The whole of Gaul was now handed over to three children: Childebert’s two sons, Theudebert and Theuderich (Thierry), and the son of Fredegond, Clotaire II. The latter, having vanquished the two former at Latofao in The fall of Brunhilda. 596, was in turn beaten by them at Dormelles in 600, and a year later a fresh fratricidal struggle broke out between the two grandsons of the aged Brunhilda. Theuderich joined with Clotaire against Theodobert, and invaded his brother’s kingdom, conquering first an army of Austrasians and then one composed of Saxons and Thuringians. Strife began again in 613 in consequence of Theuderich’s desire to join Austrasia to Neustria, but his death delivered the kingdoms into the hands of Clotaire II. This weak king leant for support upon the nobles of Burgundy and Austrasia, impatient as they were of obedience to a woman and the representative of Rome. The ecclesiastical party also abandoned Brunhilda because of her persecution of their saints, after which Clotaire, having now got the upper hand, thanks to the defection of the Austrasian nobles, of Arnulf, bishop of Metz, with his brother Pippin, and of Warnachaire, mayor of the palace, made a terrible end of Brunhilda in 613. Her long reign had not lacked intelligence and even greatness; she alone, amid all these princes, warped by self-indulgence or weakened by discord, had behaved like a statesman, and she alone understood the obligations of the government she had inherited. She wished to abolish the fatal tradition of dividing up the kingdom, which so constantly prevented any possible unity; in opposition to the nobles she used her royal authority to maintain the Roman principles of order and regular administration. Towards the Church she held a courteous but firm policy, renewing relations between the Frankish kingdom and the pope; and she so far maintained the greatness of the Empire that tradition associated her name with the Roman roads in the north of France, entitling them “les chaussées de Brunehaut.”
Like his grandfather, Clotaire II. reigned over a once more united Gaul of Franks and Gallo-Romans, and like Clovis he was not too well obeyed by the nobles; moreover, his had been a victory more for the aristocracy than Clotaire II. for the crown, since it limited the power of the latter. Not that the permanent constitution of the 18th of October 614 was of the nature of an anti-monarchic revolution, for the royal power still remained very great, decking itself with the pompous titles of the Empire, and continuing to be the dominant institution; but the reservations which Clotaire II. had to make in conceding the demands of the bishops and great laymen show the extent and importance of the concessions these latter were already aiming at. The bishops, the real inheritors of the imperial idea of government, had become great landowners through enormous donations made to the Church, and allied as they were to the aristocracy, whence their ranks were continually recruited, they had gradually identified themselves with the interests of their class and had adopted its customs; while thanks to long minorities and civil wars the aristocracy of the high officials had taken an equally important social position. The treaty of Andelot in 587 had already decided that the benefices or lands granted to them by the kings should be held for life. In the 7th century the Merovingian kings adopted the custom of summoning them all, and not merely the officials of their Palatium, to discuss political affairs; they began, moreover, to choose their counts or administrators from among the great landholders. This necessity for approval and support points to yet another alteration in the nature of the royal power, absolute as it was in theory.
The Mayoralty of the Palace aimed a third and more serious blow at the royal authority. By degrees, the high officials of the Palatium, whether secular or ecclesiastical, and also the provincial counts, had rallied round The mayors of the palace. the mayors of the palace as their real leaders. As under the Empire, the Palatium was both royal court and centre of government, with the same bureaucratic hierarchy and the same forms of administration; and the mayor of the palace was premier official of this itinerant court and ambulatory government. Moreover, since the palace controlled the whole of each kingdom, the mayors gradually extended their official authority so as to include functionaries and agents of every kind, instead of merely those attached immediately to the king’s person. They suggested candidates for office for the royal selection, often appointed office-holders, and, by royal warrant, supported or condemned them. Mere subordinates while the royal power was strong, they had become, owing to the frequent minorities, and to civil wars which broke the tradition of obedience, the all-powerful ministers of kings nominally absolute but without any real authority. Before long they ceased to claim an even greater degree of independence than that of Warnachaire, who forced Clotaire II. to swear that he should never be deprived of his mayoralty of Burgundy; they wished to take the first place in the kingdoms they governed, and to be able to attack neighbouring kingdoms on their own account. A struggle, motived by self-interest, no doubt; but a struggle, too, of opposing principles. Since the Frankish monarchy was now in their power some of them tried to re-establish the unity of that monarchy in all its integrity, together with the superiority of the State over the Church; others, faithless to the idea of unity, saw in the disintegration of the state and the supremacy of the nobles a warrant for their own independence. These two tendencies were destined to strive against one another during an entire century (613-714), and to occasion two periods of violent conflict, which, divided by a kind of renascence of royalty, were to end at last in the triumphant substitution of the Austrasian mayors for royalty and aristocracy alike.
