The so-called Chronicle of Fredegar, a universal history whose oldest extant redaction was probably compiled ca. 660, tells the story of a conversation between the fifth-century Frankish king Childeric and his new wife Basina on their wedding night.Footnote 1 Instead of consummating the marriage, the queen orders her husband to go to the palace window, look outside, and tell her what he sees, which he does three times. On the first trip, Childeric sees lions, unicorns, and leopards; on the second, bears and wolves; and on the third trip he sees dogs and smaller beasts twisting and fighting amongst themselves. The interpretation offered by Basina is clear: the diminishing succession of animals foreshadows the future of Childeric's heirs, the Merovingian kings of the Franks.Footnote 2
The Fredegar chronicler wrote almost a century before the last Merovingian king was deposed in 751 and thus had no inkling of how the dynasty's story might end, nor, certainly, of how his royal protagonists would fare in the writings of later chroniclers and historians. Yet in his short parable, the chronicler captured the spirit with which the Merovingians came to be known to posterity. Indeed, Fredegar III.12 can be viewed as an early template for future depictions of this period of Frankish history, as essentially a three-act play — ascent and consolidation; stasis and conflict; and, finally, decay and decline. Pessimism with regard to matters of state was not unique to Fredegar. Gregory of Tours opens the fifth book of his Histories with a scathing assessment of the kings of his own day.Footnote 3 Clovis is built up as a paragon of royal demeanor against which Gregory's Merovingian contemporaries fare very poorly. And while the Fredegar chronicler's debt to Gregory is unquestionable, the three-part narrative schema was his own invention; Gregory had nothing to say about a future scenario that includes the decline of the royal line.
A sense of foreboding is likewise present in the early eighth-century Liber historiae Francorum.Footnote 4 The LHF provides a modified ancestry for the Franks’ earliest kings, although like Fredegar, it links them to the Trojan line of Priam. It is a nostalgia that had contemporary aims, namely to legitimize Merovingian kingship at a time of severe crisis.Footnote 5 While the chronicle never wanes in its support of the Merovingians, it has a clear sense of their changing fortunes. The LHF sees the reigns of Chlothar II and Dagobert I as a time of unparalleled royal power and efficiency. Clovis II's kingship marks the end of the Merovingian heyday and precipitates the breakdown of political discourse in the late seventh and early eighth century. Thus, the LHF offers a history of the Merovingians that, in many respects, agrees with the tripartite model adopted by Fredegar.
The chronicles composed in Merovingian Gaul give voice to a variety of agendas rich enough to accommodate a plurality of readings. Just as the Fredegar chronicler, who relied heavily on the Histories of Gregory of Tours, consciously molded the original perspective of his composition to conform to his own narrative needs,Footnote 6 so too did later chroniclers return to Merovingian sources in an attempt to synthesize and recontextualize Frankish history.Footnote 7 Of these, perhaps no voice has been more devastatingly decisive to the memory of the Merovingians than Einhard's in his opening to the ninth-century Vita Karoli. Einhard caricatured later members of the dynasty as long-haired, bearded puppets shuffling around their dilapidated villas in ox-drawn carriages.Footnote 8 It is a vision that was energetically expounded by other works of Carolingian historiography, bent on legitimizing the family's claim to power, and has also gained traction in later generations of chronicles.Footnote 9 Despite the outsized impact of Carolingian compositions in determining the outcome of this process, the story as we recognize it today was not, by the ninth century, a fait accompli. Merovingian history never ceased to be rewritten, especially when pro-Carolingian perspectives were abandoned in favor of competing voices. Interest in the Merovingians did not subside in subsequent centuries, and much like the author of the LHF, medieval and early modern authors made the Merovingians their own, subjecting them to interpretations that fit their own agendas.
Of the great body of works that became popular in later centuries I will mention only a few, such as the tenth-century Gesta Francorum by Aimoin of Fleury,Footnote 10 the thirteenth-century Grandes chroniques de France,Footnote 11 and a sixteenth-century composition in Italian, Le vite de tutti gli Re di Francia e de gli duca di Milano Footnote 12 by a minor cinquecento historian named Vittorio Sabino. All of these works converge in an unexpected source, a sixteenth-century world chronicle in Hebrew produced by the Jewish historian Yosef Ha-Kohen. The compositions that make up this eclectic collection were written with different audiences in mind;Footnote 13 they therefore differ from each other in their language, structure, and aim. As historiographical layers accumulated and interacted, however, a recognizable way of conceptualizing the early medieval history of Gaul had emerged. Regardless of their many differences, they all share a basic understanding of this historical setting formulated in seventh- and eighth-century compositions. Since we are fortunate enough to be able to trace the evolution of the story by following a long chain of works whose intertextual relationships are fairly well studied, the forces that shaped the treatment of this narrative in the longue durée become better understood.
