Transcription
[Music] during Napoleon's reign. He was frequently under attack by the Bourbons, and the Bourbons had challenged Napoleon's right to even rule. And one of the bones of contention between Napoleon and the Bourbons was the fact the Bourbons would appeal to their ancient past. The emblems that they would use on all of their tapestries and on their crests was the fleur-de-lis. It was a symbol of antiquity.
And not to be outdone, Napoleon decided that he was going to find his own. And he lighted on the discovery of the recent tomb of Childeric I, just a century or so before. And Childeric was the son of Merovech. Merovech is this character in Frankish lore that is equal parts real human and equal parts myth. Merovech had been a great warrior. He had established the Merovingian dynasty, out of which also flowed the Frankish dynasty. And one of the things that was discovered in Childeric's tomb were a number of golden bees. Actually, they were cicadas. And these golden bees had a long history in mythology. They were used amongst the Egyptians to symbolize immortality or resurrection. Bees were believed to have come about as a result of the tears of one of the gods. And honey was believed to be the food of the gods, the nectar of the gods. And for whatever reason, the Merovingian dynasty had adopted the cicada or the bee as one of its emblems. And Napoleon found in this something that was more ancient than the fleur-de-lis, and yet which also hearkened back to the French past. And so one of the things that's often overlooked when we see pictures or art depicting Napoleon are the number of bees that are on his robes or on the walls. These bees for Napoleon were so important because they symbolized the reality of French might. It's hard to believe that bees and honey will be the thing that brings us into the Middle Ages, but in fact, it's not the honey or the bees themselves that Napoleon cared about, but it was the Frankish and the Merovingian world.
And with the fall of the Western Roman half of the empire, we find ourselves in the dawn of the Middle Ages. And so in this lecture, we're going to begin a four-part series where we look at the major players on the European scene that battle and vie for the authority and for the power of what was formerly Rome. We're going to look at kingdoms like Spain, which were ruled first by the Visigoths and then later by the Islamic world. We're going to look at Anglo-Saxon England and its Germanic heritage and as it began to fashion its own self-identity. And we're going to look at the Scandinavians and the Norsemen, the Vikings. But in this lecture, we're going to look at the Merovingian and the Frankish Empire because the Merovingian and the Frankish dynasty is perhaps the most important factor in shaping the new medieval world of the West.
The Merovingians go back to a Frankish past that is first documented we find in the second century. There are all kinds of groups that live just north of the Roman boundary, the Roman limits. And of course, the Romans would refer to almost all of these people just generically as the barbarians. But one of the subsets of the barbarians were the Frankish tribes. And there were a number of different Frankish groups. But shortly after the 3rd century, we see the rise of a group called the Salian Franks. And they were predominantly in the Rhine Delta. And these Salian Franks end up becoming the first group, the first barbaric tribe to come down into the Roman territories and establish themselves as somewhat partners, not fully, but somewhat partners with the Roman establishment. We see some, of course, maintain their own identity and they refuse to adopt any Roman practices. Others in the Salian Frankish groups, however, were more than willing to partner and to co-mingle themselves with the Roman ethos. And so these Frankish groups, the Salian Franks for one, and a number of others that we can't go into, and a number of other northern barbaric tribes, end up forming the backbone of what we would today call the Germanic culture of Northern Europe. And it needs to be stressed at this point that the Franks are not simply proto-Frenchmen. The Franks themselves are actually the forefathers of all kinds of later European cultures. They are in fact essentially Germanic. We would say they have an impact on future French culture, which is of course why Napoleon and other Frenchmen would look back to Merovech and others as part of their past. But the Franks would equally shape Germanic culture, Dutch culture, and a number of others. And this is because the areas above the old Roman boundary lines share a common past. They share a Germanic past. And so when we come to the Franks, what we find is not some distinct culture necessarily, but rather a common Germanic culture that is expressed and cultivated within the Frankish world. And out of that world, as the Roman Empire falls, we find the rise of a group that calls themselves the Merovingians.
Now, the Merovingian kings over the centuries have been known as the long-haired kings. And this is due to the fact that all the images and all the descriptions we have of the Merovingian kings show them with at least hair down to their shoulders, if not sometimes even longer. And this is due to the fact that the Merovingian kings, being pagan, believed that their hair, the length of it, was somehow the key to their success and to their military might on the battlefield. And no, this doesn't seem to have arisen by some engagement with Samson or biblical stories of long hair. This seems to have come about as a result of some sort of pagan belief in the length of their hair as serving as some kind of talisman that gives them strength. They didn't leave their hair long for the sake of ritual purity. They left their hair long because they believed it gave them some strength that others did not have.
