The appearance of the Franks on the historical stage and the emergence of Frankish kingship are inherently joined historiographical themes; it is never quite clear where one ends and the other begins. Teasing apart the genesis of a gens from the origins of its rulers was as captivating for chroniclers working in the sixth century as it was for those working in the sixteenth. Origin stories, and their attendant claims about both aspects of this issue of ethnic origins versus royal origins, stand at the heart of this chapter. It will chart the continuous process of adaptation of material that deals with the formative period of Frankish history, from its very origins to the end of Childeric I’s rule, ca. 480. Origin stories are populated by heroes, and it is to these heroes that royal lineages often attempted to trace their ancestries. Still, these stories are significant not just for the legitimacy they lend to dynasties, but also for the broader claims they can make about communities at large. In fact, they can most usefully be read against what we know about the communities for which they were written.

Frankish and French historiographical works used origin stories to express an ever-changing set of narrative constraints. As the product of a particular historical context, each composition had its own vision of the community for which it was intended, whether political, religious, ethnic, or an intersection of the three. Origin stories would have been an opening gambit in the longer game of delineating the contours of a specific community. Since these stories tend to be situated at the very beginning of historiographical treatments, they not only set the tone for what follows, but also frame the discussion and define its terminology. The best among them express an entire ideology in a few short passages. A royal history might place its emphasis on succession, continuity, and heroism. A composition that considers the development of a religious community might prefer to see kings as defenders of the faith or, alternatively, as its enemies. One that focuses on the formation of a gens or a political class could adopt a utilitarian outlook on kings, appraising them as either beneficial or detrimental according to their ability to promote certain agendas. Yet, historiographical compositions tend to defy such neat categorization. Instead, they show a medley of perspectives, reflecting a composite and layered historical vision.Footnote ¹

Despite the many differences among the historiographical accounts of the Franks and their origins, the birth of Frankishness as a recognizable category of identity and the consolidation of political power around the royal family are present in all such texts. These elements present as an imperative of any narrative that purports to contain a comprehensive history of the Franks. Although chroniclers had different aims when writing about this topic, their narrative choices were bound by earlier traditions, oral as well as written.Footnote ² Even the earliest compositions at our disposal claim to be speaking on the authority of no longer extant, older sources.Footnote ³ Certainly, all the later texts bear the marks of an intensive, purposeful quarrying of source material. More importantly, they were engaged in continuous dialog with the ideological programs developed by their predecessors.

The degree to which a chronicler was dependent on sources available to him or her is especially pertinent to the question of origin and authority, which was entwined with communal notions of legitimacy. To explain a community’s origin and networks of authority, and especially to employ it in the service of a broader authorial agenda, was to define its role as a force in history. Chroniclers were thus naturally drawn to offering new interpretations of the events, and, indeed, each of the compositions included in the family of texts discussed here—and many that are not—present some version of an origin story.Footnote ⁴ This is why chronicles, even ones making revisionist historical claims, needed to negotiate an ideological terrain already populated by earlier compositions. The basic structure of Frankish history, origin stories included, emerged not from an abrupt rejection or wholesale adoption of previous historiographical compositions, but rather from a delicate process of interpolation and rearticulation. Chroniclers broaching the topic built on and adjusted the material they extracted from their sources in ways that allowed them to forward new claims while still adhering to a narrative structure recognized by their prospective readership.

While the motivations and chronologies ascribed to characters and events could be adjusted to conform to new narrative models, the deeper foundations were not so easily unsettled, even when the underlying aims of a composition were quite different from those of its source.Footnote ⁵ Historiography is cumulative, in the sense that it is creatively constrained by what already exists. This is why the story of the Franks’ earliest beginnings, and the emergence of their kings could not be invented anew with each composition. One especially recognizable component of this narrative is the Trojan storyline, which has been among the most extensively studied aspects of Frankish and French historiography. Trojan origins are an important feature of the chronicle tradition, but they are not the whole story. In fact, in most of the compositions that rehearse some version of the Frankish origin story, it is possible to identify three distinct thematic blocks: first, the escape from Troy and the emergence of the Franks as a recognizable group; then, the Franks’ interaction with the Romans and their advance into territories previously occupied by the Western Empire; and finally, their settlement in Gaul and the rise of the Merovingian family. Each of these phases has its own cast of characters, most of whom make appearances in several chronicles, and each plays an indispensable role in the larger story. Taken together, this schema sets the Franks against a wider backdrop of other gentes and entities, about whose historical role the origin story’s author often had much to say.

From the very start, the Frankish origin story exhibits tension between several narrative poles. One strand of the narrative is concerned with the birth of the Franks from the Trojan parent-group. It chronicles the wanderings of peoples, their subsequent divisions into ethne, and the constitutive acts by which they merited their ethnonyms. Another strand is preoccupied with the emergence of Frankish political power and its structures, manifestations, and governing principles. One of these governing principles was genealogical, and many of the chronicles I will mention attempt to provide a coherent ancestry for the contemporary ruling dynasty that stretches back to Troy. At least one composition, the thirteenth-century Roman des rois, stakes much of its argument on the claim that the royal families of the Franks were linked to each other by kinship, and that the earliest of these families—the Merovingians—could trace its origins to the refugees of fallen Troy, thereby providing a Trojan ancestry for France’s kings.Footnote ⁶

It is this that makes the line separating the history of the Franks from that of their kings so difficult to draw. In the case of the Roman des rois, the constraints of patronage and its effects on authorial tone are perhaps better understood than they are for the Chronicle of Fredegar or the Liber historiae Francorum, the latter written before 727 in either Soissons or Saint-Denis. The Chronicle of Fredegar is also not as confined, thematically, to the topic of French kingship. Frankish origins only appear in the abridged version of the Eusebius-Jerome world chronicle found in Book II, and not as they do in the Roman des rois and the LHF, as an organic point of entry into the whole text. To complicate things further, the Chronicle of Fredegar also presented several, possibly conflicting, origin stories, making its position on the question all the more elusive.

Yet all three see the evolution of kingship as a natural outgrowth of ethnic creation and are especially interested in both aspects. Moreover, to these two perspectives one must surely add a third, which prioritizes religion as the most salient criterion for defining the community, focusing on the Church’s role as a legitimizing agent for the Franks and their kings.Footnote ⁷ This is obviously a strand that becomes more prominent after Clovis, but that does not mean that the pagan Franks had no role to play in the overarching agenda of Gregory of Tours writing in the sixth century, Paul the Deacon writing in the eighth, or Primat writing in the thirteenth. As we shall see, the perspective of the chroniclers could shift depending on historical circumstance. By the end of the chronological timeframe defined by the present chapter, the pendulum will have rested squarely at the royal end of its arc, although throughout Frankish history, it could be found at different points along its continuum.

1.1 Gregory of Tours’s Histories and the Unknowable Origins of the Franks

The tale of King Priam of Troy as the progenitor of the Franks is a common feature of the compositions I survey in this book. Yet Gregory of Tours’s Histories, which was the first attempt to write a broad historical narrative culminating in Merovingian Gaul, did not mention Trojan origins at all.Footnote ⁸ The omission is perfectly understandable, given that Gregory did not set out to recount a Frankish origo gentis story.Footnote ⁹ He preferred to circumvent the question by presenting any historical inquiry into the matter as futile, given the paucity of available information on the emergence of Frankish kingship. We cannot say with certainty whether the elements of the Trojan story found in later chronicles were simply unknown to Gregory, or whether he purposefully chose to ignore them. The latter seems more probable.Footnote ¹⁰ Certainly Gregory’s friend Venantius Fortunatus drew on this textual tradition when he alluded to the marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia in his poem celebrating the union of Sigibert and Brunhild.Footnote ¹¹ Incidentally, Gregory’s city of Tours was itself tied to Trojan traditions in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, although this was not a tradition that would have been familiar to him, writing in the sixth.Footnote ¹² As we shall see later in this chapter, however, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s adaptation of the Brutus storyline from the Historia Brittonum did make its way into the Roman des rois, impacting its handling of the Trojan narrative.

Yet we should not take all of this to mean that by choosing to omit Troy from his account, Gregory was resisting an established narrative tradition. Helmut Reimitz has noted that there need not have been only one Trojan story in circulation when he wrote. In other words, it would have been possible for Gregory to offer a vision of his imagined community without resorting to the Trojan narrative, which in any event was probably not yet formalized as a literary convention when he was writing.Footnote ¹³ The differences between Fredegar and the Liber historiae Francorum, the two earliest compositions to attempt an articulation of the myth, suggest as much.

As an ecclesiastical historian of Gaul, the establishment of royal power there would have been a significant point of interest for Gregory. Nine books out of the Histories’ ten cover Gaul under the Merovingians. Gregory interacted with Frankish kings and their regional and local proxies often, and even the ecclesiastical structure he so cherished was structured around centralized royal power. The king was an important force in authorizing the convocation of Church councils and in the appointment of bishops; Gregory himself owed his nomination to the See of Tours to the intervention of Sigibert I (d. 575).Footnote ¹⁴ Gregory therefore had an accommodating view of Merovingian power and, while he was certainly conscious of its vagaries and shortcomings, he never questioned the Merovingians’ right to rule. In fact, much of his political ideology used the Merovingians as templates of good (and not-so-good) kingship.Footnote ¹⁵ The moral lessons that readers were to draw from the Histories were nested in a history of Gaul and the kings who ruled it.

Yet the Merovingians in the Histories only emerge as a later feature of the Frankish storyline, preceded by a section devoted to the Frankish invasions of the Roman province of Germania and the attack on Cologne in 388. The Histories’ coverage of this period of Frankish history relied primarily on three historians—Sulpicius Alexander, Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus, and Orosius—all of whom yield little in the form of resolution. The bulk of information came from Sulpicius Alexander, who tells that the Franks, led by three leaders, named Marcomer, Sunno, and Genobaud, collided with a Roman military contingent under the command of Nanninus and Quintinus that was dispatched from the provincial administrative center of Trier. A Roman victory over a small Frankish detachment ensued. Encouraged, the Romans mounted a punitive expedition across the Rhine but fell prey to an elaborate trap set by the Franks and were cut to pieces. Gregory quotes Profuturus’s equally intricate story of imperial politics, and Orosius’s terse account of Stilicho’s victory over the Franks, but ultimately concludes that neither Sulpicius Alexander, nor any of the others, knew much about the emergence of Frankish kingship.Footnote ¹⁶ We might surmise from Gregory that Marcomer, Sunno, and Genobaud played a central role in the incursions into Roman territory during the late fourth century, and that at one point the Franks may have been led by a king whose name has not survived.Footnote ¹⁷

Gregory used these earlier historians as sources for more than just the origin (non-)story. They were critical to his work on the early chapters of Book ii, which he devoted to the persecutions endured by Catholic churches and their communities. In the prologue to Book ii, Gregory announces his intent to record the deeds of the saints, through whom he proposes to show how these antithetical, yet complementary, forces of saintliness and persecution have ruled history since biblical times.Footnote ¹⁸ It is within this framework that he discusses the misfortunes that befell the religious community of Tours, the invasions of Gaul by various barbarians, and the persecutions that followed in their wake. The cruelties inflicted on Catholic Christians by the heretical Vandals and Goths provide a preamble to the arrival of the Huns from Pannonia and the destruction they wrought on Metz and Orléans. The Battle of the Catalaunian Plains shifts the discussion to the Roman general Aëtius (d. 454), and it is here that Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus is first introduced as a source. The advent of the Franks is recounted not long afterwards, supported by the same material.

