The Dark Ages Podcast

 https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/brpycfwhziqgx2gx/Episode0060_Carry_on_sons.mp3

Hello and welcome to the Dark Ages Podcast. This is episode 60: Carry On, My Wayward Sons.

“It gives me no pleasure to write of all the different civil wars which afflicted the Frankish people and their rulers; what is even worse, we now seem to see the moment draw near which our Lord foretold as the real beginning of our sorrows: ‘The father shall rise up against the son, and the son against the father; brother shall rise up against brother, and kinsman against kinsman.’ (Matthew 10:21 and 24:7) … Just think of all that Clovis achieved, Clovis, the founder of your victorious country, who slaughtered those rulers who opposed him, conquered hostile peoples and captured their territories, thus bequeathing to you absolute and unquestioned dominion over them! At the time when he accomplished all this he possessed neither gold nor silver such as you have in your treasure houses! But you, what are you doing? What are you trying to do? You have everything you want! Your homes are full of luxuries, there are vast supplies of wine, grain and oil in your store houses, and in your treasuries the gold and silver are piled high. Only one thing is lacking: you cannot keep peace, and therefore you do not know the grace of God.”

Such was Gregory of Tours’ diagnosis of what was ailing the Frankish body politic in the second half of the sixth century. The division of the realm again set up an unstable arrangement of rulers that jokeyed for position amongst themselves, while at the same time pushing their influence further and further across Europe.

With the death of Chlothar the old in 561, we said goodbye to the first generation of Merovingian rulers after Clovis established his hegemony over the Franks. In the fifty years since, Clovis’ sons had completed the conquest of what had been Roman Gaul, and extended their rule eastward beyond the old frontier. Chlothar’s kingdom stretched from the Atlantic to the Elbe River, and from Provence to the North Sea. The Burgundian kingdom had been subdued in 534, the Thuringians and Alamani had been made subjects, and even the Ostrogoths had been forced to cede Provence to Frankish Power. The only bits of unfinished business were Brittany in the far west, and Septimania in the south, where Celts and Visigoths, respectively, resisted assimilation into the Frankish empire. 

As we’ve been hearing for the last five episodes, all of this was achieved through a mix of violence, trickery, violence, marriage, violence, and diplomacy every once in a while. Chlothar was often at the center of these machinations, though not always, and the brothers seemed forever on the edge of civil war. Their wars against the neighbors as often as not seemed to be as much about avoiding internal conflict as anything else. It wasn’t always successful, and conflict and violence within the Merovingian family was far from rare, though it usually stayed below the level of outright civil war. The most startling example to modern eyes was probably the murder of Chlodomer’s sons, conceived by Childebert and carried out with cold-blooded efficiency by Chlothar. The brothers scrapped and squabbled, formed alliances and undermined one another with enthusiasm.

Time came for each brother in his turn, as it does for all of us. Chlodomer was the first to go, killed in the war against the Burgundians. He was, somewhat surprisingly, the only one of the brothers to die a violent death. Thiuderic, the eldest, passed in 534, and his son Theudebert carried on until 547. The last of that line, Theudebald, died in 555. Chlothar and Childebert had played tug of war until Childebert’s death in 558 left Chlothar as the sole king of the Franks. By virtue of his survivorship, Chlothar was known as Chlothar the old, and remained as sole ruler of the Franks until his own death from illness in 561. 

With his passing we come full circle, as the ruler of a united kingdom dies with four surviving sons, a spooky echo of the time of Clovis’ death half a century earlier. The stakes were even higher now than they had been then; after half a century of expansion.

So I have a new batch of Merovingians to introduce you to, and a new batch of narrative problems to solve. You’ve probably caught on by now, if you weren’t previously aware, that the ins and outs of the Merovingian dynasty are complicated. Dan Carlin, in an episode of Hardcore History, described them as “for advanced users only”, and it’s hard to disagree. With this new generation, it gets even more complex.

Here’s the thing, Gregory of Tours, the primary source for the time, died in 594. His famous History of the Franks started with the creation of the world and covered events up until around 590. He organized his work into ten books, and so far we’ve been through three and a half of them. So, logically, six and a half books cover just the next thirty years. It’s much more detailed, much more dense, and we finally have Gregory writing about people and events with which he was contemporary, and many of whom he would have known personally.

That’s wonderful, of course, because now there’s a chance for more personality, color, and detail. On the other hand, there’s more detail. A lot more detail. Yet, like most medieval chroniclers and historians, often he’s maddeningly vague about the things we really would like to know.

