Of Chlodomer’s realm Childebert took the lands on the upper Loire and the capital city Orleans, Chlothar the Loire-mouth and the part of Aquitaine south of it. Hearing a false report that his eldest brother, Theuderich had fallen in battle with the Thuringians, Childebert now invaded East Aquitaine, a part of his brother’s heritage. But Theuderich returned in wrath, and the king of Paris and Orleans resolved to go instead against the Visigoths, and to drive them from the land between the Cevennes and the Pyrenees. The great Theodoric was just dead, so no help from Italy could be expected by the Visigothic king Amalric, the grandson of the departed hero. Childebert found his pretext in the complaint that his sister Chrotechildis, the wife of Amalric, had been debarred from the exercise of the Catholic religion and cruelly ill treated by her Arian husband. With this holy plea as his casus belli he marched against Narbonne, defeated Amalric in battle, and drove him over the Pyrenees to the gates of Barcelona. |War with the Visigoths, 531.| There he was slain, either by the sword of the pursuing Franks, or by the Visigothic army, enraged at the cowardice which he had displayed in the struggle. On his death the Goths raised on the shield and saluted as king the aged count Theudis, the regent who had ruled Spain for Theodoric the Great during the minority of Amalric. Thus ended the race of the Baltings as rulers of the Visigoths; their succeeding kings were not of the old royal house. Theudis, who was suspected of having had some hand in his late pupil’s murder, soon justified the choice of the Goths, by recovering Narbonne and the other cities of Septimania from the Franks. Childebert had turned off to another quest, and the old Visigothic possessions north of the Pyrenees were retaken without much trouble (531).
The enterprise which had called away Childebert was a new attempt to conquer Burgundy, in which his brother Chlothar had promised to join him. |Burgundy conquered, 532.| In the spring of 532 the kings of Paris and Soissons united their forces, and marched up the valley of the Yonne. They laid siege to Autun, and when Gondomar the Burgundian monarch came to its relief, beat him with such decisive results that he fled into Italy and abandoned his kingdom. A few sieges put the victorious Frankish brethren in possession of the whole Burgundian realm as far as the borders of the Ostrogoths on the Alps and the Drôme.
When Burgundy had been conquered, the Franks began to prepare for a new campaign against the Visigoths, in which Theuderich intended to share no less than his brothers. But this scheme was frustrated by the death of the king of Ripuaria early in the year 533. He left a son, Theudebert, already a grown man and a good warrior, but in true Merovingian fashion the uncles of the heir made a vigorous attempt to seize and divide his realm. It was only the prompt and enthusiastic way in which the Ripuarians rallied around their young king that saved him from the fate of his cousins, the princes of Orleans. Not merely, however, did Theudebert hold his own, but he compelled his uncles to give him a share of the newly-conquered Burgundy, when the partition of that country was finally made.
Theudebert was, in fact, well able to take care of himself, and soon showed that he was as unscrupulous and enterprising, if not quite so bloodthirsty, as his father and uncles. Yet he was, for a Meroving, not an unfavourable specimen of a monarch, and the chroniclers tell us that he ruled his kingdom with justice, venerated the clergy, built churches, and gave much alms to the poor. That as a politician he was shifty and treacherous was soon to be shown by his dealings with Italy. |Theudebert invades Italy, 535.| In 535 the emperor Justinian, on the eve of his invasion of the Ostrogothic kingdom, bribed the three Frankish monarchs, by a gift of 50,000 solidi, to attack Italy from the rear. Uncles and nephew alike were ready to take the money and join in the plunder of the peninsula. But in the next year the Gothic king Witiges, eager to free himself from a second war, offered to cede Provence and Rhaetia to the Franks if they would make peace with him, and grant him the aid of their arms. The three kings gladly agreed, and lent him an auxiliary force of 10,000 men, who joined the Goths in recovering Milan. Theudebert and Childebert are said to have cheated Chlothar of his third of the gains, the former having got the money and the latter the land which Witiges made over.
In 539 Witiges and Belisarius were locked in such deadly conflict that the Franks thought it a good opportunity to endeavour to invade Italy on their own behalf. Theudebert came over the Alps in person, with an army of 100,000 men, all footmen armed with lance and axe, save 300 nobles who rode around the king with shield and spear. First falling on his friends the Goths, then attacking the East-Romans in turn, Theudebert drove across the north of Italy, sacking Genoa, and wasting all the valley of the Po as far as Venetia. All the open country was in his hands, and the Goths and Romans had to shut themselves up in their fortresses. But a disease brought on by foul living fell upon the Franks, and so thinned their ranks that Theudebert had to retire homeward, relinquishing all he had gained save the possession of the passes of the Cottian Alps. It was, however, with his Italian plunder that he struck the first gold money which any barbarian king coined in his own name. Instead of placing the head of the emperor on his solidi, as had hitherto been the practice of Goth, Frank, and Burgundian, he represented his own image with shield and buckler, and the inscription Dominus Noster Theudebertus Victor, without any reference to Justinian as emperor or over-lord. Some of the pieces make him assume the more startling title of Dominus Theudebertus Augustus, as if he had aimed at uniting Gaul and Italy, and taking the style of Western Emperor; and, strange as this design may appear, it receives some countenance from a chronicler who declares that, after his Italian conquests, Theudebert was so uplifted in spirit that he designed to march against Constantinople, and make himself lord of the world (539).
