Merovech

Also Known As: Latin Meroveus and Merovechus; French Mérovée; reconstructed Frankish Merowech; the dynasty called Merohingii, the Merovingians, takes its name from him
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: Frankish Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He is said to have been fathered by a five-horned sea beast of Neptune, and his uncut hair is the mark that his descendants inherited along with the crown.
Role in Mythos: He is the eponymous ancestor of the Merovingian kings, the point at which the Frankish royal line stops being history and becomes a story about the sea.
Relation to Humans: For three hundred years descent from him was the only title deed to the Frankish kingship, and no man held that crown without it. What he did for living people in his own lifetime is not recorded anywhere.

Midday on the coast in high summer, the shingle too hot to stand on barefoot, and a Frankish queen walking out into the shallows to cool off while her husband sat above the tideline. Something found her in the water. The chronicler who reports it, writing roughly two hundred years after the fact, refuses to say what it was: a beast of Neptune, he calls it, resembling a Quinotaur. She conceived that day, and the chronicle will not tell you by whom. The boy was named Merovech, and every king of the Franks for the next three centuries took his dynastic name from him.

Almost nothing else about him survives, which is a peculiar thing to be able to say about the man a royal house was named for. Gregory of Tours, bishop and historian, writing around 590 and still the foundation of nearly everything known about the early Franks, gives him a single clause: some assert that a king called Merovech came of Chlodio’s line, and Childeric was his son. Some assert. Gregory had ten books to fill and a Frankish court to keep sweet, and when he reached the ancestor of his own kings he declined to vouch for him.

What Gregory does describe is the world such a man would have belonged to. The Franks came over the Rhine, took the country in pieces, and set over each district long-haired kings chosen from their foremost families. The hair was not ornament. Among the Franks uncut hair marked the royal kin and very little else did, which made a pair of shears a quieter instrument than a blade and just as final. Priscus, a Greek envoy who was actually alive in the 440s, recorded seeing a Frankish boy at Rome, no down on his cheeks yet, fair hair spilling past his shoulders, whom the general Aetius had taken as an adopted son. Historians have spent a century failing to agree whether that boy is Merovech, his father, or his son.

The dates, such as they are, come from other people’s defeats. Chlodio pushed south out of the Silva Carbonaria in what is now central Belgium as far as the Somme, and Aetius beat him at Vicus Helena in Artois in 448. If Merovech was his son, he belongs to the middle of the fifth century and was dead by roughly 457. His own son Childeric is the first Merovingian anyone can hold onto with any confidence, and after Childeric the line runs clean through Clovis and on for three hundred years. Before him there is one hedged clause and a sea monster.

The sea monster is worth taking seriously as a piece of writing. It appears in the Chronicle of Fredegar, compiled around 660, in a passage of about five lines. Chlodio was staying by the sea one summer with his wife; at midday she went down to bathe; and a beast of Neptune resembling a Quinotaur came upon her. Having conceived at once, the Latin says, either by the beast or by her husband, she bore a son and called him Merovech, and from him the kings of the Franks are afterwards called Merovingians. Quinotaurus means a bull with five horns. The chronicler invokes Neptune and gestures at the Minotaur in the same breath, produces the most arresting image in early Frankish literature, and then leaves the paternity open like a man who would rather not be quoted.

The likeliest explanation for the whole thing is a pun. Alexander Callander Murray argued in 1998 that the story is an etymology with a narrative grown over it: to a Latin-literate clerk in the seventh century the name Merovech opens with something that looks like the sea, and a sea-bull takes care of the rest. Work the name from the Germanic side and the water drains straight out of it. D.H. Green reads the first element as a form meaning famous rather than sea, and the second as the ordinary word for fight, giving roughly famed in battle: a plain warrior’s name of the kind carried by thousands of men who never founded anything.

