The Sea Monster That Started a Medieval Dynasty
The Merovingian Franks claimed descent from a “beast of Neptune.” Here’s why that matters today.
The Merovingians had an unshakeable right to rule. And according to legend, they derived their right from a chance encounter between a queen and a sea monster.
Who were the Merovingians?
The Merovingian Franks were a powerful dynasty of long-haired kings who rose from the ashes of the Roman Empire. They forged an incomparably powerful political hegemony in the sixth century AD. For two centuries nobody claimed Frankish kingship who was not a direct, male-line member of the Merovingian royal family.
They accomplished this dynastic security despite constant civil war. Royal brothers fought and killed each other in nasty ways for portions of their fathers’ territories. But this did not hurt the dynasty’s legitimacy. In an age when most kingdoms were small and unstable, the Merovingians ruled the largest and richest polity in Europe for nearly four centuries. Their conquests expanded the kingdom to encompass parts of modern France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. They united people of Frankish and Gallo-Roman descent to form a common culture which combined Roman and Germanic elements. This virtually eliminated ethnic-based conflict.
The Merovingians also maintained their legitimacy even after they lost real power. In the final decades of the dynasty, the king’s palace mayor was truly in charge of the kingdom. In 751, Charlemagne’s father, a palace mayor named Pippin the Short, finally overthrew the king. However, the family’s authority was still so strong that Pippin needed papal approval to depose the Merovingian figurehead. He also had to invent new rites, such as anointing, to replace the legitimacy that came automatically with Merovingian blood.
But where did the Merovingians’ incredible legitimacy come from? How did they unite the Franks, conquer large swaths of land, and rule over a diverse population for centuries? Apparently, it was because they were descended from a “Quinotaur” — whatever that is.
So where does the sea monster come in?
The Merovingians took their name from their semi-mythical founder, King Merovech. If he existed (which is far from certain), he lived in the early fifth century, from around 411 to around 460 AD. We do not know what he looked like, whom he married, or what he accomplished during his reign. Pretty much all we know about Merovech is that his father may or may not have been a “beast of Neptune.”
The seventh-century Chronicle of Fredegar tells us that King Chlodio of the Salian Franks spent a summer at the seashore with his wife in 410 AD. They likely stayed on the coast of what is now Belgium. One day at noon, Chlodio’s wife went to the sea to bathe. The queen probably wanted to cool off in the water of the North Sea to fight the midday heat. But if her goal was to relax, she was sorely disappointed, because while she was bathing, “a beast of Neptune, which looked like a Quinotaur,” attacked her.
Immediately, Chlodio’s wife became pregnant “either by the beast or by her husband.” Nine months later, she gave birth to a son named Merovech, the founder and namesake of the Merovingians.
Could this be the root of Merovingian legitimacy? The notion isn’t quite as ridiculous as it sounds. Many early medieval royal families claimed to be descended from gods to bolster their rules. A divine or supernatural origin explained why the family was special, separated it from other nobles, and justified its superior position.
But this story is strange, even by the standards of divine origin myths. Not only is Fredegar’s chronicle the only source which records this tale, it is also the only place we hear of a “Quinotaur.” So it is odd that Fredegar claims the beast which attacked Clodio’s wife looked like one, as we have no evidence that anyone has ever known what a Quinotaur is supposed to look like!
The name means “five-horned bull.” Historians generally assume that the creature was meant to resemble an aquatic Minotaur with three extra horns, perhaps something like the image below. The word could also be a scribal error for “Minotaur,” but that makes no more sense in context — Minotaurs are not exactly aquatic creatures.
Just as troublesome as the Quinotaur is the story’s neglect of the very question it is meant to answer: who is Merovech’s father? Strangely, the story seems to carry a double-edged insult to the Merovingians, since neither candidate’s paternity is particularly flattering. If Chlodio is Merovech’s father, there is nothing special about Merovech’s birth, and the story is an absurdly pointless interlude. On the other hand, if the beast is the father, Merovech is the product of adultery, and the king is therefore humiliated. The monster’s paternity would also spit in the face of the Merovingian dynasty’s centuries of uninterrupted male-line descent. If Merovech does not inherit his royal blood from his royal “father,” Chlodio, his story mocks the dynastic stability of which the Merovingians were so proud. It seems this so-called source of legitimacy is cheekily subversive towards the dynasty it is meant to bolster.
