The Sicambri, a powerful tribe apparently migrating along the Danube and the Rhine, were arriving presumably in the eastern region of the Lower Rhine in the period of Tiberius Caesar Augustus. Gregory of Tours might have connected them with a ‘migratory legend’ somewhat related to that part of land which was known to the Romans as Germania inferior and Belgica inferior. Gregory writes in book II,9 that
the Franks came from Pannonia and first settled on the bank of the Rhine; they then crossed the river, marched through ‘Thongeria’, and set over them long-haired kings chosen from the foremost and most noble family of their race in every village ‹ ‘pagus’ › or city ‹ ‘civitas’ › ...

Pannonia or Baunonia ?

As quoted above, Gregory of Tours actually maintains that the Franks migrated from ‘Pannonia’ into their well known later domain, which then, since 4^th century, was formed mainly on the left bank of the Rhine. However, Reinhard Wenskus does not exclude the possibility that Gregory could have misunderstood Baunonia or Bannomanna as Pannonia. Both name forms of this location provides Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia; cf. Wenskus, Der ‘hunnische’ Siegfried. Fragen eines Historikers an den Germanisten. In: Heiko Uecker (Ed.), Studien zum Altgermanischen, RGA Ergänzungsband 11 (1994). p. 688. Pliny writes in book IV,xiii(94), cf. Bostock & Riley IV(,27),13:

The obvious island Baunonia/Bannomanna, since Pytheas of Massalia considered with Metuo(nis), has been scholarly regarded either in the North Sea area, west of Jutland, or somewhere in the Baltic Sea, cf. Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, RGA 20, pgs 1-4.

Pliny refers to Pytheas and Metuo(nis) in XXXVII,xi(35–36) with this description:

Regarding the identification of Abalus, as said being in proximity to the Teutones, who temporarily settled in a southern or southwestern region of the Jutland Peninsula, some analysts think about Heligoland, whose area is said to have been enormously larger in the Middle Ages. However, remarkable findings of amber on this island, which some researcher likes to connect with the seat of an Eddaic hero Helgi, can not be denied.

The western part of Jutland according to the mathematician and cartographer Johannes Mejer, who had evaluated so-called ‘Urbare’, certifications of land ownership, for this geographic survey. The sinking of enormous land areas of a group of islands off western Jutland was caused by the devastating Marcellus floods in the years 1219 and 1362, cf. Heligoland below left on the map. The current land outlines (red) were drawn by Dipl. Ing. Hans Peter Balfanz, Hamburg. Baunonia has been estimated also west of Jutland. In its former area are said another 23 islands that were circumnavigated by the Romans, of which Bŭrcana, as Pliny further notes, is considered the best known. Could it have been the eponym for Borkum, which is possibly too far to the west? Image resolution for A4 print format: 300 dpi

Taking this context further, some elder and modern authors seem to agree with the spelling form  Basilia(m) of Pytheas and Timaeus in the meaning of Balcia(m), as Pliny quotes the latter toponym provided by Xenophon of Lampsakus, cf. Pliny IV(95). However, as regards the identification of this large island with ‘Baltia’, Josef Svennung points out that inscriptional evidence of -ci- before a vowel for a replacement with -ti- can be found in transmissions already since the 2^nd century: e.g. tercia for tertia. Thus, regarding the Isle of ‘a.balus’, its original root may have been a*Bal. Referring to some conjections already by Kaspar Zeuss (1837), Josef Svennung and Richard Hennig would even support an equation of this potential Baltia with the Scandinavian Peninsula – and why could not the Jutland Peninsula then be meant inclusively or instead?

PANNONIA near Illyricum or Illium ?

On the other hand, Pannonia on the Balkan Peninsular has been geographically connected with the Illyrians/Illyrii already by the descriptions of Hecataeus of Miletus (6^th century BC), cf. also the Roman province Illyricum of 1^st century.

