Notes |
- "...[T]here is no proved descent from any member of the Merovingian dynasty to any later medieval or modern person. They were subjected to the triple historical indignities of usurpation by the Carolingian Pippin, damnatio memoriae in the Carolingian accounts of that usurpation (such as Einhard's Vita Karoli magni), and finally the broad early-medieval problem of the scarcity of written records. The result is that a large and many-branched family appears to peter out in the historical record. The most accessible careful prosopography of this family is Christian Settipani's book, La préhistoire des Capétiens, Nouvelle histoire généalogique de l'auguste maison de France, gen. ed. Patrick Van Kerrebrouck, vol. 1 part 1 (Villeneuve d'Asq: Patrick Van Kerrebrouck, 1993). With detailed and thorough citations to both primary sources and the interpretive secondary literature, Settipani summarizes each (if not all) of the commonly claimed gateways from the Merovingian dynasty. The assertion that Bertrada, founder of the abbey of Prüm, was of Merovingian royal blood, is not implausible but it was a suggestion, first made by Maurice Chaume, based essentially on onomastics (the fact that members of her family appear to have used names also found in the royal dynasty)." [Nathaniel Lane Taylor]
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