While Theodoric was holding court in Italy other Germanic peoples were successfully setting up kingdoms. As early as the fourth century the Franks had been used by the Romans to keep order on the Rhine frontier and, in the disastrous years 406-7, they played some part in resisting the influx of other German invaders. Between 430 and 440 Franks are found settled between Tournai and Cambrai and it was in Tournai in 1653 that the tomb of the early Frankish ‘king’ Childeric (died c.481) was found intact. The king was surrounded by a treasury of gold and silver, two great swords with scabbards inlaid with garnets, and a rich cloak, in short all the paraphernalia of royalty. Childeric’s father, Merovech, gave the name Merovingian to the dynasty that followed.
It was Childeric’s son Clovis (c.466-5u) who was to expand the kingdom. He threw back the Alamanni towards the Upper Rhine and energetically disposed of rival kings. His shrewdest move, one that was later trumpeted as a seminal moment in French history, was to convert to orthodox Christianity, in about 506. This immediately gave him a link with the ‘Roman’ populations under Burgundian and Visigoth rule (the Burgundians and Visigoths remained Arians) and the support of their bishops as well as the ‘orthodox’ emperors in Constantinople. He now marched triumphantly into Aquitaine and, at the Battle of Vouille in 507, defeated and killed the Visigothic king, Alaric II. By the time of his death, probably in 511, Clovis had laid the foundations of a large Frankish kingdom underpinned by orthodox Christianity.
The events of the next two centuries are confused. In his important book The Myth of Nations (Princeton, 2003), Patrick Geary explains how nineteenth-century nationalist historians revived legends of the Franks, Germans, and other European peoples as having a coherent ethnic identity by the fifth century. Geary shows how simplistic this view is (and how easily it was used by racists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to talk of an ancient ‘pure’ France or Germany). Most ‘kings’ may have been little more than warriors enjoying the temporary allegiances of a mass of different peoples. So Frankish history should be written in terms of leaders controlling specific territories rather than of a Frankish nation forging its identity. After Clovis’ death his kingdom was split between four of his sons although these seem to have worked together in comparative harmony. Between 533 and 548 there was once again strong centralized rule under Clovis’ grandson Theudebert I. Theudebert eliminated the Burgundian kingdom in 534 and gained Provence from the Ostrogoths in 536. He also expanded north of the Rhine and even across the Alps into Italy. For the first time in European history the peoples of western Europe lived together in some form of political unity without the Rhine as a barrier between ‘Germans’ and others.
Theudebert deliberately cultivated an imperial presence in the old Roman style. He presided over games in the hippodrome at Arles and for his coinage adopted the eastern solidus (first minted by Constantine) with his name and title substituted for that of the eastern emperor. The kingdom disintegrated after Theudebert’s death but was reunited again by a great-grandson of Clovis, Chlothar I, in 558. Under Chlothar II (584-629) and Dagobert (629-38) the Frankish kingdom was to survive as the most effective kingdom of the west, successfully using the Merovingian bloodline to its advantage. Many records survive of its legislation, especially of laws relating to the protection of the church.
World History
