The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire

By Bart van Loo

A masterful history of the great dynasty of the Netherlands' Middle Ages.
'A sumptuous feast of a book' The Times, Books of the Year

'Thrillingly colourful and entertaining' Sunday Times

'A thrilling narrative of the brutal dazzlingly rich wildly ambitious duchy' Simon Sebag Montefiore

5 stars! Daily Telegraph

'A masterpiece' De Morgen

'A history book that reads like a thriller' Le Soir

At the end of the fifteenth century, Burgundy was extinguished as an independent state. It had been a fabulously wealthy, turbulent region situated between France and Germany, with close links to the English kingdom. Torn apart by the dynastic struggles of early modern Europe, this extraordinary realm vanished from the map. But it became the cradle of what we now know as the Low Countries, modern Belgium and the Netherlands. This is the story of a thousand years, a compulsively readable narrative history of ambitious aristocrats, family dysfunction, treachery, savage battles, luxury and madness. It is about the decline of knightly ideals and the awakening of individualism and of cities, the struggle for dominance in the heart of northern Europe, bloody military campaigns and fatally bad marriages. It is also a remarkable cultural history, of great art and architecture and music emerging despite the violence and the chaos of the tension between rival dynasties.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Oct 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789543452

Bart van Loo

Bart Van Loo has developed a rare twin talent over the years. While drawing big crowds in the theatre, he is also the author of the universally praised France Trilogy and the bestseller Chanson: A sung history of France. The Burgundians is the first of his books to be translated into English.

Book preview

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The

Burgundians

The

Burgundians

A Vanished Empire

A HISTORY OF 1111 YEARS AND ONE DAY

BART VAN LOO

TRANSLATED BY NANCY FOREST-FLIER

AN APOLLO BOOK

www.headofzeus.com

First published in the Netherlands as De Bourgondiërs by De Bezige Bij in 2019

First published in English in the UK in 2021 by Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright © Bart Van Loo, 2019

English translation copyright Nancy Forest-Flier, 2021

The moral right of Bart Van Loo to be identified as the author and of Nancy Forest-Flier to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN

(HB): 9781789543438

ISBN

(E): 9781789543452

Head of Zeus Ltd

First Floor East

5–8 Hardwick Street

London

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HEADOFZEUS

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This book was published with the support of Flanders Literature (flandersliterature.be).

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Dedicated to my Burgundian spouse, who made her home in Flanders.

The author received a grant from Flanders Literature to support the writing of this book.

‘No vestige of fright

In the face of each knight,

But courtly and calm,

With steady aplomb,

They stare each other down.’

Paul van Ostaijen: ‘Ridderstijd’

 [‘The Age of Chivalry’] from Music-Hall, 1916

‘…a sky full of bloody red, heavy and desolate with

threatening lead-grey, full of a false copper lustre.’

Johan Huizinga: Autumntide of the Middle Ages, 2020

‘…and homesick with a pain that won’t be quenched

to see the King for Whom I’d longed to fight,

I stride towards Death –

and he who hoped to be a man-at-arms

in that most passionate of bygone times,

must now report in long neglected words

on eras that have darkened into tales

– bleak and fearsome – of Crusades

and cathedrals.’

Hendrik Marsman: ‘Heimwee’

[‘Homesickness’] from Paradise Regained, 1927

‘En route to a scandalous joust,

in his iron accoutrements housed

he sings with a hushed virtuosity

of the world and its punctiliosity

thus describing himself to a fault

screwed into his ambulant vault.’

Hugo Claus: ‘Ridder’ [‘The Knight’]

from Almanak, 1982

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Genealogies and Royal Houses

Maps

Prologue

I

THE FORGOTTEN MILLENNIUM (406–1369)

From Kingdom to Duchy

From Burgundy to Flanders

II

THE BURGUNDIAN CENTURY (1369–1467)

Rising From the Mud

Ghent the Fearless

1789 Avant la Lettre

Low Countries in the Making

France as the Draught Horse of Burgundy

Beauty and Madness

Ostentation and Propaganda

Murder and the Language Wars

Arranged Marriages, Uncontrollable Tumult

Severed Hand, Cleft Skull

Three Counties, One Duke

The Battle for Holland and Zeeland

As a Woman or as a Man?

Golden Glitter

The Burial Pit and the Stake

Beauty and Peace

The Burgundian Dream

Pheasant and Fox

Fathers and Sons

III

THE FATAL DECADE (1467–77)

Joyous Entry, Sombre Reception

The Crown for the Taking

Renewal and Innovation

Death in the Snow

IV

A DECISIVE YEAR (1482)

V

A MEMORABLE DAY

(20 October 1496)

Epilogue

THE LAST BURGUNDIAN

Plate Section 1

Plate Section 2

Endnotes

Bibliography

Chronology

Historic Figures

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Translator

An Invitation from the Publisher

GENEALOGIES AND ROYAL HOUSES

THE ROYAL LINEAGE OF THE BURGUNDIANS

Gebicca

[mythical tribal king who, with his son Gundahar, united the various Burgundian kings under him, †407]

Gundahar

[king from 407 to 436, died in a battle with the Huns]

Gundioc

[437–74, contemporary of Attila, who ruled from 434 to 454]

Chilperic

[474–80]

Gundobad

[480–516, ruled for a time with his brother Godegisel, whom he murdered, and later with his son Sigismund, contemporary of Clovis]

Sigismund

[516–23]

Gundomar

[523–34]

According to Burgundian tradition, power was passed on to the next generation only when the last representative of the previous generation died. Sometimes brothers would reign together for a few years, which often led to fatal conflicts (as with Gundobad and Godegisel). Strictly speaking there were two kingdoms, with a discernible break between the slaughter by Aetius and the Huns in 436 on the one hand and the subsequent flight from Worms to the south on the other. I chose to regard them as one kingdom because in the end it was the same royal family that held sway, albeit over two different regions. It was from the southern region that the medieval and present-day Burgundy would develop.

