Battle of Zuelpich
Baptism of Clovis (after winning battle)
The Master of Saint-Gilles (around 1500)
| date | 496 |
|---|---|
| place | near Zülpich ( North Rhine-Westphalia ) |
| output | Victory of the Franks . Political strengthening of Clovis |
| Parties to the conflict | |
|---|---|
| Commander | |
|
unknown |
|
| Troop strength | |
| unknown | unknown |
| losses | |
|
unknown |
unknown |
The Battle of Zülpich ( Latin Tolbiacum ) was fought in 496 between the Rhine Franks under Sigibert of Cologne with the help of the Sal Franks under Clovis I against the attacking Alemanni . The Alemanni were decisively weakened by the battle. The intervention of Clovis I strengthened his position with the Rhine Franconians. The site of the battle was possibly the Wollersheimer Heide between Langendorf (Zülpich) and Wollersheim ( Nideggen ), about 60 km east of today's German - Belgian border. The Franks triumphed over the Alemanni. The Battle of Zülpich is the second of three battles that Clovis I fought against the Alamanni. The third battle near Strasbourg in 506 was ultimately to lead to the end of the Alemanni empire. Due to his baptism after the end of the Zülpich battle, it has also been handed down to us as a conversion battle by Gregor von Tours .
Conversion after victory
In the course of the battle the then pagan Frankish king Clovis I is said to have vowed his baptism in the event of a victory. The Alemanni submitted after their king (not named) had fallen. Clovis I is said to have ascribed his success to this promise, so he believed in God's help and was allegedly baptized a Christian in Reims that same year . The parallel to Emperor Constantine is striking , who, according to source texts, is said to have converted to Christianity in connection with a victorious battle, the battle of the Milvian Bridge against Maxentius in 312 .
After this battle, the northern Alemannic settlement area came under Franconian rule up to the current dialect border between Swabia and Franconia . The remaining Alemanni placed themselves under the protection of the Ostrogoth king Theodoric and were not finally incorporated into the Frankish Empire until 506/531, under whose sovereignty the Alemannic duchy was formed.
Place of battle
Meanwhile some historians doubt that Zülpich (Roman Tolbiacum ) was the place of this battle; the place named by Gregory of Tours, Tulbiac, could or must have been located to the south, since there were simply no Alemanni that far north.
Even if Tulbiac refers to Zülpich, there are considerable doubts as to whether the battle in which the Franks won a decisive victory against the Alemanni and as a result of which Clovis was baptized was that at Zülpich. Gregory of Tours does not name the site of the battle directly, but mentions Tolbiac only in connection with the Battle of Vouillé , in which Chloderich assisted the Franks : “a son of Sigibert the Limping, that Sigibert who was fighting against the Alemanni near Zülpich ( apud Tulbiacensium oppidum ) had been wounded in the knee ” . Schultze sees it similarly, who essentially adopts a text-critical conclusion from Wilhelm von Giesebrecht : “ After a position with Gregor (Historia Francorum II, 37), the Battle of the Lower Rhine was wrongly relocated to Zülpich, but Gregor's words can also be interpreted in a different sense, because the possibility cannot be ruled out that Sigebert was seriously injured in a battle near Zülpich. According to the Vita Vedasti , the battle on the Upper Rhine seems to have taken place because the king returned home via Toul. “ Knut Schäferdiek points out, however, that conclusions from the information in the Vita Vedast “ are not reliable evidence that Toul was in the possession of Clovis in 496/7. The Vita presupposes an encounter between the king and Vedastes in Toul and constructs a historical framework for this from the report of Gregory of Tours on the battle of the Alemanni: on returning from her, Clovis came over Toul. "
Taking into account the possibility of early first fights, significant parts of the research have already considered the 480s and early 490s for a battle near Zülpich, where King Sigebert, who is sitting in the Cologne area, is said to have suffered a knee injury. Regarding their location problem, Eugen Ewig points out that the Alamanni still had two large deployment routes to the west due to previous losses of areas around Besançon , Langres and Troyes to the Burgundians in the late 470s, one from Strasbourg via the Zaberner Steige and the other led from Worms via Kaiserslautern to Metz . For the period after 480 Ewig sees two possible directions for Alemanni incursions, namely one from the Andernach area via the Eifel on the Roman main road Trier-Cologne and on this to Zülpich, while the more southerly route from Strasbourg via Metz again on the Trier-Cologne trunk road could have led to the Zülpich area. Accordingly, it cannot be ruled out that Franconian-Alamannic battles were already taking place at the strategically important nodes both in the central and upper Rhine areas and in the more extensive Eifel areas. However, since Clovis also waged a war against the Visigoths under Alaric II in the 490s, it seems quite obvious that the Frankish king at that time was primarily dependent on the military support of his Rhine-Franconian cousin Sigebert.
Particularly controversial research opinions on the extent and location of the Alemannic-Franconian struggles exist for the years 506/507. Although the Alamanni could have found or specifically exploited a reduced Frankish defense potential due to a widespread war of aggression by the Franks against the Visigoths at that time, there are two main reasons against this assumption: On the one hand, the warning of Cassiodorus handed down at that time by Cassiodorus Theodoric the Great to Clovis not to proceed further against the Alemannic peoples, from which one can conclude that their combat units could hardly penetrate far into East Franconian areas. On the other hand, Gregor von Tours, in his description of the elimination of his Rhine-Franconian cousin Sigebert, which was initiated by Clovis, seems credible to indicate a relaxed domestic political situation, where the king could therefore afford to cross forests that are far from the Rhine and which apparently extend into today's East Hessian areas, in order to pursue his passion for hunting in the “Buchonian Forest” (“Buconia silva”) as well as to look for his treasure trove there.
