521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)

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Call 1-844-4-OTESLA or visit otesla.com for prescribing info, info about cost, and more. Queen Fredegund was very depressed, for she had been stripped of much of her power by her great rival, Queen Brunhild, and yet she considered herself a much better woman than Brunhild.
In secret, then, she sent a cleric of her household, who was to gain Brunhild's confidence by trickery and then assassinate her. If only he could, on some pretense or other, be accepted as one of her retainers and so gain her confidence, she could then be dispatched when no one was about.
The cleric went off to Brunhild and by the lies which he told made his way into her good graces. I am a fugitive from Queen Fredegund, he said, and I seek your protection.
He began by behaving in a most humble manner to everyone, and so gave himself out as the obedient and trusty servant of the Queen. But not long afterwards, they realised on what a treacherous errand he had been sent.
He was bound and flogged until he confessed his secret plan. Then he was permitted to return to the queen who had sent him.
When he told Fredegund what had happened and confessed that he had failed in his mission, she punished him by having his hands and feet cut off. So that was Gregory of Tor in his History of the Franks, which is a great chronicle, often an eyewitness account, in fact, of what happened in Merovingian Gaul in the late 6th century.

So Gregory of Tor, Tom, I studied him at university. He was a great Gallo-Roman writer, descended from the kind of senatorial classes.
It's a wonderful book. I know you're a big fan of the first line of that book, the greatest first line in all history.
I think it's my favourite ever written. Do you want to tell everyone what it is? It's so accurate.
A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad. I mean, that's the whole of history there, isn't it? Yeah.
Well, this is one of the bad things. Definitely.
So the rivalry between Fredegund and Brunhill, which is the subject of today's episode, this extraordinary feud between these two formidable queens of the Franks. Yes.
So let's start with Fredegund. Fredegund is the granddaughter-in-law of Clovis, who is the bloke we talked about last time, the founder of the Merovingian dynasty, master of what's becoming, was once Gaul, but is becoming under Frankish rule, or is going to become France.
And so actually is Brunhilde. But there's no question that Gregory of Tor, on whose account we chiefly depend for the lives of Fredegund and Brunhilde, he is absolutely Team Brunhilde.
She is never really accused of anything bad, whereas Fredegund, to Gregory, she is an absolute monster monster so he accuses her of terrible crimes multiple assassinations witchcraft he even accuses her of having murdered a bishop in his own cathedral and he has the bishop turn to Fredegund as he's dying he's been struck down by daggers his blood is spilling out over the floor as long as you live you will be accursed for god will avenge my blood upon your head and does fredigan care she does not care at all she just stands there and gloats so i guess in gregory's account she is a baggage but she might also seem what i believe americans call a badass right i mean you could be both at one. Or possibly just been badly misrepresented by a guy who just doesn't like her.
Misunderstood. Yeah.
So we will discuss that. But I think two things are absolutely clear, even from Gregory's account of her, that her life is dominated by two things.
And really important to keep these two goals in mind. One is she wants to see one of her sons rule as king and to see the end of her sister-in-law, Brunhild.
And the feud between Fredegund and Brunhild is not widely known, certainly in English-speaking countries, but it absolutely bears comparison with that between Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. I mean, in all kinds of ways, it's much more bloody and ferocious.
And even though neither of them ruled as queen in her own right, though both are hailed by their admirers as queens, their role is as wives and mothers of kings who, I mean, pretty much without exception, are vastly their inferiors in terms of ability. And the measure of that is the length of their rule.
So Fredegund is queen, inverted commas, for 29 years. And Brunhilde rules for an astonishing 46 years.
Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah.
And it's not surprising that ultimately both of them end up as kind of figures of myth. So Brunhilde in Wagner's opera, The Valkyrie, she's essentially a compound of the pair of them.
In myth, these two inveterate rivals are joined and united. All right, so Tom, let's just remind ourselves where we are.
For people who perhaps missed the last episode, we're in the ruins of the Western Roman Empire. The empire is still going in Constantinople in the eastern Mediterranean, but in the western half, the authority structures are broken down and power has passed to these

warlords who are now crowning themselves as kings. And in Gaul, that means the Franks under Clovis.

And so someone like Fredegund, do we have a sense of when she's born?

We're not absolutely sure when she's born, 530s, early 540s, perhaps.

Right. So about two generations after the end of the Western Roman Empire, approximately.
Two generations after Clovis has made himself king. And the reason essentially why we don't know when Fredegund is born, and this is the remarkable thing about this woman who becomes such a powerful figure in Gaul, is that she seems to have begun her life as a slave.
So I will quote from The Dark Queens by Shelley Puhack, which is a wonderful account of the rivalry between these two queens, the great narrative account in English. She writes, where exactly had she come from, this fredegund, this strawberry blonde slave queen? Was she left on a doorstep, sold to satisfy a debt, or more likely captured as a child? We just don't know because the early details of a slave's life are lost to oblivion.
But what we do know is that she is born at a terrible time in history. So what Michael McCormick, the great historian of the economy of late antiquity and early medieval Europe, describes as one of the worst periods to be alive.
And the reason for that, we've actually kind of touched on this before. The mid-6th century is buffeted by natural disasters.
So there's a volcanic eruption in 536, which is probably the decade that Fredegund is born. And that sees temperatures drop by as much as two and a half degrees.
Then you get the great plague, the Justinianic plague, because it originates in the reign of the Emperor Justinian, which sweeps eastwards and westwards as well. And you also have other epidemics, and particularly epidemics of dysentery.
And these just keep hitting Gaul. And Gregory of Tor writes of one in very moving terms.
It attacked young children first of all, he writes, and to them it was fatal. And so we lost our little ones who were so dear to us and sweet, whom we had cherished in our bosoms and dandled in our arms, whom we had fed and nurtured with such loving care.
As I write, I wipe away the tears. And any notion that people in the early middle ages didn't care about their children, I mean, I think that that absolutely demonstrates that's not the case.
And it is absolutely the case as well that the deaths of children by dysentery will play a key part in this story, particularly in the life of Fredegund. And what is worse, perhaps not surprisingly, given that it's an age of natural disasters, of pandemics, of the breakdown of authority, tremendous fear, no doubt.

