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( Liber Historiae Francorum)
Liber historiae Francorum ("The book of the history of the Franks") is a book that briefly starts as secondary source for early Franks in the time of Marcomer, and it gives a short breviarum until the time of the late Merovingians, where it becomes an important primary source of the contemporain history. Here it becomes an example of historiography about the Pippinid family in Austrasia before they became the more famous "Carolingians". Liber historiae Francorum is customarily dated to 727 because of a reference at the end to the sixth year of Theuderic IV, probably in Soissons, at the royal abbey of Saint-Médard.[1] and it offers a Neustrian perspective of the era of mayors of the palace, where the factions of the great territorial magnates could only be held in check and balanced by the consecrated legitimacy of the Merovingian king. It has been explored and interpreted by Richard Gerberding and more recently by Rosamond McKitterick in History and Memory in the Carolingian World. As a widely-read narrative, it helped inculcate a sense of cultural solidarity among the readership for whom it was intended, and whose biases it caters to and whose political agenda it promotes. As for that agenda, Fouracre and Gerberding (History and Hagiography) show that the book supports the Merovingian dynasty, but supports its kings only insofar as they rule with the consultation of the major nobles. The nobles, too, are supported only insofar as they do not aspire above their station. It is one of a corpus of new books of history written in the 8th century, and copied and widely distributed in the 9th, which offered their readers (and listeners) a deep background that set the Franks in the context of the Roman Empire and Christian Gallo-Roman world. From the outset the book promises to present the origins and deeds of the Frankish kings and people. It tells that the Franks originated with a group of Trojan refugees who found themselves on the north coast of the Black Sea. Following that, it relies heavily upon the Gallo-Roman bishop and historian Gregory of Tours (d. 594), whose History it epitomises, corrects and parallels. The last eleven chapters, 43-53 in Krusch's edition, present an independent account of events in the Frankish lands in the 7th and early 8th centuries and attract historians' interest, as they cover ground not lighted by any other source.
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