The Merovingians

Kingship, Institutions, Law, and History

Alexander Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000530698
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The studies collected here cover a period of about 33 years, from 1986 to 2019, and represent a sustained effort to understand the institutions of the Merovingian kingdom and its history. There has long been a predisposition to cast the Merovingian period in the dark colours of barbarism or to treat it with reference to personal relationships and archaic institutions. The present volume, instead, recognizes the Merovingian world not as an archaic, primitive intrusion on the Mediterranean civilization of the Roman Empire but simply as a participant in the wider commonwealth that existed before and remained after the dissolution of the western imperial system; in so doing, it serves to refute the scholarly tendency to primitivize Merovingian governance, its underlying institutions, and the broader culture upon which these rested.

The collection is divided into four parts. Part I considers the question of whether Merovingian kingship should be viewed as a species of archaic, 'sacral' kingship. Part II, on institutions, has chapters that deal with various offices (the grafio and centenarius ), public institutions (especially immunity and public security), and the broader makeup of the Merovingian state system. Part III, on charters, procedure, and law, has chapters on the profile of the charter evidence as now presented in the new MGH edition of the Merovingian diplomas and one on particular procedures before the royal tribunal, mistakenly referred to in scholarship as 'fictitious' trials; a final chapter provides a reflection on, and basic guide to, the law in general of the successor kingdoms, with an eye to the evidence of Merovingian Gaul. Part IV, a slight change of pace, deals with historiography, both the modern variety (Reinhard Wenskus) and the Merovingian (Gregory of Tours). All chapters deal extensively with the historiography of their subjects.

This book will appeal to students and scholars alike interested in Early Medieval European history, Merovingian history, Early Medieval law and society, Early Medieval historiography, and the influence of Merovingian law and governance on later centuries. (CS 1104).

Part IWERE THE MEROVINGIANS SACRAL KINGS?

1POST VOCANTUR MEROHINGIIFredegar, Merovech, and ‘sacral kingship’

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197508-2

From: After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History, Essays Presented to Walter Goffart, ed. Alexander Callander Murray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998)

Lord! said my mother, what is all this story about? – A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick.

Tristram Shandy, IX, ch. 33

To judge from surveys of Frankish history, modern scholarship has embraced the idea that the Merovingian kings believed themselves to be descended from the gods, specifically a divine sea creature.¹ As scholarly notions go, this idea is not a trifle; nor is it new, having been around since the mid-nineteenth century. In its modern form, it tends to be associated with a particular understanding of the Frankish state; religion, in this view, is the true foundation of primitive social and political organization, and divine descent, as an essential component in the ‘charisma’ of Merovingian kings, shows that Frankish kingship rested to a significant degree upon the ‘sacral’ roots of an archaic type of Germanic kingship.²

1 Herwig Wolfram, Das Reich und die Germanen: zwischen Antike und Mittelalter (Berlin, 1990), 298 f.; Eugen Ewig, Die Merowinger und das Frankenreich (Stuttgart, 1988), 77 f.; Hans K. Schulze, Vom Reich der Franken zum Land der Deutschen: Merowinger und Karolinger (Berlin, 1987), 76–80; E. Zöllner, Geschichte der Franken bis zum Mitte des sechsten Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1970), 5, 178. As the following notes will show, the idea has particularly strong roots in German scholarship. In English-language scholarship, see Patrick J. Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (New York and Oxford, 1988), 85, 89, and cf. 94 (‘almost magical force of Merovingian blood’); and Ian Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–751 (London and New York, 1994), 37 f., 40, 44; cf. his ‘Gregory of Tours and Clovis,’ Revue Belge de philologie et d’histoire 63 (1985): 267 n. Wood’s views may better be associated with older approaches rather than the recent perspective of German scholarship. The latter seems influential in a survey of a different kind: Michael Richter, The Formation of the Medieval West: Studies in the Oral Culture of the Barbarians (New York, 1994), 20. Edward James, The Franks (Oxford, 1988), 163, on the other hand, explicitly rejects Germanic myth as the origin of the Merovech tale. 2 For the intellectual foundations of sacral kingship theory, see Eve Picard, Germanisches Sakralkönigtum: Quellenkritische Studien zur Germania des Tacitus and zur altnordischen Überlieferung (Heidelberg, 1991). For comments and literature on some of the broader problems, of which sacral kingship is only a part, see Walter Goffart, ‘Two Notes on Germanic Antiquity Today,’ Traditio 50 (1995): 9–30.

