567 to 577
Part one of life of Brunhilda, the Visigothic princess who was regent for three generations of Merovingian rulers.
Today’s episode will be the promised bio of Queen Brunhilda, wife of King Sigibert the first, and mother, grandmother, great grandmother, and regent for three generations of Merovingians to follow. And right from the beginning I have to tell you that thanks to my own intemperance, this will be a two part episode. There was too much to write to get it done in time and rather than make you all wait even more, I thought I should release this first section and get the rest out next week.
By necessity this will also be a slightly smaller biography of Brunhilda’s nemesis Fredegund, since their lives are so closely intertwined. In the process, in a life and times kind of way, I’ll hopefully be able to shed some light on the actual practice of government in the early Merovingian kingdoms. Indeed, in this first half, it ends up being more set up than incident, but so it goes.
Really, it isn’t possible to write a biography, in any modern sense, for any woman in sixth century Europe. Our sources are all exclusively the product of men, all of whom were inheritors of the full package of Greco-Roman prejudices. Their misogyny does not usually reach the heights of later, post-Cluniac reform writers, but that is not to say it doesn’t exist. Most often it’s expressed by omission, the activities of women, even royal wives and daughters, are usually passed over without note, as if they never were. Women do appear, queens, obviously, and especially holy women. The male commentators are perfectly capable of expressing admiration for them, as Gregory of Tours did for Queen – later Abbess – Radegund, and later on the Venerable Bede would for Hilda of Whitby. Yet generations of Frankish princesses disappear down into the vortex of history, married off and seemingly forgotten, sometimes with not even a name to remember them by. For those who we do know, any sense of their inner life is deeply obscure, though to be fair, that’s the case for most people of the period, regardless of gender.
In that context, the amount of commentary on the activities of Brunhilda and Fredegund stands out all the more.
We know more about the early life of Bruhilda than of her rival, but that isn’t saying very much. She was the younger of two daughters of King Athanagild of the Visigoths, and was probably born around 543, probably in Toledo. If you think back you may remember that Athanagild was one of two kings fighting over the lordship of the Visigoths, civil strife that opened the door to the Byzantines and their conquest of the Southern Littoral of Hispania. Athanagild had ultimately emerged as the winner, but given the homicide rates among Visigothic rulers up to that point, victory probably brought only marginal peace of mind. Having the empire as a downstairs neighbor probably did not improve his sense of security, and so he was looking for friends.
Fortunately, that’s exactly what daughters were for. A marriage alliance with one of the kings of the most powerful realms of the post Roman West could help secure his northern border, and lend his somewhat battered crown some polish, some legitimacy. There was also the small matter of Guntram, the Merovingian whose lands bordered on Athanagild’s territory in Septimania, and who was making threatening noises. Connecting with one of Guntram’s brothers might discourage him from joining in on any raids.
Merovingian kings, generally, had not been particularly concerned about the social status of their spouses and partners. A high ranking consort could bring kudos, especially if she arrived as part of the spoils of war, as Radegund had for Chlothar the Elder, and daughters were married off in the search for advantage just as they always had been elsewhere, but for themselves, the Merovingian males seem to have been happy to follow their … hearts. The several forms of marriage that we’ve talked about earlier encouraged this, since some variants required no formalities at all, and could very easily shade into simple kidnapping.
However, the circumstances of Brunhilda’s marriage suggest that King Sigibert was looking for something a little shinier than his brothers and uncles. Sigibert disapproved of his brothers’ foibles, and according to Gregory, went specifically looking for a wife of more exalted blood. But where to look? No matter how cordial their relationship with the Franks, the Byzantines would most likely never countenance marrying an imperial woman to one, so that was a non-starter. The Thuringian royal houses had already been humbled and absorbed; there was little advantage to be had there. Meanwhile Italy was in chaos, and eager as the Ostrogoths might have been to find a daughter they could send in exchange for military aid, the Franks at the time were resolutely examining their fingernails and not getting involved in any of the mess on the far side of the Alps. Britain and the lands beyond the Elbe were still warrens of pagan tribes, marrying there might be more trouble than it was worth.