Now, the other factor of the Merovingians is that they were pagan. They had resisted the Arian expansion in the early centuries, the 4th century in particular, when there was a spread of the Arian faith amongst certain Germanic tribes of the north, in particular groups like the Visigoths. And the main missionary to spread the Arian faith around other barbaric tribes is Bishop Ulfilas. Ulfilas had been baptized by Eusebius of Caesarea, who was himself an Arian, at least a modified Arian in some ways. And Ulfilas had taken the Arian faith to the north. He had taken it to the Germanic tribes. And it was Ulfilas who had concocted the Gothic alphabet and had translated the Bible into Old Gothic, which then led to a further expansion and spread of the Arian faith. The Merovingians and the Franks, however, were pagan. They were not Arians. And so Merovech, even though he was difficult to understand historically given all the legends that surround him, and his son Childeric were rank-and-file pagans. They were polygamists. They espoused all kinds of ritualistic worship of various gods. Now, these gods later by Gregory of Tours would be wrapped up in Roman gods. And he takes Germanic gods and gives them the names Mercury and Jupiter and these kinds of things. But they seem to have worshiped their own kind of gods. And these gods and these deities had all kinds of strange ritualistic practices. Certain amounts of sacrifice. In some cases, certain artifacts and talismans were used by these pagans as symbols of power and strength. Just like the Scandinavians or the Vikings, the Franks and the Merovingians often would base their village or their tribe around a sacred oak or a sacred tree. And so the Merovingians and the Franks have very little to do with the expansion of the Christian faith, be it Arian or be it Catholic. That is, of course, until Merovech's grandson Clovis I comes to the throne.
During his expansions, Clovis had taken as a bride Clotilda. And Clotilda was not a pagan. Clotilda was actually a Catholic Christian. She espoused and she believed in the Nicene Creed, the orthodoxy of the Trinity. And Clotilda worked as hard as possible to convert Clovis to the faith. Now, Clovis resisted this entirely. He did not want to hear anything about the Christian faith, and he resisted baptism. And Clotilda, on two occasions, is forced to baptize her sons in secret. Now, at the end of it, Clovis relents. He begins to hear the faith. He begins to hear Clotilda. And on Christmas 496, Clovis submits to baptism. Now, this is vitally important because Clovis has converted to the Christian faith, but he has not converted to the Arian faith, which was dominant around all other northern European tribes. He converted to the Catholic faith, the faith of Clotilda, which means that he now embraced the Nicene faith, and it also meant that he had now some relationship with the established leaders of the Catholic faith, in particular the Pope.
Now, in many ways, Clovis still goes about his warrior band mentality. He still takes with him his comites, which are his warrior bands, his leaders of the armies, with him. And comites is etymologically the origin of the word count, or as a ruler, a count. And there would be others as well. Dukes would become the dukes. And the ideal for the Merovingian expansion is that these warrior bands would go and they would attack and they would conquer a region, and then Clovis, or any other Merovingian king for that matter, would distribute and parcel out the land now conquered to his comites, to those who had loyalty with him in battle. Now, you can imagine the more you conquer land, the more you distribute it, often gave rise to the fact that the Merovingian Empire felt that it did not have enough land, despite the fact that it had conquered vast numbers of territories.
Another major factor that would contribute to the weakness of the Merovingian dynasty is that they had not yet adopted the policy whereby the inheritance of the king is passed only to the eldest son. Now, in the modern world, I often get questions, why would they do this? This seems to be entirely unfair to all the other kids. At least I get students to ask this whenever they are not the eldest son themselves. If you are the oldest brother in your family, I'm sure this sounds quite nice to you. But if you are, if you're a daughter in your family, or if you are a second or third or fourth son and so on, this sounds not very good. Why would your father give the land and the kingdom only to one son? Well, the reason why this was adopted in the later Middle Ages is on display in the mayor of ancient kingdoms. As each king died, if he had a number of sons, the kingdom would then be distributed amongst them equally. And with Clovis, this is exactly what we see. Clovis had four sons. And these four sons, on the death of Clovis, break up the empire into four equal parts. Now, I don't know about you, but sibling rivalry is not a new thing. If my brother has land next to me and he has conquered, and I am a Merovingian king, I'm going to start getting a bit sniffy about the fact that I could have that land as well, that I might rule it better than he, and all these other kinds of things. And so Clovis's four sons broke the realms up. Theuderic, his eldest son, took the region of Rheims. Chloremir took the area of Orléans. And Childebert took Paris, and Clothar took Soissons. Now, thankfully, in this case, all four of the brothers did not live long enough to have sons and then break the dynasty up even further. In fact, the three oldest brothers died relatively quickly. And so, it was left to Clothar to take back all of these realms once his brothers had died. Clothar himself, though, did the same thing. He had four sons, and those four sons again further divided the empire into four smaller kingdoms. And while it might have seemed fair to distribute the kingdom equally amongst the sons of a king, the fact remains is that by doing so, the margins weakened themselves.
