Kings and Popes: The Tape Recorder Trilogy - S3E06

(710 – ~751 CE with mentions of events from earlier centuries · Spain, The Holy Land, France, & Rome) 

The Narrator relates how he changed lives from operating as a successful horse ferryman between North Africa and Spain to working as a tinker in Jerusalem, and the tragedy that unfolded when his elderly 'widow' from his earlier life found him alive and unchanged decades later. He also discusses the origins and early history of the Franks, and how the Papacy came to have an unexpected influence over the old western European half of the Roman Empire, which was coming to be called Christendom.

Based on Chapter 6 of End by Geoff Micks.

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Credits: 

Voice Acting - Geoff Micks

Editing - Geoff Micks

Music - Dimitri Kovalchuk (MokuseiNoMaguro) through Pixabay

Additional Music - Aleksey Voronin (Amaksi) through Pixabay 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In 2015, a man who has been alive since the last ice age bought a tape recorder, and over the course of three days he dictated his life story as fast as he could while waiting for a woman to visit who he believes will finally be the death of him. Hello again, my name is Jeff Mix, and you are listening to season three, episode six of the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast. Enjoy it. So it occurs to me I have spent most of the morning talking about a single hundred year stretch of my life that ended thirteen hundred years ago. If I hope to finish this project today, and I do, then I need to pick up the pace. I have fortified my position here by the fire with a bucket of ice, a bottle of Canadian rye, and a good glass with a heavy bottom. They now sit within easy reach of me in my chair here. Let us see if some lubrication can speed things along, shall we? As I said, in my next life I worked as a horse ferryman, just as I had seen in my vision. There was much work to be done for a man that profession, to work the waters that very soon would come to be known as the Strait of Gibraltar, once the Pillar of Hercules was renamed Jebel Tariq, Tariq's mountain, after the Berber general who used the Great Rock as a waypoint during his invasion. You see, the Visigoths living in Spain had fallen into a civil war, and one faction foolishly invited some Muslim Berbers to cross the narrow strait to fight for them. Now Berbers had been fighting wars in Spain as allies or mercenaries for a thousand years at this point, but this time was different. These Berbers were Muslims. Inspired by the Arabs' example of spreading the new faith, the Berbers were fighting for themselves and their god, not whichever Visigoth was stupid enough to invite a lion into his home to help him deal with his leopard problem. The Berbers won the first few battles that they could not afford to lose, and then they never went home. Instead, more Berbers came to join them, whipped on by both religious fervor and the spoils that come from conquering a rich country. I had nothing to do with their wars. I did make a very good living as a horse ferryman, though. I shuttled whole herds from ports in Africa to ports in Spain. I set up a new home and a new life for myself in Malaga, as Muslims called Malacca, a once Phoenician city that was old when Carthage was new. I married a local Christian woman named Anna. I did not ask her to convert for me, for she had a deep and abiding faith, and my converting days were over. Anna was good to me, and I tried to be good to her. We made our home at the base of the great hill that overlooked the harbor, and for many years we were a fixture of the town's social life, hosting elaborate dinner parties when fasting ended for both Christian and Muslim holidays. I am sure we were one of the first homes in the city to have lemon trees in our garden. I planted them myself with seeds a friend visiting from the east gave me. Most people considered it a decorative or perhaps a medicinal plant at the time. My wife became famous for cooking with lemon juice and lemon zest. Anyone who enjoys the sparkle lemon brings to Spanish seafood dishes owes Anna a thank you. She was a pioneer on that front. Of course, as happened whenever I married, I prepared carefully for my eventual disappearance from Anna's life. The fact that we would never grow old together was never far from my mind in any of my marriages, and I was always aware how short a leap there is from private questions from a loved one to some kind of public hysteria that usually ended with my life being in jeopardy. No, excepting that I will one day leave is just part of getting married as far as I'm concerned. Still, I have always tried to leave my wives comfortable and financially independent, and Anna was to be no different. I had a tidy nest egg collected by that time. Some of my money from my days as the Aila merchant John was still following me around, and to that I could add the riches I had gathered through the lives and careers of varied Mohammed Al Rumis. I divided all that accumulated wealth into two parts, making sure the portion in Malaga was well known to Anna and to respected men in town, and well documented in a will I entrusted with Malaga's Berber ruler. All was in