DECLINE AND DECAY OF THE MEROVINGIANS
561-656.
The sons of Chlothar divide the Frankish realm—Wars of Sigibert and
Chilperich—The fortunes of Brunhildis—Continued wars of Neustria and
Austrasia—Tyranny of Chilperich and Fredegundis—Decay of the Royal
Power among the Franks—The House of St. Arnulf and Pippin—Brunhildis
regent in Austrasia—Wars of her grandsons—Her death—Chlothar II.
sole king—His weakness—His successor Dagobert I. last free king of
the Merovingian line—Rise of the Mayors of the Palace.
After the first eighty years of its existence, the Frankish kingdom,
which under three generations of warlike monarchs had continued to
extend its borders so fast and so far, ceased suddenly to grow, and was
given up for a century and a half to ruinous civil wars, as objectless
as they were tedious and confused. In surrendering their primitive
Teutonic freedom to their royal house, in return for the glory and
aggrandisement which union under a single despotic hand gave to their
hitherto weak and scattered tribes, the Franks had bartered away their
future. As long as the house of Chlodovech were able and active, their
subjects could console themselves for submitting to an autocrat by
sharing in the power and plunder which a century of successful war
brought in to them. But when the Merovings, though still retaining their
despotic authority, grew weak and incapable, showing no trace of their
ancestor’s qualities, save an inveterate tendency to treachery and
fratricide, an evil time came upon the Frankish race. They paid for
their early aggrandisement by being condemned to five generations of
useless civil wars at home, and powerlessness abroad, while their
hereditary monarchs sacrificed everything to their unending family
feuds. Nothing more could be hoped for the Franks till they had rid
themselves of the nightmare-incubus of this wicked house, whose
repulsive annals are, on the whole, the most hopeless and depressing
page in the history of Europe.[22] From generation to generation their
story reeks with blood; there is nothing that can be compared to it for
horror in the records of any nation on this side of the Mediterranean.
We have to search the histories of the courts of Mohammedan Asia to
discover a parallel. The Franks only found salvation in the growth of
checks on the royal power by the development of the great provincial
governors, and by the final deposition of the Merovings in favour of the
great house of the descendants of St. Arnulf, the Mayors of the Palace,
whose strong hand at last stayed the fratricidal wars of the seventh
century. And even when the new dynasty had mounted the throne, the
Frankish realm showed fatal signs of the demoralisation it had suffered
under the old royal house. The tendency of the race to acquiesce in the
unwise habit of heritage-partition, and the unhappy grudge between the
eastern and the western Franks, were direct legacies of the Merovings.
Footnote 22:
In spite of the wickedness of the house of the Merovings, the Franks
were very loyal, even in the days of the decay of the royal race. We
find their chroniclers repeatedly contrasting the fidelity of the
Franks with the fickleness of their Visigothic neighbours, who, having
lost their ancient royal house, were continually making and unmaking
sovereigns from among the ranks of their counts and dukes.
We left the whole[23] Frankish realm concentrated in the hands of the
aged Chlothar, last surviving son of Chlodovech. [Sidenote: Second
partition of the Frankish Realm, 561.] When, however, this hoary
ruffian, fresh from the murder of his eldest son, sank into his grave,
in the year 561, his four surviving children parted the kingdom once
more among themselves, not without a preliminary fight, in which
Chilperich, the youngest of the four, having laid hands on his father’s
treasures, and raised an army with their aid, tried to put down his
kinsmen, but failed. When he had been defeated and brought to
submission, the realm was made into four shares. Charibert, the eldest
son, took Paris and Aquitaine; Guntram the Burgundian kingdom; Sigibert
the Ripuarian land on the Rhine, and the tributary Thuringian and
Bavarian lands beyond it; lastly, the restless Chilperich was given his
father’s original share, the old Salian land between Meuse and Somme,
with certain districts farther south added to it, so that it extended
nearly as far as the gates of Rouen and Rheims.
Footnote 23:
For genealogy of the house of Chlodovech see page 166.
[Illustration:
THE FRANKISH KINGDOMS. 575.
]
Of these four brothers, Charibert died young, in 567. He is only
remembered because his daughter Bertha married Ethelbert, the king of
Kent, and was, twenty years later, the protector of the mission of St.
Augustine. Charibert’s lands on the Seine and Loire were parted among
his three brothers, Guntram and Chilperich each taking the part that lay
nearest to his own frontier, while their distant Ripuarian brother,
Sigibert, had Tours, Poictiers, and Bordeaux, separated from his other
dominions by the whole breadth of Burgundy.
The tale of the wars and tumults which the three surviving sons of
Chlothar I. raised against each other is a long recital of objectless
strife and treachery. The uneasiest spirit of the three was the wicked
Chilperich, ‘the Nero and Herod of his time,’ as Gregory of Tours very
rightly styles him. The usual fraternal hatred of the Merovings was
embittered between him and Sigibert by an additional grievance. While
Sigibert was away beyond the Rhine striving with the wild Avars, who had
pushed their incursions along the Danube into Bavaria and Suabia, his
brother, the king of Soissons, invaded Ripuaria, and tried to seize it
for himself. Sigibert returned in haste, and succeeded in driving
Chilperich back beyond the Meuse, and preserving his eastern border.
