Rome is Dead. Long Live Frisia!

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Around AD 400, when the Barbarians were banging their drums toward the gates of Rome, the flooding had receded enough to allow many Frisians to return home. For the first couple centuries after Rome, they kept to themselves. They continued their farming, their sea-trading, and their piracy. But toward the middle of the 7th century, things began to change. Frisia started building an empire.

A couple factors led to Frisia’s 7th century land-grab. One was the emergence of kings. Prior to the 7th century, Frisia did not have a united monarch. They were a collection of loosely-knit tribes sharing the same language and ethnicity, but without any centralized leadership. It’s difficult to say who the first real “King of Frisia” was. The earliest figures are so obscured in a haze of myth and legend that it’s impossible to confirm if they were even real people.

The first historically reliable king is Aldgisl, who reigned around the year AD 680. Although we don’t know their names, his predecessors were likely strong leaders. By the time Aldgisl took the throne, Frisian territory encompassed most of Northern Europe’s lowlands, and was sneaking down the Rhine.

(It’s worth noting that even though we know some facts about Aldgisl, his position is still unclear. Contemporary manuscripts don’t agree on the exact role of these Frisian leaders. Some call them “kings,” while others call them “dukes.” In the interest of making this blog as epic-sounding as possible, we’ll use the term “king”.)

The second factor in Frisian empire-building was the rise of the Franks. As good as things were going for the Frisians, they were going even better for the Franks. They had conquered nearly all their neighboring kingdoms, and had achieved hegemonic rule of most of Western Europe. The pope even gave the newly-Christianized Franks his blessing, declaring them the heirs to the Romans, and a “Holy Roman Empire.”

Like the Frisians, the Franks had their eye on the Rhine. That’s when the trouble started.