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Liber Historiae Francorum
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Liber historiae Francorum ("The book of the history of the Franks") is a book that briefly starts as secondary source for early Franks in the time of Marcomer, and it gives a short breviarum until the time of the late Merovingians, where it becomes an important primary source of the contemporain history. Here it becomes an example of historiography about the Pippinid family in Austrasia before they became the more famous "Carolingians".
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Liber historiae Francorum ("The book of the history of the Franks") is a book that briefly starts as secondary source for early Franks in the time of Marcomer, and it gives a short breviarum until the time of the late Merovingians, where it becomes an important primary source of the contemporain history. Here it becomes an example of historiography about the Pippinid family in Austrasia before they became the more famous "Carolingians". Liber historiae Francorum is customarily dated to 727 because of a reference at the end to the sixth year of Theuderic IV, probably in Soissons, at the royal abbey of Saint-Médard. and it offers a Neustrian perspective of the era of mayors of the palace, where the factions of the great territorial magnates could only be held in check and balanced by the consecrated legitimacy of the Merovingian king. It has been explored and interpreted by Richard Gerberding and more recently by Rosamond McKitterick in History and Memory in the Carolingian World. As a widely-read narrative, it helped inculcate a sense of cultural solidarity among the readership for whom it was intended, and whose biases it caters to and whose political agenda it promotes.
As for that agenda, Fouracre and Gerberding (History and Hagiography) show that the book supports the Merovingian dynasty, but supports its kings only insofar as they rule with the consultation of the major nobles. The nobles, too, are supported only insofar as they do not aspire above their station.
It is one of a corpus of new books of history written in the 8th century, and copied and widely distributed in the 9th, which offered their readers (and listeners) a deep background that set the Franks in the context of the Roman Empire and Christian Gallo-Roman world.
From the outset the book promises to present the origins and deeds of the Frankish kings and people. It tells that the Franks originated with a group of Trojan refugees who found themselves on the north coast of the Black Sea. Following that, it relies heavily upon the Gallo-Roman bishop and historian Gregory of Tours (d. 594), whose History it epitomises, corrects and parallels. The last eleven chapters, 43-53 in Krusch's edition, present an independent account of events in the Frankish lands in the 7th and early 8th centuries and attract historians' interest, as they cover ground not lighted by any other source.
Chapter 43 begins with the attempted usurpation of Austrasia by the Pippinid mayor Grimoald the Elder, which it treats in summary form. It ends with Grimoald's death by torture under Clovis II who ruled the Pippinids' rival state Neustria. This is what Chapter 44 has to say about Clovis following that:
- At the same time he brought ruin to the kingdom of the Franks with disastrous calamities. This Clovis, moreover, had every kind of filthy habit. He was a seducer and a debaser of women, a glutton and a drunk. About his death and end nothing of historical worth may be said. Many writers condemn his end because they do not know the extent of his evil. Thus in uncertainty concerning it they refer from one to another. (Bachrach p. 102)
The rest of this chapter and the beginning of the next chapter stretch between Clovis's death, usually dated to the late 650s, and the accession of Theuderic III, usually dated to 673: a four year reign of "the boy king Chlotar".
Chapters 45ff, as Ursinus the Abbot had done, provide a hostile account of mayor Ebroin of Neustria. The closing chapters mainly cover Charles Martel.
Liber Historiae Francorum became a primary source for the Continuations to Fredegar's Chronicle, as redacted by Count Childebrand in 751 on behalf of his half-brother Charles Martel.
Further reading
- Bachrach, Bernard S., editor. 1973. Liber Historiae Francorum
- Paul Fouracre and Richard Arthur Gerberding. 1996. Late Merovingian France: History and Hagiography, 640-720 (Manchester University Press). The last eleven chapters of Liber Historiae Francorum, in English, with six contemporary hagiographies and the overlapping sections of the Metz chronicle Annales Mettensis priores, with an interpretive introduction.
- Gerberding, Richard Arthur. 1987 (1993). The Rise of the Carolingians and the Liber Historiae Francorum (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
- Krusch, Bruno, editor. 1888. Liber historiae francorum, in MGH SRM, II (Hannover), pp. 241–328
- McKitterick, Rosamond. 2005. History and Memory in the Carolingian world (Cambridge University Press).
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