This would have been cause enough for revenge, but a worse was to
follow. Chilperich and Sigibert had married two sisters, the daughters
of the Visigothic king, Athanagild. Galswintha was the spouse of
Chilperich, Brunhildis of Sigibert. They were princesses famed all over
the Western world for their beauty and abilities no less than for the
enormous dowries which their father had bestowed upon them. [Sidenote:
Murder of Galswintha, 567.] Before his marriage Chilperich had kept a
perfect harem of concubines, though on the arrival of Galswintha he had
for the moment banished them. But Fredegundis, the chief among his
former favourites, retained such an empire over him that after a few
months he openly brought her back to the palace, and insulted the queen
by her presence. When Galswintha indignantly declared that she should
return to her father, the wicked king had her murdered, and publicly
married Fredegundis within a few days (567).
Brunhildis, the sister of the murdered queen, and the spouse of
Chilperich’s elder brother the king of Ripuaria, devoted the rest of her
life to the task of avenging Galswintha’s death on the king of Soissons
and his paramour. She was a strong-willed, fearless, able woman, and her
influence over her husband was unbounded. For forty years the houses of
Sigibert and Chilperich and their unhappy subjects were destined to shed
their blood on the battle-field that the slaughter of Galswintha might
be atoned for.
It is in these wars that the final partition of the Frankish realm into
its two permanent divisions took shape, and that new names for these
divisions came into use. The Ripuarian realm of king Sigibert, from the
borders of Bavaria and Thuringia as far as the Meuse and Scheldt, is for
the future known as Austrasia—the Eastern kingdom; Chilperich’s less
purely Teutonic realm, from the Meuse and Scheldt as far as the Loire,
gets the name of Neustria, the New kingdom, or the New West kingdom, as
others interpret it.[24]
Footnote 24:
Neustria, Neuster, Neustrasia, Neutrasia, Niwistria are all found as
forms of the name. It is disputed whether it means merely the realm of
the ‘New Franks’ in Gaul as opposed to the ‘Old Franks’ on Meuse and
Rhine, or whether New and West are compressed together in the word.
The _Annals of Metz_ say, ‘Occidentales Franci qui Niwistrii
dicuntur.’ Its boundaries were the Scheldt, the _Silva Carbonaria_
about Namur and Mons, and the Upper Meuse. Verdun is the westernmost
Austrasian town; Langres the northernmost Burgundian town.
The beginning of the wars of Neustria and Austrasia follows immediately
on the death of Galswintha. As the avenger of blood, king Sigibert
entered his brother’s kingdom, and drove him westward. But the
hostilities were suspended by a great Lombard invasion of Gaul. The new
conquerors of Italy had passed the Alps, and thrown themselves upon the
Frankish realm. Guntram of Burgundy, whose kingdom bore the brunt of the
assault, prevailed upon his brothers to cease their struggles and unite
to cast out the Lombards from Provence and the Rhone valley. By his
decision Chilperich gave up as _weregeld_ for his wife’s murder, her
dowry and five Aquitanian cities, which had been bestowed upon her at
the marriage. These were made over to Brunhildis, who took them, but
nevertheless bided her time for a fuller revenge (568).
Four years of Lombard wars kept the Frankish kings engaged on their
southern borders, and they were at last successful in forcing the
invaders beyond the Alps, in a series of campaigns in which the chief
glory was gained by the Romano-Gallic duke, Eunius Mummolus, who led the
armies of Guntram of Burgundy. [Sidenote: Wars of Sigibert and
Chilperich, 573-75.] But in 573 the civil war between Sigibert and
Chilperich burst forth again. It spread at once over the whole of the
Frankish realm; for Chilperich attacked his brother’s dominions in
Aquitaine, while Sigibert pressed on beyond Meuse and Scheldt. There
followed two years of fierce fighting, attended by the most barbarous
wasting of the land. Chilperich’s sons burnt every open town between
Tours and Limoges; Sigibert’s troops from beyond the Rhine devastated
the valley of the Meuse. The Austrasians had the better in the struggle,
and Chilperich sued for peace, offering large territorial concessions.
But it was his life and not his lands that Brunhildis wanted. Her
husband was induced to decline his brother’s proposals, and pushed his
victorious arms into the heart of Neustria, after a battle in which
Chilperich’s son and heir, Theudebert, was slain. The king of the West
abandoned his capital, and fled north to hide himself and his wife
behind the walls of Tournay. Most of the Neustrian counts came to do
homage to Sigibert at Paris, and when he had chased his brother behind
the Scheldt, the Austrasian had himself lifted on the shield, according
to old Frankish custom, and saluted as King of all the Franks at Vitry,
near Arras. [Sidenote: Murder of Sigibert, 575.] He sent for his wife
and children to Paris to share in his triumph, and determined to end the
war by the siege of Tournay. But, when all Gaul seemed at his command,
two murderers, hired by queen Fredegundis, came before him with a
pretended message, and stabbed him while he listened to their words
(575).
