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| Merovech | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| King of the Franks | |||||
 An imagined portrait (ca. 1720) of Merovech | |||||
| Reign | c. 450–458 | ||||
| Predecessor | Chlodio | ||||
| Successor | Childeric I | ||||
| Born | c. 411 | ||||
| Died | c. 458 | ||||
| Issue | Childeric | ||||
| |||||
| Dynasty | Merovingian | ||||
Merovech (French: Mérovée, Merowig; Latin: Meroveus; c. 411 – 458)[1] was the ancestor of the Merovingian dynasty. He was reportedly a king of the Salian Franks, but records of his existence are mixed with legend and myth. The most important written source, Gregory of Tours, recorded that Merovech was said to be descended from Chlodio, a roughly contemporary Frankish warlord who pushed from the Silva Carbonaria in modern central Belgium as far south as the Somme, north of Paris in modern-day France. His supposed descendants, the kings Childeric I and Clovis I, are the first well-attested Merovingians.
He may have been one of several barbarian warlords and kings that joined forces with the Roman general Aetius against the Huns under Attila at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in Gaul in 451.
- ^ A Companion to Gregory of Tours, ed. Alexander C. Murray, (Brill, 2015), 659.