Citizen of the Franks, Roman soldier in arms. Such is the established translation of the first part of a burial inscription from the fourth century, which was discovered near the Middle Danube. We may call him the First Frank.
The text is rightly famous, as it seems to be one of the earliest pieces of evidence of the Franks as a “people”. The question, however, of how to rightly understand how the man or his next of kin thought to identify him has been hotly debated.
To get at the full understanding, it seems pertinent to note the full text, which reads:
Francus ego cives Romanus miles in armus, egregeria virtute tuli bello mea dextera semper (1).
First, we should note some spelling mistakes. “cives” should be “civis” (citizen) in correct Latin, “armus” is likely meant to be “armis” (in arms), and “egregeria” is probably a misspelling of “egregia” (outstanding, excellent). Also, semper appears to have lost the “p” on the way (however, this may be a misreading from the 19th century). It appears that the inscription is not the result of very skilled craftsmen.
Following this, the bottom line is easy to translate, as “mea dextera” was a standard metaphor for skills in battle, valour and “dexterity”. The expression is known from Virgil in the Aenids.
Thus, a translation of the second line might read: “always wielding my sword-arm in battle with outstanding valour”. From this alone, we might conclude our “First Frank” was a soldier of some renown among his equals.
Reading backwards, we learn that our man was a common Roman soldier carrying arms and, finally, that he was of Frankish descent. Or, perhaps more precisely, belonged to the Frankish tribe or nation.
The question, though, has been raised: how to read the first line. Should it read: Francus ego cives, Romanus miles in armis? Or rather: Francus ego, cives Romanus, miles in armis?
Did the man identify himself as a Frank with Roman citizenship and a career as a soldier? Or should we read: A Frank and a soldier in the Roman Army? As the inscription “failed” to provide us with punctuation marks, we are left with an apparent conundrum.
Does this matter? Yes, indeed, it does. Did the question of “Roman Citizenship” mean anything to a man of Frankish descent toiling as a soldier in the Roman army? Or was the question mute since he identified himself culturally (as a Frank) and by his job as a soldier in the Roman army? What sway did “Roman Citizenship” have in his mind? Did it matter at all? Or did he “keep” his identity as a “Frank” with all its cultural connotations while sojourning in the military camps along the Danube?
Roman Citizenship
Although the precise dating of the funeral inscription is elusive, it is generally said to be from the fourth century. At that point in history, all people living inside the Roman Empire were by definition “Romans”. Such had been the case since AD 212 when the Antonine Constitution allotted this status to all free persons – descendants of Romans as well as recent immigrants – living inside the borders. And, following this, the right to be judged according to Roman Law, Ius Civilis.
Looking at a vast number of funeral epitaphs such as the one dealt with here, Mathisen (2018) recently presented a survey of the available designators. Did people identify themselves according to geography, ethnicity, gender, work, or citizenship? He found that people, in general, were not identified as “Romans” but rather as belonging to a specific “gens” or “natio”; alternatively, they stressed their “geographical” descent. Hence, if someone was identified as a Roman, they were either born in Rome or belonged to the population of the city of Rome. Only very seldom was the designator “Romanus” used to describe the assemblage of the many and varied people living inside the limes, he writes (p. 260). According to Mathisen, these new ethnic or geographical identifiers developed after 212, when Roman citizenship no longer provided special treatment or status.
Later, in the 5th century, it became gradually more important to stress one’s identity as belonging to a specific “gens”, as such tribal identity conferred local rights, which were later codified in the Barbarian law codes, some of which spelt out the preferred status of say Franks or Visigoths as opposed to plain Romans.
When that happened, the centre and periphery had radically shifted. Romans had turned into what might be termed just another ethnic “gens”, while the courts of the new barbarian kings issuing their law codes were the new “centres”.
First Frank
We now know more about our soldier. He was of Frankish descent and hence belonged to the Frankish people or nation, what we might call a tribe. Also, he was a successful soldier in the Roman army. He was also a Roman citizen. However, this epithet appears not to have mattered to him. What might this mean in a wider context?