The death of Sigibert changed the whole aspect of affairs in Gaul, and
raised his assassin from the depth of despair to the height of fortune.
The Austrasian army dispersed when its commander was slain, and the
Neustrian counts flocked to Tournay to do homage again to Chilperich.
Queen Brunhildis, who lay at Paris with Sigibert’s infant son and heir
Childebert, was seized and imprisoned by the partisans of the Neustrian
king. Her little four-year-old son only escaped from his uncle’s
clutches by being let down in a basket from his mother’s prison window,
and received by a faithful adherent, who rode away with him to Metz. If
Chilperich had laid hands on the boy, the Austrasian royal house would
have been ended in the promptest way.
The East-Frankish counts and dukes, when the news of Sigibert’s death
reached them, resolved not to submit to his murderer, but to take a step
unheard of heretofore in the annals of the Merovings. When they found
that the boy Childebert had escaped, they bound his father’s diadem
about his brows, and saluted him as king. Hitherto the Franks had always
lived under the strong hands of a grown man, and the provincial
governors had been as powerless as the meaner people under the
autocratic sway of the ruler; but in the long minority that would follow
the accession of a four-year-old child, they found their opportunity for
lowering the royal power, and dividing many of its privileges among
themselves. From this point begins the degradation of the kingly office,
which was to be the rule henceforth among them; and the counts and
dukes, as well as the great officers of the palace, were destined to
acquire, in the early years of Childebert, a control over the central
power which they had never hitherto possessed.
Meanwhile the fate of the little king’s mother, Brunhildis, had been a
strange one. Chilperich had seized her treasures, and thrown her into
prison at Rouen. [Sidenote: Adventures of Brunhildis.] There she caught
the eye of Merovech, her captor’s eldest surviving son,[25] who was
charged by his father with the command of an army destined to attack the
Austrasian king’s dominions beyond the Loire. Merovech was so infatuated
by the beauty of the captive queen that, braving his father’s
displeasure, he delivered her from her dungeon, and induced
Praetextatus, bishop of Rouen, to marry them in his cathedral. King
Chilperich immediately flew to Rouen in great wrath, and at his approach
the newly-married pair took sanctuary under the bishop’s protection.
After some hesitation the king of Neustria promised to spare their
lives, but, when his son surrendered himself, he took him away to
Soissons, and shortly afterwards tonsured him, and compelled him to
become a monk. Brunhildis escaped to Austrasia, whither her husband
strove to follow her. He fled from his monastery, and had almost reached
the frontier, when the emissaries of his stepmother, Fredegundis, caught
him, and murdered him (577).
Footnote 25:
Theudebert, the eldest, had fallen in battle in the preceding year.
In Austrasia there now commenced a struggle between the liberated
queen-mother and the great officers of state, for the guardianship of
the little six-year-old king. The struggle was an obstinate one; for if
the Frankish nobles were hampered by the autocratic traditions of the
kingship, Brunhildis, on the other hand, was a foreigner, and met with
little support save among the Gallo-Roman clergy and officials, who
found some protection, under the shield of the king, from the arrogance
and violence of their Frankish fellow-subjects. In Neustria or
Aquitaine, where the Roman elements were stronger, Brunhildis might have
done more, but her lot was cast in Austrasia, where the Germans were
entirely preponderant.
THE MEROVINGIAN KINGS OF THE FRANKS, A.D. 481-752.
CHLODOVECH I., 481-511.
|
+-----------------+----------------+---------------+
| | | |
THEUDERICH I., CHLODOMER, CHILDEBERT, CHLOTHAR,
K. of Austrasia, K. of Orleans, K. of Paris, K. of Soissons, 511.
511-533. 511-524. 511-558. K. of all the Franks,
| 558-561.
THEUDEBERT I., |
K. of Austrasia, |
533-548. |
| |
THEUDEBALD, |
K. of Austrasia, |
548-555. |
+---------+-------------------------------+-----------+--------------+
| | | | |
Chramn, SIGIBERT I., = Brunhildis. CHARIBERT I., GUNTRAM, |
d. 561. K.of Austrasia,| K. of Paris, K. of Burgundy,|
561-575. | 561-567. 561-593. |
| | |
| Bertha = Ethelbert, |
CHILDEBERT II., K. of Kent. |
K. of Austrasia, |
575-596. |
K. of Burgundy, +-----------------------+
593-596. |
| CHILPERICH I., = 1 Audovena.
+--------------------+ K. of Soissons,| 2 Galswintha.
| | 561-584. | 3 Fredegundis.
THEUDEBERT II., THEUDERICH II., |
K. of Austrasia, K. of Burgundy, |
596-612. 596-612. |
K. of Austrasia, |
612-613. |
| |
SIGIBERT II., |
K. of Austrasia and |
Burgundy, 613. |
(1) (1) (1) (3)|
+-----------+-------------+-----------------+
| | | |
Theudebert, Merovech, Chlodovech, CHLOTHAR II.,
d. 575. d. 577. d. 580. K. of Neustria, 584.
