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The Merovingians: everything you wanted to know
00:39:38
Professor James Palmer answers listener questions on the long-haired kings who ruled a proto-France in the wake of the western Roman empire's collapse
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- [00:00]
Daniel Kramer Arden
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- [02:15]
Daniel Kramer Arden
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. Birthed from a sea monster, responsible for creating the idea of France and known for their immaculate hair, the Merovingians were the wildest dynasty you've never heard of. In this episode, Professor James Palmer of the University of St. Andrews explores their Civil wars sex scandals and how they connect to a character in the Matrix. He was speaking to Kev Lotchin.
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Kev Lotchin
The first place to start, I think, is who exactly are the Merovingians? I wonder if you could contextualise us in time and place.
- [02:59]
Professor James Palmer
The Merovingians were a family who dominated Western Europe in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire. So from the 5th century through to the 8th century, they were Frankish. They united lots of barbarian groups in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. And they're one of the big success stories. They rise to ultimate power. Everybody looks to them across Europe as the people, people who keep everything together in that 300 years when people are getting used to a world without empire. They start in western Germany, say Trier and Cologne, so those kind of towns right on the west of Germany. And they expand through Belgium into France, and then their capital for Most of that 300 years is Paris, also based in Soissons and Le Reims in the north of France. So they're very much based in the northern areas of France, but their power then extends south down to the Pyrenees and even for a time into northern Italy.
- [03:57]
Kev Lotchin
So this is almost a proto France with some extra bits added on, is.
- [04:01]
Professor James Palmer
That fair to say? Very much a proto France with extra bits added on. To the extent that the French today consider the Merovingians, their first dynasty, and the origins of France as a nation traditionally is taken all the way back to this fifth century, before that is.
- [04:17]
Kev Lotchin
Roman question we've had from a number of our listeners actually, is that relation between Merovingians and the Franks, are they the same?
- [04:26]
Professor James Palmer
They are not the same. You would say that the Merovingians as a word only refers to the ruling dynasty of the Franks during the 300 years from the fall of the Roman empire to the 8th century. The Franks themselves are a Germanic speaking or then a Latin speaking people who live in western Germany and what is now France. And France is named after the Franks. The Merovingians are the most successful Frankish family at maintaining power.
- [04:53]
Kev Lotchin
What made them so successful?
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Professor James Palmer
In the early days, it was just sheer brutality and success in war. They could be absolutely ruthless in creating conspiracies against their enemies. And once all their key rivals have gone, everyone just looks to them. They are the default people who are in charge. And they managed to supplement this with some wonderful storytelling that helps build up a bit of mystique. Famously, they are the long haired kings. They wear their hair long. There's a little bit of a Samson from the Bible kind of vibe, that their strength rests in their hair. Nobody else is really allowed to have long hair. So it's a symbol of they are the special people. Only they can be kings does mean that if you cut their hair, then they're not powerful anymore. So sometimes kings do this to rivals, different branches of their family. Even better than that, it is said that one of their ancestors might have been a sea monster. And nobody else is related to a sea monster. One day, a princess is swimming in a lake and encounters a five horned beast. And then after that was born a son. This is a guy called Merovec, after whom the Merovingians are named. And he may have been the son of the king, or he may have been the son of the sea monster. They don't use this story very much to build up their power, but it becomes a big thing that, yeah, they're special. Not everybody is related to a sea monster.
- [06:16]
Kev Lotchin
I love a good origin story, and it sounds almost ancient Greek myth style.
- [06:21]
Professor James Palmer
Absolutely. And the thing about the Franks, although we sometimes call them barbarians, they are very much living in a Greco Roman world. When they move into the Roman Empire, they don't come in as destroyers, they come in as partners. And people who learn Latin, even their earliest kings, are writing letters in Latin. They're reading books they know. They are engaging in diplomatic activities with the Roman emperors who are still in power in Constantinople, Byzantine Empire in the East. So actually, they're quite cultured and they take on the mantle of being the people in charge of the Latin world. They don't go in to destroy libraries and insist that everyone speak Germanic languages. They hire poets to write beautiful, eloquent Latin poems.
- [07:08]
Kev Lotchin
Yeah, we should dwell on that a minute, because this is barbarian in the Roman sense of the word.
