POWER, PRIDE, AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN LATER MEROVINGIAN GAUL: A RESPONSE Yaniv Fox

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1 POWER, PRIDE, AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN LATER MEROVINGIAN GAUL: A RESPONSE Yaniv Fox The story of the decline of the Merovingian dynasty is inextricably linked to the rise of its aristocracy. The Pippinids were but the last, and ultimately most successful, in a long line of assertive and belligerent nobles, who challenged royal authority throughout the duration of Merovingian history. Reading through Gregory of Tours Histories, one is easily impressed by the wealth of stories involving insubordinate, rebellious, or even regicidal behavior by the Frankish ruling class. While Gregory s kings and queens fell to assassins knives, poison- filled chalices, and a variety of other sordid ruses with alarming frequency, the notion of the Merovingian kingship itself as being in mortal peril is never seriously entertained. Even the most severe threat to royal hegemony covered by the Histories - the Gundovald affair - was negotiated in such a way that presupposed the exclusivity of the Merovingian claim to the Frankish kingship. A foreboding sense of erosion in royal authority becomes slightly more palpable in Fredegar. This is not an immediately intuitive assertion, because as a rule, most of the new royal protagonists introduced by Fredegar died of natural causes. Once the historic enmity between the offspring of Brunhild and those of Fredegund played out to its bloody conclusion, stability had been restored, and the bella civilia which so vexed Gregory were, to a large extent, a thing of the past. While the right of the Merovingians to rule was not being contested, the centrifugal tendencies of the aristocracy were becoming ever more pronounced. Chlothar II, and to an even greater extent his son Dagobert I, were able to play the aristocratic factions that populated their courts against one another and in so doing to secure their own hold on power. But this policy came at a price. As Guy Halsall has noted, the aristocracy of the seventh century was becoming increasingly more powerful and as a result, more aware of its uniqueness. Compared to other monarchs around the Mediterranean, the Merovingians were fantastically rich, and during the seventh century this opulence, primarily in the form of landed wealth, was gradually finding its way into the hands of the aristocracy. We all know how the story of the Merovingians ended, so it is very hard to avoid looking for ominous cracks in the structure, even relatively early on. However, the truth is that the Frankish royalty and aristocracy were mutually dependent for almost the entire duration of Merovingian history, and nowhere was this interdependence more visible than in the

2 countryside. Since most of our sources for this period are ecclesiastical, the integration of the Frankish hinterland is most commonly seen in terms of the penetration of urban Christianity into a superficially proselytized periphery. Such a view is undoubtedly helped along by another important contemporary phenomenon - the emergence and extraordinarily successful spread of rural monasticism. And so, when we compare the Francia inhabited by Gregory to the one depicted by Fredegar, we inevitably come to the conclusion that the political center of gravity was slowly shifting from the urban to the rural, and almost incidentally, from the Gallo- Roman to the Frankish. Before adopting such a view, we should pause to consider that the political, economic, and ethnic realities of the Merovingian kingdoms were probably far more complex than either of these compositions lets on. Charting the processual shift in political power through the historiographical works of the Merovingian chroniclers, one caveat which warrants mention is that the narrative interests of Gregory lay elsewhere than those of Fredegar. This point becomes even more noticeable when we add hagiography into the fray. As a diocesan bishop, Gregory came to view the world around him, and the political machinery which drove it, primarily in terms of civitates. His ecclesiastical career unfolded within the urban medium, and so did his various dealings with the long succession of monarchs he encountered as bishop of Tours. Moreover, when Gregory was composing the Histories, the crystallization of the Frankish kingdoms into three relatively stable entities was certainly underway, but it was nowhere as complete as the geopolitical landscape described by Fredegar. For Gregory and his generation, Chilperic ruled the kingdom of Soissons, Sigibert the kingdom of Metz, Childebert of Orléans, and so on. This is very different from the Neustrian, Austrasian, and Burgundian kings we have come to expect from Fredegar. The hagiographical genre, which truly came into its own during the seventh century, had its own reasons for employing the urban- rural dichotomy. At the core of this remarkable collection of works usually stood monastic heroes, men who proved their worth by braving the elements and by waging battle with the demons and taming the beasts which inhabited the proverbial deserts that lay beyond the city s walls. In his seminal Vita Columbani, Jonas of Bobbio continuously moves his protagonist from the center to the periphery. The court of the king, where Columbanus comes looking for patronage, is diametrically opposed to the wastelands in which he erects monasteries, usually atop the ruined vestiges of a pagan past.

