Holy Blood, Holy Grail (36 page)

Sion in Switzerland. Specimens of such coins were found in the Sutton Hoo treasure ship, and can now be seen in the British Museum. Many of the coins bear a distinctive equal-armed cross, identical to the one subsequently adopted during the Crusades for the Frankish kingdom of

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Jerusalem. Blood Royal

Although Merovingian culture was both temperate and surprisingly modern, the monarchs who presided over it were another matter. They were not typical even of rulers of their own age, for the atmosphere of mystery and legend, magic and the supernatural, surrounded them even during their lifetimes. If the customs and economy of the

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Merovingian world did not differ markedly from others of the period, the aura about the

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Sons of the Merovingian blood were not “created’ kings. On the contrary they “mere automatically regarded as such on the advent of their twelfth birthday. There was no public ceremony of anointment, no coronation of any sort. Power was simply assumed, as by sacred right. But while the king was supreme authority in the realm, he was never obliged or even expected to sully his hands with the mundane business of governing- He was essentially a ritualised figure, a priest-king, and his role was not necessarily to do anything, simply to be. The king ruled, in short, but did not govern. In this respect, his status was somewhat similar to that of the present British royal family.

Government and administration were left to a non-royal official, the equivalent of a chancellor, who held the title

“Mayor of the Palace’. On the whole the structure of the Merovingian regime had many things in common with modern constitutional monarchies.

Even after their conversion to Christianity the Merovingian rulers, like the Patriarchs of the Old Testament, were polygamous. On occasion they enjoyed harems of oriental proportions. Even when the aristocracy, under pressure from the Church, became rigorously monogamous, the monarchy remained exempt. And the Church, curiously enough, seems to have accepted this prerogative without any inordinate protest.

According to one modern commentator:

Why was it [polygamy] tacitly approved by the Franks themselves? We may here be in the presence of ancient usage of polygamy in a royal family a family of such rank that its blood could not be ennobled by

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any match, however advantageous, nor degraded by the blood of slaves

.. . It was a matter of indifference whether a queen were taken from a royal dynasty or from among courtesans .. . The fortune of the dynasty rested in its blood and was shared by all who were of that blood.”

And again, “It is just possible that, in the Merovingians, we may have a dynasty of Germanic Heerkonige derived from an ancient kingly family of the migration period.”

But how many families can there possibly have been in the whole of world history which enjoyed such extraordinary and exalted status? Why should the

Merovingians do so? Why should their blood come to be invested with such immense power? These questions continued to perplex us.

Clovis and His Pact with the Church

The most famous of all Merovingian rulers was Merovee’s grandson, Clovis I, who reigned between 481 and 511. Clovis’s name is familiar to any French schoolchild, for it was under Clovis that the Franks were converted to Roman

Christianity. And it was through Clovis that Rome began to establish her undisputed supremacy in Western Europe a supremacy that would remain unchallenged for a thousand years.

By 496 the Roman Church was in a precarious situation. During the course of the fifth century, its very existence had been severely threatened. Between 384 and 399 the bishop of Rome had already begun to call himself the pope, but his official status was no greater than that of any other bishop, and quite different from that of the pope today. He was not, in any sense, the spiritual leader or supreme head of Christendom. He merely represented a single body of vested interests, one of many divergent forms of

Christianity and one which was desperately fighting for survival against a multitude of conflicting schisms and theological points of view.

Officially the Roman Church had no greater authority than, say, the Celtic church -with which it was constantly at odds. It had no greater authority than heresies such as Arianism, which denied Jesus’s divinity and insisted on his humanity. Indeed during much of the fifth century

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every bishopric in Western Europe was either Arian or vacant.

If the Roman Church was to survive, still more assert its authority, it would need the support of a champion a powerful secular figure who might represent it. If Christianity was to evolve in accordance with Roman doctrine, that doctrine would have to be disseminated, implemented and imposed by secular force a force sufficiently powerful to withstand and eventually extirpate the challenge of rival Christian creeds. Not surprisingly the Roman Church, in its most acute moment of need, turned to

Clovis.