That only left Spain, and the Visigoths, and so king Sigibert sent his emissaries to negotiate with king Athanagild. The discussions would have taken months, but both sides were motivated. In the end, it was agreed that Brunhilda would make the journey from sunny Spain to the less sunny North of Francia. The Franks were pleased, since:
“The young woman was elegant in all that she did, lovely to look at, chaste and decorous in her behavior, wise in her generation and of good address. Her father … sent her off to Sigibert with a large dowry. Sigibert ordered a banquet to be prepared and married Brunhilda with every appearance of joy and happiness.”
There were still religious issues to deal with. The Visigoths had not yet made the transition to Orthodoxy, and you may remember a few decades ago, a Frankish princess had had to be rescued from her abusive Arian husband. Athanagild and daughter seem to have been of a much more practical bent. Brunhilda, for her part, knew better than to be obstinate far from home surrounded by people who had it entirely in their power to make her life miserable. The bride converted with barely a quibble, after a serious and apparently reasoned discussion with her new husband and his bishop. Gregory says that they convinced her, but really it went so easily that it was more a matter of education than of debate. Brunhilda would take to her new faith with enthusiasm, as her later behavior would show, though she would never reach, or aspire to, the heights of devotion of a saintly figure like Radegund. At the time of their marriage in 567, Brunhilda would have been in her early twenties, Sigibert perhaps seven or eight years older, and they seem to have gotten along well enough, as far as we can tell.
Meanwhile, Sigibert’s half brother, Chilperic, saw the happiness in the realm next door, and desired the same for himself.
That’s the kindest way of putting it. Given what we already know about Chilperic, I could also put it this way: Chilperic saw the prestigious match that his half brother had made, and the wealth that it had brought, and it pricked at his insecurities. How come he has one and I don’t? I want one too!
Now Chilperic already had a woman, Fredegund – I put it that way because it’s not clear whether he was married to her at the time or not – at least married in a way that other heads of state would recognize or respect. Either way, he put Fredegund aside and sent his own ambassadors to the Visigothic king, looking for a marriage at least as shiny as his big brother’s.
Athanagild, seeing no downside to having two Frankish kings in the family, further isolating Guntram, agreed, and dispatched Brunhilda’s older sister, Galswintha, with a similar dowry, pomp and circumstance.
Why the younger Brunhilda was married before her sister is not a question that seems to have a clear answer. In the Germanic kingdoms, as we’ve seen, primogeniture was far from the norm, so the order of marriage of daughters would seem to carry less import, but still, it seems odd, and I have found no explanation.
Fredegund, the woman he had put aside, had already shown herself to be an operator. Chilperic had been married before, to a woman named Audovera, with whom he’d already had three sons. Fredegund was a servant in Audovera’s retinue, and had caught Chilperic’s eye and convinced him, in one way or another, to divorce Audovera and send her to a cloister. What role she had in the Galswintha deal is open to question, was she put aside by her capricious lover, or did she agree to be placed strategically on the back burner while the dowry negotiations were undertaken?
Regardless, Galswintha was welcomed by her new husband with celebration and feasts, and was rebaptised as a Catholic, just as her sister had been. Gregory, in one of his catty moments, assures us that “[Chilperic] loved her very dearly, for she had brought a large dowry with her.”
Marriage, in my experience, is a mostly life-enhancing institution, but Chilperic found marriage to Galswintha less so.
Galswintha seems to have had expectations and standards, and she found her treatment at Chilperic’s court unfitting for her position. This is yet another area where it would be wonderful to have a more complete accounting of the relationships and personalities, what exactly was dissatisfying to the queen? Chilperic, for his part, did not seek marriage counseling, mediation, or honest discussion of their goals and needs; such was not in his temperament. He took a more direct and much more characteristic approach. He buttonholed a servant and “suggested” that perhaps Queen Galswintha would be better off … dead. A year or less after getting married, Galswintha was strangled in her bed, her body left for her “shocked” husband to “find”.
