Transcript of 520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)

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Zachary was still shaking his head. Welcome to Thailand. Now, let me school you. What you and Sarai could do and get away with in Boulder can't be done here in Phuket. Not if she's going to save face and honor her father.

She's a good girl. And here in Thailand, good girls don't fool around with or get involved with farangs. What the hell is a farang? It's the Thai word for Europeans or non Thai men. It's mostly used to describe white guys.

Since we're black, you and I are actually farang damn. Alexander stared at his twin for a moment. Well damn, he said, suddenly laughing. Laughing with him, Zachary shrugged. Farangue is also the word for guava fruit.

Go figure. So that, Dominic, was Guilty Pleasures by Deborah Mello. I'm sure you'll have read it. It's a romance novel describing the rivalry between 2 American brothers, both of them black as we heard, Alexander and Zachary, the hammer, Barrett. They're both absolute fitness fanatics like me.

And they're both obsessed by the beautiful Sarai Montrai, who is a personal trainer and the former Miss Thailand.

So of all the introductory readings I've ever had on the rest of history, that's probably the weirdest. What's going on?

Well, I'm sure what will have, stuck out for you was the use of this phrase farang dam, which literally means black franks. And it was first used in the sixties to describe black American servicemen who were being stationed in Thailand during the Vietnam War. And Thai is just 1 of a number of Asian languages that uses variation of this word frank to describe Europeans and Americans.

So the Turks, for example, they use the word Franks to mean foreigners or westerners, outsiders, don't they? And lots of people do that.

Yeah. So the Greeks used to. The Arabs still do. It's a word that's used in Urdu, in Hindi, in Chinese, in Malay. Mhmm.

And you'll have noticed in that passage of Immortal Prose I just read, the use of the word farang to describe guava fruit. And the reason for that is because it was introduced to Thailand by Portuguese in 16th century. Yeah. So it's it's basically a kind of a Frankish fruit. And similarly, in Cambodia, I gather a turkey is a Frankish chicken.

So essentially, anything that comes from what today we might call the west is Frankish. And it's absolutely bizarre because the Franks are a people who, you know, they take us back over a millennium and a half back to an incredibly distant age and an incredibly distant part of the world. And the Franks today and for the next few weeks are going to be our great theme. And it is an amazing, amazing story.

Well, the story of the Franks is the story in history, I think, that's most reminiscent of the sort of fantasy novels of Tolkien and George RR Martin and whatnot. So it's a world of crumbling empires, of landscapes kind of scarred with ruins, of sorcerers and magic, and men with massive axes, and warrior queens, and people plotting to poison each other, and dragons and kinda mountain battles and citadels and it really has got it all, hasn't it?

The other comparison to fantasy novels is that everybody pretty much in the story has completely mad names. Right. Gundabad

That's a good name.

Wolfeggund. I think my favorite, Chimney Child. Right. It's a girl's name. So anyone out there looking for a name for a daughter, I think that's a brilliant name.

But it is also a hugely significant period historically. Because basically, it's about how 1 age passes away, another is incubated. And you could say it's the great hinge moment in European history because it's the story of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west and the emergence of what will become medieval civilization. So at the beginning, we are in Gaul, and by the end of it, we are in France. And, of course, France, it is the land of the Franks, Francia.

That's where the word France comes from.

Let's kick off at the beginning. So we are in the Roman Empire in the 4th century AD, the middle of 4th century. And Gaul is is still part of the empire, but it's coming under increasing pressure, isn't it, on the frontiers from the movement of all kinds of Germanic peoples, and that's where this story begins.

Yes. So let's look at a particular moment. It's the winter of AD 357 going into 358. We are in the aftermath of Constantine, the great emperor, who has reunited the empire after it had been kind of divided up. And in Constantinople, we have Constantine's son, Constantius the second.

And he has sent his cousin, a man called Julian, to stabilize the Rhine frontier, the frontier of Gaul. And the most menacing enemy that Julian faces is a a a great confederation of peoples called the Alemanni.

Mhmm.

And in the summer of 357, he has met with them outside Strasbourg in a a great battle. Julian and and his forces have been massively outnumbered. But as the Romans so often do, he has won a crushing victory over the barbarians. The king of the Alemanni has been captured. He's been sent off to Constantius in Constantinople.

And it's all looking good. Yeah. However, to the north of Strasbourg, so higher up the Rhine, another group of barbarians have been taking advantage of Julian's distraction to pillage the line of the Meuse Valley. So that's through what's now Belgium. Yeah.

And these, Dominic, are the Franks.

So this is their first appearance, right, in the sources as the named group. From this moment, they're called the Franks, are they?

So the Franks have been a kind of a constant on the Roman frontier since the 3rd century. We'll look at exactly where they come from in a minute.

Okay.

But just for now, this is a kind of particular instant which illustrates the Roman reactions to them and the kind of the relationship between these 2 people, the Roman superpower. And this kind of essentially, at this point, they're just an annoyance on the flank of the great Roman monster, the Behemoth. Mhmm. And these Franks, there are only about 600 of them. They've taken possession of a a a couple of abandoned fortresses on the the line of the Meuse.