ENGLISH KINGS

PLANTAGENET

Edward III (1327–77)

Richard II (1377–99)

LANCASTER

Henry IV (1399–1413)

Henry V (1413–22)

Henry VI (1422–61)

(Henry V was a brother of John of Bedford

and Humphrey of Gloucester)

YORK

Edward IV (1461–83, briefly interrupted by the

return of Henry VI from October 1470 to April 1471)

Edward V (king for two months)

Richard III (1483–85)

(Edward IV and Richard III were brothers of

Margaret of York, the wife of Charles the Bold)

TUDOR

Henry VII (1485–1509)

Henry VIII (1509–47)

HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

Sigismund of Luxembourg (1411–37)

Albert II of Habsburg (1437–39)

Frederick III (1440–93)

Maximilian of Austria (1493–1519)

Charles V (1519–56)

SPAIN

Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile (1474–1504)

Philip the Handsome and Joanna the Mad (1504–06)

Joanna the Mad until 1555, but not considered able to reign, so the regency was assumed by Ferdinand II and then Charles I (who was Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor, but the first King Charles in Spain)

POPES

Based in Rome until 1305. In Avignon from 1305 to 1378. In 1378 back in Rome, but with antipopes in Avignon until 1417. From 1409 to 1415 there were three popes, the third with his seat in Pisa. From 1417 on a single pope in Rome once again.

HOUSE OF THE BURGUNDIAN DUKES

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ROYAL HOUSE OF FRANCE

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BAVARIA-BURGUNDY-FRANCE-BRABANT-LIMBURG-LUXEMBOURG ENTANGLEMENT

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MAPS

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‘That white tablecloth with spots of grease, pure

Damask with Burgundy stains, sticks

To these fingers and slowly unfurls

Between two stanzas.’

Leonard Nolens: Een dichter in Antwerpen en andere gedichten [A Poet in Antwerp and Other Poems], 2005

PROLOGUE

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Jean-Léon Huens, print no. 182: Nancy, from ’s Lands Glorie (1949–61). Heirs of Jean-Léon Huens and Musée Royal de Mariemont.

T

HEY

WEREN

’

T

EXACTLY

attractive. Their grey-green cloth covers looked dreary and dull. But once you opened the books, you found yourself in a world of excitement and adventure. By the time I was fourteen I had read them to pieces – all six volumes of ’s Lands Glorie (1949–61). Along with Thea Beckman’s famous fictional trilogy on the Hundred Years War, they were my ‘open sesame’ in 1987: the gateway to big history had been thrown open wide.

’s Lands Glorie was the first work issued by the Historia Publishing Company. The idea was to cut out coupons that were printed on the packages of various food products. You then exchanged the coupons for little colour prints, each with a brief commentary on the back, so by eating the right products you could also acquire knowledge. You pasted the pictures into the green albums provided for this purpose. We weren’t the only ones with such albums on our bookshelves. Two, maybe three generations of Belgians grew up with them. Their impact cannot be underestimated.

The author of the commentaries, Professor Jean Schoonjans, was not one to avoid clichés. In his terse summaries he spoke of ‘hale and hearty soldiers’,¹ called a lady dressed as a nun ‘a cunning lady of the nobility’,² and criticized ‘the fearsome Duke of Alva’.³ He viewed the past through a romantic filter and roused a sense of pride in us. It was no accident that the word ‘glorie’ appeared in the title. The spirit of the nineteenth century swept through every page.

Schoonjans was a dyed-in-the-wool Belgian nationalist, and in his uncompromising reading of history it was as if our country had always existed, as if the native population had been fully aware of their identity two thousand years ago. Didn’t I learn from his books that in 57

BC

‘the Belgians’ were ‘a happy people’?⁴ But then came the Romans. That was on page nine, and I was already on the edge of my seat. Not long afterwards, Schoonjans claimed that ‘the Belgians played a decisive role’ in the conquering of Jerusalem.⁵ I was so agitated that I even set Thea Beckman’s novels aside. Forsaking her for the pedantic writings of Schoonjans is hard to explain, but ’s Lands Glorie had another ace up its sleeve.

What made the series not only attractive but also unforgettable were the illustrations by Jean-Léon Huens. He often turned to the Old Masters for inspiration – I saw my first Van Eyck and Van der Weyden through his eyes – but he was just as happy to employ his own ideas. He tried out unexpected perspectives, played with surprising frames and painted the faces of the dying. His realistic style is firmly embedded in my memory. If someone happens to mention Charles Martel, Godfrey of Bouillon or William of Orange, their visages appear in my mind just as he once depicted them.

The pinnacle of his skill could be seen on page fifteen of volume III, identified as illustration no. 182: Nancy. Usually Huens served up some striking portrait, gripping scene or detail from a battle, but this time his illustration was conspicuous for its apparent emptiness.

Every time I see this picture, I’m fourteen again. I see that winter landscape just as I saw it back then: a tree, a snow-covered expanse, two armed men approaching in the distance. I was astonished by the bareness of that mainly snow-white illustration. The tree and the men were marginal details. Out of curiosity I read Schoonjans’s commentary: ‘In 1477 Charles the Bold laid siege to the city of Nancy. He met his death in battle, the circumstances of which remain unclear. His body was found beneath the snow half devoured by wolves.’⁶ I looked again at the illustration, and only then did I see the dark outline barely visible in the shadow of the tree. You could just make out the contours of a dead body.

My eyes jumped from text to picture and back again, and the same questions cropped up. Who was Charles the Bold? Why was he given that name? What in the world happened to him in Nancy? And what about those wolves? No matter how much I was dragged along by the further course of history, I kept coming back to this illustration. To the wolves, the snow, the body… to the mystery of Nancy.

It would take thirty years for me to figure it all out. The tragic demise of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, became an important element in this book, in which I search not only for the facts surrounding this anecdote but also for what Huens and Schoonjans tried to dredge up in their own way in ’s Lands Glorie: the origin of our whole region. And by that I do not mean Belgium, for despite Schoonjans’s good intentions it was the Low Countries that emerged first, only later to be followed by Belgium and the Netherlands.

Finally, in 1987, I resumed my reading of Thea Beckman. After Geef me de ruimte! (Give Me Room, 1976) came Triomf van de verschroeide aarde (Triumph of the Scorched Earth, 1977) and Het rad van fortuin (The Wheel of Fortune, 1978). Countless Belgian and Dutch readers were gripped by the adventures of Marije, alias Marie-Claire, and her son Matthis. I regard their ordeals during the Hundred Years War as my first great reading experience. This was the real thing: reading great books that breathe new life into age-old events, getting inside someone else’s skin, trembling with emotion and suspense. And learning something at the same time.

