The Era I Couldn’t Quit: Returning to Thugs and Miracles

Hello again, everyone!

Düsseldorf Stadterhebungsmonument (City Founding Monument) 

I’m still here. I didn’t die, get sick, or have anything dramatic happen that forced me to step away—I just did. I wish I could offer a cleaner explanation, but the truth is simpler: life got hectic, and something had to be cut. Unfortunately, at that moment, that something was Thugs and Miracles.

Don’t get me wrong—I loved the podcast. I loved researching and writing about a period of history that, in my opinion, doesn’t get anywhere near the attention it deserves. The Merovingians are, and always will be, a fascinating group to study and explore.

When I stepped away, I honestly didn’t think it would be for long. It was 2022, I was in the middle of Season 3, and I was a little burnt out. So I paused. I stepped back from social media in particular—it had become overwhelming—and I set the show aside for what I thought would be a quick two-week break.

Then life happened. I had a lot going on at that moment, and the pause stretched longer than I intended. The show never quite got picked back up, even though it never really left my mind. I’ve thought about returning to Thugs and Miracles often. I’ve just been waiting for the right time.

And I think that time is now.

When I first started the show, my goal was broad: French history from the fall of Rome to the fall of the guillotine. In hindsight, that was a bit much. But more than the challenge of covering 1,300-plus years, I realized something else—I genuinely love this earliest era of French history.

The people were nothing like the familiar clichés: Bonaparte, Antoinette, and the rest. What fascinated me was the world that emerged immediately after Rome fell—a moment so many people gloss over with a hand-wave and a vague reference to “the Dark Ages.” In reality, these were amazing, brutal times: a real-life mash-up of Lord of the Flies and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, with the occasional bit of Monty Python and Mean Girls thrown into the mix. Bloody, chaotic, cruel, wicked, funny, unbelievable—and endlessly entertaining.

When I tried to move on and began writing more about Charlemagne, I found myself missing this earlier period.

Charlemagne is cool, don’t get me wrong—but he’s no Clovis.

There’s a finite group of historians who focus heavily on the Merovingians, and the ones who pulled me in did so not through sweeping narratives, but through smaller, more human stories. Fredegunda and Brunhilda kept resurfacing for me—not just as historical figures, but as people whose lives could easily be novelized. They lived so long ago, yet their hopes, ambitions, fears, and instincts feel unmistakably human.

Fredegunda, in particular, stood out. Her life was filled with extraordinary highs and devastating lows, yet she’s often written about as a caricature of evil. But was she? How did she get to where she was? What choices did she make that led later historians to condemn her for centuries? Was she really as monstrous as she’s been made out to be?

Coming back now, my approach is different. I’m stepping away from trying to cover all of French history and focusing instead on roughly 300 years—from 476 to 751—when the Merovingians were in power. Once you reach Charlemagne and beyond, the sources multiply, but the narratives grow messier and harder to untangle. From a fiction standpoint especially, there’s simply more room to work in the Merovingian era, in part because fewer sources force fewer certainties.

So, with all of that said—what now?

The next step is to go back to the beginning and relaunch Thugs and Miracles. To clean it up. To make the focus what it should be: Clovis and his children. Let’s stay with the period we love and make it sound better. Many of the references in the early episodes are five years old, and podcasting ages fast. We can do better.

I also want to expand beyond the podcast with non-fiction books with images, visual material, and elements that capture what I’ve learned, including things I’ve seen while living in Europe and visiting museums around the world. I want to bring listeners and readers into that experience.

And then there’s fiction. Novelizing this period isn’t about being 100% historically rigid—it’s about emotion and humanity. What did it feel like to live then? What did fear, ambition, loyalty, and survival look like on the ground? And when history tells us that two events happened, what had to occur in the spaces between to connect them? There’s room here to imagine, to speculate, and to tell human stories.

That’s what I’ll be working on: refreshing the podcast, bringing non-fiction books into the world with stories people can access in multiple ways, and pairing those stories with visuals. And I’m going to publish a novel. The words are already on the page. I want to put Fredegunda’s story into the world—seen in a new light, from a different angle—and see how people respond.

I hope they want more.