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Boniface's Influence On Frankish Society

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Although addressed to Aethebald, an Anglo-Saxon king, this incredibly powerful sentence by the famous missionary Boniface, allows a glimpse into the mindset of the church regarding kingship. “A king’s sin could destroy the image of God in him and make him an image of the devil instead.” Boniface, although principally working as a missionary for the Germans, also helped to reform the Frankish Church, which had declined greatly. The Merovingian kingdom began a decline after the death of Clovis that trickled down until the rise of the Pippinid and Arnulfling families in the sixth century. Likewise, the church became corrupt, with little learning or any growth. The combined family of Arnulflings and Pippinids combined to become one of the strongest …show more content…

The premier exercise of their authority was in legislation enacted at councils. This law was wide in scope and expressive not only of moral ideals, but also of a fully elaborated social thought. Most bishops in Frankish society not only held their respective bishoprics, but also extensive family land as most came from the nobility. This aristocratic origin of most bishops was not seen by contemporaries as an impediment to episcopal office, but rather as an appropriate background for someone who would rule a community, in addition to governing its religious cult. Bishops, moreover, did not act as functional equivalents of senators or nobles, but as a distinctive, cohesive group, possessing a self-conscious and unifying identity. However, that changed during the missionary wars in Germany under Pippin II and Charlemagne. Unlike senators, bishops were ordained clerics, gave sermons, and baptized people. They adopted a special hairstyle (tonsure) symbolically connecting them to the asceticism of the desert and a moral code that brought them into contact with the poor and that gave them a unique position from which to make demands on their kings (and on the poor.) However, towards the end of the Merovingian kingdom, these same bishops proved prone to corruption and sinful natures, similarly to how the Carolingians would also depict the Merovingians

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