being slowly overrun by the Basques (turning its name from Novempopulana to Vasconia or Gascony). But the most serious symptoms of local independence were much nearer home, in Austrasia. In Dagobert's reign the antagonism between Austrasia and Neustria, which was to colour Merovingian politics for the rest of the seventh century, was already apparent. The difference between the two provinces was in part cultural: the language of the Neustrians was very largely Latin or protoFrench, while that of the Austrasians was largely Frankish or German. The Rhineland Franks had been conquered by the Salian Franks at the time of Clovis, but their separate identity was acknowledged and even fostered under Clovis's descendants. They successfully persuaded Dagobert to give them their own king, and it was under Dagobert that their own law code, Lex Ribvaria, was first written down.

Although it is possible to see in this regional fragmentation a foretaste of the break-up of the Merovingian kingdom later in the seventh century, there were positive aspects to Dagobert's rule. The right of the Merovingians to rule the kingdom was never questioned. Indeed, the record of the Merovingian dynasty in monopolizing royal power among the Franks for two and a half centuries is unparalleled anywhere else in early medieval Europe. As the dynasty grew older it survived partly because it was old, and hence endowed with immense prestige and mystique, and eventually because it was so powerless it was harmless. But it was also the only dynasty in north Europe which could justly claim to be the heirs to Roman power. The Byzantine emperor remained, in the eyes of the kings, their nominal sovereign. And Merovingian methods of government, even in the time of Dagobert, were recognizably Roman. Government and administration were still by the written word (the earliest surviving governmental documents are from the reigns of Chlothar and Dagobert), frequently still written on imported papyrus, following Roman bureaucratic norms, and the documents themselves, all in Latin, still used many of the old legal formulae. Administrators were still largely educated laymen, although from Chlothar II onwards there is an increasing clerical presence. Frankish pride in their own achievement bore fruit in Dagobert's reign in the emergence of

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