Early modern Italian historiography provides an especially illuminating example of the continued appeal of the Merovingians for new audiences. Opening horizons in the East and in the far West radically shifted the worldview of cinquecento chroniclers, occasioning new attempts at historical synthesis. Old compositions once thought lost were rediscovered apace and subjected to renewed scrutiny, and, as the sixteenth century progressed, humanist historiography spread across Europe, and with it came a budding interest in early medieval history. One example of this is the first printed edition of the Chronicle of Fredegar, which was prepared by Mathias Flacius Illyricus and appeared in Basel in 1568.Footnote 14
Jewish communities throughout Europe had likewise not remained unaffected by the humanistic proclivity for historiography, although the chronicles that ensued differed from those produced in Christian circles. The inherent difficulty in defining the nature of sixteenth-century Jewish historiography, which seemingly teeters between traditionalism and novelty, was famously — and pessimistically — evaluated in several studies by Robert Bonfil.Footnote 15 Looking at the relatively paltry harvest of Jewish historiography up to the sixteenth century, Bonfil viewed renascent Jewish interest in writing history more as a swansong than a renaissance. Even more damningly, he regarded the inability of Jewish historians to emulate the secular-political perspective of Christian authors as the ultimate undoing of Jewish historiography. Consequently, Bonfil saw the chronicles of the period as products of compromise; they either treat Jewish and gentile history as separate fields meriting separate works or they focus on the Jews as victims of persecution. There can be no doubt that Jewish historians wrote for a different audience than did their humanist contemporaries. It is nevertheless possible to appreciate the complexity and precariousness of the Jews’ condition and their ensuing literary sensibilities without assuming, as Bonfil had done, that the reluctance to embrace fully humanistic historiographical models meant that Jewish historiography had atrophied. More recent scholarship has, moreover, expressed a growing appreciation for the debt Jewish historiography owed to humanist attitudes.Footnote 16
Yosef Ha-Kohen (1496–ca. 1575) is a clear example of the effect humanist thought had on Jewish intellectuals in the sixteenth century. The son of exiles from Spain (Cuenca and, after 1412, Huete), Ha-Kohen was born in Avignon, where his parents had settled briefly after the 1492 expulsion. Ha-Kohen spent most of his adult life in the environs of Genoa and became an eminent member of the Italian Jewish community with far-reaching connections throughout the Apennine peninsula. He was also intimately involved in current affairs, ransoming Jewish captives and representing the interests of his coreligionists. Throughout most of his turbulent career, framed by the gradually worsening state of the Jews in northern Italy, Ha-Kohen wrote extensively. He produced two major chronicles — Sefer Divrei Hayamim lemalkei Tzarfat ulemalkei Beit Otoman haTogar, or The Book of Histories of the Kings of France and of the Kings of Ottoman Turkey,Footnote 17 a universal history completed shortly before 1554 and Sefer Emeq Habakha, or The Vale of Tears,Footnote 18 composed several years later, which records the travails and persecutions endured by the Jews from the destruction of the Second Temple to his own day. Ha-Kohen was an equally prolific translator. His works include Sefer Metsiv Gevulot ‘Amim, a reworking of Joannes Boemus's Omnium gentium mores, leges, et ritus; Sefer India and Sefer Fernando Cortez, a revision of Gomora's La historia general de las Indias; and Sefer Mekits Nirdamim, a translation of Meir Alguades's medical treatise.Footnote 19 In addition, there survive numerous letters sent and received by Ha-Kohen, as well as a number of smaller works on diverse subjects such as Hebrew grammar, epistolary protocol, and poetry.Footnote 20
Ha-Kohen's erudition was undoubtedly impressive, although not unprecedented among Italian Jews. One of his epistles expresses an admiration for its addressee's fluency in “foreign wisdom” and his ability to detect flaws in the arguments of philosophers.Footnote 21 At the very least, such a statement suggests that acquaintance with Christian scholarship was not unheard of in his social circles. Ha-Kohen was also fluent in at least five languages. He was born in a Spanish-speaking home and would have picked up Italian from his surroundings. On his mother's side, Ha-Kohen was a scion of the elite Aragonese Alconstantini family and his father, Yehoshua, was a physician, who bequeathed to his son several medical treatises. Considering his background, it stands to reason that Yosef grew up in a highly literate environment, where he was also able to perfect his mastery of Hebrew.Footnote 22 Ha-Kohen was equally conversant in Portuguese, in which his main source for the Vale of Tears — Samuel Usque's Consolação ás Tribulações de Israel — was written. Latin would have been the standard medical language, and Mekits Nirdamim contains a list of medicinal formulae in Hebrew and Latin.Footnote 23 Ha-Kohen's reliance on the Grandes chroniques betrays a knowledge of French, and indeed as a resident of Genova, he would have spent several years under French occupation in the first decades of the sixteenth century.Footnote 24
Ha-Kohen is the only known Jewish chronicler to have taken up early Frankish history as a topic of inquiry, which makes him especially interesting. The first two chapters of Ha-Kohen's Divrei Hayamim provide a Hebrew rendering of late antique and early medieval Frankish history, a treatment that has no parallels in comparable Hebrew works. Admittedly, the early material is but a small introduction into a much lengthier treatise, which devotes considerably more attention to later and, primarily, contemporary events. The two opening chapters are nevertheless remarkable in their own way. Firstly, in their unique authorial tone, which is informed by an eclectic mixture of sources ranging from biblical prose and early medieval Jewish sources to late medieval and humanist historiography. Secondly, they are significant in the way Ha-Kohen uses the early medieval section to frame his discussion and establish its terminology. Ha-Kohen's editorial decisions and the way he chose to conceptualize Merovingian history for a sixteenth-century Jewish audience are the topic of this paper. In what follows, I will discuss the early medieval Frankish narrative found in the opening chapters of Divrei Hayamim, following Ha-Kohen's prose in tandem with that of his sources. I intend to show that, while Ha-Kohen was certainly no expert in early medieval history, he nevertheless deftly adapted the treatment he took from his sources to conform to his readership's ideological, historical, and religious expectations, and did so in a way that served his overarching agenda as an author. Ha-Kohen therefore produced an early medieval history that was a unique adaptation of earlier renditions, informed by the needs of a new readership.
