ABSTRACT
Grafio is a term for an official who appears in Merovingian sources with a northern perspective carrying out duties associated with his better-documented counterpart, the comes (or count) of southern-based sources. It is widely claimed that the grafio’s identification with the comes was a late development and that originally he was a Germanic official of much lower rank who only reached parity with the count late in the history of the kingdom. This chapter shows the equivalency of the two offices from the beginning and regards grafio as simply a northern, Frankish term for the Roman comes of the rest of Merovingian administration.