Beckman’s trilogy covered the years 1346–69. She introduced characters who would haunt me for years to come: Bertrand du Guesclin, John the Good, The Black Prince, Charles V, Étienne Marcel. Not to mention the settings: the Battles of Crécy and Poitiers, the cities of Paris and Bruges in the fourteenth century. They all appear in the book you now hold in your hands. The period between the time depicted in her trilogy and the death of Charles the Bold constitutes its beating heart.

Some reading experiences are so powerful that they continue to ferment for decades. One day I could no longer resist the temptation, and I stepped into the breach that Beckman’s trilogy and Huens’s illustration no. 182 had opened in my imagination. Like the world around us, we ourselves are the fruit of the past.

*

I spent years peeking over the wall, and my eyes were invariably drawn to the south: to France, about which I’ve written several books. Feasting on that culture has made me who I am today. Only much later did I realize that in all that time my feet had never strayed far from home: first in the sandy soil of the Campine, then in the streets of Antwerp, and finally in the clay of West Flanders and, due to my increasingly frequent travels to the north, the polders of Holland. Suddenly my eyes abandoned the southern horizon and began looking down. The place occupied by my own feet began to intrigue me. How could I have been so neglectful of my roots for all those years?

Our historiography is full of book-length works explaining how the Low Countries broke up at the end of the sixteenth century, dividing the Northern Netherlands from the Southern Netherlands (and ultimately the Netherlands of today from Belgium). Historical research has paid so much attention to that painful division of property that we seldom ask ourselves what it had been like before the divorce. As if we had never been together at all.

I began to read and travel through time to Dijon, Paris, Lille, Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, Mechelen, Delft, Gouda, Nijmegen and ’s-Hertogenbosch. I saw blossoming cities, incipient individualism and dying chivalric ideals. Schizophrenic kings, aggressive dukes and brilliant artists. Pyres and banquets, plague and jousting, Joan of Arc, Philip the Good and the Order of the Golden Fleece. This long search led me to the emergence of the Low Countries in the fifteenth century. And what did I learn? That the Low Countries are a Burgundian invention.

Naturally, the geographical fact of the ‘lagen landen bi de zee’ (lowlands by the sea),⁷ as an anonymous monk once put it, had existed for years, but the inhabitants of the principalities located there lived independent of each other for the most part. In feudal terms, they belonged either to the kingdom of France or to the Holy Roman Empire. Yet in the Late Middle Ages a number of these domains merged and, wedged as they were between these two great powers, a new entity was born. The Burgundian dukes Philip the Bold, John the Fearless, Philip the Good and Charles the Bold (who met his end at Nancy) played a leading role in this process and emerged as the founding fathers of the unified Netherlands. Philip the Bold laid the foundation, his descendants built on his legacy, and under the authority of his grandson Philip the Good the united lands on the lower reaches of the Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt would acquire a political dimension for the first time. These events certainly constitute the forgotten genesis of the Low Countries. But with the intense interconnectedness of those regions with France, England, the Holy Roman Empire and, finally, Spain, it’s not too much of a stretch to also see them as European history of the highest order. Burgundy was the principal actor in history’s last great crusade. It played a key role at the end of the Hundred Years War and was instrumental in the growing European power of the Habsburgs.

It all started when Philip the Bold, as Duke of Burgundy, married Margaret of Male, the daughter of the Flemish count. Their marriage in Ghent on 19 June 1369 seemed like the ideal opening for this book. The only problem was that after three pages I found I needed fifteen footnotes to keep from needlessly weighing down my text by identifying someone like Louis of Male or explaining a concept like feudalism. In short, I needed to back up a bit to keep the story from buckling under the weight of information that I could not assume every reader might have at hand.

Beginning half a century earlier might do the trick. Not far enough, as it turned out. A hundred years then? Eventually I cast my line almost a millennium earlier. My thinking went something like this: what if I were to begin the great story of the Middle Ages from the standpoint of the ancient Burgundians, the Germanic peoples who first appeared in the pages of history in 406, the royal predecessors of the dukes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? It proved quite a challenge to find an alternative means of resurrecting an era that for the most part has been shrouded in mystery, but it was worth the effort. Not only did the ancient warriors point the way to a great many key historic moments, but they also solved the problem I was facing: now the reader would embark on the Burgundian journey with the proper luggage.

While the first part of the book spans almost a thousand years (406–1369), the next part comprises a century (1369–1467). The third part covers a decade (1467–77), while parts four and five deal with exactly a year (1482) and a day.

The shape of the book is that of an inverted pyramid. It starts by spreading its wings and flying with rapid strokes high over the Middle Ages. Then it takes its time to observe events from a closer range. As its focus sharpens, it heads slowly but surely towards a carefully chosen destination: a forgotten day in Lier, a small city in the former duchy of Brabant, where

*

Ten years ago, as if to thank me for services rendered, France sent one of its women my way – something no Légion d’honneur can top. She turned out to be a descendant of a Burgundian family and had spent her youth in the old duchy. Exactly 647 years after the wedding of Philip the Bold and Margaret of Male, we celebrated our Flemish-Burgundian nuptials. The dowry was less impressive, nor could our reception hold a candle to the lavish banquets of the Burgundian dukes, but the actual decision to get married occurred at approximately the same time as the plan to chronicle the historic bond between Burgundy and the Low Countries. My wife had to admit that despite her origins she knew little or nothing about the dukes, let alone Burgundy’s connection with my native region. Burgundy has always been regarded as a poor relation in the history of France. Anyone who knows the story will understand why.

Our little daughter followed this entire process from close range. She was raised with an ear for both French and Dutch, and now she crosses the language border dozens of times a day without being aware of it. She also makes the actual journey to the south a couple of times a year – to the Burgundian motherland, to be exact. I decided to tell her about my new book by degrees. Could it be that I wrote it mainly for her? Wasn’t she a French-Belgian child? Flemish-Burgundian? In short, the ideal reader of this book in progress?

After my last book she became quite skilled at chanting the names of all the Napoleonic campaigns, and now she’s surprising museum visitors. On a recent trip to the Musée des Beaux-Arts (Museum of Fine Arts) in Dijon I showed her the portrait of a man dressed in black, his gaze clear, with a black chaperon on his head and the chain of the Order of the Golden Fleece round his neck. When I asked her on the spur of the moment if she knew who this fellow was, this little girl – not yet four years old – promptly answered: Philip the Good!