It is an age of war, Tom, because the Franks are warriors above all. They came, they were working for the Roman army.
That's what they do. That's what they're very good at.
That's what they know to do. Yeah.
And so I think people would have the sense, you know, this is the Dark Ages, the Roman Empire's collapsed. These are warlords.
It's just endless violence and things. I mean, the thing to emphasize is that what you've just said, that it is a time of war, but it's quite a Roman style of war.
The Frankish kings are really the heirs above all to Rome's military traditions. And so the military tradition in Gaul was for the Romans to impose their power on the eastern banks of the Rhine.
And so that is what the Frankish kings do. So having conquered Gaul, they then do as the Roman emperors had done throughout the course of Roman history, which is to send military expeditions into Germany.
And actually the Franks do it in a way more effectively than the Romans ever did. So for instance, in 531, Clovis' son, a guy called Clothar, conquers the region that would come to be known as Thuringia.

So a great swathe of East Germany. And he brings back enormous quantities of slaves to Gaul.

And Clothar is a king very much in the mold of Clovis.

He is simultaneously Roman and barbarian.

He's also very fecund.

And he has four sons, three of them by one sister, one by another. And when he dies, he divides the kingdom up four ways between them.
And I have to say that I always thought of this, this tendency of the Frankish kings to divide their kingdom up between their sons as being a barbarian practice. But then I read Patrick Geary, the great historian of this period on it, and he writes, the solution of dividing the kingdom among his four sons seems less a Frankish than a Roman one.
So again, this idea that he's behaving like a Roman, not a barbarian. Clothar's territories were divided along roughly Roman political boundaries, and each brother was established with his own and Roman advisors centered in a major city.
But of course, if you think about it, the Roman Empire was endlessly being divided up. Yeah, never worked.
And this fostered war. And the problem is that exactly the same thing happens, you know, this third generation on from Clovis, these four sons of Clothar, because they don't necessarily get on with each other very well.
And there was one of them in particular, who's the kind of, if you like, the runt of the litter, who is particularly embittered, particularly resentful. And this is the youngest of Clothar's sons, a guy who is called Chilperic.
And Chilperic is not just the youngest, but also the half brother of the other three. And so he's the only son of Clothar's second wife, who's the sister of the other wife who's given him the three sons.
And I think what's also very Game of Thrones, I mean, it's an absolute kind of trope from fantasy fiction, is that the youngest son, who's bitter and resentful, is also the keenest to try and kind of elbow his brothers out the way and grab everything. Always the most hungry and ruthless.

Exactly. So when their father dies, Chilperic immediately moves to try and seize the entire kingdom.
And he does this by grabbing both Paris, so the capital, and the royal treasury. And if you control the treasury, which is mobile, you know, it's a kind of great repository of gold and loot, then brilliant.
You know, you can employ men to follow you. But he's foiled by his brothers and in the division of Gaul.

He's left with this kind of rump of territory in the northeast of the country. And this had actually been the old Frankish heartland.
So Soissons was where Clovis had beaten Cyagrius, the last Roman ruler in Gaul. And Soissons becomes Chilpric's main base.
And there's Amiens where St. Martin had cut his cloak and given half of it to the beggar.
There's Tournai where Chilpric was buried. But it is the smallest of the four kingdoms.
And it comes to be known by the Franks as Neustria, which translates from Frankish as the Western Lands. And this is because there's an Eastern territory, which they have basically

carved out of what's now Germany, which is called the Eastern lands, which is Austrasia. So Neustria and Austrasia, they become great adversaries, don't they? They will.
And at this point, Austrasia is much, much larger than Neustria, centered on Reims, on Metz, on Strasbourg. And that is ruled by the third of Clothau's Four Sons,

and here's a guy called Sigbert.

And Chilperic detests Sigbert. And that may be partly because they are the closest in age, but it's also because they have a long 300 mile border.
And Chilperic is endlessly maneuvering against Sigbert, desperate to kind of drag him down. And this is the background to the emergence of Fredegund as a player in this great game of thrones.
So we said she's a slave in his household. Right, Chilperic's household.
Yeah, in Chilperic's household. She's absolutely at the bottom of the pile.
Now, we've said it's a dangerous, plague-swept, war-torn world. But I guess that where there is peril and upheaval, there is also opportunity, particularly if you are a woman of remarkable abilities, which I think even Gregory of Tall would acknowledge Fredegund was.
So she's clearly

very sexually attractive. I mean, that is probably the single most important attribute that she brings to the party at the beginning of her career.
But she's also clearly very, very intelligent. So even though she's a slave, she seems to have taught herself letters and also to speak Latin as well as Frankish.

She's incredibly daring.

She's incredibly determined.

And she also has, so Shelley Puhak puts this, I think, wonderfully, the honing of small talents, the ability to slip in and out of a room unnoticed, to intuit which cook or lackey was likely to let slip a choice bit of information. So throughout her career, her ability to read people, to manipulate them, to pick up secrets.