And Julian wants to nail them down. He doesn't want them to kind of cause trouble. So he lays them under siege even though it's beyond the campaigning seasons, the snows are coming down. And in fact, as the winter comes on and the risk of the river freezing over, we know from, a historian called Ammianus Marcellinus, who is a great fan of Julian, great historian of this period. And he writes, anxious in case the savages should take advantage of some moonless night across the frozen river, Julian gave orders that all night from sunset to dawn, soldiers should row up and down stream in scouting vessels, thereby breaking up the ice and denying the barbarians the chance to escape.

And this is very effective. Finally, the Franks have no choice to surrender. And you might think that Julian would then put them to the sword, but he doesn't. He settles them on the northernmost line of the Roman Empire, so kind of by the mouth of the Rhine to serve as allies of the Roman people, what the Romans called foederati. And the following summer, so the summer of 358, there are more Frankish warbands who intrude.

Julian defeats them again. And again, he settles them in, you know, what what are now the low countries.

So some people might think that's very peculiar behavior. This not unprecedented tactic that the Romans have of taking warlike peoples on their periphery and actually settling them and trying to sort of tame them and to use them. So I guess we'll get into that in a second. But before we do that, what do we know of these people, the Franks? I read in your notes, appearance colon terrifying.

Now is that just Roman propaganda, or are they genuinely scary looking people? I

think they are genuinely scary looking. You know, they want us kind of scarify. They make themselves look as intimidating as possible. So we have a record of how they looked to a Roman poet writing in the following century, so in 5th. Yeah.

And you might say it's propaganda, but I don't think so. So this poet writes, these monsters have red hair which descends from the top of the skull in a knot, while the back of their head is shaved and shines baldly.

So they look Scottish.

Yes. I suppose. They're clean shaven, this poet writes, except for locks of hair which descend from the nose and be combed. So again, this is something we've talked about before on the podcast, the inability of the Romans to find a word for what we would call mustaches.

A lock of hair which descends from the nose. Yeah. Surely, the Romans must be aware that hair grows under your nose. No. They don't have a word

for it. And also the detail that they comb it. And then this brilliant detail, the clothes they wear over their immense genitals are exceedingly tight.

Right.

So

Yeah. Yeah. Like a kind of, like a prog rocker or something from the 19 seventies.

Yes. And also like prog rockers, they have fearsome throwing axes.

Right. And massive mustaches. So, yeah, it's it's very Genesis circa 1973.

So the Franks are not, I guess, a tribe in the way that the Romans of earlier centuries would have recognized the tribe. They're a kind of confederation. That is a pattern that has been developing over the course of the centuries. Because the impact of Roman gold, of Roman military techniques, but also of the desire of the Romans to understand barbarian peoples in a way that corresponds to the Roman world vision, has kind of been creating ever larger tribal entities across the Rhine.

The Romans have basically invented these peoples in a way.

I think that Germanic peoples start to recognize the Roman standards as the measure to which they should conform.

Mhmm.

And so they start to mold themselves into a people like the Romans, which, of course, makes them actually, ironically, much more menacing. So the Alemanni, who we mentioned, I mean, that is all the men. That's all the people who've been gathered together. They're a particularly large confederation. The Franks compared to the Alemanni are not as large.

Certainly not as large as the most famous confederations of all. So the Goths

Yeah.

The Visigoths, the Western Goths, the Ostrogoths, the Eastern Goths. Compared to them, they're low rent. And I think that that is why Julian and other Roman emperors and generals are prepared to kind of install them along the frontier as foederati, as allies. And as I said, this is a process that doesn't begin with Julian. It goes back to the 3rd century.

So from the late 3rd century, we have a funerary inscription in which the buried warrior has written, I belong to the Frankish nation, but as a soldier under arms, I am a Roman. So there, you have this idea that you can be both a Frank and a Roman.

Right.

Even under Constantine, a Frank is registered as having served as a general in the Roman army. And I think that reflects the fact that there is something in this trade off for both peoples. Because just as the Franks get the benefits of Roman civilization, you know, wine and central heating and all that kind of stuff, so the Romans get these fearsome guys with their very tight pants and their throwing axes

Yeah.

To fill a massive manpower shortage. There are a lack of people who want to serve in the Roman army, and the Franks are kind of brilliant at that. And the broader question of who the Franks are, where they come from, this is 1 that the Franks themselves later will struggle to answer. So 1 story which will develop much later is that they come from a place called Pannonia, which is basically the great plains of Hungary.

But I

think that's unlikely because it's telling that that's where the goths come from. So basically, the Franks are identifying themselves with the goths. And then much later, there's an even more improbable claim that the Franks came from Troy, which, of course, is where the Romans also came from. Yeah.

Of course.