The first struggle began on the accession of Clotaire II., when Austrasia, having had a king of her own ever since 561, demanded one now. In 623 Clotaire was obliged to send her his son Dagobert and even to extend his First struggle between monarchy and mayoralty. territory. But in Dagobert’s name two men ruled, representing the union of the official aristocracy and the Church. One, Pippin of Landen, derived his power from his position as mayor of the palace, from great estates in Aquitaine and between the Meuse and the Rhine, and from the immense number of his supporters; the other, Arnulf, bishop of Metz, sprang from a great family, probably of Roman descent, and was besides immensely wealthy in worldly possessions. By the union of their forces Pippin and Arnulf were destined to shape the future. They had already, in 613, treated with Clotaire and betrayed the hopes of Brunhilda, being consequently rewarded with the guardianship of young Dagobert. Burgundy followed the example of Austrasia, demanded the abolition of the mayoralty, and in 627 succeeded in obtaining her independence of Neustria and Austrasia and direct relations with the king.
The death of Clotaire (629) was the signal for a revival of the royal power. Dagobert deprived Pippin of Landen of his authority and forced him to fly to Aquitaine; but still he had to give the Austrasians his son Sigebert Renascence of monarchy under Dagobert, 629-639. III. for their king (634). He made administrative progresses through Neustria and Burgundy to recall the nobles to their allegiance, but again he was forced to designate his second son Clovis as king of Neustria. He did subdue Aquitaine completely, thanks to his brother Charibert, with whom he had avoided dividing the kingdom, and he tried to restore his own demesne, which had been despoiled by the granting of benefices or by the pious frauds of the Church. In short, this reign was one of great conquests, impossible except under a strong government. Dagobert’s victories over Samo, king of the Slavs along the Elbe, and his subjugation of the Bretons and the Basques, maintained the prestige of the Frankish empire; while the luxury of his court, his taste for the fine arts (ministered to by his treasurer Eloi[28]), his numerous achievements in architecture—especially the abbey of St Denis, burial-place of the kings of France—the brilliance and the power of the churchmen who surrounded him and his revision of the Salic law, ensured for his reign, in spite of the failure of his plans for unity, a fame celebrated in folksong and ballad.
But for barbarous nations old-age comes early, and after Dagobert’s death (639), the monarchy went swiftly to its doom. The mayors of the palace again became supreme, and the kings not only ceased to appoint them, but The “Rois fainéants” (do-nothing kings). might not even remove them from office. Such mayors were Aega and Erchinoald, in Neustria, Pippin and Otto in Austrasia, and Flaochat in Burgundy. One of them, Grimoald, son of Pippin, actually dared to take the title of king in Austrasia (640). This was a premature attempt and barren of result, yet it was significant; and not less so is the fact that the palace in which these mayors bore rule was a huge association of great personages, laymen and ecclesiastics who seem to have had much more independence than in the 6th century. We find the dukes actually raising troops without the royal sanction, and even against the king. In 641 the mayor Flaochat was forced to swear that they should hold their offices for life; and though these offices were not yet hereditary, official dynasties, as it were, began to be established permanently within the palace. The crown lands, the governorships, the different offices, were looked upon as common property to be shared between themselves. Organized into a compact body they surrounded the king and were far more powerful than he. In the general assembly of its members this body of officials decided the selection of the mayor; it presented Flaochat to the choice of Queen Nanthilda, Dagobert’s widow; after long discussion it appointed Ebroïn as mayor; it submitted requests that were in reality commands to the Assembly of Bonneuil in 616 and later to Childeric in 670. Moreover, the countries formerly subdued by the Franks availed themselves of this opportunity to loosen the yoke; Thuringia was lost by Sigebert in 641, and the revolt of Alamannia in 643 set back the frontier of the kingdom from the Elbe to Austrasia. Aquitaine, hitherto the common prey of all the Frankish kings, having in vain tried to profit by the struggles between Fredegond and Brunhilda, and set up an independent king, Gondibald, now finally burst her bonds in 670. Then came a time when the kings were mere children, honoured with but the semblance of respect, under the tutelage of a single mayor, Erbroïn of Neustria.
