ABSTRACT
As we saw in the last chapter, Pippin’s eldest son Drogo died in 707, and his young son Arnulf may at this point have succeeded him as duke in Austrasia. In early 714 Pippin himself fell ill, and when his son Grimoald came to visit him in April of that year, he was assassinated while praying at the shrine of St Lambert at Liege. His slayer was one Rantgar, sometimes said to have been a Frisian because the LHF called him gentilis, a pagan. But the name Rantgar is also Frankish, and the term gentilis could be an insult rather than a description. If Lambert’s own death a decade earlier really had been the result of his denigration of Alpaida, Charles Martel’s mother, one might read Grimoald’s visit to the saint’s shrine as a further slight upon her, to which Rantgar, possibly a supporter of her family, reacted with violence. But there is no hard information with which to support speculation about the motive for Grimoald’s murder, and there was surely any number of people who might have wished him dead. Here, as in every reference to the Liege area in the period 688-715, Charles Martel and his mother are con spicuous by their absence. Pippin lay ill at nearby Jupille. The clear impres sion is that it was Plectrude, not Alpaida, who was at his bedside.1 After the event, as we know, Pippin ordered Grimoald’s young son Theudoald to succeed him as mayor of the palace in Neustria, and we have already noted that the appointment of this parvulus would turn out to be disastrous.
