Book Note | The Merovingian Kingdoms and the Mediterranean World

Stefan Esders, Yitzhak Hen, et. al., The Merovingian Kingdoms and the Mediterranean World: Revisiting the Sources. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.

Since the posthumous publication of Henri Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne in 1937, scholars of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages have found the “Pirenne Thesis” a provocative hypothesis on the economic and cultural history of the Mediterranean world. Against “decline and fall” narratives that placed the end of the Roman world in the west in the later fifth century, Pirenne argued that trade and cultural exchange continued uninterrupted between Europe and the Byzantine Empire until the Islamic invasions in the eighth century. The territorial expansion of Islam, he argued, irreparably sundered east-west Mediterranean travel and precipitated Europe’s return to a solely agricultural economy. Though some aspects of the Pirenne Thesis have been discredited —most notably, the role of Islam in the purported end of maritime trade in the eighth century— his argument for continued ties between east and west in the Merovingian period has been confirmed by a wealth of economic and textual evidence in the past three decades.

Despite the mounting evidence, however, historiography has continued to treat the Merovingian kingdoms themselves as insular, provincial entities. A recent collection of essays edited by Andreas Fischer and Ian Wood brought attention to this discrepancy regarding post-Roman Europe as a whole by examining east-west cultural connections from the western perspective. The present volume, The Merovingian Kingdoms and the Mediterranean World: Revisiting the Sources, continues this research by delineating the Merovingian kingdoms’ involvement in Mediterranean trade, diplomacy and cultural exchange.

Merovingian Kingdoms is the product of four workshops held as part of the German-Israeli project, East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective, funded by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development. One of the major aims of these workshops was to support the research of emerging scholars in the field. Thus, along with several well-established scholars, Merovingian Kingdoms includes contributions from three doctoral candidates and three postdoctoral researchers.

Each of the thirteen essays begins with a translated excerpt from a primary source that sets the topic of the essay. The essays are divided thematically into four sections. The first section sets the context of the post-Roman world. Yitzhak Hen examines the reception of the fourth-century geographical treatise, Expositio totius mundi et gentium, in the barbarian kingdoms of the fifth and sixth centuries. Contrary to Andy Merrills, who has argued that geographical descriptions in this period attempted to undermine Romano-centric conceptions of the Mediterranean world, Hen argues that barbarian historians’ use of the Expositio represents rather “an attempt to integrate current events into a Romano-centric worldview” (13). Helmut Reimitz discusses the renegotiation of power and authority in the early Merovingian kingdoms. Examining Gregory of Tours’ account of the Council of Mâcon (585), Reimitz argues that the bishop consciously rejected episcopal attempts to counter royal opposition through appeal to Roman law, preferring instead to assert the lex Dei and canones themselves as the foundations of Merovingian power.

The second section deals with Merovingian diplomatic ties in the wider Mediterranean world. In her article, Anna Gehler-Rachunek explores the role of marriage alliances in Visigothic king Reccared’s political maneuverings within the “Frankish-Visigothic-Byzantine triangle” (a term borrowed from Walter Goffart) (32). Gehler-Rachunek argues that Reccared’s conversion to Nicene Christianity was intertwined with a multi-generational Visigothic strategy of forming alliances through marriage with Nicene princesses. The shifts that Roman diplomatic conventions underwent in the post-Roman world also come into view in Hope Williard’s chapter on Gregory of Tours’ use of the term amicitia in his Histories. Whereas the Roman world had understood amicitia as encompassing genuine friendships founded on shared values and interests, Williard shows that in Gregory’s worldview the term could easily evoke its opposite in the form of betrayed alliances and fawning clients on the international stage. In the fifth chapter, Bruno Dumézil offers a new thesis on the provenance of the Epistolae Austrasicae, an invaluable collection of early Merovingian diplomatic correspondence. Against a recent thesis by Graham Barrett and George Woudhuysen that the Epistolae were collected in the early 9th century at the monastery of Lorsch, Dumézil uses careful examination of the manuscript and external evidence to posit a late sixth-century date of compilation, possibly by Bishop Magneric of Trier. The following chapter, by Yaniv Fox, delves into the Epistolae Austrasicae themselves by considering the function of emotive language in letters sent between the Byzantines and the court of King Childebert II. Fox shows that, when communicating about particularly contentious issues, each side appealed to their correspondents’ emotions in ways that belie the formalistic “purple prose” often attributed to late Latin epistolography.

