Everything about Dagobert Ii totally explained
Dagobert II (c.
650 –
December 23,
679) was the
king of Austrasia (
676 – 679), the son of
Sigebert III and Chimnechild of Burgundy. He was the last of the
Merovingian dynasty to rule independently in
Austrasia, with the exception of Charles Martel's dubious candidate
Clotaire IV.
Overview
Dagobert II was the son of Sigibert III (631 - 656), an Austrasian king of the
Merovingian line.
The
Arnulfing mayor of the Austrasian
palace,
Grimoald the Elder, the son of
Pippin of Landen, and Dagobert's guardian, had had his own son
Childebert adopted by Sigebert III, when Sigebert was still childless. Then when Sigebert died in
656, Grimoald seized the throne for his own son and had Dagobert
tonsured and exiled.
The tale that Dagobert was ordered to be killed and his death published about, but that he was spirited out of the country, seems to be an embellishment, perhaps developed to explain the silence of Dagobert's mother Chimnechild. She may have cooperated with Grimoald to set up Childebert the Adopted; later she hoped by marrying her daughter
Bilichild to
Childeric II to keep the eventual Austrasian heir in her bloodline.
(External Link
) It has also been hypothesised that Chimnechild wasn't Dagobert's mother, thus her reason for abandoning him.
Dagobert was given to the care of
Desiderius,
Bishop of Poitiers, where there was a cathedral school. The boy was sent on to a monastery in Ireland, sometimes identified as
Slane, to be further trained as a page at an Anglo-Saxon court in England. An old tradition relates that he married Mechthilde, an Anglo-Saxon princess, during his exile, but the tradition that among his daughters was Saint Hermine, abbess of Oëren, and Saint Adula, abbess of Pfalzel, are fabrications, perhaps designed to link the saintly foundresses of these abbeys with the revered Merovingian line.
In the meantime the great nobles of Austrasia appealed to
Clovis II, king of
Neustria, who expelled the usurpers, executing Grimoald and Childebert, and added Austrasia to his own realm. The dating of these events is greatly confused, they occurred perhaps as early as
657 or as late as
661, under
Clotaire III, Clovis' son. The effective ruler however was the Neustrian
major domo Ebroin, who was obliged soon thereafter (in
660 or
662) to give the Austrasian realm a king of its own once more: the choice was the child king
Childeric II, brother of Clotaire III, with a mayor of the palace,
Wulfoald, as regent. The young king was assassinated on a hunt near
Maastricht in
675, and in the chaotic power struggle that ensued, the Austrasian magnates, who wanted a king of Merovingian blood, pressed Wulfoald for the return of Dagobert, while opponents of Wulfoald acclaimed one
Clovis III, possibly an impostor. Ebroin returned from a monastic "retirement" to lead Clovis' partisans, but Wulfoald effected Dagobert's succession in 676, partly through the help of
Wilfrid, Bishop of York, on Clovis' untimely death. In spite of the continuing bitter enmity of
Ebroin and the party who had attempted to press Clovis as an alternate candidate, Dagobert was restored to a portion of his rightful lands, a territory along the
Rhine, which pious tradition relates that he governed with the mildness and piety his childhood experience had taught him, but which history suggests he left largely to the mayor of the Austrasian palace, while he concerned himself more with the founding of cloisters and abbeys, including
Surburg and
Wissembourg in Alsace, where the Duke was his cousin. Nonetheless, he was undoubtedly an intelligent, educated man, an adult at the time of his succession, who couldn't be completely controlled by factions and mayors.
The dynamics of Dagobert's career are largely a passive reflection of the competition between two sources of power, patronage and prestige, the
palace institutions of Neustria on the one hand, and on the other, of Austrasia, firmly in the control of the Arnulfing dynasty that would become the
Carolingians in the following century. In the chaos, the search for a consistent, rational pattern is hard to follow in the shifting loyalties.
During revived conflict between Neustria and Austrasia, Dagobert in his turn was murdered in another hunting incident, December 23, 679, near
Stenay-sur-Meuse in the
Ardennes, probably on orders from Ebroin, still mayor of the palace in
Neustria. Wilfrid must have remained in Austrasia until this time, because, according to his biographer, Wilfrid left Austrasia after the death of Dagobert, in mortal danger from the supporters of Ebroin. At the cloister of Stenay afterwards there grew a cult of Dagobert, venerated as early as 1068 as "Saint Dagobert". The cult spread from there into
Lotharingia and
Alsace, and Saint Dagobert is recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, like his father and many royal
Merovingians.
After Dagobert's brief reign, leaving his lands without a male heir, the lords of the
Rhineland divided the territory among themselves, while Pippin II, Mayor of the Palace of Austrasia (679 – 714) dominated Austrasia, and left the throne empty until after the battle of Tertry (687), when he accepted
Theuderic III.
The Feast Date of St Dagobert II is 23 December
In popular culture
The name of Dagobert II achieved prominence in 20th century popular culture, when it became associated with speculation, which tried to link Dagobert II and his supposed descendants with a secret
Merovingian line of legitimate royal succession, unjustly displaced by the Carolingian and Capetian monarchies but continuing into modern times. It is currently one of the central legends associated with the conspiracy-laden French village of
Rennes-le-Château.
Some hoaxsters, led by
Pierre Plantard, had forged two sets of documents to fabricate supposed proof of the existence of a thousand-year-old secret society, the
Priory of Sion. One set of documents, the
Dossiers Secrets, was planted in the
Bibliothèque nationale. The other set was published in a 1960s French "hidden treasure" book,
Le Tresor Maudit de Rennes-le-Chateau. In the book were (forged) Latin documents that had supposedly been found by a priest in the 19th century. An encrypted message hidden in one of the Latin documents revealed the phrase, "
A Dagobert II Roi et a Sion est ce tresor et il est la mort." ("To King Dagobert II and to Sion does this treasure belong, and he's there dead.")
Henry Lincoln, a British science-fiction author, spotted the encrypted message in 1967, and, unaware of the hoax, he and some associates began writing books about what the message might mean. This eventually brought the story to mainstream attention via the 1982
pseudohistory book
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. The book attempted to put forward a hypothesis that
Jesus Christ had married
Mary Magdalene and sired a child who had later married into the Merovingian line, and that the assassinated Dagobert II had really had a secret male heir who had been spirited away to "his mother's hometown" of Rennes-le-Château after his father's death.
It was later shown that much of the research in
Holy Blood Holy Grail was based on the forged documents. However, the theory gained further attention when it was incorporated into the 2003 bestselling novel
The Da Vinci Code by
Dan Brown. Because Brown claimed that the information about the Priory of Sion was "factual," many debunking books and documentaries resulted, further bringing the little-known name of Dagobert II into the limelight.
Further Information
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