At least there’s one person who will recognize the man on the cover of my book, I thought: the most beautifully preserved portrait of the real founding father of the Low Countries, after a lost original by Rogier van der Weyden. While the dukes engaged in battles, entered into marriages and introduced reforms in order to forge a single entity from those fragmented lands, the unforgettable works by Claus Sluter, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden and Hugo van der Goes were created under their impulse. Telling the story of the Burgundians is like opening a treasure chest full of masterpieces.

During the writing process, I realized I had no choice but to include large sections of French history as well. After all, Philip the Bold was the first of the four dukes, the youngest son of the French king John the Good, brother of Charles V and regent of the young Charles VI, and during the Hundred Years War he planned the most spectacular French-Burgundian invasion of England ever. The tension between France and Burgundy (and later, the Burgundian Netherlands) inevitably became a recurring theme in the narrative.

I have to admit that things didn’t go quite as expected. In order to tell the story of the Low Countries properly, I would have to begin with what I had wanted to avoid all along: peeking over that wall. My gaze was once again drawn southward, towards France. Only gradually did my story make its way to the north. That happened step by step, little by little, a process that perfectly reflected the evolution that I myself had gone through.

The roots of the Low Countries run underground to the south. I never would have expected it, but my southward gaze and northern roots were destined to intersect.

Bart Van Loo

Druy-Parigny (Burgundy), summer 2015

– Moorsele (Flanders), autumn 2018

Along with the genealogies and maps I thought it necessary to provide in the front of the book, I have also included a series of miniatures, portraits and fragments from the works of art discussed in its pages, presented in chronological order. In the back of the book are a timeline of the main historical events and a list of the most important figures, each accompanied by a brief biographical sketch. These can prove quite useful in reading a book that necessarily involves a large number of actors and events.

PART I

‘To us in olden story

are wonders many told

Of heroes rich in glory,

of trials manifold:

Of joy and festive greeting,

of weeping and of woe,

Of keenest warriors meeting,

shall ye now many a wonder know.’

Anon.: The Nibelungenlied, c.1200

THE FORGOTTEN MILLENNIUM

406–1369

Or how you can take a fresh look at the first thousand years of the Middle Ages from the perspective of the Burgundians, and how these Romanized Germanic tribes always seem to have been on the front line at great events such as the migration of peoples, the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the emergence of Christianity, the invasion of the barbarians from the north and heretics from the south, the golden age of the great monastic orders and the Hundred Years War between England and France. In short, long before they emerged as the founding fathers of the Low Countries thanks to Philip the Bold, John the Fearless and Philip the Good, the Burgundians had already left their mark on key moments in European history.

FROM KINGDOM TO DUCHY

Or how the Romans, Huns, Germans, Moors and Vikings jostled one another on the way to an uncertain future, and how Burgundy came into being.

I

N

THE

LAST

month of the year of our Lord 406, temperatures dropped to well below freezing. It was so cold that during the Christmas holidays the Rhine froze solid in the area around the city of Mainz. The seemingly untraversable river – the heavily guarded border between Gaul, administered by the Romans, and the obscure Germania, where countless tribes were always at each other’s throats – turned into a big and inviting bridge. Vandals, Suebi and Alans wasted no time and soon overran Gaul.

Of course, there’s no such thing as a watertight border. Just imagining it was an exercise in futility. No matter how much effort the Romans put into guarding the Rhine, the Danube and the fortified wall defences between them during the first centuries of the Common Era, border traffic had always been heavy, and the main purpose of the so-called limes was to keep the numerous passages under control. Some Germanic tribes were even given permission by Rome to settle in the border region, forming a sort of human buffer zone. Thus the Salian Franks fanned out between the Meuse and the Scheldt, and held sway in large parts of what today are the Netherlands and Flanders.

As the centuries passed, migration pressure intensified. Both the prosperity on the other side of the border and their own growing population made the Germanic tribes in the north-east and the Goths in the east increasingly eager to trek westward. The second and third centuries had seen a great many waves of migrants, but by the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth there was no stopping them. When the Huns from the steppes of Central Asia commenced their rampage, they drove numerous Germanic tribes from their homelands, and these groups subsequently propelled each other westward, fighting all the way. The Romans refused to grant asylum to this swarm, but before they knew what was happening to them a vast conglomeration of tribes was sweeping over them like a tornado. By the end of 406 the Germans were forced to break through the borders. The inundated Romans struggled against them for seventy more years, when they were finally swallowed up for good.

In this story of the Great Migration, as epic as it is complex, the Burgundians are often ignored altogether or mentioned in passing at the very most, if not whisked away in a footnote. Everyone knows their famous contemporaries Clovis and Attila, the Franks and the Huns, but who has ever heard of the Burgundians in this context? Yet this forgotten Germanic tribe also crossed the Rhine in 406–7 and made their contribution as a small cog in setting the gigantic wheel of time in motion and causing antiquity to tip into the Middle Ages.

When the Burgundians settled in the area of Worms after their crossing, they had centuries of wanderings behind them. If you reverse that journey and go further and further east, you end up in their ancestral homeland. Before Worms they had lived in the Mainz region; a century before that they populated the middle course of the Elbe, where they ended up after a sojourn near the Oder; and before that, in the first century

AD

, they lived on the banks of the Wisła in today’s Poland. Rivers tell the story of peoples.

The Wisła empties into the Baltic Sea and points the way to their first home: the small island of Bornholm that lies in the Baltic Sea between Poland and Sweden 150 kilometres east of Denmark, of which it is now a part. At that time the old Norwegians called the island Burgundarholmr, which was echoed in the name the Burgundians claimed for themselves and smuggled all through Europe, across the Wisła, the Oder, the Elbe and finally the Rhine. They made their way valiantly but did not come out of the long journey unscathed. They fought numerous battles that have gone practically unnoticed and lost many of them, especially against the Alemanni, resulting in a steady decrease in their numbers.

