The Powerful in Merovingian Society
The Merovingian elite—who included monks and bishops as well as kings and lay aristocrats—obtained their power through hereditary wealth, status, and personal influence. Many of them were extremely wealthy. The will drawn up by a bishop and aristocrat named Bertram of Le Mans, for example, shows that he owned estates—some from his family, others given him as gifts—scattered all over Gaul.
Along with administering their estates, many male aristocrats spent their time honing their proficiency as warriors. To be a great warrior in Merovingian society meant perfecting the virtues necessary for leading armed men. Merovingian warriors affirmed their skills and comradeship in the hunt: they proved their worth in the regular taking of plunder, and they rewarded their followers afterward at generous banquets.
Merovingian aristocrats also spent time with their families. The focus of marriage was procreation. Important both to the survival of aristocratic families and to the transmission of their property and power, marriage was an expensive institution. It had two forms: in the most formal, the man gave a generous dowry of clothes, livestock, and land to his bride; after the marriage was consummated, he gave her a “morning gift” of furniture. Very wealthy men also might support one or more concubines, who enjoyed a less formal type of marriage, receiving a morning gift but no dowry. Churchmen in this period had many ideas about the value of marriages, but in practice they had little to do with the matter. Marriage was a family decision and a family matter: the couple exchanged rings before witnesses, and later the bride moved to the house of the groom.
In the sixth century, some aristocrats still patterned their lives on the old Roman model, teaching their children classical Latin poetry and writing to one another in phrases borrowed from Virgil. But this changed in the seventh century. The spoken language had become very different from classical Latin, and written Latin was learned mainly to read the Psalms. Just as in Byzantium, a religious culture that emphasized Christian piety over the classics was developing in Europe.
The arrival on the continent around 590 of the Irish monk St. Columbanus (c. 543–615) heightened this emphasis on religion. Columbanus’s brand of monasticism—which stressed exile, devotion, and discipline—found much favor among the Merovingian elite. The monasteries St. Columbanus established in both Gaul and Italy attracted local recruits from the aristocracy. Some were grown men and women; others were young children, given to the monastery by their parents in the ritual called oblation. This practice was not only accepted but also often considered essential for the spiritual well-being of both the children and their families.
Alongside monks, bishops ranked among the most powerful men in Merovingian society. Gregory of Tours, for example, considered himself the protector of “his citizens.” When representatives of the king came to collect taxes in Tours, Gregory stopped them in their tracks, warning them that St. Martin would punish anyone who tried to tax his people. “That very day,” Gregory reported, “the man who had produced the tax rolls caught a fever and died.” Little wonder that Frankish kings let the old Roman land tax die out.
Like other aristocrats, many bishops were married, even though church councils demanded celibacy. As the overseers of priests and guardians of morality, bishops were expected to refrain from sexual relations with their wives. Since bishops were ordinarily appointed late in life, long after they had raised a family, this restriction did not threaten the ideal of a procreative marriage.
Noble parents generally decided whom their daughters would marry, for such unions bound together not only husbands and wives but entire extended families as well. Aristocratic brides received a dowry from their families in addition to their husband’s gift. This was often land, over which they had some control; if they were widowed without children, they were allowed to sell, give away, exchange, or rent out their dowry estates as they wished. Moreover, people could give property to their women kinfolk outright in written testaments. Many aristocratic women were very rich, and like rich men, they frequently gave generous gifts to the church from their vast possessions.
Though legally under the authority of her husband, a Merovingian married woman often found ways to exercise some power and control over her life. Tetradia, wife of Count Eulalius, left her husband, taking all his gold and silver, because, as Gregory of Tours tells us,
he was in the habit of sleeping with the women-servants in his household. As a result he neglected his wife. . . . As a result of his excesses, he ran into serious debt, and to meet this he stole his wife’s jewelry and money.
A court of law ordered Tetradia to repay Eulalius four times the amount she had taken from him, but she was allowed to keep and live on her own property.
Other women were able to exercise behind-the-scenes control through their sons. A woman named Artemia, for example, used the prophecy that her son Nicetius would become a bishop to prevent her husband from becoming a bishop himself. After Nicetius fulfilled the prophecy, he nevertheless remained at home with his mother well into his thirties, working alongside the servants and teaching the younger children to read the Psalms.
Some women exercised direct power. Rich widows with fortunes to bestow wielded enormous influence. Some Merovingian women were abbesses, rulers in their own right over female monasteries and sometimes over “double monasteries,” with separate facilities for men and women. Monasteries under the control of abbesses could be substantial centers of population: the convent at Laon, for example, had three hundred nuns in the seventh century. Because women lived in populous convents or were monopolized by rich men able to support several wives or mistresses at one time, unattached aristocratic women were scarce.
Atop the aristocracy were the Merovingian kings, rulers of the Frankish kingdoms. The Merovingian dynasty (c. 486–751) owed its longevity to good political sense: from the start it allied itself with local lay aristocrats and ecclesiastical (church) authorities. Bishops and abbots bolstered the power that kings also gained from their leadership in war, their access to the lion’s share of plunder, and their takeover of the public lands and legal framework of Roman administration. The kings’ courts functioned as schools for the sons of the elite. When kings sent officials—counts and dukes—to rule in their name in various regions of their kingdoms, these regional governors worked with and married into the aristocratic families who had long controlled local affairs.
Both kings and aristocrats benefited from a powerful royal authority. The king acted as arbitrator and intermediary for the competing interests of the aristocrats. Gregory of Tours’s history of the sixth century is filled with stories of bitter battles between Merovingian kings, as royal brothers fought continuously. Yet what seemed to the bishop like royal weakness and violent chaos was in fact one way the kings contained local aristocratic tensions, organizing them on one side or another, and preventing them from spinning out of royal control. By the beginning of the seventh century, three relatively stable Frankish kingdoms had emerged: Austrasia to the northeast; Neustria to the west, with its capital city at Paris; and Burgundy, incorporating the southeast (see Map 8.3).
As the power of the kings in the seventh century increased, however, so did the might of their chief court official, the mayor of the palace. As we shall see, one mayoral family allied with the Austrasian aristocracy would in the following century displace the Merovingian dynasty and establish a new royal line, the Carolingians.