K. of all the
Franks,
613-628.
|
+---------------------------+
| |
DAGOBERT I., CHARIBERT II.,
K. of Austrasia, K. of Aquitaine,
623-628. 628-630.
K. of all the Franks, ?
630-638. ?
| Boggis, D. of Aquitaine.
| ?
| ?
| Eudo, D. of Aquitaine.
| This descent is
| uncertain.
| |
| |
_a_ _b_
_a_ _b_
| |
DAGOBERT I., Eudo, D. of Aquitaine,
K. of Austrasia, 717-735.
623-628. |
K. of all the Franks, Hunold, D. of Aquitaine,
630-638. 736-745.
| |
+---------------------+ Waifer, D. of Aquitaine,
| | 745-768.
SIGIBERT III., CHLODOVECH II.,
K. of Austrasia, K. of Neustria and
632-656. Burgundy, 638-56.
| |
| +--+--------------+----------------+
| | | |
DAGOBERT II., CHLOTHAR III., CHILDERICH, THEUDERICH III.,
K. of Austrasia, K. of Neustria, K. of Austrasia, K. of Neustria,
674-678. 656-670. 660-673. 673-698.
? K. of all K. of all K. of all
? the Franks, the Franks, the Franks,
? 656-660. 670-673. 678-691.
? | |
? +------------+ +----------+--------+
? | | |
CHLOTHAR IV., CHILPERICH II., CHLODOVECH III., CHILDEBERT III.,
K. of Austrasia, K. of Neustria, K. of all K. of all
717-719. 715-720. the Franks, the Franks,
This Prince’s K. of all 671-695. 695-711.
descent is the Franks, |
uncertain. 719-720. DAGOBERT III.,
| K. of all
CHILDERICH II., the Franks,
K. of all 711-715.
the Franks, |
742-752. THEUDERICH IV.,
Deposed by Pippin. K. of all
the
Franks,
720-737.
To protect the young Childebert against the attacks of Chilperich, his
mother allied herself with the boy’s uncle, Guntram, king of Burgundy.
Guntram, who had no children of his own, designated Childebert heir to
all his dominions, and took up his cause with vigour. But he was not a
very warlike prince, and it was as much as he could do to protect his
own realm against the active and ruthless king of Neustria. Though
Burgundy and Austrasia were allied, Chilperich succeeded in conquering
their united armies, under the Burgundian general, Mummolus, and seizing
Tours, Poictiers, and all the north of Aquitaine. He would probably have
carried his arms further if internal troubles had not arisen to check
him. The Bretons of Armorica burst into rebellion, and had to be put
down, and other risings were excited by his ruthless and excessive
taxation. [Sidenote: Atrocities of Fredegundis.] But his worst vexations
were those of his own household, caused by the strife of his elder sons
with their stepmother, Fredegundis. All through these years the wicked
queen had been fearfully active. Theudebert and Merovech, the eldest of
her husband’s family, were dead, but their brother, Chlodovech, still
stood between Fredegundis’ children and the throne. In 580 the plague
swept all over Gaul, and two sons of Fredegundis’ were carried off by
it. She accused their step-brother of having caused their death by
witchcraft, and got her husband to permit her to execute him. But when
her last child died, two years later, the wretched woman’s rage and
grief led her into the wildest outbursts of cruelty. She accused numbers
of persons about the court of magic arts practised against her boy, and
burnt them alive, or broke them on the wheel. Many other acts of murder
and treachery are attributed to her, notably the death of Praetextatus,
bishop of Rouen, whom she detested for the part he had taken in the
marriage of Merovech and Brunhildis, and her crimes fill many a page in
the gloomy annals of Gregory of Tours. A legend tells how two holy
bishops once stood before the gate of the palace at Soissons. ‘What
seest thou over this house?’ said one. ‘I see nothing but the red
standard which Chilperich the king has ordered to be set up on its
topmost gable.’ ‘But _I_ see,’ said the first, ‘the sword of God raised
above that wicked house to destroy it altogether.’
Meanwhile, Chilperich’s wars with his brother of Burgundy and his nephew
of Austrasia continued to fill central Gaul with blood and ashes. They
ceased for a moment when the Austrasian nobles, against the will of
Brunhildis, forced their little king to make peace and alliance with his
father’s murderer. But no one could long trust Chilperich, and after
less than a year the old league between Austrasia and Burgundy was
renewed.
[Sidenote: Death of Chilperich I., 584.] In 584 Chilperich, to the great
joy of all Gaul, was murdered by an unknown hand:—‘As he was returning
from the hunt to his royal manor of Chelles, a certain man struck him
with a knife beneath the shoulder, and pierced his belly with a second
stroke, whereupon he fell down and breathed out his foul soul,’ says the
chronicler. He was perhaps the worst of the wicked Merovings—cruel,
unjust, gluttonous, and drunken, vain, boastful, and irreligious, the
worthy son of the ruffian Chlothar, and grandson of the murderer
Chlodovech. But his untiring energy and reckless courage bore him safely
through many an evil day, and he died leaving the kingdom he had
inherited in 561 increased to three times its original bulk.
