The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 Page 16

  The lasting importance of the Merovingian royal courts was in large part due to the huge wealth that every king or maior could dispose of. Kings owned very large tracts of land; they had access to commercial tolls and judicial fines. They also for long controlled the surviving elements of the Roman land tax. These are described (and complained about) by Gregory of Tours, and they seem to have been most firmly rooted in the south-west, the Loire valley and Aquitaine. Even in Gregory’s time, as noted in Chapter 4, the tax system was not very systematically maintained: registers could go without updating for a generation, tax levels were far lower than under Rome, and royal cessions of tax immunity to whole city territories were beginning. Indeed, an organic fiscal structure of a Roman type could not still have existed if kings moved cities between each other so easily. By the mid-seventh century tax liabilities seem to have become fixed tributes, taken from smaller and smaller areas. In the north, this process may well have started earlier, and Chlotar II formally renounced the right to new taxes in 614; by 626-7 a church council at Clichy near Paris regarded taxpayers as an inferior category, to be excluded from the ranks of the clergy. It is likely that the tax system had already decayed so much that Chlotar could regard it as worth abandoning, for political effect; it only survived regionally after that (it is documented in the Loire valley into the 720s at least). This does not seem to have done Chlotar any harm, all the same; the vast landed resources of the Merovingians continued into the Carolingian period. The major immediate consequence may simply have been the sharp drop in the gold content of Merovingian coins, first visible around 640. The Merovingians could let tax lapse because they did not pay their army, which was by now based on the military obligations of the free: it was above all made up of aristocrats and their entourages, and also of contingents from city territories led by local counts. Their incomings were thus far greater than their structural outgoings, even after Chlotar’s reign, never mind before. The thesaurus, the treasure, of each king was enormous, and functioned above all as a resource for gifts to courtiers. Courts under powerful kings, queens and maiores were where any ambitious aristocrat might want to be in order to gain preferment and land, but, even when rulers were personally weak, the attraction of the thesaurus kept courts at the centre of political life. Every account of a coup against a king or an uprising by a rival in the seventh century hangs on the seizing of a thesaurus: it was the essential basis for gaining aristocratic support. Charles Martel still did this in the civil war of 715-19; the parameters of politics did not change here at all.

  Merovingian government was quite complex; written records of royal orders were regularly made and archived (bishops and cities, and perhaps aristocrats, had archives too), quite apart from the more standard maintenance of tax accounts (until the late seventh century at least) and judicial records. The late seventh-century formulary of Marculf, a collection of templates for documents, preserves forty sample royal documents for copying. Among other matters, they concern the appointment of bishops and counts, the feeding of royal messengers, the confirmation of a marriage agreement, the division of private property, the demand that seized property be returned, a summons to a presumed robber, and the demand that all ‘Franks and Romans’ should swear fidelity to the king’s heir. When documents themselves begin to survive, either as originals or in later cartularies (which is above all from Chlotar II’s reign onwards), they show kings doing most of these things as well: besides cessions of land and court records, which are the main currency of all document collections in the early Middle Ages, Chlotar II confirmed the will of a Parisian merchant called John; Dagobert in 626 sent one of his courtiers to divide the land in the Limousin of one of the main aristocratic families of the period; Sigibert III in 644 wrote formally to his southern bishops to cancel a church council because he had not been informed of it; Theuderic III in 677 expelled the bishop of Embrun in the Alps for infidelity, though allowing him to keep his property; and so on. These show a dense set of relationships between kings and their secular and ecclesiastical magnates (even if seldom anyone else), as well as the fact that these relationships were systematically recorded.

