This history does not begin with women in charge but—as is so often the case—with competitive men at odds with one another. When Clothar I, King of the Franks, died in 561, his sons split the empire into four separate Kingdoms. Then, when one brother died, the number fell to three, with the city of Paris held in common. Guntram ruled Burgundy, Chilperic ruled Neustria, and Sigibert ruled Austrasia.

Sigibert recognized an opportunity to distinguish himself from his brothers right away. King Sigibert “saw that his brothers were marrying spouses who were absolutely unworthy of them and were so far degrading themselves as to even marry their own servants,” according to Bishop Gregory of Tours. Even though Guntram had numerous lowly mistresses, Sigibert’s major concern was their third brother, Chilperic, who was having an affair with a palace slave named Fredegund. Fredegund had already succeeded in having his first wife removed from the marriage and put to a convent.

In order to get the upper hand and further legitimize his rule through a marriage relationship, Sigibert asked Brunhild, the daughter of Visigoth ruler Athanagild, for her hand in marriage. Brunhild was a beautiful, intelligent princess who had a sizable dowry. The couple wed in a spectacular ceremony in 567 AD after Sigibert’s proposal was approved to great fanfare.

But Chilperic was not to be so easily outdone. Ever competitive with his brothers, he promised to forsake his other wives and mistresses, including Fredegund, and negotiated for the hand of Brunhild’s sister Galswintha. A second lavish marriage took place later that same year, in Rouen.

With two brothers from two neighboring Kingdoms marrying two sister-princesses and forging a significant alliance with the Visigoths in Spain, the twin marriages of 567 AD seemed to herald peace. However, after less than a year, Fredegund returned to Chilperic’s bed, prompting Galswintha to request a divorce. She requested permission to leave her dowry behind and go back home. Gregory relates that Chilperic refused and “made ingenious pretenses and comforted her with soothing words” before “ordering her to be strangled by a slave and finding her dead on the bed” shortly after. Fredegund and Chilperic were wed three days later.

The sophisticated princess Brunhild and the former palace slave Fredegund were now sisters-in-law in positions of power that would come to dominate the political landscape of Europe for several decades.

Even by Merovingian standards, the Queens’ rise to power was unheard of in its violence. After the murder of Galswintha, Sigibert and Guntram invaded Chilperic’s Kingdom at Brunhild’s urging. The brothers drove Chilperic out and kept him on the run over the next eight years. Finally, they surrounded his forces in Tournai.

In 584 AD. Queen Fredegund gave birth to her fifth male child. Her four previous sons had died at the ages of 8, 4, 1 and 1. 

ChilpericI and Fredegund had named one of their sons Samson. As Gregory tells the story, Samson was born in 575, while the royal couple were being besieged in Tournai. Although Fredegund initially wanted to reject the boy, Chilperic persuaded her to accept him and had the bishop of Tournai baptise the young prince.

This fifth child’s outlook became even darker after his father was assassinated and the vengeful Brunhilda sent her armies into Neustria. Fredegund did not give the boy a name to protect him against assassins who might identify him and she secreted him to a royal villa in the north, in modern day Vitry-en-Artois. In the meantime, Fredegund appealed to King Guntram of Burgundy to recognize the boy as heir to Neustria.

With their newborn boy in tow, Brunhild and Sigibert marched triumphantly into Paris with plans to conquer the entire Frankish Empire. However, Fredegund had persisted in her scheme, bringing in assassins in a desperate effort to save her husband. She sent her hired help to Sigibert’s victory feast, where they used poisoned dining utensils to stab the jubilant King. Brunhild was kidnapped along with her small son. Her political career appeared to be over; she was no longer under the Spanish court’s protection and it was impossible for it to negotiate her release. Brunhild nevertheless managed to get away.

She went on to conspire with Chilperic’s deposed first wife and then married one of Fredegund’s stepsons, which allowed her to raise her own army.

Later, Brunhild persuaded the childless Guntram to designate her son as his heir in addition to ascending the throne as regent on behalf of her infant son. All of this had the result that she was able to claim two of the three Kingdoms of Francia in a short period of time, having previously been the imprisoned widow of a dead King.