By 486 Clovis had significantly increased the extent of Merovingian domains, striking out from the Ardennes to annex a number of adjacent kingdoms and principalities, vanquishing a number of rival tribes. As a result, many important cities Troyes, for instance, Rheims and Amiens were incorporated into his realm. Within a decade it was apparent that

Clovis was well on his way to becoming the most powerful potentate in Western Europe.

The conversion and baptism of Clovis proved to be of crucial importance to our investigation. An account of it was compiled, in all its particulars and details, around the time it happened. Two and a half centuries later this account, called The Life of Saint Remy, was destroyed, except for a few scattered manuscript pages. And the evidence suggests that it was destroyed deliberately. Nevertheless the fragments that survive bear witness to the importance of what was involved.

According to tradition, Clovis’s conversion was a sudden and unexpected affair, effected by the king’s wife, Clothilde - a fervent devotee of Rome, who seems to have badgered her husband until he accepted her faith and who was subsequently canonised for her efforts. In these efforts she was said to have been guided and assisted by her confessor, Saint Remy. But behind these traditions, there lies a very practical and mundane historical reality. When Clovis was converted to Roman Christianity and became first

Catholic king of the Franks, he had more to gain than his wife’s approbation, and a kingdom more tangibly substantial than the kingdom of

Heaven.

It is known that in 496 a number of secret meetings occurred between Clovis and Saint R6my. Immediately thereafter an accord was ratified between

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Clovis and the Roman Church. For Rome this accord constituted a major political triumph. It would ensure the Church’s survival, and establish that Church as supreme spiritual authority in the West. It would consolidate Rome’s status as an equal to the Greek Orthodox faith based in Constantinople. It would offer a prospect of Roman hegemony and an effective means of eradicating the hydra heads of heresy. And Clovis would be the means of implementing these things the sword of the Church of Rome, the instrument whereby Rome imposed her spiritual dominion, the secular arm and palpable manifestation of Roman power.

In return Clovis was granted the title of “Novus Constantinus’ - “New Constantine’. In other words, he was to preside over a unified empire a “Holy Roman Empire’ intended to succeed the one supposedly created under

Constantine and destroyed by the Visigoths and Vandals not long before.

According to one modern expert of the period, Clovis, prior to his baptism, was ‘fortified .. . with visions of an empire in succession to that of

Rome, which should be the inheritance of the Merovingian race.”9

According to another modern writer, “Clovis must now become a kind of western emperor, a patriarch to the western Germans, reigning over, though not governing, all peoples and kings. “

The pact between Clovis and the Roman Church, in short, was one of momentous consequence to Christendom not only the Christendom of the time, but also the Christendom of the next millennium. Clovis’s baptism was deemed to mark the birth of a new Roman empire a Christian empire, based on the Roman Church and administered, on the secular level, by the

Merovingian bloodline. In other words, an indissoluble bond was established between church and state, each pledging allegiance to the other, each binding itself to the other in perpetuity. In ratification of this bond, in 496, Clovis allowed himself to be formally baptised by Saint Remy at

Rheims. At the climax of the ceremony, Saint Remy pronounced his famous words: Mitis depone colla, Sicamber, adora quod incendisti, incendi quod adorasti.

(Bow thy head humbly, Sicambrian, revere what thou hast burned and what

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thou hast revered.) It is important to note that Clovis’s baptism was not a coronation as historians sometimes suggest. The Church did not make Clovis a king. He was already that, and all the Church could do was recognise him as such. By virtue of so doing, the Church officially bound itself not to Clovis alone, but to his successors as well not to a single individual, but to a bloodline. In this respect the pact resembled the covenant which God, in the Old Testament, makes with King David a pact which can be modified, as in Solomon’s case, but not revoked, broken or betrayed. And the

Merovingians did not lose sight of the parallel.