readiness when the fateful day came. She began to ask hard questions about why I had not aged a day since we first met. I ended the conversation with as little drama as possible, putting her off and delaying her as I had hundreds of suspicious people before. And then I set sail on one of my regular ferry runs. That is when I arranged to be murdered. We arrived at one of my usual African ports, and I left my crew to mine the ferry while I went inland to meet a horse breeder they knew I knew well. They never saw me again. Two days later the harbourmaster told my crew I had been set upon by bandits and killed. If the harbourmaster wondered why I wanted to disappear, the weight of silver I had put into his hand every visit for the last several years numbed his curiosity. When the big day came and I asked him to lie for me, he did it without question. But what about a body, you might well ask? My crew certainly wanted to take my remains back to my wife for a funeral, the Christians among them anyway. The few Muslims already knew the harbour master's reply before he said it. In keeping with Islamic custom, I was already buried. He offered to show them my grave, but whether they ever bothered to look at one of the unmarked graves in the cemetery or not was of no real concern to me. Either way, I am certain they returned home to tell Anna she was a widow. Why did I just tell you all this when I have skipped over so many other stories of my switching lives to protect the secret of my immortality? Well, Anna stands out in my memory because we met again, and it was terrible. As big as the world is, and as far as I went, we still somehow crossed paths. I had left her a wealthy widow and still young enough to marry again, and marry well if that was her wish, but she chose instead to dedicate the rest of her life to salvation. This culminated for her two decades after my death, in a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to see where her Savior had died for her sins. Oh ho ho was she unhappy to see me working as a tinker in a stall in Jerusalem. Mohammed Anna shrieked, a hundred heads turned to stare at the silver haired woman. Mohammed Alrumi, she cried, clarifying for all the other Mohammeds who exactly had earned her ire. Meanwhile, I was now desperately wishing I had chosen a profession in my new life that did not tie me to this tiny booth, full of brass and bronze and iron and pewter pots and pans and trays and ladles. There was no way for me to make a quick and quiet exit. She stormed her way over to me and put her finger in my face. How dare you leave me? How dare you? I looked around at my neighbors in the souk, merchants and customers who had known me for years. May I help you, madam? I said in the accented Latin my friends knew well, the Latin of a man born speaking Greek who learned Arabic in his youth, and acquired a smattering of other languages useful to his trade fixing people's cookware and flatware. Mohammed Al Rumi the Tinker had never been to Spain, so his Latin could not possibly have Iberian or Visigothic inflections. Muhammad Al Rumi the Tinker did not know this angry old Spanish lady, but she sure as hellfire seemed to know him. Don't madam me, Muhammad. You abandoned me. I asked you why you weren't getting any older in Spain when my hair was still black, and now I find you here all these years later, and you have not aged a day. Anna had lost none of her passion in her old age. She was aghast at having found me, almost beside herself with fury, and she was babbling like a crazy person. Let my telling her story now be a long overdue apology. I am sorry, Anna. My stomach is still in knots when I think about what happened next, but I was never going to agree with you or explain myself. At least now I can honor your memory by saying what happened, even if I am the villain of the peace. I asked Is there someone here with you, madam? And I craned my neck to look around her for a friend or caregiver with an expression suggesting a dawdy old woman was having a moment. She slapped me then. She might have been elderly, but there was nothing wrong with her hand or her wrist or her elbow or shoulder. She put everything she had into the blow, and she hit me such that I could feel every one of her fingers, hard as four oak switches bunched together. The flesh under the blow itself went numb, but the edges tingled as my blood rushed into the newly forming bruise. I felt the outline of her hand from jaw to orbit, ear to nose. The souk was now silent, as all eyes turned to watch an old Christian woman strike a Muslim shopkeeper of good standing in our close knit community. That was the moment where the crowd would most be on my side in this encounter. The first person who started taking her seriously, the first person who realized they were seeing outside confirmation of their own private suspicions, and this crowd would become a lynch mob against me. I have seen it far too many times in my life. People fear nothing so much as the supernatural living unsuspected in their midst. Anna, forgive me, but I did what I had to do. When she pulled her hand back to strike me again, I wailed God protect me and I said it in Arabic before the eyes of hundreds of my fellow Muslims. I covered my face with my arms