This is a key part of how she keeps on top of all the tumultuous events that will typify her life. Well, talk about keeping on top of events.
There's a story, isn't there, about how she actually makes her move, which is that she has been promoted from the kitchen to serve the queen as her maid. The queen's called Aldeweire.
And then basically she tricks the queen, Aldeweire, into falling out, into having a row with Chilperic. And then all the time she's kind of, you know, lurking in the background.
What would the Mail Online say? She's flaunting her curves at Chilperic, who basically says, right, the queen's got to go get her off to a convent. You know, you're with me tonight.
And that's exactly as she's planned it all along. Yes.
The story about her being promoted from the kitchens, it's quite late and is maybe gilding the lily of the inherently kind of dramatic story of her rise. But I don't think there's any question that it is her curves, if you want to put it that way, that appeal to Chilperic.
And

definitely that this queen out of era is packed off to a convent and Fredegund does become, you know, the kind of the chief royal concubine. But of course, to be a concubine is absolutely not to be secure because you are very, very expendable.
And the problem for Fredegund is that Chilperic is not only resentful and ambitious, but he's also very, very willful. And he is absolutely determined to do whatever it takes to break out of this tiny corner of Gaul that he's been penned into and kind of strut his stuff in an authentically Roman way.
And he clearly does have overtly Roman ambitions. so of all his brothers, he, so far as we know, is the only one who builds amphitheaters and stages spectacles in them, like a Roman emperor.
It's kind of amazing to think of this being carried on in sixth century Gaul, decades after the Roman Empire has fallen there. But it also means that he needs a queen who is commensurate with the status that he thinks should be his.
And clearly, you know, a slave girl doesn't measure up at all. So not long after he's taken Fredegund into his bed, he's already looking around for a suitable bride to replace Aldeweire.
And he fixes on a princess from the one kingdom that can rival that of the Merovingians. And that's the kingdom of the Visigoths, is centered in Spain again a very powerful barbarian kingdom and his chance to press for a Visigothic princess comes in 567 when the oldest of the four brothers a guy called Charibert dies of natural causes and his lands are then divided up among the three surviving brothers and the result is a kind of completely mad, unworkable patchwork of kind of territory.
It's a bit like the Holy Roman Emperor. You know, bits of towns here, chunks of land there.
So Paris is left neutral. That's a kind of safe space between the three brothers.
Sigebert, who's the king of Austrasia, so that's the kind of the eastern chunk. He gets the Loire, which is obviously the opposite end from him,

and that includes Tor.

Oh, right. So he gets St.
Martin.

Yeah, so very important.

The eldest surviving brother, so this is a guy called Guntram,

his power base is in Burgundy.

He gets Aquitaine, which again is on the opposite side of Gaul from him.

But the key thing for Chilperic, you know, he's been penned in in the north

and there's no way

that the Visigoths

would give him the time of day

if that was all he had to offer.

His sway is extended

all along the line of the channel

as far as Brittany,

which remains independent.

But he also gets

most of southwestern Gaul.

And that, of course,

abuts the Pyrenees,

which means Spain.

And so that does make him a person of interest to the Visigoths. Initially, in the wake of Charabert's death and his getting all these new lands, he gets up to his normal tricks.
He tries to grab Tor, because with its tomb of St. Martin, it's so important.
But Sigibert manages to beat him off. But then he opens marriage negotiations with the Visigoths and he gets what he wants.
He gets a princess. And in 568, the eldest daughter of the king of the Visigoths, a princess called Galswintha, duly sets off from Spain northwards to Neustria.
And she arrives on the banks of the Seine. She's come up the river, a bit like Marie Antoinette did.
And she steps out from the boat and she's greeted on bended knee by Chilperic and his entire army. He's brought them out as a gesture of honor.
That's a very Game of Thrones scene, isn't it? Very. And Gregory of Tor describes this moving and romantic moment.
King Chilperic loved her very dearly for she had brought a huge dowry with her. Ah, what's not to like? What's not to like? Money can buy him love.
Yeah, but what does Fredegund make of this? Because she's been sharing the royal beds. She can't be best pleased that this Visigothic princess has pitched up.
It's very, very bad news for Fredegund because reports of Chilperic's enthusiasm for her have reached the Visigoths. And so it's become a specific clause in the marriage negotiations that Chilperic will chuck her out and not have any other woman other than Galswintha, the Visigothic princess.
So Chilperic really wants this princess. So he's chucked Fredegund out.
You know, she loses her status as the royal mistress. And rather than kind of throw a hissy fit and risk her relationship with Chilperic, you know, she goes back to her former duties.
But as Shelley Puhack puts it, she made sure Chilperic caught glimpses of her in passageways and courtyards, enticing reminders of an easier and more blissful time. So she is still flaunting her curves.
And does it work? It turns out Chilperic can't resist her. You know, she is irresistible to him.
And so a few months after the wedding, Galswinther finds Chilperic in bed with Fredegund. And there's an absolutely massive row.
Galswintha threatens to leave for Spain, which would obviously be mortifying for Chilperic. One morning, Galswintha is found in her bed and she has been strangled.
And Gregory of Tor writes, King Chilperic wept for the death of his queen. But then a few days later, he goes to the church and there at the altar, dressed in splendid jewels in the robes of a royal partner is Fredegund and they get married.
And the scandal of it echoes across Gaul. It echoes across Christendom.
And everyone, of course, is thinking what Gregory of Tor puts into words. It was Chilperic who had ordered Galswintha to be garrotted by one of his servants.
Greggy. So that is a shock.
Bombshell. A real bombshell.
And what's the reaction across the sort of Frankish world? So do people say, oh, good on you, this is reasonable behaviour, or is this going to make Chilperic and Fredegund pariahs? Well, the place where it particularly reverberates is in the court of Austrasia, where Chilperic's brother, Sigibird, is king. And the reason for that, why it particularly reverberates there is partly because Sigibird and Chilperic really detest each other.
But it's also because Sigbert is also married to a Visigothic queen.

And this queen is the younger sister of Galswintha,

so the princess who's just been murdered.

And she had arrived in Austrasia the year before, so in 567.