Queen Fredegundis had borne one more son, named Chlothar, to her husband
just four months before his murder, so that Neustria was not left
altogether without an heir. But Fredegundis feared that Guntram and his
nephew would now seize the whole realm, and slay her with her infant.
She took sanctuary at Paris; but when the king of Burgundy arrived he
showed his superiority to the morals of his family by sparing the life
of the wicked queen, and recognising her son as king of Neustria.
Brunhildis sought in vain to induce Guntram to give over to her the
murderess of her husband; he refused, and Fredegundis took advantage of
his kindness to hire assassins to make attempts on the lives both of
Brunhildis and her son the young king of Austrasia. Luckily the project
failed in both cases.
The civil wars of the Franks now ceased for a moment. Guntram, a mild
and not unamiable character, controlled both his nephews, the
fifteen-year-old Childebert of Austrasia, and the one-year-old Chlothar
II.; and for nine years the three kingdoms had a certain measure of
peace, broken only by wars with the Lombards and Visigoths. [Sidenote:
Wars with Goths and Lombards.] Guntram seems to have hoped that the
fratricidal wars of his family might be staved off for a space by
turning the energy of the Franks against their southern neighbours, and
engaged himself in a war with Reccared, king of Spain, while the
Austrasian nobles were induced by the gifts of the emperor Maurice to
assist the Byzantines in their struggle against the Lombards. Both wars
were long and fruitless. In the West, the repeated attacks of the
Burgundian armies on Septimania were all beaten back. In the East, the
Austrasians twice crossed the Alps, and wasted the valley of the Po, but
in 588 they received such a defeat at the hands of king Authari that
they made peace with him and withdrew across the Alps. In 590
Childebert, who had now attained his twentieth year, and was governing
for himself, renewed the struggle; but his army was thinned by famine
and pestilence before the walls of Verona, and he was finally fain to
renew the peace with Agilulf, the successor of Authari.
Unfortunate foreign wars, however, were better than strife in the heart
of Gaul, and the last years of Guntram were fairly free from this pest.
He was only troubled by one rebellion: a conspiracy between his
illegitimate brother, Gundovald, and two great Romano-Gallic dukes,
Mummolus and Desiderius, who were apparently wishing to become
king-makers, and rule under the name of an obscure and incapable
pretender. But the day of the complete triumph of the great State
officials over the kingship had not yet come, and though he was for a
moment master of all Aquitaine, Gundovald was easily put down, and
executed in company with his chief supporter Mummolus (585).
Guntram died in 593, and his nephew Childebert received his dominions in
Burgundy and Aquitaine, thus becoming ruler of four-fifths of the whole
Frankish kingdom in his twenty-third year. Under his nominal sway
Austrasia had been the theatre of a long struggle between his mother
Brunhildis and the great counts and dukes, whose plots and riots were
secretly abetted by Fredegundis. From her home in Neustria the ruthless
widow of Chilperich did her best to set her nephew’s kingdom in
disorder, and promised lands and titles to the Austrasian chiefs if they
would murder Brunhildis and Childebert, and proclaim her own son,
Chlothar, king of Austrasia. But the stern and able Brunhildis
unravelled and crushed all these conspiracies, and had the triumph of
seeing her son attain his majority, and assume the rule in his own name.
[Sidenote: Brunhildis attacks Neustria.] The moment that the pacific
Guntram was dead, Brunhildis and her son, freed from all restraint, set
out to punish the intrigues of Fredegundis, and by invading Neustria to
make an end of her and her boy Chlothar. But the fortune of war declared
in favour of the Western Franks. At Droisy, near Soissons, the army of
Childebert was defeated with the loss of no less than 30,000 men, and
Neustria was saved from conquest. The war continued without definite
result, for Childebert was prevented from using his full strength by a
rebellion beyond the Rhine, among the Warni in Suabia. Probably his
superior force must in the end have carried the day, but the entire
aspect of affairs was suddenly changed by his unexpected death in 596,
at the early age of twenty-six. He left two infant sons, Theudebert and
Theuderich, to the care of their grandmother, who found herself, though
she was now verging on old age, once more called upon to assume the
regency.
The death of Childebert was to the kingly authority a fatal blow, from
which it never recovered. His own long minority had raised the counts
and dukes to a pitch of power which they had never gained before, and
all the efforts of Brunhildis had not succeeded in fully holding them
down. The equally long minority of his sons was the last blow to the
kingship. Their grandmother struggled with all her might to retain the
power for the kingly race, and to curb her unruly subjects. But though
she worked with untiring energy and zeal, and kept the reins of
government in her own grasp for some time, the treacherous nobles, bent
on their own aggrandisement at the expense of the royal authority, were
at last too much for her.
[Sidenote: Second Regency of Brunhildis.] Of the two sons of Childebert
II. Theudebert, the elder, became king of Austrasia, Theuderich, the
younger, king of Burgundy, the legacy of his uncle Guntram. It was an
uneasy inheritance to which they succeeded, for Fredegundis saw her
opportunity, and urged the Neustrians forward against her great-nephews.
At Lafaux near Laon the Austrasians suffered a great defeat, and all the
lands as far as the Meuse fell into the hands of the queen of Neustria.
