Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (20 page)

• A woman raped, 12
solidi

• A woman whose hair is cut off without cause, 12
solidi

• A murdered slave, 30
solidi

• A murdered carpenter, 40
solidi

• A murdered blacksmith, 50
solidi

• A murdered silversmith, 100
solidi

• A murdered goldsmith, 200
solidi
  
³⁴

(Women’s hair would be cut off in order to enable them to fight as warriors.) Except for an occasional Burgundian phrase, such as
wergeld
or
wittimon
, the Code was written in Latin. A number of counts appended their seals to it as witnesses, thereby leaving a rare list of Burgundian personal names:

Sigismund, son of Gundobad, a convert and a saint of the Catholic Church, is often credited with the wholesale conversion of his people. Together with his royal brothers, he campaigned none too successfully against the Franks, but was better at suppressing the Arian enclaves which had survived during the kingdom’s partition. He is reputed to have strangled his infant son to exclude him from the succession, and, abducted by the Franks, he ended his life at the bottom of a well at Coulmiers, near Orléans. He was declared a martyr, and his cult spread to many parts of Europe.
³⁶
Among his lasting achievements were a long correspondence (
c.
494–523) with his chief adviser, Archbishop (later Saint) Avitus of Vienne,
³⁷
and the foundation of the abbey at Agaunum (now St Maurice-en-Valais), a site of the
laus perennis
or ‘unceasing praise’ of God.
³⁸

The ‘Catholic’ ascendancy in Burgundy was systematized in 517 at the Council of Epaon (possibly Albon in the modern Dauphiné), where Avitus, whose letters constitute a very rare contemporary source, laid down guidelines for social and ecclesiastical practice. The rules whereby Arians could be reconciled to the Church were relaxed. Rules governing monasteries and convents were tightened, as were those relating to marriage and consanguinity. This last measure so enraged King Sigismund that he withdrew from communion with the Church, threatening to revert to Arianism. He relented when the bishop of Valence helped cure him when he was ill.
³⁹

The suppression of the (second) Kingdom of the Burgundians came about as a result of the Frankish victory in the seemingly endless Franko-Burgundian wars in the first decades of the sixth century. The key role played in those wars by Clothilda, Clovis’s Burgundian widow (Clovis died in 511), was traditionally attributed to her support for Catholicism, but it was equally marked by her political engagement on behalf of her sons in their feud with her Burgundian kinsmen. The kingdom came under attack from the Franks, both from the north and, in the wake of their victory over the Visigoths at Vouillé, from the west. In 532 or 534, Gundimar, trapped between them, was proscribed, pursued and executed, and his birthright annexed.

The period during which the former Burgundian kingdom was subjected to Frankish overlordship lasted more than three hundred years, long enough for the original distinction between Franks and Burgundians to be blurred and for the Franco-Burgundian overlords to merge into the culture and society of the former Gallo-Roman population. Two dynasties were descended from the offspring of Clovis and Clothilda. The Merovingians, who ruled to 751, traced their bloodline to Merewig or Merovée, the grandfather of Clovis, and wore their hair long as a sign of royal status. The Carolingians, who ruled from 751 to 987, rose to prominence as ‘mayors of the palace’ of the Merovingian court at Jovis Villa (Jupille) on the River Meuse, and were descended from the famous warrior Charles Martel. Their mightiest son was Charles the Great, or Charlemagne (r. 768–814), whose dominions stretched from the Spanish March to Saxony and who raised himself to the dignity of emperor.

Those same centuries saw fundamental linguistic changes. In the days of Clovis and Gundobad, the old Frankish and Scando-Burgundian tongues had still been spoken alongside the late Latin of the Gallo-Romans. By Charlemagne’s time, all these vernaculars had been replaced by a range of new idioms in the general category of
Francien
or ‘Old French’. Frankish only survived in the Low Countries as the ancestor of Dutch and Flemish. Latin survived in stylized form as the language of the Church and as a written medium. Burgundian was totally submerged. The numerous variants of Old French are usually divided into two groups – the
langue d’oïl
and the
langue d’oc
. The former was characterized by the use of
hoc ille
for ‘yes’, hence the modern
oui
, and the latter by an unvarnished
hoc,
and in general by a closer adherence to its Latin roots. The line dividing the
oïl
and the
oc
ran right through the former Burgundian sphere, and is still very visible on today’s linguistic map.
⁴⁰

Within the Frankish realms, a territorial unit known as Burgundia always existed. Many of the Merovingians styled themselves kings of ‘
Francia et Burgundia
’ or of ‘
Neustria et Burgundia
’. (Neustria was the early medieval name for the north-western region round Paris.) In the late sixth century, one of the grandsons of Clovis and Clothilda, Guntram (r. 561–92), established a distinct
Regnum Burgundiae
, which functioned for a century and a half until it was reabsorbed by Charles Martel. This shadowy principality figures as No. II on Bryce’s list, though it would be better described as the ‘third kingdom’. Presumably on the grounds that it was not a fully sovereign state, its existence has often been ignored. Yet both of the preceding Burgundian kingdoms had similarly been subject to overlords.