Readers of Gregory have observed that he did not regard the pre-Christian Franks as essentially different from other barbarians.Footnote ¹⁹ At least as far as the three Frankish regales were concerned, Gregory clearly did not mean for them to function in the plot as the direct forerunners of the Merovingian kings of his day. If anything, when the Franks make their first appearance in Gregory, they are depicted as being like the Huns. Tellingly, the two scourges that descend on the population of Gaul, the Huns and the Franks, had their origins in Pannonia. But of course, so did Martin of Tours, foremost among Gaul’s myriad saints.Footnote ²⁰ Assuming that neither mention is coincidental,Footnote ²¹ one wonders which of these prototypes—Attila or Martin—the advancing Franks were meant to evoke in the mind of the reader.Footnote ²² In the beginning, it is likely to have been the former, since Gregory reports that under Marcomer, Sunno, and Genobaud, the Franks proceeded to plunder Cologne and Trier just as the Huns had terrorized Metz and other Gallic cities under Attila only a few chapters earlier.Footnote ²³ All of this must be understood in the moralistic context of Gaul’s invasions which undergirds the beginning of Book ii.

Yet there is much in the story of the Franks that speaks to their resemblance to Martin. Notably, this is where Gregory switches from his written sources to a different body of evidence, which seems to have been primarily oral.Footnote ²⁴ Like the Franks, Martin was a pagan in Pannonia, but it was his life as a Christian in Gaul that mattered to Gregory. Martin’s journey, measured in miles but also in terms of spiritual growth, was a process of astonishing personal evolution. The Franks ended up retracing the footsteps of Martin as he made his way from Pannonia to Gaul and from paganism to Catholic Christianity, although they did not know it at the time: “At first the Frankish people did not understand this; they would understand later, as the Histories will narrate in what follows.”Footnote ²⁵

From Pannonia, the Franks travelled to Thuringia, where they began to elect “long-haired kings” from their most noble families.Footnote ²⁶ This comment seems to have been a nod to an established tradition, although, if anything, the disjointed series of details that follows Gregory’s statement makes the story even more difficult to understand.

Gregory remarks, for instance, that the son of Ricimer, whom he identified as Theudemer, was executed alongside his mother and that Clodio came to power around Duisburg at about the same time. Theudemer is otherwise unknown, although, if his father can be identified as the Richomeres who was appointed consul of 384 and held a long line of senior military commands, the context of the family’s activity becomes slightly clearer. Richomeres’s ranks are mentioned in the consular annals;Footnote ²⁷ his battles against the Goths and his imperial appointments are mentioned by Ammianus.Footnote ²⁸ While this is useful information, it does not support his identification as the figure from the Histories. In any event, Ricimer, his wife Ascyla, and their son Theudemer appear out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly. This obscure interjection suggests that Gregory relied on a particular unmentioned source in which these details were included, but it contributes very little to our understanding of early Frankish leaders and the establishment of royal power.

Notably, the Histories make no attempt to link Theudemer to Clodio by succession or kinship. The two are presented as ruling separate regions, and Clodio’s ancestry and the circumstances of his coming to power are not disclosed. The relationship of Clodio to Merovech, the next named king of the Franks, is similarly ambiguous. Though Gregory reports that some claim that the two were of the same family, he is not willing to commit on this point.Footnote ²⁹ Gregory’s reticence to contextualize the earliest Frankish kings could have stemmed from faulty sources, but he clearly preferred to leave the matter unresolved. Recounting ancient royal ancestries would have shifted focus away from the Franks’ paganism and ferocity, as well as from the parallels he was attempting to draw with Martin. These, more than any royal origin story, were the real point of this section of the narrative. Like Clodio, Merovech is essentially a nonentity in the Histories, whose sole purpose is to move the plot along to the rule of Childeric.

It is quite likely that Gregory saw the rule of Childeric as belonging to another thematic section. The story of Childeric appears after a lengthy segue, which begins with a drawn-out admonition of the Franks’ cartoonish paganism in chapter 10 and is followed by the installation of Aegidius (d. 464/5) as magister militum (per Gallias). Aegidius, who ruled a Roman enclave centered on the city of Soissons after the assassination of Majorian (d. 461), becomes a central figure for understanding Childeric’s (and Clovis’s) career.Footnote ³⁰ He seems to have commanded Roman as well as Frankish troops, and was the one who deposed Childeric, according to the Histories on account of his womanizing. While in Gregory’s account Childeric was eventually restored after the Franks tired of Aegidius, this had more to do with the machinations of his ally than with any repentance on his part. Historically, Aegidius’s position vis-à-vis the Franks was probably more complicated, but in the Histories he, and later his son Syagrius, were there primarily to illuminate certain aspects in the careers of the earliest Merovingians.Footnote ³¹ To add insult to injury, Childeric took as his wife Basina, once the wife of the Thuringian king Bissinus, with whom Childeric found shelter during his eight-year-long exile. Hardly an impressive portrait.Footnote ³²

Much has been said about the Histories’ intentional juxtaposition of Clovis and Constantine, which likened the newly christened Frankish king to the first Christian emperor of Rome.Footnote ³³ Gregory’s vigorous claim for Clovis as a novus Constantinus leaves one wondering whether he also meant for Childeric to function as a Frankish mirror-image of Constantine’s predecessor and polar opposite, Diocletian. The Histories do not have very much to say about Diocletian.Footnote ³⁴ The emperor is charged with carrying out extensive persecutions, resulting in thousands of fatalities. He is also blamed for the martyrdom of Bishop Quirinus of Siscia. This snippet was almost certainly lifted from the Chronicle of Jerome, where it appears in the fifth year of the persecution, and three years after Diocletian had “laid down the purple” (i.e., 308).Footnote ³⁵ If Gregory had access to the late fourth-century Passio sancti Quirini, he would have learned that the riverine martyrdom scene, which is mentioned in Jerome, took place in Sabaria (Szombathely, modern-day Hungary).Footnote ³⁶ Quite the coincidence, given that in the very next chapter, Gregory relates that Martin was born in Sabaria during the reign of Constantine. Unlike the Chronicle of Jerome, the Passio cast Diocletian as the persecutor instead of Licinius, which coincides with Gregory’s chronology, although this could simply be a matter of better storytelling. Diocletian was the archvillain of numerous works, Eusebius-Jerome included, and would have made for a more dramatically pleasing persecutor.Footnote ³⁷ Gregory discusses the structure of the Eusebius-Jerome chronicle in chapter 36, so we must assume that this was his main source, which, other than wrongly identifying the emperor, resembles his account in every detail.Footnote ³⁸ But the temptation to read intent into Gregory’s pairing of Diocletian with the martyrdom of a bishop and Constantine, in the subsequent chapter, with such meaningful events as the discovery of the True Cross and the birth of “Gaul’s new light,” seems almost too good to pass up.Footnote ³⁹ Given the consciously antithetical treatment of Diocletian and Constantine, and Clovis’s comparison with the latter, we should consider how Diocletian informed Gregory’s handling of Childeric. In any event, as Book ii structurally mimics Eusebius-Jerome’s model of prolonged persecution capped by triumphant imperial conversion, this comparison seems justified.

All of this surely has bearing on Gregory’s understanding of Childeric’s narrative role as an exemplum of corrupt rule and moral bankruptcy.Footnote ⁴⁰ As a character, Childeric is not well developed. We hear of his philandering, exile, and return in chapter 12, but the five subsequent chapters have to do with cities that held special importance for Gregory—Clermont, Autun, Tours, and their bishops. Childeric next appears as an actor in the regional reshuffling that followed the death of Aegidius. This chapter presents substantial difficulties, no matter how one chooses to explain its events.Footnote ⁴¹ The Histories wrap up this episode and return to the episcopal history of the Auvergne, focusing on the episcopacy of Sidonius. Coverage of Childeric is concluded in chapter 27 with the report of his death and succession by Clovis. His anticlimactic portrayal was perhaps meant to serve as an inverted version of Clovis’s, but in this he was not alone. Gregory had many Diocletians that could play the heel to his “new Constantine.” Since his Clovis was a model of kingly conduct, he could be compared favorably not only to his ancestors,Footnote ⁴² but also to his contemporaries, most commonly to Gundobad, king of the Burgundians.Footnote ⁴³

Helmut Reimitz has termed Gregory’s overall approach to the question of the Franks’ origins an anti-origo, for its refusal to engage with any coherent origin story. This was, of course, intentional, since neither the Franks nor their Merovingian kings were the heroes of Gregory’s opus. In the Histories’ narrative architecture, they had an important role to play, but only insofar as they served a broader agenda—to focus on Gaul against the wider backdrop of Church history.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Trojan origin story had several unappealing elements as far as Gregory was concerned. Firstly, it rested on a classical mythology that stood in opposition to the biblical reading Gregory brought to bear on history. Secondly, it made a strong identitarian argument that undercut Gregory’s own ideas about the crystallization of a Christian community in Gaul. The Trojan story sidestepped Christianity entirely, in fact, and thus could not be harmonized with Gregory’s authorial objectives. Historians of later generations did not follow Gregory in this regard; the Trojan origin story would become a mainstay of Frankish historiography for a millennium.

1.2 The Chronicle of Fredegar: The Ethics of an origo

The fall of Troy is a prodigiously popular textual motif featured in a wide range of western compositions, secular as well as ecclesiastical.Footnote ⁴⁵ For late-antique and early medieval authors, it was an especially useful point of reference for events that carried unique symbolic weight, such as the Visigothic sack of Rome in 410, or that reordered regional geopolitics, such as the Muslim conquest of Spain in the early eighth century.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Trojan origin of the Franks famously makes its debut in the Chronicle of Fredegar, first as an interpolation of the excerpts of Eusebius-Jerome and the continuations of Hydatius that make up the second book, and then again in the early chapters of the third book. Not much can be said about Fredegar’s treatment of the Trojan material that has not already been covered by the voluminous literature on the topic.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is nevertheless possible to offer some remarks on the relationship between ethnic formation and kingship in the Frankish case. In the Fredegar chronicle, the discussion of the emergence of kingship remains ancillary to the one concerned with the formation of the Franks, and this fact accords with the chronicler’s overall assessment of contemporary and near-contemporary Merovingians. Additionally, the treatment of Frankish origins in Fredegar may have been styled to convey a message about Fredegar’s royal contemporaries. It was undoubtedly intended to evoke in the reader connotations of the Roman origin myth, appropriating it and thereby fielding the audacious claim that the Franks were just as much the inheritors of this myth as were the Romans. By inference, Frankish dominion over extensive swaths of the orbis Romanus was justified.Footnote ⁴⁸

In the Excerpt from the Chronicle of Jerome found in Book ii, the Frankish origin story appears as an offshoot of the Trojan narrative. Fredegar follows Jerome in recounting that Priam, Helen’s abductor, unwittingly caused the breakout of the ten-year Trojan war. He likewise reports on Memnon and the Amazons’ rally to Priam’s aid and on the fall of the city. But there he breaks off from Jerome to explore an alternative storyline: the origin of the Franks. Fredegar announces the new topic by declaring, “thereafter was the origin of the Franks,” after which he identifies Priam as their first king.Footnote ⁴⁹ Priam was succeeded by Friga, who led half of the escapees on a circuitous journey that ended in their settlement, under their new king Francio, between the Danube and the Rhine, where they came under Roman rule.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Franks eventually rebelled against the Romans and freed themselves, never again to be yoked by foreign oppressors. Friga is inserted strategically into the next few chapters, but this is where the interpolation in Eusebius-Jerome ends.