But in the moment of triumph, her son’s throne being now firmly
established, and her rival’s power on the decline, the wicked
Fredegundis died at Rouen. Her countless murders and cruelties met no
chastisement on earth, and the son for whom she had risked so much was
destined to carry out to a successful end the schemes in pursuit of
which she had so long striven, and to unite all the Frankish realms
under his sceptre (597).
The death of Fredegundis brought no relief to Brunhildis. For two years
more she struggled on against the intrigues of the Austrasian nobility;
duke Wintrio, who led the opposition against her, was seized and
executed in 598. [Sidenote: Exile of Brunhildis.] But in 599 a final
rising took her by surprise, and she was forced to fly alone and
unaccompanied from Metz to save her life. She escaped to Burgundy, where
she took refuge with her younger grandson Theuderich, and was there
received with all honour. Two successive Mayors of the Palace, Protadius
and Claudius, both of Romano-Gallic blood, lent themselves to her
schemes, and the royal power in Burgundy was still upheld by her strong
hand.
The curse of fratricidal wars was never to depart from the house of the
Merovings. When Theudebert II. and Theuderich II. grew up and reached
early manhood, they united for a moment to attack their cousin Chlothar,
and to recover from him the lands between the Meuse, the Seine, and the
Loire, with Paris, Rouen, and Tours. But soon after they fell to strife,
and it would seem that the old Brunhildis was greatly to blame for its
outbreak. She was burning to revenge herself on the Austrasian nobles
for the banishment she had endured at their hands, and stirred up the
Burgundians to war. She and the Mayor Protadius were far more eager than
the counts and dukes of Burgundy to begin the strife, and when the two
armies came in sight of each other, the soldiers of Theuderich lowered
their weapons, slew Protadius when he strove to force them on, and
compelled their young king to make peace with his brother. [Sidenote:
Wars of Theudebert II. and Theuderich II., 612.] But the curse that
rested on the Merovings was not so easily to be exorcised; Brunhildis
and Theuderich were determined to have their way, and ere very long the
war was renewed. The Austrasians were beaten at Toul, their lands
wasted, and the victorious Theuderich forced his way as far as Zülpich,
in the very heart of his brother’s realm. Here Theudebert withstood him
for a second time, was again beaten, and fell into the hands of the
Burgundians. He was led before his grandmother, who assailed him with
bitter reproaches, and bade him be tonsured and become a monk. But this
did not content the king of Burgundy; a few days later he had his
brother dragged out of his monastery and put to death (612).
The revenge of heaven seemed to be called down by the wicked deed of the
young king of Burgundy. Only five months after his brother’s murder he
was smitten down by an attack of dysentery, and died at Metz in the very
prime of his early manhood (613).
Now for the third time the unhappy Brunhildis was left alone, with a
helpless child as her only stay. Once more she steeled her heart and
faced the situation; she led her great-grandson Sigibert, the eldest son
of Theuderich, before the assembly of the East Franks, and bade them do
homage to him as king of Austrasia and Burgundy. For a moment they bent
before her, and Sigibert II. was acknowledged as ruler of the East
Franks. But the Austrasians were determined to have no more of
Brunhildis’ rule; they sent secretly to Chlothar, king of Neustria, and
bade him arm and invade his cousin’s realm, for no hand should be raised
against him. When the Neustrian king marched into Austrasia, Warnachar,
the mayor of the palace, and most of the nobles of the land took arms
and joined him. Brunhildis with her great-grandson fled to Burgundy, and
raised an army there, with which she faced the Neustrians near the
headwaters of the Aisne. But when Chlothar’s army came in sight, the
Burgundian patrician Aletheus and the dukes Rocco and Sigvald led off
their troops, and joined the invader. In a moment the whole of
Sigibert’s army had deserted or dispersed. [Sidenote: Death of
Brunhildis, 614.] Brunhildis and the little king fled away as far as
Orbe, hard by the lake of Neuchatel, where the emissaries of Chlothar
overtook and captured them. They were led before the king of Neustria,
the worthy son of Fredegundis. ‘Here is the woman,’ he cried, ‘by whose
intrigues and wars ten princes of the Franks have come to their
deaths,’[26] and he bade his soldiers scourge the old queen, and then
bind her by hands and feet to the heels of a wild horse, who dragged her
among stones and rocks till her body was torn limb from limb. The boy
Sigibert and his younger brother Corbo were strangled.
Footnote 26:
We can reckon Theudebert, son of Chilperich, and Theudebert, son of
Childebert, slain in battle; Chilperich, whose murder was sometimes
put down to Brunhildis by her enemies; Sigibert, who was murdered in a
war to which Brunhildis had urged him; Merovech, who was murdered for
marrying her. But who were the other five?
Thus perished Brunhildis, and with her the greatness of the house of the
Merovings. For the future it was the counts and the mayors of the palace
who were to exercise real power among the Franks, and not the kings.
Chlothar, who had conquered only by the treachery of the nobles, was,
with all his descendants, to be their servant, not their master.