- [07:12]
Professor James Palmer
Right.
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Kev Lotchin
Where barbarian is just othering. It's not that they are uncultured, illiterate or anything like that.
- [07:17]
Professor James Palmer
Exactly. It's very rarely a word that's used in any of our sources to describe them. The Romans saw anybody who lived north of the Rhine or the Danube as barbarians. They have a nasty way of talking. This doesn't mean their language is bad. But we have letters, two Franks who say things like, well, surprised. Your Latin is very good. For somebody who's from all the way over there in Germany, it's quite snobby, really. One of the things that actually gets them a bad reputation that is quite undeserved is that across 300 years, the Latin that people speak under the Merovingians changes, but in the same way that English. Now, if you go back in time 300 years ago, the English that we would be talking about, very different to the English that we Talk now. And this meant that in the 19th century, when people are rediscovering Merovingian sources, they go, oh, well, this isn't very much like Cicero.
- [08:10]
Kev Lotchin
Okay, so we've established the Merovingians. They've united various tribes. They formed the proto France, their cultures, their brilliant hair. We'll talk about hair again in a moment. Who are the key figures in this dynasty? Who we should know about?
- [08:23]
Professor James Palmer
The most famous, or ought to be the most famous is King Clovis, who is king from about 481 to 511. And he is important because he is the king who unites the Frankish people. And it's him who is responsible for extending the Frankish territories from Belgium and northern Germany all the way down to the Pyrenees in the south of France. So it's him who makes it look like a united France with a bit of Germany that we would recognise today. He's also very interesting because he's the first Catholic Christian barbarian king. He has this reputation of not just being a successful war leader, but also he is a patron of the Church and becomes kind of a role model for future kings that you don't just do government, you are pious as well. Another king after him that certainly in France we would know about, is a king called Dagobert, who is king in the early 7th century. Not quite as perhaps successful in things like war as Clovis had been. But Dagobert is often considered the last of the successful, proactive kings. His reign is full of consolidations. He's one of the great consolidator kings. When he's young, he is king in the eastern parts of the kingdom. When his father has control of the west, he's built up a career as somebody who dispenses justice, and he fights wars against the Slavic peoples and some Germanic peoples on the eastern frontier. But when he moves west and starts to live in Paris after his father dies, on the one hand, yes, is a great consolidator, but he gets a reputation for enjoying luxury too much, especially with women and food and drink, to the extent he gains this kind of ambiguous reputation that's very powerful, very authoritative, just a little bit too much into fun. The most salacious story about Dagobert is that he is forced to marry his first wife by his father. When his father dies, he immediately gets divorced and marries the woman he actually wanted to be married to, and then leaves her behind and goes on a tour of the eastern parts of his kingdom and gets another woman pregnant and then goes home and gets his Actual wife pregnant. And so then he has two sons by different women fathered within a very short amount of time. And then they are brought up to be competing kings. It's said by the chronicler of this period that he had so many girlfriends that it would have made the chronicle far too long to have listed them all.
- [10:52]
Kev Lotchin
Dagobert's philandering actually takes us to an interesting place about Merovingian succession laws. Because my understanding, correct me on this, is that even though it's one empire, it kind of fractures and comes back together, fractures again throughout its life.
- [11:05]
Professor James Palmer
By practice, the Franks always believe in dividing their inheritance between people equally, rather than being the eldest son becoming king. It's great if there's only one son, but if you have four sons, as happens to Clovis, then you have to divide the kingdom four ways. But if you look at the geography of France, it's not very easy to decide where you would draw lines. And so what they do is they're given capital cities and then it's kind of up to them to see which other cities will join which king. So you end up with these kind of very chaotic maps where different towns support different kings, but not creating one consolidated bit of territory. It's absolute chaos. And it encourages the kings in charge of these different sub kingdoms to be constantly at war with each other. It doesn't really work very well. Everyone considers it to be one kingdom, but just divided up into little bits and pieces. Eventually what happens is that that's far too chaotic and they decide that there's basically going to be a western kingdom that they call Neustria, an eastern kingdom that they call Austrasia, and then there's the more southern kingdom of Burgundy, and they stick that to Neustria or Austrasia, depending on what was going on at the time.
- [12:18]
Kev Lotchin
How does that play out?
