This week, we’re going to take a look at the end of Charles Martel, the naming of his two legitimate sons as heirs, and consider just how different the world is now from the world we started with in 451. I mean, think of how much has changed: the Franks adopted Nicene Christianity and converted most of their people and the surrounding groups to that faith, breaking them from either the Roman- or Germanic-style paganism that most had practiced when we began this show. Those who were not yet converted were faced with missionaries such as Boniface, who operated in the name of the Pope and under the protection of the Franks. On top of that, the Franks had become such a force in the world that they now had the Pope sending envoys asking for help and protection of himself and Rome in addition to the Church’s missionaries in Germania.

Staying along these lines, we’ve seen the people pressuring Rome transition from the Ostrogoths to the Lombards; while they’re a different group, they present the same general problems for the Catholic institutions of Italy. And we’ve also seen a dramatic weakening of the power structures of the Eastern Roman Empire; compare where we’re at now, with the Pope asking Charles Martel for assistance in the face of the threats from both the Lombards and Constantinople, to where we were in 507 when Clovis I won the Battle of Vouillé and was invited to be a consul of Rome by the East. In that earlier case, the recognition from Constantinople was a sign of respect; now, over 230 years later, the Franks are on a more even footing with the Emperor. Finally, moving past all of the groups we’ve traditionally seen the Merovingians and Franks have to deal with, we have seen a new group of people sally forth with a religion that is, at first glance, far different than anything Christianity has to offer.

The Umayyad Caliphate successfully ran through every part of what had once been a part of Rome in North Africa and destroyed or appropriated entire groups - and for the Franks, this was encapsulated most notably in the Visigoths. The Ummayads had to have looked unlike anything the Franks had ever known, and when they started coming into Francia around 720, they would have changed the way the Franks viewed their southern border. One can only imagine if this interaction made Charles Martel and his subordinates wonder about any other groups out there that they hadn’t yet met. It’s possible that the knowledge of that first Danish raid in 516 into Francia was remembered within the realm, as Gregory of Tours had written about it in his _History of the Franks_, but how much a story from over 200 years earlier would have concerned the current Franks about the possibility of an invasion by the Northmen is questionable.

So this is the world of 741 that Carloman and Pépin are about to inherit. Christianity is growing exponentially and Frankish power is aligning with that growth; the Byzantines are weakening, but new groups are still available in the world to surprise and destabilize the known order. Charles Martel fought one of these back in 732 in the form of the Caliphate, but that doesn’t mean other groups wouldn’t come along looking for a soft underbelly to strike. And with all of this going on, the matter of leadership - king-wise - is still an issue. Since 737, we’ve not had a Merovingian king, and while no one seems any worse for the wear for this being the case in the past four years, that was all under the firm hand of Charles. It was all but an inevitability that someone would come along and challenge the brothers, on this issue if on no other.

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Listenable: History of the Merovingians, 451-613