The chronicle of the so-called Fredegar makes known the ‘Trojan origin’ of the Franks in his books II,4–6,8,9 and III,2. According to Fredegar’s accounts, which he recursively defends i.a. with the writings of Jerome of Stridon and Virgil (III,2), the people of ‘Latium’ under Aneas and those led by Friga were inferred from Troy. In II,8 Fredegar calls Frigia/Friga, an eminent protagonist of the Franks, as brother of Aeneas, whom he introduces as a rex Latinorum. Furthermore (II,4–5 and III,2), the pseudonymous authorship of this chronicle claims Priamus as the first king of the Trojan Franks, and moreover, that these people had to emigrate from Troy because of its cunning conquest by Odysseus. Then Fredegar proceeds to evocate that the division and the great wandering of these Trojans occurred during and after Friga’s rulership: One part emigrated to Macedonia and formed it essentially thereafter, and the other, now under Francio, was guided to settle on the banks of the Danube and the Ocean ‹ cf. III,2 – which one: the Atlantic, the North or Black Sea? ›. The reader of III,2 is also told that the later Franks under Friga moved through Asian territory, and II,6 provides also a further separation on the Danube, which brought forth the Torci/Turqui. Fredegar then continues that Francio’s people came to a region near the Rhine, where they  built an unfinished city according to the model of Troy.

Regarding in this context the Colonia Ulpia Traiana (CUT) at Xanten on the Lower Rhine, Fredegar’s localization appears even as an unhistorical northern allocation. Ewig follows this interpretation:

Edward James (The Franks, p. 235) agrees basically with this possible context and argues without Athanarid’s ‘mythical assoziation’:

The Liber Historiae Francorum (LHF) provides the ‘Trojan history of the Franks’ with only an approximate matching story (c.1–3). There are mainly these significant differences:

According to the Liber, Greek kings were warring against the tyrant Aeneas, who finally fled from Illium (Ilium = Troy) with his loyal people to Italy. However, the rest of the Trojan people was shipped by two leaders called Priamus and Antenor, and these 12,000 people came across the Black Sea via Tanais, (on) Don river, and the Maeotian marshes (Sea of Azov) to ‘Pannonia nearby’, where they built a civitas Sicambria (c.1). After rendering successfully service for the Romans against Alans in the Maetion region, they received from ‘Emperor Valentinian’ the name Francos – the ‘Wild People’ in Attic language as already mentioned by Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae IX 2,10 and (e.g.) the Carolingian scholar Ermoldus Nigellus, Carmen in honorem Ludowici  Pii (c.2). The Liber then narrates that after ten years, when the Franks violently refused to pay the customary tax to the Empire, their leader Priamus was killed in fighting for their independence. As the Liber's authorship underlines this resolute military response of the Romans, Priamus' Franks finally had to flee to the Rhine because of their superiority (c.3).

A civitas called Sicambria was not found in the regions of Pannonia and the Danube (Ister), but Tacitus annotates a cohors Sugambra that repulsed rebelling Thracians (dated AD 26), cf. Annals IV,47. The only Sicambrians or Sugambrians we reliably know of have been historically localized mainly in the eastern Westphalian Lowland and, temporarily, on the Lower Rhine. Since Gregory connects Clovis' regional descent with the same region, the Franks under his predecessor(s) may have previously settled east of the Lower Rhine. But he nowhere tells the Trojan legend in his Decem Libri Historiarum.

This very dubious Trojan legend goes back further in time. Already in the 5^th century the Gallo-Roman bishop, poet and politician Sidonius Apollinaris spread the story that the people of Auvergne (Clermont) were said to be of the same blood as the Trojans. He wrote in his letter to Bishop Graecus, dated to 474 or 475, on the martial Visigothic annexation (Epistolae VII,7,2):

Sidonius had certainly read De Bello Civili written by the 1^st century Roman poet Lucanus (‘Lucan’), who left this passage on the wars between Julius Caesar and Pompey in book I:

Arvernique ausi Latio se fingere fratres sanguine ab Iliaco populi

[Transl.: and Avernians pretending to be Latium’s brothers, as if they were a people of Trojan blood.]