However, none of this put a stop to the ongoing civil war between the Kingdoms, which saw Brunhild and her allies unite against Chilperic and Fredegund. According to accounts from the time, the former slave of the palace possessed authority and influence as queen:

Fredegund often operated independently of her husband, offering bribes to officials and arranging the assassinations of her rivals, including Brunhild’s husband, Chilperic’s other wives, and her stepson who had married Brunhild.

Chilperic was assassinated in 584. Despite Fredegund’s reputation for ruthlessness, this move put her in a precarious position, one eerily similar to that of her rival years earlier.

With her four-month-old son and the majority of the palace’s treasure, Fredegund escaped the Kingdom for the sanctuary of the cathedral in Paris. However, her adversary spotted an opening when Brunhild’s son ordered Paris to be surrounded and demanded that Fredegund be handed over so that he could answer for the deaths of his aunt and father. However, Fredegund managed to flee once more by requesting Guntram, the last surviving brother, to “adopt” her young boy in exchange for protection. Guntram agreed, but only if Fredegund gave way. He made arrangements for her to leave public life and sent her to a bishop’s care in in Rouen. While in exile, however, Fredegund launched an attempt on Brunhild’s life, she framed the royal treasurer for her husband’s murder, and then seized the crown. She had spent sixteen years as a powerful queen consort; now she would rule on her own for thirteen more years as regent for her son, Clothar II.

Brunhild governed for even longer, acting as regent for her son, grandchildren, and great-grandson for three generations after eight years as Queen consort. The chronicles of the time describe Brunhild’s impact even during the brief time in between regencies, after she had formally resigned. The third participant to the pact that her son negotiates with Guntram is, of course, “the most renowned Lady Queen Brunhild.” The reply from “Brunhild Queen” arrives in the Byzantine Emperor’s letter to her son. And even though she is legally only one country’s queen Frankish Kingdom, Pope Gregory I addressed her as the supreme ruler of the land: “Brunhild Queen of the Franks.”

This became true enough after Guntram died in 592: Brunhild became regent of the third Frankish Kingdom, meaning that all three Kingdoms of the Frankish Empire had fallen under female rule.

Although Chilperic was the King, he often publicly deferred to Fredegund’s judgment.

He once told a nobleman begging for a pardon that he could not act unilaterally but had to wait “until I have discussed this matter with the Queen and found some way of restoring you to her good grace.” (Chilperic was not successful, apparently; the poor man was soon executed “at the personal command of the Queen” by being beaten across the throat with a piece of wood. His punishment exemplifies Fredegund’s penchant for creative retribution: she was infamous for ordering failed assassins to have their hands chopped off and servants, messengers, and commoners who disappointed her to be stretched on the rack, disfigured, or burned alive.)

In the latter half of the sixth century, Brunhild and Fredegund were not the only female regents in existence. In neighboring Lombard, Italy, widowed Queen Theodelinda served as regent; when Emperor Justin II fell ill in Byzantium, Aelia Sophia, the emperor’s wife, took over as regent; and, though it is unlikely that Fredegund or Brunhild would have known about it, halfway across the globe, Empress Suiko served as the Japanese Empire’s first female regent. Women were in power of four different medieval empires at the same time.

But dual female rule in Francia was cut short by Fredegund’s death in 597. Even though much of her reign was defined by fearsome battle, she died surprisingly peacefully in her own bed and was buried with great honor in Saint-Germain-des-Prés under a faceless effigy on her sarcophagus lid. Brunhild lived longer, well into her seventies, but her machinations caught up to her, bringing upon her a horrific death.

Depending on whose tale you believe, Clothar II, the son of Fredegund, seized her, paraded her on a camel, tormented her for three days on the rack, and finally had her torn to pieces or dragged to death by wild horses. It was a shockingly harsh method of killing a Queen, a public humiliation of a lady. Many people think it is still unparalleled today.