as a score of men dragged her away from me. I heard Anna's scream shift from rage to fear. I heard the first blows land upon her before the crush of bodies swarming her muffled those sounds. I kept my eyes closed and my nose buried in my elbows as the mob did what it did to her. I do not think they meant to kill her. Not really. They did not like a Christian woman striking a Muslim man, but I am sure they would have been content to teach her a lesson she would never forget and call it a day. Unfortunately, mobs are not known for their restraint, and rarely know their own strength, especially when it comes to beating an old woman within an inch of her life. Who knows where that inch starts and stops in the heat of the moment? When it was all over, I paid for her funeral. I wept over the grave, and my friends thought me a good and kind and compassionate man to feel so deeply for a stranger, a mad woman who had assaulted me without provocation. I found I could not bear their admiration, nor could I explain my crisis of conscience. I had abandoned many wives in my life, but not often has an angry mob torn them apart because of something I said out of fear that an angry mob might tear me apart. Her curse was knowing me. Her curse was marrying me. Her curse was caring enough for me to be hurt at losing me, and furious to discover I had lied to her, furious that there was something about me she did not understand that must matter more to me than she did. She was entirely in the right, and I was entirely in the wrong, and it does not matter one whit. I would not do things differently if I had to do it over again. That is what really haunts me. I was the death of her. If she had married anyone else, she might very well have lived and loved and died a happy life in Malaga. She might have been a mother and a grandmother who filled her days with family. She might have done so many things, were it not for me. The guilt hangs on me like a heavy cloak. I swore to never marry again, a promise I kept for centuries, by the way. I sold my tinkering business on the first anniversary of her death, and returned to Spain to try to make whatever small amends I could. I threw a lot of good money at the bad business ventures of Anna's grandnepheas, but it did not make me feel any better, and none of them did much with my support. I gave up on them about the time they started taking my financial backing for granted. The last I heard, they had all converted to Islam and taken up the sword against Christians to the north. It was the thing to do at the time. I started off by saying I was going to go quickly, and I have lingered here perhaps too long on one of the great regrets of my life. I am sorry. The last thing I will say about Anna? I think about her whenever I taste lemons. So, uh back to doing this quickly, yes? Let me talk about what was happening for a bit, and not about what I was doing. The Berbers and Arabs flooded into Spain, driven both by holy war and the prosperity that comes from conquering somewhere richer than your homeland. Soon enough, though, there were divisions along ethnic lines about how the spoils should be divided, and who should rule the new territory, which Muslims took to calling Al Andalus, the land of the Vandals, for the silly reason that the Germanic Vandals that they found in the near and middle west had come to North Africa from Spain. The fact that they were not from Spain originally, or that Spain had been ruled by Visigoths since the time the Vandals lived there, or the fact that Spain already had half a dozen older names known to the locals and the Berbers and the Moors, somehow did not matter. Muslim Spain became Al Andalus, an emirate answering to the governor in Africa based in Caron, who answered to the caliph in Damascus, the descendants of Muoeya, whose dynasty was known as the Umayads. In truth, Al Andalus was a sideshow of a sideshow as far as the House of Umaya was concerned, for they were still locked in a titanic struggle with the Romans in Constantinople, while also still grappling to the east with the myriad peoples of what had once been the Sasanian Empire. With that said, a thing the Caliphate did care deeply about? Arabs should always get the best lands and the best jobs in any new territory. Even an emirate on the far side of the world from anything that really mattered. Yes, as I said even back when Muawiyah and Amr ibn al As were fighting against Ali, even though everyone was equal within the Uma, some Muslims who were more equal than others when it came to power. Under the Caliphate of the Umayyads, the spoils of victory belonged first to the caliph, then the caliph's family and extended family, then the descendants of the companions of the Prophet, then the other Arabs whose clans hailed from Mecca and Medina, then every other Arab, and only then the Muslims who were not Arabs were entitled to divide up the rest. The Berbers, despite having so much in common with the desert dwellers of Arabia, were not Arabs. When Arab Gazis arrived in Al Andalus, they made common cause with the Muslim Berbers who were there already, but they expected to be given first choice of everything when the time came to divvy up the fruits of victory, including victories won before their arrival. Play