Considering that she was a woman and a foreigner, it is wonderful that
Brunhildis continued for so long to sway the councils of Austrasia. Save
her abilities and her force of character, she had no advantage, yet she
not only dominated in succession her husband, her son, and her grandson,
but held down the unruly counts and dukes, who were neither allied to
her by blood nor constantly under her eye and influence. [Sidenote:
Character of Brunhildis.] The tale of her life has sufficiently shown
her qualities and defects. That she was something more than a fury
stirring up war and strife from personal revenge for the blood of her
sister and her husband is clear enough. She was an administrator of
marked ability. Almost alone among the rulers of the Franks, she is
noted as a builder and a founder. Churches, hospitals, and monasteries
she erected in great numbers. The old Roman fortresses and military
roads were also her care. To this day some of the high roads of Belgium
still bear her name, and as the ‘Chaussées de Brunehaute’ preserve her
memory as the first potentate who cared for them after the Franks came
into the land. That she was a sincerely religious woman would seem to be
vouched for by the series of her letters to Gregory the Great, which
moved the good pontiff’s admiration. But sincere piety was not in those
days, any more than in our own, inconsistent with a headstrong
impatience of opposition, and an unscrupulous readiness to sweep
obstacles out of the way. There is no doubt that Brunhildis struck down
the Austrasian counts by the dagger, as well as by the sword, when they
intrigued against her. She never forgave her own grandson Theudebert II.
for allowing her to be driven out of his realm, and was not satisfied
till, ten years after his offence, she caught him, and forced him to
become a monk. Her enmity pursued not only Fredegundis and Chilperich,
the murderers of her sister and husband, but their young son and their
subjects long years after they themselves were dead. Yet, if she was
relentless and unforgiving, we must remember that few rulers in history
have suffered such wrongs and faced such odds. Compared with her
contemporaries, Brunhildis might almost pass for a heroine and a saint.
Chlothar II., though he became king of all the Frankish realms by the
murder of Brunhildis and her great-grandchildren, acquired little real
power thereby. The Austrasians and Burgundians, who had combined with
him to destroy the old queen, wrung terms from him which deprived him of
many undoubted regal rights. The dukes Warnachar and Ratho, who were
made mayors of the palace of the two realms, stipulated that they were
to hold their offices for life, not at the king’s pleasure. [Sidenote:
Decay of Royal power.] For the future the mayorship became an office of
far greater importance than it had yet been. Another step in the
weakening of the kingship is shown by the fact that the legislation of
the Franks from this time forward is always noted as being done by the
king, with the counsel and consent of his bishops, counts, and dukes. A
code of laws which Chlothar II. put forth for the Suabians, somewhere
about the year 620, is indorsed not merely with his own authority, but
with that of thirty-three bishops, thirty-four dukes, and sixty-five
counts. The fact that the reign of Chlothar was exceptionally fertile in
legislation is probably to be accounted for by the fact that he was
compelled to listen to the demands of his nobles, and grant redress to
their grievances, rather than by any particular taste of his own for the
enacting of laws. When, for example, we hear that he ‘met the mayor
Warnachar, and all the bishops, and great men of Burgundy at Bonneuil,
and there assented to all their just petitions,’ we must remember that
he was facing an irremovable mayor of the palace, and a nation who had
freely given themselves into his hands on stated terms, and had no
longer over them the unlimited authority that a Chlodovech or a
Theuderich had owned a hundred years before. [Sidenote: Troubles of
Chlothar II.] Nothing can show more clearly the growing weakness of the
king than an incident which occurred at a great national gathering of
Neustrians and Burgundians, at Clichy, towards the end of his reign. In
the midst of the council a brawl arose, and the followers of a duke
named Ægyna, slew Ermenhar, the steward of the palace of the king’s son.
At once all the Neustrians seized their arms, and drew apart into two
bands. While Ægyna and his friends seized the hill of Montmartre, and
formed their array on its brow, the larger party, headed by Brodulf, a
kinsman of the slain man, started off to storm the position. The king
was only able to keep the peace by inducing the Burgundians, who were
not interested in the quarrel, to follow him, and to promise to attack
whichever of the two sides should strike the first blow. He dismissed
the assembly, and was unable to punish any one, either for the murder or
for the riot which had ensued.
Chlothar, with his diminished royal prerogative, seems to have had
neither the opportunity nor the power to engage in wars of conquest
beyond the bounds of his realm. [Sidenote: Samo and the Slavs.] He had
to look on, without stirring, while a great, if ephemeral, kingdom was
built up beyond his eastern frontier. Behind the Thuringians and
Bavarians, on the Elbe and Oder, there had dwelt for the last two
hundred years, since the German races had migrated westward, a group of
small and disunited Slavonic tribes, calling themselves Wiltzes, Sorbes,
Abotrites, and Czechs. Their dissensions had kept them from being
dangerous neighbours till the time of Chlothar. But about 620 a Frankish
adventurer, named Samo, who had gone eastward, half as trader half as
buccaneer, united many of the Slavonic tribes, and became their king. He
gradually extended his power all down the valley of the Elbe, on both
sides of the Bohemian mountains, and was soon to prove himself a serious
trouble to the realm of the Merovings.