Guntram or Guntramnus is an interesting figure, not just because he was declared a saint, but also because his armies fought as far afield as Brittany and Septimania in south-western Francia. For a time, as ‘king of Orléans’, he even shared dominion over Paris. He was the exact contemporary of the chronicler-bishop Gregory of Tours, who carefully recorded the progress of his reign, largely a non-stop series of wars, dynastic quarrels, murders, intrigues and acts of treachery. Guntram’s marital affairs were as complex as his military campaigns:

The good king Guntram first took a concubine Veneranda, a slave belonging to one of his people, by whom he had a son Gundobad. Later he married Marcatrude, daughter of Magnar, and sent his son Gundobad to Orléans. But when she too had a son, Marcatrude became jealous, they say… and poisoned [Gundobad’s] drink. Upon his death, by God’s judgement… she incurred the hatred of the king, and was dismissed by him. Next he took Austerchild, also named Bobilla. He had by her two sons, of whom the older was called Clothar and the younger Chlodomer.
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At one point, Gregory of Tours stops his narrative to present a sketch of Divio (Dijon), which was to have a special place in Burgundian history. He had just been talking about Gregorius, bishop of Langres:

[Divio], where [Bishop Gregorius] was so active… is a stronghold with very solid walls, built in the midst of a plain, a very pleasant place, the lands rich and fruitful, so that… a great wealth of produce arrives in due season. On the south it has a river… very rich in fish, and from the north comes another little stream, which runs… under a bridge… flowing around the whole fortified place… and turning the mills before the gate with wonderful speed. The four gates face the four regions of the universe, and thirty-three towers adorn the Wall [which] is thirty feet high and fifteen feet thick… On the west are hills, very fertile and full of vineyards, which produce such a noble Falernian that [the inhabitants] disdain the wine of Ascalon. The ancients say this place was built by the emperor Aurelian.
⁴²

Despite this air of plenty, if Gregory is to be believed, Guntram spent his final years fasting, praying and weeping. His capital lay at Cabillo (Chalon-sur-Saône), where he was buried in the church of St Marcellus. He was declared a saint by the spontaneous acclamation of his subjects, and became the patron of repentant murderers.

A corrective to what are sometimes thought Gregory’s excessively pro-Frankish leanings comes from Marius d’Avenches (532–96), bishop of Lausanne (later St Marius Aventicensis), famed both for piety and scholarship. Protector of the poor, he was said to have ploughed his own land; as a scholar, he restarted the work of St Prosper of Aquitania, extending Prosper’s Universal Chronicle to 581.
⁴³
The premier cleric of the age, however, was probably St Caesarius of Arles (d. 542), a formidable preacher, theologian and prelate. Born at Cabillo, he studied at Lerinum, and presided for nearly forty years as primate of Gaul.
⁴⁴
The Irish missionary St Columbanus (
c
. 540–615) would also have arrived in Guntram’s time. He lived partly as a guest at the Burgundian court and partly as a hermit in the Vosges.
⁴⁵

At its height in 587, Guntram’s
Regnum Burgundiae
briefly commanded the greater part of Gaul, including Bordeaux, Rennes and Paris, as well as the former Burgundy of Gundobad. It was too extended for its own good, and invited the depredations of its neighbours. Guntram’s sword-swinging successors performed numerous contorted exchanges of thrones and territory. Several rulers’ names are recorded by the chroniclers as kings of Burgundy, of Neustria and Burgundy, or of ‘all the Franks’; as well as Guntram they include Childebert II (r. 592–5), Theuderic II (r. 595–613), Sigebert (r. 613), Clotaire II (r. 613–29), Dagobert (r. 629–39), Clovis II (r. 639–55) and Clotaire III (r. 655–73).

Some phases of Merovingian history are irredeemably opaque, but the chronicler variously known as Fredegar, Fredegarius or the Pseudo-Fredegarius (d.
c
. 660) throws a shaft of light on the third quarter of the seventh century. He lived in a monastery, possibly at Chalon or Luxeuil, and started by trying to ‘improve’ a number of existing chronicles. But for eighteen years from 624 he compiled a detailed and reflective commentary on contemporary events which amply illustrates how the cult of the blood-feud was alive and well at all social levels of Franco-Burgundian society. A quotation from Attila is more than apt: ‘
Quid viro forti suavius quam vindicta manu querere?
’ (‘What could be more delightful for a strong man than to pursue a vendetta?’) Fredegar mentions an incident involving the emperor of Byzantium that nicely illustrates the cheapness of human life. After two Burgundian envoys had been killed in a brawl in Byzantine-ruled Carthage, the Emperor Maurice offered restitution in the form of twelve men, ‘to do with as you will’.
⁴⁶
Fredegar’s particular bugbear, not to say the object of his vilification, was the Visigoth princess Brunechildis, who came to the Burgundian court from Hispania and allegedly filled it with violence and hatred: ‘
Tanta mala et effusione sanguinum a Brunechildis consilium in Francia factae sunt.
’
⁴⁷