When in the next year the faithless Theudebert planned another expedition to reconquer north Italy, and had the effrontery to offer his alliance once more to king Witiges, we need not marvel that the Ostrogoth refused to listen for a moment to the overture, and chose rather to open negotiation with his East-Roman foes. The surrender of Ravenna and the triumph of Belisarius followed, and Theudebert found that, in invading the peninsula, he would have the emperor as his foe rather than the king of the Goths. He refrained for the time from following up his first successes, but it is strange to find that when the Gothic cause had again triumphed in the hands of king Baduila, and north Italy was once more torn asunder between Roman and Teuton, the Frank did not take advantage of the renewed troubles to make a second expedition. |Conquest of Bavaria.| It is probable that in these years, 541-45, he was occupied in another conquest, that of the land between the Danube and the Noric Alps, which now bore the name of Bavaria. The German tribes in the ancient Noricum, who had been subject to Theodoric in the great days of the Gothic Empire, the remnant of the Rugians, Scyrri, Turcilingi, and Herules, had lately formed themselves into a federation under the name of Bavarians, and had chosen a duke Garibald as their prince[[16]]. We have no details of Theudebert’s wars against them, but merely know that by the end of his reign he had made the Bavarians tributary to the Franks. Their conquest in all probability fills the unrecorded time between Theudebert’s expedition to Italy and his death in 548. For some years at the end of this period we know that he was sick and bedridden, so that it is fair to put the subjection of Bavaria somewhere about 543, five years before the death-date of the Ripuarian king. Theudebert left his kingdom to his young son, Theudebald, a weak and sickly boy, whose accession, knowing the character of his great-uncles, we are surprised to hear was not troubled by any opposition.
[16]. This seems the best way of accounting for the obscure beginnings of the Bavarian duchy. The derivation of the word Bavaria is hard to fathom.
While Theudebert had been busied in Italy, the other two Frankish kings, Childebert and Chlothar, though now they were both advanced in years, had made a second expedition against the Visigoths, and in 542 overran the Gothic province north of the Pyrenees, and then crossed into the valley of the Ebro. They took Pampeluna, and advanced as far as Saragossa, to which they laid siege, but in front of that city they received a crushing defeat from Theudigisel, the general of the old Gothic king, Theudis, and were driven back into Gaul without retaining one foot of their conquests. Narbonne and the Mediterranean shore still remained an appendage of the kingdom of Spain.
A similar fate to that which attended the armies of his great-uncles in Spain was destined to befall the first expedition which Theudebald of Ripuaria despatched to Italy. The boy-king was too young to head the army, but the Eastern Frankish magnates who governed in his name had resolved to renew the enterprise of king Theudebert. Two dukes of Alamannian race, Buccelin and Chlothar, who seemed to have possessed the chief influence at the court of Metz, set out in 551, while King Baduila was engaged in his last desperate struggle with the East-Romans, and overran part of Venetia. Holding to the alliance of neither Roman nor Goth, they threatened to attack both; but Narses, when he marched into Italy from Illyria, left them alone, and proceeded to assault king Baduila, without paying attention to the northern invaders. |Battle of Casilinum, 553.| It was only in the next year, when Baduila and his successor Teia had both been slain, that the armies of the Franks broke up from their encampments in northern Italy, and marched down to challenge the supremacy of the victorious Narses in the desolated peninsula. How they fared we have had to relate in the preceding chapter. Chlothar and his division perished of want, or plague, in Apulia. Buccelin and the main body were defeated and exterminated by Narses at the battle of Casilinum. By the end of 553 all the gains of the Franks in Italy were gone, and 75,000 Frankish corpses had been buried in Italian soil or left to the Italian vultures.
Less than two years after the armies of his generals had been exterminated by Narses the weakly Theudebald died, and, as he left no brother or uncle, the East-Frankish realm was heirless. It fell by the choice of the Ripuarian folk-moot to Theudebald’s great-uncle, the aged Chlothar, king of Soissons, who thus became possessed of three-fourths of the Frankish Empire. As his brother, the still older Childebert, king of Paris, was childless, it was now certain that after fifty years of division the empire of Chlodovech was about to be once more reunited (555).