- [12:20]
Professor James Palmer
It creates epic civil wars. When Clovis hands over his kingdom to. To his four sons, they're constantly competing with each other. And they don't just do this diplomatically. They do things like forming alliances against the brother they don't like. People end up burnt alive in sheds, sons unceremoniously murdered. All kinds of chaotic things go on. This is sometimes in the 6th century, made even worse, because there are these two queens, Queen Brunhild and Queen Fredegund, who themselves have this terrible rivalry that isn't really anything to do with the kings. Queen Fredegund was briefly put aside by her husband so that the husband could marry Brunhild's sister. But Then puts pressure on the husband to get out of that marriage. Brunhild's sister is then assassinated. And so Brunhilde doesn't like that and she tries to have Fredegund assassinated and Fredegund tries to have Brunhilde assassinated back. So in the middle of this civil war, then you have these two queens creating little conspiracies against each other as well. People think that the Merovingians are kind of chaotic and barbaric, partly because this kind of little window in the middle of the sixth century, when everybody is fighting, there is no stability. It's very Game of Thrones. Nobody is safe. Few kings last very long and you have to be very careful that you are surrounded by people that you trust. There are poisonings, assassinations, armies traipsing across each other's territories. Absolute chaos. The irony of this is when you get to the seventh century, everything is united by this king called Clothar ii. Clothar II is the underrated king of the Merovingian period. He's actually Fredegund's son. But he basically invites everybody across the kingdom to come to a couple of big meetings in Paris. And they all agree they're going to do things like follow justice and be friends to each other. And there's, apart from one very brief window, there's never any civil war ever again. The problem for the reputation of the Merovingians after that is that if you have a consolidated, calm system of government where everybody knows who's in charge and what their power and responsibilities are, it's not quite as story worthy as when everybody is assassinating each other and getting into scrapes and fun. So the reputation of the merovingians in the 7th century, so it becomes they are do nothing kings. It's the phrase that's been told since the time of Louis xiv. Now, what they were doing was doing everything the kings should have done, other than fought wars against rival kings.
- [14:43]
Kev Lotchin
He's being a good king, right?
- [14:45]
Professor James Palmer
Being a good king, hearing justice, making sure that the churches are well provided for, making sure that the noble boys are educated and with letters and numbers and things like that doesn't make for a good story. By giving the people what they wanted, everybody was like, oh, that's boring. I liked the heroes when they were.
- [15:01]
Kev Lotchin
Fighting war, did they still have immaculate hair at that point?
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Professor James Palmer
Such immaculate hair?
- [15:06]
Kev Lotchin
So let's talk about that, because you said that kind of the hair was almost a symbol of their kingship.
- [15:10]
Professor James Palmer
The Merovingian kings are known as the long Haired kings, right from kind of deep legend. According to the earliest historian, Gregory of Tours. He's a bishop in Tours in the late 6th century. He says that even going back to their old days when the Franks were disunited people living in western Germany, they had this long flowing hair. And he doesn't really go into too much about it. The people who are most interested in the Franks long hair as a symbol as their royalty are the Greeks. And we have this lovely account from Constantinople about their hair and how they're never allowed to cut it. So they have very elaborate ways of getting it all kind of wound up, but they brush it regularly and it's well looked after. It's beautiful. Also, they like to put themselves in the position of being like Roman emperors. So they had to have a crown, maybe a kind of garland or something, wearing kind of nice fancy tunic. You can't just have mad hair. So they have to look very carefully done. They don't have beards either. Part of the symbolism of hair is that they're clean shaven with long hair. We know this from pictures of them, mostly on coins. But like the Romans are clean shaven, they're clean shaven too. When the Merovingians are finally overturned, one of the things that the Carolingian family who dethrone them do is that they wear mustaches as a symbol that they are different.
- [16:29]
Kev Lotchin
So the hair's not just long, it's never cut.
- [16:32]
Professor James Palmer
It's never cut. It can't be very practical for fighting in wars. Well, you're getting a proper tangle. But this is where, yeah, they really do kind of wrap it all up and have kind of very intricate things.
- [16:42]
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Professor James Palmer
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- [17:46]
Professor James Palmer
And you didn't stop for a Big.