For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the beast was read the other way round. Georg Waitz took Merovech for a son of the sea, a god or demigod the Franks had honoured before their conversion, and the birth story for a surviving splinter of genuine Germanic paganism that had slipped past a Christian copyist. J.M. Wallace-Hadrill’s The Long-Haired Kings did much to make sacral Merovingian kingship the standard picture in English, and Wallace-Hadrill himself later moved away from it. The plain version is this: not one Frank of the fifth century is on record telling this story, and the earliest person who tells it is a Christian chronicler two centuries later, working at a court with every reason to want its kings descended from something.

Some go further and remove the man altogether. Étienne Renard, rereading two royal genealogies of the ninth and tenth centuries, calls Merovech an evanescent figure attached to no battle and no event, and suggests the name was reverse-engineered out of the dynastic label Merohingii rather than the other way about. Jean-Pierre Poly makes him a byname of Chlodio’s son Chlodebaud. Christian Settipani, working the same lists, keeps him and rearranges his neighbours instead. He may simply be a name a dynasty needed.

Nobody describes his face. No source gives his height, his voice, the colour of his eyes, or one word he is supposed to have said. The record hands over a category rather than a person: the weight of uncut hair on the shoulders, a war-band, a treaty with an empire in its last decades. Every portrait of him is a guess made long afterwards, the best known being a bronze medal struck by the Geneva engraver Jean Dassier in 1720, which shows a clean helmeted profile and tells you a great deal about eighteenth-century taste and nothing whatever about the fifth century.

The beast had one more career in it. In 1982 Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, writing The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, took Fredegar’s Neptunian bull, quietly converted it into a fish, matched the fish to the early Christian ichthys, and concluded that the Merovingians carried the bloodline of Jesus. Dan Brown built The Da Vinci Code on that foundation in 2003 and carried it to a global readership. Nothing in Fredegar, in Gregory, or in any other medieval source supports it. The five-horned bull went into the water in the seventh century and came out a fish in the twentieth.

What Merovech had, and it was entirely real, was the power of a name. Descent from him was the Frankish crown’s proof of title, and for three centuries no man could take the kingship without it, however young he was and however little he did with it. That is also its limit. The gift worked only while the descent worked, and the same hair that proved the claim could be used to cancel it: in 751 the last of the line, Childeric III, was deposed, shorn and put into a monastery, and Pippin took the crown without needing a sea-bull at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Merovech?

Merovech was the semi-legendary Frankish king from whom the Merovingian dynasty took its name. He is placed in the middle of the fifth century as a son or descendant of the warlord Chlodio and as the father of Childeric I, which makes him the grandfather of Clovis I. Gregory of Tours, the earliest source to name him, mentions him only once and hedges even that.

Was Merovech a real person?

Historians are divided. Alexander Callander Murray holds that Merovech was a real Frankish king even though the story of his birth is a later invention, while Étienne Renard treats him as an evanescent figure attached to no battle or event and possibly conjured backwards out of the dynastic name Merovingian. No source written during his supposed lifetime names him with certainty.

What is the story of Merovech and the Quinotaur?

The Chronicle of Fredegar, compiled around 660, says that Chlodio’s wife went into the sea to bathe at midday and was set upon by a beast of Neptune resembling a Quinotaur, a bull with five horns. She conceived immediately, and the chronicle states openly that it is unclear whether the father was the beast or her husband. The son she bore was Merovech, and the Frankish kings were called Merovingians after him.

What does the name Merovech mean?

The most likely reading takes the first element from a Germanic word meaning famous and the second from the ordinary word for fight, giving a sense of famed in battle. Medieval chroniclers appear to have heard the first element as the sea instead, and that misreading is probably how a sea beast got into the story at all.

Were the Merovingians descended from Jesus?

No. That claim comes from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, published in 1982 by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, who reinterpreted Fredegar’s sea beast as a fish and connected it to the early Christian fish symbol. Dan Brown popularised the idea in The Da Vinci Code in 2003. No medieval source supports it.