The Text
Ha-Kohen did not set out to write an early medieval history, of course, and consequently its events occupy a very modest place in the overall arc of his composition. Ha-Kohen's foray into Merovingian history in Divrei Hayamim is not a very original one either. During the early chapters of the composition, he appears to be more a compiler than an innovative author, betraying his reliance on established narrative traditions very clearly.Footnote 25 Ha-Kohen did not supplement his account with anything that may not be recovered with relative ease from a small, though diverse, list of sources. This pertains not only to the factual nature of his account, but also to his dependence on a borrowed historiographical model. Ha-Kohen's debt is especially apparent in his decision to portray the Merovingian centuries as a sequence of three vignettes: first, an account of Frankish prehistory, which includes semi-legendary figures and brings the plot up to Clovis; then, an abridged history of Clovis's heirs and their regnal dramas; and finally, the royal family as an exhausted force overwhelmed by Carolingian vigor. Ha-Kohen's wholesale adoption of his sources is telling in its own right; yet it also makes his sporadic revisions especially illuminating.
Divrei Hayamim open with a genealogy of nations, charting the geographical spread of the offspring of the biblical Noah. Such openings are not a rarity in Jewish historiography, and in fact the passage we read here was lifted in its entirety from the tenth-century Hebrew composition, Sefer Josippon.Footnote 26 Ha-Kohen likely saw himself as continuing his namesake's historiographical mission because he also used Sefer Josippon for his opening of the Vale.Footnote 27 The first sentences of the Liber generationis were therefore copied verbatim, although Josippon was discarded when it reached the Franks, from which point Ha-Kohen went his own way. Such lists were not an isolated phenomenon found only in Hebrew texts. Based on Genesis 10, they were useful templates for any author wishing to place his subject within a clear historical and geographical setting.Footnote 28 The Fredegar chronicle also incorporates a Liber generationis as a preamble to a more detailed discussion about the Franks’ Trojan pedigree.Footnote 29
Divrei Hayamim contains several elements that first appeared in Fredegar, such as the Trojan origin story, so it is tempting to speculate that the Liber generationis passage, though borrowed from Josippon, was inspired indirectly by Ha-Kohen's Christian sources. Incidentally, a manuscript of the Fredegar chronicle would have been available to Ha-Kohen had he managed to gain entry to the archives of the Basilica of St. Ambrose in nearby Milan. Since Ha-Kohen admits to using “their books,” by which he means Latin compositions, this is, at least, within the realm of possibility.Footnote 30 Yet, as will become clear in what follows, Ha-Kohen's Trojan comment, and in fact much of the factual basis for his Merovingian section, were drawn from sources composed much nearer to his own day and cultural milieu.
One important source for Ha-Kohen's work that was undoubtedly influenced by Fredegar was the late thirteenth-century Grandes chroniques de France, which he frequently quarried for tidbits with which to enrich his narrative.Footnote 31 Fredegar and the LHF are the narrative trunk from which sprang an entire tree of French medieval historiography. The Grandes chroniques are but a later leaf on a larger narrative branch of this tree, which emerged from Aimoin of Fleury's Gesta Francorum and from its continuators.Footnote 32 It is therefore no surprise that material from Fredegar found its way into the Grandes chroniques and into other works of Latin and vernacular historiography, with Aimoin as the conduit. The Gesta Francorum omits the biblical Liber generationis, opting instead for a lengthy geographical discussion of Germany and Gaul, followed by a shorter treatment of the Trojan origins of the Franks. The Grandes chroniques follows Aimoin in omitting Fredegar’s genealogy of nations, yet here too the Trojan story remained. It is an understandable editorial choice for the author of the Grandes chroniques, whose writing was aimed primarily at legitimizing the French monarchy.Footnote 33 Fredegar’s universal history may have dictated its use of biblical lineages, but for the authors of the Gesta Francorum and the Grandes chroniques illustrious mythological origins would have been much more relevant. Ha-Kohen's introduction contains both the biblical stemma and a brief allusion to the Trojan story,Footnote 34 so he seems to have adopted his opening not from the Grandes chroniques, but elsewhere.