In the 4^th century, the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus may have quoted the idea of Trojan origin of the Gauls, see his Res gestae XV,ix,4–5:

However, still to be annotated are the records of the Roman writer Tacitus as a likely or potential receptive source. As he provides in his Germania, c. 3, ‹ the Trojan hero › Odysseus is said to have built Asciburgium and an altar there on the banks of the Rhine. (Asciburgium is the Latin name of the Roman castra at Moers-Asberg on the Lower Rhine.)

The historical point of establishing the Trojan descent of the Franks has been thematized with Ammianus. With him in mind, Ian N. Wood predicates:

According to reliable historical sources, the most important development of the Franks, by which we mean especially their tremendous rise by its history of power politics, undoubtedly began in this area. This rather late view finds support – of course disregarding Fredegar and the Liber – in the earliest extant mention of the Franks. In 291 they first appear as Franci in a panegyric to the emperors Diocletian and Maximian. About 70 years later, Aurelius Victor notes in his Liber de Caesaribus that the peoples of the Franks (= Francorum gentes) had already ravaged Gaul by the end of the 250s.

Concluding further about the literary-historical impact of the Troyan legend, the authors of Fredegar and the Liber, possibly even Sidonius at hand of e.g. Lucan, may have equated the Illyrii with the people of Ilium/Illium, the second Latin name of Troy, for creating a precious story about the progenitors of the Franks. According to prevailing scholarly opinion, it is obvious that Fredegar and the writer(s)/editor(s) of the Liber tried to impute an ancient tribal origin with royal tradition to the Franks, which had to be at peers with the highly respected civilizations of the Romans and the Greeks.

Gregory of Tours vs Trojan-Carolingian ancestry ?

Gregory of Tours, who might not necessarily mean that Pannonia as the prominent part of today’s Hungary, could have suspected all this; cf. Wenskus (op. cit.), but see Wood (op. cit. p. 35) remembering Gregory’s devotional relation to St Martin of Tours coming from there. Though writing definitely before Fredegar and the Liber’s author(s), Gregory most likely reviewed and rejected foreseeingly the sources and highly questionable elaborations of these authors and their later editors on the Frankish Troy myth. At least Gregory refrained from equating the people of Troy with the Illyrians, whose territory came later under the Roman Illyricum, which partly overlapped Pannonia or was adjacent to its region.

With additions known as Continuationes to Fredegar’s original transmission of about AD 650, efforts can be observed among the (Pre-)Carolingians around Charles Martel’s (half-)brother Childebrand to corroborate the Trojan reference by questionably appearing sources of evidence. See, for example, the Historia Daretis Frigii de origine Francorum, a compilation completed around 770 to present the origin of the Franks from Dares’ novel Daretis Phrygii de excidio Trojae historia (likely of the 5^th century). This work is by no means the only one with which Carolingian historians imputed knowledge of the Trojan origin to Frankish history. In the Historia vel gesta Francorum (apparently completed under Childebrand’s son Nibelung), which was presented almost simultaneously with the de origine Francorum attributed to Dares, further compilations were cited in terms of content which had been written as excerpts under the titles Scarpsum de Cronica Hieronimi and Scarpsum de Cronica Gregorii episcopi Toronaci in order to affirm the Trojan origin of the Franks with further sources. Bede, too, was used for this purpose: Moreover, the Carolingian author of the Chronicon universale usque ad annum 741 contextualizes the Trojan origin of the Franks at hand of Bede’s chronology in De temporum ratione, cf. c.66. The latest Carolingian ethnology of Trojan descent received further support from Paulus Diaconus, who was temporarily active in the scriptorium of Charlemagne. In his Gesta episcoporum Mettensium, Paul did not shy away from declaring Ansegisel’s name, who was the father of Pippin II, as the ancestral memory of the Trojan Anchises/Anschisus, as he could already be taken from Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. Further, the 8^th-century author Aethicus ‘Ister’, whose epithet may be attributed to the Danube and/or Istria, knows of details by Frankish historiography as provided especially by the Liber. Following to certain extent also the Historia Daretis Frigii de origine Francorum, he forwards the Trojan Frigia/Frigio as the father of Franco and Vasso in his rather bizarre Cosmographia.