Another version of the Troy story is included in the early chapters of the third book of the chronicle, the so-called Excerpt from the Chronicle of Bishop Gregory of Tours.Footnote ⁵¹ The Trojan narrative, which is absent from the Histories, is also Fredegar’s first departure from Gregory. The account repeats the tale of the destruction of the city and the fate of its survivors. Here, too, the refugees split into two groups. One made its way to Macedonia, while the other, under the leadership of Friga, eventually settled on the shore of the Danube. There, another division took place, from which two nations arose—the Turks, led by Torcoth, and the Franks, by Francio.Footnote ⁵² After this time, adds Fredegar, the Franks were led by duces.

Fredegar’s interpolation in the second book and the opening to the third are primarily concerned with the Franks and their origins. Only later do they turn to discuss the question of Frankish kingship and, even then, in a way that leaves many questions unanswered. In both accounts, the chronicler interpolates into his source text material that was preoccupied with the division into recognizable ethne: the Macedonians, the Turks, and the Franks. It is true that the king-figures leading the Trojans on their journey into Frankishness have names and are thus an element of any subsequent lineage one could draw from this text. Yet they are figures that function only as templates for the ethnonyms adopted by the groups they helped constitute, not as active characters in a historical drama. The point of this name-giving process is, of course, to introduce Francio, after whom the Franks are called.

This theme ties into the discussion of Merovingian beginnings rather uneasily. Though the kinship between the semi-historical Frankish leaders, Ricimer, Theudemer, and Clodio, and their mythological forbears, Priam, Friga, and Francio, is eventually revealed, their link to the Merovingians is left unresolved. The Trojan story is therefore constructed in such a way that prioritizes the formation of the Franks in their various stages of development over the institution of kingship, and certainly over the emergence of the Merovingians. As the many twists in Fredegar’s treatment of the formation of Frankish kingship make clear, it is by no means obvious that Fredegar wished to endow the Merovingians with a Trojan ancestry. The only intent we can attribute to Fredegar with any certainty is that he claimed that the Franks more generally shared a Trojan history with other gentes, most crucially with the Romans whose traditions the text is clearly usurping, and that in the earliest stage of their history they were led by two sets of kings that had Trojan ancestries and long hair.Footnote ⁵³

The intervening period of Frankish history under the duces is equally important to our understanding of Fredegar’s origin narrative, as is the story of Clodio and Merovech. As we shall see, the chronicler’s treatment of pre-Merovingian kings and duces does not promote the notion that the kings of his day had any preferential claim to Trojan origins. Rather, it functions as an important element in a storyline that was meant to delineate the emergence of a Frankish community and perhaps to propose a subtle view of the place of the Merovingian family within it.Footnote ⁵⁴

The section dealing with the Franks under the three duces is imported from Gregory, although their election in the place of kings is original to Fredegar.Footnote ⁵⁵ As Woodruff has noted, the Fredegar chronicler may have misunderstood the account in the Histories on a number of points, namely the details surrounding the Frankish ambush of Roman legionaries in the Charbonnière and the shift the Franks had made from duces to kings after a respite from hostilities with the Romans.Footnote ⁵⁶ Fredegar explains that, since the duces were dead, the Franks resumed the habit of electing kings from the same ancestral line as before, which wraps up this section of the narrative and provides a path to the subsequent narrative block—Ricimer, Theudemer, and Clodio.Footnote ⁵⁷

The chronicle contains no additional information about the duces after reporting on the incursions of Arbogast into Frankish territory, which were prompted by his hatred of Marcomer and Sunno.Footnote ⁵⁸ Arbogast is said to have set the forest ablaze to avert possible traps, and to have depopulated the trans-Rhenish lands ruled by the Amai, most likely a misspelling of the Chamavi, one of the constituent tribes of the Frankish confederation.Footnote ⁵⁹ Since Fredegar leaves open the question of how Arbogast’s campaign concluded, one might assume that he meant for his readers to infer that these campaigns led to the deaths of Marcomer and Sunno, and that a change in the model of rulership was now required. Yet Fredegar is entirely dependent on Gregory here, who specified quite clearly that, while Arbogast’s maneuvers across the Rhine were met with no Frankish opposition, the legionaries sighted a group of Amsivarii and Chatii, led by Marcomir. As far as Gregory was concerned, this is how the story ended, with at least one Frankish dux alive and well. This is also where Gregory complains that Sulpicius Alexander abandoned his vague usage of duces and regales altogether and openly asserted that the Franks were led by a king, whose name he nevertheless failed to mention.Footnote ⁶⁰ This moved Woodruff to propose that the Fredegar chronicler mistook Gregory’s intent to mean that the duces were dead. While that is possible, Fredegar’s next move seems to suggest otherwise, as I argue on pp. 47–48. The narrative block which is concerned with the three duces stands uncomfortably between the first period of Trojan kingship and the second. The Fredegar chronicler had to come up with a workaround to connect the two periods coherently.

The author of the Liber historiae Francorum faced a similar problem. He—or she, the evidence seems inconclusive on this pointFootnote ⁶¹—also wanted to keep Marcomir and Sunno, who are called principes, so the solution was to make them out to be sons of Priam and Antenor, respectively.Footnote ⁶² The author of the Liber historiae Francorum did not entirely share Fredegar’s ambivalence toward the Merovingians’ Trojan origins. The LHF allowed for a smoother transition between the progeny of Priam and the Merovingians proper, although it did leave room for uncertainty by claiming that Merovech was not Clodio’s son, only his kinsman, “de genere eius.”Footnote ⁶³ This imprecise terminology could have meant either that Merovech was Clodio’s relative or his descendant. If the LHF was paraphrasing Gregory’s “de huius stirpe,” we could be inclined to prefer the latter.Footnote ⁶⁴ In the LHF, Sunno’s death prompts Marcomir to nominate his son, Faramund, as the first king of the Franks.Footnote ⁶⁵ Importantly, Faramund is the first to be described as rex crinitus, followed shortly thereafter by Clodio. The LHF author adds that from that time, the Franks began to have long-haired kings, which goes some way to assuaging any doubts attached to Merovech’s paternity and his eligibility to claim Trojan origins, since he obviously met this criterion.Footnote ⁶⁶

Fredegar does not go that far. Although he ends up keeping Marcomir and Sunno, in order to return to a new cast of characters that boast Trojan origins he needs to kill off the duces. His solution is not altogether elegant, but it does allow him to reattach Ricimer, Theudemer, and Clodio to their Trojan roots. Priam, Friga, and Francio, we now learn, were themselves long-haired kings, so Fredegar might have intended long hair as a metonym for Trojan origins.Footnote ⁶⁷ In this Fredegar differs from both the Histories and the LHF, which see the institution of long-haired kings as a constitutive break with the past, not a continuation of it.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Histories never attempted to link Clodio to previous kings and remained on the fence on the question of his connection to Merovech. Yet, for Gregory, the connection between long-haired kings and Merovingians was unquestionable. Fredegar’s attitude towards the Merovingians is another matter entirely.Footnote ⁶⁹ Any conclusions one wishes to draw are grounded in the story of Merovech’s birth, for which the Fredegar chronicler presents a curious and by now well-known interpolation of the Histories:

This is all that Fredegar has to say about Merovech. The next passage already turns to the debauchery of Childeric, Merovech’s son, making it that much harder to decipher the chronicler’s precise intent. The interpolation clearly means to convey a message about the formation of the royal family: Merovech came either from a line of Trojan kings or from an unnatural union with a sea-monster, a question Fredegar left intentionally open.

Alexander C. Murray and Ian Wood offer somewhat divergent readings of the episode, but on several points it seems possible to agree—firstly, that a version of this story could have circulated with the purpose of etymologizing the Merovingian dynasty, perhaps at a time when the name Merovech was making a comeback on Chilperic I’s side of the family.Footnote ⁷¹ Secondly, that the overall orientation of this story is classical and should be understood in relation to the Trojan chapters.Footnote ⁷² The Trojan origin story was certainly meant to correspond to parallel stories recounted by different peoples, most notably the Romans. The version in the Scarpsum de Cronica Hieronimi, which contains a more fully developed rendering of the Frankish origin story, moves from Friga to Francio. In a corresponding plotline several chapters later, it suggests that Friga and Aeneas might have been brothers.Footnote ⁷³ A short treatment of Latin ancestry and Roman republican history then follows. Jerome’s Chronicle moves straight from the fall of Troy to the Latin kingship of Aeneas, so Fredegar’s decision to interpolate the story of Frankish origins here, of all places, seems aimed at creating a parallel between Franks and Romans. While Roman history is not expanded upon in any detail in Book iii, the Trojan story does lead naturally into a Frankish encounter, under the three duces, with the Romans, whose own Trojan ancestry is acknowledged by Fredegar in Book ii. In the third book, however, the Romans appear without any Trojan connotations as the ultimate losers in their encounter with the Franks, whose own Trojan bloodline frames the entire discussion.

For later chroniclers working from Fredegar, the Trojan narrative and the Quinotaur story were irreconcilable. In the end, the Trojan version prevailed. Using the story of Merovech’s unusual birth would have meant taking on the challenging task of harmonizing it with the Trojan storyline, which was the more important part of the plot. The Quinotaur story seems also to have carried an unappealing pagan aftertaste. Regarding the source material, the intertextual relationship between the different works of Merovingian historiography has been overwhelmingly conservative. In the case of Marcomir and Sunno, for instance, both Fredegar and the LHF retain a narrative nucleus extracted from the Histories, even when they are forced to make concessions to accommodate it. The Quinotaur story is different. It was probably lack of awareness of the story that kept the author of the LHF from relating to it, but later chroniclers largely deferred to the model proposed by the LHF, which on the question of Clodio’s paternity of Merovech reflected the view expressed in the Histories.Footnote ⁷⁴ Fredegar and the LHF are similar in that they maintain some distance between Clodio and Merovech, but neither rules out the possibility that Merovech, and subsequently the Merovingians, were heirs to the line of Priam.Footnote ⁷⁵ Yet they go about doing this in different ways: The LHF takes a simpler approach, which rests on the supposition that Merovech was at the very least a relative but more likely a descendant of Clodio, and in any event shared his status as rex crinitus.

Fredegar’s narrative contortions suggest that the chronicler had something else in mind, although the reasoning behind his inclusion of the Quinotaur subplot is lost to history. It may have caught an echo of a competing origin story, as suggested by Wood. The relative diversity found in all three major works of Merovingian historiography suggests that the Franks held on to several parallel traditions about the early days of Frankish kingship, and Merovech’s birth could easily have been one of them. Indeed, the Trojan story may have derived from myths recounted by the Gallic segment of the population.Footnote ⁷⁶ Moreover, the overall tone of the Quinotaur story was not a flattering one for the Merovingians.Footnote ⁷⁷ This is true not only because an ancestry which issues from a random encounter with a sea-monster does little to advance royal prestige, certainly when compared to stories by competing royal lines.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Fredegar chronicler ensured that his readers understood that Merovech’s paternity was not attributable to either the Quinotaur or Clodio with any certainty. Taken against the backdrop of Fredegar’s thoroughly Christianized chronology, its pagan undertones make the Quinotaur element feel even more out of place.

