[476 - 987] Rise of the Franks: Merovingians to Charlemagne

The year is 476. The final emperor of the West, a boy-ruler, has been deposed, and the machinery of the Roman Empire in Gaul has shuddered to a halt. The once-manicured province is a fractured landscape of decaying cities and sprawling forests, a mosaic of competing powers. Gallo-Roman aristocrats cling to their villas, Visigoths rule in the south, Burgundians in the east, and everywhere, tribes of restless Franks push against the old frontiers. Into this vacuum of power steps a young man, barely a teenager, named Clovis. He is a king of the Salian Franks, but his domain is small, his warriors loyal only as long as the promise of plunder holds. He is brutal, ambitious, and possessed of a cunning that belies his years. Clovis did not unite the Franks through negotiation; he did so through the cold, sharp edge of his axe. He systematically eliminated rival chieftains, absorbing their warriors into his own swelling army. An early story, perhaps legend but telling nonetheless, involves a sacred vase looted from a church in Soissons. When a warrior brazenly defied Clovis's wish to return it to the bishop, the king said nothing. A year later, during a troop inspection, Clovis found the same warrior, berated him for the poor state of his weapons, and split his skull with his axe, proclaiming, “Thus you did to the vase at Soissons!” The message was clear: there was a new kind of authority here, one that superseded the old warrior-band democracy. But Clovis's greatest masterstroke was not military. Most Germanic kings were Arian Christians, a branch of the faith considered heretical by the far more numerous Gallo-Roman Catholic population. Clovis, at the urging of his Burgundian Catholic wife, Clotilde, converted to Nicene Christianity around 496. In a single, brilliant move, he became the legitimate, God-ordained ruler in the eyes of the most powerful and educated class in Gaul. The Church and the landed aristocracy now backed his ambition. He was no longer just a barbarian warlord; he was a defender of the true faith, and his conquests became holy wars. By his death in 511, he had forged a unified Frankish kingdom, the foundation of a new world, ruled under a legal code known as Salic Law, which would influence European inheritance for centuries. What followed was an age of chaos and blood, the era of the Merovingian Dynasty, known as the “long-haired kings.” Clovis's kingdom, seen as his personal property, was divided amongst his four sons, a Frankish custom that unleashed nearly 250 years of fratricidal civil war. History records a grim succession of assassinations, betrayals, and brutal queens like Brunhilda and Fredegund who plotted against each other with chilling ferocity. The kings, their long, uncut hair a symbol of their virility and royal authority, presided over a violent court culture of feasting, hunting, and war. Yet, as generations passed, their power withered. They became phantoms, paraded once a year in an ox-cart, while the real power fell into the hands of the chief official of the royal household, the *major domus*—the Mayor of the Palace. Life for the common person during these dark centuries was dictated by the seasons and the local lord. The great Roman aqueducts had crumbled, cities shrank, and society turned inward. Most people were peasants, living in small villages of wood and wattle-and-daub huts, the smoke of their hearth fires stinging the eyes. They worked the land with heavy, wheeled plows pulled by oxen, their lives bound to the soil. Their diet consisted of coarse bread, pottage of vegetables and grains, and, on rare occasions, pork. They wore simple woolen tunics, perhaps dyed with plant extracts if they could afford it. It was a world governed by custom, superstition, and the ever-present threat of violence and famine. From the ranks of the Mayors of the Palace rose one of the most formidable figures of the age: Charles, an illegitimate son of a previous mayor. He was so relentless and effective in battle that he earned the name *Martel*—the Hammer. His defining moment came in 732. A massive raiding army from the Umayyad Caliphate in Spain, laden with plunder from its campaign north through Aquitaine, moved towards the city of Tours. Charles Martel assembled a force of hardened Frankish infantry. For seven days the armies faced each other near Poitiers. The Umayyad cavalry, famed for its swift charges, crashed against the Frankish shield wall. The Franks, fighting on foot, held their ground like a wall of ice, their discipline a testament to Charles's leadership. The battle was a bloody repulse of the invaders and, while perhaps not the single event that “saved Christendom,” it cemented Charles Martel’s authority as the undisputed ruler of the Franks in all but name. It was Charles's son, Pepin the Short, who decided to claim the title his father had earned. In a masterful stroke of political maneuvering, he sent a letter to Pope Zachary asking a simple, loaded question: “In regard to the kings of the Franks who no longer possess the royal power, is this state of things proper?” The Pope, beset by enemies in Italy and desperately needing a powerful military protector, gave the answer Pepin wanted. In 751, the last Merovingian king was unceremoniously shorn of his symbolic long hair and dispatched to a monastery. Pepin was anointed King of the Franks by the Pope’s emissary, beginning the Carolingian dynasty. The alliance between the Frankish crown and the Papacy was now sealed in iron. If Pepin laid the foundation, his son built the empire. He was a man of boundless energy and ambition, standing over six feet tall in an age when most men were a head shorter. He was Charles, later known as *Carolus Magnus*, or Charlemagne. For over forty-five years, he was a king at war, leading his armies on near-annual campaigns. He shattered the Lombards in Italy, crushed the Avars in the east, and pushed his borders into Muslim Spain. His most brutal and protracted conflict was a thirty-year war to subjugate and forcibly convert the pagan Saxons, a campaign of immense bloodshed that expanded his realm to the north. By 800, his kingdom stretched from the North Sea to central Italy, and from the Atlantic to the plains of Hungary. It was the largest single territory under one ruler in Europe since the fall of Rome. But Charlemagne was more than a conqueror. He sought to create a new Christian empire, a revival of the order and learning of Rome. He gathered the finest scholars of Europe to his court at Aachen, men like the English Alcuin of York. He promoted education for the clergy and nobility, standardized weights, measures, and currency, and championed a new, beautifully clear script known as Carolingian minuscule, the direct ancestor of our modern lowercase letters. On Christmas Day, 800 AD, as Charlemagne knelt in prayer at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Pope Leo III placed a crown on his head and declared him Emperor of the Romans. Contemporary accounts claim Charlemagne was surprised, but it is hard to imagine this master of statecraft was unaware. In that moment, the political center of gravity in Europe shifted north, away from the Mediterranean, for good. The empire, however, was a construct of one man’s will. It could not outlast him. After Charlemagne's death in 814, his son Louis the Pious struggled to manage the vast and diverse territories. Frankish tradition once again proved fatal; Louis's own sons warred against him and each other. In 843, the Treaty of Verdun formally split the empire into three kingdoms for Charlemagne’s grandsons. West Francia, under Charles the Bald, would form the core of the future kingdom of France. East Francia would become Germany, and the unstable middle kingdom of Lotharingia would be a source of conflict between them for a thousand years. The Carolingian line weakened, battered by internal division and savage raids from Vikings, Magyars, and Saracens. In 987, the nobles of West Francia, weary of a failing dynasty, elected one of their own, Hugh Capet, as king. A new chapter had begun. The age of the Franks was over, and the history of France was about to be written.