This chapter offers a survey of the principal Merovingian narrative sources. It covers the key chronicles: Gregory, the Chronicles of Fredegar, and the Liber historiae Francorum, plus their relatives. It also offers a guide to the production of hagiography in the period. Throughout the emphasis is on how we might read the stories in these sources, drawing on the competing arguments that have been put forward by scholars about the nature of the texts. Only by understanding some of the strengths and weaknesses of the common approaches to the narrative sources can readers be armed to approach the complexities of Merovingian history.

This chapter charts the nature of political power from the earliest Merovingian kings to the unification of the kingdoms under Chlothar II in 613. The period witnessed conquest and civil war, as competition for power between kings, queens, and their families transformed late Roman political structures into more fluid and responsive modes of government. It covers the key reigns of Childeric I and Clovis for establishing the power of the Merovingian dynasty through a mixture of war, legend-building, and performance. It also examines how competition between kings in subsequent generations affected how the family was defined, especially under the influence of queens Brunhild and Fredegund.

This chapter introduces how the study of the Merovingian kingdoms has developed since the sixteenth century. Merovingian history is not easily or self-evidently presented in the source material; it has had to be recovered and reconstructed. The historiographical survey is therefore important to understanding how writers and scholars have put that history together. It highlights some of the key political, confessional, theoretical, and methodological issues that have shaped how the period is interpreted, from the Magdeburg Centuriators of the Reformation to the Monumenta Germaniae Historica’s self-consciously ‘scientific’ approach to editing sources.

A short epilogue brings together the themes of the book, inviting us to look at the period not as a ‘Dark’ or ‘Golden Age’ but as a period of great complexity and transformation. As Gregory of Tours himself wrote: many things happened, both good and bad.

Chapter 7 is focused on conversions in a family context, collecting and comparing evidence from Gaul, Hispania, and Italy. The starting point is an examination of the secular and ecclesiastical rules governing interdenominational marriages and the differences in church loyalty between parents and children. Then the conclusions drawn from the normative sources are connected with what we know about the social reality of ‘mixed’ families. Given the nature of our evidence, the chapter focuses primarily on marriages and conversions in royal contexts. It analyses the examples from the ruling house of Suevi, marriages in the Burgundian family of Gibichungs, and marriages between the Visigothic and Frankish ruling families.

This chapter explores the ways that rivers could shift from cultural and economic resource to sites of risk. Beginning with a close reading of the early medieval historian Gregory of Tours, it argues that as a bishop, Gregory saw rivers both as sites of regular and significant economic and cultural risk and of potential religious salvation. This balance between practical and religious response and representation weaves through the chapter, which draws heavily on hagiographical accounts and historical sources to explore cultural constructions of “risk.” Rivers were sources of economic and political instability, and threats to cultural memory and cohesion. Floods, shipwrecks, drought, and other disasters are found throughout medieval narrative, and form the basis of this chapter’s analysis. Finally, this chapter argues that medieval authors also saw rivers as connected to existential threats: the “Flood,” sin, demons, and the dissolution of memory and cultural identity. Paired with these fears, those same rivers became sources of salvation and markers of sanctity.

The second chapter will focus on the depiction of Clovis I, the first Christian king of the Franks. The inflation of the Clovis myth in the medieval chronicle tradition has been treated exhaustively, primarily in French historiography. This is why this chapter proceeds along an alternate route. Instead of interrogating the evolution of Clovis from Fredegar and the LHF to high- and late-medieval works of history, it will compare the story found in Gregory of Tours with that found in the sixteenth-century De rebus gestis Francorum [DRG] by Paolo Emilio. The reason for this choice is that, to a large degree, Emilio bypassed the intermediate sources, relying primarily on Gregory for this section of his opus. The DRG is thus only once removed from the Histories, although the differences in the two authors’ attitude toward character-building and in their stylistic approach are glaring, for reasons that will be elaborated upon in the chapter.

The first chapter is dedicated to the origin stories that depicted the birth of the Franks and their leading family. Gregory of Tours was reluctant to discuss the topic, privileging other axes of identity. While he chose to downplay the importance of Frankish identity, his treatment of the arrival and establishment of the Franks betrays an understanding of distinct phases of Frankish history. The Trojan origin myth made its first appearance in the Chronicle of Fredegar. The second section is dedicated to the Trojan myth in Fredegar and the LHF and the possible reasons for its inclusion and for the rejection of competing origin myths. The third section discusses the Trojan comment in Paul the Deacon’s Gesta episcoporum Mettensium, which offered an idealized ancestry for Charlemagne and a curious reworking of Merovingian history. In the final section, the discussion will turn to the Trojan story found in the thirteenth-century Roman des rois. The process whereby the story was made to conform to contemporary royal and Dionysian ideologies will be presented, alongside a discussion of Primat’s usage of Childeric to explore Capetians' relations with their aristocracy.

The three subchapters illustrate, how the authors from the Medieval period down to the fifth century have heavily relied on Eusebius of Caesarea’s Church history to writing their own beginnings of Christianity. In addition, they drew heavily on pseudonymous material outside the New Testament canon which they largely ignored. Driven by the challenges of their own times and in answering questions of their own days they developed the beginnings of Christianity from Frankish and late Roman perspectives. In these, vernacular, Greek and Roman cultural elements were deeply inter-related and re-projected into earlier times, while Christianity became regarded as the filter through which to perceive and judge the past.

From the sixth century onwards, numerous visions of the afterlife and the otherworld were recorded by authors who operated in the post-Roman barbarian West. The most prevailing characteristics of all these accounts are their brevity and conciseness. More often than not, these stories were integrated into a larger historical or hagiographic narrative, in an attempt to stress various political, religious, or cultural points. It was only towards the end of the Merovingian period, with the composition of the so-called Visio Baronti, that more comprehensive accounts of the afterlife began to appear in the West, and thus paved the way for the emergence of a new literary genre. This chapter discusses the evolution of these narratives, as well as the various possible reasons why travels to the otherworld became a seminal component in the historiographical and hagiographical tradition of the early medieval West.