Why then would Fredegar include this tale at all? The historian Ian Wood suggests that the story is a joke. Claims of supernatural descent were common among medieval dynasties, but most genuine origin myths associated a family with powerful pagan gods, such as Odin. In comparison, Fredegar’s story of a random sea creature who may or may not have started a powerful dynasty is comically lame. It mocks the dynasty’s hereditary legitimacy instead of bolstering it. The episode may therefore be a satire either of the trope of divine descent or of the Merovingians themselves.
Alternatively, as Wood and Guy Halsall both suggest, the whole story could be a drawn-out pun. To a Latin speaker like Fredegar, the name “Merovech” sounds a lot like “sea cow.” The element “mero” would sound like mare, the Latin for “sea,” and “vech” like vacca — “cow.” Medieval chroniclers loved to explain etymologies, even when they got them horribly wrong. So maybe Fredegar just found the king’s name funny and wanted to explain it with an equally silly vignette.
The story may also be political commentary on events current to the seventh century. The Chronicle of Fredegar was written during a series of dynastic disputes, one of which centered on whether an adopted Merovingian could be king. By calling Merovech’s parentage into question through the story of the sea monster, Fredegar may have indicated his own position on this issue.
So it seems that Fredegar made the sea monster story up for his own purposes. The tale has implications which the Merovingians would not have wanted to stir up and seems to mock the dynasty. There is also no other written evidence that the Merovingians ever claimed descent from a Quinotaur. So why does a seemingly credible chronicle tell us that they did?
Medieval chroniclers lied. Constantly.
It turns out that telling the truth was only a secondary concern of most early medieval writers. And as a result, everything we know about the Merovingians could be exaggerated, misrepresented, or straight up fake. That famous inter-familial brutality I mentioned? Some of it is true. But our source, Gregory, Bishop of Tours, made a lot of it up. Gregory’s primary concern was to show how depraved humanity was so that everyone would become a bishop. So, he ratchets the violence up to eleven and turns every run-of-the-mill death into a premeditated murder to convince people to abandon the material world. He accuses one woman, Queen Fredegund, of killing her husband, two of her husband’s ex-wives, her stepsons, her own sons, and everybody else who displeases her. He also claims she tried to strangle her daughter in a money chest. Some of those accusations could be true, but it is very unlikely that they all are.
This may seem terribly dishonest. But at the time, it was the only way chroniclers and historians could justify recording events at all. Writing history in sixth century Francia was actually really edgy. The most influential thinkers of late-Roman Gaul forbade bishops from writing history and tried to get rid of secular history altogether. It worked for a long time. For a century and a half, nobody in Europe wrote any history at all. But Gregory broke the silence. To justify his writing, he manipulated historical events to teach Christian lessons. But we can still learn a lot about an otherwise silent era by reading between the lines of what he records. Gregory is the only reason we know anything at all about sixth century Francia. And because Fredegar’s Chronicle is a summary and continuation of his work, he is the only reason we know the story of the Quinotaur.
Gregory and Fredegar made a lot of stuff up. But the Quinotaur story might not be one of those things after all. There is a small piece of physical evidence that the Merovingians may have used some form of the legend hidden in the lost grave goods of Merovech’s son.
The tomb of Childeric I
Childeric I, unlike Merovech, definitely existed. He ruled from 440 to 481 AD, but is primarily remembered for his tomb, which was discovered in the seventeenth century. Childeric was buried lavishly with piles of gold and garnet jewelry. Excavators found a seal ring with his name and image on it, heaps of coins, and three hundred tiny golden bees. But, most importantly for us, the grave also contained a golden bull’s head.
As this engraving shows, Childeric’s bull has two horns, and not five. But there is an intricate spiral design on its forehead and a fishtail motif on its nose, which may indicate that it is not an ordinary bull. Could this be the original Quinotaur?