So they're equating themselves to the Romans. So basically, I think what that tells you is that the Franks are pretty low rent as a group of people. They don't have a distinguished ancestry. They can't really remember where they come from. And even the name that they give themselves, so Franks means literally the brave ones, the war hungry ones.

In due course, they will say that the Franks means the free ones, but that is actually under the Romans exactly what they are not. They're not free. They are subordinate.

So it's a window, isn't it, into the Roman world in in this period where the empire has come under enormous pressure on the frontiers. And as a part of that, the army is becoming ever more the domain of historians are a little bit wary of using these terms now, aren't they? Like barbarians. Basically, Germanic peoples are now serving the army in large numbers. In the frontier zones, lots of Germanic peoples who've been settled, kind of slightly military settlements.

A lot of the officers are Germanic backgrounds and whatnot. The emperors by now are less and less. You're kind of pampered Italians, and then more and more you're kind of bulk and strong men and things. And there's a sort of story about the militarization of the Roman Empire, isn't it, I guess? I think

there's a real kind of reversal of what had happened early in the Roman Empire, where the army which is stationed along the Rhine is basically the agent of turning these frontier regions Roman. Increasingly, in the 3rd, the 4th, or 5th centuries, the army, because it is becoming more and more barbarian, is barbarianizing those frontier regions. Right. But that doesn't mean that the Franks are the equivalent of the warriors in the Trojan halls waiting to come out and destroy the Roman Empire.

So they're

not the enemy within?

They're not the enemy within. Because, actually, by the end of 4th century, they are clearly very loyal as foederati. By the end of 4th century, they've been serving Rome for for several generations. They are even willing to fight other Franks who lie beyond the Roman frontier. And I think they remain loyal, basically, because their warlords, their leaders remain loyal.

And these Frankish leaders, on the 1 hand, they are very, very Roman. They speak Latin. They read Virgil. They're highly cultured. The gods that they worship are the traditional Roman gods.

Right.

But at the same time, their authority depends on the fact that they are Frankish warlords, that they are respected by their troops. And so you have this sense of a a Romano Frankish identity, which doesn't really require the warlords or indeed their soldiers to choose between the Franks or the Romans.

In what way then are they not Roman? Because their lingua franca is is a Germanic language? Because they have their mustaches?

Because they have a mustaches, they have their tie pads. Yeah. I think their leaders are able to kind of migrate between both worlds. I think the mass of the warriors are kind of more recognizably Germanic, but they are absolutely integrated into the Roman military system. Yeah.

And so that means that in the early 5th century, when basically the Rhine frontier collapses, the Franks are are very implicated in the kind of the great catastrophe, the great drama of this story. So, I mean, the highlights of this process, 406, you get large groups of barbarians crossing the Rhine. 410, the Visigoths sack Rome. The following year in 4 11, a great confederation called the Burgundians cross the Rhine, conquer stretches of the river, and they conquer all the regions that Julian had been defending 50 years previously, so including Strasbourg. And, you know, this is a situation in which the Franks have to play a crucial part, because they have to decide where their loyalties lie.

Right.

Does it lie with the imploding Roman Empire? Or does it lie with the, the Germanic peoples?

Right. Because when the institutions fall apart, the people with all the weapons and the military know how are suddenly in an incredibly powerful position, aren't they?

Absolutely.

I mean, they they will literally become the kingmakers in the post Roman world.

And indeed, in due course, become the kings. Yeah. So they are going to play a key part in this process of transformation, which takes place through the 5th century. But before we get to that, there is also another massive process of transformation that's been taking place in the Roman Empire in the 4th and into the 5th century. And this also will have a transformative impact on the Franks over the the course of the succeeding centuries.

And, again, I think the best way to kind of introduce this great transformation is to go back to the 3 fifties and the campaigns of of Julian in Gaul. Because there is 1 particular soldier who is serving with Julian's armies in that campaign. And this is a man from Pannonia, so from the Hungarian plain. A man of pretty humble lineage, certainly not high class in any way. And he is called Martinus, or as as we would call him today, Martin.

And he is stationed 1 winter in Amiens, which is very much in the region where the Franks are being stationed as well. So kind of what's now northeastern France.

Shall I read what happened to him, Tom? Would you enjoy that?

I would because I actually wrote it. It's in Dominion.

I'll read it with the respect it deserves. The cold that year was exceptionally bitter. A beggar in rags stood shivering by the gateway of the city. His fellow townsmen, wrapped up warm as they crunched through the snow, gave him nothing. Then came Martin.

Dressed for duty, he had no money, only his arms. As a soldier, though, he did have his heavy military cloak. And so taking out his sword, he cut it in 2 and gave half to the beggar. Oh, that's kind. The following night, Martin had a dream.

He saw Christ dressed in the very portion of the cloak that he'd given away that day. And the Lord said to him as he had done on earth, whatever you did for 1 of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.

That's how Jesus speaks, is it?

Oh, that's such a moving story. And I bet that really happened.