This representative of royalty, chief minister for four-and-twenty years (656-681), attempted the impossible, endeavouring to re-establish unity in the midst of general dissolution and to maintain intact a royal authority usurped Struggle between Ebroïn and Léger. everywhere, by the hereditary power of the great palatine families. He soon stirred up against himself all the dissatisfied nobles, led by Léger (Leodegarius), bishop of Autun and his brother Gerinus. Clotaire III.’s death gave the signal for war. Ebroïn’s enemies set up Childeric II. in opposition to Theuderich, the king whom he had chosen without summoning the great provincial officials. Despite a temporary triumph, when Childeric was forced to recognize the principle of hereditary succession in public offices, and when the mayoralties of Neustria and Burgundy were alternated to the profit of both, Léger soon fell into disgrace and was exiled to that very monastery of Luxeuil to which Ebroïn had been relegated. Childeric having regained the mastery restored the mayor’s office, which was immediately disputed by the two rivals; Ebroïn was successful and established himself as mayor of the palace in the room of Leudesius, a partisan of Léger (675), following this up by a distribution of offices and dignities right and left among his adherents. Léger was put to death in 678, and the Austrasians, commanded by the Carolingian Pippin II., with whom many of the chief Neustrians had taken refuge, were dispersed near Laon (680). But Ebroïn was assassinated next year in the midst of his triumph, having like Fredegond been unable to do more than postpone for a quarter of a century the victory of the nobles and of Austrasia; for his successor, Berthar, was unfitted to carry on his work, having neither his gifts and energy nor the powerful personality of Pippin. Berthar met his death at the battle of Tertry (687), which Battle of Tertry. gave the king into the hands of Pippin, as also the royal treasure and the mayoralty, and by thus enabling him to reward his followers made him supreme over the Merovingian dynasty. Thenceforward the degenerate descendants of Clovis offered no further resistance to his claims, though it was not until 752 that their line became extinct.
In that year the Merovingian dynasty gave place to the rule of Pippin II. of Heristal, who founded a Carolingian empire fated to be as ephemeral as that of the Merovingians. This political victory of the aristocracy was merely the consummation of a slow subterranean revolution which by innumerable reiterated blows had sapped the structure of the body politic, and was about to transfer the people of Gaul from the Roman monarchical and administrative government to the sway of the feudal system.
The Merovingian kings, mere war-chiefs before the advent of Clovis, had after the conquest of Gaul become absolute hereditary monarchs, thanks to the disappearance of the popular assemblies and to the perpetual state of warfare. Causes of the fall of the Merovingians. They concentrated in their own hands all the powers of the empire, judicial, fiscal and military; and even the so-called “rois fainéants” enjoyed this unlimited power, in spite of the general disorder and the civil wars. To make their authority felt in the provinces they had an army of officials at their disposal—a legacy, this, from imperial Rome—who represented them in the eyes of their various peoples. They had therefore only to keep up this established government, but they could not manage even this much; they allowed the idea of the common interests of kings and their subjects gradually to die out, and forgetting that national taxes are a necessary impost, a charge for service rendered by the state, they had treated these as though they were illicit and unjustifiable spoils. The taxpayers, with the clergy at their head, adopted the same idea, and every day contrived fresh methods of evasion. Merovingian justice was on the same footing as Merovingian finance: it was arbitrary, violent and self-seeking. The Church, too, never failed to oppose it—at first not so much on account of her own ambitions as in a more Christian spirit—and proceeded to weaken the royal jurisdiction by repeated interventions on behalf of those under sentence, afterwards depriving it of authority over the clergy, and then setting up ecclesiastical tribunals in opposition to those held by the dukes and counts. At last, just as the kingdom had become the personal property of the king, so the officials—dukes, counts, royal vicars, tribunes, centenarii—who had for the most part bought their unpaid offices by means of presents to the monarch, came to look upon the public service rather as a mine of official wealth than as an administrative organization for furthering the interests, material or moral, of the whole nation. They became petty local tyrants, all the more despotic because they had nothing to fear save the distant authority of the king’s missi, and the more rapacious because they had no salary save the fines they inflicted and the fees that they contrived to multiply. Gregory of Tours tells us that they were robbers, not protectors of the people, and that justice and the whole administrative apparatus were merely engines of insatiable greed. It was the abuses thus committed by the kings and their agents, who did not understand the art of gloving the iron hand, aided by the absolutely unfettered licence of conduct and the absence of any popular liberty, that occasioned the gradual increase of charters of immunity.
Immunity was the direct and personal privilege which forbade any royal official or his agents to decide cases, to levy taxes, or to exercise any administrative control on the domains of a bishop, an abbot, or one of the great secular Immunity. nobles. On thousands of estates the royal government gradually allowed the law of the land to be superseded by local law, and public taxation to change into special contributions; so that the duties of the lower classes towards the state were transferred to the great landlords, who thus became loyal adherents of the king but absolute masters on their own territory. The Merovingians had no idea that they were abdicating the least part of their authority, nevertheless the deprivations acquiesced in by the feebler kings led of necessity to the diminution of their authority and their judicial powers, and to the abandonment of public taxation. They thought that by granting immunity they would strengthen their direct control; in reality they established the local independence of the great landowners, by allowing royal rights to pass into their hands. Then came confusion between the rights of the sovereign and the rights of property. The administrative machinery of the state still existed, but it worked in empty air: its taxpayers disappeared, those who were amenable to its legal jurisdiction slipped from its grasp, and the number of those whose affairs it should have directed dwindled away. Thus the Merovingians had shown themselves incapable of rising above the barbarous notion that royalty is a personal asset to the idea that royalty is of the state, a power belonging to the nation and instituted for the benefit of all. They represented in society nothing more than a force which grew feebler and feebler as other forces grew strong; they never stood for a national magistracy.