And we can see this in the case of Brunhilda. Now, Brunhilda, of course, is another one of these legendary figures, but she was an historical figure. Brunhilda married Sigebert, one of the four sons of Clothar, and Brunhilda becomes one of the most interesting characters in the entirety of Western history. Brunhilda essentially, over the course of a number of decades, rules outright or rules through the puppet shadow king of one of her son's grandsons, or at the end of her life, great-grandsons. And Brunhilda, of course, begins ruling with piety and ruling with good stability. She supports missionary work. She builds churches. She does all kinds of things that we can applaud. But as the vicissitudes of the Merovingian dynasty begin to rage on, Brunhilda becomes bloodthirsty and vindictive. By the end of her life, we can account for a number of things that we simply sort of have to shake our heads at. At one point, she marries her nephew to maintain stability in the realm, to maintain power. She has a bishop assassinated whenever he speaks out against her. And she does a number of bloodthirsty and vicious things to all of the other breakup kingdoms within the Merovingian dynasty. And we can find her in her 70s, which is just about ancient by any standard of the medieval world, ruling behind the scenes, directing things for her great-grandson. And all of this comes to a head in 613 when Brunhilda is finally overthrown by the Merovingians in concert with people that were known as the Mayors of the Palace. More on that in just a second. But these groups banded together, all these different subgroups of the Merovingian dynasties and the Mayors of the Palace. And they came on Brunhilda at the age of 70. And they charged her with murder and bloodthirstiness and all of these evil things. And they concocted the worst way to die for anyone, much less for a 70-year-old woman, which is that they dragged her through the streets behind a mare by her hair. Some accounts say, and at the end, they tied her to four strong stallions who pulled her limb from limb, and then her bones were burned.
Now, what the unfortunate story of Brunhilda tells us is that the kingdom of the Merovingians was suffering from too much division, too much subtraction of land into the hands of the king's sons. And so as the Merovingian dynasty's infractions begin to weaken in power, we see arise, as I've already mentioned, this title of Mayor of the Palace. Now, the Mayor of the Palace started essentially as a kind of White House Chief of Staff position. It's the man who runs the kingdom on behalf of the king if the king is doing something more leisurely or if he just simply doesn't want to do it. The Mayor of the Palace is sort of the lieutenant, the right-hand man. Well, out of the Mayor of the Palace comes the Carolingian dynasty. The early Carolingian rulers were these Mayors of the Palace. And as they engaged in the politics of the day, and as they began to go to war on behalf of the Merovingians, eventually the Carolingians, as we'd later know them, began to take on power unto themselves. And so, as the Merovingian star begins to fall, the star of the Carolingian dynasty begins to rise. And one of the first real serious Carolingian rulers to arise out of the Mayors of the Palace ranks is Pepin. Now, Pepin is also known by another name, which is Pippin, which is of course probably where Tolkien gets the name Pippin from his Lord of the Rings stories. And in 687, Pepin defeats one of the old arch-enemies of the Merovingians, the Neustrians. The Neustrians were a group out east, and there were all kinds of battles between the Merovingians and the Neustrians. But Pepin manages to really soundly beat the Neustrians. And because of that, he is seen somehow more in command than even the Mayor of the Merovingians themselves.
And Pepin's son, Charles Martel, Charles the Hammer, as he is later known, takes on Pepin's mantle and pursues his own military glory and his own military power. He is ruthless in battle, Charles Martel is. In fact, one of the main things he uses is cavalry, due in large part to the fact that the armies that they were coming up against were largely foot soldiers. Sitting on a horse makes it much easier to dominate your enemy who's running around on his own two feet. And Charles Martel is vicious. He is strong. He is a military battleman. But in fact, it is Charles Martel who begins to court a relationship with the Papacy. Charles Martel hands to the Papacy all of the central band of the boot of Italy and he gives to the Papacy these lands outright. And this donation of the land of central Italy to the Papacy forms for the very first time what we would call for centuries, all the way down really until the modern world, the Papal States, which is a geographical position of power and strength for the Papacy as it begins to expand its influence in the West.