During the remaining years of his life Clovis fully realised Rome’s ambitious expectations of him. With irresistible efficiency, faith was imposed by the sword; and with the sanction and spiritual mandate of the

Church, the Frankish kingdom expanded to both east and south, encompassing most of modern France and much of modern Germany. Among Clovis’s numerous adversaries the most important were the Visigoths, who adhered to Arian

Christianity. It was against the empire of the Visigoths which straddled the Pyrenees and extended as far north as Toulouse that Clovis directed his most assiduous and concerted campaigns. In 507 he decisively defeated the Visigoths at the Battle of Vouille. Shortly thereafter Aquitaine and

Toulouse fell into Frankish hands. The Visigoth empire north of the Pyrenees effectively collapsed before the Frankish ohslaught. From Toulouse, the Visigoths fell back to Carcassonne. Driven from Carcassonne, they established their capital, and last remaining bastion, in the Razes, at Rhedae now the village of Rennes-leChateau.

Dagobert II

In 511 Clovis died, and the empire he had created was divided, according to Merovingian custom, between his four sons. For more than a century thereafter the Merovingian dynasty presided over a number of disparate and often warring kingdoms, while lines of succession became increasingly tangled and claims to thrones increasingly confused. The authority once centralised in Clovis became progressively more diffuse,

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progressively Map 7 The Merovingian Kingdoms

NeusTRlA _

AUSTRASIA

BURGUNDY

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- . Ruucn - -__ ~ _ ~MeezTr-j

Pans ._

BRITTANY ;

(ARMORICA)

Pouicn

- AQUITAINE

_ “N;A

~/ -__

Touloum =’~PMaruJlcz~

Narhmnc

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more inchoate, and secular order deteriorated. Intrigues,

machinations, kidnappings and political assassination became ever more commonplace.

And the court chancellors, or “Mayors of the Palace’, accumulated more and more power a factor which would eventually contribute to the fall of the dynasty.

Bereft increasingly of authority the later Merovingian rulers have often been called “les rois faineant’ - “the enfeebled kings’. Posterity has contemptuously stigmatised them as weak, ineffectual monarchs, effeminate and pliably helpless in the hands of cunning and wily counsellors. Our research revealed that this stereotype was not strictly accurate. It is true that the constant wars, vendettas and internecine strife thrust a number of Merovingian princes on to the throne at an extremely youthful age and they were thus easily manipulated by their advisers. But those who did attain manhood proved as strong and decisive as any of their predecessors. This certainly seems to have been the case with Dagobert II.

Dagobert II was born in 653, heir to the kingdom of Austrasie. On his father’s death in 656

extravagant attempts were made to preciude his inheritance of the throne. Indeed Dagobert’s early life reads like a medieval legend, or a fairy tale. But it is well documented history.”

On his father’s death Dagobert was kidnapped by the presiding Mayor of the

Palace, an individual named Grimoald. Attempts to find the

five-year-old child proved fruitless, and it was not difficult to convince the court that he was dead. On this basis Grimoald then engineered his own son’s acquisition of the throne, claiming this had been the wish of the former monarch, Dagobert’s deceased father. The ruse worked effectively. Even

Dagobert’s mother, believing her son dead, deferred to the ambitious Mayor of the Palace.

However, Grimoald had apparently balked at actually murdering the young prince. In secret Dagobert had been confided to the charge of the bishop of

Poitiers. The bishop, it seems, was equally reluctant to murder the child.

Dagobert was therefore consigned to permanent exile in Ireland. He grew into manhood at the Irish monastery of Slane, ‘2 not far from Dublin; and here, at the school attached to the monastery, he received

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an education unobtainable in France at the time. At some point during this period he is supposed to have attended the court of the High King of Tara.

And he is said to have made the acquaintance of three Northumbrian princes, also being educated at Slane. In 666, probably still in Ireland, Dagobert married Mathilde, a Celtic princess. Not long after he moved from Ireland to