FORTUNATUS’ CONNECTIONS TO Merovingian royalty had many facets and lasted throughout his career. This chapter demonstrates how ideas of patronage and friendship informed Fortunatus’ works for Merovingian kings. While Fortunatus’ poems for royalty are by no means an understudied topic, scholarly discussion has primarily focused on his most formal and mannered poetry and its connections to classics models for such works. Integrating ideas of patronage and friendship into these discussions illuminates the poet’s innovative use of traditional models as it developed throughout his career. To explore this development over time, this chapter takes a chronological approach, first discussing Fortunatus’ epithalamium for the wedding of Sigibert and Brunhild, in which he chose to present Merovingian marriages within the late antique tradition of friendship between spouses. I will analyze the influence of late antique Christian thinkers on his ideas about royal marriage in order to illuminate this neglected aspect of his work. Secondly, I discuss the panegyrics for the Merovingian kings Childebert and Chilperic as carefully crafted public responses to the situations in which they were written. By contrast, many of poems for royal patrons lack a clear context and cannot be analyzed as occasional poems in the same way as the panegyrics for kings, but they offer a clear portrait of the importance of family, patronage, and generosity in the lives of Merovingian royal women. The final two sections of this chapter focus on the themes of Fortunatus’ last poems for Merovingian royalty: grief, loss, and the appearance of the next generation.

Fortunatus began his career in Merovingian Gaul with the patronage of royalty, writing for the wedding of Sigibert and Brunhild, and performing at royal functions, while also composing poetry for bishops and members of the nobility. Save Chlodomer (r. 511–524) and Chlothar II (r. 584–629/630), Fortunatus mentioned all sixth-century Merovingian kings, and he knew and wrote about Sigibert, Charibert, Chilperic, and Childebert II in detail. However, of the kings who controlled Poitiers during his lifetime, he wrote only for Charibert, Chilperic, and Childebert II. Guntram is named only once, in a poem for an obscure comes Galactorius. Reydellet, surprised by this absence, argues that this must be explained by the assumption that Fortunatus never met Guntram, who came to prominence in his world in 584, when the king assumed guardianship of Chlothar II and Childebert II. The poet celebrated the king’s visit to Metz in 588. The rulers in X.9, discussed below, are not named, though I take them to be Brunhild and Childebert.