While criticism of the Merovingians is a clear element of the story as related in Fredegar, it only really follows from one possible interpretative route of the Quinotaur story and should not be seen as its sole raison d’être. Two distinct possibilities, with a moral dimension attached to each, were envisaged by the chronicler. The content of these moral lessons is less easily determined, although we might suppose that they applied to the circumstances of the Merovingian kingdoms at the time of Fredegar’s composition in the early 660s. The Quinotaur story was concerned with problematic paternity and its unfortunate result, namely, that a Merovingian of dubious origins would occupy the royal throne. Denial of paternity was a useful weapon for delegitimizing royal candidates;Footnote ⁷⁹ we might then ask to which candidates Fredegar is alluding here. The Grimoald affair that took place in the 650s seems to suggest itself as a possible point of reference. Wood has argued that the Fredegar chronicler was sympathetic to the Pippinids, and indeed his appraisal of Pippin I was impeccable. Yet he was not as decisively supportive of Grimoald.Footnote ⁸⁰ If the story of Merovech’s birth was a veiled reference to the coup, then Grimoald was its Quinotaur.

Thus, I suggest that we might read Fredegar’s interpolation as an expression of unease with the rule of Childebert “the Adopted,” Grimoald’s putative biological son.Footnote ⁸¹ The chronicler would surely have been aware of Grimoald’s fate, and, depending on the exact date of the composition, could also have known of the death of Childebert, which could have taken place as late as 662. If Fredegar was composed in Childeric II’s Austrasia or, indeed, in Chlothar III’s Neustro-Burgundy, interpreting the story as a call to Merovingian loyalism seems quite plausible. For both regna, but especially Austrasia, the early 660s would have been a period of recuperation from the Grimoald affair, punctuated by the Neustrian takeover of the Austrasian throne with the implicit approval of Chimnechild, Sigibert III’s widow, who wed her daughter Bilichild to Childeric II.Footnote ⁸² On a more pragmatic level, Fredegar’s Quinotaur story functioned, much like Gregory’s Pannonia, as a point of narrative inflection, from which our reading of history might unfold in one of two ways. Now, this does not necessarily mean that the author wished for the identification of Grimoald with the Quinotaur to be an obvious one. As the framing of the story suggests, other solutions were left on the table. It is only to be construed as an interpretive path that may or may not be followed, at the reader’s discretion. If it is, the comparison with contemporary events on the political stage might suggest itself and, with it, the drawing of appropriate moral conclusions. The ethics of the Fredegar chronicler continued to play a role in his presentation of the story’s next hero, Merovech’s son, Childeric I.

As a character, Childeric is certainly amplified in Fredegar.Footnote ⁸³ The general outline of the story’s earlier events resembles the one found in the Histories, although the motives of Childeric and his supporting cast are explored in much greater depth. Fredegar follows Gregory in pointing to Childeric’s licentiousness as the reason for his escape to Thuringia. Like his source, Fredegar’s Childeric is only able to return once his ally at court appeases the angry Franks, who have since invited Aegidius, the Roman magister militum, to rule over them. This ally, who remains unidentified in the Histories, is called Wiomad in both Fredegar and in the LHF. Yet here is where the similarities end. While for the most part the LHF sticks to Gregory’s narrative, Fredegar introduces new details that take the plot in unexpected directions. Especially noteworthy is Fredegar’s evaluation of the courtly intrigues that went on when the king was in exile and the international networks that were activated to facilitate his return.

Wiomad appears at the very beginning of the story, where he is credited with having saved Childeric and his mother from Hunnic captivity.Footnote ⁸⁴ If this indeed reflects a historical event, Wiomad would likely have been a generation older than Childeric, probably one of his father’s men.Footnote ⁸⁵ After Childeric departed for Thuringia, Wiomad won Aegidius’s trust and was appointed subregulus over the Franks. Determined to bring about Childeric’s return, he immediately began to undermine Aegidius’s position with his leading men. First, he convinced Aegidius to impose increasingly steep levies on the Franks. Then, Wiomad insisted that the only way to prevent the Franks from rebelling was to carry out a mass execution, for which he selected 100 men described as being useless and unsuitable in times of need—“inutiles et in necessitatibus incongruos.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Later, Wiomad riled up the indignant Franks against Aegidius, reminding them that those scheduled for execution were their parentes.Footnote ⁸⁷ Having heard enough, the Franks were content to invite back Childeric. Wiomad then put into action the second part of his plan: Aegidius was lulled into thinking that his harsh measures were effective, and that now would be an opportune time to request from the emperor in the East financial support to put the neighboring peoples directly under imperial rule.Footnote ⁸⁸ Wiomad then deceitfully inserted one of his men into the legation sent to Constantinople to procure the funds.

Wiomad’s agent also had a secret task—to recall Childeric. The king was apparently ensconced not in Thuringia, his initial place of refuge, but in Constantinople, where he was a guest of the emperor. This is a surprising revelation, to which the Fredegar chronicler made no previous allusions. The Byzantine court is known to have regularly harbored foreign dissidents and refugees—Radegund’s cousin Amalafrid who fled the Frankish conquest of Thuringia is one such exampleFootnote ⁸⁹—although in Childeric’s case, the entire episode was an ahistorical narrative ploy. A dramatic scene at the imperial court follows, in which Childeric managed to prevail over Aegidius’s emissaries, secure the emperor’s support, and lay the ground for his return to Gaul. We next read that Wiomad and Childeric held a meeting in Gaul, where they hatched a plan for getting Childeric reinstated. The plan was adopted enthusiastically by the king’s supporters, Childeric regained his throne, and went on to defeat Aegidius and his Romans on the battlefield.

Some of the details provided by Fredegar seem to have a basis in reality. The LHF, which is not dependent on Fredegar,Footnote ⁹⁰ repeats the name Wiomad, likewise casting him in a leading role in Aegidius’s court. And while he is not mentioned by name in the Histories, the character of Wiomad might nevertheless reflect some measure of historicity. His successful rescue of Childeric and his mother from the Huns is possibly another older, possibly oral, account of historical events. Yet, the Wiomad story waves several red flags. For one, subregulus—Wiomad’s office under Aegidius and probably also under Childeric—is an anachronism when applied to late fifth-century northern Gaul. More likely, it reflects the court hierarchy of Fredegar’s own day. It is not a word the chronicler uses again, so we have no way of comparing Wiomad’s position to that of other characters. The long extract from Sulpicius Alexander in Book ii of the Histories invokes the term to refer to the duces Marcomir and Sunno. Gregory frames these men as Frankish leaders who were not answerable to any king, although whether this was how Sulpicius Alexander wished the term to be understood is impossible to say.

Subregulus does appear in hagiographical compositions contemporary with the composition of Fredegar—the Vita Romarici and the Vita Arnulfi—where it is always used to refer to a mayor of the palace.Footnote ⁹¹ Fredegar shares other similarities with these hagiographies, not least of which is its close acquaintance with the Vita Columbani, so we might hazard a guess that subregulus was understood relatively uniformly by all three. As noted by Roger Collins, the Fredegar chronicler looked for particular virtues in his leading men, such as loyalty, patience, and, above all, good counsel.Footnote ⁹² With regard to these three traits, the wording of “Wiomad the Frank, more loyal to Childeric than all others” is reminiscent of the description of another maior domus, the seventh-century Aega. Fredegar described Aega as “outstanding amongst the other leading men of Neustria, acting with prudence and imbued with the fullness of patience.”Footnote ⁹³

The unstinting loyalty of Wiomad to Childeric may be helpfully compared to Aega’s devotion to Dagobert I, and, more importantly, to his son, Clovis II. During the young prince’s minority, Aega functioned as royal nutritor and staunch ally of Queen Nanthild, calling to mind Wiomad’s Hunnic rescue of the underage Childeric and his mother. The years Wiomad spent in subterfuge under Aegidius are nothing if not evidence of his paciencia. And of course, had it not been for his sound advice, Childeric would never have been able to win back his kingdom. In fact, Wiomad’s consilium is the main theme of chapter 11. He is a much more active character than Childeric, and his recommendations are the ones that dictate the fates of the episode’s other protagonists. Similarly, Wiomad’s kings can be juxtaposed with Aega’s—Dagobert’s debauchery reminds us of Childeric, and his avaricious behavior toward the nobles’ property, of Aegidius. It seems likely, then, that Fredegar meant for the affair to function as a moral exploration of the power of loyalty and sound advice, and the king’s reliance on both, and for this lesson to be applicable to a contemporary readership.

Now, let us consider the imperial angle of the story. Childeric’s victory scene at the Constantinopolitan court is unique to Fredegar. It gained little traction in later historiography, primarily because it was rejected by Aimoin of Fleury’s tenth-century Gesta Francorum, the main bottleneck such narrative blocks had to overcome were they to survive and reach medieval chronicles. Aimoin must have been aware of this scene because he made use of Fredegar in countless other instances, but here he decided to defer to the less detailed account found in the LHF.Footnote ⁹⁴ More to the point, Aimoin would have had no reason to shine a light on the Constantinopolitan subplot, which would have been superfluous to his treatment.Footnote ⁹⁵ It is likely that he considered the LHF as essentially a product of Gregory of Tours and relied on it and not on Fredegar where the two disagreed.Footnote ⁹⁶

What Aimoin lost by adhering to the LHF’s simplified plot, he made up for in the grandiloquence of his characters. Be that as it may, the story of Childeric in Constantinople did not withstand his scrutiny, nor, for that matter, should it withstand ours. As it is portrayed, the episode has several irregularities and here, again, we should read it not as an attempt at disinterested historical reportage; as is so often the case with Fredegar, Childeric’s Byzantine adventure should probably be understood as a metaphor for contemporary events.

For Childeric to have had some relationship with the eastern court is not out of the question, of course. Coins from the reign of Marcian were found in his tomb, discovered in Tournai in 1653. The story of the tomb and its finds has a riveting history of its own and has been discussed by Bonnie Effros and others in detail.Footnote ⁹⁷ On the more pragmatic level for our purposes, eastern artifacts recovered from the tomb might suggest some form of contact between Childeric and his fideles and the Roman court in Constantinople. As noted by Guy Halsall, however, the tomb and the message it was made to convey were not of Childeric’s design, but of Clovis’s.Footnote ⁹⁸ The coins were obviously there to tell a story, but, as Fischer and Lind point out, any assembly of burial goods was “an independent ideological demonstration” that we should interpret separately from the question of its origin.Footnote ⁹⁹ The contents of the hoard must have been curated to make a statement about legitimacy, and were probably assembled in a western context, but they teach us little about Childeric’s relationship with the eastern court.

More likely, the story in Fredegar carried a different meaning. The misidentification of the emperor as Maurice (and not Marcian) could, of course, be a simple error; the names of the two emperors were similar.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ But the Fredegar chronicler was well versed in international affairs, with a vista much broader than that of Gregory, who famously misplaced Antioch in Egypt.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The Fredegar chronicler’s diplomatic horizons spanned across the Mediterranean, penetrating the Sasanian heartlands and beyond.Footnote ¹⁰² He is the first to mention the Göktürks, who dwelt to the east of Iran, and is also the first among both western and eastern sources to mention Muslim advances against the Byzantines.Footnote ¹⁰³ For him to have mistaken characters that were essential to his Frankish storyline was decidedly odd.