And the name of this princess, this Visigothic princess,

married to Sigbert is Dominic Brunhild. Okay, so now we've got the other great player in the drama, Brunhild.
We have. And now we can obviously understand why Brunhild absolutely despises Fredegund and vice versa, because Brunhild clearly is never going to forgive her for the death of her sister.
But we've talked about Fredegund. Brunhild herself is a pretty remarkable woman, isn't she? She's incredibly fashionable.
She's very beautiful. She's very elegant and she's brilliant at politics.

She really is. So she's in a difficult situation.
She's a foreigner in a Frankish court, but she's already in the space of a year showed herself to be a very shrewd, a very tough political operator. And she's made a point of forging alliances with the kind of you know the leading men at Sigbert's court so that's one thing that she's done but the key thing she's done and it's what basically queens are there for in the opinion of their husbands is that she's fulfilled her prime duty which is to give Sigbert a son and Sigbert's son is called Childebert.
And he is born at Easter. He's baptized at the great Christian festival of Pentecost.
And this seems to everyone in Austrasia an absolute marker of divine favor. So Brunhild is very much in everyone's good books in Austrasia.
And she works on Sigbert and says, look, my sister has been murdered by your brother's mistress, who is now kind of posing around in my dead sister's robes and clothes. And this is unsupportable.
You know, you have to have vengeance. I think that's a reasonable position, to be fair.
I think it is. Yeah, I think it is.
And so Sigbert, he turns to his brother, Guntram, the king of Burgundy, so the elder brother. And he says, look, let's take this to trial.
You should summon Chilperic to answer for what is clearly a terrible crime, and we will try him so that everything will be above board. And Guntram says, yeah, fair enough.
Clearly something terrible has happened. We need to get to the bottom of this.
So Guntram summons to Chilperic to come and stand trial and Chilperic refuses. So he's tried it in absentia and found guilty.
And this, of course,

then provides Sigbert with the perfect legal, religious sanction to invade Neustria and know

that everyone in Gaul basically will be on his side. He's got Guntram on his side.
He's got all

his own followers on his side. And he's got quiteram on his side.
He's got all his own followers

on his side. And he's got quite a lot of people in Neustria who are, of course, very anxious about

the crime that their king might have committed. They are also very prone to go over to him.

And so when he launches his campaign in 575, it's an absolute triumph. Chilperic and Fredegund

are forced to flee Soissons, their capital. They have to take all their treasure with them.
You know, they can't risk losing that. They also abandoned Paris, which Chilperic had occupied.
Sigbert moves into Paris, the place where Clovis, the founder of the Merovingian dynasty, is buried. And he summons Brunhild and his little boy Childebert and various daughters, who Brunhilde has also given birth to by this point.
And so the whole family, they move to Paris. They move into the great palace on the Ile de Paris.
And the Bishop of Paris hails Brunhilde as Praecelentissima Regina, the most excellent queen. So she is being hailed as queen in the very heart of the Merovingian dynasty.
And this is looking brilliant. And meanwhile, out in Neustria, all the nobles are starting to defect to Sigbert.
And so Sigbert decides he will go north and meet them. He leaves Brunhild and his children behind in Paris.
He goes northwards. He goes to one of Chilperic's royal villas where all the nobility of Neustria have assembled.

The nobility of Austrasia join them.

There's a massive great assembly.

They hail Sigurbert as king.

He's lifted up onto a shield.

He's paraded through their ranks.

And it seems that Chilperic and Fredegund are absolutely doomed.

But that, Dominic, is to reckon without Fredegund's determination and cunning right because if this was game of thrones it's like when uh readily baratheon looks like he's going to take over the kingdom and there's a great twist so you know it's all looking too good there would be some unexpected narrative development that would slightly strain credulity but would nevertheless be true? And is something like that just looming around the corner, maybe? Well, let's find out. So Sigbert's been paraded around in his shield.
All the nobles of the two kingdoms have hailed him. It's all looking brilliant.
So he steps down from his shield. He's kind of wandering around his camp and he is approached by two young boys.
And they're very small. They look to be no threat whatsoever.
They're clearly slaves. You can tell that from their dress.
They have no armor, no real weapons, apart from pretty blunt hunting knives that everyone as a matter of course in Gaul kind of wear on their belts. So they seem to be no threat at all.
And they kneel before him and say that they have a message for him and so Sigbert stops waits to hear what they have to say and they reach for their knives and they strike him on both sides Gregory of Tor tells us but these are pretty blunt knives it shouldn't be enough to kill him but Sigbert even though he's really only got a kind of scratch within minutes he has collapsed onto the ground starts to froth at the mouth and within hours he's dead and it's clear the knives were poisoned and who in Gaul would have had the ability to know how to command poisons the daring to come up with such a scheme the powers of persuasion to get two boys to sacrifice themselves,

because, of course, they're immediately put to death. And the assumption is that there is only one person who fits that bill.
And that person, Dominic, is Fredegund. What a twist.
Come back after the break to find out what happens next. The wife of a Merovingian king enjoyed a position both dependent and precarious, resting as it did on her personal sexual association with a husband whose interests or fancy could all too easily attach him to her supplanter, even if the royal bride was, as occasionally in the 6th century, a foreign princess, her situation in practice might be little different from the ex-serving maids.
Her dependence on her husband's generosity and favour, when her own kin were far away and her people reckoned perhaps the enemies of the Franks, might be similarly complete. So Tom, that's a historian called Janet L.
Nelson writing in an article, I assume, called Queens as Jezebels. Why do you like that reading? Well, I think it provides the academic perspective on all these shenanigans.
And it also sums up why Fredegund and Brunhilde, one a slave girl, one a princess, are actually, you know, you can reckon them worthy adversaries because the princess, like the slave girl, faces incredibly daunting challenges. And that is what makes it so amazing that their feud, it endures decades.
But their struggles, I guess, are not only against each other, but also the circumstances that both of them, as the most powerful woman in their respective kingdoms, are facing as women.

and even though we can't follow every twist and turn of their rivalry,

I think the details, the kind of the broad outline that we'll go through in the second half,

I mean, it's so extraordinary,

so kind of jaw-dropping at points

that it will become clear just how remarkable. that we'll go through in the second half.
I mean, it's so extraordinary, so kind of jaw-dropping at points

that it will become clear

just how remarkable both these figures are,

both these women are.