So a very dramatic moment, Christ appearing to the soul to Martin who's given away half of his cloak. And Martin is convinced by this appearance of Christ, essentially, to give up on his military career. So he's offered a donative by Julian along with all his other men. And he refuses to accept it, and he demands to be released from the army. And he supposedly tells Julian, until now it is you I have served.

From this moment on, I am a servant of Christ.

But Julian didn't like that.

That was a shocking display of of lace majestay. Yeah. The truth is, Dominic, that it is Martin and not Julian who embodies the future. Because Julian is better known as Julian the Apostate, the last emperor to worship the traditional Roman gods. Yeah.

And Martin, of course, is a Christian, and the future of the Roman Empire is a Christian 1.

0, the irony.

But the thing about Martin is that he is a Christian of a a a peculiarly radical kind. Because even though Julian is very hostile to Christianity, Constantius, his his cousin, he's a Christian. Most of the Roman elites are starting to kind of jump ship and and become Christian. They can tell the way that the wind is blowing. And when they become Christian, they don't give up their wealth or their snobbery or their kind of contempt for the poor.

Instead, they see the church as another opportunity for self advancement. So whereas a previous generation of the elite might have become consuls or whatever, Now they might become bishops, because to be a bishop is to be in the late Roman Empire, the Christianizing Roman Empire, is to be a figure of immense authority and power. And they retain all the appurtenances of power. They they keep their palaces. They keep their slaves.

They keep their fine clothes. But Martin, that's not what he's into at all. He completely rejects this kind of conviction that you can be Christian and be rich. So an admirer of his, who is himself an aristocrat, who is converted to Martin's understanding of Christianity, writes of Martin, his looks were those of a peasant, his clothes shoddy, his hair a disgrace. And Martin's ambition is to become what the Greeks call a monarchus, so literally 1 who lives alone, I I e a monk.

And he's 1 of the first monks in the western half of the empire because they they kind of originate in the eastern half. And he settles on a grassy plain named Marmoutier, which is 3 miles downriver from the the Gallic town of Tor. And he subjects himself to incredible austerity. So as a soldier, of course, you know, he'd he'd gone through vigorous military training. But now as a monk, he's basically living on nothing.

He's enduring extremes of cold and heat, living a very, very tough life. But this becomes a source of huge admiration for lots of people in Gaul. So there are people in the elites who come to admire him not despite, but because of his rejection of everything that that they represent. All the kind of, you know, the worldly standards of greatness. And it wins him the ability to perform spectacular miracles that further kind of increases his fame.

And so you start to get people of immensely wealthy backgrounds giving up the kind of traditional path to greatness and to rank, and coming to join him. And they camp out in caves or in wooden shacks.

Just a question about the miracles. What are the miracles?

He's healing the sick, people with twisted limbs. He's straightening them. He's giving sight to the blind. He's giving voice to the mute. Wow.

It's Amazing. Absolutely happening. And the proof of this, Dominic, and I can see you looking skeptical, is that in 371, Martin is elected as the bishop of Tours. And this is absolutely stupefying because as we've been saying, bishops are people from the absolute elite of society. Yeah.

And it comes as a complete shock to the elites. But it also comes as a shock to Martin. He doesn't want to be a bishop at all. And he runs away and hides himself in a barn. And the geese go and, tell the people who've elected him where he is.

And so he has to come out and become a bishop.

They, That's a small thing, but how do the geese communicate to those people?

They honking.

Okay. They just honking people interpret it as they

Yeah. They honk. They honk and hiss.

Okay.

Yeah. They're not talking. No. That would be too miraculous.

Okay.

So anyway but the miracles continue. And this means that Martin, you know, he has a source of power that does not derive from the traditional standards of Roman life. He's coming directly from heaven. And so that means that his person is charged with an incredible source of power. And it means that when he dies, his body, his relics, will continue to be a source of power.

And so he dies in his cell, and 2 groups of people, 1 from Tor and 1 from the neighboring city of Poitiers, they both decide that they would like to have the body, and so they all camp outside his cell. And the people of Poitiers basically block off the entrance so that the people of Tours can't get in and stand guard over it. But they then all fall asleep, and the people of Tours who've stayed awake, they sneak in through the window, grab the body, take it to Tours in great triumph, and they keep it there. And so from that point on, the relics of Martin are kept at Tours.

Isn't it a funny thought that if that little confrontation were worked out differently, the French might not have shamed themselves in 1356, the Marquis de Poitiers, because he would have been on their side.

Well, Dominic, it's another example for French history of people falling asleep at in aupartite in times.

It is. Like like the Marquis de Lafayette.

Very sad. So Martin's body is taken in triumph to Tours. The people are thrilled to have it. The elites of Tours less so. The bishop, for instance, who succeeds Martin, he's very sniffy about it.

You know, he builds a small shrine over Martin's tomb, but he doesn't do anything much more than that. And, essentially, to the elites for several generations, Martin remains an embarrassment. But his relics do continue to perform miracles. And his fame grows and grows and grows. And, essentially, he embodies a kind of source of power that is so uncanny, so unsettling, that the Christian elites of Gaul don't quite know what to do with it.