Did he carry his way of Frankish life and worldview to the Danube, such as he surely would have acquired intimate knowledge of in his childhood? And further, what role did this cultural affinity play in his life as a soldier, since it was worth commemorating on his funeral epitaph?
This question was explored by Barlow (1996) thirty years ago when he carefully sifted the evidence about Franks in Roman Late Antiquity. In this work, he tells the stories of several high-ranking military Franks, who seamlessly flittered back and forth across the Rhine together with the steady flow of deserters, hostages, captives, and tradesmen who lived and worked in the area between the Rhine and the Elbe.
According to archaeological evidence, this was a frontier zone where people and artefacts mingled and mixed liberally and where the “new settlers”, the Franks – who had joined the local police force, aka The Roman Army – worked to keep the people to North and West of the Elbe (the Saxons, the Frisians, the Thuringians and the Scandinavians) from harassing and plundering this frontier-zone.
We have to imagine a very differently organised army than the one we are familiar with from Caesar. His army was one of conquest and subjugation, in which a soldier had to wait until after his tour ended. At that point, he could “buy” himself a wife with the remains of his soldierly pay and raise his family on the promised land in a newly founded Colonia or soldierly settlements.
In Late Antiquity, however, the army was transformed into a highly skilled military police force, turning soldiering into a question of protecting the Limes against raids, punishing brigands, and combatting insurrections. In this new world, the new soldiers from all sorts of “nations” lived together with their families, writes Barlow, and quotes how this was in line with their traditional way for a German to go off to war. Already, Tacitus described this when he wrote about “what most stimulates their courage”, namely “that their squadrons or battalions, instead of being formed by chance or by a fortuitous gathering, are composed of families and clans. Close by them, too, are those dearest to them, so that they hear the shrieks of women, the cries of infants. They are to every man the most sacred witnesses of his bravery, his most generous applauders. The soldier brings his wounds to mother and wife, who shrink not from counting or even demanding them and who administer both food and encouragement to the combatants.” (2)
We have to imagine our First Frank deriving from the Lower and Middle Rhine area, where the Franks settled in the 3rd century, moving to the Danube with his wife, children and family. Likely, he kept up his way of life (his cultural habitus) even if the garrison he lived in was “Roman”.
Marriage Patterns
A closer study of the individual Franks presented by Barlow demonstrates another significant difference, though, concerning the inheritance of land.
To grasp this significance, it is essential to note the fundamental difference between the Mediterranean and Northern European household economies. In a traditional Mediterranean context, resources typically consisted of several diversified economic elements – access to water and irrigation, access to (irrigated) fields, vineyards, grazing rights (transhumance), flocks of animals, olive groves, chestnut trees, etc. Any farm should be considered a portfolio of diversified resources rather than an integrated production unit. As opposed to this, any farm in a Northern European context was an integrated production unit, where the animals, the manure, and the fields constituted an integrated production unit, where each element had to be present to secure the following year’s harvest.
Hence, in a Southern context, a woman might inherit parts of the economic unit (the farm), as each independent element was not a necessary precondition for the day-to-day running of a property. Not so in the North, where each resource was non-alienable from the farm.