Eugen Ewig makes his assumption that for the years 506/507 an ultimately decisive Alemannic-Franconian battle should rather be assumed in the Upper Rhine or Strasbourg area - which ultimately led to the Ostrogothic warning message to Clovis - also in the context of subsequently shifted spatial conditions there of Franks and Alemanni.
The medievalist Dieter Geuenich , including the Zülpich area, finally considers nine venues discussed in research for all Alemannic-Franconian fighting during Clovis's reign as more or less likely.
→ See Clovis stele
consequences
The conversion of the Franks under Clovis had far-reaching consequences for the history of the Franconian Empire: unlike the Romans, where the turn to the new faith was a matter for the individual, the conversion to the Christian faith among the Germanic peoples was often a matter for the whole people, according to Specification of the king. Clovis professed Orthodox, Athhanasian Catholicism - in contrast to the other Germanic peoples who had become Arians - and thus minimized the potential for conflict with the Gallo-Roman population of his new empire from the outset. This led to a rapid and largely problem-free amalgamation of the peoples.
reception
When King Louis-Philippe I opened the Louvre on June 10, 1837 , the Galerie des Batailles in the center of the painting collection contained images of the battles from Tolbiac to Wagram to depict the history of France. The battle of Zülpich was thus placed at the origin of the French state. Under Napoleon III. A wide street in the southeast of Paris was named Rue de Tolbiac and still bears this name today. In the Paris Panthéon there is also a representation of the bataille de Tolbiac among the wall paintings depicting the history of France from the perspective of the 19th century .
In Germany, the folk poet Karl Simrock addressed the conversion of Clovis in the poem The Battle of Zülpich , which appeared in 1836 and was learned by heart in many German schools well into the 20th century.
"Chlodewig the Frankish King saw in Zülpich's fierce battle,
That the Allemanns were victorious through the overwhelming population ..."
The writer Michael Kuhn built the plot of his novel trilogy around the Merovingian Marcellus around the battle of Zülpich.
literature
- Dieter Geuenich , Thomas Grünewald, Reinhold Weitz (editor): Clovis and the "Battle of Zülpich" - history and myth 496-1996 . Book accompanying the exhibition in Zülpich from August 30 to October 26, 1996. Ed .: Association of History and Home Friends of the District of Euskirchen eV, Zülpich History Association. Association of friends of history and homeland of the Euskirchen district, Euskirchen 1996, ISBN 3-9802996-7-8 .
- Dieter Geuenich (Ed.): The Franks and the Alemanni up to the "Battle of Zülpich" (496/97) . Supplementary volumes to the real dictionary of Germanic antiquity . tape 19 . de Gruyter , Berlin / New York NY 1998, ISBN 3-11-015826-4 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jean-Paul Demoule: Archaeological Cultures and Modern Nations - considers the year 508 to be more likely - In: Peter F. Biehl, Alexander Gramsch, Arkadiusz Marciniak (ed.): Archaeologies Europe. History, methods and theories. Tübingen Archaeological Pocket Books Vol. 3 (2002). Waxmann Münster ISBN 3-8309-1067-3 pp. 133-146
- ↑ Reinhard Schmoeckel: German heroes of legends and historical reality , Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim, 1995 ISBN 3-487-10035-5
- ↑ "Hic Sigebertus pugnans contra Allemannos apud Tulpiacense oppidum percussus in geniculo claudicabat"
- ↑ "Rex ad patriam rediens venit ad Tullum oppidum."
- ↑ Dr. Phil. Walther Schultze: "Die Gaugrafschaften des Alamannischen Badens", Stuttgart 1896. Cf. Wilhelm Giesebrecht: Ten books of Fränkischer Geschichte , 1851, p. 89, end note 2.
- ↑ Knut Schäferdiek (eds. WA Löhr and HC Brennecke): Schwellenzeit. Contributions to the history of Christianity in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages . Berlin / New York 1996, p. 333, fn. 15.
- ↑ Cf. with references to Ingo Runde: The Franks and Alamanni before 500 . In: Supplementary volumes to the Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde , Vol. 19, pp. 680–681.
- ↑ Eugen Ewig (ed. F. Petri and G. Droege): The Rhineland in Franconian times . In: Rhenish history . Vol. 1, p. 16.
- ↑ Cassiodor: Senatoris Variae II, 41. Cf. Ennodius: Panegyricus 212. In addition Dieter Geuenich: Chlodwigs Alemannenschlacht (s) and baptism . In: Supplementary volumes to the Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde , Vol. 19, pp. 429–432.
- ↑ Eugen Ewig (ed. F. Petri and G. Droege): The Rhineland in Franconian times . In: Rhenish history . Vol. 1, pp. 16-17.
- ^ Dieter Geuenich: Chlodwigs Alemannenschlacht (en) . In: Chlodwig and the “Battle of Zülpich” , pp. 55–60.
- ↑ Maurice Samuels, Illustrated Historiography and the Image of the Past in Nineteenth-Century France. French Historical Studies 26/2 (French History in the Visual Sphere) 2003, 276
- ^ Karl Simrock, Rheinsagen , 2nd increased edition, Bonn, 1837, p. 158. [1]
- ↑ Marcellus the Merovingian at histo-couch.de