It's in excess of their ability to control. But a time is approaching when a new people will emerge as the masters of Gaul, and they will recognize in Martin exactly what they need. A celestial patron who has been despised by the traditional masters of Gaul, but is perfectly suited to their needs. And those people, of course,

are the Franks.

What a cliffhanger. So return after the break to find out how the Franks continue their rise to become the warlords of the west. Now, Tom, we have something unbelievably exciting to share with our listeners, don't we?

Absolutely, we do, Dominic. We are announcing the launch of the Rest is History merchandise. Yes. You can now own a piece of history, literally. We've got shirts, mugs, phone cases, notebooks, so much just in time for Christmas.

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That's right, Dominic. And our new merch truly is the perfect gift for any history fan, whether they're a friend of the show or, dare we say, someone who's not yet a friend of the show. Yeah.

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Christ's lineage was in perpetual danger. The early church feared that if the lineage were permitted to grow, the secret of Jesus and Magdalene would eventually surface and challenge the fundamental Catholic doctrine, that of a

divine messiah who did

not consort with women or that of a divine messiah who did not consort with women or engage in sexual union. He paused. Nonetheless, Christ's line grew quietly undercover in France until making a bold move in the 5th century when it intermarried with French royal blood and created a lineage known as the Merovingian bloodline.

So those are the unmistakable tones of, Gandalf AKA, Ian McKellen playing Salee Tebbing. And and that is, of course, the unmistakable prose of very much, I don't think friend is the right word, but he's an associate. He's an associate to the rest of history, and that is the acclaimed novelist, renowned novelist, Dan Brown in the Da Vinci Code. And Saliq being there, for people who are just absolutely baffled, he's explaining how Christ's descendants have intermarried with the Merovingian bloodline, and this is the royal dynasty that comes to rule the Franks, and they're basically all descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene. And like so many things in this story, this absolutely definitely happened, didn't it, Tom?

So so, people who haven't read The Da Vinci Code or or seen it or read The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which is the, the book purporting to be history on which, The Da Vinci Code was based. The theory in this is that Jesus and Mary Mankalin get married. They have children. This is a holy bloodline, the sangria, the holy blood. And that, as Leeti Bing says, that it it marries into, Frankish royalty, and they create this family called the Merovingians.

And you may wonder where where all else has this come from? And the answer is is that there's a a Frankish chronicle which is written in the 7th century, which claims that the Merovingians, who are absolutely historical dynasty, will be looking at them, that they took their name from a guy called Merovech, who was a Frankish king whose mother had been out for swim in the ocean, where she had encountered a mysterious sea creature that was part sea monster, part human, and part bull.

It's kind of hard to picture that, isn't it?

It is.

Part bull. Which bit of him is bull? Which bit of him is human, and which is sea monster?

I don't think that is explained. Yeah. But according to the holy blood and the holy grail, which informs Dan Brown's novel, this sea creature was actually a fish, and an early Christian symbol for Jesus was a fish.

Yeah. Still is.

And so that proves that Yeah. That, that the Merovingtons are actually

So this creature was Jesus?

Yeah. It's a different Jesus.

God Almighty. That's a shock, isn't it, if that's what Jesus looks like?

So that's the theory, but there is an alternative, and I would say he likely a explanation.

Ah, that's disappointing. What's this alternative? And no doubt very very drab explanation.

And the explanation probably is that Maravich, if he existed at all, was a Frankish leader who was a Roman commander in the age of Attila, and he fights with the Romans against Attila in the great battle that sees the Huns turned back. But equally, I mean, he may have been completely legendary. There's all kinds of, debate about this among historians. But in either case, I mean, people may be wondering where on earth did this kind of mad story about the sea monster come from. And I think it comes from the fact that over the course of 5th century, and definitely into the 6th century, these Frankish warlords, who previously had proclaimed their power in Roman terms, are having to find alternative sources to manifest their greatness.

And, essentially, they are looking for ways to market themselves as kingly and to have a kind of mad origin point, a third bull, a third human, a third sea monster. I mean, that's a great way to say that you belong to a dynasty that is somehow kind of out of the ordinary. And we know that by the end of 5th century, Frankish warlords are starting to proclaim themselves kings. And the first person that we absolutely know did this is a guy called Childeric, who'd been a commander of Frankish foederati. He may actually have been a son of Maravich.

There are historians who argue this. And he is taking on himself all the symbols of royalty. So among the Franks, the particular symbol of royalty is to grow your hair longer than than anyone else. So, you know, if you're the guy in the prog rock band, your hair is right the way down to the back of your knees. Yeah.