Within a few days, Chilperic had reconciled with Fredegund, to the disgust of his brothers, bishops, probably anyone else who heard about it, and to the undying rage of Galswintha’s sister, Brunhilda.
We need to be a tiny bit careful about all this though. Gregory is generally unsympathetic to Chilperic for various reasons, and he is deeply prejudiced against Fredegund and never passes on an opportunity to portray her as cruel, vindictive, immoral, and the ultimate source of all the inter-familial strife that was to follow. Later on, when the story of these years was taken up by the chronicler known to us as Fredregar, that role was filled by Brunhilda. The evil step mother trope was as strong in Merovingian Francia as it had been in imperial Rome, and for that reason, I think we have to assume that, whatever crime we’re talking about, the truth is that Livia did it.
All that aside, it seems certain that Galswintha was murdered. It seems equally certain that Brunhilda believed Chilperic and Fredegund had murdered her, and so began a feud that would shape Merovingian politics for the next four decades. Now, I say that, and it’s happily repeated by several secondary sources, nowhere does Gregory explicitly say that Brunhilda was motivated by blood feud. That arises from other sources, and from reading between the lines, and this round of conflict between the brothers arose autochthonously. I encountered that word for the very first time in Wolfram’s History of the Goths four years ago and am delighted to have finally found a place to use it. Autochthonous.
I’m sure that Sigibert disapproved of Chilperic murdering his new wife and taking back his low-born fancy-woman. But I struggle to see, at this early stage, that any of the four brothers needed any extra incentive to fight with each other. Especially Chilperic, who seems to have been consistently the black sheep of the four, and regularly made himself obnoxious to his half-brothers. By, for example, sending his son to capture some of Sigibert’s southern towns and burn others.
That gives me a slightly tenuous excuse to launch into a potentially deep digression, by asking the question, what exactly were these four fighting over? We could say they were fighting for “territory” and move on, but lines on a map would have had little meaning to them in the way it does to us. How would they have understood their own goals?
It’s part of a larger question: what exactly does a king do? Based on the evidence of this podcast, you could be forgiven if you were to answer that the primary function of a Frankish king was to engage in mindless violence in the search for wealth and status. And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but it is an oversimplification to say that that was a king – or ruler’s – only, or even primary function.
Isidore of Seville, who was a contemporary of our Gregory of Tours and whose Etymologia would be one of the most influential books of the middle ages, (and who is also the patron saint of the internet – how about that? The things you learn.) wrote:
“God gave the governance to princes for the ruling of the peoples … Therefore the office of ruling ought to profit the people and not to harm them, not to press on them by lording it over them but to consult with them by condescending to them, so that this badge of power might truly be beneficial and they might use this gift of God for the protection of the members of Christ.” From the very beginning, the most important functions of a king were to dispense justice, and provide protection.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are a well-off land-owner. You have several farms, and people and servants to work them for you. You also have neighbors, of more or less equal wealth, and one of them has decided that he likes the look of that field down the valley, the one with the big rock at the corner. In the spring, he sends his workers to the field to begin the plowing, and when your people arrive, they’re told that the field is under new management. You may send some of your more muscular people to drive the interlopers off, but your neighbor has thought of that, and has sent some of his own beefsteaks to protect his plowmen. A fight breaks out. There are broken teeth and one of your men has lost a finger. Meanwhile, your greedy neighbor is claiming that everyone knows that field with the rock has always been his, and that you have had no right to be working on it these past years. To whom will you go to help resolve this dispute? You might go to your other neighbors, but you have a history with all of them, and they may or may not be impartial. More importantly, you all have more or less the same amount of muscle available, which will make it difficult for any one of you to enforce any decision that might be reached. No, you need to go to someone more powerful than either you or your neighbor, and who is disinterested in the outcome of your disagreement.