Gregory’s thesis for the second half of his History is that constant civil war among the brothers and their descendents was the number one problem facing the Frankish kingdom, which means he spends a lot of time explaining the ins and outs and plots and alliances that came and went amongst the Merovingians and their aristocracy. And I’m going to cut to the chase here: I have been in a panic, for months, really, thinking about how the hell I was going to take you through it all without losing you completely or making your brain liquify and then shrivel up inside your skull before being blown out your nose the next time you sneeze. Finally, I came up with an answer, and the answer is: I’m not going to.

Detail has been my stock and trade for a while now, I know, but in this case it’s just not worth it. It would inevitably lead to the brain-sneezing thing, and probably to the unsubscribing thing. So instead, I’m going to try summing up the civil wars of this generation in this episode. Get it done and out of the way. It sounds like I’m cheating you out of a bunch of drama, and that I’m rushing just to get past the Merovingians to other things. I’m not going to deny the latter part too strongly, but the drama is repetitive, confusing, and takes up time that could be spent talking about the things that are actually interesting about the Merovingians, like legal developments, religion, and the actually interesting personalities of the time, the women. 

All of that is to follow, so let’s get the general form of these civil wars out of the way. 

Chlothar had fathered at least seven sons that were acknowledged as royal heirs, three of them predeceased their father, leaving four. The older three were Charibert, Guntram, and Sigibert, all sons of Ingund. The youngest was Chilperic, son of Ingund’s sister Aregund and as we’ll see, the black sheep among the four. Chlothar’s fecundity meant that there was always the potential for ambitious adventurers to pop up and declare themselves as lost sons of the king, with claims on the throne. We’ll deal with one of these toward the end of the episode.

Trouble started immediately upon Chlothar’s death, with Chilperic seizing the royal treasury and trying to rally aristocratic support to take sole command of the realm. 

Sigibert was distracted at the time by an invasion from the east by people that Gregory calls Huns but who were probably Avars. Nonetheless, Guntram and Charibert were able to hold the fort until he’d dealt with the external threat, and Chilperic was put back inside his box. The four divvied up the lands of Frankia as their father and uncles had before them, and were all equally satisfied and content with their portions.

Not.

 The old realities still applied; prestige and generosity were the underpinning of power, and war was the best way to keep the coffers filled. The nobility and fighting men more generally put constant pressure on their overlords to wage war and keep the goodies flowing, and so differences of opinion about who controlled which city could easily lead to a fatal fraternal fracas. 

Incentives to violence came in another form as well, closely related to prestige, in the form of bloodfeud. The Merovingians’ continued habit of setting wives aside at will in favor of new ones was bound to lead to hurt feelings, and when murder followed, then the kingdom might be set on a course for war.  Most active in this particular arena was Sigibert’s wife Brunhilda, a Visigothic princess who would be at the center of plots and conspiracies through three generations, and the subject of her own episode, probably next time. 

For now, I’ll note that Brunhilda’s political career really began when her sister, Galswinth, wife of Chilperic, was murdered by his former mistress, Fredegund. The murder put Chilperic once again on the receiving end of his brothers’ hostility, and Brunhilda and Fredegund’s feud would rumble on as a kind of wild card while the kings played their territorial games.

Sigibert and Guntram, for example, quarreled over possession of Arles and other southern territories, with open war breaking out between them in 566 and again 573. In the second case, Chilperic added his own salt to the stew by attacking Sigibert’s southern lands at the same time. That led Sigibert to call in allies from among the tribes across the Rhine. Chilperic and Guntram hung together more or less, though Guntram was liable to manipulation by Sigibert, who was able to move him away from Chilperic a few times. 

Eventually Sigibert had pushed Chilperic into a corner and seemed on the verge of victory, which is always when one should be careful. 

In 575 Sigibert was murdered, most likely by Fredegund’s operatives. His death left his wife, Brunhilda, as regent for their young son, Childebert II. It was a dangerous time. Chilperic seized Brunhilda’s treasure and banished her to Rouen. Childebert the younger survived thanks to the loyalty of his father’s nobles, which may speak in favor of Sigibert’s political skills. For an early example, while Brunhilda was still distracted by her grief, a duke Gundovald had spirited little Childebert away to safety. He proclaimed the five year old king on Christmas Day 575, and so bound Sigibert’s nobles to him.

Meanwhile, Chilperic should have been feeling a bit more comfortable, since his primary rival had been removed. But the same force that had eliminated Sigibert was sowing the seeds of more trouble for him.