  Royal courts had, among other officials, referendarii, who supervised the production of documents, domestici, who were household administrators with a variety of roles, thesaurarii, who were financial officials, all of them presumably answering in some way to the maior domus. These positions also meant access to the ruler, and their holders were important political mediators as well: for the patronage networks of the Roman empire had their close analogues in the Frankish kingdoms. Being a conviva regis, that is to say having the right to eat with the king, was indeed a formal title, with privileges attached. German historians call this access Königsnähe, ‘closeness to the king’, a useful concept, with relevance both in this period and later. We must see royal courts as a permanent bustle: of greater aristocrats seeking Königsnähe and office, local élites seeking favours, abbots and bishops, among others, seeking justice in legal disputes, and everyone seeking gifts of land and money. Bishop Praejectus of Clermont had to go to Childeric II’s Austrasian court in 675 to defend a land dispute against Hector, patricius of Provence. Hector, himself a very powerful magnate, had enlisted the support of Leudegar, bishop of Autun, who was one of the king’s main advisers; Praejectus accordingly sought the patronage of Leudegar’s opponent, Childeric’s mother-in-law Chimnechild, who was also the widow of his uncle Sigibert III. Despite this shrewd move, Praejectus was an apparently unworldly figure; he refused to plead because it was Easter Saturday, and he only won his case because palace politics caused Hector and Leudegar to flee the court. (Hector was killed, Leudegar exiled; Praejectus was killed a year later, in the context of the crisis after Childeric’s death, probably by Hector’s allies.) But courts welcomed the unworldly as well as the worldly, together with ambassadors from abroad, preachers (such as Columbanus the Irish ascetic and monastic founder, d. 615, who had to flee Theuderic II’s court in 609 because he had denounced him for immorality), and beggars. To the average local notable, engaged in city-level politics over who was to be the next bishop, a royal court must have represented the same sort of temptation that Las Vegas represents to poker-players: in this case, almost limitless wealth and power for winners, inventive death for losers.

  Kings were more widely visible than this may imply, too. There seems to have been an annual assembly for the king and his armed Frankish people in the spring; Childebert II’s laws from the 590s were promulgated on 1 March, for example. It was at this assembly that decisions were made to go to war, which were not entirely under royal control: Chlotar I in 556 was forced against his will by the Rhineland Franks to fight the Saxons, for example, according to Gregory (he lost). Exactly who came to such assemblies is not easy to tell; members of the king’s armed entourage, for certain (called leudes or antrustiones), who were largely from the élite; dukes and counts and their own followings, too. Whether there was a wider participation of free Franks of lesser status cannot easily be said; one has a sense that this was more a feature of the sixth century than the seventh. But the large-scale gathering together in assemblies of the politically active sections of society was a frequent event. It marked the accession of kings; Ebroin did not call an assembly of aristocrats in 673 to mark the accession of Theuderic III in Neustria, which led them to conclude that Ebroin intended to rule without consent, so they recognized Childeric II of Austrasia instead. And legal disputes were resolved in front of assemblies, placita, everywhere; they gave legitimacy to all such decisions. These gatherings represented a link between kings and their Frankish people which extended well beyond the habitual visitors to royal palaces and courts, even if it did not include many peasants. It should be repeated that the word ‘Frankish’ quickly ceased to have an exclusive ethnic connotation. North of the Loire, everyone seems to have been considered a Frank by the mid-seventh century at the latest; Romani were essentially the inhabitants of Aquitaine after that.

  The
Frankish attitude to legislation was more muted. Clovis’s basic Salic law, the Pactus Legis Salicae, for the ‘Salian’ (north-western) Franks, is unique among ‘barbarian’ law codes in that it does not actually mention a king, only a set of four mythical judgement-makers; and the idea of a grass-roots law-making persisted in the rachineburgii of local communities who were asked to ‘speak the Salic law’ at moments of conflict; indeed, it has been noted that the provisions of ‘Salic law’ that are cited in documents do not in most cases even appear in the Pactus. Clovis’s successors did legislate, but not often, and the collected laws of the period 511-614 (after which they ceased) only make up twenty-three pages of the standard edition. This aspect of traditional late Roman - and Romano-Germanic - politics was not taken up much in Francia in this period, then. All in all, the Merovingian kings seem to have preferred a relatively low-key ideological presence. Church councils existed (again, more in the sixth than the seventh centuries), but their surviving records mostly deal with internal church affairs, except under Chlotar II and his immediate successors. Royal morality was bound up with doing justice in public, certainly (this image recurs for kings like Dagobert, just as injustice is associated with Chilperic by Gregory of Tours), but not with changing the behaviour of their subjects. We lack the image of the king as a systematic political and moral reformer that is so much a feature of Visigothic Spain and indeed Carolingian-period Francia, as we shall see in later chapters.