The genesis story of the Frankish kingship provides the next narrative block. Initially, this strand was introduced into medieval historiography through Fredegar and a report found in the eighth-century LHF. In the latter chronicle, the story unfolds roughly as follows: after a brief survey of the Franks’ Trojan ancestors, their flight from the fallen city, and their subsequent divisions into distinct ethnic groups, the author's lens narrows, closing in on the duces of the Franks in Sicambria.Footnote 35 Faramund, the son of the Frankish princeps Marcomir, makes his debut in the LHF as the Franks’ first king.Footnote 36 Faramund is present in many — though not all — textual traditions, and is also found in Ha-Kohen. Faramund begets Chlodio, who in turn is succeeded by Merovech, the eponymous ancestor of the Merovingian dynasty. Both Fredegar and the LHF credit Merovech with lending his name to the royal family, but they also leave the question of Chlodio's paternity of Merovech hanging.Footnote 37 The former satirically postulates a sea-monster for a father,Footnote 38 while the latter only admits to the existence of kinship ties between the king and his successor.Footnote 39 Aimoin of Fleury seems to be downplaying this ambiguity by referring to Merovech as Chlodio's affinis, on whose account relied the more detailed and explicit treatment found in the Grandes chroniques.Footnote 40
As I have already mentioned, the Grandes chroniques was not the only composition to make use of the LHF material, nor, it seems, was it the main source for Ha-Kohen's Merovingian material. In fact, a more concise — and patently corrupt — account, which Ha-Kohen used as the backbone of his Merovingian chapters, is the Italian composition Le vite de tutti gli Re di Francia e degli duca di Milano by the sixteenth-century humanist Vittorio Sabino.Footnote 41 Having sided with the French invaders of Italy, Vittorio Sabino went to France, and his Vite was written with the purpose of legitimizing French rule over north Italian cities.Footnote 42 As he himself notes, he wrote to inform his readers:
how and under what kings the great and richest Kingdom of France gained such repute, so it is first necessary to relate where they had their origins, for which I shall refer to what is said by the great part of ancient writers.Footnote 43
During Sabino's French sojourn he could easily have come into contact with the Grandes chroniques, although how much it influenced his own writing is a matter for speculation. He certainly partook in a renewed interest among Italian historians in the French monarchy, following France's involvement in Italian affairs since the fifteenth-century.Footnote 44 Sabino's decision to include the Trojan narrative is a clear indication of his Francophile leanings. The storyline came into vogue in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a topos meant to bolster French legitimism, and was later also used to place French learning on equal footing with the intellectual accomplishments of Italian humanism; both would have been consonant with Sabino's aims.Footnote 45 It is from Sabino that Ha-Kohen drew his brief remark about the Franks’ Trojan lineage and it also accounts for his depiction of Chlodio. Ha-Kohen follows Sabino, closely mimicking the wording found in the Vite (and, more distantly, those of the Grandes chroniques):
Chlodio died without leaving any legitimate sons, having reigned twenty years. In his place Merovech, who came from the same family, was made king.Footnote 46
Or, in Ha-Kohen's work:
He did not have any sons; he reigned for twenty years and died. And Merovech his kinsman succeeded him.Footnote 47
Jacky Kessous and Robert Bonfil are at odds about the sources used by Ha-Kohen, with Kessous opting for the Grandes chroniques and Bonfil for Sabino's Vite and other Italian histories.Footnote 48 It is, however, quite obvious that for the early medieval section of his work, at least, Ha-Kohen used both. Sabino provided the primary narrative scaffolding, which was occasionally supplemented with anecdotal information drawn from the Grandes chroniques. Since the Grandes chroniques was an excellent starting point for early modern historians interested in early Frankish history, it is possible that Ha-Kohen was influenced by it twice: once directly, and once as it refracted from his main source, Sabino's Vite. Ha-Kohen further streamlined an already heavily aestheticized storyline, either augmented considerably by the Grandes chroniques or reworked for brevity in the Vite. Yet it is important to recall that the basic narrative architecture shared by all of these chronicles was put in place by the seventh- and eighth-century material. Nevertheless, it remained relatively intact in the later works. Whether Divrei Hayamim assume the shape of the Vite, as is most often the case, or whether they incorporate material from the Grandes chroniques, the narrative nucleus undoubtedly originated with Fredegar and the LHF, and it retained much of its original structure.
Ha-Kohen's account then moves on to Childeric and Clovis, providing for each a cursory note on military accomplishments, followed by certain emblematic aspects of their career. For Childeric, it was his pride that caused him to be deposed from his kingship, though he would later reclaim it:
Merovech died and his son Childeric succeeded him. He was very proud and wherever he went he committed evil deeds and the peoples banished him and refused to obey him. It eventually came to pass that he reclaimed the cities of his kingship.Footnote 49
For Clovis, the space devoted is equally modest in scope:
He died and his son Clovis succeeded him. He is the same Clovis who subdued the inhabitants of Reims and Soissons and subjected them to tribute. Clovis also fought the Alamanni and they fell before him. And an unclean spirit came upon him and he forsook his god. Bishop Remigius of Reims baptized him. He then gathered men-at-arms and fought the Burgundians, the Aquitanians, and the Goths, and he crushed them, and they fell beneath his feet.Footnote 50
Childeric is uncomfortably lodged in the shadowy regions between myth and history. We are certain of his historicity because he appears not only in Gregory of Tours's Histories and in the sources mentioned above, but also in the Vita Genovefae, or Life of Genevieve, a hagiography of a fifth-century Parisian saint.Footnote 51 More important still for our understanding of Childeric is his tomb, unearthed in Tournai in the mid-seventeenth century, which yielded the famous signet ring bearing the inscription “CHILDIRICI REGIS.” Childeric never speaks for himself, however. His tomb complex and its riches, and whatever message they were meant to convey, were not his creations, but those of his son Clovis.Footnote 52 The hagiography and historiography are later still and provide very little actual information. In any event, Ha-Kohen's superficial treatment of Childeric is forgivable, given the paucity of source material.Footnote 53 Childeric's tomb was only discovered a century after the publication of Divrei Hayamim, so any information it may have revealed was, of course, unavailable to Ha-Kohen.Footnote 54
Clovis is another matter entirely. Not only was he the first of his line to secure single rulership over all the Franks and to legislate on their behalf, he was first to adopt Nicene Christianity. From his glowing portrayals in Gregory of Tours to the eleven chapters dedicated to him in the Grandes chroniques, Clovis towers over other Merovingians in the relevant historiographical works.Footnote 55 Rightly seen as a turning point in Frankish history, Clovis's death thematically concludes both Gregory of Tours's Book 2 and the Grandes chroniques Book 1.