Prior to this tale of two queens’ epic and tragic conclusion, Bishop Gregory of Tours and his companion Felix, Bishop of Nantes, held a meeting with Guntram in the spring of 588 to arrange a peace pact. Gregory describes how, following the conclusion of the discussions, the men dined, drank, and then shifted their conversation to the infamous early-medieval scandal between Brunhild and Fredegund, the other two Frankish kings at the time. Guntram questioned Felix if it was true that he had “established warm cordial contacts” in some way.

Gregory drily answered for his friend:

“The ‘friendly relations’ which have bound them together for so many years are still being fostered by them both. That is to say, you may be quite sure that the hatred which they have borne for each other for many a long year, far from withering away, is as strong as ever.”

There is still so much history that cannot be learned or understood, particularly history pertaining to the perspectives of women. The few male-written accounts that are still around convey their own tale. The only surviving eyewitness account of Brunhild and Fredegund’s bloody rule is Gregory of Tours’.

Another chronicle was written in the 660s, fifty years after Brunhild’s demise, and was later credited to a person by the name of Fredegar. It continues Gregory’s History’s narrative of the end of both Queens’ reigns where it left off, but this time with a flattering eye for the Fredegund heirs who now had control of the Empire.

Another fifty years later, a century after Brunhild’s death, the Liber Historiae Francorum synthesized and embellished Gregory of Tours’ and Fredegar’s accounts.

While Gregory of Tours was very matter-of-fact about these monarchs’ gender, the accounts of the queens’ lives composed after their deaths focus unduly on them as failed wives and mothers. Fredegund is introduced as “beautiful, very cunning, and an adulteress,”

Brunhild as “a second Jezebel.” Salacious sexual details are added—Fredegund murders King Chilperic after being caught committing adultery with one of his generals and Brunhild is pointedly said to have seduced many men when she was well into her late fifties.

Fredegund was notorious for assassinating her stepsons and for coming to blows with her own daughter, once attempting to kill her by slamming her head with the lid of a treasure chest.

Brunhild, too, was harshly judged for her actions against members of her own family, in particular her ordering the deaths of her infant great-grandsons.

Though the Queens’ most brutal actions were not out of line with those of Merovingian Kings who came before and after them chroniclers express horror, rather than viewing the acts as calculated, common political moves.

But no matter what salacious stories might have dominated the historical narratives about them, These Queens had inarguable political effect: they consolidated and centralized Frankish control of the region.

Brunhild did so through her talents for administration and foreign relations, repairing old Roman roads, including the one once used by Caesar that ran past Alligny-en-Morvan. And she built other infrastructure: in Autun, a hospital, a convent, and church dedicated to St. Martin; in Laon, the abbey of Saint Vincent and in Bruniquel, a castle.

She also handled the tense relationships between the nobles in her court with competence. When one of her supporters was ambushed, she even “armed herself like a man and raced into the middle of the opposing forces” to successfully defend him.

Brunhild was a talented diplomat who conducted negotiations with the Goths, Lombards, and the Byzantine Empire. She also played a significant role in the Christianization of England. Her services to the Augustine mission were hailed by Pope Gregory I as being second only to God’s.

The answer may lie in the very treaty Gregory of Tours was negotiating with King Guntram during that visit in the spring of 588 where the “friendly relations” were discussed. The Treaty of Andelot refers back to the event that thrust both queens onto the international stage, the murder of Galswintha. Upon her marriage to Chilperic, Galswintha had been given a lavish gift unheard of in the early medieval world: five wealthy cities, Bordeaux, Limoges, Cahors, Béarn, and Bigorre. After her murder, Galswintha’s morgangabe, or bridal morning-gift, passed on to her heir, her sister Brunhild. The treaty specifically mentions the fact that Brunhild’s claim to these lands in Chilperic’s former Kingdom is supported by the law: “the Lady Brunhild is recognized to have inherited these cities, by the decree of King Guntram and with the agreement of the Franks.”

Chilperic had publicly violated an alliance with the Visigoths in Spain by slaying Galswintha. Additionally, he had taken Brunhild’s property and claimed it as his own, breaking established inheritance laws. This reveals a distinct type of motivation for Brunhild’s actions: rather than battling Fredegund nonstop, she did it to seize valuable land rather than seek revenge. However, this would go against the stereotype that males battle over territory and wealth while women struggle over relationships.