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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
2024/12/12
The Rest Is History
多
多米尼克
播
播音员
主持著名true crime播客《Crime Junkie》的播音员和创始人。
汤
汤姆
播音员:本集讲述了弗雷德冈德和布伦希尔德两位法兰克王后之间充满血腥、暴力、复仇和巫术的世仇故事。弗雷德冈德出身卑微,却凭借魅力和手段成为王后,并与布伦希尔德展开长达数十年的权力斗争。
汤姆:格里高利·都尔的《法兰克史》详细记载了这段历史,但其对弗雷德冈德的描述带有明显的偏见,将其描绘成一个嗜血的暴君。然而,弗雷德冈德也可能是一个被误解的、强悍的女性。她的主要目标是确保她的儿子继承王位,并彻底击败布伦希尔德。
多米尼克:弗雷德冈德的出身和所处的时代都充满了挑战。她出生在一个动荡的时代,自然灾害、瘟疫和战争频繁发生。她从奴隶一步步走向权力巅峰,展现了非凡的智慧、胆识和手段。
汤姆:布伦希尔德出身高贵,是西哥特公主,她同样是一位杰出的女性,精明强干,在政治上有着非凡的才能。她与弗雷德冈德的世仇源于弗雷德冈德杀害了她的姐姐加尔辛莎。
多米尼克:弗雷德冈德和布伦希尔德的斗争不仅是她们个人之间的冲突,也是她们作为女性在那个时代所面临的挑战。她们的权力和地位都建立在她们与国王的关系之上,她们的命运与她们的丈夫和儿子的命运紧密相连。
汤姆:西格贝尔特的死是弗雷德冈德和布伦希尔德斗争的转折点。西格贝尔特的死使弗雷德冈德和希尔佩里克扭转了局势,但弗雷德冈德也因此被视为阴险狡诈之人。布伦希尔德则失去了丈夫和在奥斯特拉西亚的地位,但她设法保护了她的儿子希尔德贝尔特。
多米尼克:布伦希尔德和梅罗维奇的结合是违反伦理的,但鲁昂主教同意主持婚礼。梅罗维奇的叛乱失败,他最终自杀。布伦希尔德逃离修道院,回到奥斯特拉西亚。
汤姆:弗雷德冈德的儿子们死于痢疾,她怀疑是有人下毒,并因此杀害了希尔佩里克的儿子克洛维斯。希尔佩里克被刺杀后,弗雷德冈德通过向甘特拉姆透露自己还有一个儿子,从而保住了自己的地位。
多米尼克:甘特拉姆死后,弗雷德冈德和布伦希尔德之间的世仇再次爆发。弗雷德冈德利用计谋成功地伏击了布伦希尔德的军队。希尔德贝尔特的死使布伦希尔德再次成为摄政王。
汤姆:弗雷德冈德和布伦希尔德同时作为摄政王统治着广阔的领土,她们从未谋面,却成为了彼此的宿敌。弗雷德冈德死后,她的儿子克洛塔尔继承了与布伦希尔德的世仇,并最终残忍地杀害了布伦希尔德。
supporting_evidences
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....He was bound and flogged until he confessed his secret plan....she punished him by having his hands and feet cut off.
So Gregory of Tours in his History of the Franks, which is a great chronicle, often an eyewitness account, in fact, of what happened....So the rivalry between Fredegund and Brunhild, which is the subject of today's episode, this extraordinary feud between these two formidable queens of the Franks.
So let's start with Fredegund. Fredegund is the granddaughter-in-law of Clovis....he is absolutely team Brunhild....He even accuses her of having murdered a bishop in his own cathedral....A baggage. But she might also seem what I believe Americans call a badass.
One is she wants to see one of her sons rule as king and to see the end of her sister-in-law, Brunhild....it absolutely bears comparison with that between Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots....In myth, these two inveterate rivals are joined together.
So let's just remind ourselves where we are for people who perhaps missed the last episode....is that she seems to have begun her life as a slave.