So let's go with Fredegund first

because we ended with her

apparently assassinating Sigbert.

So that is a tremendous coup.

Like she's basically wiped out

the bloke who was the single biggest threat

to her and her husband.

And now, you know, she was staring into the abyss and now everything is possible again. Yeah.
I mean, we don't know for sure that she did it, but she definitely benefits from it. And as we will see, it does have her kind of fingerprints all over it.
So she's clawed everything back, both for herself and for Chilperic. because with Sigbert gone, his heir, Childebert, is, I mean, you know,

he's a little boy about five years old so no conceivable threat and all the Neustrian nobles who had pledged their loyalty to Sigebert you know they think well we're not going to pledge our loyalty to a foreign child so they immediately swing back to Chilperic and actually some of the Austrasians do as well so the nobles who'd been following Sige. And actually, some of the Austrasians do as well.

So the nobles who'd been following Sigbert and the vast mass of the Austrasians, the

nobility, the men at arms who've been following them, they all withdraw to home territory.

They feel there's no point in carrying on this war.

And I think one of the reasons for thinking that Fredegund is behind this is that Chilperic

from this point on seems to have treated her with an unusual degree of respect and devotion

of the is behind this is that Chilperic from this point on seems to have treated her with an unusual degree of respect and devotion, almost as though he's kind of acknowledging what he owes her. And not only, I think, does he recognize that he's found in Fredegund a partner for his own ambitions, similarly kind of determined and ruthless, but also Fredegund, like Brunhild has done, has provided sons.
So two in Fredegund's case. And so her position now seems completely secure.
She's completely reversed the seeming abyss that she was about to fall into. She is now looking at kind of very solidly ensconced as the most powerful woman in Neustria, which isn't to deny that the assassination of Sigbert comes with pretty high costs for her.
So she is now seen not just as a slave, but as treacherous, as cowardly, as underhand. Actually, for Franks, this is the epitome of what it is to be a slave and for what it is to be a woman.
So Fredegund, in that sense, is the kind of the embodiment of everything that they most fear and despise. But Gregory of Tor, who is absolutely, as we said, Team Brunhild, he goes further and accuses Fredegund of having practiced witchcraft.
How else would she have known to apply the right amount of poison? How else would she have been able to suborn these two boys who were clearly going to their deaths? And this is a very serious charge. So Shelley Puhack in her wonderful book, The Dark Queens, points out that the fine in Gaul for slandering a woman as a whore was 45 solidi.
I'm not quite sure exactly what that is, but respectable amount, I guess. But if you falsely accuse a woman of witchcraft, then the fine you have to pay is 187 and a half solidi.
So, you know, that's quite an imbalance. Yeah, definitely four times more.
So does Fredegund care? Fredegund does not seem to have cared and neither really does Chilperic. At no point in their lives, so far as we know, do either of them ever deign to respond to the accusations that are levelled against them.
They never deny having committed murder. They never deny having practiced witchcraft.
And I guess

Fredegund feels that it's better to be feared than to be loved. And she certainly does become feared.

And what about Brunhilde? Because she was looking great at the end of the first half.

She was left in Paris

all was good and then her husband has been killed by these two boys and all her hopes have crumbled away to nothing right she's suddenly stranded and alone yeah so Fredegund has gone from zero to hero and Brunhilde has gone from hero to zero she has been left stranded in Paris she's surrounded by. And her priority, of course, is to ensure the survival of her son, Childebert, because everything for her future depends on him living.
According to tradition, she puts him into a bag and smuggles him out of the palace into a boat, crosses the Seine, and they manage to get him back to Austrasia. And sure enough, Childebert bird even though he's kind of only five or whatever he's crowned in austrasia on christmas day 575 so he at least that's something that brunhild can cling on to but for her things are looking very bad because she has fallen into chilperic's hands and he does what he always does to women, which is to pack her off to a convent.
And it's a very particular convent in Rouen, kind of great masses of stone, very highly protected. So it's effectively a prison.
And this is where he sent Aldeweire, his first wife, the one that Fredegund had supplanted. And it's a terrible place.
It's fully cloistered you know there are no servants you

have to wear rough coarse robes you have a regulation pudding bowl haircut it's not at all brunhild scene right in any way and she's looking around for opportunities to escape and so she starts talking to out of era and they obviously swap notes about what a terrible person fredegund is and talking to Aldeweire gives Brunhild an idea about how she can escape.

And this idea becomes manifest in the spring of the following year, so 576.

And that spring, the army of the Neustrians arrives in Rouen.

And it is led by Chilperic's eldest son, who is called Merovich, so as in the sea monster.

