Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

At the head of the Visigoths rode Athaulf, brother-in-law of Alaric, unanimously chosen king by the tribe on the death of that mighty warrior.[1] Instead of continuing the campaign in South Italy, Athaulf had made peace with the Emperor Honorius and married his sister, thus gaining a semi-royal position in the eyes of Roman citizens.

‘I once aspired,’ he said frankly, ‘to obliterate the name of Rome and to erect on its ruins the dominion of the Goths, but ... I was gradually convinced that laws are essentially necessary to maintain and regulate a well-constituted state.... From that moment, I proposed to myself a different object of glory and ambition; and it is now my sincere wish that the gratitude of future ages should acknowledge the merits of a stranger, who employed the sword of the Goths, not to subvert, but to restore and maintain the prosperity of the Roman Empire.’

Fortified by such sentiments and the benediction of the Emperor, who was glad to free Italy from his brother-in-law’s presence, Athaulf succeeded, after a short struggle, in establishing a Visigothic kingdom in southern Gaul, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Biscay. This, under his successors, was enlarged until it embraced the whole of the province of Aquitania, with Toulouse as its capital, as well as both slopes of the Pyrenees.

The Burgundians, another German tribe, had, in the meanwhile, built up a middle kingdom along the banks of the Rhone. Years of intercourse with the Romans had done much to civilize both their manners and thoughts, and they were quite prepared to respect the laws and customs that they found in Gaul so long as they met with no serious opposition to their rule. The fact that both Burgundians and Visigoths were Arians raised, however, a fatal barrier between conquerors and conquered, and did more than anything else to determine that ultimate dominion over the whole of Gaul should be the prize of neither of these races, but of a third Teutonic tribe, the Salian Franks, whom good fortune placed beyond the influence of heresy.

The Franks

The Franks were a tall, fair-haired, loose-limbed people, who, emerging from Germany, had settled for a time in the country we now call Belgium. Like their ancestors, they worshipped Woden and other heathen gods of the Teutons, while in their Salic law we see much to recall the German customs described by Tacitus five centuries before.

The king was no longer elected by his people, for his office had become hereditary in the House of Meroveus, one of the heroes of the race. No woman, even of the Merovingian line, might succeed to the throne, nor prince whose hair had been shorn, since with the Franks flowing locks were a sign of royalty. Yet, in spite of the king’s new position, the old spirit of equality had not entirely disappeared. The assembly of freemen, still held once a year, had degenerated into a military review: but the warriors thus collected could demand that the coming campaign should meet with their approval. When a battle was over and victory obtained, the lion’s share of the booty did not fall to the king, but the whole was divided by lot.

A great part of the Salic law was really a tariff of violent acts, with the fine that those who had committed them must pay, so much for shooting a poisoned arrow, even if it missed its mark; so much for wounding another in the head, or for cutting off his nose, or his great toe, or, worst of all, for damaging his second finger, so that he could no longer draw the bowstring.

The underlying principle of this code was different from that of the Roman law, which set up a certain standard of right, inflicting penalties on those who fell short of it. Thus the Roman citizen who murdered or maimed his neighbour would be punished because he had dared to do what the state condemned as a crime. The Frank, in a similar case, would be fined by the judges of his tribe, and the money paid as compensation to the person, or the relations of the person, whom he had wronged: the idea being, not to appease the anger of the state, but to remove the resentment of the injured party.

For this purpose each Frank had his wergeld, literally his ‘worth-gold’ or the sum of money at which, according to his rank, his life was valued, beginning with the nobles of the king’s palace and descending in a scale to the lowest freeman. When the Franks left Belgium and advanced, conquering, into northern Gaul, they also fixed wergelds for their Roman subjects; but rated them at only half the value of their own race. The wergeld of a Frankish freeman was two hundred gold pieces, of a Roman only one hundred.