The existence of this object reveals that the Merovingians themselves used a bull as a royal symbol. Fredegar could therefore have drawn on a genuine foundation myth when he wrote his account of the lady and the sea monster. He may have added the extra horns, perhaps to satirize the original myth. Or, if “Quinotaur” is a scribal error for “Minotaur,” Fredegar may have intended to describe a creature with only two horns.
Unfortunately, we will never be able to study Childeric’s bull in person to discover what other secrets it may hold. The engraving above is all we have left of it. The treasure survived over a thousand years buried in the ground, but it lasted only two centuries under human care. In 1831, there was a midnight break-in at the National Library of France. The items from Childeric’s tomb were stolen. There was a manhunt for the thieves and a desperate bid to recover the objects, but it was too late. Two coins and two bees were recovered from the Seine where they had been hidden. The rest had been melted down and sold. Our only direct link with the early Merovingians was gone.
Why does this matter today?
The Merovingians, like Chilperic’s bull, exist today only in impressions. We see them only through the eyes of writers, like Gregory of Tours and Fredegar, who did not intend to record the objective truth. And as a result, we must treat everything Gregory and Fredegar claim about the Merovingians as critically as we have examined Fredegar’s account of the Quinotaur. Because the sea monster story is so outlandish, it is easy to accept the need to question it and to explore why it is present and what it might imply. But even the most realistic scenes in our primary sources could be as distorted or fabricated as Fredegar’s clearly mythical origin story.
Public perception of the Merovingians and their era is even more distorted than our accounts. This is largely because later readers of Gregory and Fredegar abused their works to project contemporary agendas onto the past. Carolingian state-builders and nineteenth-century nationalists used accounts of the Merovingians for their own political purposes. Eighth-century editors re-titled Gregory of Tours’ work from Ten Books of Histories to History of the Franks and began to see and use it as the “national” history they wanted it to be. They even removed the portions of the work which did not fit their image of it. This nationalistic reputation has endured until quite recently.
Luckily, modern historians have begun to strip this false nationalism from our conception of the Merovingians. But much of it remains in erroneous popular understandings of the Middle Ages as having been “purer” or “whiter” than the present. Our primary sources unreservedly refute that view of their era. Gregory’s works are virtually blind to ethnic difference, but he himself was a Gallo-Roman living in a kingdom of Franks who recognized that the preservation of both Roman and Germanic history was valuable. The only “pure” thing in medieval Francia was the Merovingian bloodline, and Fredegar was very clear about how little respect he had for that sort of purity.
The story of the lady, the sea monster, and their dynasty therefore reveals how crucial it is to think critically when interacting with accounts of events, whether they are first-hand reports or later analyses. And this is a skill we need more than ever here in the present, where lies seem so deceptively true and history remains a political tool.
Suggestions for further reading
For a readable introduction to the early Middle Ages, see Christopher Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages (Penguin 2010).
For the Merovingians, see Gregory of Tours’ Ten Books of Histories, usually (erroneously) titled History of the Franks. Lewis Thorpe’s 1974 English translation is the most accessible, but does not always fit with modern scholarship. Unfortunately, there is no complete English translation of the Chronicle of Fredegar, but the Latin original is available for free here. For the literary structuring, truthfulness, and intentions of Gregory’s work, see Martin Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Walter Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).
For commentary on the Quinotaur story, see Ian Wood,“Deconstructing the Merovingian Family,” in The Construction of Communities in the Early Middle Ages: Texts, Resources, and Artefacts, edited by Richard Corradini et al. (Leiden, 2003) pp. 149–72; Ian Wood, “Fredegar’s Fables,” in Historiographie im frühen Mittelalter, ed. A. Scharer and G. Scheibelreiter, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforderung 32 (Vienna 1994) pp. 359–366; and Alexander Callander Murray, “Post vocantur Merohingii: Fredegar, Merovech, and ‘Sacral Kingship.” In After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History (Toronto, 1998) pp. 121–152.
