Early Middle Ages: the Frankish Kingdoms

Visigoths settle in Aquitaine

By treaty with the patrician Constantius, the Visigoths of Wallia are settled as Roman foederati in Aquitania Secunda, with Toulouse as their seat. A barbarian kingdom now sits inside the Gallic provinces.

The Catalaunian Plains

The Roman general Aetius, allied with the Visigoth Theodoric I and Frankish, Burgundian, and Alan contingents, halts Attila's Huns near Châlons. Theodoric falls in the battle, but the Huns are checked and turn back across the Rhine.

Jordanes and the Gallic chronicles preserve the battle's place in Western memory as the last great victory of Roman arms in Gaul. The relief of Orléans by Aetius and the bishop Anianus would enter hagiography; so too would Saint Geneviève's intercession at Lutetia, said to have turned Attila away from Paris.

Clovis defeats Syagrius at Soissons

The young Salian Frankish king Clovis crushes Syagrius — the last Roman ruler of the Domain of Soissons between the Loire and the Somme — and absorbs his territory. The Gallo-Roman political order north of the Loire is at an end.

The baptism of Clovis at Reims

After his victory over the Alemanni at Tolbiac, Clovis is baptised by bishop Remigius of Reims with three thousand warriors. He becomes the first Catholic king of a major Germanic people, while his rivals remain Arian heretics.

Gregory of Tours, writing nearly a century later, transforms the conversion into the founding myth of Catholic France. Remigius' phrase to the king — 'bow your head, proud Sicamber; adore what you have burned, burn what you have adored' — and the legendary dove that brought the holy oil for the anointing would consecrate Reims as the coronation church of French kings for thirteen centuries.

Vouillé and the fall of the Visigoths

At Vouillé near Poitiers, Clovis defeats and kills the Visigothic king Alaric II. The Visigoths are driven beyond the Pyrenees, and Aquitaine, the richest of the Roman provinces of Gaul, passes to the Franks.

Death of Clovis; the kingdom is partitioned

Clovis dies in his new capital, Paris, and is buried in the church of the Holy Apostles. His realm is divided among his four sons — Theuderic, Chlodomer, Childebert, and Chlothar — establishing the pattern of Merovingian partitions for two centuries.

In the same year, the council of Orléans summoned by Clovis defines the relations of the Catholic Church to the new Frankish kingship: the bishops accept the king as patron of synods and confirmer of bishops, the king accepts canonical law. The Lex Salica, recording the customs of the Salian Franks in Latin, takes its earliest written form in his reign.

The feud of Fredegund and Brunhild

On the death of Chlothar I, the kingdom is again partitioned. The murder of the Visigothic princess Galswintha at the order of her husband Chilperic ignites a forty-year war between Brunhild of Austrasia and the slave-queen Fredegund of Neustria.

Gregory of Tours' Decem Libri Historiarum, written in this generation, is the great narrative of the bloody politics of the late sixth century. The age also produces the Latin poetry of Venantius Fortunatus and the foundation by Radegund of the Holy Cross at Poitiers, the first royal nunnery of the West.

Chlothar II reunites the Franks

The Austrasian and Burgundian magnates surrender the aged Queen Brunhild to Chlothar II of Neustria, who has her tortured and torn apart by horses. The Frankish kingdoms are reunited, and the aristocracies of each region win the formal right to their own mayors of the palace.

Pippin of Herstal triumphs at Tertry

Pippin II, mayor of the palace of Austrasia and grandfather of Charles Martel, defeats the Neustrian king and his mayor Berchar at Tertry. The mayors of the palace, not the Merovingian rois fainéants, now rule the Franks in fact.

Charles Martel at Poitiers

Between Tours and Poitiers, the Frankish mayor Charles Martel halts the Umayyad governor Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi, who is killed in the fighting. The deepest raid of the Arab conquest into Christian Europe is broken.

The contemporary Mozarabic Chronicle, the earliest source, gives Charles his cognomen — the Hammer. Edward Gibbon would later imagine, with characteristic colour, the muezzin calling the prayer from the pulpits of Oxford had Martel lost. The reality was more limited: Arab raids continued for a generation, but the days of conquest beyond the Pyrenees were over.

Pippin the Short deposes the last Merovingian

With the sanction of Pope Zacharias — 'better that he should be called king who has the power' — Pippin III deposes Childeric III, shaves the long royal hair of the Merovingian, and confines him to a monastery. Pippin is anointed king at Soissons.

Three years later Pope Stephen II himself crosses the Alps and re-anoints Pippin and his sons Charlemagne and Carloman at Saint-Denis. In return, Pippin's army wrests the lands of the Lombard king Aistulf from him and grants them to the papacy — the Donation of Pippin, the territorial nucleus of the future Papal States.

Roncesvalles and the death of Roland

Returning from an unsuccessful campaign against Saragossa, Charlemagne's rearguard is ambushed in the pass of Roncesvalles by Basques. The count of the Breton March, Hruodland, falls — and his death will become the founding epic of vernacular French literature.

Three centuries later the Chanson de Roland would transmute the Basque raiders into Saracens and make Roland the paladin par excellence of Christendom. The campaign also produced the Spanish March, the buffer of frontier counties south of the Pyrenees that would slowly evolve into Catalonia.

Charlemagne crowned emperor in Rome

On Christmas Day in St Peter's, Pope Leo III places a crown on Charlemagne's head and the people of Rome acclaim him as Imperator Romanorum. Three centuries after the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, a Roman emperor sits again in the West.

Charlemagne's biographer Einhard, in his Vita Karoli, claimed the king was annoyed at the surprise coronation. Whether or not that was true, the Byzantine court at Constantinople — where the empress Irene then sat alone — refused to recognise the new Western Augustus until 812, and only then in return for the recovery of Venice and Dalmatia. The Carolingian renaissance — the schools of Alcuin, the script of the Caroline minuscule, the palatine chapel at Aachen — was the cultural face of the new empire.

Louis the Pious succeeds his father

Charlemagne dies at Aachen in his seventy-second year and is buried in the palatine chapel. His one surviving son, Louis the Pious, takes the empire — already crowned co-emperor at Aachen the year before — and inherits a realm that stretches from the Ebro to the Elbe.

The Treaty of Verdun

After three years of war among the sons of Louis the Pious, the Treaty of Verdun divides the Carolingian empire. Charles the Bald receives the western Francia, Louis the German the eastern, and the eldest Lothair the imperial title and the middle kingdom from the North Sea to Italy.

Two years before, on the eve of the partition, Charles and Louis swore the Oaths of Strasbourg — each in the language of the other's followers. Louis's oath in Romance is the earliest extended document of what will become Old French, and the eastern oath in Theotisca lingua the earliest such document of German. The political language of two future nations is born in the same act.

Ragnar's fleet sacks Paris

A great Norse fleet under a leader the Frankish annals call Ragnar sails up the Seine and sacks Paris on Easter Sunday. Charles the Bald buys the Vikings off with seven thousand pounds of silver — the first of the great Danegelds of West Francia.

From the 830s the Vikings devastate the coasts and rivers of West Francia: the abbey of Saint-Wandrille burned, the cities of Rouen, Nantes, Bordeaux, and Toulouse plundered. The collapse of central defence drove the great castellans of the countryside to fortify their lands themselves, accelerating the rise of regional power that would define the tenth century.

The Capitulary of Quierzy

Departing for an Italian campaign, Charles the Bald issues the Capitulary of Quierzy, recognising in practice that the counties of his magnates pass to their sons in his absence. The capitulary is read in later centuries as the legal birth of hereditary fiefs.

The siege of Paris

A Viking host of perhaps thirty thousand under Sigfred surrounds Paris, defended by Count Odo and bishop Gozlin from the Île de la Cité. The siege lasts almost a year. The poet-monk Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, an eyewitness, writes his Bella Parisiacae urbis.

The fat emperor Charles III arrives at last but disgraces himself by paying off the Norsemen and offering them Burgundy to plunder. Within two years he is deposed, and the Frankish magnates elect not a Carolingian but the hero of the siege, Odo of Paris — beginning the alternation of Robertians and Carolingians that will end a century later with Hugh Capet.

Saint-Clair-sur-Epte: the gift of Normandy

After the Viking defeat at Chartres, King Charles the Simple grants the lands around the lower Seine to the Norse chieftain Rollo, on condition of baptism and homage. The duchy of Normandy is born.

Dudo of Saint-Quentin, the first historian of the Normans, tells how Rollo's followers refused to kiss the king's foot in homage; one of them lifted the royal leg high and threw the king on his back. Within three generations the Norsemen would speak Romance, build stone donjons, and produce dukes — William Longsword, Richard the Fearless, Richard the Good — who would set in motion the conquest of England.

The Capetian century begins

On the death of Louis V, the magnates and Archbishop Adalbero of Reims pass over the Carolingian Charles of Lorraine and elect Hugh Capet, Duke of the Franks, king at Senlis. He is crowned at Noyon on 3 July. A dynasty that will rule France for eight hundred years is born.

Hugh's actual demesne was small — barely the Île-de-France between Paris and Orléans — and the great princes of Flanders, Normandy, Aquitaine, and Burgundy were richer and more powerful than he. But by anointing his son Robert the Pious co-king within months of his own coronation, Hugh founded the dynastic principle that would slowly, patiently, build the medieval kingdom of France out of the wreckage of West Francia.