And so the Merovingian kings come to be called the reges kriniti, the long haired kings. And the reason that we know that Childeric called himself a king is that his tomb was found near Tournai in, Belgium in 16/53, and it was kind of full of sumptuous grave goods. He had this cloak that was decorated with lots of golden bees, And these golden bees actually provided Napoleon with the symbol for the French empire that he wanted. So it was designed to kind of replace the, the fleur de lis, the royal symbol. And as well as all these golden bees, there was a ring that had the inscription, I belong to Childeric, the king.

So just on this thing about being a king, Childeric died in 4/81. And lots of people listening to this podcast will know that 5 years earlier, the Roman Empire in the West had formally come to an end. And we always think of this as a massive moment, but actually at the time, probably a lot of people barely even noticed there was no longer an emperor in the west. But that's reflective of a general breakdown across the 5th century in the institutions and the authority of Rome in the western half of the empire. And so, as we said in the first half, when the institutions break down, basically power passes to those people who have weapons and then know how to use them.

And I guess it's clearly only gonna be a matter of time before some of these warlords or officers or captains or gangland mobsters or whatever image you want to use to describe them before they start to say, well, you know, actually, who needs an authority above me? I'll be the top dog and I'll make myself a king. So is that what's going on here, that the Franks they're part of a general pattern of warlords turning themselves into kings?

Absolutely. So Jildrick is succeeded by his son, who's a guy called Clovis. And Clovis, the great Frankish warlord, proclaimed himself as a king, he's only 1 of a number of of would be warlords who, at this point, are scrapping over the corpse of what had been Roman Gaul. The most formidable of these are the Visigoths, the Goths of the west, who have conquered much of Spain, but they also rule a huge swath of of southern Gaul. There are others as well.

So there's the Burgundians, who had crossed over the Rhine in 4/11 and conquered all the area around Strasbourg. There are our friends, the Alemanni. They're also very much on the scene. And there is also a Roman renegade, a guy called Sayagrius, who calls himself king of the Romans, so Rex Romanarum. And he is Clovis' most immediate rival and neighbor.

And the town that he has taken as his capital is a city that from early times in Roman Gaul had been called Lutetia parasaurum. So Lutetia of the Parisii. That's the local Gallic tribe, but which by this point has come to be known as Paris. And so it's unsurprising with Syagrius right on his doorstep that the first person that Clovis targets is this so called king of the Romans. And in 486, Clovis wins a great battle at Soissons, defeats Sigrius.

Sigrius runs away, escapes. He turns up in Toulouse, which is the capital of the Visigoths in southern Gaul. The Visigothic king returns him to Clovis, who imprisons him, and then has him murdered. And you might say that, actually, you know, we did a whole series, didn't we, on when the Roman Empire in the West ends. This might be an alternative point because Zagros had been ruling as a Roman.

And with him gone, there were no more people claiming to rule Gaul in a kind of Roman way. And Paris from now on will be the capital of the Franks. This is where Clovis puts down his own base. So he's conquered northern Gaul with the exception of Amorica of of Brittany, which he kind of leaves alone. He then decides he's going to advance southwards and try and conquer all these other peoples who are lurking in the south.

So his first target are the Alemanni, and he defeats them in in a great battle at a place called Polbiak in the Rhineland. Very, very close run. At 1 point, as we will see, Clovis thinks that he's going to lose, and he he makes a vow that has a a seismic impact on the future course of European history, but we'll come to that in due course. He then turns on the Burgundians. He forces them to pay him tribute.

And then finally, in 507, he's ready for the big 1, the kind of heavyweight championship. And that is to take on the Visigoths in the south of Gaul. So he marches southwards just by Poitiers, so very close to Tours, the shrine of Saint Martin, the place called Vuilliers. He meets the Visigoths under their king. The Visigoths are are wiped out.

The king is killed. Clovis continues southwards. He lays Toulouse, the Visigothic capital, under siege. 508, Toulouse falls. And all that remains to the Visigoths of their their former enormous waves of territory in southern Gaul is a tiny strip of land.

Right. And it's an astonishing achievement. Because the Franks, who in lots of ways had been the most inferior of all the kind of various Germanic confederations, have emerged as the masters of Gaul, the most prosperous of all the provinces in the Western Empire. And the lands that for 500 years, pretty much, had been ruled by the Caesars are now subject to a Germanic warlord who's got his long hair. He's got his enormous genitals bulging out of his tight pants.

He's got his beads. He's got all this kind of stuff. And, you know, it's quite the transformation.

But the cancer argument might run like this. That these guys have been serving in the Roman army now for generations. I mean, not talking about decades, we're talking about more than a century. That perhaps to a lot of people they would look pretty romanized. That they know how the Roman Empire works because they've been in it for so long.

That actually they are not replacing Roman authority, but they're simply succeeding to it. And that possibly to a lot of people, provincial elites and whatnot, these just look like, you know, the imperial army or people who were once in the imperial army have basically moved in and reasserted control. Isn't that how it might look?

