User:Botteville/sandbox
This is page 1 of my sandbox. It is currently being used to develop an article on an aspect of Frankish history. It is not to be taken with serious consideration until I say it is. You can't expect an article like this to be done overnight. When it goes into circulation we will have to worry about Wikidata connections (right now there are none) and see also connections.
Myth of the Trojan Franks
[edit] Part of a Roman castra at Roman Acquincum near Budapest, location of Sicambria, where the Trojan Sicambrians were believed to have settled. In fact the name came from Sicambrian Franks in the Roman army being quartered there. | |
| Folklore | myth |
|---|---|
| First attested | Gregory of Tours |
| Other name(s) | Trojans |
The myth of the Trojan Franks is a speculation concocted by otherwise reasonably credible mediaeval authors to explain the origin of an ethnicity they termed the Franks. Despite the fact that this people had managed to create an empire (German Reich) uniting all Western Europe except for Britain and Scandinavia, and that they themselves were Franks, they were unable to explain the origin of the term. The Franks seemed to them to have appeared as though by magic at some time prior to the first Frankish emperor, Clovis I, r. 481-511.
Each writer had his floruit under the Franks at some time before the last emperor of a united Frankish realm, Charlemagne, r. 748-814. The death of the latter left his realm divided into two main portions: an eastern population speaking Old High German, which became a German reich, represented today by the nation of Germany, and a western population speaking Romance languages, which descended from the language of the Roman Empire. This population still inhabits the nation of France, which name descends from Frankia, home of the Franks.
The Frankish authors looked back to a succession of Frankish kings dating from the first few centuries of the Christian Era. Before then they saw only the tribal polities outlined in the writings of Julius Caesar (late Roman Republic) and Tacitus (early Roman Empire). The Franks were attested only from the 3rd Century onward.
The gist of the myth
[edit]A prime example of authors faced with this difficulty is Gregory of Tours. His History of the Franks is a standard work, but, apart from some church history, he is forced to start with Clovis after the fall of Rome. He omits the entire history of the early Franks, manifestly because it is not available to him. All he has is scattered fragments. However, he is a knowledgeable scholar of Roman history. What comes to his mind is the standard history of Rome, reflected by Livy, signed, sealed, and stamped, so to speak, by the emperors. In it a band of Trojans under Aeneas escape from the fall of Troy, journey to Italy, take up a position in Latium, and set in motion the chain of events that resulted in the foundation of Rome. The whole thing is covered in an epic poem, the Aeneid, written by Vergil in the early empire, parallel to the Iliad.
Gregory skips the poem, but decides it would not be too unacceptable to his masters in the Frankish Empire if something like that happened to them, hence the myth of the Trojan Franks. A band of Trojans escaping the conflagration of Troy came to Pannonia up the Danube and founded a city called Sicambria after their own name, the Sicambri. There they were assigned the name of the Franks by the Roman emperors, and went on to populate the Lower Rhine.
The myth in the light of modern scholarship
[edit]Modern scholarship has resulted in a preponderance of evidence that there is no possibility of any Franks at Troy or any escape on their part up the Danube. Furthermore, the supposed direction of migration was actually opposite from that of the myth. Sicambria was inhabited by Franks from the Lower Rhine per order of the Roman army, in which they had enlisted as frontier guards. Consequently moderns regard the myth as an error on Gregory's part, an obvious fill-in for a gap caused by loss of tradition.
There are two main obstacles in the path of the speculation. First is a time difference. It is standard in the field of Classical Archeology that the destruction of Troy that is the theme of the Iliad and also begins the Aeneid must be dated to the Late Bronze Age. It more or less ends the Mycenaean Period. The earliest tribal names of Europe are at least several hundred years later, in the Iron Age. In the Late Bronze Age none of the Iron Age states yet existed, much less the Roman provinces. Rome did not exist yet. The sources for the date of Troy available to Gregory were the same as those used by Carl Blegen to estimate the date of Troy. Gregory could have arrived at the same conclusion as did Blegen, had he not been distracted by the Roman dogma.
The second major condition is the difference in culture. The Franks spoke Germanic. Even if one may assume an early assimilation to Latin or an admixture of Celtic, neither were the language of Troy, which, based on an inscription finally found in the last major excavation of Troy, was most likely Luvian, an Anatolian language. Specifically it was neither Etruscan nor Greek. Moreover, the Germanic proto-language most likely did not exist yet.
The question that most naturally arises is, what prompted Gregory to choose the Trojans.
The sources
[edit]Gregory of Tours
[edit]- JONATHAN BARLOW Gregory of Tours and the Myth of the Trojan Origins of the Franks Frühmittelalterliche Studien 29 (1), 86-95 http://ereserve.library.utah.edu/Annual/HIST/4990/Moreira/Trojan.pdf
Liber Historiae Francorum
[edit]Fredegar
[edit]See also
[edit]References
[edit]Reference bibliography
[edit]- Huppert, George (1965). "The Trojan Franks and their Critics". Studies in the Renaissance. 12: 227–241.
External links
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