- [17:47]
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- [17:52]
Professor James Palmer
Bag as a placemat, then that wasn't a road trip, it was just a really long drive at participating McDonald's.
- [18:00]
Kev Lotchin
So does that mean if I wanted to depose a Meroving king, I could walk up behind him with, you know, a small knife, cut for a bit of his hair and was like, well, you're not fit to rule anymore.
- [18:08]
Professor James Palmer
It happens. It actually happens. There is this one king, Theuderic iii, who when he's quite a young boy, when he is dethroned. And it's partly because the nobles would rather that his older brother Childeric II become king. And so they do just cut his hair and they send him to live in a monastery, because who else cuts their hair really short? Monks. He just goes and sits at this very famous monastery for a bit, learning some letters and doing whatever else the monks are doing. But of course, then what he does while he's there is he grows his hair back after a couple of years, when they've decided that actually Childeric II was a really nasty guy. And he is really nasty. He has people beaten up for no reason, just for laughs. So then he is deposed. He's actually just killed. And this is one of the very few times that a Merovingian king is actually killed as a tyrant. But then they just invite his younger brother back from the monastery and say, oh, you've grown your hair back now you can be king.
- [19:01]
Kev Lotchin
Do we have any kind of knowledge of if the everyday person living in that time, like, can they go to the barber? Are they not allowed maybe to grow their hair long? Because that's something the kings do.
- [19:12]
Professor James Palmer
Yeah, absolutely. You can't pretend to be a king. And there are usurpers, wannabes, pretenders who kind of come in and say, I'm actually a Merovingian. Look, I've got the right hair and everything. And people, I don't know who you are. Oh, I'm the forgotten illegitimate son of that long dead king. And because people like Dagobert, having lots of children with lots of girlfriends, who's to say that they're not policing the family inheritance can get quite confusing.
- [19:38]
Kev Lotchin
A couple of times Though we've been talking about here, you've mentioned that kind of Roman connection. How important is that link back to the Romans? For the Merovingian, I suppose, legitimacy, it's very important.
- [19:49]
Professor James Palmer
Although they have their own ways of constructing legitimacy, their own merriment, very Frankish terms, things like long hair. When they are doing government, when they're being in charge of things, they have inherited things like the Roman taxation system. They conduct their business in Latin. They have a Roman population who are subject to Roman law as good administrators and people who are definitely not tyrants. They're very keen not to be tyrants. They don't make everybody subject to their one Frankish law. They say that the Franks are subject to Frankish law and the Burgundians are subject to Burgundian law and the Romans are subject to Roman law. So then it is kind of like an empire. They are a multicultural world of all the different peoples. And so building on that Roman idea of empire where everybody can be a citizen, it doesn't really matter what your background is, that's something that they're quite happy with. It's not quite this kind of centralised state. It becomes a bit more decentralized. One of the things that the Merovingians are quite keen to do is to support the Church. To do that, the Church has literate people in it, it has wealth. And this is the period in which the Church actually becomes quite wealthy. There are estimates that a third of all of the land is transferred to the Church in this period. The Christian Church under the Roman Empire wasn't very rich and powerful. This is the time when it becomes rich and powerful. Clovis, the great unifying king, when he is setting out at the end of his career to present himself as a good Christian, he summons church councils and he writes letters of advice to his bishops. So he's not just a passive person who says, oh, I support the Church. He's actually driving Church reform and trying to improve standards. And the reason he does that is because that's what Roman emperors did. Going back to the Emperor Constantine in the 4th century, the first Christian Roman emperor, he convened church councils. And so this becomes. That's what Roman emperors emperors did. That's what the kings are going to do.
- [21:49]
Kev Lotchin
This is a really good place to talk about Clovis and you mentioned he was the first Catholic Christian king. Now, implicitly, then, there are other Christian kings who were not Catholic.