that trend forward, and soon enough you have Arabs living on the coast and ruling the richest farmlands, worked by people who accepted the new reality of Muslim rule and paid their jizya without complaint. The Berbers, meanwhile, lived in the interior and the north on constant garrison duty, putting down revolts and fighting the guerrillas who have always and will always spring up in the Spanish hills whenever outsiders try to rule them. It was thankless, bloody work, and it grated on the Berbers that they fought harder to spread Islam and got less from their sweat and blood than the men of Syria or Jordan or Yemen, none of whom had particularly famous grandfathers or great grandfathers in the stories of the early days of Islam, but all of whom spoke Arabic from birth. I will return to the conflicts between Berbers and Arabs eventually, I promise, but before I do that I want to say that, as Muslims, both factions were still unified enough to continue pushing Islam northward. That brings me at last to the Franks. I should be a little embarrassed to have gone this long without mentioning them, to be honest with you. The Franks were one of those rare peoples who somehow became a big deal without my having any real contact with them. I only learned to speak their language after they had already turned back the advance of Islam into Christendom, as Western Europe would come to be called. Before that achievement, they just were not worthy of my time and attention. So how did I miss the rise of the Franks? Well, I prefer to avoid trouble, and for most of their history, the Franks have been troublemakers, who brought trouble with them wherever they went, and sought out trouble when they were in the mood to be troublesome, which was often enough that the expression let me be frank is still a pretty good indication you were about to hear something you do not want to hear, in a way you do not want to hear it. I know nothing about their earliest days or origins. I am sure they started in Germania somewhere east of the Rhine and north of the Danube, but that vast area was peopled with a multitude who had names for themselves, and also names for how their clans fit into larger and larger tribes. Was there ever one specific group calling themselves Frank whose fame drew allies to make common cause? Or has it always been a collective term like Goth or Hun? However we answer that question, I am confident I would not have known a Frank in my Carthaginian lives. I had no business in northern Europe back then. What about when I was a Roman? I am sure that from time to time during my work on the Colossus of Nero, I shared a drink with some of the Germans who made up the emperor's bodyguard, but I never heard anyone call himself a Frank. Perhaps they used that term among themselves, but I spoke no German in those days. If the spirit ever moved me to go anywhere close to Germania, I could be perfectly understood in Latin by anyone worth talking to, so why bother to learn their guttural babble? Still, the centuries rolled on, as centuries are wont to do. The northern frontier became an itch Romans could never relieve despite a frenzy of scratching. It was always there, stretching from the North Sea south to the Alps, and from the Alps east towards the Black Sea. Even when the Roman armies crossed the Rhine and the Danube to build great fortresses out in the wilderness, those islands of civilization did not domesticate the locals as they did everywhere else. The German tribes were like a pot of water on a low boil. They never stayed still in those dark forests of theirs long enough to learn to ape their Roman betters. About the only thing you could do was pay some of them to fight for you instead of against you. During the long, slow twilight of the western half of the Roman Empire, some of its greatest heroes were German generals commanding German soldiers trained as Romans, waging war on behalf of Rome against other Germans who crowded up against the borders, desperate to get into the Empire, but unwilling to swear loyalty to some distant Caesar or Augustus for the privilege. There were Franks on both sides of that never ending conflict. I am sure I heard our general so and so is a Frank, and Emperor What's his face just pushed those Franks back into their swamp. But that was as far as my experience with them went. If I did not have much business up there when times were good, how much worse would it be to go to the frontier when times were bad? People were always dying up there. Fortunately, it was usually just our Germans killing other Germans, or vice versa. No, I stayed in my Mediterranean ports where the weather was warm and border wars were something I heard about second and third hand in the wine bars. I was living in Constantinople a little over four hundred years after the birth of Christ when the Rhine froze over one terrible winter, and half of Germany walked across the water and into the western half of the Roman world without asking for an invitation. That really happened. I did not mention it yesterday because I was not there, thank God. I say it now because I'm talking about the Franks, and the Franks were there. They were on both sides of a mighty river that froze solid enough to roll a wagon across