Primitive religious beliefs are commonly thought to be expressed through myth. The divine descent of the Merovingian kings, too, is said to be accompanied by a myth, propagated by the royal house itself; the myth is supposed to appear in the Chronicle of Fredegar, written about 660, where it is associated with the conception and birth of Merovech, a mid-fifth-century king and founder of the Merovingian house.³ In epitomizing Gregory of Tours’ account of the reign of Chlodio, Fredegar adds a story about a strange encounter on the seashore between Chlodio’s wife and a creature from the sea.

Fertur, super litore maris aestatis tempore Chlodeo cum uxore resedens, meridiae uxor ad mare labandum vadens, bistea Neptuni quinotauri [= Minotauri] similis eam adpetisset. Cumque in continuo aut a bistea aut a viro fuisset concepta, peperit filium nomen Meroveum, per co regis Francorum post vocantur Merohingii.⁴

It is said that, when Chlodio was staying with his wife on the seashore in the summer, his wife went to the sea around noon to bathe and a beast of Neptune resembling the quinotaur [= Minotaur] sought her out. Right away she was made pregnant by either the beast or her husband, and afterwards gave birth to a son called Merovech, after whom the kings of the Franks were later called Merovingians.

3 Since Walter Goffart, ‘The Fredegar Problem Reconsidered,’ Speculum 38 (1963): 206–41 (repr. in his Rome’s Fall and After [London, 1989], 319–54), and A. Erikson, ‘The Problem of Authorship in the Chronicle of Fredegar,’ Eranos 63 (1965): 47–76, theories of multiple authorship of the Chronicle have largely been abandoned. See also Andreas Kusternig, trans., ‘Die vier Bücher der Chroniken des sogennanten Fredegar,’ in Quellen zur Geschichte des 7. und 8. Jahrhunderts, ed. Herwig Wolfram (Darmstadt, 1982), 9–13; and now Roger Collins, Fredegar, Authors of the Middle Ages 13 (Alder-shot, Hants., and Brookfield, Vermont, 1997). 4 Fred. Chron. III 9.

The modern account of Merovech’s conception as an expression of Germanic myth begins with Karl Hauck.⁵ Hauck was the creator of an exegetical framework designed to detect and explain fragments of Germanic myth and religious practice embedded in the sources of antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Hauck’s conceptual models depended heavily on products of the comparative study of religion; he expanded the scope for applying this material by using terminology that he derived from the Latin sources by wrenching terms from their original contexts; redefining them; and generalizing them into genres, types, and models of mythic discourse and cultic practice. In Hauck’s scheme, the circumstances surrounding Merovech’s birth constitute an origo, an old cult myth of the Franks explaining the origin of the people and their royal house. The origo describes the begetting of the royal lineage by the chief god of the Franks through the primus rex, their first king. The god in question, Hauck believes, was the OHG Frô, the equivalent of Freyr of Scandinavian sources, a representative of the Vanic powers of fertility; the myth alludes to a process of temporary divinization by which Chlodio became the god, who took the form of a divine sea creature, half man and half bull. This theriomorphic divinization is demonstrated by the fact that Merovech’s conception is said to be effected ‘aut a bistea aut a viro,’ a phrase Hauck reads to mean ‘by both the beast and the husband.’ The origo myth, Hauck argues, is also linked to usus, cult practice, repeatable acts celebrated as part of the state cult of the Franks. Here he discovered one of the cherished motifs of comparative religion, the holy marriage between representatives of divine powers. Details of the cult can also be detected in the bathing, which represents the purificatory preparation of the bride; in the season, the time of a midsummer festival; and in the location, the beach as the meeting zone of the elements. In Hauck’s reconstruction, the myth and the cult practice associated with it represent the beginnings of the lineage (primus rex) and the people it leads. To meet the objection that such primordia should lie in the dim past and can hardly be applied to a fifth-century king such as Chlodio, Hauck argues that primordial myths could be transferred to heroes of more recent vintage, who were glorified as representatives of the original divine ancestor (Stammvater); Fredegar’s text, in calling the dynasty Merohingii, presupposes such an ancestor with the name Mero. Despite its association with Chlodio, the Merovingian origo is, in Hauck’s view, one of the true old cult myths of the pre-Christian state religion of the Germanic peoples.