- [22:00]
Professor James Palmer
That is correct. So going back to Constantine, when Constantine in the 4th century Converts to Christianity, there are two rival kinds of Christianity that one can choose from there is what basically becomes Catholicism. And the principle of that is just the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are the same. Well, not the same, but they're kind of together. And the rival is developed by Bishop Arius of Alexandria, is that it's more of a hierarchy. And so the Son maybe is more of a human being. And then various different versions of this get developed, like, maybe Jesus in his human nature then isn't a fully divine being, he's really partly human. And then there's huge debate, debates about, well, does that mean he's completely human? Does he have divine knowledge? So this splinters massively in lots of different ways throughout the whole of the Merovingian period, between people who believe in the Holy Trinity and people who are not entirely sure that Christ is the equivalent of God, that he's like a lesser being, but he very much is the Son. As a separate thing, most of the barbarian peoples pick up on this Arian form of Christianity in some respect, and in particular, the Goths. Now, we're not talked about the Goths, but they're the first barbarian peoples who can enter the Roman empire in the 4th century. They're spectacularly successful. They work with the Romans, they are the Roman army for a while. They are settled in southern France. They have a big kingdom in Spain, they have a kingdom in Italy. One of the things that makes Clovis is that he is the first person to really defeat the Goths in battle at 507, which means that he gets control of southern France from them. But the Goths are Arians, and so one of the things that makes Clovis so respected is that he is the guy who went to fight against the Arians. Now, all the Arians are Christian, but of course, there is still the church system. And so the Pope in Rome is Catholic, unsurprisingly, and doesn't recognize any of these people as being good Christians. And he's constantly, constantly griping, particularly as a group of people, the Lombards, who live in northern Italy, after whom the region of Lombardy is named. These are long beards. They have. That's what the Lombard means, and they have long beards. And they refuse to really play along with the Pope. So there's a constant fighting going on. And so having people like Clovis up in Frankia in France, lobbying for the Catholic side, fighting against the Arians becomes a real badge of honour for the Merovingians. And so they are the Christian heroes, starting with Clovis. They are the one group who stood up for Catholicism and saved the day for the Roman Church. Popes are very happy that this is happening.
- [24:36]
Kev Lotchin
Can you just tell a bit about how this is going to impact the Merovingian dynasty as the years roll on.
- [24:43]
Professor James Palmer
In all sorts of weird and wonderful and unpredictable ways? The pope in the 5th century is not the kind of all powerful figure that we might imagine now. You do get great popes. Pope Leo I, who's famous for helping to defend Rome against the Vandals, people called the Vandals. Not actually just people who turn up and trash the place, although they do trash the place. Some popes are not. Some aren't really very interested in anything that's up in the north. And people in the north aren't necessarily always very interested in what's going on in Rome. It's a long way away and it's not in their kingdom. But they're friends at least. And we can see that perhaps the great flowering of the relationship between the Franks as a people and the papacy during the pontificate of Pope Gregory I. Pope Gregory the Great, he's one of the first popes to really think, well, Rome is becoming increasingly distant from the Byzantine Empire and the great churches of Constantinople and Jerusalem and Antioch. We should really be doing more to strengthen Christianity in Western Europe. And what Gregory is most famous for in terms of developing the Western Church, is sending the first missionaries to convert the English. And one of the things that he does with the Merovingians is write to their kings and write to Brunhild, who I mentioned earlier, to get their support. They're supposed to help missionaries when they are going to Britain to convert the pagan English people. And this then means that lots of the English Church, although it looks to Rome primarily, often looks to the churches in places like Lyon and bishops in Paris for support as that's developing too. So then the Merovingian kingdoms become this very important kind of middle ground where they are kind of brokering relations between this kind of expanding Latin Christendom.
- [26:29]
Kev Lotchin
So they're kind of like the long arm of the Pope.
- [26:31]
Professor James Palmer
Yeah. And it's kind of convenient for them because, yeah, we're on the same side as the Pope. This is fine. It ends up being quite tragic. As the Merovingians go on, there's a family going on to become the Carolingian dynasty who replaced the merovingians in 751. They start to develop much closer relations with the papacy in the 8th century, particularly, starting with a guy called Charles Martel. Charles the Hammer, who as his name nickname suggests, is a great war leader. And this is right at the time when the Merovingian kings seem particularly weak. He becomes so powerful that the Pope, Gregory iii, writes to him to intervene in Italy to help protect them against the Lombards. Then this kind of, then becomes the boulder which really starts to move. So when we get to the dethroning of the last Merovingian King in 751 by Charles Martel's son, Pippin. Pippin only dethrones Childeric III when he has the express permission of the Pope to do so. And this means that he is not a tyrant. He has not usurped the kingship for himself as a bad person who is staging some kind of military coup. It becomes a spiritual venture almost. I have done this with the blessing of the Pope and the Pope's got my back and I've got the Pope's back. And this is, this is a good Christian thing to do.
