The Merovingians

Derna poland'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 chilled Eric the first just the century or so before until Derek was the son of Maravich Maravich is this character in Frankish lore that is equal parts real human and equal parts myth Maravich 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 chil Derek'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 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 harken back to the French past and so one of the things that's often overlooked when we see pictures or art of 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 the turn 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 II 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 Norseman the Vikings but in this lecture we're going to look at the mayor of engine in the Frankish Empire because the mayor of engine in the Frankish dynasty is perhaps the most important factor in shaping the new medieval world of the west the mayor of engines 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 salient Franks and they were predominantly in the Ryan Delta and these salient 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 salient Frankish groups however were more than willing to partner and to co-mingle themselves with the Roman ethos and so these Frankish groups thus alien Franks for one and the number of others that we can't go into and a number of other northern barbaric tribes end up forming the backbone of a would today called the Germanic culture of northern Europe and it needs to be stressed at this point that the Franks are not simply proto French 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 Nicole Ian and other Frenchmen would look back to Maravich and others as part of their past but the Franks would equally shaped 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 this year 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 mayor of engines over the centuries have been known as the long-haired kings and this is due to the fact that all the images in all of the descriptions we have of the mayor of engine Kings shows them with at least hair down to their shoulders if not sometimes even longer and this is due to the fact that the mayor of engine Kings being pagan believed that their hair the length of it was somehow the key to the success into their military might on the battlefield and now this doesn't seem to arisen by some engagement with Sansom 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 Aryan expansion in the early centuries 4th century in particular when there was a spread of the Aryan faith amongst certain Germanic tribes of the north and particular groups like the Visigoths in the main missionary to spread the Aryan faith around other barbaric tribes as bishop old Phyllis who Phyllis has been baptized by you see abuse of riah who was himself an Aryan at least a modified Aryan in some ways analysts had taken the Aryan faith to the north he had taken it to the Germanic tribes and it was Alice 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 Aryan faith the Merovingians in the franks however were pagan they were not Aryans and so Maravich even though he was difficult to understand historically given all the legends that surrounds him and his son shall Derrick 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 tour 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 worshipped 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 Scandinavian to the Vikings the Franks and the mayor of engines often would base their village or their tribe around a sacred oak or sacred tree and so the mayor of edges and the Franks have very little to do with the expansion of the Christian faith be it Aryan or be it Catholic that is of course until marriages grandson Clovis the first comes to the throne during his expansions Clovis had taken as a bride clotilda in 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 in Clothilde a-- 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 in 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 the here clotilda Ananse 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 of faith of clotilda which means that he now embraced the Nicene faith 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 Co mace which are his warrior bands is his leaders of the armies with him and ko mace is etymologically the origin of the word count or as a ruler account and there would be others as well do case would become the dukes and the ideal for the mayor of engine 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 Co mace to those who had loyalty with him in battle now you could imagine the more you conquer land the more you distribute it often gave rise to the fact that the mayor of engine Empire felt that it did not have enough land despite the fact that it 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 they 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 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 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 is 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 is four sons broke the realms up Theodoric his eldest son took the region of reign Clos de mer took the area of or Lyon and shield a bear took Paris and clothed or took soil now thankfully in this case all four 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 close our to take back all of these realms once his brothers had died clothes are 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 mayor of engines weakened themselves and we can see this in the case of Brunhilde now Brunhilde of course is another one of these legendary figures but she was a historical figure Brunhilde married Siebert one of the four sons of clothes are and Brunhilde becomes one of the most interesting characters in the entirety of Western history Brunhilde essentially over the course of a number of decades rules outright or rules through the puppet shadow king of one of her sons grandsons or at the end of her life great grandsons and burn Hilda 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 mayor of engined dynasty to rage on burn held it becomes bloodthirsty and vindictive by the end of her life we can account for a number of things that we sent blade a sort of side 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 Brunhilde is finally overthrown by the Merovingians in concert with people that were known as the mayor 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 Brunhilde 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 seven year old woman which is that they dragged her through the streets behind a mayor 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 Brunhilde 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 mayor of engine dynasty's infractions begin to weaken and 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 or on behalf of the mayor of engines eventually the Carolingians as we'd later know them begin to take on power unto themselves and so as the mayor of engine star begins the 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 Thor engines the Thuringian 's were a group out east and there were all kinds of battles between the Merovingian and the Thuringian the Pepin manages to really soundly beat the Thor Indians and because of that he has seen somehow more in command than even the mayor of engines 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 in his own military power he is ruthless in battle Charles Martel is in fact one of the main things he uses his 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 in Charles Martel is vicious he is strong he is a military Battlement 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 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 the third who would later be known as Pepin the short and because of the good relationships between this family and 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 Zacharias actually decrees that the last Merovingian ruler shall Derek the third 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 mayor of engines are king in name it is the mayors of the palace Pepin and Charles Martel and others who are the actual rulers until Derek the third 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 Tor 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 all Andaluz but 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 we're taking over Spain at this time were the Umayyad dynasty sometimes called the Saracens in for 21 years they had conquered Spain from Gibraltar all the way up to the very northern part of Spain and in the seven 20s this army crossed over the mountains into Aquitaine which is modern-day France now Aquitaine is not part of the mayor of engined dynasty Aquitaine is its own independent state and at this time Aquitaine is ruled by auto and auto was actually an enemy of the Franks Charles in particular had frequently skirmished with Otto and the Aquitaine regions Charles that seemed wanted to take over these regions for himself to make them part of the Frankish Empire and Otto therefore was an animated Charles however Otto had an even greater concern when the sara scene of the Umayyad dynasty crossed over the mountains into the region of Aquitaine Otto 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 Otto has to appeal to for help Otto 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 had Otto made a decision Aquitaine it was decided will become part of the Frankish Empire Otto 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 Tor and to give comment about this battle we have to know a little bit about warfare in the Middle Ages often than 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 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 De Smet 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 happen during certain seasons you wouldn't go out for example during the day 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 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 there 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 failings 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 at immovable failings in which the formation is meant to withstand a charge of cavalry and then kill the cavalry men as they come into your ranks Charles also applies the element of surprise he scopes out a piece of land and was there's a great number of trees and forests and he takes the high land now despite all of these advantages that Charles it knows his enemy that he knows how to fight them and that he has superior tactics and planning does not pillai 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 would 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 has somewhere between fifteen eighty thousand soldiers a vast number of which of course would be cavalry the best estimates of charles army is that they are somewhere in the range of thirty thousand now as the only 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 someone did 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 tor 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's 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 in 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 oomiya dynasty had fled back into Spain now this is not just any battle that though it is of course a significant battle in general given the size of the troops involved but rather this battle the Battle of Tor 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 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 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 in the vision a 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 on 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

Channel: Ryan Reeves

Views: 1,207,919

Rating: 4.80299 out of 5

Keywords: Merovingian, Dynasty, (Family), Church, History, Charles, Martel, Battle, of, Tours, (Royal, Merovingian Dynasty (Royal Line), Documentary, Medieval Literature (Field Of Study), Franks, Battle Of Tours (Military Conflict), Middle Ages (Event), Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (College/University), Ryan M. Reeves

Id: wXaN2vXEgwg

Length: 29min 52sec (1792 seconds)

Published: Wed May 28 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/ChubbySuperhero]

I'd take Merovingians over Carolingians any day

[u/exorad]

May be interesting to play if Paradox ever does a Rise of Islam start (620ish AD)

[u/mnduck]

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