Francus

Also Known As: Latin; earlier and in the chronicles Francio, in Ronsard’s French Francion, and identified variously with Astyanax or with Laodamas, sons of Hector
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: Frankish Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He is a name that makes a people, an exiled Trojan war-leader whose only recorded power is that everything after him is called after him.
Role in Mythos: He supplies the Franks with a beginning that starts at Troy rather than on the Rhine, which is the whole of what he was made to do.
Relation to Humans: Every Frank, and later every subject of the French crown, was invited to understand himself as this man’s descendant, which made a Rhineland people the cousins of Rome and the equals of anyone in Europe. No one prayed to him, no shrine was raised to him, and no feast marked his day; he was for reading about, and for being descended from.

The column had been walking for years. Wives, children, carts, the dust of Asia still in the wool of their cloaks, and no king over any of them since Troy burned. Somewhere on that road they stopped and chose one from among themselves, a fighter named Francio, and from that moment they had a name as well as a leader. It is the oldest thing anyone ever says about him, and very nearly the only thing.

He comes into existence around the year 660, in Burgundy, in a chronicle now attributed to a writer called Fredegar. The chronicler was working through Jerome’s universal history, and when he reached the fall of Troy he added something Jerome had not written. The origin of the Franks, he says, is due to these events. They had Priam as their first king, and afterwards Frigas. Then they split. One part went to Macedonia and bred the men who would follow Philip and Alexander. The other part, cast out of Phrygia by the fraud of Ulysses but never actually taken prisoner, wandered through many regions with their wives and children and chose Francio. He fought a great many peoples for a long time, laid waste part of Asia, then crossed into Europe and settled between the Rhine or the Danube and the sea. Nothing in that says what he looked like. Fredegar did not know, and the writers who spent the next nine hundred years elaborating him never filled the gap, which leaves Francus the rare founding hero with a full genealogy and no face.

Fredegar tells it twice, and the second telling is stranger and better. In the third book of the chronicle, spliced into the text of Gregory of Tours, the wanderers reach the Danube and divide again. One half stays and elects a king called Torcoth, and those become the Turks. The other half follows Francio into Europe, settles along the Rhine with their wives and children, and begins to build a city named after Troy. The work was started. It was left unfinished. That single line, dropped without comment, is the most affecting sentence anyone has ever written about him: a people who had crossed a continent, standing at a river with the footings of a second Troy already laid out in the mud, and then not finishing it.

There is no version of this that survives contact with evidence. Gregory of Tours, writing a century before Fredegar and much closer to the Franks he was describing, has no Trojans at all and thinks the Franks came from the lower Rhine, which is where they came from. Fredegar’s Turkish cousins are the giveaway. The only people calling themselves Turks in the seventh century were the Göktürks of Central Asia, whose khaganate collapsed around 632, and the likeliest route for their fame into Burgundy is the pair of ambassadors, Servatus and Paternus, whom Fredegar himself reports coming home from Constantinople in 629 with the news of an everlasting peace. A scrap of Byzantine flattery about three great Trojan peoples, Romans and Franks and Turks, seems to have been carried west, misremembered, and written down as history.

He is also missing from the one place he ought to be. The anonymous Liber Historiae Francorum, finished in 727, tells the Trojan story again and does not use him. There, Priam and Antenor put twelve thousand survivors into ships, sail to the banks of the Tanais, and found a city called Sicambria; the line runs down to Priam’s grandson Faramund, who is raised up as the first long-haired king. No Francio anywhere in it. Two Frankish chronicles, two Trojan origins, two different founders, inside seventy years of each other. Nobody at the time seems to have minded.

What happened next is that he got better rather than truer. The Latin form Francus displaced the older Francio, and the medieval chronicles took him seriously as genealogy, and by the sixteenth century the French crown had a founder who needed only a proper poem. Jean Lemaire de Belges, in his Illustrations de Gaule et Singularitez de Troie of 1510, decided that Francus was really Laodamas, Hector’s second son and Astyanax’s brother, a figure salvaged from the late accounts of the Trojan war attributed to Dares and Dictys. Others made him Astyanax himself. François de Belleforest, in the Cosmographie universelle he adapted from Sebastian Münster and published in 1575, simply strung the three names together as though they were interchangeable: Laodamas, or Astyanax, or Francus.

