05. The Merovinglan Kings
CHAPTER V. The Merovinglan Kings (481-687)
When Clovis died he left four sons. It was a custom among the Franks that the sons of a king should divide among themselves the country that their father had governed. In most of the countries of Europe, at the present time, the eldest son becomes king of the whole kingdom on the death of his father, and the younger sons are made Dukes, and have money given to them, but no part of the country to govern, which is a much better plan, for when there are different rulers of equal power in the same country, they are almost sure to go to war with each other, and no country can be prosperous while one part of its people is fighting against another part. The sons of Clovis divided their father's kingdom into four parts, and drew lots to settle which division should belong to each of them. One had Paris and the country round, and was called King of Paris, another was King of Orleans, a third King of Soissons, and the fourth, who reigned over that part of Gaul which was nearest to Germany and to the river Rhine, was King of Metz. The Franks then began to attack the wild neighbours who lived to the south and east of them, and they were usually successful in their wars. In a battle against the Burgundians the King of Orleans was killed. He left three sons, still children, who were under the care of their grandmother.
Their uncles, the Kings of Paris and of Soissons, seized the children and carried them away. They then sent to the grandmother a pair of scissors and a sword, with a message, saying, "We await thy wishes as to the three children; shall they be slain or shorn ? " that is, shall they be killed, or shall they have their hair cut off, and be turned into monks — men who live shut up from every one in a building called a monastery, and do nothing but pray and sing hymns, and never come out into the world again. When the poor old grandmother got this message, " Shall they be slain or shorn ?" she was in such despair at the idea of the children being shut up all their lives in a monastery, that she cried out, "Slain rather than shorn." When the cruel uncles heard this, they seized up in their arms first the eldest boy and then the second, and killed them by dashing them against the floor, but some one who was standing near caught up the third boy, carried him out, and escaped with him. The child was put into a monastery, and lived and died a monk. After his death he was worshipped as a saint, and St. Cloud, a village near Paris, where many of the French kings have lived, was named after him.
The lands of the King of Orleans were divided between the Kings of Soissons and of Paris, and when the King of Paris died soon after, the King of Soissons became ruler of the whole.
The King of Metz meanwhile had died, and left his kingdom to his son, a brave prince, who made many expeditions against the Germans, and tried to govern wisely with the help of a Gaulish friend, who taught him much that he himself had learned from the Romans. The King of Soissons at last seized his land also, and so became the only king of the Franks. He died soon after, saying, "Oh! how great must be the King of Heaven, if He can thus kill so mighty a king as I." I have not mentioned the names of the four sons of Clovis, because they are long, hard, and so much like one another, that it is confusing to try to remember them; and as they lived so long ago, and we know so little about them, their names are not very important to us. It is more useful to know the names of their chief cities, as that gives us some idea as to what part of the country that is now France belonged to the Franks at the time of which I am writing.
Paris, Orleans, Soissons, and Metz, the four towns after which these four kings were called, are all near together, and all in the same part of France. If the whole of France were divided into three horizontal strips, that is, strips running from east to west — Paris, Soissons, and Metz would all be in the topmost or most northern strip, and Orleans close to the top of the next strip. This northern part of the country, where the Franks had settled, was called after them, Francia, and all the country that the Franks conquered was also called Francia, till at last that name belonged to all that had been Gaul, and it was but a small change to pronounce Francia as we now do France.
The King of Soissons died, and, like his father, left four sons. One became King of Paris, another King of Soissons, another King of Burgundy, and the fourth, who governed the same country that had before belonged to the King of Metz, was now called King of Austrasia, a word meamng east kingdom. Burgundy was a country which had been conquered by the last king of Orleans; it was south of Francia, and on the east side of France.
The King of Paris died, and the King of Soissons, whose name was Hilperik, seized upon his lands, joined them to his own, and called the whole Neustria, or west kingdom. Frankish Gaul was now divided into three parts, Neustria, Austrasia, and Burgundy. Neustria was the country which is now the north of France; the country which was Austrasia is now part of it the north-east corner of France; part of it Belgium, and part of it the western side of Germany. The Neustrians and Australians were usually at war with each other; the Burgundians took the side sometimes of one, sometimes of the other.
