybe several horses, perhaps to their tails, perhaps to their hooves. The wild horses, a lash is given to their rumps, perhaps to their hooves. The wild horses, you know, a lash is given to their rumps, they go galloping off. Brunhilde is tied to them and she is very rapidly reduced to a bloody pulp. Her head, it is said, is sent flying. Her limbs are scattered far and wide. Clothar then sends out servants to gather up the bloody remains they're brought to him,

and they are ceremonially burnt so that nothing remains of Brunhilde, and Clothar watches feeling that he has at last triumphed over the great enemy of his mother, but also watching are those two greatest of Austracian noblemen, the lords whose treachery had doomed Brunhilde and her great-grandchildren, and they are Pepin and the Bishop of Metz, Arnulf, and their joint descendants, they will have a very, very bright future indeed, a future so bright that in due course it will come to blot out the very line of the Merovingians. Well, what a terrific cliffhanger. So next week, the story of the rise of the Franks,

the Warlords of the West, takes an even more exciting turn as we come to one of the great decisive battles in medieval history or perhaps in all world history. The Battle of Tor. And if you want to hear that episode right away, you can of course do so by joining the Rest is History Club at therestishistory.com. And if you don't, I'm afraid you'll have to wait till Monday. And believe me, it will be worth the wait. All right. On that bombshell, thank you very much, Tom.

Tor of Force, as always. Goodbye. ["Tour de force"]