the tradition that the Franks were descended from the Trojan royal family, and were thus equal to the Romans. By the eighth century Franks would boast that they were superior to the Romans; Romans had persecuted Christians, while the Franks were powerful protectors of the Church.

Dagobert's own achievements and ambitions were quite the equal of his sixth-century ancestors. He chose a Frankish duke for Thuringia; he organized the Church in Alamannia, and he had law codes drawn up for the Alamans and the Bavarians. Even those Germanic peoples adjacent to Slav and Avar territory were prepared to acknowledge his rule. The monarchy still had considerable amounts of land at its disposal, and Dagobert and his aristocracy were able to bestow large quantities of it upon the Church. This was a period of monastic renewal in northern Gaul, inspired by the Irish holy man Columbanus. Several of the court officials of Chlothar and Dagobert were involved in this movement, including Audoen and Desiderius. The best known was an Aquitanian called Eligius (immortalized in a French nursery rhyme about St Eloi and Dagobert's trousers). He was a goldsmith and jeweller, brought to Paris to embellish some of the great churches of Neustria, including Saint-Denis, but also to act as a senior financial official at court. He acted also as a moneyer; coins bearing his name are well known to numismatists. He entered the church not long after Dagobert's death, became bishop of Noyon, and won a reputation as a holy man concerned with evangelizing his diocese. There were in northern Gaul at this time a number of clerics originating in the Gallo-Roman aristocracy of Aquitaine, who still preserved the learning and traditions of the Roman world. Their influence was strong in the revival of book production and learning in the Merovingian monasteries of the north, which in turn laid foundations for the revival of learning in the eighth century known nowadays as 'the Carolingian Renaissance'.

The Carolingians

The family which was to produce the most powerful rulers in Europe in the eighth century came from Austrasia, where they,

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