Queen Fredegund was not only feuding with Brunhilda. She, in the grand tradition of royal stepmothers, was determined that only her children with Chilperic would inherit royal title, and worked to eliminate Chilperic’s other offspring. She succeeded in murdering one young prince, and the threat she posed forced another, prince Merovech, to challenge his father for authority. He saw it as the only way to survive and inherit anything in the face of Fredegund’s hostility. Looking for support and legitimacy, he took the seemingly extraordinary step of marrying Brunhilda, who was, after all, his aunt. Chilperic was unimpressed, as was Gregory, both by the violation of canon law and by the rebellion. He separated the two and imprisoned Merovech, but he escaped. 

Merovech was then obliged to live on the lam, avoiding the traps set by his father’s agents, though he did have time at one point to stop and have dinner with Gregory of Tours. As he moved, he made all kinds of accusations against his father and step mother, as Gregory said: “Some of these may well have been true, but in my opinion it is not acceptable in God’s sight that one should make such revelations …”

In the end, it was the loyalty of Chilperic’s nobles that assured that he survived Merovech’s treachery. Most notably, one Leudast, who pursued Merovech relentlessly and forced him to seek sanctuary in a series of churches. Eventually he landed in Tours and sought the protection of the Bishop, who happened to be our Gregory, of course.

Chilperic was hot on his heels, army in tow. He sacked the area around Tours, hoping that someone in town would betray Merovech to him, but the rebel slipped away again. He fled to the neighborhood of Rheims, where the locals told him they were willing to join his cause. They were fibbing, though. While they were reassuring the prince of their support, they had sent word to Chilperic to please come and pick up his son, he was causing exactly the kind of problems the region didn’t need..

 Merovech got wise, saw the jig was up with nowhere left to turn, and in despair he asked a servant to kill him. The servant did, and was poorly rewarded for his fidelity. 

When Chilperic reached Rhiems and found his son dead, the poor servant was tortured, dismembered, and executed. Other members of Merovich’s entourage were similarly killed. Thanks to this story, and many others, Chilperic is often depicted as a bloodthirsty tyrant in later literature, and there’s a painting of him by Jean-Paul Laurent that has him looking suitably saturnine and malevolent. I’ll stick it on instagram. With what you’ve heard so far, I’ll bet you’re all thinking that it’s a pretty fair assessment, but we’ll wait til the end to weigh up the pros and cons.. 

Merovech’s rebellion was seen as illegitimate, but no one questioned his right to be considered a Merovingian. Less accepted was the claim of Gundovald, a Frankish adventurer who claimed to be another son of Chlothar. It wasn’t an outrageous idea; I’ve made great play of the Merovingians’ general scorn for sexual moderation. In this case, even some of Clothar’s other sons were willing to be convinced, namely Childebert and Charibert. For the record, Chlothar himself while he was alive denied Gundovald’s claim, and the erstwhile prince was forced into exile in Italy. While there he met Narses, who was Belisarius’ bette-noire and his replacement in the ongoing wars with the Goths, and thus through him made contact with the Byzantine court. 

Gundovald sat on ice for a few years while the machine of Merovingian family politics squealed and clanked without him. Chilperic ended up with only one son, the infant Chlothar, to be known as Chlothar the young. Meanwhile young Childebert and Guntram fell out, and so Childebert and Chilperic kissed and made up. Guntram was suddenly on the back foot and without an heir, so he adopted his nephew, Brunhilda’s son. Quarrels carried on over various cities, especially in Aquitaine and the Auvergne. As was probably inevitable, Childebert and Guntram eventually also made up, and Chilperic just barely had time to be upset at his brother’s treachery when he was murdered at Chelles in 584.

Okay, that was a lot of names. Unfortunately all i can really do is acknowledge that it is a lot of names and then carry right on going. Maybe now would be a good place for a break so we can all take a breath and allow our brains to decompress. [Monty Python music] 

You all thought that was going to be an ad, didn’t you? It’s only a half-hour show, who puts ads in the middle of a half-hour show? [pointed silence]

The situation now, as we start the second half, is as follows: Chilperic’s murder left his infant son, Chlothar II as his only heir. His nephew, Childebert II, had been heir but had turned on Chilperic at the last minute and allied with his other uncle, Guntram. Not so bad so far, right? Secretly, Guntram had his doubts about young Chlothar’s paternity, but he kept them to himself for now. The death of Chilperic presented an opportunity for Gundovald to reassert his claims of royalty, as there would be a bunch of nobles formerly associated with Chilperic who might now be looking for stronger leadership than baby Chlothar could offer. It was thus a perfect opportunity for the pretender Gundovald, waiting in the wings in Italy.