Well, we know for a fact that it does because we have a letter that is written by the Bishop of Reims in northern Gaul, a guy called Ramidius, who is clearly Roman. You can tell that from his name. Also very, very holy. He's a man who supposedly can raise the dead back to life. And he writes to Clovis when Clovis succeeds his father, Childeric, essentially hailing Clovis, not as a king, but as the new governor of the Roman province of northeastern Gaul.

And we have the letter that he he writes to him. And he says, the bestowal of your favor must be pure and honest. You must honor your bishops and must always incline yourself to their advice. And this is exactly as he would have written to a Roman governor.

Well, he says that it's no surprise you have begun just as your forefathers had always done. Yes. So there's no sense there of, like, this is a huge rupture.

Absolute continuity.

This is just as things always are. You're the legitimate authority. You've moved in. You've taken power. Great.

Everything can continue as it always has.

Yes. Now there is, of course, complication here, which is that Clovis, like his forefathers, he's not a Christian. He worships the Roman gods.

Mhmm.

And that is unlike the other and that is unlike the other barbarian kings who seized power in Gaul, who have adopted Christianity, but tellingly, a a heretical form of Christianity. Arianism. Right? Yeah. So God the Son, so Christ, is not held to be of 1 essence with God the father.

He's subordinate to God the father. And that enables them to kind of buy into the fabric of Christian civilization, but to be a part, and as they see it, superior to their Roman subjects. What will Clovis do? Because the more he advances southwards into Gaul, so in a way, the more pressing it is that he arrives at an accommodation with the Christian elites of Roman Gaul. And you can see him over the course of his life kind of doing this in a gingerly way, like someone, you know, kind of inching his way into a very cold swimming pool.

So he has married a Burgundian princess called Clotilda, who, unlike most of her compatriots, is an orthodox Christian, so a Catholic Christian as we would call them, not an Arian. She baptizes the 2 sons that she bears Clovis. 1 of these dies and Clovis says, well, this proves that, you know, your god can do nothing. Where is your power now? But the second son survives, and and Clovis is happy for that son to be baptized.

And then comes the decisive moment according to, to tradition at the Battle of Tolbiac, where he defeats the Alemanni. And people remember that this is the moment where he thinks he's going to lose and he raises a vow, and the vow is to the Christian god. And Kova says, if you allow me to win this battle, I will turn to you. I will convert. And he wins the battle, and he is true to his vow.

And not just Clovis, but 3,000 of his followers, it is said. And we get that report from the great historian of 6th century Gaul, a guy called Gregory of Tours, who's the bishop, writes this incredible history, and we'll be drawing on it a lot in our next episode. But Gregory does also write about Clovis. And he reports that Clovis and his 3,000 followers are baptized on Christmas Day by Ramidius, this holy bishop who can raise the dead back to life, in Reims. And Gregory writes, like some new Constantine, Clovis stepped forward to the baptismal pool, ready to wash away the sores of his old leprosy and to be cleansed in flowing water from the sordid stains which he had borne so long.

And this, Dominic, of course, is why, you know, we've been doing this series on the French Revolution. That's why Louis the 16th was crowned and anointed in Ruiz. And it's actually why Louis is called Louis because Louis is a variant of Clovis.

Just on Clovis' conversion, an alternative explanation for why he does it is not just because he thinks God has given him victory at Tobyak, but it's also am I not right in thinking that adopting Christianity is becoming increasingly high status?

Yes. Absolutely.

It's a way of assimilating himself into the elite now that he's beaten his enemies, got the power. He's upgrading to a more high class religion that will ensure his acceptance by the other provincial power brokers. Right?

I don't think they're mutually exclusive. No. You can feel that your own needs and those of God are compatible if you are the chosen 1 of God. So often the way. Yeah.

But, of course, the key thing is is that the form of Christianity that Clovis is converted to, unlike that of the Visigothic or Burgundian or Alemanic kings, it isn't Arianism. It's the orthodox form of Christianity, the Roman form of Christianity. And this means that Clovis can be acknowledged not just by his rival barbarian compadres, but by the Roman emperor who still prevails and presides over a Roman Empire in Constantinople. And so the key indicator of this comes in 508 after he's captured Toulouse, the capital of the Visigothic Kingdom. And he's heading southwards, tellingly, to tour the shrine of Saint Martin.

And on his way, he's met by emissaries of the Roman Emperor, Anastasius, who presents him with this official document that honors him and recognizes him as a consul of the Roman people. So this is official recognition from the new Rome. And this is brilliant for Clovis because, you know, he's this barbarian warlord, but he's also now a Roman consul. And so he then heads to the shrine of Saint Martin, this unbelievably potent saint of Roman Gaul. And he goes into the shrine.

And Gregory of Tours writes, he stood there clad in a purple tunic and the cloak of a Roman general, and he crowned himself with a diadem.

Wow.

So again, I mean, very much as Napoleon in due course will do. So kind of providing a role model. Yeah. And it's a sumptuous setting. So by this point, you've got a great complex of churches and courtyards and towers that have been built around the tomb of Saint Martin.

