Late Merovingian France. History and Hagiography 640–720.pdf

LATE MEROVINGIAN

FRANCE

HISTORY AND HAGIOGRAPHY

640–720

by Paul Fouracre and Richard A. Gerberding

Manchester University Press

Manchester and New York

distributed exclusively in the USA and Canada by St. Martin’s Press

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Introduction

The seventh century in its historical context

Peter Brown has described the Roman Empire as an exquisite border

of lace sewn to the sackcloth of the hinterland around the shores of the

Mediterranean. 1 The Roman Empire was an urban phenomenon.

Where the Romans conquered, they either took over existing cities or

built new ones, and it was in the cities that their culture flourished.

The hinterlands produced; the cities consumed. The hinterlands

worked; the cities ruled. The cities taxed; the hinterlands paid. The

hinterlands remained largely as they were; the cities became Roman.

And although land was the economic base of Roman life, the political

use of land was filtered through the medium of the cities. The cities

through the use of money, among other things, ruled through

permanent bureaucracies, paid troops and aristocratic magistrates who

had vast rural estates but who lived in the cities and were the guiding

force of the urban culture.

Medieval culture, on the other hand, is not urban but rural. Medieval

Europe, to be sure, had its urban centres, but they were generally small

by Roman standards. By the seventh century they no longer housed

Europe’s rulers and their culture was not foreign to the hinterlands

round about them. For the most part, they did not contain the

dominant aristocracy, a permanent bureaucracy or an organised taxing

structure, nor did they sponsor paid armies. In other words, they were

no longer the medium between the wealth the land produced and the

use of that wealth for political ends. Europe’s political structure had

come to sit upon the land directly and nothing was more fundamental

to its political history. It is in the seventh century, the period of our

study, that we can first see many important facets of the new politics.

So far we have used the rather abstract phrase ‘political ends’. Let us

be more specific; our sources certainly were. Seventh-century chroni-

clers and hagiographers had no great love of the abstract; for them the

1 P. Brown, The World of late Antiquity (New York, 1980), p. 12.

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

explained the nature of early medieval kingship, 3 but we can content

ourselves with a few important observations. First and foremost, the

king was different from the nobility; there was an unbridgeable gap

between them. We find what can appear at first to be a remarkable

commitment by the Franks to exclusive rule by their hereditary

Merovingian kings. But this state of affairs obviously served to

dissuade non-royal aspirants from breaking the peace in attempts to

gain the throne. Modern descriptions of early medieval kings empha-

sise their hereditary legitimacy. Legitimacy, however, is a misleading

word. The Frankish sources do not use it to describe their kings,

probably because the authors, writing in Latin, were very aware of its

base in the word for ‘law’ ( lex , legis ). The Merovingians’ status was

based not at all in anything as changeable or open to interpretation as

law, but in their bodies; they were born royal. Rather than talk about

a king’s legitimacy, the sources, following their preference for the

concrete rather than the abstract, will list his father and perhaps his

grandfather. Aristocracy and nobility, likewise, are words not found in

our sources. We would not expect to find ‘aristocracy’, since it is

Greek, and to express the idea of nobility the sources use the adjective

nobile (famous or excellent) modifying the word genus (high birth).

Modern discussions juxtaposing a nobility which enjoyed its privi-

leged position because of its lineage ( Geburtsadel ) against one which

did so because of the functions or service it performed ( Dienstadel ) offer

refinements not found in our sources. In the contemporary view, the

aristocracy and the king both enjoyed their position by the right of

birth.

By the seventh century the Franks had long since been Catholic

Christians. In a system such as the Roman, all the urban characteris-

tics mentoned above, and especially the cities’ concentration of

movable wealth, acted as mediating and stabilising mechanisms

between the land which produced wealth and the rulers who used it.

Without a flourishing urban culture, however, early medieval society

had need of other institutions to perform the mediating functions, and

to a large extent it was the Church which did so. The Church began

to collect land very early on, in fact, three-quarters of the land the

Church was ever to own was already in its hands by the seventh

3 Cf. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship in England and on the Continent

(Oxford, 1971); P. H. Sawyer and I. N. Wood (eds), Early Medieval Kingship (Leeds,

1971); and T. Mayer (ed.), Das Königtum. Seine geistigen und rechtlichen Grundlagen.

Vorträge und Forschungen , 3, (Lindau and Konstanz, 1956).