By going to this judge, whether he be lord or king, you and your neighbor agree to be bound by his decision, and so put yourselves in his power. He may request a fee or tribute in return for his consideration. A lord will have several subordinates who come to him for justice, and the lords in turn will go to their king to resolve their own disputes. If you have a very good memory, you may recall the kindins, the judge-king of the Goths before they crossed over the Danube. This function of leadership is integral to the Germanic tradition of kingship, and in earlier days, was often separate from the role of war leader. Migration led to streamlining, combining the roles in the person of the Gothic kings, and contact with Rome led to greater sophistication of the philosophy of law. That’s its own subject which I keep meaning to get to, and I will one of these days.
In a way, this kind of justice is subset of the king’s responsibility to protect his subjects, as in this case, he protects them from each other. And for both this internal and external protection, he expects to be rewarded, in the form of legal fees, fines, and taxes.
All of that is a rather long winded way of explaining what all of these Merovingian brothers were actually fighting over. The right to be the final arbiter of disputes in the various regions (and collect the fees and fines that resulted from that power), and to claim the taxes that were generated by the regions.
The Roman apparatus for collecting those taxes was beginning to decay, but its organization remained centered in the cities, and so the right to appoint officials that controlled cities and oversaw the collection of those taxes was commonly the core of conflicts.
Those officials were drawn from the cloud of loyal men that surrounded each of the kings, his comitatus. Individually these men were known by the Latin name comes which is often unhelpfully translated as count. That is where the noble title derives from, but it gives the wrong connotation this early. (Yes I know I’ve used it, mea culpa.) Comes actually means companion, and that’s a much more accurate description of the relationship. These were men of status, fighting men, wealthy men, with their own lands and influence, who the king could delegate to carry out his wishes. These could be anything, except for a handful of the very top jobs, there was little specialization. A king’s companion may escort guests, train young fighters, act as a purchasing agent, oversee harvests or the collection of taxes and tribute, or any service his king might think he was suitable for. His most trusted would be dispatched to the various cities to act as royal representatives and overseers, and to liaison with the local bishop, who would have the stronger local network.
The loyalty of these men was obviously key, these were very personal relationships. By the sixth century most of the bureaucratic institutions of the empire had crumbled away, except at the most local level, and so every part of royal government’s effectiveness depended on the effectiveness and loyalty of the comes on site. That loyalty was a matter of principle of course … but it was also a matter of personal advantage. So in the conflicts between the Merovingian brothers, it was a matter of either placing your own man in a particular city, or, sometimes, convincing your brother’s man to change sides.
Given all of that, where do queens fit in? Just because their activities are mostly unrecorded does not mean that royal women were universally passive, and queens in particular could be very influential. They could influence their husbands directly, depending on their personalities. Ultimately the queen’s position depended on the production of heirs and maintaining a good relationship with the king. With that as a starting point, though, queens worked as hard as anyone to build up their own bases of power. Queens held their own property, their morgengabe, granted to them by their husbands. Chilperic had granted Galswitha a gobsmacking morgengabe of five cities in his efforts to show up his half brother. What that really means is that he granted her that tax revenue of five cities as her own personal income.
Such personal property and wealth could be used to build up a clientage from among the nobility and fighting men, as it gave the queen the wherewithal to grant patronage – jobs, annuities, and so on, in return for loyalty and support when needed. She might set up abbeys or monasteries, both for spiritual support in the form of the occupants’ prayers, as well as a kind of retirement plan, as abbeys were often where noble widows went to live out their later lives. On top of her personal wealth, the queen also had considerable access to the royal treasury, in the traditional wifely role as manager of the domestic household, and could use those resources to her advantage as well – in some consultation with the king, but many queens enjoyed wide latitude in day to day affairs. Nobles, both male and female, and other members of the comitatus would elbow each other to win the queen’s favor almost as much as the kings.
The inevitable negative result of all of this was the appearance of factions. Those with influence fought to keep it, and those without fought to get it, and things could get very nasty very quickly.