  Kings were surrounded by aristocrats, who hoped for advantage; but aristocrats were themselves strikingly rich. The private wills we have for the Merovingian period show several people in possession of more than seventy-five estates; no equivalent property collections are known anywhere in the early Middle Ages outside Francia, and such owners, Bishop Bertram of Le Mans (d. after 616), Bishop Desiderius of Cahors (d. 650), patricius Abbo of Provence (d. c. 750), would only have been outstripped by the richest late Roman senators. The Pippinids, too, must have owned on at least this scale; and so also, above all, must the Agilolfings, the most powerful and wide-ranging aristocratic clan of the early seventh century, who owned land and founded monasteries around Meaux just east of Paris (the powerful Audoin, bishop of Rouen, d. 680, was linked to them), but also owned in the Rhineland, ruled in Bavaria, and even furnished the longest-lasting line of Lombard kings of Italy from 653 to 712. The Paris region, in particular, as we can see from the seventh-century Saint-Denis charters, was full of the properties not only of the Neustrian king, who was based there, but also of his principal aristocrats; the rivalries that ensued may explain some of the tenseness of Neustrian politics, particularly in Ebroin’s time, and also maybe back to Chilperic a century earlier. But throughout Francia the simple fact that major aristocrats could be hugely rich meant that politics would be more violent, for all secular aristocratic identity was military by now - even career administrators at court were regarded as having obligations to fight, and dressed in military fashion, with an elaborate belt of office - and what landed wealth could buy above all was an armed entourage, to make one’s ambition more clearly marked. It was the existence of such entourages that underpins the faction-fighting of, in particular, the later seventh century, but going back to Rauching and Ursio and earlier still. This aristocratic wealth is clearly visible in Gregory’s narratives and in seventh-century documents. In the south of Gaul, it had antecedents going back to the late empire, and some of the great late Roman families can be traced into the seventh century, in one case (the descendants of the emperor Avitus and of Sidonius Apollinaris) up to 700 and beyond. In the north, the evidence is less clear, but the balance of probabilities argues for at least some major families, whether Frankish or Roman (in the north the distinction was never great), surviving right through the confusion of the pre-Clovis period and the killings of rivals which accompanied the creation of Clovis’s united kingdom, into the world described by Gregory.

  We shall look at aristocratic lifestyles in greater detail in Chapter 8, but the boisterous factional politics visible in Merovingian sources has some other implications. The first is that, early on, political ambition was seen as an aristocratic prerogative. Gregory did, still, confront some counts of low-born origin, like Leudast of Tours (d. 583), a Chilperic supporter and his own opponent; but by the mid-seventh century none can be seen. Even bishops, who did still include some people of relatively modest birth, like Eligius of Noyon (d. 660) or Praejectus of Clermont, were overwhelmingly aristocratic, and indeed increasingly often led a fully military lifestyle, including army leadership in some cases.