She writes, where exactly had she come from, this Fredegund, this strawberry blonde slave queen?....So what Michael McCormick, the great historian of the economy of late antiquity and early medieval Europe, describes as one of the worst periods of life....As I write, I wipe away the tears.
And 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....So for instance, in 531, Clovis' son, a guy called Clothar, conquers the region that will come to be known as Thuringia.
And when he dies, he divides the kingdom up four ways between them....But of course...If you think about it, the Roman Empire was endlessly being divided up.
And this is the youngest of Clothar's sons, a guy who is called Chilperic....And he does this by grabbing both Paris, so the capital, and the royal treasury....But he's foiled by his brothers
And this had actually been the old Frankish heartland....They'll become great adversaries, don't they?
So we said she's a slave in his household....to intuit which cook or lackey was likely to let slip a choice bit of information.
which is that she has been promoted from the kitchen to serve the queen as her maid....And then all the time, she's kind of, you know...Lurking in the background....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....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.
And he fixes on...a princess from the one kingdom that can rival that of the Merovingians....And the result is a kind of completely mad, unworkable patchwork of kind of territories.
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....And in 568, the eldest daughter of the king of the Visigoths, a princess called Galswintha, duly sets off.
And she arrives on the banks of the Seine....King Chilperic loved her very dearly, for she had brought a huge dowry with her.
So what does Fredegund make of this?...So Chilperic really wants this princess....So she is still flaunting her curves.
And so a few months after the wedding, Galswintha finds Chilperic in bed with Fredegund....And they get married....it was Chilperic who had ordered Galswintha to be garrotted by one of his servants.
Well, the place where it particularly reverberates is in the court of Austrasia, where Chilperic's brother Sigbert is king....And the name of this princess, this Visigothic princess married to Sigbert is Brunhild.
She's incredibly fashionable....And this seems to everyone in Australia an absolute marker of divine favor.
And she works on Sigbert and says, look, my sister has been murdered by your brother....So Guntram summons to Chilperic to come and stand trial and Chilperic refuses.
And so when he launches his campaign in 575, it's an absolute triumph....And so the whole family, they move to Paris....But that, Dominic, is to reckon without Fredegund's determination and cunning.
So Sigbert's been paraded around in his shield....And it's clear the knives were poisoned....And the assumption is that there is only one person who fits that bill and that person, Dominic, is Fredegund.
Well, I think it provides the academic perspective on all these shenanigans.
And it also sums up why Fredegund and Brunhild, one a slave girl, one a princess, are actually, you know, you can reckon them worthy adversaries....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.
So let's go with Fredegund first because we ended with her apparently assassinating Sigbert....And not only, I think, does he recognise that he's found in Fredegund a partner for his own ambitions, similarly kind of determined and ruthless, but also Fredegund, like Brunhilde's done, has provided support
He goes further and accuses Fredegund of having practiced witchcraft....So does Fredegund care? Fredegund does not seem to have cared
And she certainly does become feared....Her priority, of course, is to ensure the survival of her son, Childebert, because everything for her future depends on him living.
And it's a very particular convent in Rouen, kind of great masses of stone, very highly protected....And he is one of two surviving sons of Alderweire, and he has been ordered by his father, Chilperic, to march on the Austrasian holdings in the Loire....And it's pretty clear that Brunhild has written to him and said, look,
So let's just get our heads around this, Tom....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.
But fortunately, the Bishop of Rouen, who is a man of very...holy reputation....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 northeast of France and he knows that now you know he's rebelled twice he can expect no mercy from his father and so he gets his servant to kill him
But on the plus side, she's no longer in the convent....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 Fredegund's two sons....How he managed to do this while alone in a cell with his hands bound behind his back was never explained.
But obviously it's a problem....She does something that will reverberate down the centuries, and Geoffrey of Tor describes it.
And Dominic, we talked about how Fredegund, as well as Brunhild, feeds into the figure of Brunhilde in Wagner's great opera....he gets down from his horse and he is greeted by a servant who rushes up to him and stabs him to death.