At first glance, this all seems to have left very little trace on Ha-Kohen's blasé depiction of Clovis. Given its faithful adherence to Sabino's text, one would expect Clovis to merit a more thorough treatment than he receives in Divrei Hayamim. This is an anomaly, considering Ha-Kohen's sources, and requires some explanation. Ha-Kohen's inclination for brevity meant that Clovis's legislative policies and political maneuverings, discussed in Merovingian chronicles, were regarded as superfluous. That left only his martial prowess and baptism, which were, of course, a source of great pride for the author of the Grandes chroniques. As one would expect, Clovis also received the most detailed treatment of any Merovingian king in the Vite. Not so for Ha-Kohen. While he was certainly able to muse about Christendom's role as a vehicle for ushering in Jewish salvation in the end times, he also had firsthand experience of the evils perpetrated by Catholic kings against his parents and his coreligionists, harboring no illusions about the greater significance of Clovis's baptism. This is why he uses a phrase which awkwardly translates as:
And an unclean spirit came upon him.Footnote 56
Of Sabino's narrative not much remained apart from a terse statement on Clovis's psychological change and his decision to undergo baptism. To compare, this is some of what Sabino had to say:
Clovis …, having defeated the Alamanni in an undecided battle, was baptized by Remigius bishop of Reims, and was anointed with oil carried from heaven by a dove, as some have written. Here was born the solemnity that the kings of France, when they receive the royal ornaments, are anointed with the same oil. Having been thus anointed and made Christian, Clovis vanquished the Burgundians, the Aquitanians, and the Goths.Footnote 57
The description in the Vite distantly echoes Hincmar's Vita Remigii and its account of Clovis and the holy ampulla also found in the Grandes chroniques.Footnote 58 Ha-Kohen of course rejected the miraculous events that preceded the baptism in Sabino's account and therefore glossed over them. His account builds on an imagery of the Visitation, though, tellingly, the word chosen to describe the supernatural presence is רוח אחרת. Literally, the phrase translates into “foreign” or “other spirit,” calling to mind some supernatural aberration afflicting an erstwhile good king and causing him to forsake his god. Yet it is also reminiscent of another well-known Hebrew phrase — דבר אחר (lit. “other thing”) — used frequently in the Talmud and elsewhere as a euphemism for pig, signifying the animal's uncleanly, abhorrent nature.Footnote 59 Ha-Kohen does not say “gods” or “idols” (Hebrew: צלמים) but uses the neutral-sounding “his god” (אלוהיו), toning down the sympathetic tone used by Sabino. Even more strikingly, Ha-Kohen entirely omitted Sabino's comment about the royal tradition of using the oil to anoint the kings of France and substituted the explanatory preamble about Clovis's anointing and Christianization with a phrase of his own invention: “He then gathered men-at-arms” (Hebrew: ויאסוף אנשי חיל).
Here Ha-Kohen is clearly in the role of a Jewish author writing for a Jewish readership. Not wanting his audience to become too impressed with his subject, he kept his reporting to a factual minimum, omitting the story of the holy ampulla entirely. The decision to speed through the baptism and to ignore the later royal traditions is not only a sign of Ha-Kohen's general disapproval, but perhaps also of his reluctance to acknowledge it as the constitutive act of the Merovingian dynasty, and, by extension, of the French monarchy. Since he divulges so little, it is perhaps best not to push this point any further. Nevertheless, Ha-Kohen does see Clovis's reign as concluding a period of early Merovingian history characterized by conquest and consolidation of power. For the succession of kings stretching from Chlodio to Clovis, Ha-Kohen follows Sabino in reporting the cities and tribal entities subdued by the Franks.Footnote 60 Sabino was, again, possibly influenced by the Grandes chroniques, which contain a similar list of captured cities. For Sabino and Ha-Kohen, this is not something that recurs in the accounts of later Merovingian kings, although we know from Gregory of Tours and other sources that it was under Clovis's direct heirs that the Franks achieved dominion over the Burgundians, the Thuringians, and Provence, and that they embarked on a campaign against the Danes. A generation later, successive expeditions against the Lombards in Italy were dispatched and an offensive posture was frequently adopted on the Visigothic front. In the seventh century, Bavaria and other outlying regions on the eastern frontier were brought under Frankish hegemony. Silence on this matter was therefore intentional, and in service of a greater narrative model.