- [27:52]
Kev Lotchin
And this ties back to the idea of these do nothing kings, right?
- [27:55]
Professor James Palmer
Exactly. So if you have these powerful noble figures who aren't kings and then able to take their armies around and score victories against people, people are going to, okay, so what's the king for?
- [28:07]
Kev Lotchin
And one of our listeners asked about mayors of the palaces and is this what these powerful nobles are?
- [28:13]
Professor James Palmer
Exactly. So the mayor of the palace is the first minister to the king. And this is a long established. Goes back definitely into the 6th century. We can see they're just palace officials to start off with. There are all sorts of different palace officials and people in charge of the stables. And you put people in charge of cities, the whole civic administration built around these titles. In the 7th century, you get a run of kings who. You get administrative kings. And if you've got very administrative kings, what you need is a good administrator to help you. And so the role of the mayor of the palace becomes very important. And then you get a run of kings who die, unfortunately, early. It's not through any fault of their own. They're on hilarious slut events or coups or wars. There's just a few that catch something and die because it's the Middle Ages. And so then the mayors of the palace then become the continuity. They're the people who are there making sure that everything works. And they generally end up being a bit older than the kings in that situation. So going back to Charles Martel then. So Charles Martel's father had been the mayor of the palace for a while. He had to fight battles against other Franks to get that position because it becomes such a lucrative thing. And so then Pippin was in control of it. And he actually initially did not want Charles Martel to be mayor of the palace because he was the son with a previous wife, so he was going to be completely disinherited. And Charles Martel was not very happy with this. So when his father dies, he fights a series of wars against other rival Franks so that he gets to be mayor of the palace. And so this thing that had started off the idea of mayor of the palace, which started off being a very administrative position, ends up being something that creates lots of wars. And then the most powerful nobles have it, and obviously then it's only going to be a short amount of time before that leads to, well, why aren't I king? And this is exactly the question, then, that Charles Martel's son poses to the Pope when he becomes mayor of the palace. And it's like, well, I'm mayor of the palace, I have all the power. The King has no power, but he's called king. Shouldn't I be called king? And the Pope says, yeah, this is a great idea that creates a debt. That's a classic gift. If I say yes, then you're going to be internally indebted to me. And the first thing that he then gets Pippin to do, once Pippin is king, is to come and fight war wars in northern Italy against his enemies and to give the Pope lots of land. And then this goes on for hundreds of years. Every time the Pope feels in danger, they get in contact with the Frankish kings and say, remember how we helped you become king. Come and help.
- [30:38]
Kev Lotchin
Are we saying the Merovingians are then responsible for creating. Well, beginning to create the Papal states? As they would become.
- [30:44]
Professor James Palmer
As they would become, yes. So Charles Martel is often banned in with Carolingian history, but he's kind of the last chapter of Merovingian history as well. So this is a very pivotal time in European history. So the Merovingians, in terms of their significance, that they start with taking over the Roman Empire and then at the end of the period, they're kind of building up the Papal States. They get involved in some hugely transformational issues that then influence the course of European history for centuries to come.
- [31:14]
Kev Lotchin
We talked earlier about how the Merovingians influence stretches through to present day into the French identity. I wonder if you can tell us a bit more about the significance of that.
- [31:23]
Professor James Palmer
So Merovingians being first Catholic kings being kings of The Franks, which gives the name to France just because of the way that they unite areas of what we call Gaul so that it is controlled by France. It looks like a modern day map of France. And so for a long time they are just known as the first dynasty of the French. And obviously, even after the French Revolution, when there's perhaps less interest in monarchy, they are still seen as the dynasty who brought things together in such a way that the nation of France, the people of France, were united. This very important 19th century scholar and bureaucrat, Jules Michelet, who wrote a famous history of France. It's one of the kind of the great histories that makes a big statement about who we are as a nation. And it kind of goes all the way back to the Roman Empire. But the Merovingians have this very important role play in that because Michelet says, you know, we are a melting pot of people because we are Gauls, we are Franks, we are Romans, we are Jews, we are Arabs, we are Germans. All that we have a mixing. And it's. What holds us together isn't our common blood, because we do not have common blood. What holds us together are the institutions that we have built together, the way that we've collaborated, the way that we observe laws, the way that we shared devotional practices. It's really about nation as culture. And he can see that in the Merovingians, if you put aside their civil wars and their chaos, what's actually going on beneath the surface is a lot of people getting together, working together and building up this cultural universe that can then be identified by people in 19th, 20th century as the origins of our nation.