I'll see you later. The army of the Neustrians arrives in Rouen, and it is led by Chilperic's eldest son, who is called Merovich, so as in the sea monster.
And he is one of two surviving sons of Aldeweire, and he has been ordered by his father Chilperic to march on the Austrasian holdings in the Loire, so that would include Tor. But Merovich has directly disobeyed these orders and instead has gone to Rouhr.
And he claims that it's to see his mother, Aldeweire. But it's clear that his real object is Brunhild.
And it's pretty clear that Brunhild has written to him and said, look, why don't we get married? We can have an alliance. Fredegund is clearly out to get you.
You are a rival to her sons. She's going to want you out of the way.
This is a person who is ready to practice poison at the drop of a hat. If we get married, I can go back to Austrasia and, you know, serve as regent for my son.
You can get rid of Fredegund, establish yourself as Chilperix heir, and then we can join the two kingdoms and rule effectively as king and queen so let's just get our heads around this tom so this guy is meravec and he is the son of chilperic and aldevar and aldevar who's in the convent we can forget about aldevar she's in the convent he's an older son and he doesn't like fredegund the new queen and fears well i think more to the point fredegund doesn't like him because fredegund's power depends on her son becoming king rather than him so he's

now proposing to marry his uncle's yes ex-wife who is also the sister of his father who's been

murdered of his father's ex-wife right okay so it is very like a fantasy novel yeah it's very clear

it's really clear if you can't get your head around it don't worry because neither can i well Thank you. father's stepmother who's been murdered of his father's ex-wife right okay so it is very like

a fantasy novel yeah it's very clear it's really clear if you can't get your head around it don't worry because neither can i well i think the key point there is that you're right that this is technically incest right and you would think that for instance holy bishops would not be keen to give their stamp to incest but fortunately the bishop of rouen who is you know a man of reputation, very venerable, a Gallo-Roman aristocrat called Praetextatus, he thinks, okay, fair enough, I'll do it. And probably the reason that he does that is that he is the godfather of Merovich.
And so he kind of feels obliged by that relationship. And so he goes ahead with the ceremony.
Brunhild is sprung from this convent in which she's been imprisoned she gets married and she is loose but there's another twist isn't there there's always a twist so you think meravich has got it all you know going for him now but actually no no chilperic is too strong for him is that right overpowers him and captures him captures him shaves off his long hair which of course is the mark of his royal status so he basically goes bald and this is a terrible humiliation and sends him off to a monastery on the assumption that there he will be no harm but meravich he's not taking that so he grows his hair back he escapes the monastery tries to continue the fight but he ends up cornered in a village that actually isn't far from agincourt so right up in the in the northeast of France. And he knows that now he's rebelled twice.
He can expect no mercy from his father. And so he gets his servant to kill him.
And back in Austrasia, Brunhilde is now being left a widow for the second time in two years. That's bad.
But on the plus side, she's no longer in the convent. She's escaped that.
She's back in Australia where her son is the crowned king. And not only that, but she's managed to persuade King Guntram of Burgundy, so the elder brother of Sigiburt and Chilperic, to adopt her son, Childebert, as king.
And I'm aware that there are an enormous quantity of mad names. But basically basically brunhild has got her son adopted by the king of burgundy and fredegund has not managed to get her sons adopted so she to that extent is one up right and in fact as brunhild's wheel of good fortune goes up so fredegund's starts to descend and you know you may, why would King Guntram in Burgundy adopt his nephew as king? Hasn't he got sons of his own? Well, he did have, but they had died in one of these endless dysentery epidemics that is always sweeping Gaul at this time.
and in 580 there is another dysentery epidemic and this claims the lives of Fredigan's two sons

and this is devastating for her. It's devastating on a personal level, and it's devastating because she has now lost the guarantees that she, as queen mother, would have when and if her husband dies.
And she, if you trust Gregory of Tours' accounts, she seems to have been crazed either by grief or by frustrated ambition i mean maybe both and according to gregory of tor fredigund accuses out of era's last surviving son clovis so that's the brother of meravich who had married brunhild of having conspired with one of fredigund's own servants to kill her sons by means of witchcraft. And Clovis supposedly been having an affair with this servant girl.
Her mother was a witch. It's all a kind of very dark conspiracy.
So Fredegund goes to Chilperic, says, look, your son, he's plotted against our two boys. He's engaged with a witch.
This is terrible. You know, you've got to sort him out.
So Chilperic is obviously, I mean, it's a measure of, if this story is true, of how obsessed he is by Fredegund. He has Clovis stripped of his weapons.
This is his own son. Yeah.
Stripped of all his finery, chained up, turned over to Fredegund. Fredegund then has him removed to a private estate.
He's locked up there, chained, and supposedly stabs himself to death as jellie poohook points out how he managed to do this while alone in a cell with his hands bound behind his back was never explained okay so it's likely that again you know fredegund has strikes again yes and so she also has the purported witch and her mother tortured and executed and she also has Aldeweire murdered as well. So she has now destroyed both her rival as queen and her two stepsons.
So to that extent, she has managed to clear the decks. But obviously it's a problem.
She needs to give Chilperic a son. I mean, everything depends on that.
And fortunately for her in 582, she manages to do that. a third son, and he dies of dysentery too.
Oh no. Terrible.
But she thinks this is not just a common death by dysentery, does it? She thinks somebody has, again, poison has been involved, that somebody has been plotting this, right? I think witchcraft. Witchcraft.
I think witchcraft, I think by this point, both her and Chilperic, her husband, they keep having sons. The sons keep dying of dysentery.
Yeah. They think it must be witchcraft.
And so Fredegund accuses a local dignitary of having done it. He's tortured horribly.
They take little shards of wood and drive them beneath his nails, his fingernails and his toenails. And that's something that I would always give in to any torturer who threatens to do that to me on the spot.
So really horrible. And she also, she rounds up various women who were probably midwives.
And she has some of them beheaded, some of them burnt at the stake, others broken on the wheel. And then as a climactic demonstration of her grief and her despair and her anger, she does something that will reverberate down the centuries and Geoffrey of Tor describes it.
The Queen now collected together anything to belong to her dead son and burnt it, all his clothes, some of them silk and others of fur and all his other possessions, whatever she could find. It is said that all this filled four carts.
Any object in gold or silver was melted down in a furnace so that nothing