In both Sabino's and Ha-Kohen's account, Clovis is located at the end of a thematic block devoted to the Merovingians' energetic beginnings. The sense of stasis becomes apparent immediately after the death of Clovis, whose successors, remarks Ha-Kohen, were prone to fighting amongst themselves.Footnote 61 Of Clovis's four sons only Chlothar survived, and was, in turn, succeeded by Charibert. After Charibert died in Toulouse, Dagobert, his “mother's son” (Hebrew: בן אמו) ascended to the Frankish throne. This is a mistake, of course, since Chlothar had not one but four sons who survived him — Charibert I, Guntram, Sigibert I, and Chilperic I — as well as several who did not. Each received a part of Chlothar's bequest, and when Charibert died in 567 his kingdom, centered on Paris, was carved up and redivided among the remaining brothers. Thus, the Charibert who appears in Ha-Kohen's narrative more closely resembles the next king who bore the name. Charibert II also had a father named Chlothar — Chlothar II — who, much like his namesake and grandfather, came to rule the entire regnum Francorum toward the end of his life. When Chlothar II died in 628, he left his kingdom to his eldest son Dagobert, who allowed his younger half-brother Charibert II to take possession of Gascony and Aquitaine. This Charibert indeed ruled from Toulouse, as Ha-Kohen reports, and when he died in 632 — probably assassinated by Dagobert's henchmenFootnote 62 — his brother took over his kingdom and treasure. So, when Ha-Kohen writes that Charibert succeeded Chlothar and was, in his turn, succeeded by his own brother Dagobert, he was partially correct, although he did mistakenly create a collage of two men who lived almost seventy years apart. The reason for this blunder is obvious: Ha-Kohen was building on the Vite, which contains the same mistake.
The account of Dagobert opens with a direct translation of Sabino's report, which focuses on the king's generosity toward Saint-Denis, burial place of the first king of the Franks:
Dagobert, his [i.e., Charibert's] brother on his mother's side succeeded him; he built up the temple of St. Dionysius, where the first king of the Franks was buried.Footnote 63
And in Ha-Kohen:
Charibert died in Toulouse and Dagobert his mother's son succeeded him. He built Dionysius's altar of the Ba'al where the first king who ruled France was buried.
As in previous instances where his Christian source uses standard pietistic language, Ha-Kohen intervenes. Here, Sabino's tempoi di santo Dionysio becomes במת הבעל דיאוניזיו, an awkward phrasing best translated as “Dionysius's altar of the Ba'al.” While this is almost surely just a formulaic expression of derision for Christianity, it is tempting to wonder whether Ha-Kohen was making a pun by equating St. Denis, whose name means “of Dionysus,” with the Canaanite deity Ba'al, given the similarities between some of their attendant mythologies.
Dagobert is a point of some importance on the regnal continuum for Ha-Kohen. Dagobert's tenure was marked by relative stability, allowing him to develop a fruitful relationship with the Byzantine emperor Heraclius once the latter was able to stabilize his empire after the near-catastrophe of the Persian war. Contacts with Constantinople brought about, sometime around 632, a treaty of cooperation between the Franks and the Empire. The motivation behind it probably was, as Stefan Esders has shown, to jointly address the mounting threat of the Avars, who were wedged in central Europe between Frankish and Byzantine spheres of influence.Footnote 64 A curious consequence of the negotiations seems to have been a Byzantine requirement to forcefully baptize Jews living under Dagobert's rule and a Frankish acquiescence to this demand, which most of our sources dutifully report. Heraclius's petition stemmed from his misinterpretation of an astrological portent that warned of the imminent Muslim conquests, but which the emperor mistook as referring to the Jews.
While it was previously rejected as fantasy, Dagobert's behavior on this issue may actually have some basis in history. Heraclius's anti-Jewish policies have left their traces not only on works produced within the Byzantine world, such as the Doctrina Iacobi nuper baptizati, which tells the tale of a Jew who had recently been forced to accept baptism under Heraclius, only to realize the validity of his new faith.Footnote 65 They left a mark also on Arabic compositions, the earliest of which is Ibn Isḥāq's eighth-century composition, Sīrat Rasūl Allāh,Footnote 66 and on eastern Christian sources, such as the tenth-century Arabic composition by the Egyptian bishop Severus ibn al-Muqaffa‘.Footnote 67 In western sources, the Heraclius story became an established part of Dagobertian lore. Originating with Fredegar, it found its way into such compositions as the Gesta Dagoberti, composed in the 830s by an anonymous author bent on legitimizing the claims of St. Denis to independence from episcopal jurisdiction.Footnote 68 There, the story is told from Dagobert's perspective, although the influence of Fredegar is indisputable.Footnote 69 Likewise, the Heraclius story was incorporated into the Gesta Francorum, from which it leapt on to the Grandes chroniques, and finally to Ha-Kohen.
