Dagobert II

Dagobert II was a Merovingian king of Austrasia in the later seventh century, the son of King Sigebert III and Queen Chimnechild. After Sigebert’s death in the mid-650s, while Dagobert was still a child, the Austrasian mayor of the palace Grimoald had the boy tonsured—thereby marking him as ineligible for kingship under contemporary custom—and removed him from the kingdom. Frankish tradition, notably the Liber Historiae Francorum, records that Bishop Dido of Poitiers conveyed the young prince to Ireland. There Dagobert spent many years in monastic exile and received an ecclesiastical education. In his absence Grimoald placed his own son, known as Childebert the Adopted, on the Austrasian throne, a usurpation later undone by the Neustrian branch of the dynasty.

Dagobert remained in Ireland for roughly two decades. In the mid-670s, after the murder of Childeric II and a period of confusion among the Frankish kingdoms, Austrasian notables sought a legitimate Merovingian to restore. According to the near-contemporary Life of Wilfrid by Stephen of Ripon, the Northumbrian bishop Wilfrid of York assisted Dagobert’s return from exile. Dagobert was established as king of Austrasia around 676. His reign was short and is thinly documented: surviving narrative sources give only a spare outline of years dominated by rivalry between Austrasian and Neustrian factions and by the ambitions of mayors of the palace, above all Ebroin of Neustria.

On 23 December 679 Dagobert was killed while hunting in the forest of Woëvre, in the district of Stenay. Near-contemporary accounts present the death as assassination, commonly attributed to Ebroin or to Austrasian magnates who found the restored king inconvenient. He was buried at Stenay. In later generations a local cult grew around him as a royal martyr; a church there came to bear his name, and his feast was kept on 23 December. A later Latin Vita Dagoberti is of limited historical value, conflating him with material belonging to Dagobert I. Reliable seventh- and eighth-century sources do not record a wife or children; genealogies that assign him a spouse and a son named Sigebert belong to medieval legend or modern fabrication. After his death Austrasian kingship passed into the orbit of Theuderic III, while effective power remained with the mayors of the palace, a development that prepared the later rise of the Carolingians.