There is a pattern to these conflicts, if I can be forgiven a brief analytical digression. They often flare up in the wake of one of the kings’ deaths. In the intensely personal world of an early medieval court, there were always going to be men around the king who felt that they deserved more than they were getting. Nobles who were feeling insecure, or unappreciated, often would take up with challengers in hopes of improving their own positions. If the old king doesn’t like you, and you’ve spent your whole career skulking around the edges of the court, you’d probably be willing to take a chance on a newcomer, given that the establishment is likely to stay largely the same if there’s already a designated heir. Better to take a flyer and get a little bit of adventuring in, plus if you won, you’d be in clover. If you lost, well, old age didn’t look like very much fun anyway.

So Gundovald found support among exactly those kinds of nobles in Provence, and in 584 they declared him their king. He challenged Guntram most directly, since he held the most territory in the southeast, and was the senior statesman of the family by now. 

The threat was real, too. Gundovald had the support of the Bishop of Marseilles along with the  secular lords who had joined him, and may have had material support from the Byzantines as well. It’s difficult to explain how rich he was when he returned from Italy otherwise.. It’s possible that the Empire was seeking to set up a reliable ally on the doorstep of Italy, since things were not going brilliantly for them there at the time.

Interestingly, Gundovald also claimed to have the support of Radegund, Chlothar’s one-time wife, and one of Gregory’s favorite people in the whole world. Radegund would probably have been in a position to know about Chlothar’s affairs (ahem) and so could possibly have backed up Gundovald’s claims of royal blood. She was in control of both a rich abbey and a fair amount of moral authority that could be used in the pretender’s support. There’s not much evidence that she gave him anything beyond moral support, if she even did that.

Other sources of support are more shadowy, and the way Gregory talks around them raises an eyebrow. The Bishop of Marseilles, for instance, claimed that he was acting on the instructions of Childebert, or those of nobles associated with Childebert. One of Guntram’s more active companions, a noble named Boso, was accused by his king of inviting Gundovald to return to Francia. He denied it, and his later conduct did a lot to exonerate him. But Boso and Gundovald had spent time in Constantinople at the same time, and Gundovald himself referred to conversations between the two of them. Later on Boso would point the finger at a handful of other magnates that had supported Gundovald. They had indeed done so, but Boso may have been deflecting attention from himself. 

It’s all speculation, because while Gregory lists many of the nobles who had supported Gundovald once he arrived in Francia, he never makes a clear declaration of who had invited him in the first place, in a way that suggests that whoever it was was still active in one or another of the Merovingian courts, and it may have been unsafe for Gregory to be too free with information.. 

Gundovald’s claim ultimately failed. He had a good run for about a year, accepting oaths from cities that belonged to both Guntram and Chilperic, but fortune’s wheel turned against him. He was abandoned by a few of his more powerful supporters – maybe they were bought, maybe for other reasons, and militarily Guntram gained the upper hand. In the end he retreated to a town called St Bertrand de Comminges, where he was besieged by a general named Leudegisel, who was a member of Guntram’s court, along with Boso.

It was a violent undertaking, two assaults were repulsed. Among the defenders was a bishop named Sagittarius, of whom Gregory noted: “[he] walked round and round the ramparts fully-armed, and with his own hand kept tossing rocks onto the heads of the besiegers.” I picture him rock in one hand, bishop’s crozier in the other, but I’m probably wrong about that.

Eventually Leudegisel decided to try a more subtle approach. He sent a messenger to one of Gundovald’s earliest supporters, a man named Mummolus, who told him that his wife and children had been captured, and look, Gundovald was clearly cornered, there was nothing in this rebellion for him any more. If he gave up, Leudegisel would use his influence to make sure that Guntram would not punish the rebels too harshly, or, failing that, he would make sure that there Mummolus would be able to escape to sanctuary somewhere.

Mummolus agreed, and, along with several of Gundovald’s other supporters, including the aforementioned bishop. They went to Gundovald and convinced him that they had made a deal with Leudegisel, and that Gundovald would not be harmed. Manfully sobbing that this defeat was all their fault, he accompanied them out of the gates and into the waiting arms of Leudegisel’s men. At that moment, Mummolus and company scurried back inside the town walls and shut the gates as quickly as they could. Gundovald cursed them before he was taken to the edge of a nearby cliff. Boso, who was in Leudegisel’s army, chucked a rock at the unfortunate Gundovald, which struck him in the head and sent him falling to his death.