The gift of 50,000 solidi is evidence that the episode was written with a different message in mind. Memorably, Childebert II received an identical gift from the actual Maurice, given with the specific provision that the Franks invade Italy and dislodge the recently established Lombards.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Childeric’s story was also about removing unwanted political authority, so the chronicler could have been alluding to a much more recent diplomatic exchange between the Franks and the Byzantines, one which took place in the 580s. It is also possible to see other layers in the story. We know of at least one other incident in which a Merovingian claimant—Gundovald—was laden with gifts and sent by the emperor to undermine the status quo in Gaul.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The chronology of Gundovald’s departure from Constantinople is quite difficult to assess, although it was located close to Tiberius II’s death and the ascent of Maurice in August 582. Whoever financed Gundovald—to the tune of 50,000 solidi, if what Walter Goffart suspected is correct—it is clear that Maurice had a stake in his royal aspirations, which unfolded completely within the emperor’s first three years in office.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

However one chooses to read Childeric’s story of exile and return, its components were invariably made to correspond to Fredegar’s understanding of the Byzantine policies of subsidy and intervention enacted under the emperor Maurice in the 580s. Yet this was about more than dressing up Childeric as a late sixth-century character. Contacts with the Byzantines were a developing story with contemporary significance for the Fredegar chronicler, evidenced by the detailed account of Heraclius’s career and his contacts with Dagobert I. As demonstrated by Stefan Esders, in the early 630s the Byzantines were once again interested in cajoling the Franks into a joint military adventure, this time against the Avars.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The Fredegar chronicler was not only well informed, he was also opinionated, if his later appraisal of Heraclius’s demise and the unimaginable success of the Saracens is anything to go by. I would not go so far as to imply that Childeric’s Byzantine episode was code for the events of the 580s, or that the attentive reader was meant, by making the correct inferences, to glean the chronicler’s opinion about the policies of his own day. It seems safe, however, to read the treatment of Childeric in Fredegar as an astute meditation on the risks and benefits of playing along with Byzantine interventionism.

1.3 A Carolingian Interlude: The Trojan Comment in the Gesta episcoporum Mettensium

As the dynasty that displaced the Merovingians, the Carolingians would have had every reason to suspect origo stories that privileged their predecessors. The ambition of Carolingian historiography was primarily to broadcast a message of legitimacy. Dwelling on the accomplishments of the Merovingians was counterproductive, to say the least. It is no surprise, then, that the most iconic Carolingian work depicting the Merovingians is one in which ridicule prevails. The first chapters of Einhard’s Vita Karoli are a caricature of the late Merovingian kings, whose lethargy becomes their most defining feature. Einhard’s vignette is partly true; while the actual career of Childeric III, the very last Merovingian, is almost entirely unknown, it is certain that he was firmly under the thumb of both Carloman and Pippin III.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Carloman and Pippin did not inherit Childeric from their father. Charles Martel had ruled without a king for the four final years of his life; the last Merovingian crowned in 743 was their own creation.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ He was likely every bit as ineffectual as the sources make him out to have been. Still, Einhard does not limit his criticism solely to the final Merovingian. Fault lay equally with Childeric’s predecessors. Einhard clearly says that: “ … this family (i.e., the gens Meroingorum), though it may be regarded as finishing with him, had long since lost all power, and no longer possessed anything of importance except the empty royal title.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Einhard, and Carolingian historiography more generally, was committed to a narrative of long decline. The sooner the Merovingians began to wane, the sooner Pippinid figures could be brought to the fore.

This is not to say the Merovingian-era chronicles did not have their place within the Carolingian historiographical project. The Continuations of Fredegar are perhaps the most conspicuous effort by the Carolingians to reframe Merovingian historiography to suit dynastic needs. They were compiled, together with the original chronicle, into what is essentially a new composition, the Historia vel gesta Francorum.Footnote ¹¹¹ As shown by Helmut Reimitz, the Fredegar Chronicle was experimented upon widely in Carolingian scriptoria, with the earliest sections of the text arousing particular interest.Footnote ¹¹² Carolingian authors also knew the LHF well and used it extensively, not least in their framing of the Fredegar continuations. In fact, most manuscripts containing the composition are Carolingian.Footnote ¹¹³ Although the initial purpose of the LHF was to legitimize Merovingian kingship and its cooperation with the Neustrian elites, the work could certainly lend itself to other interpretations.Footnote ¹¹⁴ It is not overtly hostile to the Carolingians and contains a quite favorable depiction of Pippin II and Charles Martel.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The details of the latter’s career after 727 were of course unknown to the author of the LHF. One might assume that Martel’s decisive dismantling of late Merovingian power might have changed the composition’s tone.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Counterfactuals notwithstanding, the LHF was a valuable link in the Carolingians’ historiographical chain. It was also the composition that took the Merovingians’ association with Troy the farthest.Footnote ¹¹⁷ We must therefore assume that the origines Francorum presented in Fredegar and the LHF were on the minds of Carolingian authors and readers.

Of course, Trojan stories were in circulation long before they were ever put in writing, and oral versions probably survived well into the Carolingian period. Whether this corpus of written and oral material was understood to have foregrounded the Merovingians’ place in the story or whether it was perceived as a shared myth of common origins applicable to all Franks is difficult to tell. Still, Carolingian authors were actively engaged in altering the stories they found in Merovingian-era chronicles and in oral tradition, such as it was. These authors also came up with fresh uses for the Trojan origo, such as the one we find in Paul the Deacon’s Gesta episcoporum Mettensium. Composed in 784 in Francia at the behest of Angilram bishop of Metz, the Gesta took a novel approach to Trojan material, all the while consciously reflecting a vision of the Carolingians as they would have liked to be seen. The reworking and continuation of the Chronicle of Fredegar into the Historia vel Gesta Francorum was significant, as was the continued preoccupation with the Trojan theme in other early Carolingian works, such as the Cosmographia of Aethicus or the Historia de origine Francorum attributed to Dares of Phrygia.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Yet Paul the Deacon’s surprising variation on Ansegisel-Anschisus, to which I shall turn shortly, is a new—and rare—use of the Trojan story by Carolingian historiography.Footnote ¹¹⁹

In his history of the episcopacy of Metz, Paul would have been able to draw on comparable compositions, such as the Liber Pontificalis, which records the deeds of the bishops of Rome, ordered according to the sequence of their succession.Footnote ¹²⁰ Scholarship has noted that, despite the Gesta’s suggestive title, the composition is not so much preoccupied with the deeds of the bishops of Metz as it is with events on a regnal scale.Footnote ¹²¹ One indication of this is that a seemingly off-topic emphasis on the Carolingian lineage, or rather a heavily stylized version thereof, dominates large swaths of the Gesta. This becomes especially apparent in the passages dealing with Metz’s twenty-ninth bishop, Arnulf, for whom Paul reserved the role of the Carolingian clan’s paterfamilias. Paul reports that Arnulf’s career, and the marvelous events that it occasioned, were based on stories he heard from the praecelsus rex Karolus himself. Charlemagne, adds Paul, was Arnulf’s trinepos—his great-great-great-grandson, a noteworthy bit of information. It is also significant that this comes on the heels of the episcopacies of the senator Agiulf and his nephew, Arnoald, both of whom, according to Paul, were scions of none other than the daughter of Clovis, king of the Franks.Footnote ¹²² The qualifier fertur seems to introduce some skepticism about the veracity of the claim, though perhaps this reading should not be pushed too far. What is clear is that, for Paul, Merovingian roots were a historical dead end and that the future belonged to the progeny of Arnulf, whose own dynastic success he parades in subsequent passages. Arnulf’s sons are presented in the next vignette, and it is here that we learn that his younger son Ansegisel, styled Anschisus, was named after Anschises, the father of Aeneas. Aeneas, so the story goes, went to Italy from Troy, the place where an “old tradition” claims the Franks had their beginning.Footnote ¹²³ Paul’s approach to the question of origins—the Merovingians, the Carolingians, and the Franks as a community—is meant to guide the reader toward certain conclusions about the desirable relationship between all three.

First, the Merovingians. Although they were around for most of the period covered by the Gesta, Merovingian kings are nowhere mentioned.Footnote ¹²⁴ As argued by Goffart, the Merovingian period lay silently in the interim between two important episcopacies, that of Bishop Auctor, who opposed the Huns, and that of Bishop Chrodegang, who enacted a series of ecclesiastical reforms.Footnote ¹²⁵ The silence is only interrupted to report matters of special consequence, most notably the life of Arnulf.Footnote ¹²⁶ The bishops who presided over the diocese of Metz in the days of Gregory of Tours are often no more than names in the Gesta, as are those that flourished after Arnulf’s mid-seventh-century episcopacy.Footnote ¹²⁷ Not only do the kings that preceded the Carolingians have no place in the account, even the bishops of Metz in their day amounted to little, apart from Arnulf, that is. This invisibility seems suggestive of Paul’s understanding of the Merovingians’ historical role.

Though he was an important element in Paul’s structuring of the composition and merited several long paragraphs in the Gesta, not much of Arnulf as a person comes through. The Vita Arnulfi is only dimly reflected in the Gesta, which prefers to spotlight the contemporary Carolingian benefactors as opposed to the many unknowns of Arnulf’s life. What perhaps does shine through Paul’s depiction of Arnulf, if we accept Goffart’s reading, is a thinly veiled portrait of Charlemagne. To his treatment, Paul appends an elaborate discussion of the progeny of Ansegisel and a set of four eulogies written for Charlemagne’s wife and daughters, who were buried outside Metz, in St. Arnulf’s oratory.Footnote ¹²⁸ Since Arnulf was the progenitor of the gens that would supplant the Merovingians, it was as fitting a place as any to insert the Carolingian perspective on the Trojan story.

The Gesta offers a foundational story for a dynasty of kings, beginning with Arnulf and ending with the progeny of Charlemagne. With resolute strokes, Paul brushes away any ambiguity about the history of Carolingian succession.Footnote ¹²⁹ According to him, it was a direct and untroubled affair, from Arnulf to Anschisus and from him to his son, Pippin. Pippin left his position to his son, Charles (Martel), who was then succeeded by Pippin III, and finally by Charlemagne, whose many offspring by his wives were all accounted for in the text. No Grimoald, no Plectrude, and of course no Carloman, Grifo, or Drogo; this is a reductionist schema of Carolingian origins, and it was probably meant to be recognized as such, given that Paul ignores what other canonical Carolingian historiographies tacitly acknowledged, namely the numerous challenges faced by Charlemagne’s ancestors in their quest for power.