Accordingly, even if daughters in both cultural and geographic contexts inherited more or less on par with sons, the transfer of their inheritance took different forms. In a Southern context, girls might indeed inherit part of the landed wealth and resources accumulated by their parents – an olive grove or a flock of animals. Transformed into the traditional “dower”, this inheritance accompanied the girl when she was bmarried off. Yet, part of the strategy to keep control of exactly this inheritance was to marry her off to someone in the clan, hence the proliferation of cross-cousin marriages. In a Northern context, the girls (or rather their “mund”) were “bought” through the payment of the brideprice or “meta” to her parents (or “mundbora”, that is the one “bearing the mund”) and the presentation of the “morning gift” (presented after the consummation of marriage). In the Lombard laws, the expressions were “metfio, faderfio, and morgingab”, with the faderfio, representing the dower, and “fio” referring to “Fihu”, Old High German for “Vieh” or “cattle”. In an old Norse context, “Fæ” simply denoted property as well as “cattle”. Later, the “metfio” (bride price) and the “morgingab” (morning gift) collapsed into one “gift”. However, this did not take place until the 10th and 11th centuries. (3)
These expressions are not found in the Salic Law (3) written down in the early Frankish context in the 5th and 6th centuries. Nevertheless, we get a precise sense in chapter LIX of what was at stake, when we read how girls might be situated in terms of inheritance and property. According to the Salic Law, there were two property types: the allodial and the Salic land. Often, allodial property in the early Barbarian laws is identified as allodial land. The text, however, speaks only of “De alodis”, which means, this word may just as easily refer to a nondescript and movable “inheritance” as refer to “inherited land” (4). This misrepresentation (and misunderstanding) echoes what the chapter stipulates further down (in LIX, 6-7), where the “Alodis” is counterpoised to the Salic Land. We read: “Indeed, concerning Salic Land, no portion of the inheritance shall pass to a woman, but the male sex acquires it; that is, the sons succeed to the inheritance”. Likely, the chapter tells us about the allocation in a Germanic or Barbarian context of inheritance, where daughters inherited their part as movable wealth (alodis). In contrast, sons inherited their share of the impartible land (terra), governed by the head of the household. Following this, marriages were ideally exogamous in a Northern context, while in a Southern context, preferably endogamous.
What might this mean for our understanding of the identity of our “First Frank”?
Likely, he lived with his family in a garrison close to the Danube – someone erected his funeral epitaph. This family probably derived from a Frankish context. Why else should his next-of-kin stress his Frankish citizenship? Also, we may be sure that he had extensive networks back in Francia, whether located on the right side of the Rhine or in the new “colonies” up North, which later turned into the cores of the Frankish successor kingdom. Perhaps, he even had a stake in his paternal landed inheritance inside Francia, which his father, brother or uncles was in charge of? And – more specifically – this was what then funerary text alluded to?
FOOTNOTES
(1) The inscription is catalogued as CORPUS INSCRIPTIONUM LATINARUM, CIL III 3576 (ILS 2814). The stone is preserved in the Museum of Budapest.
(2) Tacitus, Complete Works of Tacitus. Transl. by Alfred John Church. William Jackson Brodribb. And Lisa Cerrato. New York, Random House 1942 chapter 7
(3) The best overview of the different models may be found in: The Power of Women thorugh the Family in medieval europe: 500 – 1100. By Jo Ann McNamara and Suzanne Wemple. In: Feminist studies (1973) Vol 1, no. 3-4, pp 126 -141.
(3) The Laws of the Salian Franks. Translated and edited by Katherine Fischer Drew. University of Pennsylvania 1991, p. 122.
(4) In a footnote to her translation of Lex Salica, Drew refers to Niermeyer, who in his lexicon indicates a distinction between “movable and real” property where “alodis” should only refer to the “movable” part. Drew does not share this lexical definiton, but she is obviously steeped in the idea, that only landed property is “real”. Likelym the “alodis” consisted of that part of a family’s fortune, which might be transferred or moved (some of which might be land). The Thuringian law laid down that daughters might only inherit slaves, movables, and jewelry, but not land, weapons, or armour. See “Women and Laws in Early Medieval Europe”, by Janet L. Nelson and Alice Rio. In: The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in medieval Europe. Ed. By Judith Bennnett and Ruth Karras. OUP 2023. See also the the story of the value of the brooches treated as heirlooms and trditional symbols.
PHOTO:
Detail from the south face of the Obelisk of Theodosius showing his barbarian guards in the Roman army . Source: Wikipedia/Ribeiro CCBYSA30
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