Regarding the Frankish ancestry of the first half of 5^th century, a Germanic chief called Meroveus, the suggested grandfather of Clovis I, appears recorded for rendering heroic service to the Romans about 417. At that time, possibly as a merited high-ranked mercenary, this Meroveus (Merovech) appears rewarded with the leadership of parts of the Germania inferior and Belgica inferior, nowadays pertaining to Dutch, Belgian and German territory. He could have ruled even Sicambrian and/or adjacent regions east of the Lower Rhine, albeit we do not know where he came from. We may also question whether his father was the leader of those Franks who moved eastward to and possibly across the Rhine in the second half of the 4^th century. Furthermore, we know that a few generations earlier a Merogaisus is said to have commanded Bructerians, temporarily located on the eastern bank of the Lower Rhine along the Lippe river, who were defeated and subjugated by Constantine the Great in 306. This may give rise to the etymologically- ethnically- geographically based conjecture that Merovech could also have had a rulership in this area in the first half of 5^th century. We may also annotate that Flavius Merobaudes, a native Frank († 383 or 388), was acting under Emperor Valentinian II as magister militum, acting in 377 as consul for the Western Empire.

With regard to geoethnic identifications, Karl Müllenhoff (Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum, 6, p. 433) follows Heinrich Leo (Lehrbuch der Universalgeschichte 2, 28) who connects Merovingian location with the Dutch watercourse Merwe (Merwede). Franz Joseph Mone (Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der teuschen Heldensage, 1836, p. 47) recounts some authors who have already combined likewise. Emil Rückert (Oberon von Mons und die Pipine von Nivella, 1836, p. 39) argues accordingly:

Eugen Ewig regards the earliest region of the Salian Franks originated in the region of the Overyssel. This river is crossing the former Sal-land which may stand for the former central part of the Frankish Salia, as roughly marked today by the Dutch towns Deventer, Kampen and the German Nordhorn. Likely with Batavian people, they afterwards migrated to Toxandria which encompassed the current Dutch province of North Brabant and, finally in the first half of the 5^th century, the region mainly west of the woodland called Silva Carbonaria.

According to estimations mainly based on archaeological explorations of Frisian and Low Saxon lands, the Salian Franks were settling previously, until c. 365/370, between Mid and North German lands up to the middle course of Weser river; cf. for instance Eugen Ewig, Die Merowinger und das Frankenreich, p. 9. Following further archaeological and historical estimation, Saxon tribes had forced them to move south- and southwestward in the second half of the 4^th century. Thereafter, after the beginning of the 5^th century, the Franks withdrew to regions mainly on the left side of the Lower Rhine.

The Cosmographer of Ravenna describes the geography of the Francia Rinensis between c. 480 and 490. He reckons the Germania inferior, almost the whole Belgica superior (presumably without Verdun) and a northern part of the Germania superior to the ‘Rhenish Franks’, cf. RGA 9 (1995) p. 369.

The castle was (re-?)built between 1357 and 1368 by Lord Diederick van Horne who was (nick-)named Loef (Lion). In 1385, Albrecht van Beieren took over possession of the castle and appointed his trustee Brunstijn van Herwijnen as the castle’s keeper.

It seems obvious that already in and after the 3^rd century AD the Franks settled Frisian coastland extending from the banks of the North Sea to the Channel. Regarding this spatio-temporal situation, Ian N. Wood combines the demonic origin for the Merovingians – its lineage gendered by a bistea Quinotaurus (Fredegar’s book III,9, see below under Merovingian etymology and (re)placements) – with a suggestive association of them with the sea:

[Wood, Defining the Franks: Frankisch origins in early  medieval  historiography.  In: From Roman Provinces to Medieval Kingdoms, ed. Thomas F.X. Noble (2006), pgs 91-98, cf. p. 93.]