whatsoever remained intact to remind her of how she had mourned for her boy and dominic we talked about how fredegund as well as brunhilde feeds into the figure of brunhilde in wagner's great opera she immolates herself on a pyre and i think that this is you know clearly kind of distorted echo of this great bonfire of everything that had reminded fredegund of her son and so you know it's a devastating moment for her but she doesn't burn herself on the pyre in fact she has another child she has another boy she does so because she and chilperic are so nervous of witchcraft, when she gets pregnant,

she keeps it secret. And when she gives birth to her son, she keeps that secret as well.
So this means that when in September 584, Chilperic, who's been out for a day's hunting, returns home to his villa, he gets down from his horse and he is greeted by a servant who rushes up to him and stabs him to death. No one knows that he has a male heir.
Crikey. So how old is this boy? Do we know? So this boy is, at this point, a few months old.
Crikey. So now Chilperic has been stabbed to death.
Now Fredegund is up against it, is she? Or did she actually have a hand in it, Tom? That would be a twist.

Well, there are people who accuse her of having murdered her own husband

because whenever a mysterious assassination happens,

Fredegund always gets accused of it.

But if you think about it, that would be mad

because for her, everything depends on Chilperic staying alive.

She needs him at least until this baby boy that she's got

has grown up and come of age, able to succeed his father.

The loss of Chilperic leaves her fortunes hanging by a thread.

See you next time. This baby boy that she's got has grown up and come of age, able to succeed his father.
The loss of Chilperic leaves her fortunes hanging by a thread. So if you had to say, well, who's the likeliest person responsible? You would probably say Brunhild, which isn't to say that Brunhild did it.
But I mean, she must be the chief suspect because she, of course, doesn't know that Chilperic has this male heir. And so she would assume that with Chilperic out of the way, there isn't anyone to claim the Neustrian throne.
And so presumably she's now kind of plotting to take over Neustria. But Fredegund has one last card to play.
So she writes to Guntram, the king of Burgundy. She reveals the bombshell news that she has this baby boy.
And she says, let my lord come and take charge of his brother's kingdom i have a tiny baby whom i long to place in his arms at the same time i shall declare myself his humble servant so she's reading guntram like a book she's being submissive she's being subservient she's saying you know you can have theustria. You can look after this boy who is your nephew.
And Guntram is, you know, is charmed by this. And Brunhild doesn't dare go against Guntram's wishes.
And so she has to play quiet. And so Fredegund lives to fight another day.
And so Fredegund has played a blinder. She's plucked security from the jaws of danger, Dominic.
And for the next eight years until Guntram dies in 692, Fredegund and her son, who she calls Clothar, essentially are secure from Brunhild's vengeance. And in that time, Fredegund essentially rules Neustria as her son's regent.
You know, this is remarkable for a former slave to be doing this. And it's a measure, I think, of how respected and feared she is by the Neustrian nobility that they allow her to do that.
Simultaneously, Brunhild is kept on a tight leash by Guntram. She has signed a treaty with him at a place called Anderlot.
And this is the oldest surviving medieval treaty. We still have it.
And it's signed on the 28th of November 587, the oldest surviving medieval Treaty and this is the oldest surviving medieval treaty we still have it and it's signed on the 28th of november 587 the oldest surviving medieval treaty and this confirms that childerbert who is brunhild's son will inherit burgundy on guntram's death so that's one up for brunhild so both of them have what they want brunhild has expanded her son's territories when guntram dies and Fredegund is secure from Brunhild's revenge while Guntram is alive. Well, I mean, one day Guntram will die, and then, you know, the feud will restart, presumably.
Right. So Fredegund, all the while, is kind of practicing a kind of Putin-style dirty war in the background against Brunhild.
She incites a revolt against Brunhild, which Brunhild personally, you know, she marches out in armor to put down. In 586, this is when Bishop Praetek Startus is murdered in the cathedral.
So that was the one who'd married Brunhild to Merovich. And this is the one we said at the beginning where Fredegund supposedly gloats over the bishop as he dies and the blood spills across his cathedral.
But at the same time, she is brilliant at keeping justice herself. So just as she deals death from the shadows, so she deals justice from the shadows.
And there's one extraordinary story that is told about this, that there's a vendetta has broken out in a particular family and they're all kind of killing each other. And so she invites three of the leading members of this family, the kind of heads of the various factions in this blood feud to a great banquet.
And the three feuding members of this family are sat down in her great hall. They have to hand over their weapons.
They have to be polite to each other for the length of the banquet. of food is served lots of drink the ice starts to melt by the end of the evening the three men are all kind of chatting away as though they've kind of buried the hatchet and then fredegund who's been watching this from the high table gives a signal three men each one man holding an axe comes up to the three feuding members.
Swish, swish, swish. Their heads are sent bouncing across the table.
Fredegund stands up, walks out of the room, and everyone in her hall knows that she has literally executed justice. Wow.
So this, I think, is you can see why she's respected and feared by people in Neustria. But all the while, of course, this isn't helping her against Brunhild, because she knows when Guntram dies, that Brunhild is going to come on the attack.
Right. And so we get to 592, Guntram dies, and now the feud can restart in earnest.
Fredeguen knows that Brunhild is about to attack, right? Absolutely. And this happens the year after Guntram's death.
Brunhild orders her forces to capture Soissons, which is the main centre of Neustrian power. It's where the treasury is and everything.
And this is very bad for Fredegund because Brunhilde now has the forces of Burgundy as well as Austrasia at her back. So massively outnumbering anything that Fredegund could summon.
And so Fredegund has been studying Roman military manuals. And she has read there that the only way that an outnumbered force can hope to defeat a larger one is to take it by surprise.
And so she decides to do exactly that, to try and ambush the Australian forces before they can attack Soissons. So she leads her hugely outnumbered forces in person.
She is the war leader out from Soissons. And she finds that the Austrasian forces are camped out at a village called Doisy.
And Fredegund orders her troops to fasten bells to the bridles of their horses so that the Austrasians will think that they are their own horses who are out grazing, because that's what you would do. You would have, you know, your horses belled so that they won't wander off.
So when they hear the Neustrian horsemen approaching, they think, oh, it's just our own horses kind of grazing. And the other thing that she does, she orders them to disguise themselves by carrying tree branches.
And this is, of course, very, very Burnham Wood. Yeah, very Macbeth.
and there are theories that this is ultimately where the story in macbeth comes from and it's a brilliantly successful strategy the austrasians are taken completely by surprise they're put to the sword massacred fredegun then leads a raid deep into enemy territory and she returns to soissot in triumph absolutely loaded with booty. And this is the last great confrontation between the two rivals, between Fredegund and Brunhilde.
And they've been enemies for so long that essentially by the end of their life, they have become the mirror image of the other. So this becomes even clearer in March 595 when King Childebert, so Brunhilde's son, king of Burgundy as well as of Austrasia, he's aged 25.
He dies of dysentery. So yet again.
And he leaves behind two sons. And listeners will be thrilled to know that they also have mad names.
So they are called Theudebert and Theuderic. very young, and Brunhild now rules on their behalf

