I recently found out that Charlemagne was descended from a long line of Roman senators. Is this where royal dynasties tended to originate from in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Rome?

by _DeanRiding
Compieuter

Where did you actualy find this? This could technically be possible as the Frankish and Gallo-Roman elite in Merovingian Gaul merged together over the course of the 6th and 7th century. ^^1 But I don't know of any particular roman senatorial family having descendents in 8th century Austrasia.

So if this could be a somewhat dubious claim and if it is then it falls into a medieval and early modern tradition of fabricating your ancestry. In the middle ages it was fashionable to trace your family lineage back to some heroic ancestor. The four most popular links were Charlemagne, king Arthur, the Romans or even the Trojans. ^^2 A claim to ancient heroical ancestry together with an old castle and some nice heraldry would legitmise a claim to moral superiority for that family. This was quite helpfull in being considered nobility. But many of these family trees weren't based on actual good history and they could even be completely fabricated.
So I'll give the example that Enenkel and Ottenheym give in their book. The geneology of the duke of Brabant made in 1320 claimed that it's founding father was a knight named Brabon. Brabon was contemporary to Julius Caesar who was born near Brussels as the son of emperor Octavian and Zwane daughter of the Greek emperor. In this story Zwane and her children were sort of kidnapped and locked away in a castle in Noviomagus (Nijmegen). Brabon together with Octavian and with the help of a swan rescued Zwane and her children. For his help Brabon got Octavian's daughter as his bride. So the duke of Brabant was descendent from both the Greek and Roman emperors and Julius Caesar's brother in law.
As you may suspect, this is all made up. And that didn't really matter as these stories were also often changed and they weren't taken super seriously. So the point of this is that you shouldn't really trust medieval and early modern family trees tracing back their lineage to some mythologcial figure.

  1. Van Dam R., ‘Merovingian Gaul and the Frankish conquest’, in P. Fouracre ed., The New Cambridge medieval history. Vol. 1, C.500-c.700 (Cambridge, 2005), 217.

  2. Enenkel K. & Ottenheym K., De Oudheid als ambitie. De zoektocht naar een passend verleden (Nijmegen, 2017), 31.