The significance of Paul’s mention of Troy becomes clearer when we consider it in relation to his intentions for the Carolingian origo model. Goffart has argued that Paul sought to link Arnulf to the Trojan past, and this is partly true. Going even further, Kempf has claimed that the Carolingians’ appropriation of the Trojan origo was somehow meant to circumvent the Merovingian claim on this tradition.Footnote ¹³⁰ Paul’s framework, however, ties Troy to the entire gens Francorum rather than to any particular family. Not the Merovingians, surely, about whose near-contemporary scions Paul has little to say. But not the Carolingians either, whose progenitor flourished in the early seventh century. The suggestive exegesis of Ansegisel’s name does not extend to a claim of exclusivity and is even qualified with a creditur esse. What it does is provide context for Paul’s next statement about the Trojan origins of the Franks. Paul’s Trojan comments and his version of the Carolingian family tree do not, in the end, cohere into a claim about the exclusivity of the Trojan story to any genus in particular. It is a tradition that applies to the people as a whole. These people, the Franks, are led by a family that embodies something of the Trojan spirit but whose ideological investment lies not so much in tales of mythological origins as in the Christian values personified by Anschisus.Footnote ¹³¹

1.4 An Evolving Royalism: Dionysian Historiography and Its Influences

With the late thirteenth-century chronicle, the Roman des rois, we are on entirely new terrain. Primat, the author of this Old French work, addressed an audience that could not read Latin but still had a taste for historiography. This was an inquisitive and literate secular readership, dissatisfied with what was then available in the vernacular, namely, versified histories whose emphasis was more on style than on historicity.Footnote ¹³² It wanted its history in prose, and the Roman des rois delivered. For generations, Saint-Denis’s scriptorium housed authors working on Frankish history, and it is there that one finds the context and the source-base for Primat’s work. Primat had expert guidance and unparalleled access to source material in Saint-Denis, and he used these resources fully in his Roman des rois. As expected, the monastery and its patron saint take center stage in the composition.Footnote ¹³³

In the prologue, Primat spells out the work’s rationale: “Because many people doubt the genealogy of the kings of France, of what origin and of what line they are descended, he [Primat] set out to compose this work on the order of such a man that cannot be refused.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Whether this person whom one cannot refuse was King Louis IX, as Jules Viard believed, or the abbot of Saint-Denis, Matthew of Vendôme, as suggested by Bernard Guenée, Primat’s work carries unmistakable royalist overtones.

It would nevertheless be unhelpful to view Primat’s work as an expression of royal ideology as Louis IX or Philip III’s courts would have understood it.Footnote ¹³⁵ While the Roman des rois surely presents what it perceives to be the best framing of royal history, the articulation of this history echoes the perspective of a monk of Saint-Denis and his abbot, not the king’s, inasmuch as the latter could even be expressed in narrativized form.Footnote ¹³⁶ More to the point, Primat drew heavily on earlier sources. For example, his statement of doubt regarding the origins of the kings of France, quoted above, is lifted almost verbatim from the early thirteenth-century Gesta Philippi Augusti, by the monk Rigord of Saint-Denis. Rigord helpfully alerts readers to his editorial process: “because many are wont to doubt the origins of the kingdom of France, how and in what manner the kings of the Franks are said to have descended from the Trojans themselves.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Since some of Primat’s main sources offer an almost identical rationale to his, one hesitates to assign to the Roman des rois motives that are wholly subordinate to those of his royal patrons. Put differently, this was not merely a new spin on an old story, recycled here to express contemporary concerns. Primat was indeed tethered to previous traditions, in whose continued relevance Saint-Denis had an important stake.

In the end, Primat was able to produce a mature vision of royal history, one that included a meticulous treatment of the question of royal origins. It contains a historiographical mosaic that reflects distinct stages in the development of the origin story. In the following discussion I take as my main points of reference Aimoin of Fleury’s Gesta Francorum, Rigord of Saint-Denis’ Gesta Philippi Augusti, and William the Breton’s reworking of the latter, in whose pages we will see a process that culminated with Primat.

The Roman des rois presents a fully developed Trojan story that serves as a central pillar of the composition’s rationale.Footnote ¹³⁸ The first order of business, states Primat in his prologue, is to cover “the noble line of the Trojans, from whom it [i.e., the French monarchy] is descended in long succession. Thus, it is certain that the kings of France, through whom the kingdom is glorious and renowned, descended from the noble line of Troy.”Footnote ¹³⁹

These themes were central to the ideology of the French royalty. Just as their lineage was especially noble, so too were the kings glorious in victory, honorable in renown, and pious in belief. Christian kingship and Trojan origins are tightly intertwined in the prologue. For Primat, Troy was but one, albeit important, element in the glory associated with the kings of France, to whom “Our Lord has given […] through His grace a prerogative and an advantage over all other lands and over all other nations, because never, since it converted and began to serve its creator, was faith more fervently and more righteously protected in any other land; through it was it multiplied, through it sustained, through it defended.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ This faith owed its spread to the power of St. Denis, with whose cult Primat’s monastery was so closely associated. As Primat explains toward the end of his prologue, the divine favor enjoyed by France was the product of an alliance between clergie and chevalerie. The two, he adds, are inseparable; one cannot survive without the other.Footnote ¹⁴¹ This clergie was embodied in the institution of Saint-Denis, whose links to the Frankish kings went back to Merovingian times.Footnote ¹⁴² Only once these essential elements are in place does Primat turn to narrate the story of Trojan descent.

The details of the story in the Roman des rois are familiar—Priam sends his son, Paris, to Greece to kidnap Helen. The enraged Greeks place Troy under a ten-year siege, leading to the deaths of Priam’s sons and his wife, Hecuba, and the destruction and burning of the city along with its many inhabitants. More than a few managed to escape the flames, however, and among them were the three princes Helenus, Aeneas, and Antenor. Helenus and his 1,200 followers reached the kingdom of Pandrasius, whereas Aeneas and his 3,400 Trojans reached Dido’s Carthage on their way to Italy. There, Aeneas was succeeded by his son, Ascanius, who married Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus. From this union would emerge Silvius, and from him Brutus, whose lineage came to rule Britain after evicting its indigenous giants, a theme adopted from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Brittaniae.Footnote ¹⁴³

Primat’s account becomes especially illuminating when he turns to discuss the royal cousins Francio and Turcus, the sons of Hector and Troilus, respectively. The two left Troy and proceeded to Thrace, where they crossed the Danube and dwelt for some time on its shores. Later they parted ways, with Turcus heading for Scythia Inferior to settle there with his people and Francio remaining on the Danube, where he founded the city of Sicambria. It was there that his people dwelt for 1,507 years. Eventually, four new peoples emerged from Turcus’s Scythian Trojans: the Austrogoths, Hypogoths, Vandals, and Northmen (or Normans). This last element of the story is one of numerous borrowings from Rigord of Saint-Denis’s Gesta Philippi Augusti, whose third and final version was produced by 1206.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

In Rigord’s Gesta, the question of Frankish origins is introduced in a short diversion from the main storyline, the kingship of Philip Augustus. After a discussion of Philip’s public works in Paris and its environs, Rigord makes an abrupt turn to the origo story in a way that quickly feeds back into the near-contemporary coverage of events. Brief though it is, the diversion is instructive. It begins with a family tree, in which the Trojan ancestry of the Franks and their relationships to the other branches formed by the Trojan exodus is put in order.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Priam, the king of Troy, sits at the top of the tree, succeeded by two sons, Hector and Troilus. Whereas the former enjoys a long succession of heirs terminating in Childeric,Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Troilus receives but one successor, Turcus, from whom we later learn sprang forth those same four nations mentioned by Primat. Much of what Rigord had to say about Francio found its way into the Roman des rois. Unlike Rigord, however, who ignored the particulars of the Trojan war and skipped ahead to Francio, Primat gives Troy its due.

Despite its debt to Rigord, the narrative in the Roman des rois is mainly drawn from the Gesta Francorum. Primat borrows heavily from Aimoin, but we can detect a difference between the chroniclers’ approaches even as early in the plot as the story of Trojan descent. While Aimoin generally followed the outline provided by the LHF,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Primat’s Francio and Turcus are influenced by elements initially codified by Fredegar. Primat was not reading Fredegar directly; what reached him were refractions of Fredegar from his sources, among whom we find Aimoin again, but also Rigord and William the Breton. William’s two works, an identically named reworking and continuation of Rigord’s Gesta Philippi Augusti and an almost 10,000-line-long verse titled the Philippide,Footnote ¹⁴⁸ are factually similar to Rigord’s work, yet they narrativize Frankish origins differently. Instead of Rigord’s thematic tangent wedged in the middle of the composition, William’s origo assumes its natural place at the beginning of the composition, yielding a more coherent chronology, one that is at least partially embraced by Primat.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ It thus seems plausible that the Francio material in the Roman des rois originated with Rigord, and that the overarching narrative structure was adopted from William’s reworking.

Aimoin, Primat’s preferred source, offered little on Francio. We may recall that the LHF, whose lead Aimoin seems to have been following, had no need for a Francio, since its royal lineage spanned directly from Aeneas to Merovech. Aimoin does mention Francio in the next chapter, titled De Francorum appellatione altera opinio (“A different opinion about the naming of the Franks”), alongside Torchotus, as one possible reason why the Franks were called by that name.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The travels of Friga and the associated details of Francio and Torchotus were probably drawn from Fredegar, but for Aimoin, Francio was no more than a sidenote to the real storyline.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The Gesta Francorum’s main narrative axis followed the LHF’s explanation for the meaning of the Franks’ name: that the Franci were, in the Attic language, synonymous with the Latin feroces, given to the Trojans by the emperor Valentinian following their exploits in the Meotian Swamps. Aimoin thus knew of Fredegar’s Francio eponymic, but he bracketed it as an alternative explanation and returned quickly to the Swamps, signifying his clear preference for the LHF version.Footnote ¹⁵²

Yet preference did not mean absolute adherence, and on certain occasions Aimoin tempered the claims made by the LHF. Importantly, Aimoin ruled out the direct filiation of the Merovingians in particular, and the Frankish kings more generally, from the line of Trojan kings. In fact, he made no effort to link Marcomir (or his equals in command, Sunno and Genobaudes) to the Trojans. Kings, we gather from Aimoin, had no more of a claim to Trojan origins than did any other Frank. As noted by Justin Lake, Clovis’s appeal to the Franks on the battlefield of Tolbiac emphatically insisted on this point.Footnote ¹⁵³ If anything, in Clovis’s address to his fighting men, Aimoin privileged the Christian faith over the ineffective pagan cults which he associated with Troy. What we see in the Gesta Francorum then is a political moment in which the Trojan narrative could be again ethnicized, especially as state fracture seemed the order of the day. None of the many claimants to royal power had any privileged stake in this story, although by Primat’s day this changed with the crystallization of a particular rhetoric around the Capetians and their origins.

Primat’s Trojan version thus had everything to do with the kings of France and, while much of his narrative was directly borrowed from Aimoin, for Marcomir he chose a different path to that of his source by adding that this Marcomir had been the son of King Priam of Austr(as)ia, who descended from the lineage of the great king Priam of Troy, in essence returning to the ancestry model provided by the LHF, though here mediated through the lens of Rigord’s Gesta Philippi Augusti and William’s reworking thereof.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Rigord elaborates on the LHF’s material, combining it with an improved version of the crude genealogy employed by Fredegar to link the Trojans of myth and the Frankish duces of the late fourth century. In Rigord’s account, the descendants of Francio’s Trojans were expelled from Sicambria after refusing to pay tribute to Valentinian, causing them to resettle on the eastern banks of the Rhine, within the confines of Germany and Alamannia, in a place called Austria (i.e., Austrasia).Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The leaders of the Sicambrian exiles at this time were Marcomir, Sunno, and Genobaudes. Tellingly, at this specific textual juncture, Paris, BnF MS Lat. 5925 contains an addition above the name Marcomir of filio Priami regis Austrie, and one line below, Antenoris filio for Sunno, written in a different hand.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The other extant medieval manuscript, a thirteenth-century composition possibly penned at Bourges, is Vatican City, BAV Reg. lat. 88. While at the same point in the text it does not contain a similar addition,Footnote ¹⁵⁷ it includes an explanation of the Trojan lineage of the duces at other points.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Whether this suggests that the development of these elements of the plot was not entirely complete when Rigord was working is difficult to say. The superscript note in Paris, BnF MS Lat. 5925 could have been added to prevent confusion of the different Priams. However we choose to explain it, the simplified family tree had become part of the story by William’s day.