it. They were the poor bastards in the Roman forts watching millions of desperate men and women trudge towards them through the snow, and they were also a good chunk of those millions of poor bastards doing the trudging. Now the Franks were not the only ones pouring into what used to be the Roman Empire, and I have mentioned some of this already. It was a terrible time to be in the west, and so I only went there as a ship captain, transporting ambassadors from Constantinople to bribe Germanic warlords to behave just a little bit better in exchange for high sounding honorifics and a recognition of ownership for the land they had stolen at Sword Point. Even then, none of those warlords were Franks, because the Franks were still not on the Mediterranean. No, where some Germans like the Vandals made it all the way to Carthage in North Africa, the Franks settled on either side of the Rhine, in the Rhine's Delta, and in what is now called Belgium. Is that because they were stronger than the other Germans who had to go further to seize lands of their own? Is it because the Franks who had so long been living in Roman territory as a reward for their military service to the Empire made a home for the new Frankish arrivals? Maybe it is both. Maybe it is neither. However it happened, the Franks were dominating a triangle of land in northwestern Europe when the bubonic plague first swept across the civilized world, not that I include the Franks as being part of the civilized world at that time. I do not know or care to what extent the plague impacted them. They seemed to have come through it all right, but that was never in doubt. Even someone as uninformed as my own humble self had heard three things about the Franks by then. The Franks bred like rabbits, fought like wolves, and they were one people with many kings. As with most stereotypes, there are kernels of truth in there, but a lot of nuances lost. It would be more accurate to say the Franks were prosperous enough that their children survived more than many other peoples. Those children then grew up to be strapping adults who excelled at violence, and while they did have many kings, they usually fought their way down to a single ruler in each generation before starting all over again with the new batch. Let me explain. The first true king of the Franks. Franks was named Clovis, which means famous in battle in Frankish. If you have never heard of him, you have probably heard of people named for him. Every Louis, Luigi, and Ludwig is a namesake of Clovis the Frank. Clovis married a Christian woman named Clotilda, which also means famous in battle in Frankish, if you can believe it, and at her urging, Clovis decided not only would he become a Christian himself, but that all Franks should be Christian as well. On something as strange as two people both named famous in battle, falling in love, embracing a new faith, and then ordering people on pain of death to renounce their Germanic gods and be baptized by Latin speaking clergy, the whole direction of European history changed. There were centuries where Europe was called Christendom because of Clovis and Clotilda. Anyway, when Clovis died, his eldest prince did not inherit Francia after him. As you may have gathered, the Franks practiced a very strange form of royal succession. If you were the son of a king, not just the first son, but any son, even a bastard, you got to be king too. The Franks counted out how many princes the king of the Franks had upon his death, and then they divided themselves up into equal numbers and equal lands, so that every prince could be a king, as his father was before him. Those many kings then fought amongst themselves until only one triumph to become king of the Franks in the end. Have I said the Franks were a phenomenally stupid people yet? The Franks were a phenomenally stupid people. These overlapping cycles of many and few and one Frankish kings became a messy dynasty known as the Merovingians after Clovis' grandfather Merovitch, who may or may not have ever really existed. They say Merovitch's father was a sea god, which is a strange thing for people who have nothing to do with the sea. Anyway, these Merovingians made the Franks power players in Western Europe, in Christendom, because as much as they loved fighting among themselves, they would set aside their mutual hatred and unite at a moment's notice to fight against a common foe, or on behalf of a common friend. One of their most common friends was the Pope in Rome. I have not mentioned anything about the papacy yet, and it is time I fix that. I have spoken a little about the rise of Christianity and more about the rise of Islam, but where does Rome and Rome's bishop fit into this larger picture? I will tell you, dear listeners, if Clotilda had not been a Christian, there would be no pope today, and Rome would be remembered in the past tense in the same way we speak about my beloved Carthage. Rome and the papacy would be nothing if the Franks had not fought for them time and time again. I am sprinting back and forth through history now, so forgive me. When the first Christian emperor Constantine built Constantinople as a new capital free from pagan roots, Rome still had standing in the new world order he created. Enough