Towards the end of his reign, Chlothar II. made his son Dagobert king of
Austrasia, while he was still a very young man. The chief councillors by
whose aid Dagobert administered his realm were two men whose names form
a landmark in Frankish history—Arnulf, bishop of Metz, and count Pippin
the elder, the ancestors of the great house of the Karlings. [Sidenote:
St. Arnulf and Pippin the elder.] Bishop Arnulf was the wisest and best
of the prelates of Austrasia, and, after a long life of usefulness in
church and state, won the name of saint by laying down his crozier and
ring and retiring to a hermitage, to spend his last fifteen years in the
solitudes of the Vosges. Count Pippin, a noble from the land between
Meuse and Mosel, whose ancestral abodes are said to have been the manors
of Hersthal and Landen, was appointed mayor of the palace, and lived in
the closest concord and amity with Arnulf. They cemented their alliance
by a marriage, Begga, the daughter of Pippin, being wedded to Ansigisel,
the son of the bishop; for Arnulf, like many of the Frankish clergy,
lived in lawful wedlock. From these parents sprang the whole of the line
of mayors, kings, and emperors whose mighty deeds were to make their
comparatively unimportant ancestors famous in history.
King Chlothar II. died in 628, and his son, Dagobert I., became ruler of
all the Frankish realms. He was, for a Meroving, a very creditable
ruler, though he lived with three wives at once, and indulged in
occasional outbursts of wrong-headedness. For the two first years of his
reign he chose to share the sovereign power with his brother Charibert,
whom he made king of Aquitaine out of pure fraternal affection. But when
Charibert died, in 630, he resumed his southern dominions, disregarding
Charibert’s three sons. [Sidenote: Reign of Dagobert I., 628-38.]
Dagobert was the last of the Merovings whose will was of much importance
in the ordering of the Frankish realms; his successors were to be mere
shadows. Even in his own time the royal power was already of little
force in Austrasia, where the king leant entirely upon the support of
Pippin, who, with his son-in-law, Ansigisel, held the post of mayor of
the palace for the whole sixteen years of Dagobert’s reign. His loyalty
to the king concealed the fact that he was far more powerful in the
eastern kingdom than Dagobert himself. The king had several sharp
quarrels with him, but never dared to depose him from his post lest
trouble should ensue. In Neustria no great mayor of the palace had yet
arisen, and there Dagobert was ruler in fact as well as name. Hence it
is not surprising that he always dwelt west of the Meuse, and made Paris
his favourite residence.
Dagobert was the last Meroving who took arms to extend the limits of the
Frankish power. He supported the pretender Sisinand in Spain, by the aid
of a Burgundian army, made an alliance with the emperor Heraclius
against the Lombards, and entered into a protracted war with the
Slavonic tribes of the East. On the Elbe, the kingdom of Samo the Frank
was now at the height of its power. Dagobert took alarm at its rapid
growth, and when the Wends plundered part of Thuringia, in 630, sent
against them three great armies, comprising the whole military force of
Austrasia. Two of these expeditions fared well, but the third suffered
complete annihilation at Wogastisburg, in Bohemia, and the victorious
Slavs ravaged Thuringia and Bavaria, from Saal to Danube, with fire and
sword, till Radulf, duke of Thuringia, at last checked them, in 633.
Dagobert I. died in 638. He left two sons, Sigibert III., aged nine, and
Chlodovech II., aged six. It was the long minority of these two boys
which finally achieved the ruin of the Merovingian house. While Sigibert
and Chlodovech were growing up to manhood, the future of the Frankish
realms was being settled by the sword, the all-important issue at stake
being the question whether the house of Pippin and Arnulf should retain
permanent possession of the Austrasian mayorship of the palace or should
sink out of sight. Pippin the Old died in 639, the second year of
Sigibert’s reign. His son Grimoald at once proclaimed himself heir to
his father’s office. [Sidenote: Grimoald, Mayor of the Palace.] But a
great part of the Austrasian nobles, headed by Otto, the foster-father
of the young king, refused to acknowledge his right to the mayorship,
and a fierce war of three years was required to settle the dispute. At
last the son of Pippin conquered, and for fourteen years (642-56) was
undisputed master of Austrasia. King Sigibert, indeed, grew up to man’s
estate, but he was completely dominated by his servant, and never made
any endeavour to take the power out of his hands. Hence he is known as
the first of the _Rois Fainéants_, or do-nothing kings, who were from
henceforth to be the rule among the house of the Merovings.
In Neustria, meanwhile, the royal power was saved for a time by the
cleverness of queen Nanthildis, a lady of great piety, the widow of
Dagobert, who acted as guardian for her younger son Chlodovech. She
enlisted in her cause the Neustrian mayor of the palace, Erchinoald, who
was akin to the royal house himself,[27] and therefore not unfavourable
to its dominance. Not till these two passed away was the Western realm
to sink into the same state as the Eastern. But the fall of royalty
here, too, was now imminent.
Footnote 27:
He was brother of Dagobert’s mother, it would appear, and therefore
great-uncle to the little king.
------------------------------------------------------------------------