In 406–7 King Gundahar led approximately 80,000 Burgundians to the region around Worms; it is not clear whether this number refers to his soldiers alone or to the entire population. In exchange for guarding the border, the Romans gave him permission to establish a kingdom along the Rhine. But that was not enough for this ambitious monarch. In 435 he moved westward to Gallia Belgica, the area between the Rhineland and the Seine that would later lend its name to Belgium, in order to increase the size of his territory. Such audacity cost Gundahar dearly. In 436, with a mercenary army consisting of Huns under the command of a certain Attila, the Roman supreme commander Flavius Aetius crushed the Burgundians in a bloody battle.

Most of Gundahar’s family were massacred. Only his son Gundioc managed to escape. Gundioc led what remained of his people to the south and saved the Burgundian royal house from extinction. The massacre must have been so overwhelming that it inspired Burgundian poets to create epic stories, which were passed on and embellished. Over the course of the centuries they would fuse into the German epic poem the Nibelungenlied, in which Gundahar appears as Gunther. The name of King Etzel could be seen as a nod to the Roman Aetius, but it probably refers to Attila. Whatever the case may be, Richard Wagner owed the inspiration for his operatic trilogy to a devastating defeat suffered by the Burgundians in the fifth century, and more specifically to their aborted desire to conquer what later became Belgium.

‘The Fate of Western Civilization is Hanging by A Thread’

In 436 Attila had happily accepted payment from the Romans to teach the Burgundians a lesson, but in 447 he destroyed that lucrative alliance and made his way through Gallia Belgica, plundering and pillaging as he went. Although there’s little to substantiate Attila’s boast that the grass no longer grew wherever his horse left its hoofprint, his violent raids did inspire the Romans to undertake their last spectacular military operation in Western Europe. Unless they stopped Attila, Gaul would soon belong to the vast barbarian empire that stretched from the Rhine to the Caucasus and had initially been governed from present-day Hungary.

On 20 June 451, two motley armies crossed swords on the Catalaunian Plains near Troyes, in the north-east of today’s France. On one side were the Huns and all the tribes they had managed to scrape together on their path of destruction, on the other was a bloc that the Romans had formed with Gallic and Germanic forces: the menacing horde from Central Asia against the western allies, the Scourge of God from the east against the most important man in the Western Roman Empire, Attila versus Aetius.

The composition of the armies says a great deal about the fragmentation that the various European migrations had brought about. The Huns themselves formed only a part of Attila’s army, which consisted of Ostrogoths, Gepids, Thuringii and Rugii. Fighting on the other side along with the Romans and Burgundians were Visigoths, Alans and Salian Franks. Almost all the peoples who lived between the Atlantic Ocean and the Volga were present, and prepared to tear each other to shreds during the most important battle of late antiquity. According to the chroniclers, hundreds of thousands of warriors were involved, but modern estimates speak of around 60,000 troops, more or less evenly divided between the two camps.

For the Burgundians, Attila’s arrival in Gaul was a signal for revenge. Driven by memories of the good times in Worms and the nightmare of a bitter defeat, they oiled their weapons and saddled their horses. Some of the older warriors among them had been present at the disastrous battle fifteen years earlier, and the youngest soldiers had replayed that defeat in their childhood games. Now the opportunity to get justice done was being handed to them on a silver platter. The fact that the Burgundians had been invited to join the fray by Aetius of all people, the commander who had unleashed the Huns on them in 436, didn’t seem to bother them.

After a few skirmishes Aetius was able to take the high ground, enabling him to survey the Catalaunian Plains. Attila instructed his priests and diviners to hurriedly predict the battle’s outcome. After examining the shoulder blades of the sheep they had sacrificed, the priests announced that things looked far from rosy. The Hunnish leader saw only one way out. Offence was the best defence. ‘I myself… will throw the first javelin, and the wretch who refuses to imitate the example of his sovereign, is devoted to inevitable death.’¹

Archers exchanged volleys for a short time, until suddenly the fearsome cavalry of the Huns made a great charge. These horsemen could twist their upper bodies while astride their galloping horses in order to attack their pursuers with bow and arrow. They opened a breach in the centre of Aetius’s army. Theodoric, the King of the Visigoths, was killed in the chaos and then trampled by his own troops. In the face of total confusion and the danger of flight, Theodoric’s son Thorismund drew his sword, set his father’s crown on his head and drove the Huns back. Franks, Burgundians and Romans came to his aid, and Attila was forced to take cover behind an improvised fortress of saddles and wagons. The allies’ advance was brought to a halt only by the coming of night.

Attila could not imagine himself leaving the field of battle alive. He set fire to his defensive enclosure and calmly prepared himself for death. During the allies’ fatal final assault, he planned to cast himself into the flames as a martyr and thus avoid the humiliation of imprisonment. With that thought in mind, he went to sleep.

But the dreaded attack never materialized. Supreme commander Aetius put all his powers of persuasion on the line to convince his troops to let the Huns escape. With the skill of a master chess player, he had succeeded in getting all the tribes to join him while realizing that soon he would have to lock horns with them in a contest for the leadership of Gaul. The external threat of the Huns could come in very useful. The power of the Visigoths in particular was a thorn in his side. They occupied not only south-western Gaul but also part of the Iberian peninsula, so he was glad to trick Thorismund into returning home. He fooled Thorismund into thinking that his brothers had seized the throne in their capital city of Toulouse, now that their father Theodoric had perished. With the departure of the Visigoths the great army was deprived of its most effective force, and there were too few troops left to deal a death blow to the Huns. With his tactical cunning, Aetius had denied the Burgundians the chance to retaliate for all the pain they had suffered, but he would soon richly reward them.

When dawn broke, Attila was utterly astonished to see a practically empty plain stretched out before him. He quickly got over his astonishment, as well as his heroic suicidal intentions, and fled across the Rhine. Seeking revenge, he turned his attention to Rome. That campaign fizzled as well, although it did have important consequences. When the inhabitants of north-eastern Italy heard that Attila was on the march, they panicked and took cover on the islands in the lagoon of the Adriatic Sea. This precarious refuge would one day become Venice, the largest metropolis of the new age after Paris.