Christians had been martyred in Rome to give the place great spiritual power in an empire embracing Christianity. Constantine erected a great basilica on the Vatican Hills outside Rome's walls, where Saint Peter had been crucified upside down, and as he organized the Holy Church with himself at the top, as appointed by God, he made Rome one of the five most important bishoprics in the world, along with Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, and of course Constantinople itself. You will note that four of the five are in the eastern half of the Roman Empire, and while Constantinople is strictly speaking in Europe, it is fair to say that the bishop in Rome was responsible for the development of the church in most of Europe, in Christendom, in a way the other holy fathers were not. When the Empire was split in two for administrative purposes, the eastern half of the Empire was governed temporally from Constantinople by the successors of Constantine, with the spiritual assistance of the Patriarch of Constantinople, supported by the leaders of the Church in Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch. The western half of the empire, meanwhile, was governed from Rome by a series of generals and nobodies, and general nobodies, with the holy authority of the Bishop of Rome often wielding more quiet influence than whoever was calling himself the Caesar or Augustus of the West at the time. In Constantinople, even the most incompetent emperors had more power than their patriarchs. The eastern emperors were the head of the universal church with the power to hire and fire patriarchs. That was not the case in Rome. As the western frontiers were overrun, Germans and Goths poured into Italy itself. The emperors of Rome abandoned the eternal city and tried to rule from Ravenna, a city made easily defensible where the Po River empties into the Adriatic. The Pope remained in Rome. Soon enough, the Germans and the Goths did away with the Emperor in Ravenna, but the papacy in Rome endured. The papacy endured, and the churchmen who answered to the Bishop of Rome went out amongst the invaders to preach the gospel. The barbarians embraced Christianity to the extent that it promised them an eternal reward after their deaths, without impacting their worst excesses while they were still among the living. Without a doubt there was a give and take between the Germans and the Roman churchmen in the beginning. The Pope was willing to look the other way on some matters that would have been deal breakers to the warriors who had just swarmed all over half the civilized world. No one could call those first converts the kind of Christians that Constantinople wanted, obedient and compliant to decrees from regular assemblies of high ranking, Greek speaking clergy, debating minutia of theology at the bidding of an all powerful but distant emperor. No, half of Christendom did not have the patience or the temperament to be prattled at by bookish strangers from the east who put on errors and were critical of everything they saw even while constantly changing their minds about what was right and proper in the first place. Do you know what those Germans did respect right down to their marrow and head for centuries? Rome. The very name was magic to them, even if its glories were all in the past. Now that the conquerors were embracing a new faith in new lands, they looked to the Pope in Rome for spiritual guidance. They wanted to hear holy truths in Latin, the Roman tongue. Under these circumstances it was not long before the Pope was communicating with the other holy fathers as if he was on an equal footing with the lot of them put together. Sometimes the emperor in Constantinople could look away from his other problems to bring a particularly arrogant bishop of Rome back in line, but when that happened, some German or Goth would come along and murder the Chassin Churchman for the crime of repeating Constantinople's opinion about what was and was not Christian. Of course, that is when the popes were not being killed by rivals for the papacy, or by the mobs of Rome, or by the Germans living in Italy who were not yet Christian, or by Christians who were a slightly different kind of Christian than the Pope was at the time. When I say the papacy endured, I should be clear individual popes rarely lasted long. It was so easy to kill a pope in those days. He had no army, and for many of Rome's worst days the Vatican did not even have walls around it. As for the Rome he sometimes ruled, after several wars between the Goths and the Romans and the Germans, Rome became so empty that the Roman forum was a cow pasture. A cow pasture. Imagine cattle wandering among the ruins of buildings erected by men like Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius, eating grass growing out of shallow topsoil that had accumulated on a bedrock of paving stones once trod upon by the rulers of the world. Pity the poor cow herds who watched over their animals in that place, surrounded by tumbled down wonders and words carved in stone in a language they spoke but could not read. They lived and died knowing their ancestors had it all and left them nothing but ruins. With that said, things did get better once the Franks started taking an interest in