Once the pretender was gone, the town opened their gates, but that was a mistake. Whether Leudegisel had ever intended to spare anyone is an open question, he may just have been unable to control his men. On the other hand, no mention is made of him trying to stop the violence that followed, as soldiers poured into the town, put all its inhabitants to sword, and burned it to the ground. The men who had betrayed Gundovald were found and killed, even the bishop Sagittarius, who was beheaded while trying to escape. To give credit where it’s due, it takes much more skill to behead someone as they are running away than the modern version of simply shooting them in the back..

Well, see, I said I wasn’t going into a lot of detail about these civil wars, but I went ahead and told the Gundovald story anyway. I’m sorry, I got carried away, the same way I sometimes get carried away at the Whole Foods cheese counter. 

The Gundovald affair is the last significant round of civil violence that appears in Gregory’s History; the bishop ended his work in 591. Our primary source now shifts from the engaging and contemporary Gregory to the much less entertaining Fredregar, a chronicler writing decades after the events he describes.

With the challenge of Gundovald dispatched, the Merovingians could get back to their more accustomed arrangement of family politics. By then, Francia was divided between Chlothar II, who was about seven at the time, his older cousin Childebert II, around 21, and their uncle Gunthar, the elder statesman now at nearly 60. Most of the clashes between brothers were focused on control of land. The initial conflict after the death of Chlothar in 561 was only aggravated by the death of Childebert I in 567, as all his lands suddenly came up for grabs. Conflict likewise followed Sigibert’s death in 575, and the murder of Chilperic gave impetus to the Gundovald affair starting in 584. These were all royal conflicts, and all basically struggles to fill power vacuums. By the end of Gregory’s narrative, there were still signs of irritation between Childebert and Gunthar, but the old uncle died just a year later, and his lands were absorbed into Childebert’s.  

It’s from Fredregar that we hear of the death of Childebert only a few years after Gunthar. His lands were divided between his two sons, Theudebert and Theuderic (I know), who were united in their hostility to young Chlothar II, and pushed him into a small corner of territory in the north of France before they fell out with each other. Fredregar blames Brunhilda for the strife between them. She was by now in her late fifties and served as regent for the two Theuds while they were young. Quite the lady. The two brothers fought, Theuderic took the victory, and Thedebert was killed in 613. He was ready then to turn on Chlothar and finish him off. Fortuna turned, though, and delivered to Theuderic the gift of fatal dysentery. The board was thus cleared for Chlothar II, also known as Chlothar the Young, and Francia was under the rule of a single king again for the first time in half a century. There was, for a moment, peace. 

Royal conflict made up the bulk of the civil wars, as I’ve said, but there was also blood feud, which I’ll talk more about when Brunhilda gets her episode. Also, there was the simple reality that the nobles also liked to fight. What else were they going to do with their spare time anyway? There have been multiple instances in our story where kings have sought peace, especially with people at the margins of their kingdoms, like the Saxons, and their armies have forced them to fight. We don’t have many of the details, but the Frankish nobility were just as fractious and riven by rivalries as the Merovingians were. Historian Ian Wood suggests that the civil wars of the sixth century gave these nobles a channel in which they could sublimate their own rivalries, which prevented more generalized anarchy. The civil wars were without doubt destructive and terrible to live through, but they were better than a general anarchy that would have ensued had there not been strong kings able to pull most of their own nobles along with them. Such is Wood’s argument. I don’t know if I can quite follow him there, but I can see his point. We will, down the road, have plenty of examples of general anarchy in Francia, and it will indeed be an unpleasant time. 

But that’s for quite a bit in the future. Next time, I think I will put together a biography of Brunhilda, for her own sake, but also to look at the role that queens played in Merovingian political life. After that we’ll talk some about administration, law, and the church, and I think that should bring us up to date on the Franks in the sixth century. Then we’ll be able to return to Italy, and see what’s been going on there since Belisarius declared victory and left. That strategy, commonly used, is pretty much never much connected with reality, and so it would be for the Byzantines in Italy. I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself though.. 

In the meantime, thank you so much for listening and for supporting me and the Dark Ages Podcast in whatever way you choose. Whether it’s with financial support via ko-fi.com, telling your friends about the show, spreading it around on your social media accounts, or just listening and enjoying it, I appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. 

I’ll talk to you all soon, until then, take care.