Gaining power is difficult, but holding everything together once you’ve arrived... well, therein lies the real challenge.

Frankish Kings emulated Constantine... was this used against them? Find out how the Donation of Pépin may have been based on a fraud!

Pépin le Bref is now King Pépin I, having just overthrown the last Merovingian. The Pope is on the run from the Lombards. Worlds collide...

A year in prison. A broken army. And now caught between two tribes. No problem, Charles Martel thought. I've got them right where I want...

A powerful man, a young woman and an upset, long-suffering wife from the 7th century prove that midlife crises are timeless...

How do you justify the notion that certain people were chosen, either by God or by fate, to sit in judgement over all other people?

Victory rides on a knife’s edge. Oftentimes what appears to be a loss is actually the access point to a path not hitherto contemplated...

Twenty years. A lot can change in the world in 20 years. A lot can change in a person. And that’s how long Dagobert II was locked away...

Leodegar knew he had been bested as he looked out of his window and saw the army below waiting for his capitulation...

This week we’re finishing the trilogy that began with a coup... and then kept getting worse. Meet Ebroin, the new Mayor of the Palace...

"The King may let you go to a monastery, or he may choose to end your life quickly. Those are your only real options..."

The long hair marking Dagobert II as a Merovingian prince was gone, replaced instead by a tonsure that marked his as a monk...

Bathilda was slender and had long, golden hair, but more than this, the girl walked with poise strikingly out of place in a slave market...

“The Queen is dead, bishop, and our King is now an orphan. I rule the in his name, and that makes it my responsibility to tell him..."

Samo sat alone before his campfire, considering the battle to take place and how best to prosecute his attack against the mighty Franks.

Unlike his father, who had to rely on luck, illness and a homicidal mother for the throne, Dagobert had a more conventional ascension.

Chlothar II loved to hunt, and that's what he did while others ruled his Kingdom - right up to death. His reign led in a legacy of decline.

A Roman beheading. A stag hunt. A slighted guest. How these came together to make Paris' Basilica of St Denis the resting spot of royalty...

People assume that being king was a glorious, entertaining, easy way of life. Glorious? Absolutely. Entertaining? Sometimes. Easy? Never.

Chlothar II needed a new place to sit, a throne befitting his station as the new King of the Franks. But where to find a good craftsman?