Attila was not the bloodthirsty tyrant legend makes him out to be. He was too clever and diplomatic for that. Nor was he the brilliant warrior that countless books have asserted. The meagre results of his western campaign of conquest give the lie to that claim. He did emerge as an exceptional leader who managed to forge one big empire out of the chaotic diversity of Hunnic tribes, and who forced the great power blocs of his age to face him down in one powerful alliance. But mainly he was the quintessential barbarian of his time, and he achieved this status when the up-and-coming barbarians were beyond counting. Because of the terrifying aura that surrounds him when he appears in the various chronicles, his most important conquest was posthumous: he now occupies a blood-drenched place in our collective memory. The small but sturdily built Attila (as he has been traditionally described) met his end during his wedding feast in 453 under less than heroic circumstances. One chronicler described him getting blind drunk and choking on his own blood as a result of a copious nosebleed; another cited his new wife, Ildico, as his unexpected murderer.

The claim that the fate of western civilization was hanging by a thread on 20 June 451 is romantic hyperbole. The end of the Western Roman Empire had already been written in the stars for quite some time. All the Romans did on the Catalaunian Plains was to ensure that the new driving force of the west would not be the Huns but the Germans, fighting it out among themselves: the Franks, the Visigoths – or perhaps the Burgundians?

In any case, halfway through the fifth century the Hunnish threat was defused for good, although Attila’s ghost did come prowling round one last time a quarter of a century later. In 475, the successful politician Orestes manoeuvred his young son onto the Roman throne. This was only a diversionary tactic, for in fact the strong man in the capital was Orestes himself. When the Germanic Odoacer had the devious Orestes executed and then deposed the weak Romulus Augustulus – literally ‘little emperor’ – in 476, it meant the end of the moribund Western Roman Empire.

The Scourge of God must have had a good chuckle in the heathen hereafter. For this Orestes, who held in his hands the very last spark of Roman power, was none other than his former secretary. Attila could embrace eternity with a clear conscience.

‘Rancid Butter, An Excess of Onions and Garlic’

Let’s let the dust settle on the turbulent fifth century and turn our eyes to the Burgundians. After the defeat of the Huns, Aetius assented to what in reality was already a fact: the region of Savoy in today’s France (with northern and southern offshoots) became the Burgundians’ official territory. After a journey that took hundreds of years and covered thousands of kilometres, they found themselves nearing the endpoint of their adventurous trek, a hair’s breadth from the French region that still bears their name. The Burgundians were almost home.

In the preceding centuries they had mixed so often with other tribes and adjusted so often to new climatological and geographical conditions that whether anything remained of their Scandinavian genes and customs is open to question. Scientists specialized in genography believe that based on recent research into human ancestry, the haplogroup Q – a particular group of genetically related individuals – occurs with greater frequency (> 4 per cent) in certain regions of Scandinavia, including Bornholm, and in the French valleys of the Rhône and the Saône, with slight outliers running northward in the direction of Worms. Remarkably, this corresponds with the beginning and end points of the Burgundian wanderings.² However, similar research establishes with equal validity that the Vandals, the Suebi, the Franks and the Burgundians exchanged at least as many chromosomes as sword blows during their long journey towards Gaul. The genetic characteristics of the Germanic tribes that crossed the Rhine in the fifth century were acquired haphazardly for the most part, although it would appear that the story of the migrations can still be read to some extent in our genes.

Do we have any idea what the ancient Burgundians looked like? Sidonius Apollinaris, who later became Bishop of Clermont, encountered the tribe for the first time in 466 and described them as ‘long-haired giants more than six feet in height who speak an incomprehensible babble’. On top of that ‘they smear their hair with rancid butter… and their food stinks of an excess of onions and garlic’.³ Quite colourful to be sure, but this was essentially the kind of cliché that refined Gallo-Romans would apply to any barbarian. It says just as much about the observer as the observed.

King Gundobad, son of Gundioc, profited from the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire and gradually expanded his kingdom, so that by the beginning of the sixth century it extended from Nevers to Basel, and in the south as far as Avignon. Yet that paled in comparison with what his Germanic rivals managed to pull off in Europe, and in around 500 there was every indication that Gundobad was in danger of being crushed from both sides. The almighty Visigoths and the fierce and ever advancing Franks were ready to eat the Burgundians alive. The challenge for Gundobad was not insignificant, but he proved himself a very capable administrator and politician. Not only did he manage to strengthen his international position, but a sense of Burgundian identity blossomed under his leadership. The latter in particular was quite a feat, given the fact that as Germans they were seriously outnumbered in their own kingdom, which was populated mostly by Gallo-Romans.

The Celts had been living in Gaul since time immemorial. The Romans regarded them as a rather hot-tempered, macho people and mockingly called them Galli (roosters). In 52

BC

, Julius Caesar put an end to the defiance of these Gauls by besieging Alesia for six weeks, after which the city surrendered and their leader Vercingetorix made a historic genuflection before the Roman commander. Caesar’s triumph not only resulted in the birth of a mixed Gallo-Roman culture in the conquered areas, but it also gave him the self-confidence he needed to strive for supreme power in Rome. These events – the unfurling of Caesar’s hubris and the official beginning of the Romanization of what would later become France – didn’t happen just anywhere. Alesia lay in the region that soon would become known as Burgundy.

Like the Celts, who had been conquered by Caesar in bygone days, the Burgundians (and other Germanic peoples who arrived with them) would let themselves be intoxicated by Roman culture. This was evident not only in their adoption of Roman dress and gastronomic preferences but also in their tendency to soak their language and customs in a tub of Latinate herbs, of which the Lex Burgundionum (502), the statute book of King Gundobad, is a fine example. With this collection of laws, the Burgundians hoped to accommodate the local Gallo-Roman residents, who were now easily in the majority. Every trial had to be presided over by a Burgundian and a Gallo-Roman, and from then on the right of intermarriage was extended to both peoples. Germanic and Roman names were used interchangeably with greater frequency, and a new kind of aristocracy took shape, combining the large-scale land ownership of the Gallo-Romans with the militarism of the Burgundians – a forerunner of the feudal system. The incorporation of Germanic tribal customs into existing Roman law was rendered in Latin, interestingly enough. The Burgundians had already been living almost sixty years in Romanized territories, and most of them spoke East-Germanic as well as Late Latin. Thanks to the Lex Burgundionum, the Gallo-Romans did become a bit Germanized, but what the statute book mainly showed was how a Germanic people dropped their own language in official documents and opted for full Romanization.