Ha-Kohen included his version of this event not only in Divrei Hayamim but also in the Vale, which focuses on the Jewish experience of these fateful times. His information could only have come down through the Grandes chroniques, since, as we have seen, Sabino's account of Dagobert says nothing of Heraclius or the Jews. In fact, the account is a direct borrowing from the Grandes chroniques,Footnote 70 itself a close copy of Aimoin's rendition of the plot found in Fredegar. As a result, the passages from Fredegar are very similar in content to Ha-Kohen's version, which retains most of Fredegar’s original syntax and structure. The few dissimilarities that we do find are nothing if not intentional. The original Fredegarian passage reads:
Being very learned in letters, he became an astrologer. With God's help he discerned that his empire would be devastated by circumcised peoples. So he sent a delegation to the Frankish king Dagobert, requesting him to order all the Jews of his kingdom baptized to the Catholic faith; this Dagobert fulfilled promptly. Heraclius decreed that the same should be done in all the imperial provinces.Footnote 71
Aimoin's Gesta Francorum contains this account:
Because he was thoroughly educated in the study of letters, he eventually became an astrologer. He therefore recognized in the signs of the stars that his empire would be devastated by a circumcised people, and having affirmed it to refer to the Jews, sent messages to Dagobert, king of the Franks, and asked him that he order all those of Jewish descent who are subjects in his provinces to become Christian; and that those who refused would be punished by exile or death, which Dagobert willingly carried out, having driven away from the boundaries of Francia all of those who would not submit to baptism.Footnote 72
The Grandes chroniques contain a similar, though by no means identical, account:
And because he was a great scholar and had a profound literary knowledge, at last he became an astrologer. He understood from the signs of the stars that his empire would be destroyed by a circumcised people, and because he thought that it would be the Jews, he requested through messengers that Dagobert, the king of France, have the Jews of all the provinces of his kingdom baptized, and that all those who would refuse should be condemned to exile. And this King Dagobert did, and thus all those who did not want to receive baptism were exiled and chased out of the kingdom of France.Footnote 73
And finally, Ha-Kohen's version, which runs like this:
Heraclius grew very wise in astrology (lit. wisdom of the zodiac), and in his wisdom, he saw the rule of Rome fall in his own day under the feet of the circumcised; and the scoundrelFootnote 74 said in his heart: God will not deign to grant this honor to none but the Jews, because they are circumcised. And he raged against them and ordered that in all the cities of his rule those Jews that refuse to convert and turn away from God be killed. He sent messengers to Dagobert king of France so that he would do the same evil deed and Dagobert obeyed him and many converted. Many were put to the sword in France in those days.Footnote 75
The first sentence is indeed a faithful replication of Fredegar, but here the stories begin to diverge ever so slightly, in fact as well as in emphasis. Ha-Kohen's Heraclius is a “son of Belial” (בן בליעל), literally a scoundrel, but more likely meant as idolater, perhaps a remark on the emperor's promotion of Marian iconography or on his Monotheletist initiative. Allusions to Heraclius as בן בליעל predate Ha-Kohen. In fact, the seventh-century Jewish apocalyptic composition known as Sefer Zerubbabel, which was written in the aftermath of the Persian-Byzantine wars, identifies its main villain, Armilos, as בן בליעל.Footnote 76 The Antichrist figure Armilos was often seen as a thinly veiled indictment of Heraclius, especially since the monstrous Armilos's father was Satan himself and his mother a marble statue, clearly meant to evoke in the reader the image of Marian iconography, which the author of Sefer Zerubbabel refers to as ראש לכל עבודה זרה, or “the zenith of all idolatry.”Footnote 77
In Ha-Kohen's version, Heraclius refuses to give the Jews the pleasure of having that which God deemed them worthy to receive and decrees that any Jew who refuses baptism be put to death. In his treatment of the Heraclius account, Ha-Kohen's assumption that a providentially guided history can only conclude in Jewish temporal dominion makes a subtle first appearance. The punishments apportioned to reluctant Jews undergo evolution — from complete ignorance in Fredegar, exile or death in the Gesta Francorum, and exile in the Grandes chroniques, to death in Divrei Hayamim, which in Ha-Kohen occasioned mass executions. He ends his account with a quote from Deut. 32:43: “for he will avenge the blood of his servants, and will render vengeance to his adversaries.” Although the story as it is related in the Vale is an exact copy of the one found in Divrei Hayamim, the biblical quotation is missing; considering the Vale’s overall consolatory tone, it is rather a surprising absence. Yet in Divrei Hayamim, the quotation serves to signal the end of one narrative strand (the Persian-Byzantine wars) and the beginnings of another (the conquests of the Muslims), while at the same time underscoring the eschatological aims of the composition.Footnote 78 More importantly for us, this lengthy account also serves as the ultimate piece in the second thematic block — Merovingian stasis and conflict. It is no wonder then that “the good king Dagobert,” purportedly the last effective Merovingian, concludes this section of the plot.
