From the Margins to the Mainstream: Dutch History to 1384 - The Merovingian and Carolingian Periods - The Advance of Frankish Christendom

6 important questions on From the Margins to the Mainstream: Dutch History to 1384 - The Merovingian and Carolingian Periods - The Advance of Frankish Christendom

When was the Netherlands taken by the Franks?

  • It took time before these Frankish kings, in a slow process of expanding their authority, made their weight felt in the present-day Netherlands. By the early seventh century they were casting their eyes on the prosperous river region, and the Merovingian King Dagobert seized Utrecht in 630.
  • Though twenty years later the town would again fall into Frisian hands, this move was but the first step in an ultimately successful expansion of Frankish power into the northern Low Countries.

What religion took charge in the Netherlands with the expansion of Frankish power?

  • Closely allied with them was the Roman Catholic Church, which by the mid seventh century took the first systematic steps to Christianize the area that now comprises northern Belgium and the southern Netherlands.
  • The country's earliest known church was erected in Maastricht around 570.

What was crucial to the Church's eventual success?

Crucial to the Church's eventual success, was the work not of Frankish missionaries but of English ones, who stemmed from the recently converted Angles and Saxons and whose language was so close to their kinfolk, the Frisians.
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Who was Radbod and who was Pepin of Herstal? What happened between these two?

  • Further Christianization would not take place, however, without military pressure on the Frisians, particularly given the stance of Radbod, the Frisian king, who resisted the encroachments of the Franks and the Church.
  • Taking the lead in the campaign against the Frisians was the energetic Mayor of the Palace for the Merovingians, Pepin of Herstal, born in the town of that name just south of Maastricht.
  • Around 690 Pepin defeated Radbod at Dorestad, taking both it and nearby Utrecht, the town that Radbod had regarded as his residence. Pepin then forced Radbod into an alliance.

When and where did Willibrord reside?

In 695 Pope Sergius I consecrated another English missionary, Willibrord, "archbishop of the Frisians," and for most of the next four decades he used Utrecht as his missionary base, a base that for a long time would serve as the springboard for English mission work into northern Europe.

What happened to Boniface?

  • That support of local elites did not always exist in Frisia's fragmented political landscape is evidenced by the fate of yet another English missionary, Boniface, a former co-worker of Willibrord, who had spent much of his long life as an evangelist and bishop in central Germany.
  • In 754, during an infamous confrontation that may simply have been a violent robbery, the eighty-year-old churchman was killed by a hostile crowd near what is now Dokkum in northern Frisia.

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