Even during their Germanic period, the Burgundians had a special craving for the alcoholic drink for which they would become world famous over the course of the next millennium. As the new statute book stated: ‘If anyone enters a vineyard at night or during the harvest period and is killed by the guard, the family of the victim has no recourse to complaint.’⁴ The Romans had introduced viniculture, and the vines seemed to thrive on the so-called Golden Slopes (Côte d’Or).

Some of the Germanic punishments must have surprised the local population. A man who had stolen a hunting dog was made to kiss the animal’s backside in public. For stealing a falcon, the thief’s head or chest would be covered with meat, after which the falcon would be released to satisfy its hunger. Clearly the legal texts did not rule out a certain macabre wit. But they also show how much importance the Burgundians attached to their animals, especially those that were used in hunting – another fact that would stand the test of time.

It was always possible to escape such ridiculous punishments by handing over a sum of money. First you paid the amount that the animal or victim was worth, then a financial penalty for the violation itself. The Lex Burgundionum contains a carefully compiled list of rates. To name but a few: killing a dog: 1 solidus (a Roman coin, from which the word ‘soldier’ was derived because that is how they were paid); raping a woman: 12 solidi; cutting off a woman’s hair for no reason: 12 solidi; murdering a slave: 30 solidi; murdering a carpenter: 40 solidi; murdering a blacksmith: 50 solidi; murdering a silversmith: 100 solidi; murdering a goldsmith: 200 solidi.

Family honour was central to their culture, but in order to prevent clans from tearing each other apart in endless feuds the Burgundians worked out an ingenious system. Those whose honour had been defiled could simply be bought off. If the guilty family refused to pay, however, there was only one way out, and that was the so-called faihitha, or bloody vendetta. The vendettas in which the royal family became entangled over the course of the sixth century escalated to such a degree that it led to the end of the kingdom.

‘Gaul Is Certainly Worth An Icy Bath’

On 25 December 506,⁵ one hundred years to the day since the Germanic tribes had crossed the Rhine, a forty-year-old Frankish king waded through a vessel of holy water. When Clovis reached the other side of the large baptismal font in the cathedral at Reims, he looked round and nodded humbly, the sign for 3,000 Frankish warriors to do the same. The splashing of the sacred waves caused an undulation that would continue for centuries to come. The baptism of Clovis caused the wheel of time to click one notch further, but what a notch it was. The kingdom of the Franks, which would lend its name to la douce France, became ‘the oldest daughter of the church’ and would resolutely support Rome in the conquering of the west. Of course, this historic moment could never have taken place without the ruthless ambition of the Frankish king himself, but it was equally unthinkable without the persuasive powers of one particular Burgundian princess.

There had been little indication that one day Clovis would ensnare the Catholic Clotilde in his nets. Legend has it that his grandfather Merovich, after whom the Frankish Merovingian dynasty was named, had fought on the side of the Burgundians against the Huns, but little was left of that band of brothers. More than a century earlier, the Salian Franks had been given permission to live in present-day Belgium on the condition that they join in defending the borders against invaders. This small kingdom north of Gaul failed to satisfy Clovis’s ambitions, however, and from his capital of Tournai he felt the south beckon. In 500 he marched on Dijon in Burgundy, where King Gundobad and his brother Godegisel were waiting for him.

The battle had just begun when Godegisel betrayed the Burgundian cause and defected to the Franks. Devastated, Gundobad fled to Avignon. Just as he was about to be overtaken by the enemy troops, they turned round and tore off to the north, having heard that the Visigoths, who controlled all of south-western Gaul, were threatening their land. Gundobad took advantage of Clovis’s departure by personally killing his brother Godegisel, drowning his sister-in-law in the Rhône, beheading their sons and throwing them into a deep well. He spared his two grandchildren because they were too young, an impulse of human kindness that would have fateful consequences. He then formed an alliance with Clovis in order to guarantee the safety of the kingdom. As part of the negotiations, he thought it would be a good idea to marry his niece Clotilde, the Catholic daughter of a deceased brother, to the Frankish king.

And so it was that the two peoples who only recently had been at each other’s throats were joined together in the bonds of matrimony in 501. At first the pagan Clovis would have nothing to do with the Christian faith, no matter how hard his pious wife tried to convert him. Nevertheless, Clotilde had their first child baptized without her husband’s permission. When the child died in its baptismal garment, Clovis ranted that it was all the fault of that foreign religion. His rage was rekindled when their second child also succumbed to illness after having been baptized. Nevertheless, in the chill of Christmas night in the year 506 he would immerse his long, wavy locks (a Frankish sign of strength and regal dignity) in the holy water font. Just as the Huguenot Henry IV converted to Catholicism under the motto ‘Paris is well worth a Mass’ at the end of the sixteenth century, so Clovis might have thought: Gaul is certainly worth an icy bath. In his hunger for power, the leader had understood that he could make good use of the up-and-coming Catholic Church.

‘Another Constantine advanced to the baptismal font, to terminate the disease of ancient leprosy and wash away with fresh water the foul spots that had long been borne,’⁶ wrote Gregory of Tours. Even though his Historia Francorum (History of the Franks) dates to the end of the sixth century, Gregory described events as if he had been there himself. Thus he noted Clovis’s promise to the bishop: ‘the people who follow me cannot endure to abandon their gods; but I shall go and speak to them according to your words.’ Clearly, Gregory was summoning every ounce of his rhetorical talent to make sure that Clovis, and by extension all of Francia (the kingdom of the Franks), was absorbed into the history of holy Rome. The reference to Constantine was not a gratuitous flourish. After the Holy Cross appeared to the Roman commander in 312, he ordered that every soldier’s shield be adorned with this symbol. Constantine won the battle at the gates of Rome. Not only did he become the new emperor, but he also cleared the way for the Christianization of the Romans.

What happened to Clovis was strikingly similar. A few months before his baptism he had gone to war on the Tolbiac plain near Cologne against the Alemanni, the Germanic tribal confederation that controlled the southern part of today’s Germany and was advancing westward. The Frankish troops were taken by surprise, and when the appeal to Wodan proved ineffective, Clovis, at his wits’ end, was said to have cried out, ‘Jesus Christ, whom Clotilda asserts to be the son of the living God, who art said to give aid to those in distress, and to bestow victory on those who hope in thee, I beseech the glory of thy aid, with the vow that if thou wilt grant me victory over these enemies, and I shall know that power which she says that people dedicated in thy name have had from thee, I will believe in thee and be baptized in thy name.’⁷ The God of his Burgundian spouse must have sensed an opportunity, for He did what was asked of Him. The tide of the battle turned, and at the very last moment Clovis claimed victory. To show his gratitude to the benevolent Christian God, he solemnly swore that he would let himself be baptized.