The kings of Neustria and of Austrasia had each the misfortune, or the folly, to have a horribly wicked wife; they are almost the worst women of whom we ever hear. The Queen of Neustria was called Fredegond, the Queen of Austrasia Brunehild, and it would he hard to say which of the two was the worse. Fredegond was at first the slave of the King of Neustria, who had a young and amiable wife; Fredegond murdered the wife, and persuaded Hilperik the king to marry her instead. The king was a weak and bad man; having married her, he let her do all the bad things she chose, and sometimes helped her in them. She had two of her stepsons murdered; she murdered a bishop who had displeased her; she murdered the King of Austrasia, who had conquered her husband in battle, and had just been declared King of Neustria, as well as of Austrasia; at last she murdered her husband.
She then governed, and governed well, the kingdom of Neustria for her son, who was still a child, and when she died she left him firmly settled on the throne. Brunehild, Queen of Anstrasia, was a bitter enemy of Predegond, for which she had good reason, as the queen whom Fredegond had murdered, in order to become queen herself, was Brunehild's sister. Brunehild persuaded her husband, who was by nature a peacefal man, to make war on the Neustrian king: he was successful, as I said before, and had just been declared King of Neustria when two pages sent by Rredegond appeared before him, pretended to have business to do with him, and while he was talking to them murdered him.
Brunehild was taken prisoner, but managed to escape, and went back to Austrasia, where she governed the country for her son, who was a child like the King of Neustria. She built churches, made roads, and was great and prosperous, till she quarrelled with the chiefs of the country, and murdered several of them. They rose against her, and drove her into Burgundy. She made war upon them, and in later years murdered her grandson with his children because he took part against her. At last she was taken prisoner by the Austrasians, and put to death with great cruelty.
After the death of Brunehild, Fredegond's son became King of all the Franks, and in Neustria every one obeyed him; but in Austrasia he found two sets of enemies, the great chiefs and the bishops. The bishops had by this time become rich and powerful; they had a great deal of land, for people who were dying, and had no children to whom to leave their land, often left it to the Church, and even those who had children often thought it right to leave to the Church some of their land or some money.
The clergy, by which I mean all the clergymen in the country — bishops,deans, village priests,spoken of together - had separate courts of justice. If a clergyman did anything wrong, he was not tried like other men in the court belonging to the king, or to one of the great lords of the country, but he was tried in the court of the clergy, judged by the clergy, and punished less severely than he would have been if tried in the other courts. The bishops in Austrasia thought themselves too great to obey the king in everything he chose to command, so they and the great Austrasian chiefs joined together to resist the king if he did anything to displease them.
The clergy had one power which the king never tried to take from them, it was that of sheltering and protecting people who came for safety into the churches. Any man who was pursued by an enemy, or who wanted to escape from any danger, might go into a sanctuary, which was either some particular church or the chapel of some monastery, or the place where some saint or good man was buried. When a person was in a sanctuary he was safe, no one might come in after him to take him away, and so long as he stayed there his enemies could not get at him. It was no matter whether he was good or bad, whether he was trying to escape from wicked enemies, or from honest people wishing to punish him for some harm that he had done; any one who had gone into the sanctuary to hurt him there, or to drag him out of it by force, would have done what was thought to be a most wicked deed, and would probably have been killed by the priests on his way.
When any great person, such as a prince or noble, was in sanctuary, his servants were allowed to go in and wait upon him; and the clergy of the place provided food and whatever else they might want for those who were poor. One of the people whom Fredegond tried to murder, her own stepson, stayed in sanctuary for some time, with the soldiers of the king, his father, watching to take him prisoner when he should come out. He got tired of the sanctuary at last, left it secretly, and was soon after caught and murdered.
This power of the clergy was on the whole useful to the country, as the Franks were still fierce and cruel, and the strong often ill-treated the weak, and found no one to prevent them. When there were no fixed laws by which it could be settled what people might and might not do, and very few wise judges to determine whether any particular person had done wrong or not, it was very likely that people would be punished unjustly, and it was a good thing that there should be means by which innocent people could escape, even though people who were not innocent sometimes made use of them.