as regents.

And so both Fredegund and Brunhild are now regents, and Shelley Buhack in her book, The

Dark Queens, points out how extraordinary this is.

So she writes, when Brunhild assumed the regency for her two grandsons, she ushered in one

of the most unusual periods of European history, one of dual female rule.

She and Fredegund reigned as regents at exactly the same time, and the empire they shared encompassed modern-day France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Western and Southern Germany, and parts of Switzerland. Only Charlemagne would briefly control more territory than these two women.
Amazing. I mean, amazing they're not better known, really.
The remarkable thing is they never met. So they're implacable enemies, but they never met.
Fredegund died in 597. In her bed.
Safely in her bed. Yeah.
Her son Clothar was 13. But he's inherited the feud with Brunhild, and he doesn't forget it, does he? Yeah, he does.
And, you know, he's still pretty young. He bides his time, so all the way through his teenage years into his 20s and meanwhile in austrasia brunhild's two grandsons sudebert and theudric have fallen out with each other theudric the younger son murders his elder brother of course he does he then has a drink from a well and he gets dysentery he dies so he's out the way yeah he leaves behind three sons and a daughter they're all underage and so brunhild now has to kind of step forward and become regent again and by this point she is 70 yeah and essentially her nobles the nobles in austrasia i mean they look at this and they say a 70 year old woman and you know an infant king this is hopeless you know we can't have this and So they turn to clothar fredegund's son in austrasia and they say look this isn't good enough and the two people who lead this approach are two of the leading figures in austrasia one of them is a nobleman called pippin and one of them is a bishop called arnulf he's the bishop of metz and these are significant figures in the subsequent history of the Franks.
And they say, look, we will take Brunhild and her great-grandchildren, and we will secure them, and we will hand them over to you. And that's what they do.
And Brunhild and her great-grandchildren are taken in carts to the great camp that Clothar has set up in northern Australia. They're brought into his presence.
The two eldest boys are beheaded, the girl is packed off to a convent, and the youngest boy, because Clothar is his godfather, is spared and sent away to grow up as a Neustrian nobleman. And what does Clothar do to Brunhild? Brunhild, I think, would be expecting that she too would be sent to a convent.
That's what had happened before when she was captured. But Kothar has inherited this vendetta from Fredegund, his mother, and he has not forgotten it.
And so he has Brunhild arraigned on charges of murdering no less than 10 kings, including Sigbert, Merovich, Clovis, her own two great grandsons, which is mad. I mean, it's clear Brunhilde hadn't killed any of those.
Essentially, it's a way of kind of whitewashing Fredegund's reputation. Brunhilde, unsurprisingly, is found guilty and her punishment is an absolutely terrible one.
so in front of all the kind of serried ranks of the Austrasian and Austrasian nobility, she's publicly stripped of her jewellery, her robes, all her finery. She's then beaten.
She's tortured. This goes on for three days.
She's then paraded on a camel facing backwards and led through the entire army. She's 70 at this point, just to remind everybody.
She's 70 and she's being paraded around on a camel yeah you know this isn't the old age that she was expecting no and then after she's been paraded around on the camel she is bound to either a single wild horse or maybe several horses perhaps to their tails perhaps to their hooves the wild horses you know a lash is given to their rumps. They go galloping off.
Brunhild is tied to them and she is very rapidly reduced to a bloody pulp. Her head, it is said, is sent flying.
Her limbs are scattered far and wide. Clothar then sends out servants to gather up the bloody remains.
They're brought to him and they are ceremonially burnt so that nothing remains of Brunhild and Clothar watches feeling that he has at last triumphed over the great enemy of his mother but also watching are those two greatest of Austrasian noblemen the lords whose treachery had doomed Brunhild and her great grandchildren, and they are Pepin and the Bishop of Metz, Arnulf, and their joint descendants, they will have a very, very bright future indeed, a future so bright that in due course, it will come to blot out the very line of the Merovingians. Well, what a terrific cliffhanger.
So next week, the story of the rise of the Franks, the warlords of the West, takes an even more exciting turn as we come to one of the great decisive battles in medieval history, or perhaps in all world history the battle of tor and if you want

to hear that episode right away you can of course do so by joining the rest is history club at the

rest is history.com and if you don't i'm afraid you'll have to wait till monday and believe me

it will be worth the wait all right on that bombshell thank you very much tom tour de force