Ultimately, it was all part of the same shoving match, nobles jockeyed with each other for influence, wealth, and land, the Merovingians jockeyed with each other for the wealth and land to distribute in order to grow their power. And the queens were right there in the snakepit with everyone else.
The first round of squabbling between brothers mainly revolved around Sigibert and Chilperic, with Guntram and Charibert dipping in and out on one side or the other. The thing went back and forth for a while, but eventually circumstances began to turn against Chilperic. He lost a son in the fighting; brother Guntram who had mostly been on his side, abandoned their alliance and sided with Sigibert, and many of the nobles and magnates that had supported Chilperic began to find other ways to spend their time. Never try to catch a falling knife, they may have said to each other, as they sent their regrets.
Pursued by Sigibert’s forces, Chilperic was forced to seek refuge in the fortified city of Tournai. Sigibert was confident. He had his wife and children join him in Paris as he made ready to march east.
He and Brunhilda had been pretty regular at the outset of their marriage, and in the first three years, Brunhilda had given birth to three little Franklets, two girls and a boy. We aren’t sure of their birth order, but can say that at this moment they would have ranged between five and eight years old. I can imagine Sigibert crowing with confidence to them as they waved him out of the gates. He had uncle Chilperic on the ropes, he was going to make him submit, give up his claims on a whole bunch of cities and hand them over to Sigibert and Guntram. It was inevitable, all Sigibert had to do was sit down outside Tournai and wait.
As he was making his preparations to leave, the bishop of Paris, later to be known as St. Germain offered him advice: If he intended to spare his brother’s life, then his endeavor would end successfully. If not, then Sigibert should consider the words of Solomon in the book of Proverbs: “Whoso digs a pit for his brother shall himself fall in.” (Prov 26:27) Gregory’s fellow bishops all seem to have had an amazing talent at foreshadowing.
Disregarding the good bishop’s exhortation, Sigibert left Paris and headed toward the final showdown at Tournai. As he went, he accepted the submission of the surrounding towns. Everything was coming up roses.
But the roses had thorns, as they often do. In a town called Vitry, near Calais, in the press of people that surrounded the king as he accepted accolades and declarations of loyalty, two men indicated they wished to speak with Sigibert. He agreed, and once they were a little apart from the crowd, the two men struck at the king with their seaxes, wounding him badly. Most sources name Fredegund as the instigator of the murder, though it is doubtful she acted without the knowledge and at least tacit support of Chilperic. The stricken Sigibert was carried to his tent, but it turned out the blades had been poisoned, and Sigibert soon died. (A side note: accusations of poisoned blades are fairly common. While I have no doubt that it did happen, it’s just as likely that an especially aggressive infection leading to sepsis could be attributed to poisoning.)
As an aside, one of the things that strikes me about this and many other stories of assassinations from this time is the easy access to the kings. Leaders are not siloed off from their constituencies the way they often are now. It reinforces the personal nature of kingship, a king must be seen by his great men, he must be accessible to them, or relationships will break down and the government cease to function.
I doubt that’s what Brunhilda was focusing on at the time, though. The news struck her like a charging bull, according to Gregory “she was prostrate with anguish and grief, and hardly knew what she was doing.” We can’t know for sure how she felt about her husband personally, but let’s give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she at least liked him a bit. More pressing than her personal grief, though, was her safety and the safety of her children. The girls were probably all right in the short term, but little Childebert was in immediate danger. The loyalty of Sigibert’s comites was decisive. One of them, Gundovald, gathered as many of Sigibert’s subjects as he could, took possession of Childebert and took him to Metz. On Christmas Day, 575, declared the five-year-old king. There is a story about Brunhilda lowering her son in a bag on a rope to the waiting Gundovald and escape. The point is that she consented to her son’s removal from her custody.
