As a pagan people living on the border of the Frankish kingdoms, and like the Franks inhabiting land on both sides of the River Rhine, we might expect the Frisians to have a central place in Frankish historiography, especially since they had featured in Roman sources concerning the area. But from a modern perspective the Frisians are notably absent from sources written before the late seventh century.1 Indeed, as Bazelmans has shown, there is a hiatus of over 300 years between the last Roman reference to Frisians and the first Frankish reference to them in 580.2 Furthermore, this reference comes not from a Frank, but from the Italian poet Venantius Fortunatus, who included them in a list of peoples in whom Chilperic I inspired fear.3 Conversely, Fortunatus’s contemporary Gregory of Tours mentions them neither when discussing Hygelac’s raid, which took place in the area we might expect to find Frisians, nor in any other part of his works.4 Bazelmans has argued the implications of archaeological work show there was massive, if not complete depopulation of the area in the third and fourth centuries. This would mean by the sixth century there were no peoples in the region who referred to themselves as Frisians.5 Instead, the re-introduction of the name came from the Franks, who simply borrowed an antique ethnographic label for the peoples of the Lower Rhine, and applied it to those who lived there in their own day; Fortunatus certainly provides a compelling link in the chain through which the Franks would have acquired such a term.6 By this argument, the term would then have been appropriated by the target group.
1
For what follows see J. Bazelmans, ‘The Early-Medieval Use of Ethnic Names from Classical Antiquity: The Case of the Frisians’, in T. Derks and N. Roymans, (eds.), Ethnic Constructs in
Antiquity: The Role of Power and Tradition (Amsterdam, 2009), pp. 321-337.
2 There had been a slightly earlier mention of Frisians by Procopius, which need not concern us here;
Bazelmans, ‘The Case of the Frisians’, p. 329.
3 Venantius Fortunatus, Opera Poetica, ed. F. Leo, MGH AA, 4, 1, ix.1. 4 DLH, iii.3 for Hygelac’s raid.
5
Bazelmans, ‘The Case of the Frisians’, pp. 322-7.
6
This was certainly the case by the end of the seventh century, when the Frisian rulers Aldgisl and Radbod appear in the sources. Nevertheless, it is impossible to determine how much authority the seventh-century Merovingians wielded over the Frisians.7 We should not over-emphasise the independence of the Frisians or other peripheral peoples in the late Merovingian period – or even their desire for independence – even if we should also not make the case the Frankish kings of this period wielded the same authority east of the Rhine as their predecessors had done. Far from enjoying independence from Frankish rule, Radbod’s rule in Frisia witnessed the beginning of a phase of aggressive interactions between the Frisians and the Pippinid-Carolingians, which began with the wars between Pippin II and Radbod in the 690s and culminated in the integration of Frisia into the growing Frankish Empire.
Yet just because the Franks used the blanket terms ‘Frisians’ and ‘Frisia’ to refer to the area around and to the north of the mouth of the Rhine does not mean this was a coherent unit, either politically or geographically. A definite border with, or materially different culture from Saxony is difficult to determine,8 as are the borders between these two regions and Austrasia. The blurring of the lines between Frisia and Saxony did not disappear during the ninth century, as shown by the trans- regional dioceses of Bremen and Münster (the latter founded by the Frisian missionary Liudger).9 Indeed, the Frisians and Saxons were even seen by some as ‘mixed together’.10
Geographically speaking the area is somewhat more distinct if divided into two sub-regions, something only Bede of all our early medieval authors did. While the area adjacent to Austrasia and dominated by Utrecht and Dorestad, which Bede referred to as Frisia citerior,11 was geographically similar to northern
7 Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms, pp. 160-1. 8
D. Meier, ‘The North Sea Coastal Area: Settlement History from Roman to Early Medieval Times’, in in D.H. Green and F. Siegmund (eds.), The Continental Saxons from the Migration Period to the
Tenth Century: An Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 37-66, at pp. 50-1.
9 For Bremen, see Vita sancti Willehadi, ed. A Poncelott, AASS 8th Nov., vol. 3 (Brussels, 1910), 8;
For Münster, see Vita Liudgeri, i.24.
10
See the charter of Lothar I preserved in Rudolf and Meginhard of Fulda, Translatio sancti
Alexandri, 4: ‘commixta.’ See also Wood, ‘Before or After Mission’; I.N. Wood, ‘Beyond Satraps
and Ostriches: Political and Social Structures of the Saxons in the Early Carolingian Period’, in D.H. Green, and F. Siegmund (eds), The Continental Saxons from the Migration Period to the Tenth
Century: An Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 271-98, at pp. 278-80; J.T. Palmer,
‘Beyond Frankish Authority? The Frisians Between Anglo-Saxons and Carolingians’, in H. Sauer and J. Story (eds), Anglo-Saxon England and the Continent (Arizona, 2011), pp. 139-162.
11
Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum, ed. B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1969), v.10.