And over the tomb itself, there's this glittering gilded dome. Clovis comes out from the shrine, and he scatters gold and silver coins as he rides through the streets to the cathedral where he's welcomed by the bishop. And Gregory writes, from that day onwards, he was hailed as consul or Augustus. And it it's such a genius move. I'll read you what Patrick Gere, who's 1 of the great historians of this whole process of how Gaul becomes France.

Now no cult barrier separated the army from the indigenous inhabitants of Gaul. The peasants, artisans, and most importantly, the Gallo Roman aristocracy and its leaders, the bishops, for whom religion was an essential element of their identity. Christianization made possible not only the close cooperation between Gallo Romans and Franks, but a real amalgamation of the 2 peoples, a process well underway at all levels by the 6th century. So a massively significant maneuver on the part of Clovis with kind of epical consequences.

But here's the thing. Clovis is not just turning himself into another Roman. Because the fact that he has gone to the shrine of Saint Martin, who is this guy who left the Roman army, who was an outsider, whose whole persona was based on his kind of monasticism, his rejection of wealth, and all that kind of thing, who is somebody who's not an elite person. That's something new, isn't it? That he is identifying himself with with somebody who's very much on the on the fringe, on the periphery, and therefore creating a new kind of identity, a new kind of power base for himself.

Yeah. And Martin is this guy who can perform incredible miracles, and that has given him power. And power is kind of equivalent to lordship. And it's a lordship that stands outside the traditional power structures of the the Gallo Roman elite. And so it's brilliant for Clovis to identify himself with that.

He can be Christian. He can be completely orthodox. It's all, you know, very Roman. But at the same time, it's outside the kind of the frameworks of snobbery and prestige of that kind of class of bishops who essentially remain the arbiters of power in all the various cities of Roman Gaul. But Clovis, by identifying himself with Saint Martin, is kind of pushing himself over and above them.

It's an absolutely brilliant move, and it's reflective of his absolute determination to acknowledge no rivals, let alone any equals. He is absolutely the superior. And just as adopting Saint Martin enables him to put the bishops of Roman Gaul in the shade, so also does he spend the last years of his life, so in the wake of his his conversion, basically going around like a kind of mafia boss and exterminating all the other Frankish chieftains. And again, Gregory of Tours has a very funny passage about this. So he describes Clovis 1 day when he had called a general assembly of his subjects.

He is said to have made the following remark about the relatives whom he had destroyed, so all the other Frankish chieftains. How sad a thing it is, he said, that I live amongst strangers like some solitary pilgrim, and that I have none of my own relations left to help me when disaster threatens. But he said this not because he grieved for their deaths, Gregory of Thore writes, but because in his cunning way, he hoped to find some relative still in the land of the living whom he could kill.

He's a ruthless man.

He is. But, you know, ruthlessness pays dividends in the troubled circumstances of the early 6th century.

Right.

By 5/11, when he dies, he gets buried in Paris. So he's the 1st Frankish king to be buried in Paris. He has established the most formidable kingdom in what had been the Western Roman Empire. And his dynasty, the Merovingians, like Clovis, they will rule both as, you know, the sacred, long haired descendants of a sea monster Yeah. But also as the descendants of an Augustus of a Roman consul.

And, of course, they have, in Saint Martin, this this patron of unbelievable potency. And even the Merovingian kings who follow Clovis will be a bit intimidated by Saint Martin. So they actually they tend to avoid his tomb because they're they're nervous of him. They don't want their own charisma to be blotted out by the much greater charisma of the saint. And in due course, they obtain that cloak, Dominic, which, Saint Martin had cut in half and given to the beggar.

And it becomes the kind of the great totem of Merovingian power, the badge of Frankish greatness. And they set up a special class of priests to look after this cloak, capella in Latin. And these priests are called the capellani or chaplains. And this cloak, this capella, as it's called in Latin, comes to be guarded by a special class of priest who are called the capillani or chaplains. And this is in due course where we get the word chapel from.

And these capillani, these chaplains, will follow it when the the Merovingian king rides into war. And it bears stunning witness to the way in which Roman military power and Christian sacral power have been fused by this barbarian king to become a source of unbelievable potency. And it's that fusion of the Roman, the Christian, the barbarian that will typify the emergence of the Frankish kingdom in the 6th century.

Okay. And so it begins. Now the 1 thing

we didn't talk about in today's episode, it had sea monsters, it had magic cloaks, it had the works, but it didn't have many women. But the great news is that in the next episode, we will be exploring the warrior queens of the Franks and their mad rivalries. It's an unbelievable story. There will be all kinds of extremely, extremely bad behavior. So that's a lot to look forward to.

If you remember the rest is history club, you can actually hear that episode right away. And by the way, you can sign up at the rest is history.com. If you're not, however, you will have to wait until Thursday for the blood feud between queen Fredegund and her great rival, queen Brunhild. So we'll be back on Thursday with that story or indeed right away if you remember the rest of history club and on that bombshell.

Goodbye.