So how old is this boy?...The loss of Chilperic leaves her fortunes hanging by a thread.
So she's reading Guntram like a book....And so Fredegund lives to fight another day.
And in that time, Fredegund essentially rules Neustria as her son's regent....And this confirms that Childebert, who is Brunhild's son, will inherit Burgundy on Guntram's death.
And she incites a revolt against Brunhild....She stands up, walks out of the room and everyone in her hall knows that she has literally executed justice.
And so Fredegund...has been studying Roman military manuals....And this is, of course, very, very Burnham Wood.
And this is the last great confrontation between the two rivals....very young, and Brunhild now rules on their behalf as regents.
She and Fredegund reigned as regents at exactly the same time....So they're implacable enemies, but they never met.
And meanwhile in Austrasia, Brunhild's two grandsons, Theuderbert and Theuderich, have fallen out with each other....The two eldest boys are beheaded.
And so he has Brunhilde arraigned on charges of murdering no less than 10 kings....She's then paraded on a camel facing backwards and led through the entire army.
and they are Pepin and the Bishop of Metz, Arnulf, and their joint descendants, they will have a very, very bright future indeed....of the Merovingians.
Deep Dive
Why did Fredegund rise to power?
Fredegund, initially a slave, rose to power by leveraging her intelligence, beauty, and cunning. She manipulated her way into King Chilperic's favor, supplanted his first wife, and eventually became his queen after orchestrating the murder of his second wife, Galswintha.
What was the feud between Fredegund and Brunhild about?
The feud between Fredegund and Brunhild was fueled by revenge and power. Fredegund had orchestrated the murder of Brunhild's sister, Galswintha, leading Brunhild to seek vengeance. The rivalry escalated into a decades-long conflict that reshaped the Frankish kingdoms.
How did Fredegund secure her position after the death of Chilperic?
After Chilperic's assassination, Fredegund revealed the existence of her infant son, Clothar, to King Guntram of Burgundy. By appealing to Guntram's authority, she secured her son's position and ensured her own safety from Brunhild's vengeance for eight years.
What was the significance of the treaty signed between Brunhild and Guntram?
The treaty signed at Omsk andalot in 587 confirmed that Brunhild's son, Childebert, would inherit Burgundy upon Guntram's death. This treaty provided Brunhild with a strategic advantage and ensured her son's future rule, while also keeping Fredegund's ambitions in check.
How did Fredegund's military strategy against Brunhild's forces succeed?
Fredegund's forces, vastly outnumbered, used a surprise attack strategy. They fastened bells to their horses' bridles to mimic the enemy's grazing horses and carried tree branches to disguise their numbers. This tactic caught the Austrasian forces off guard, leading to a significant victory for Fredegund.
What was the fate of Brunhild after her capture by Clothar?
Brunhild was subjected to public humiliation and torture. She was stripped of her finery, beaten, paraded on a camel, and eventually torn apart by wild horses. Her remains were ceremonially burned, marking the end of her life and her feud with Fredegund.
Why were Fredegund and Brunhild considered remarkable rulers?
Fredegund and Brunhild were remarkable for their political acumen, resilience, and influence over their respective kingdoms. Both women served as regents for their sons and controlled vast territories, including modern-day France, Belgium, and parts of Germany, making them among the most powerful rulers of their time.
What role did natural disasters play in the lives of Fredegund and Brunhild?
The mid-6th century was marked by natural disasters, including volcanic eruptions, the Justinianic Plague, and dysentery epidemics. These disasters devastated populations and weakened the stability of the Frankish kingdoms, creating a volatile environment that both Fredegund and Brunhild navigated through their political maneuvers.
This chapter details Fredegund's remarkable journey from a slave in Chilperic's household to becoming queen of Neustria. It highlights her ambition, cunning, and ruthlessness, culminating in the murder of Galswintha and her subsequent marriage to Chilperic.
- Fredegund's humble beginnings as a slave
- Her rise to power through manipulation and ambition
- The murder of Galswintha
- Fredegund's marriage to Chilperic
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