Charles Martel himself had a son, Pepin III, who would later be known as Pepin the Short. And because of the good relationships between this family and the Papacy, eventually the Papacy sides against the Merovingian kings in favor of the new dynasty that is being formed around Pepin and Charles. In 751, Pope Zachary actually decrees that the last Merovingian ruler, Childeric III, is to be deposed. His reasoning and argument is that those who rule as a king should be the de facto king. And so even though the fact that the Merovingians are king in name, it is the Mayors of the Palace, Pepin and Charles Martel and others, who are the actual rulers until Childeric III has his hair cut off and he is banished and exiled to a monastery. And so, as a result, the Merovingian Empire is swept away, at least in name, and into the place of power comes Pepin and Charles Martel and their dynasty.
And one of the most important events of the time of Charles Martel and Pepin is the Battle of Tours. Now, in a later lecture, we're going to look at the importance of the Muslim conquest of Spain, which gave rise to the kingdom of Al-Andalus. And one of the things we have to note is the extent to which the Muslim rulers of Spain attempted, to whatever extent they could, to take over Europe. Now, the armies that were taking over Spain at this time were the Umayyad dynasty, sometimes called the Saracens. And for 21 years, they had conquered Spain from Gibraltar all the way up to the very northern part of Spain. And in the 720s, this army crossed over the mountains into Aquitaine, which is modern-day France. Now, Aquitaine is not part of the Merovingian dynasty. Aquitaine is its own independent state. And at this time, Aquitaine is ruled by Odo. And Odo was actually an enemy of the Franks. Charles, in particular, had frequently skirmished with Odo in the Aquitaine regions. Charles, it seemed, wanted to take over these regions for himself, to make them part of the Frankish Empire. And Odo, therefore, was an enemy to Charles. However, Odo had an even greater concern when the Saracen or the Umayyad dynasty crossed over the mountains into the region of Aquitaine. Odo did his best to repel the force. At one point, he manages to have a victory against the Umayyad armies, but before long, he is outnumbered and outmatched, and he is on the run. And of all the people that Odo has to appeal to for help, Odo reaches out to Charles. And Charles, of course, knows that an enemy is one thing, but to have a Muslim army advancing up into Europe creates a greater crisis. And therefore, he and Odo made a decision. Aquitaine, it was decided, would become part of the Frankish Empire. Odo would therefore join forces with Charles, and this joint army would then fight back the Umayyad dynasty.
And so in 732, we have the Battle of Tours. And to give comment about this battle, we have to know a little bit about warfare in the Middle Ages. Often in this time, you had more skirmishes than you had outright battles. Hollywood has often given us a picture of medieval battles, or battles from any time, uh, before modern mechanized warfare. And usually what we see depicted on screen is something to the effect of all the armies rushing towards each other and engaging in sort of a mass hand-to-hand combat, and only the best will survive. Unfortunately, people back then knew that that just meant a lot of death and destruction. And your goal as a leader of an army was generally not to get your people killed as fast as possible. And running them indiscriminately towards the enemy usually would do that. Often what would happen in medieval warfare is you would have skirmishes. You would have advances and retreats. You would do everything you could to take out the supply lines for your enemy. You would try to scare them. Very often you had situations where armies would attempt to break up the discipline of the opposing army to get them to run indiscriminately in defeat. And if you managed to do that, you could of course kill people as they retreated from you, but often it meant that you won the battle, usually without losing significant numbers of your forces. The other factor of medieval warfare is that armies were rarely trained very well at all. Usually battles happened during certain seasons. You wouldn't go out, for example, during the dead of winter and try to engage in a battle. Also, if you took your forces from the fields, from from your regions, from your lands, you would often need to send them back at some point, or else the harvest, the food you needed as a nation would not be cultivated or would not be harvested.