Of course, his conversion was a masterly example of realpolitik more than anything else, but in France’s national narrative this fable of insight and repentance, this story of Christian purification and divine intervention, sounded much better. It was hardly surprising when the Burgundian Clotilde was added to the growing list of saints almost immediately after her death, and that her intercession would henceforth be sought for the conversion of unbelieving spouses. Anyone who could prevail over the headstrong Clovis must have been cut from the right persuasive cloth. Interestingly enough, over the centuries she also became the patron saint of notaries, paralytics and light aircraft, the latter probably because the Frankish king crushed the Alemanni in Tolbiac ‘thanks to fire from the sky’, according to Gregory of Tours.

Legend has it that when Bishop Remigius – whose remains still lie in the abbey in Reims that is dedicated to him – discovered that he had forgotten to prepare the chrism on Christmas night of 506, a dove promptly flew in with a vial of oil. With this holy oil he was able to make the sign of the cross on the forehead of the Frankish leader in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In Gregory’s text we read that the king ‘confessed all-powerful God in the Trinity’.⁸ These innocuous words conceal an important medieval dispute: the internecine struggle between two different Christian beliefs, classical Catholics against the followers of Arianism, which the Catholic Church regarded as heretical. It was a power struggle in which the Burgundians again played an important role.

‘The History Of France Starts Here’

According to the standard cliché, the freshly arrived barbarians did all they could to distinguish themselves from the local population. But what happened to the Burgundians is a good example of the opposite, and from it we can extrapolate what it was like throughout Western Europe. In any event, Gundobad did everything he could to eliminate the tense relationship between the Arian Burgundians (mainly aristocrats and soldiers) and the Catholic Gallo-Romans (the vast majority of the population).

Christianity didn’t really take off until Emperor Constantine passed an edict in 313 in which the teachings of Jesus were officially tolerated, and the persecution of Christians gradually came to an end. At the end of the fourth century Emperor Theodosius went even further by prohibiting all other religions, and Christianity became the de facto religion of the state. By the early fifth century half the Roman population consisted of Christians. That growth was stimulated not only by the enthusiastic commitment of the emperor and the Bishop of Rome (the pope), but also by the growing riches of the church. The ecclesiastical authorities were only too glad to receive gifts from well-to-do aristocrats and citizens, who thereby hoped to secure their salvation. The faith thrived on the despair of the serfs and the riches of the aristocracy, like nettles and roses on a dungheap.

Not only did the followers of Christ come down firmly in their choice of Latin as the language of their cult, but their dioceses also adopted the late classical management structure, which benefited the spread and organization of early Christianity. The local establishment of the church progressed smoothly because the church had been clever enough to retain pagan shrines and convert them into Christian places of prayer. Monasteries began sprouting up here and there – a phenomenon that developed when the first ascetic hermits decided to give up their solitude and embrace community life. In these institutions, the monks kept classical culture alive thanks to their practice of teaching and copying manuscripts. Latin culture could have been entirely obliterated in the chaos of the migration of peoples, but partly thanks to the church the influence of Roman civilization would continue to make itself felt in the prevailing administrative language, liturgy, teaching and visual arts. The seeds of the great classical resurgence were sown in the Early Middle Ages.

By installing themselves in the still powerful structures of the Roman empire, feeding upon the spiritual inspiration of church fathers like Augustine, systematically winning over the allegiance of the barbarians, and thanks in no small part to their culture of hard-working synods and councils, the Christians succeeded in creating an inspiring administrative homogeneity. Probably the most dangerous problem the church had to deal with in that early period was that of heretics, people who espoused heterodox doctrines. One of the most important of these was Arianism, the teachings of Arius, a third-century Egyptian priest. He opposed the idea that the unique God of Christianity consisted of three equal manifestations: the Father, the Son (Christ) and the Holy Spirit, in which Jesus was the only one to possess both a divine and a human nature. Arius argued that Jesus was subordinate to the Father, having been begotten by Him, so he could not have a divine nature, while others professed that Jesus, the Father and the Holy Spirit were equals. This debate almost brought about a schism in the church. Who was right: the Catholic Trinitarians (three equal persons?) or the staunch Arians (Christ subordinate to the Father)? During the Council of Nicaea of 325, not only did the ecclesiastical officials decide what day Easter should fall on for the rest of eternity, but they also declared once and for all what orthodox teaching was, thereby branding the followers of Arius as heretics. It took a long time for that message to reach all the remote corners of Christendom. In the meantime, the Arian bishop Wulfila converted the Goths, which meant that the heresy was actually gaining followers. It was probably through the Goths that Arianism spread to the other barbarians of the east. The Burgundians had already converted during their Worms period, so they were heretics by definition when they landed in the valley of the Rhône and the Saône.

In order to integrate into Gaul successfully, there was little the Franks and Burgundians could do except join the Christianity of the Gallo-Romans. Gundobad himself equivocated for years when it came to converting, but he remained an Arian. He opted for a policy of tolerance and a gradual transition from one religion to the other. His wife, Caretene, was a Catholic, like Clotilde, and was given permission to build a large church in Lyon. The king even allowed Bishop Avitus of Vienne to dedicate an openly critical treatise on Arianism to him. This Avitus succeeded in convincing Gundobad’s son Sigismund to convert only a few months before Clovis’s baptism in 506. Because Sigismund was already a Christian (albeit of the wrong sort), he, unlike the Frankish leader, was spared a dip in cold water and had to make do with a simple laying on of hands. Thus the first Germanic leader to be received into the Catholic Church was a proper Burgundian king. This event quite probably hastened Clovis’s religious turnaround.

Clovis and Sigismund were still well and truly converted when they left together for the war against the Visigoths, who ruled over an enormous kingdom that extended from the Loire to Andalusia. ‘I take it very hard that these Arians hold part of the Gauls,’