- [33:09]
Kev Lotchin
Well, speaking of cultural references coming into like the 21st century, we have the film the Matrix. There's a character in that called the Merovingian, and he's used like a passage for just general Frenchness. But is there anything in that character going like, oh, that's Merovingian?
- [33:26]
Professor James Palmer
Well, a little bit. Thinking about the, the origins of the French nation and putting it all the way back, it's the same kind of thing. So in the Matrix movies, the whole point of the character, the Merovingian, is that he is an old program, so he's like the original. So it's in the same way that the Merovingians are kind of the founding dynasty of France. So to then the Merovingian is like the founding program and it's become defunct and much has happened since. And so imagine it had this French character who's kind of sitting back going well, I'm still here and maybe defunct, but I can still control things. I'm still responsible for how things turned out. It's quite a thoughtful nod, but he.
- [34:02]
Kev Lotchin
Didn'T have long hair. That's a bit of a miss.
- [34:04]
Professor James Palmer
Didn't. Although it was quite slicked back, wasn't it? And he did in the fourth Matrix movie a couple of years ago ago. He did have quite long hair, but by that point he had gone mad from being sidelined.
- [34:15]
Kev Lotchin
As a way of bringing this interview to a close, I wonder, is there any kind of like, stories from the history of Merovingians we haven't touched on that you think would be really great to share?
- [34:24]
Professor James Palmer
I think the story of King Chilperic and his wife Fredegund is perhaps quite a fun one in so many levels. I've mentioned Fredegund before for having a rivalry with Brunhilde, but the death of Chilperic is scandal all to itself. And Fredegund and Chilperic have had this kind of very complicated relationship all the way through. And there's always been rumours that Fredegund has been cheating on him and he's never quite managed to catch this. And he actually puts Gregory of Tour, one of the big historians of the period, on trial for allegedly having spread rumours about his wife's infidelity. And it's not true, it's not true, it's not true. Then one day they go to a hunting lodge and Chilprick leaves Fredegund behind in the hunting lodge and goes out with the lads and then decides that he's going to pop back to see his wife just as a nice surprise, and sneaks in behind her and playfully pats her on the back and she calls out her lover's name. Oh, Landerik. No, you're. The king will come and catch us. And turns out it's me. Oh. And so he runs off in a great big temper. She panics, she gets hold of Landrick and gets Landrake to make sure that Chilprick then doesn't return from his hunting in a terrible accident. There's several things that make the story quite dramatic. So on the one hand, Chilperic has finally found out that his wife had been cheating on him all along. His wife then discovers that she's pregnant and the rival Merovingian king, a guy called Guntram, who's Chilpric's half brother, demands to know because there are suspicions whether Fredegund's son is actually a Merovingian king or from an affair and she will not come and visit him for the longest time. Time. And then suddenly appears, oh, look, I have a baby. And it's like, are you sure? And it's like, yes, yes, absolutely sure. And eventually, Guntram is forced into a position where since he can't prove that the child is illegitimate, that he feels compelled to effectively adopt the son spiritually as his own and make sure that he's protected and they can bring him up. But this then echoes out throughout the rest of history that no one's entirely sure that this king. King, he's legitimate. But then sets up, he ends up being the king Clar ii, who unites the whole of the Frankish people. It's a very strange origin story for this new chapter, built on infidelity. And just to make the story even slightly weirder, the hunting lodge then gets turned into a monastery where queens hang out. Later in the seventh century, these queens hanging out at the converted hunting lodge where this infidelity and assassination had taken place. Place.
- [37:00]
Daniel Kramer Arden
That was Professor James Palmer of the University of St. Andrews. James is the author of Merovingian Worlds, which is published by Cambridge University Press. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.