The third section explores the social, legal and religious aspects of connections across the Mediterranean world. This section departs from the historiographical bent of the previous two: instead of narratives of political and military history, the authors in this section look to sources such as law codes, hagiography and liturgical tracts to glean insights into the movement of peoples and ideas across the Mediterranean. Lukas Bothe discusses provisions against kidnapping and human trafficking in early barbarian law codes and their implications for Merovingian participation in the international slave trade in the seventh and eighth centuries. Through close reading of the leges, Bothe suggests that such provisions were intended to prevent the theft of Frankish slaves and the depletion of the Frankish work force amidst a lucrative and (for kidnappers) attractive Mediterranean slave trade. This chapter also shows how Roman legal concepts concerning kidnapping were adapted to address the changing economic and geopolitical situation in the early Middle Ages. Taking a letter of Pope Vigilius to Bishop Aurelianus of Arles as his starting point, Till Stüber analyzes the implications of Merovingian diplomatic relations with the Byzantine Empire for the formation of international doctrinal consensus in the Three Chapters controversy.[1] By tracing political developments alongside the theological statements of Gallic councils, popes and emperors, Stüber suggests that “theological and church-related knowledge was more likely to be transmitted if it aligned with the political aims of the respective ruler” (102). Rob Meens shifts the section from law to liturgy in his chapter on the Sacramentary of Gellone’s ordo for the reconciliation of altars desecrated by murder. Meens shows that, along with aiding in the spiritual renewal of the physical altar, this ordo used all-encompassing concepts of purification (purgare, restituere, mundare, etc.) to heal social rifts created by the murder itself. Meens attributes the increasing Frankish concern with murder at altars and with the sacredness of church spaces to the influence of insular penitentials that began arriving on the continent in the seventh century. Tamar Rotman closes the section with a vignette from Gregory of Tours’ Histories on the would-be Gallic stylite saint Vulfilaic, who was ordered off his pillar by his local bishops. By juxtaposing this odd displacement of eastern ascetic practices with Gregory’s wider knowledge of Byzantine customs and traditions, Rotman suggests that the bishops’ opposition was founded on a well-informed understanding of the charisma attributed to stylite monks in the east.

The final section examines Frankish views of Byzantine emperors and the Byzantine perspective on the Franks. Pia Lucas opens the section with an analysis of Gregory of Tours’ depiction of the emperor Tiberius II in his Histories. Noting the particularly glowing and lengthy account Gregory gives of the reign of Tiberius —longer than for any other non-Merovingian ruler— Lucas explains this imbalance by placing the Tiberius passages within the context of Gregory’s moralizing depiction of Merovingian kings. Far from suffering from a lack of information, Lucas argues, Gregory chose to cast Tiberius in the Histories as a Byzantine analogue to the good King Guntram, who find their evil foils in Emperor Justin and King Chilperic, respectively. Stefan Esders likewise highlights Frankish familiarity with Byzantine affairs in his analysis of Fredegar’s curiously proleptic account of the Arab conquests in his Chronicon. Jumping from the 640s to the conquests of the 650s before returning again to the 640s, this digression in the otherwise neatly chronological work has puzzled historians. Esders explains this seeming disorder by showing that Fredegar chose to draw thematic parallels between Frankish and Byzantine rulers, such as the paying of tributes and the perils of royal minority. In so doing, Esders argues, Fredegar “embraced Frankish history as part of a wider world” (142). The volume closes with a view from the east in Federico Montinaro’s analysis of Theophanes Confessor’s account of the rise of the Carolingians and the coronation of Charlemagne in his Chronicle. Similarly to Esders, Montinaro deals with certain inaccuracies in Theophanes’ chronology, which Montinaro accounts for by suggesting that the ill Theophanes merely appended scholia to his history in his final year of writing. Montinaro also shows that Theophanes depended on Frankish sources for his information about the Carolingians.

Merovingian Kingdoms is a valuable contribution to the study of post-Roman Europe and the nature of cultural exchange and continuity between the Merovingians and their Mediterranean neighbors. It also traces several important lines of continuity between the law and culture of the Western Roman Empire and those of the early barbarian kingdoms. In so doing, Merovingian Kingdoms makes a cogent argument about the place of post-Roman Europe in the world of late antiquity: though no longer under the aegis of the Empire, it remained well-integrated within what could still be described as a Mediterranean-wide Roman cultural sphere. One weakness of the collection, which the editors acknowledge, is a lack of essays discussing art or material culture as evidence for these exchanges. The absence of material culture from the discussion is unfortunate, because such evidence could have contributed additional insights on Mediterranean economic history, which is curiously under-represented in the collection (only Lukas Bothe’s essay focuses on economics). However, as a revisiting of the textual sources, Merovingian Kingdoms offers a valuable set of new perspectives on Merovingian connections in the Mediterranean.

[1] For further reading on the Three Chapters controversy, see R.A. Markus, Gregory the Great and His World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 125-135; Richard Price and Mary Whitby, eds., Chalcedon in Context: Church Councils, 400-700, Translated Texts for Historians (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009); A.D. Lee, From Rome to Byzantium, AD 363 to 565: The Transformation of Ancient Rome, The Edinburgh History of Ancient Rome (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 264-300.

Kent Navalesi is a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.