3 What Jonas does not tell us is that these abandoned castra, supposedly dotted with the old statues of classical deities, were royal property. Recent archeological work, moreover, has demonstrated that many of these alleged deserts already contained some rudimentary Christian shrines. The Vita Columbani would become the narrative basis upon which an outpouring of hagiographical creativity was modeled in the seventh century. Such works as the Life of Filibert and the Life of Arnulf of Metz, to name but a few, all contain similar motifs of liminal movement. Similarly, the Life of Gall, the Life of Eligius of Noyon, and the Life of Audomar invoke the image of rural pagans and their superstitious practices. The fact that all of these compositions were the product of the Columbanian monastic nexus, whose most recognizable feature was the establishment of rural, aristocratically- funded monastic communities, leads us to envision seventh- century monasticism as having taken place against a rural backdrop teaming with lively crowds of rambunctious pagans, who only stop their hypnotic dances and beer sacrifices when they are sufficiently frightened by the advent of a holy man. This depiction is, of course, flawed on several levels. Firstly, the political motivations of Columbanian monasticism were often very pragmatic. For the Merovingians whose fisc supported the brunt of this activity, the resulting monasteries were valuable because they enabled kings to assert their control over regions that were, until that point, only tentatively held. For the aristocratic groups that constructed the monasteries and often appointed themselves to abbatial positions within them, these houses were a tool for upward mobility, proximity to royal resources, and a means of consolidating their own proprietary interests. Secondly, despite the skepticism so prevalent in the introductions of the editors of the Monumenta, the narrative nuclei of many of these compositions have been proven to be roughly contemporary. Regretfully perhaps, the more colorful aspects of the story - pagan sacrifices included - were, more often than not, a Carolingian addition, and cannot be seen to faithfully represent the realities of monastic activity in the Frankish countryside. For the rural population, resistance to incoming religious activists could have had its roots in a variety of different reasons, which need not involve paganism. On other occasions, those very same rustic denizens of the wilderness were perfectly content to embrace monastic efforts in their

4 vicinity and to tie their respective fates to that of the monastery, to which the countless donation charters produced in the eighth century can surely testify. Once we reach the time of the Vita Karoli, such literary conventions are compounded by Einhard s overwhelming desire to denigrate the previous dynasty by ridiculing its outdated practices. But we would do well to remember that the early Carolingians had their own hinterlands to contend with. For Pippin II, control over the countryside was the stepping stone to power. His prudent policy of land management, and the hefty dowry of rural property he received when he married Plectrude were the tools that ultimately enabled him to seize power. It is also needless to reiterate that the rise of the Carolingians was a process riddled with failures, and that their attempts to encroach upon rural centers of Neustrian, Burgundian, and Provençal political power were opposed quite efficiently at first. Most of the career of Charles Martel, and a significant portion of the tenures of his immediate successors were spent reintegrating areas that had been lost during the travails of the late- seventh and early- eighth centuries. The literary responses to this challenge, and to the new challenges that followed on the heels of their military successes, drew their inspiration from traditional models of hagiographic rationalization. Given that the image of the final Merovingians as rois fainéants has been largely abandoned by scholars, at least until the reigns of Chlothar IV and his successors, we may doubt whether royal presence in the countryside during the early eighth century should, in fact, be construed as an act of defiance or as an exodus from the cities. Merovingian and Carolingian kings did not spend much time in cities, but their symbolic importance was certainly recognized by both dynasties. In the last bout of Neustrian resistance, Chilperic II was able, together with his mayor Ragamfred, to attack Cologne, seriously weakening Plectrude. Even as late as 719, Charles Martel is described as ceding an unnamed sedes regalis to the same king. When attempting to interpret the cultural and political symbolism of the civitas and the ways in which it interacted with its purported opposite - the rural expanse - we should be aware that these categories would not have carried the same meaning for the people living in the cities, villages, and remote farms of Merovingian Gaul as they do for us. In fact, for archeologists seeking to map elusive centers of power, they are often quite difficult to tell apart, especially since the environs of the city often morphed into the countryside, and were not always so abruptly and clearly separated. This straightforward division would surely have

5 been meaningless for the peasants worshiping at the sarcophagus of St Benignus, located in the cemetery of Dijon - an intermediate space between city and country. They would have been equally so for Bishop Gregory of Langres, who reluctantly adopted the cult he initially denounced as pagan, but was content to leave the body among the graves, moving it only slightly to a nearby crypt. In summary, urban dwellings and their rural equivalents were complementary components of social and political life. For the ruling strata of the late Merovingian kingdoms, city and country would have had different roles, but both were necessary functions in the wider political game. For Merovingian kings, the city was not the only natural space for exercising their power, but as long as they could exercise it, they were present on the urban scene. In the dying days of the dynasty, the presence of Theuderic IV or Childeric III in either space would have been largely inconsequential.