the Pope's safety. Why should they care? Well, when you have all those Christian kings fighting each other about who should survive, God's opinion on the matter matters to them. Before you know it, a letter from Rome saying Help me has all of the men who would be kings stop fighting each other and ride out to save the eternal city and win God's favor as it was interpreted to them by the only church that mattered to them, the church in Rome. I came into this little rant talking about the Franks turning back the tide of Islam. I have not forgotten where I am going. Let me get there. The Merovingian Franks were a strange lot, as I hope I have now persuaded you, dear listeners. With their one king, many kings, one king cycle of violence, it would be surprising if their weirdness did not come with some superstitions and oddly practical decisions, right? As an example, while the Franks like to be clean shaven and keep their hair cut very short, it was believed, like Samson, that a king's strength was bound up in his hair, and so the Merovingian royals were the hairiest men in Francia. It was never even a contest, to have long locks and a beard and not be a prince or a king was to take your life into your own hands among the Franks, for they did not suffer pretenders to the monarchy gladly. Meanwhile, even among the royal family, to have long locks and a beard marked you for death by those who saw that hair standing between their leader and final victory. As I have said, the Franks were phenomenally stupid people, phenomenally stupid. Did I mention the Pope in Rome turned a blind eye to polygamy among the Merovingians? Oh, only one wife, says the Church, but every Frankish noble winked at his priest and kept as many women in his household as he could manage. By the time a man climbed all the way up to become king of the Franks, he would have a lot of sons, and the Franks did not care for the Church's opinion about what bastards were and were not allowed to inherit either. The Pope and his churchmen did not press the point if they knew what was good for them. So now you have large families of Hirsuit Merovingian men set on killing each other in the scramble for the ultimate prize. How much quality time would any male royal ever give to another male royal, even if it is one of his many potential successors? How much of the art of ruling does even a great king learn from his father or get to pass down to his son? Do you know who was training heirs? The Merovingian's chiefs of staff. Now, if I had to pick a word for what I am about to describe, I would go with Chamberlain, or Major Domo, but French historians centuries ago all agreed they wanted something a little more grand when they talk about this, and so they decided as a group to say that every Merovingian had a right hand man known as Mayor of the Palace. You will excuse my chortle considering the Franks had neither real towns nor real palaces at this time. Still, that is the term, and whatever you want to call them, these Frankish administrators were capable men. For their lord to become the one king to succeed in the next generation, the best of these mayors of the palace needed to be able to read, write, do sums, gather political support, organize armies, write and enforce laws, and understand enough economics and religion and foreign policy to guide their master's affairs while he focused on growing his hair and making babies with his many women. Soon enough the Merovingians themselves were not really in charge of anything. We are now entering the era remembered as the time of the Do Nothing Kings, and it is an apt nickname. Many of the Frankish kings grew so proud and vain and lazy that they were hauled around in ox carts while their fighting men rode to war on horses. They became mascots rather than commanders. The mayors of the palace did the real governing and generaling. And so we come to Carulus Mantel, known in English as Charles the Hammer. Charles was mayor of the palace to a king of the Franks whose name does not matter. I am sure the king's hair was magnificent, but when Arabs and Berbers poured over the Pyrenees from Spain and marched north, it was Charles the Hammer who beat them bloody on a hill somewhere between Tours and Poitiers in the heart of modern France. We Muslims did not realize it at the time, but that was as far north as our armies would ever advance into Western Europe. For the next seven and a half centuries, Christianity would push us back and back until one day we were driven out of Al Andalus altogether. Where was I when this happened? I was in Malaga, mourning the death of Anna and throwing money at her family. I never thought of the Franks at all back then, but Charles the Hammer changed that forever. For the next several centuries all Europeans were Franks to Muslims, just as Moors and Saracens were generic terms for Muslims to Western European Christians. Who, I suppose, it is time I start calling Roman Catholics. Catholic is a word meaning universal, but also broad minded, and having sympathies with all. The Western half of Christendom, as defined by the bishop in Rome, was Roman Catholic. The eastern half of the Christian world, in contrast, came to be called Orthodox. Today there are many different Orthodoxies, each