5 ‘Lebensnormen und Kultmythen in germanischen Stammes- und Herrschergenealogien,’ Saeculum 6 (1955): 186–223.

Hauck’s reading can be traced in many recent accounts of the Fredegar passage.⁶ It is now generally claimed, for example, that the eponymous hero of the Merovingian dynasty was not Merovech, the historical king, but a mythical Mero; Merovech appears in Fredegar’s version as a result of contamination. The divine progenitor of the Merovingians is supposed to be Frô, in the form of a bull deity. Even the legendary and real sexual practices of the Merovingians are interpreted as an extension of their role as agents of Vanic fertility. The Merovingians of historical times are said to have continued to hedge their kingship with ideology, symbols, and ritual derived from pagan times, prime exhibits from the early Middle Ages of an ancient form of sacral kingship.

6 O. Höfler, ‘Abstammungstraditionen,’ § 15, RGA 1: 26 f.; R. Wenskus, ‘Bemerkungen zum Thunginus der Lex Salica,’ in Festschrift Ernst Percy Schramm zu seinem siebzigsten Geburtstag, ed. P. Classen and P. Scheibert (Wiesbaden, 1964), 1: 234–6; and ‘Chlodio,’ RGA 4: 477; H.H. Anton, svv. ‘Merowech’ and ‘Merowinger,’ Lexikon des Mittelalters, vol. 6 (Munich, 1993), 542 f.; H. Moisl, ‘Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies and Germanic Oral Tradition,’ Journal of Medieval History 7 (1981): 223–6; and cf. his ‘Kingship and Orally Transmitted Stammestradition among the Lombards and Franks,’ in Die Bayern und ihre Nachbarn, ed. Herwig Wolfram and Andreas Schwarcz (Vienna, 1985), 111–19; Georg Scheibelreiter, ‘Vom Mythos zur Geschichte: Überlegungen zu den Formen der Bewahrung von Vergangenheit im Frühmittelalter,’ Historiographie im frühen Mittelalter, ed. A. Scharer and G. Scheibelreiter, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforsc-hung 32 (Vienna and Munich, 1994), 33–6. Shorn of details, Hauck seems influential in J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship in England and on the Continent (Oxford, 1971), 16–20; cf. his earlier The Long-Haired Kings and Other Studies in Frankish History (London, 1962), 84, 220.

Those who champion these ideas also claim to find support for them outside Fredegar. In particular, two interesting, but rather minor, objects in the archaeo-logical record of the Franks have taken on a disproportionate role in substantiating the association of the Merovingians with a bull deity.⁷

7 On representations of bulls in the Merovingian period, Edouard Salin commented: ‘il semble bien que cette figuration animale, fort en honneur auprès de civilisations antérieures, n’ait pas été pratiquement retenue par la civilisation mérovingienne.’ He gives two examples with confidence, both fifth century – the bull head from Childeric’s grave and another from a Gallo-Roman fibula: La civilisation mérovingienne, part 4 (Paris, 1959), 166–9.

The first of these is a small bull head found among the grave goods of Clovis’ father, Childeric, discovered in Tournai in 1653, subsequently stolen, and for the most part lost in 1831.⁸ Moderns have been rather quick to impute symbolic significance to the various objects in the grave, though with varying perceptions. Almost immediately the large number of insect-shaped fittings, the so-called apes, bees, were interpreted as marks of rulership, and their imputed connection to the later lilies of France became a minor point of dispute in the Bourbon-Habsburg rivalry of the period. Napoleon, too, passed over the significance of the bull’s head, but had the cloak he wore at his imperial coronation decorated with ‘bees’ like those found in the grave, believing them ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS*
• List of figures and tables
• List of maps
• List of genealogies
• Preface
• Common abbreviations
• PART I Were the Merovingians sacral kings?
• PART II Institutions
• PART III Charters, procedure, and law
• PART IV Historiography
• Maps
• Genealogies
• Alexander Callander Murray: bibliography
• General index
• Index of selected authors