The last few paragraphs are concerned with the heirs of Dagobert, who are soon revealed as veritable rois fainéants. Clovis II is dispensed with in one sentence, containing the length of his kingship and the fact that he had three sons. Of those, Chlothar III fares no better and is said only to have been the eldest and that he ruled four years but produced no heirs. The plot then moves to the events of the 670s, which it chronicles with some detail, all of which is concerned with the disintegration of Merovingian authority. Theuderic III becomes king, while his brother Childeric II is said to have been banished to Austrasia. This is another mistake that Ha-Kohen took from Sabino, since, as we gather from the LHF, Childeric was invited to ascend to the Austrasian throne. We then learn that:
Theuderic became very proud, and the Franks said: what have we done in that we anointed this villain to be our king; they conspired against him and banished him from their presence.Footnote 79
The calamitous tenure of Childeric II is explored in the following sentences, including his callousness and his disrespect for the aristocracy, which culminated with his decision to have one of his courtiers — the LHF reveals the man's name was Bodilo — flogged publicly.Footnote 80 He is then murdered, alongside his wife, while returning from a hunting expedition. Theuderic, then a “priest unto his god” (Hebrew: כומר לאלהיו), referencing his forced tonsure and incarceration in Luxeuil, is recalled and reinstated.Footnote 81 Theuderic's sons are given a short and programmatic treatment:
Clovis his eldest son succeeded him: three years Clovis reigned and had no sons and died: his brother Childebert succeeded him for several days: Childebert died at the beginning of his reign and Dagobert his son, who was a small boy at the time, succeeded him: this boy died without issue: he did not leave after him any heirs in the land.Footnote 82
Here we find another mistake that Ha-Kohen adopted from Sabino. Childebert III's reign was not a brief one, lasting in fact seventeen fruitful years. Childebert III is a favorite of the LHF author, who refers to him as a famous man (vir inclytus) when he reports his ascent and calls him “the glorious and just lord King Childebert of good memory” (bonae memoriae gloriosus domnus Childebertus rex iustus) when he tells of his passing.Footnote 83 Interestingly, in the latter chapter the LHF also relates the murder of Grimoald, son of Pippin II, by a pagan named Rantgar, who receives the epithet “son of Belial.”Footnote 84 The point about the inefficacy that has taken hold of the Merovingian line is elaborated further is Sabino and Ha-Kohen:
Lacking thus in the royal line, a certain Daniel, who was a priest, was elected king and came to be called Chilperic.Footnote 85
This is arguably also the cutoff point for the third thematic strand. It is here that Charles Martel first appears as Chilperic's enemy on the field of battle. Martel is victorious and Chilperic escapes, only to be graciously reinstated by his adversary. Martel is thenceforth given the title “constable” and proceeds to rule the Franks. After Chilperic dies without issue, Martel, on the counsel of his leading men, appoints Theuderic IV, “who was, in their eyes, like a saint.”Footnote 86 Tellingly, Ha-Kohen uses קדש, which, when used in this context, is likely a pun. Phonetically, the word closely resembles the Hebrew word קדוש, or saint, but actually means fornicator or idolater. His snipe at Theuderic, on all accounts a rather mediocre figure, can only be explained as a critical response to the favorable portrayal we find in Sabino's Vite:
Mostly through the efforts of Martel, Theuderic was created king, who was held to be saintly by majority opinion, and is said to have been reared by some monks from nearby Chelles.Footnote 87
Shortly after, Ha-Kohen abandons the Merovingians and turns his attention to the ascending Carolingians. He returns, much like Sabino, for one last sentence at a later point in the text, in which he relates the deposition of Childeric III, wrongly identified, here and in Sabino, as Theuderic:
Theuderic's laziness made him loathsome in the eyes of the peoples. Pope Zacharias anointed Pippin king and Theuderic returned to worship his idol as he once did.Footnote 88
And thus, the curtain is drawn over the Merovingians. That this was perceived as the starting point of a new thematic block is made evident by Sabino's decision to return to the topic of conquest. Unlike their Merovingian puppets, both Charles Martel and his son Pippin energetically continued the expansion of the kingdom of the Franks, a project that has been neglected in the Vite since the days of Clovis. Naturally, Ha-Kohen followed suit.
Conclusion
Though it is at times difficult to ascertain which compositions Ha-Kohen exploited for each segment of his work, he undeniably had access to and made frequent use of a variety of Christian historiographical compositions. The accessibility of a flourishing book trade in Genoa must have been very beneficial to him,Footnote 89 and indeed Sabino's 1525 printed edition likely arrived through this channel. As for the Grandes chroniques, the French conquest of northern Italy could have made the composition accessible in Genoa. Despite Ha-Kohen's commitment to write for a Jewish audience, his dependence on Christian sources cannot be overestimated. His decision to compose a world chronicle, moreover, sets him outside the historiographical horizons of his Jewish contemporaries, betraying his humanist influences. Ha-Kohen moved between these two poles, never settling comfortably in either tradition, and Divrei Hayamim reflect this duality throughout.
Ha-Kohen's adherence to a tripartite narrative model with regard to the Merovingians is primarily the result of his reliance on Sabino's work. Sabino was a partisan of the French, and many of the authorial decisions he made as a result reflect his political leanings. Loyalism, in this case, was expressed by adopting a narrative espoused by compositions like the Grandes chroniques, although whether Sabino actually worked with the text is impossible to say. Yet Sabino's humanist perspective, which favored a flowing, politically themed narrative as opposed to the Grandes chroniques ’ belabored, religiously inspired prose comes through clearly in his work. It is likewise a perspective adopted by Ha-Kohen, albeit in the service of a slightly different agenda.Footnote 90
Ha-Kohen does not reveal himself in the first few chapters of Divrei Hayamim to be an especially innovative or groundbreaking historian. He mostly follows Sabino, and when he does depart from the Vite, it is usually to turn to older sources like the Grandes chroniques. In this sense, Divrei Hayamim was not subversive historiography. Yet Ha-Kohen does teach us something about the ways historical narrative and authorial structures traveled between cultures. While his world chronicle is infused with the humanist worldview of his Italian contemporaries, his relationship with the humanist perspective is noncommittal; when it ceases to suit him, he has no qualms about making alterations to the text or about using other sources. What emerges is no doubt an eclectic whole. It is nevertheless a composition that attempts to subtly harmonize Ha-Kohen's affinity to humanist historiography with his Jewish cultural sensibilities. Ha-Kohen's Merovingians are equally composite figures. Much like earlier renditions in medieval chronicles and early modern histories, the Merovingians’ narrative arc of expansion-stasis-decline in Divrei Hayamim serves as scaffolding into which contemporary commentary may be injected.