Their worries were well founded. The military pressure on him having evaporated, Chilperic moved to retake his own lost possessions and make a play for those of his deceased brother. In the process he moved into Paris and took Brunhilda and her daughters prisoner, along with all the treasury that Brunhilda had had with her. That’s significant, in light of our earlier discussion. It’s doubtful that Brunhilda had anything like the whole royal treasure with her, but it was certainly an amount significant enough for Gregory to mention, and the loss of it removed a great deal of Brunhilda’s ability to influence others.
Brunhilda was sent to Rouen, while her daughters were sent to Meaux, a town on the Marne east of Paris. We don’t know the nature of either’s captivity, but rotting in a dungeon is unlikely. They were most likely hosted as involuntary guests, either in the house of a nobleman loyal to Chilperic, or on one of Chilperic’s own estates.
Chilperic was busily trying to scoop up as much territory as he could, and to that end he sent one of his sons on a mission to the West, to Poitiers. The son, Merovech, decided that he did not want to go to Poitiers, and instead disobeyed his orders and headed to Tours, where he spent Easter, and his army made themselves a nuisance by commandeering the supplies of the surrounding farms and villages.
Merovech was a child of Chilperic’s first wife, Audoveda, and therefore a target for the malice of Fredegund, who was determined that her own children would be the ones to inherit. His rebellion in this case seems to have been an attempt to carve out a power base for himself that he could use to oppose his step-mother’s machinations. One way of bolstering his position was to tie himself to one of the other Merovingian houses, and so he put out the word that he was going to visit his mother, and traveled to Rouen. Once there he “made Brunhilda his wife”.
This is one of those episodes that absolutely begs for more detail, which Gregory simply does not give. How much choice was Brunhilda given here? Was it actually her idea? Her continued presence in Rouen, while her son Childebert remained at Metz, suggests that she was still in some kind of custody, so was this a rescue? It also suggests that the people around her son had made no move to free her, and may have been actively ignoring her. The marriage was clearly counter to Chilperic’s wishes, as well as against canon law, since Merovech was her nephew, even though not a blood relation. Attaching herself to Merovech may have been part of a play to regain control over Childebert and her late husband’s lands. Maybe she also liked him – but that’s irrelevant really. We can’t know, and Gregory ain’t telling.
He does tell us that Chilperic was indeed unhappy about this turn of events, and went to Rouen in all haste to separate the pair. Merovech and Brunhilda holed up in a church and refused to come out until Chilperic finally swore that they could remain together “as long as it was God’s will”, which is a pretty smooth way of leaving his options open, if you ask me. For now, he seems to have decided that what was done was done. Maybe he thought that he could use this marriage to sow discord among the nobles that surrounded young Childebert. He received them as family members, and Brunhilda was free. Well, free-er than she had been before.
Chilperic had plenty to be worried about when it came to Childebert’s men. Still a child he may have been, but his father’s comitatus weren’t going to give up their new lord’s patrimony, or their own positions, without a fight. To that end, an army was assembled in Champagne, and marched on Soissons, where Fredegund and one of her sons was staying. Chilperic rode to meet this new threat, and took Merovech with him, either because he needed his men, or to keep an eye on him, or both. Brunhilda was left behind in Rouen. She was in the wind for the moment, and needed to decide what to do next.
And we’ll leave her there for now, watching from the gate as Chilperic and her new husband rode away to the east. Next time we’ll pick up Brunhilda’s story. She had to see to the safety of her daughters, and to find her way back to her son, which she eventually would. Once there, it will become clear that Brunhilda was not the kind of woman to sit in the background while the men-folk around the young king ran things for him. She would exert her own considerable influence and begin the first of the periods of regency that defined her life.
Until then, thank you all for listening, for supporting, for your emails and messages on Instagram and Facebook. I appreciate you all, both individually, and as a group. I haven’t said anything about them for a while, so special thanks to monthly supporters Michaya, Paul, Alex, Jon, Dusty, Jesse, Barchester, Toasty, and new supporter Mr Jordan. I hold you all close to my heart.
That’s it for now then, until next time, take care.
The Dark Ages Podcast 