Now, when we look at Charles's army, we see something different. Charles is actually a very serious warrior. He knows how to fight. And one of the things he decides is through church funds, through money given to him by the Papacy, again, they have a good relationship. Charles is able to train his troops around the clock, year-round. Also, Charles knows tactics. He knows that the Umayyad dynasty that is coming up into France has cavalry, and that this cavalry is fast. It's quick, and it likes to charge at lines of foot soldiers, break them up, and quickly defeat its enemies and get them running. And so Charles decides that he's going to take a different tactic. He trains his armies very well. The core of it, he decides, is going to become a phalanx. Now, not the triangle-shaped phalanx we sometimes see in Greek history. Rather, he's going to form a bit of a square or a rectangle shape that is going to be an immovable phalanx, in which the formation is meant to withstand a charge of cavalry and then kill the cavalrymen as they come into your ranks. Charles also applies the element of surprise. He scopes out a piece of land in which there's a great number of trees and forests, and he takes the high land. Now, despite all of these advantages that Charles knows his enemy, that he knows how to fight them, and that he has superior tactics and planning, does not belie the fact that Charles simply was outnumbered. Now, the numbers on both sides of the chronicles, whether we look at the Muslim chronicles or whether we look at Christian chronicles, are divergent on this. The Muslims like to believe that Charles Martel had something like 400,000 soldiers, which is significantly off the mark. And Charles Martel's chroniclers like to say that the Umayyad dynasty had innumerable forces that had crossed over into France. Modern estimations differ, but we do know that the Muslim army far outnumbered Charles Martel and his army. Probably the best estimates are that the Muslim army had somewhere between 50 and 80,000 soldiers, a vast number of which, of course, would be cavalry. The best estimates of Charles's army is that they are somewhere in the range of 30,000.
Now, as the Umayyad armies have advanced into France, one of the weaknesses that they self-impose, that they self-inflict, is that they have extended beyond their supply lines. They also were not prepared for the cold of the north of Europe. And so, the larger numbers was somewhat at a disadvantage because the soldiers were not prepared for the weather and they had fewer supplies to work with. Just before the battle, Charles takes the high ground just outside of the city of Tours. He finds a high ridge with significant numbers of trees. He hides the majority of his armies within these trees, making sure that the Muslim armies believe that they have the advantage even more so than they already did. Out in front there was a phalanx, and Charles had drilled them not to run, not to break, and to always hold the high ground. And for a period of time, it was a bit of red rover, red rover, between these two armies. The Muslims, of course, knew that the high ground was not the place to go, even if you have superior cavalry. Charging up a hill is the quickest way to get killed. And so the Umayyad army stays down on the lower regions, and they wait, hoping to draw Charles and his armies out, and then they can attack and win a decisive victory. Charles and his armies, though, are unswayed. They will not move. And so, as a result, the Umayyads believe that they still have the superior numbers and the superior tactics. And so they decide instead to charge. And it is at this point that accounts differ. Either the charges are repelled decisively and quickly, and the Umayyads lose and they retreat, or according to at least one account, there was a rumor that had spread amongst the armies that a skirmishing gang of Charles's army had somehow made it to the camps and were looting and taking all the booty that the armies had acquired during their years of combat. In either case, the charge of the cavalry never managed to break Charles's army. And at some point, whether for the sake of loss or whether they were racing back to secure their loot, the Umayyad dynasty fled. Charles waited up on the hill. He did not believe that the battle was over. And then after a certain period of time, he sent reconnaissance troops out. And they noticed that in the middle of the night, the Umayyad dynasty had fled back into Spain.
Now, this is not just any battle, though it is of course a significant battle in general, given the size of the troops involved. But rather, this battle, the Battle of Tours, would live on in the minds of Europeans, at least as the Christian armies had to fight back against the Muslim armies. And so in the long history, the long, tortured history, frankly, of Christian and Muslim armies fighting one another, particularly in the Middle Ages, this is seen as one of the first major decisive battles between the two sides. Notice, by the way, that this is several hundred years before the Crusades. People often mistakenly believe that the Crusades were the first time that Muslims and Christians decided to take on political armies and start fighting. Actually, it happened from essentially the very beginning. The Umayyad dynasty had conquered certain parts of Spain, and they had encroached up into Europe, and as a result, the Christian armies, led by Charles Martel, repelled them. However, putting aside what this means for Christian and Muslim relations throughout the Middle Ages, this battle was hailed by all of Europe as an example of the Frankish power that Charles Martel had not only displayed prowess in battle against other Europeans and other tribes, but now he had stood up for the faith and he had repelled the Muslim armies that were coming to conquer and to ravage the church in Europe.
In the end, the rise of the Frankish or the Carolingian Empire out of the Merovingians sets the stage for one of the greatest rulers to ever come on the scene in Europe. Charles Martel's grandson was named Charles. And Charles would take the reign and the vision that Charles Martel and Pepin the Short set out for the Frankish dynasty. And he would achieve all of the vision that they had and more. And for that, he would be called Charles the Great, or as he is known to us, Charlemagne. And so in the next lecture, we're going to pick up and continue the story of the Frankish dynasty by looking at the rise of Charlemagne and the Renaissance that he achieved during his reign. [Music] [Music] [Music]