Dagobert II

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Dagobert II : biography

650 – 679

Dagobert II (c. 650 – December 23, 679) was the king of Austrasia (676–79), the son of Sigebert III and Chimnechild of Burgundy. He is also accounted a saint by the Roman Catholic Church; his feast day is 23 December.

Notes

Biography

Dagobert II was the son of Sigibert III, 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, thus marking him unfit for kingship,; J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Long-Haired Kings and Other Essays (London, 1962:154ff). 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. It has also been hypothesised that Chimnechild was not 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,According to the eighth century Vita Sancti Wilfrithi ( Life of St Wilfrid), and also mentioned in one of the versions of the Vita Sancti Arbogasti by Utho Argentinensis. 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 Surbourg 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 could not 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.