ABSTRACT
Pippin was a leading Austrasian magnate, rich in land in the Moselle valley and to the north around Liege.4 Arnulf was equally rich. But despite their support for Clothar II in 613, the king gave the position of mayor of the palace in Austrasia to a man named Rado who may well have been their opponent. Clothar, it seems, favoured a group of western Austrasians who had strong family ties with the Neustrians. Rado was probably a member of a family group which historians have called the ‘Faronids’ or ‘Gundoinings’. This group of highly privileged people, who held land and power in the area in which Burgundy, Neustria and Austrasia met, were well placed to serve Clothar II as a link between his three kingdoms. Members of the family would continue to be prominent throughout the seventh century. The great Audoin, bishop of Rouen in the later seventh century, and an acclaimed holy man, was connected to them, for instance. Another of the leading family groups under Clothar was the Agilolfings, who were in fact related to the Faronids. The Agilolfings were even more widely spread across Francia, and the rulers of Bavaria were Agilolfings. There was even a line of Agilolfing kings in Lombardy. The Agilolfings and Faronids together dominated southern Austrasia, and they seem to have been rivals to the Pippinids. The Merovingian kings, past masters at dividing in order to rule, most probably stimulated this rivalry, hence the appointment of Rado, rather than Pippin, as mayor of the palace in Austrasia, and the same tactic would be used against three generations of Pippinids. At the same time, the Pippinids
3 For circumstantial evidence that Arnulf was an ancestor of the family see G. Halsall, Settlement and Social Organization. The Merovingian Region of Metz (Cambridge 1995), pp. 15, n. 7, 263, n. 1.