The trouble with Astyanax is that Astyanax dies. He is thrown from the walls of Troy, and everyone who could read knew it. Pierre de Ronsard, working on his Franciade from 1550 for Henri II and then for Charles IX, solved the problem the way an epic poet solves problems: Jupiter substitutes a decoy made of clouds for the real prince, and it is the cloud that falls from the tower. The Latin poem printed at the front of the 1572 edition says so outright, that Jupiter saved him with a decoy in order to hide him, and that the point of the hiding was to found a dynasty under a new name. Four books appeared in 1572. Ronsard never wrote the rest, and in 1578 he closed the project formally, giving the death of Charles IX as his reason.

His readers were not fooled and did not pretend to be. Belleforest complained that his great Gaulish poet had dragged the origin of the French into a fable too little to be believed. Jean Le Bon objected on the same ground. Another critic, Jean de Schélandre, called the cloud a phantom and refused to accept that the majesty of a hundred kings could rest on it. They admired the poem. They just would not have the man.

His powers, such as they are, are the powers of a name. He turns a scattered Rhineland confederation into a chosen people with an exodus behind them and a destiny in front, and he does it without a single miracle, weapon or beast. He out-ranks Rome by being Priam’s man rather than Aeneas’s. He licenses a monarchy. Peoples who had no migration of their own to remember copied him almost immediately: the Britons got Brutus, and Snorri Sturluson eventually walked the Æsir out of what he cheerfully called the Turkish city of Troy.

His weakness is that he cannot survive being checked. Étienne Pasquier began his Recherches de la France with the Gauls and Caesar’s descriptions of them, and simply left Francus out, which at the time was close to an act of vandalism. In 1714 a twenty-six-year-old scholar named Nicolas Fréret read a paper to the Academy of Inscriptions arguing that the Franks were a league of South German tribes and not a nation of free men out of Troy. The Abbé Vertot denounced him to the government as a libeller of the monarchy, a lettre de cachet was issued, and Fréret spent three months in the Bastille reading Xenophon. He was released in March 1715. Francus was not.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Francus?

Francus is the legendary Trojan exile whom medieval and Renaissance writers made the founder and name-giver of the Franks. He first appears, under the form Francio, in the Chronicle of Fredegar around 660, where a band of Trojan refugees wandering out of Asia elect him king and take their name from him. He is not a historical person, and no evidence outside the chronicles supports his existence.

Was Francus the same person as Astyanax?

Renaissance writers generally said yes, but they never fully agreed. Jean Lemaire de Belges argued in 1510 that Francus was really Laodamas, Hector’s second son and Astyanax’s brother, while others identified him with Astyanax directly, and François de Belleforest used all three names as equivalents in 1575. Pierre de Ronsard took the Astyanax identification and had to invent a rescue for it, because in the classical tradition Astyanax is killed at the fall of Troy.

How did Ronsard explain Astyanax surviving the fall of Troy?

In the Franciade, Jupiter substitutes a decoy made of clouds for the real prince, so that the figure seen falling from the tower is not the child himself. The Latin verses printed at the front of the 1572 edition state this plainly and connect the deception to the founding of a dynasty under a new name. Contemporary readers including François de Belleforest, Jean Le Bon and Jean de Schélandre objected to the device and refused to accept it.

Is Francus in the Liber Historiae Francorum?

No. The Liber Historiae Francorum, completed in 727, tells a Trojan origin story that does not use him at all: Priam and Antenor lead twelve thousand survivors to the river Tanais and found the city of Sicambria, and the royal line descends to Priam’s grandson Faramund. The two surviving early Frankish versions of the Trojan legend therefore name different founders.

When did people stop believing in Francus?

The legend lost its authority gradually between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Étienne Pasquier’s Recherches de la France began the history of France with the Gauls and omitted Francus entirely, and in 1714 Nicolas Fréret argued to the Academy of Inscriptions that the Franks were a league of South German tribes. Fréret was denounced by the Abbé Vertot, imprisoned in the Bastille for three months, and released in March 1715.