Not basically contradictory to this abstracted focus on the genesis and localization of the Merovingians, we can encounter an obvious early ‘Nordic representative’ of them: turning to the heroic lays of the Edda and the Vǫlsunga saga, their writers know of a king called Hjalprek. Some analysts suggested him as Chilperic I, but he could have been confused with Childeric I, father of Clovis I (likely the Old Norse Hlǫðvér mentioned in the Wǫlundarkviða and Guðrúnarkviða II), which may indicate an early tradition conveyed already in the time of that Chilperic I. In the Guðrúnarkviða II,25, Gudrun’s mother offers (a part of) Hlǫðvér’s sali = Clovis' kingdom to the brave one who avenges the death of her son-in-law Sigurð. Clovis' alleged father Childeric is said to have sailed as far as the Mediterranean, to have had also martial Anglo-Saxon activities and, if representing Hjalprek, also a realm in Denmark or rather on the Jutland Peninsular. Further, a Saxon chief Cheldric appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. Since the Thidrekssaga may point to an analogous or similar dynastical-geographical milieu that already show the Sinfiǫtlalok and Sigurðarkviða Fafnisbana ǫnnur, we may also recognize the figures called Nidung and Ortvangis, and regions to be determined as the Hesbaye (not ‘Hispania’) in Salerni (geostrategically the Salian province Belgica II) and Þióð/Thiodi/T(h)y on Jutland.

Regarding the latter region, the lands around the Limfjord on the ancient ‘Amber Route’, of considerable strategic importance for maritime Frisians, Franks and Saxons, seems worth the effort to scrutinize there the presence of the first Meroveus. There are at least two locations of interest whose former spelling and tradition seem to indicate themselves as name spending godfather: The isle of Mors with known word forms of ‘Morø...’ and, close to the east, Cap Salling.

Further to mention is Samsø (Samsey) north of Funen, where the Lokasenna,24 from the Poetic Edda already narrates a meeting of Loki with Odin. The naming of Samsø, a venue given by the historiographer Saxo Grammaticus and Old Norse sagas, is said to be based on ‘Sams ey’ (‘Sam’s Isle’) and may appear as personalized as the name Samson in the Merovingian genealogy. Appearing rather as a Salian-Frankish than Italian hero of the Thidrekssaga, Samson as the nickname or second name of Childerich – or the Old Norse Hjalprek – has been critically questioned in the bandwidth between saga and historiography:

With respect to Fredegar’s parable of Merovingian genesis, possibly typified by means of rather a native Nordic chief Meroveus with (e.g.) ‹ impressing horns on his furry alien helmet ›, we may wonder about Emil Rückert’s successive order of Merovingian onomastics and question furthermore: Was there already any recurrently related Nordic homeland of the invading ‘Salian’ or Merovingian founder, the name spending godfather of that dynasty which the Dutch Merwede and its contemporarily surrounding region Salland or, more common, Salia seem to remember?

Reinhard Wenskus remarks that Bishop Freculf of Lisieux, formerly a pupil at the scriptorium of Charlemagne’s Aachen residence, claims Scandinavian origin of the Franks despite of his knowledge of the Trojan legend, cf. J. P. Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, Seria I, latina, CVI, col. 967:

The RGA (see appendix below) recounts that Feculf’s contemporary Ermoldus Nigellus, a son of Louis the Pious, notes in the vita of his father a fama (heroic lore, popular tradition) that situates the origin of the Franks to the neighbourhood of the Danes.

After all, it seems superfluous to underline that both Carolingian scholars have deliberately ignored the southern Pannonian migration of the Franks provided by Fredegar, the Liber Historiae Francorum and – if actually referring to the southern Pannonia – Gregory of Tours.

A subtle figural-personified reference to Frigio’s Franks migrating rather via Frisian islands may have been left by the first continuator of the Fredegar’s chronicle in ch. 17, where these people appear paraphrased with forms such as maritimam Frigionum/Frigione..., Insulas Frigionum..., exercitum Frigionum...; cf. MGH SS rer. Merov. 2 (1888), p. 176.