centered around a specific region or people, now that there is no central government in Constantinople to hold the whole thing together. Still, Orthodox means conforming to approved doctrine. Today it is very popular to say the Roman Catholics are the rigid ideologues who enforce the papacy's policies on everyone. That is not where Catholicism started. The bishops of Rome Christianized invaders and barbarians, millions of people who answered only to themselves and who held power over half a continent. In the quest for creating a universal faith through being broad minded enough to allow little things like polygamy among Frankish nobles to slide, the Catholic Church succeeded as a spiritual force in a way Eastern Orthodox Christianity could not. Let us return to Charles the Hammer, the Frank who was in everything but name a king of the Franks. After beating the Muslim army bent on conquering the Franks as the generation before them had conquered the Visigoths of Spain, he went on the offensive, pushing Islam back over the Pyrenees. No one remembers what the Merovingian he served was doing while Charles the Hammer was saving Christendom and establishing the front line between two warring faiths. At a guess that worthy man was probably combing his magnificent tresses or embracing one of the many mothers of his many children. Anyway, Charles the Hammer's son Peppen the Short was educated by Frankish monks who answered to the Pope in Rome. Such was their influence that Pepin's younger brother would eventually renounce all claims to power and become a monk himself. When Pepin succeeded his father as mayor of the palace, he put down all sorts of small revolts and wars, some led by Muslims, others by factions within the sprawling family of Merovingians who would be king if God would but just grant them victory over the long haired puppet Peppen served. One day Peppen wrote to the Pope In regards to the king of the Franks who no longer possess the royal power, is this state of things proper? If God decides who is king, what am I who wields royal power by the grace of God? The Pope did not miss the obvious intention behind such an inquiry. Ever eager to maintain good relations with the true ruler of the Franks, he endorsed Peppen in a letter that Peppen could read to his nobles, and he also permitted his senior churchmen in Francia to crown Peppen as king. Peppen had the Merovingian he once served shaved and shoved into a monastery. There were more wars to follow, from Muslims and Merovingians and from Peppen's brothers and half brothers aping the habits of Frankish royalty and fighting their kin for the crown, but Peppen the Short always prevailed. He was, by the grace of God and the Pope in Rome, the king of the Franks. Peppin truly was an impressive man, despite his short stature. I met him many times, and it surprised me that history has not made more of him. Still, I can understand the why of it. Peppen had the great misfortune to be the son of a more famous man, Charles Martell, and the father of one of the most famous men of his or any age. Charlemagne. I expect many of you may have heard of him. Okay, let me come back to Charlemagne. I promise I will come back. Now that we finally have a familiar name to use as a landmark after all this blather, I need to go east before I circle back again. I have spoken about the Muslims in Spain, the Franks in Northwestern Europe, and the Pope in Rome. Let me talk about what was happening with the Emperors in Constantinople and the Umayyads in Damascus before we return together to Charlemagne. You have been listening to the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast, and there is a lot more to come. Here are a few ways you can help support this program. First, if you are enjoying it, please tell someone about it. Audio dramas live and die on word of mouth, so please help spread the word. This may be the third and final season, but I plan to leave the series up as long as people continue to take an interest in it. Second, please like it, review it, and subscribe to it wherever you find your podcasts. We want to teach the algorithm that this show is worth people's time. Third, this podcast is based on the novels Beginning, Middle, and End by Jeff Mix available on Amazon. If you want a copy of the story for yourselves, that would be so appreciated. Fourth, I have a link to a typeform survey in the show notes for each episode. Tell me a little about yourself and feel free to ask me questions. I have already done a QA mailbag episode during the run of this series, and I probably will do another one in a little while once people have had a chance to find it and enjoy the show after the final episode airs. Fifth, while this may be the final season of the Tape Recorder trilogy podcast, I already have plans for two more shows, so please remain subscribed to this channel for updates on those when they are ready to be shared. Finally, while I don't want to break up the episode with ads, I do have a Patreon account with extra content for those of you who are willing to support this channel with a donation. A link to that is also in the show notes. With that said, thank you so much for your time and attention, and I look forward to you enjoying the next episode soon.