  A second point is that politico-religious practice, as it affected the aristocracy, changed somewhat in the seventh century. Columbanus was the first important impresario of monasticism in the northern Merovingian heartland, and, after Chlotar’s reunification, kings, queens and aristocrats all founded monasteries, usually following the traditions of the main Columbanian monastery in Burgundy, Luxeuil. The shrine of Saint-Denis just outside Paris was also heavily patronized by Dagobert, who was buried there, as were most of his successors; Saint-Denis and the other major cult-centres of Gaul were turned into monasteries by Balthild around 660. Monasteries were closely associated with their founders and their families, and less dependent on the bishops in whose dioceses they lay; they marked a political and religious practice more clearly linked to aristocratic and royal identities and family strategies, which cut across diocesan boundaries. The church in the seventh century thus became more of a resource for factional rivalries, and contributes to our knowledge of them, too, for most of our Merovingian documents and saints’ lives are products of monastic archives and religious commemoration. Monastic patronage also contributed to a growing sense that the aristocracy was somehow religiously special; even sanctity took on an aristocratic tinge in many of our surviving lives. This fits with the steady aristocratic takeover of episcopal office, too, although bishops and monasteries were often in conflict.

  A final crucial point is that aristocrats were overwhelmingly committed to the Merovingian political system. They had for the most part rural residences, and rural monastic religious centres too, but these were not real power centres in the sense that aristocrats sought to control their local areas as de facto local rulers. Indeed, although the surviving wills tend to show concentrations of estates in most cases, Desiderius of Cahors owning land around Cahors and neighbouring Albi for example, they shared their local territories with others, and most of the greatest owners also had outlying properties, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away. This was very different from the castle-based local aristocracy of the tenth century and onwards (see below, Chapter 21), and indeed, as we saw, Ursio’s main centre was not even fortified. Unfortunately, few or no élite residences from this period have been excavated, but the rest of our written documentation confirms that picture. Power was not local, and did not have to be defended by walls; it was seen as royal. That is to say, it came from office or from Königsnähe, and preferably both. All great landowners aimed at these, or at their ecclesiastical equivalents; their wealth and armed men were focused on these, not on local autonomy and domination. The most one can say is that some office-holders in the late seventh century were going their own way, in the period of royal involution. The outlying dukes and the patricius of Provence were instances, marking a general geographical fragmentation, as already noted; in the central Frankish lands, we might add the dukes of Alsace, for early eighth-century documents for Alsace conspicuously do not mention kings, until the ducal family was removed or died out around 740. Bishops, too, whose political remit was essentially their dioceses, sometimes developed local autonomies (‘episcopal republics’ in Eugen Ewig’s words) which Charles Martel and his sons had to move against, as in the case of Eucherius of Orléans (d. 738). But these were a minority, at least in the core Frankish lands; most aristocrats remained as focused on and as defined by court politics in the age of Ebroin, Pippin II and Charles Martel as they had been before.

  It is not that local pol
itics did not matter at all. The cities described by Gregory of Tours and in some of the seventh-century saints’ lives, particularly in southern Gaul, seem to have had an active factional politics, focused on obtaining the offices of either bishop or count. That of Clermont is particularly well documented. Counts were royal appointees, but they tended to be local men; they ran the armies and law courts of city territories. Bishops were even more often of local origin, and could face trouble if they were not - as Gregory did in Tours, even though his predecessor was his uncle, for he was brought up in Clermont, and some people saw him as really from there. Episcopal choices were generally made by local élites and neighbouring bishops, as in Sidonius’ time, but by Gregory’s time and onwards the king had the last word, and could (as in Gregory’s own case) select his own candidate: bishops had the task of representing their cities politically, and so it mattered to kings who they were. In a sense, though, counts were most responsive to kings, and bishops were most responsive to their dioceses. Bishops who threw themselves too fully into central-government politics could be unpopular; Arnulf of Metz was nearly removed by his flock for spending too much time at the palace, and when Leudegar of Autun was finally destroyed by Ebroin in 676-8 it is clear that he got little support from Autun itself. These local communities were, nonetheless, connected to court politics by innumerable channels: kinship, marriage, patronage linked them to other communities and to the ambitions of the more powerful, and all bishops and counts had to go to royal courts, and deal with court politics, on a regular basis. ‘Episcopal republics’ were all the weaker for being isolated from that network.