Merovingian etymology and (re)placements

A further onomastic approach, which basically does not contradict these northern localizations of apparently experienced Merovingian seafarers, might come from the students and translators of the Old English Beowulf, cf. its lines 2920–2921:

merewíoingas    milts ungyfeðe.

Karl Simrock equated the term on the left with the ‘Merovingas’ (Ger. ‘Merowinge(r)’, cf. Beowulf, Stuttgart & Augsburg 1859, p. 147). Francis B. Gummere correspondingly translated this very passage

And ever since the Merovings' favor has failed us wholly...,

whereas other reputable philologists (e.g. Levin Ludwig Schücking, Martin Lehnert, Gisbert Haefs) have emended the term in question to the compound

mere-wícingas = sea-pirates.

Fredegar provides this parable of the Merovingian genesis (book III,9), as already quoted in the author’s article Merovingians by the Svava:

Fertur, super litore maris aestatis tempore Chlodeo cum uxore resedens, meridiae uxor ad mare labandum vadens,* bistea Neptuni Quinotauri similis eam adpetisset. Cumque in continuo aut a bistea aut a viro fuisset concepta, peperit filium nomen Meroveum, per co regis Francorum post vocantur Merohingii.
[It is said that in the summertime Chlodio sat with his wife on the shore of the churning sea, and at noon she went to ‹ take a bath in › the Labadian Sea* where a beast of Neptune, which resembled a Quinotaur, took possession of her. Whether he may have been begotten by the beast or by the man, in any case, she bore a son named Meroveus, and after him the kings of the Franks were later called Merovingians.]
_______________
*  Fredegar most likely means Labadus or Lebedus (Lebedos), one of the twelve cities of the Ionian League located on the Aegean Sea as the
     urbs Ioniæ in Asia minori, maritima in parte Australi Isthmi
     peninsulæ Ioniæ; quæ etiam Labadus dicta est...
as explained by the author of the Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti...,  Jacobi Usserii Annales, Genevæ MDCCXXII, Index Geographicus ‘L’.

Image by www.figuren-shop.de with added details by the author.

Does this ‘Greek version’ allow to re-transfer this location, just c. 135 mi. (c. 218 km) south of the archaeological Troy, to a shore of Chlodio’s domain somewhere on the North Sea? And we further may ask for a compromise to all translators mentioned above: Is there generally reason enough to contradict the derivative-based identification mere-wícingas → Merovings?

According to all this we can only assume with this abstract that Chlodio’s Franks could have come from the south to the northern Rhine, while his successor Merovech possibly had his roots rather in the north. Thus, it seems obvious that Fredegar did not arbitrarily decide for the drastically depicted interference of Merovech into the ancestral lineage of Chlodio’s Franks. Considering at least contemporary tradition, understanding and conviction, this may actually correspond with a massive intervention into the ethnic identity of the gens Francorum: If Chlodio’s wife had been impregnated by a barbarian individual, the male Trojan lineage would have been lost. Fredegar looks upon this highly probable disruption as an authoritative offence against the prima linea Francorum, and he showed reason enough to vent his frustration about this with a splendid theatrical performance. Because he hardly wanted to see the Trojan lineage broken, he transferred the stage of his drama, in which Chlodio seems to appear in the rôle of a ‘vice-father’, to that impressing coastal scenery which had to be not far away from Troy.

Gregory’s vague statement on Merovech’s racial inclusion, ascribing him to Chlodio’s stock ‘as asserted’ : De huius stirpe quidam Merovechum regem fuisse adserunt (op. cit. II,9), has been much thematized. With regard to Fredegar’s parable, however, we can obviously conclude no more than an unclear consanguinity between Merovech and Chlodio. However, we can also ask urgently: would Fredegar have written his play at all if Childeric had been fathered by Chlodio?

The RGA vol. 22 (2003) pgs 189–191, see translation below, states on the ‘Origo gentis’ of the Franks: