The Merovingian Kingdoms and the Mediterranean World

One of the most productive trends in the study of the Merovingians—and indeed of the early medieval period more generally—has been the blurring of boundaries that supposedly divided various post-Roman polities in the fifth and sixth centuries (and beyond). Eschewing the “what happens in Gaul, stays in Gaul” approach, the essays in this volume, which grew out of a collaboration funded by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF), emphasize the myriad of connections that linked the Merovingian kingdoms chronologically to the Romans before and the Carolingians after and geographically to Spain, Britain, Ostrogothic, Byzantine, and Lombard Italy, North Africa, and the Byzantine Empire. With this methodological approach as its foundation, each of the volume's thirteen essays, divided into four subsections, begins with an extended quotation from a source drawn from a variety of different genres, including historical writing, geographical excurses, letters, leges, ordines, and chronicles, although for obvious reasons Gregory of Tours makes his presence felt repeatedly. These quotations, some of which appear in English translation for the first time, serve as a jumping-off point for thinking about the methodological, textual, and interpretive issues related to the sources of Merovingian history embedded in its Mediterranean context.Part I, titled “Setting the Context of the Post Roman World,” consists of two papers, by Yitzhak Hen and Helmut Reimitz. Hen's examination of the Expositio totius mundi et gentium, a mid-fourth-century geographic and economic survey of the late Roman Empire and beyond, illuminates the intersection between historical and geographical writing in the early medieval period. While a common feature before the second century CE, short geographic digressions in otherwise historical texts disappeared, according to Hen, until it was revived in the fifth-century West. Reimitz's contribution compares Gregory of Tour's account of the Council of Mâcon in 585 with the surviving canons of the synod. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Reimitz detects a stark difference in emphases. Where as the bishops, leaning on Roman and canon law, attempted to define “the clergy as a separate social order with bishops at the top of this new hierarchy,” Gregory, in contrast, sought to minimize Roman legal precedent in order to promote “a Christian vision of community for the post-Roman Merovingian kingdom,” which was rooted the canons and the lex Dei (24).Part II, “Mediterranean Ties and Merovingian Diplomacy,” contains four essays that examine, as the title suggests, the diplomatic connections linking post-Roman Gaul to the wider Mediterranean world. In chapter 3, Anna Gehler-Rachůnek considers the diplomatic connections between the Frankish world, the Visigothic kingdom, and the Byzantine Empire, through the lens of marriage negotiations, situating the conversion of the Visigoths to Catholicism under Reccared within this larger context. In a useful complement to Gehler-Rachůnek's essay, Hope Willard's stimulating contribution investigates amicitia and diplomacy in the Histories of Gregory of Tours. In one of the strongest chapters in the book, Willard demonstrates how amicitia—a word, that tends to evoke only positive connotations for modern readers—was understood much more ambivalently by Gregory, who applied the term to a range of often instrumental relationships. Personal friendship, according to Gregory, was often a veneer obscuring ambition and manipulation. And when he uses it to describe relationships between political communities, amicitia appears as a tool used by rulers, especially those in weak positions, to bolster their positions with more powerful men. Part II concludes with chapters by Bruno Dumézil and Yaniv Fox, both of which investigate the Epistolae Austrasicae, a letter collection that Dumézil argues was compiled at the initiative of Magneric, bishop of Trier, by one of his followers in the late sixth century. Fox's chapter takes up the diplomatic rhetoric in the communication between Emperor Maurice and Childerbert II, preserved among the Epistolae Austrasicae.The four chapters composing part III examine the sources for law and religion. Lukas Bothe's amusingly named Mediterranean Homesick Blues describes how barbarian leges appropriated Roman law in order to protect the interests of slaveholders, especially in frontier regions, from the danger of a shrinking labor (and military) force that resulted from the “illegal” seizure and sale of men and women and their sale beyond the frontiers. This chapter also reminds us that our understanding of Merovingian slavery must both be situated in the wider context of Mediterranean trade, but also in its Roman legal precedents. In the following chapter, Till Stüber takes up the vexing topic of the Three Chapters Controversy and its reception in Gaul. Highlighting the intersection between theological dispute and political expediency, Stüber argues that “theological and church-related knowledge was more likely to be transmitted if it aligned with the political aims of the respective rulers” (102). This is amply illustrated by the imperfect understanding of the controversy among the Gallic bishops who attended the Council Orléans in 549 CE. Part III ends with contributions from Rob Meens and Tamar Rotman. Meens discusses the eighth-century Gellone Sacramentary's ordo for purifying and rededicating a defiled altar, while Rotman considers Gregory of Tours's encounter with the Lombard ascetic Vulfilaic, who lived on top of a pillar in imitation of famous fifth-century eastern stylites like Simeon.The final section, “Shifting Perspectives: Emperors, Tributes and Propaganda,” contains three essays, two of which consider Frankish depictions of Byzantine rulers. Pia Lucas's chapter examines Gregory of Tours's superficial “cardboard-character” portrayal of Emperor Tiberius II (574/8–582). Lucas argues that Tiberius is mobilized as a foil by Gregory against which other Byzantine—but more importantly, other Merovingian—rulers could be compared and, in the case of Chilperic I, unfavorably contrasted. Of course, this was a rhetorical device; but as Lucas shows, Gregory's use of this device demonstrates that he knew quite a bit about the Byzantine world. In a similar vein, Stefan Esders discusses the depiction of Heraclius and Constans II in the Chronicle of Fredegar. As was the case with Gregory, the author of the Chronicle was well informed about affairs in the east. The volume concludes with an excellent short chapter by Federico Montinaro, which examines chronological discrepancies and later updates to the Byzantine Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor (d. 817/818) in order to demonstrate its dependence on Frankish sources. Montinaro's conclusions parallel those of Lucas and Esders, and all three essays nicely illustrate the interconnectivity between the Merovingian and Byzantine worlds.Taken together, the volume's essays raise interesting questions regarding how we think about the sources of early medieval history. For instance, the renewed emphasis on geography in history writing during a period of political and social dislocation, as Hen's contribution argues, can be understood as a novel way to integrate barbarians into the Roman understanding of the world. Gregory of Tours is not merely a historian, but as Reimitz, Gehler-Rachůnek, Willard, Rotman, and Lucas demonstrate, in different ways, he was both an author of histories and an actor in them, a man deeply embedded in the society he described—even if his descriptions cannot be taken at face value—and an author who shaped and reshaped the past in order to serve his own purposes. Chronicles are much more than a repository of historical information; as Esders and Montinaro argue, they could also be polemical documents and, more importantly, provide insight into the Mediterranean-wide world perspective of their authors, hinting at networks of knowledge linking east and west. Letter collections too are more than the sum of their parts. Dumézil, Fox, and Stüber highlight the importance of rhetoric in letters and demonstrate the intentionality of the collections, which, compiled as they were for specific purposes and intended to convey a particular perspective, are worthy of study as collections. Roman law, as Bothe's contribution demonstrates, was reinterpreted and repurposed for new contexts and reminds us of the centrality of slavery and the slave trade to the early medieval Mediterranean economy and beyond. Finally, Meen's fascinating examination of the ordo for rededicating altars illustrates how liturgy, an often-neglected area of historical research, can shed light on evolving ideas of sacrality and sacred space, pollution, and ritual.As readers of this journal well know, the Mediterranean, both as a subject area and as a framework for understanding premodern history, has grown in popularity and importance in recent decades. The contributions in the volume demonstrate why this approach can be so interpretively fruitful, particularly by undermining geographically essentialist interpretations of the early Middle Ages. In the words of Lucas and Rotman, the Merovingian kingdoms were “deeply rooted in the Mediterranean politics and culture: understanding the inner workings of the Merovingian kingdoms means that we cannot sever them from these links” (3). Importantly, the editors and the authors do not conceive the Mediterranean in merely geographic terms. As Willard notes, when scholars fail to consider the continuities in diplomatic language that link the Merovingians with their late Roman antecedents, they artificially “disconnect early medieval diplomacy from its late antique precedents leaving a gap in our understanding of how medieval writers responded to these precedents” (42). Her observation could be taken as programmatic for the book as a whole.The volume itself is well produced. One minor annoyance is the insistence of publishers that books pitched at an academic audience employ endnotes rather than footnotes, which makes following up citations needlessly tedious. But the biggest shortcoming of the volume is that each contribution is quite short—often too short to fully address the important issues they raise. With thirteen chapters, each averaging around twelve to thirteen pages in length, the essays are often underdeveloped. This is particularly noticeable in the introduction and conclusion, both of which could have done more to place the volume and its approach within the field of Merovingian history and to situate the individual contributions more firmly in relationship with one another. To take one example: questions of trade and exchange, and specifically the analyses of Henri Pirenne and Michael McCormick, are addressed explicitly in several essays and implicitly in several more. It would have been useful if this strand had been teased out more than it is. On the other hand, by including so many different contributions, the editors have exposed the reader to a range of topics and introduced (at least to me) new voices alongside more established scholars. This is to be applauded. Indeed, this is perhaps the book's greatest strength, and the chapters by graduate students and early-career scholars are some of its strongest

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