Francia,12 the area to the north of the Rhine was quite different, being composed of hill-settlements known as terpen (or wierden) which stretched across the modern- day northern Netherlands, north-eastern Germany and southern Denmark. These
terpen provided the only areas of permanently habitable land in a region dominated
by salt marshes which were periodically submerged by rivers, lakes and tidal flooding, at least before the building of dikes from around 1200.13 The significance of this difference in geography is southern Frisia easily came under Frankish domination after Radbod’s death in 719. Northern Frisia – Frisia ulterior – on the other hand, was only fully subjected after 785 and the submission of the Saxon leader Widukind, who had some influence in the region, as we shall see; the terpen and the tides must have played at least as big a part in this difficulty as Frisian paganism did.
What will concern us in this chapter, though, is not the narrative of either the conquest or the conversion of Frisia.14 Instead, we will focus on the place of the Frisians in the political and religious discourses of the early Carolingian period, in other words how they were depicted in the sources of the eighth and early ninth centuries.15 Most of these sources are Frankish in origin, and those that are not tend at least to have what we can call a Frankish perspective, in that they represent contemporary Frankish thought in some way. The authors of our historical sources were almost certainly all Franks who had some connection to the Frankish royal court. The hagiographers tended to be non-Franks – primarily Anglo-Saxons or Frisians – but their audience understood the Frankish context the saints worked in, and so the sources should be seen as representing Frankish religious thought. There were also two Anglo-Saxon authors who dealt with Frisia in texts written for an initially Anglo-Saxon audience. Bede included information about the Frisian missions of Wilfrid and Willibrord in his Historia Ecclesiastica, but his use of the clearly Frankish phrase Frisia citerior and his Christian subject matter, which
12
H.A. Heidinga, Frisia in the First Millennium: An Outline, ed. J. Bazelmans and D. Gerrets (Utrecht, 1997), pp. 38-44.
13 Heidinga, Frisia, pp. 35-8.
14 For which, see Heidinga, Frisia, pp. 18-24; Levison, England and the Continent, pp. 49-65;
Wallace-Hadrill, Frankish Church, pp. 143-7.
15 Because of this focus, we must also leave aside the issue of the Frisians as traders in the early
medieval North Sea world. This topic has been addressed particularly comprehensively by S. Lebecq,
Marchands et navigateurs frisons du haut Moyen Age, 2 vols (Lille, 1983). See also, Heidinga, Frisia, pp. 27-32.
favours Willibrord and Pippin II over Radbod, mean even he was part of a wider discourse which both influenced and was influenced by Frankish ideology.16 Stephen of Ripon also mentioned Frisia in his Vita Wilfridi when dealing with Wilfrid’s continental exploits.17
As we have seen in previous chapters, this source actually contains information about and interpretations of Frankish matters not found in any contemporary Frankish sources, and so we should not separate it from having continental interests or appeal.
We will begin by looking at representations of the individual Frisian for whom we have the best evidence: Radbod. As we shall see, this evidence is not always uniform or conclusive in the picture it paints, but it allows us to see how Radbod was perceived by those living in the century after his death, during which time he achieved something of a central position in both historical and hagiographical narratives. This status was achieved due to Radbod’s very nature; he was a Frisian pagan who was intimately involved in the political conflicts of the Franks, thus placing him in that ambiguous position between member of the community and outsider. The LHF-author, who lived through these conflicts, certainly had little sympathy for the Frisian ruler, while for Fredegar’s continuator and the AMP-author, looking back on the origins of Carolingian dominance, his relationship with the Franks made him something of a model for the relationship between the Franks and their peripheries. Radbod’s paganism and political dominance of Frisia at the time when the Frisian mission was beginning also made him a point of discussion for those writing about the missionaries, and he thus features heavily in the hagiographical materials concerned with the Frisian mission. Yet depictions of him in these sources are neither straight-forward nor one- dimensional. While he could be portrayed as an idolater and a persecutor, as he was in Vita Bonifatii, he could also be portrayed as a more reasonable leader with whom the missionaries negotiated the progress of their work. It is this Radbod we see hinted at in Vita Willibrordi, and more explicitly in Vita Vulframni.18
Once we have established Radbod’s place in early Carolingian political and religious thought we will turn to the place of the Frisians themselves. This is slightly harder to access, because the Frisians are largely absent from the historical
16 On the Frankish origin of the term Frisia citerior see Bazelmans, ‘The Case of the Frisians’, p.
331.
17
Stephen of Ripon, Vita Wilfridi, 27. See Palmer, ‘Wilfrid and the Frisians’, pp. 231-42.
18
narratives in their accounts of events between the Battle of the Boorne in 734 and the Danish invasion of 810, with the annals instead focussing on other political opponents, as we have seen. Yet because of the importance of the Frisian mission as the base from which other missions east of the Rhine progressed, the Frisians continued to feature heavily in the hagiography, especially since the Frisians themselves began to contribute to this genre from the beginning of the ninth century. Thus we have rich portrayals of the eighth-century Frisians, ranging from the vicious murderers of Vita Bonifatii to the tide-worshipping pagans of Vita Liudgeri and Vita Vulframni, to the bizarre metaphors of Vita altera Bonifatii.19 Yet these portrayals were not simply depictions of a pagan Other. As the target of the mission, the Frisians became a tool through which the very nature of missionary work could be debated; the interactions between saint and pagans in a text show us each author’s own views on exactly how the conversion of non-Christians should be carried out, and so we see the emergence of a highly ambiguous depiction of the Frisians and their paganism.