Valentinian tried again to subdue the Trojans but eventually despaired, giving them the epithet Franci on account of their ferocity.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ From that time, adds Rigord, the Franks were able to subjugate Germany and Gaul entirely, extending their power as far as the Pyrenees. Sunno and Genobaudes decided to remain in Austria, but Marcomir had different plans. For Rigord, relocating Marcomir to Gaul was a significant narrative choice, because it allowed him to focus exclusively on the kings of Gaul, which quickly become synonymous with the Neustrian branch of the Merovingian family. By painting Sunno and Genobaudes out of the picture, Rigord in effect marginalized Austrasia and its contribution to this stage of Frankish history. The Gesta Philippi Augusti presents a streamlined chain of filiation that includes only Neustrian kings and plants its roots as far back in the past as Marcomir’s departure from what they called Austria, or, in other words, trans-Rhenish Francia. By doing this, Rigord privileged the progeny of Marcomir as the only true heirs of the Trojan lineage. As we shall see, this motif resurfaces when the plot turns to the final Merovingians and the first Carolingians. We should consider how Rigord chose to present Marcomir’s advent into Gaul: “But later, when Sunno and Genobaud remained duces in Austria, Marcomir, son of Priam, who descended from Francio, the descendant of Priam king of Troy, through numerous successive generations that it would here be slow to enumerate, came to Gaul with his followers.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰

At this point, Rigord offers a synopsis of events recounted thus far—the fates of Helenus, Antenor, Aeneas, and Ascanius—and concludes with the story of Brutus, descendant of Antenor, and his takeover of Albion, henceforth called Britain in his honor. Some of this relied on Geoffrey of Monmouth, to be sure, and in this sense Rigord was engaging with the literary sources available to him as he worked. He was nevertheless more interested in Frankish origins, especially in what they might have meant in his day. Importantly, Rigord leaves out Sunno and Genobaudes’s successors, providing instead a brief note on the kings that ruled Austrasia until the time of Childeric II (d. 675). “But,” explains Rigord, “because they were deficient, the duces known as ‘mayors of the palace’ Pippin, Charles Martel and the others began to dominate.”Footnote ¹⁶¹

After dispensing with Austrasia, Rigord could finally turn to the adventures of Marcomir in Gaul, and adventures indeed they were. He opens with the exceptional story of Marcomir’s alliance with the people of Gaul. This alliance was fated to occur, we learn, because the Gauls were the descendants of a group of 23,000 Trojans who had left Sicambria under the leadership of Duke Ibor, making Gaul their home. These Gallic Trojans founded Lutetia (later Paris), where they weathered the centuries of Roman domination until Marcomir came to their rescue. A mutual recognition of their shared ancestry is not long in the making: “When the Parisians heard that he [i.e., Marcomir] was, like them, descended of the Trojans, they received him honorably. Because he instructed them in the use of arms and walled the cities against the frequent attacks of robbers, he was established by them as defender of all of Gaul.”Footnote ¹⁶² This phrasing is almost identical to that used by Rigord in chapter 20 to depict the actions taken by Philip Augustus in the fourth year of his reign (1183) for the benefit of the people of Paris, demonstrating his desire to equate the two kings in greatness.Footnote ¹⁶³

Marcomir then moves off the stage to make room for his son. Faramund was the first to be crowned with the diadem of king of France, and under his rule Lutetia was renamed Paris, in honor of the son of Priam whose deeds brought about the Trojan exodus. In William’s Philippide, the reunification of Gauls and Franks is developed further:

Primat adopts and adjusts William’s (and thus, Rigord’s) account in the Gesta Philippi Augusti of Ibor’s Sicambrians and Marcomir’s accomplishments in Gaul.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ He must have been aware of the inconsistencies in the chronologies and storylines of his various sources, because he felt the need to offer an apology in the prelude to the next chapter: “We have heretofore reproduced the opinions of certain authors, but because we do not want anyone to take offense to this text, we shall take the material as it appears in the chronicles, which state thus, that after the Franks left Sicambria, and they conquered Germany and Alamannia, and defeated the Romans in two battles, they crowned a king whose name was Faramund.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Primat’s explanation comes just as he abandons Rigord, who did not continue to elaborate past this point. Instead of recounting the deeds of Clodio, Rigord provided an ancestral list, which simply stated: “Faramund begat Clodius, Clodius begat Meroveus, and from this good king the kings of the Franks were called Merovingians … ”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Rigord’s list worked its way through the sequence of generations, taking a Neustrian trajectory through Childeric I, Clovis I, Chlothar I, Chilperic I, Chlothar II, Dagobert I, and Clovis II. Somewhat unexpectedly, he then went on to name Clovis’s three sons by St. Balthild—Chlothar III, Theuderic III, and Childeric II. Why would Rigord make an exception to discuss all three sons of Clovis II, especially when Childeric II was primarily an Austrasian king?Footnote ¹⁶⁸

The answer probably lies at the tail end of the list, where we encounter three historically inaccurate kings after Childeric—Dagobert, Theuderic, and Chlothar. Rigord’s understanding of later Merovingian history was obviously faulty, since Childeric’s son Dagobert is not known to have sired any heirs, nor did he occupy the Frankish throne.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Rather, it was with the successors of Childebert III, Childeric II’s nephew, that one could find a suitable Dagobert (III), a Theuderic (IV) and possibly also a Chlothar (IV). This confused sequence of kings could have been the result of a simple conflation of Childebert III with Childeric II. A more interesting option is that Rigord faulted the final Merovingians on the list with the degeneration of the Merovingian line, and that by implying that they were Austrasian kings, he was essentially shifting the blame.

Additional surprises lie in store. Historically, Charles Martel was perfectly happy to keep the throne vacant after Theuderic IV’s death in 737. His sons, Carloman and Pippin III, found it necessary to appoint another Merovingian, Childeric III, who may have been related either to Theuderic IV or to Chilperic II. No trace of this remains in Rigord. Rather, the Gesta Philippi provides two unexpected names as the successors of the last Chlothar: Ansbert and Arnoald. That these two would be considered Merovingian kings is perhaps not as far-fetched as one would imagine, if we assume that, on this point, Rigord was not following the LHF but the Gesta episcoporum Mettensium. Though in Paul the Deacon’s account Ansbert was Arnoald’s uncle (or grandfather, but certainly not father), this is replaced by direct filiation in Rigord’s version. Nevertheless, in the Gesta episcoporum Mettensium both were members of the Merovingian family, and thus found their way into Rigord’s list.

Ansbert and Arnoald also allowed Rigord to introduce Arnulf as both Arnoald’s successor and the father of Ansegisel, identified here importantly as bearing two other names: Anschises and Ansedunus, obviously meant to evoke in the reader the memory of Troy.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Through Ansegisel, Arnulf becomes the forefather of another family with an ancestral list, the Carolingians. Their lineage is as follows: Pippin II, Charles Martel, Pippin III, Charlemagne, Louis the Pious, and terminating, in a manner befitting a monk of Saint-Denis, with Charles the Bald.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Rigord here leaves the question of the relationship between Chlothar and Ansbert unresolved. What remains is a continuous list of royal successions that lead smoothly from the Merovingian to the Carolingian era, without the need to elaborate on the co-existence of kings and mayors or, for that matter, to mention Childeric III, whose reign would have coincided with Pippin III’s, described by Rigord solely as rex.Footnote ¹⁷² Rigord does call Pippin II a maior domus, but this in no way serves to diminish his stature—quite the contrary, in fact, given his place in the chain of succession. That this all comes as an introduction into the career of Philip Augustus is, of course, doubly significant, given the motif of reditus regni ad stirpem Karoli Magni, or the return of kingship to the seed of Charlemagne, as argued so convincingly by Werner and Spiegel.Footnote ¹⁷³

Rigord left us another composition, until now unedited, the Courte chronique des rois de France, or the Brief Chronicle of the Kings of France.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ The work, as its name suggests, is a short chronicle focusing on French kings and royal succession. The Brief Chronicle offers a version like the one we encounter in the Gesta Philippi Augusti. It nevertheless differs from it in ways that are highly revealing:

With all its obvious faults, the chronology Rigord presents in the Brief Chronicle is much more in line with historical reality than the version in the Gesta. For one, he does not neglect to mention the kingship of Childeric III, whom he dubbed insensatus, “a fool.” While the influence of Paul the Deacon is palpable, so is that of other Carolingian authors, most notably Einhard and the author of the ARF (Annales Regni Francorum).Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Rigord’s own understanding of the transfer of royal power nevertheless shines through, especially in his decision to edit out the royal vacancy of 737–743, portraying instead the succession as an uninterrupted process.

But, as Rigord makes clear, the actual dynastic transfer, the translatio generationis, occurred much earlier than that, during the time of Blithild, daughter of Chlothar I and sister of Sigibert I. Blithild fills a narrative role, but she was not an actual historical princess. She is a natural evolution of the daughter of Clovis from the GeM, only now she has a name and a slightly adjusted place in the Merovingian family tree. Casting her as sister to Sigibert I would have made sense, chronologically speaking, since she had an adult grandson at court in the 620s. Blithild, and Pippin’s alleged claim to Merovingian ancestry through her, was an enduring myth; she even makes a surprise appearance in William Shakespeare’s Henry V, where she is used to justify claims to inheritance based on the Salic Law.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ As mentioned previously, she came into being as part of an extension of Paul the Deacon’s genealogy in the GeM, but in her adjusted form she debuted in a text composed in the late eighth century at Metz and titled Commemoratio de genealogia domni Arnulfi episcopi et confessoris Christi.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ We should, as Oexle pointed out, see her appearance in the context of the episcopal vacancy of Metz after the death of Angilram.Footnote ¹⁷⁹

Restricting the kingship of the final Merovingians to Austrasia was likely meant to contextualize the ascent of the Pippinids, who were, after all, an Austrasian family. Rigord’s intentions with this particular framing of the ancestral line can be traced to certain hints that he embeds in the text. Nonetheless, one might argue for alternative readings, given his insistence on the Neustrian line in the Gesta and the associated decision to lay the blame of the dynasty’s decline at the feet of Austrasian kings. By using the genealogy of the Commemoratio de genealogia domni Arnulfi, Rigord might be insinuating that the progeny of the senator Ansbert and Blithild, daughter of Chlothar I, were the true heirs of the Austrasian line. It is perhaps in this context that we should understand the mention of the Austrasian king, Sigibert I. Yet it is also possible to read the text differently, as implying that the royal line of the Merovingians remained incorrupt until Blithild, who then transferred it intact to her Carolingian progeny. Regardless of which reading we adopt, Rigord insists on the Austrasian limits of early eighth-century royal power, disassociating the kingship of his day from the degeneration of the final Merovingians. It is worth recalling, at this point, his decision to marginalize the Austrasian duces and focus instead on Marcomir and his Gallic exploits.

Primat was apparently not satisfied with Rigord’s terse remarks, and, for the earlier phases of the Merovingians’ genealogy at least, relied mainly on Aimoin. Take, for example, the thorny issue of Merovech’s paternity. As noted by Lake, Aimoin essentially decoupled Merovech from Clodio’s Trojan ancestry.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Lake rightly argues that Aimoin’s general adherence to the Trojan plot made him indispensable for Primat and the later editors and continuators of the Grandes Chroniques. His view that Aimoin and the Fredegar chronicler pull in opposite directions is less accurate. Fredegar’s treatment of Clodio and Merovech indicates that the chronicler had his doubts about the connection between the original Trojan émigrés to Pannonia and their Merovingian successors. Among the Merovingian-era chronicles, it is not Fredegar, but the LHF that comes closest to depicting a seamless link. Certainly, any ambiguity is eliminated in Rigord’s Gesta Philippi Augusti, which laconically states Clodius genuit Meroveum, a sentiment followed obediently by William.Footnote ¹⁸¹

Despite the Roman des rois’s strong royalist bent and clear acquaintance with Rigord and William, it embraces Aimoin’s more cautious phrasing. In fact, it seems to go even further than its source in claiming that: “After Clodio had reigned for twenty years, he passed away. After him reigned Merovech. This Merovech was not his son but was from his lineage (lignage). From him issued the first generation of the kings of France; it persisted without fail from heir to heir until the generation of Pippin II, father of Charlemagne the Great.”Footnote ¹⁸² Of course, how we read Primat on this point depends on our reading of lignage as either a claim of ancestry or more generally of kinship, much like the LHF’s de genere eius. It is closer to the LHF than it is to Aimoin’s eius affinis, but still stops short of Rigord’s decisive presentation. Viard has alerted us to the fact that the commentary on the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties was a new addition, but this tells us only that Merovech was important as the eponymous ancestor of the royal line, not that he was Clodio’s relation.

Clodio is anomalous in the Roman des rois in other respects, too. Primat uses the king’s desire to “enlarge the honors of his kingdom” as a segue to a lengthy discussion of Gaul and its provinces, based largely on Aimoin’s treatment in his proemium.Footnote ¹⁸³ Aimoin’s clear division between the institutions, religion, and geography of the Gallic past and the more recent Frankish episodes would have been out of place in the Roman des rois. Since Primat was not willing to jettison Aimoin’s Gallic material entirely, he embedded it in the story of Clodio, a king for whose expansionistic designs he had solid evidence. It seems, then, that Primat regarded the Gesta Francorum as a more reliable source than the Gesta Philippi Augusti. He follows Aimoin even on this uncomfortable point, modifying only minimally the source’s phrasing.

The question of Merovech’s kingship is entirely subsumed within Aimoin’s treatment of the Hunnic incursions of Gaul, and here Primat follows his source diligently. The miraculous deliverance of Orléans from the armies of Attila, present in both the Gesta Francorum and the Roman des rois, is a simplified version of the story told in Gregory of Tours’s Histories ii.7. In Gregory’s account, Bishop Anianus instructed the terrified inhabitants of Orléans to make three visits to the city walls to seek signs of divine assistance, which eventually materialized with Aëtius and his Visigothic federates. The story was cut down in size by the author of the LHF, and from there it made its way to the Gesta Francorum.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Gregory did not tell the story in conjunction with the kingship of Merovech, but since it matched the chronology of his reign, it was inserted there by the LHF author, and continued to occupy this spot in the storyline thereafter.

Coverage of Childeric in the Roman des rois essentially echoes what we find in the Gesta Francorum. Aimoin drew on the LHF but also on Fredegar for thematic structure, dramatic elements, and dialogue. Wiomad (Winomad in the Historia Francorum, Guinemenz in the Roman des rois) is the main protagonist in both Aimoin’s and Primat’s accounts, but the focus of the story shifts in the Roman des rois to the attitude of the Frankish nobility—les barons—toward their rightful ruler, their foreign oppressor, and, more generally, the genealogical aspects of kingship. Childeric’s luxure (lechery), and exile with Bissinus in Thuringia is dispensed with in two sentences. What follows is a flashback scene in which Wiomad counsels the king on the eve of his departure for exile. The barons, here, are driven by passion, their judgement clouded by anger, l’ire des barons. Remaining amidst the enraged Franks, Wiomad warns the king, would end in envy and hatred; departing would sway the heart toward compassion.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ After Childeric left for Thuringia, the barons, who did not wish to remain without a master, invited Giles/Gilon (Aegidius) to become their king. Primat follows Aimoin in condemning this choice, noting that “they did not remember the injuries and burdens that were done to them by Rome and by that same Gilon.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶

Wiomad, being both wise and full of guile, befriended the new king and gained his confidence. Aegidius’s escalating oppression of the Franks was another motif that Primat took from Aimoin, himself paraphrasing Fredegar. While Fredegar suggested that Wiomad, on orders of his master, condemned to death 100 inutiles et in necessitatibus incongruos, Aimoin’s Winomad selected only those who were most vocally opposed to Childeric as a way of eroding the opposition’s powerbase.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Primat further expands this structure, placing into Guinemenz’s mouth the words: “You [i.e., Gilon] will not be able to crush the treachery nor the pride of the Franks, if you do not destroy some of their most noble and most powerful; in this way you will be able to easily bend the others to your will.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Gilon agrees, and Guinemenz, who is charged with carrying out the plan, selects those nobles who are Childeric’s staunchest rivals. Ironically, those same nobles who are the most hostile to Childeric are tried before Gilon after having been charged with conspiracy and intent to harm the king.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Appalled by Gilon’s cruelty, the other nobles confide in Guinemenz, who proceeds to rebuke them:

The barons see the light and decide to orchestrate Childeric’s return: “We greatly repent the indignity and the humiliations we have done to our rightful king, and, if we knew now where we could find him, we would send him messages and humbly beg him to agree to return to his realm.”Footnote ¹⁹¹ Long story short: the golden half-besant is sent; Childeric is summoned, successfully engages Gilon in battle, and wins back his kingdom.

In the Roman des rois, the particulars of the Childeric story are not new. His exile, the atrocities of Aegidius’s reign, and the dynamics between Wiomad and the leading Franks are all there, with a similar logic and narrative trajectory. But the subtle reframing of the details leaves one wondering whether this account can be taken as a commentary on more recent events. Childeric’s liberties, his exile, and his relationship with the nobility were all potential exempla from which contemporary lessons might be drawn. Rebellious barons, a recurrent theme in the political narratives of Primat’s day, are one such exemplum. To the readers of the Roman des rois, the scene presented here would have called to mind similar themes addressed in the Song of Roland, or, more concretely, the consequences of aristocratic rage epitomized in the murders of Thomas Becket and Charles the Good.Footnote ¹⁹² Nor was baronial recalcitrance and rebelliousness a foreign concept in the political world of Primat’s royal patrons, Louis IX and Philip III. In fact, it was a problem that dogged the kingship of Philip Augustus, Louis’s grandfather, whose struggles with the English over their continental holdings had made open enemies of many of his disgruntled barons. The expansion of Capetian power to the south from the 1220s resulted in mass expropriations of landed wealth from southern lords. In the 1240s, rebellions broke out, which soon spiraled into an attempt, backed by the English, to dislodge the Capetians. While Louis prevailed, the specter of future disturbance remained.Footnote ¹⁹³

Louis’s barons could certainly be troublesome, and nowhere could this penchant for rebellion have been more devastating than when the king was away on crusade.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Well aware of the dangers his journey to Outremer could pose to his rule, Louis cajoled many of his nobles into joining him in his journey to the Holy Land. Count Raymond Berenger of Provence, whose dynastic ambitions were a constant concern for Louis, was a particularly worrisome nobleman. Had his plans come to fruition, they would have severely weakened the king’s foothold in the south. Raymond wed his four daughters to leading figures in England and France. Margaret married Louis and Eleanor married Henry III, the king of England. Royal siblings were also part of this matrimonial mix. A third sister, Sanchia, was married off to Richard, Henry’s brother.

Richard is an interesting figure whose career took many twists and turns. He was gifted Cornwall by his brother, making him a fortune he partly spent during the crusades when he rebuilt the fortifications of Ascalon.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ But his more worrying claim, as far as the Capetians were concerned, was to Poitou, with whose governance Louis had charged his own brother, Alphonse. Louis eventually defused this challenge by arranging for Raymond Berenger’s fourth daughter, Beatrice, to marry his brother, Charles I of Anjou. After briefly considering purchasing the kingship of Sicily, Richard ended up crowned at Aachen in 1257 as King of the Romans (Romanorum rex), a title whose first bearer was none other than Syagrius, thus styled in Gregory’s Histories.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Naturally, in Primat, it is Gilon, father of Siagre, who first bears the title.

Richard would not have been a well-liked person in Dionysian circles, especially since he was responsible for the alienation of property owned by Saint-Denis in Deerhurst on the River Severn and the dispersal of the monks residing there.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ His plans for transforming the Deerhurst estate into a castle eventually came to naught, although the disruption to the dependencies of Saint-Denis was an obstacle on the path to a much-desired rapprochement between the English and French courts. While the affair was eventually resolved thanks to King Henry III’s direct mediation, it caused Matthew of Vendôme much consternation.

Let us return for a moment to the question of royal absence. Baronial loyalty must have weighed heavily on Louis’s mind, and likely on Primat’s as well. Louis’s time as a prisoner of the Egyptians following the Battle of al-Mansura in 1250 can even be considered an exile of sorts, although securing the king’s return was, in this case, much costlier than half a besant—the symbolic value of which was obvious to a royal readership: Louis IX, accompanied by his son Philip, would frequent the monastery once a year to offer four besants d’or to the protector of the Capetian dynasty.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Royal patronage became an important facet of Saint-Denis’s self-image. Not only was Louis’s devotion to the saint a well-known and much-lauded motif in Dionysian historiography,Footnote ¹⁹⁹ his institutional links to the monastic leadership were a cornerstone of his policy, culminating in the appointment of Matthew of Vendôme as regent in his absence during the ill-fated Seventh Crusade in 1270.Footnote ²⁰⁰ If Louis is to be the Childeric of this story, perhaps Matthew is its Wiomad/Guinemenz.

1.5 Conclusions

In this chapter, I have argued that the nucleus of most of the material presented in the chronicles surveyed can be traced to the Histories of Gregory of Tours and to interpolated material in the Fredegar Chronicle and the LHF. Coverage of the Trojan origins and the histories of the earliest Frankish kings was substantially augmented and recontextualized in later compositions, such as Aimoin of Fleury’s Gesta Francorum, Rigord’s (and William the Breton’s) Gesta Philippi Augusti, and Primat’s Roman des rois. Already contained in the nucleus narrative of the Merovingian-era historiographies are all of the themes that would later be developed in Aimoin, Rigord, William, and Primat. It would nevertheless be incorrect to view the evolution of the story as straightforwardly linear. Even when we feel confident about the narrative aims of the authors in question, their authorial choices defy easy contextualization. Often, the power of conservatism seems equally decisive, pushing chroniclers to preserve, albeit in a modified form, material which does not coincide with our understanding of their overarching agendas.

Royal history was not meant to be read simply as a diversion. There would have been no point in delving into Merovingian history if the exercise brought no benefit to the reader, royal or otherwise. It is crucial to consider how contemporaneous audiences would have interpreted these texts. The Trojans, the duces, and the earliest Merovingians were thematic packages that, when applied correctly, could stand in for characters and circumstances of the present or the near past, and could offer a productive way of thinking about the future. While the analogies are never absolute, the universality and applicability of the lessons conveyed in these stories were intentional, and it is in this light that we must consider them.