Europe · The migration period
Kingdom of Thuringia
drawn on the map AD 476–533
This second Thuringian entry in the list highlights the royal dynasty and specifically Basina of Thuringia. The full political history is at entry 30; here the focus is dynastic.
- Shown on the map
- AD 476–533
- Peak area
- 40k km²
- Region
- Europe
Overview
This second Thuringian entry in the list highlights the royal dynasty and specifically Basina of Thuringia. The full political history is at entry 30; here the focus is dynastic. The Thuringian kings of the late 5th century (Bisinus and his queen, also named Basina, and their sons Hermanafrid, Baderic, and Berthachar) presided over a kingdom that punched above its weight through marriage diplomacy with the Ostrogoths (Amalaberga), Lombards, and Franks.
Decline and legacy
Basina of Thuringia (fl. later 5th century) was, according to Gregory of Tours, the wife of the Thuringian king Bisinus who left her husband to marry Childeric I, king of the Salian Franks, declaring she had come to the most capable man she knew. She became the mother of Clovis I, founder of the Merovingian realm — making the Thuringian royal line an ancestor of the Frankish (and thus French) monarchy. (She should be distinguished from her later namesake, the 6th-century Merovingian princess Basina, daughter of Chilperic I, involved in the Poitiers nunnery revolt.) The kingdom's destruction at the Unstrut in 531 and Hermanafrid's death ended Thuringian independence; the memory of the dynasty survived chiefly through this Merovingian connection and through Radegund, a Thuringian princess taken by the Franks who became a revered saint.
Common questions
- What was the Kingdom of Thuringia?
- This second Thuringian entry in the list highlights the royal dynasty and specifically Basina of Thuringia. The full political history is at entry 30; here the focus is dynastic.
- When is the Kingdom of Thuringia shown on the map?
- The border data draws the Kingdom of Thuringia AD 476–533. The source samples borders at fixed dates, so a span can begin late or run on past the end.
- How large was the Kingdom of Thuringia?
- At its greatest extent drawn on this map, the Kingdom of Thuringia covered about 40,000 km². That is the largest area the border data gives it across the years it is drawn, not necessarily its greatest extent in history.
- How did the Kingdom of Thuringia end?
- Basina of Thuringia (fl. later 5th century) was, according to Gregory of Tours, the wife of the Thuringian king Bisinus who left her husband to marry Childeric I, king of the Salian Franks, declaring she had come to the most capable man she knew. She became the mother of Clovis I, founder of the Merovingian realm — making the Thuringian royal line an ancestor of the Frankish (and thus French) monarchy.
Sources
This compendium cites its sources once for the whole document rather than per territory. Its bibliography names the English Wikipedia articles for each territory and its key figures as the primary basis, with Encyclopædia Britannica, the World History Encyclopedia, and academic and primary sources — Jordanes, Procopius, Gregory of Tours, Bede, Ammianus and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, read through the secondary literature. The article this entry is anchored on:
- Wikipedia — Basina of Thuringia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basina_of_Thuringia
This entry was last updated .
This entry was researched and drafted with AI from the sources above, and has not been reviewed by a historian. How entries are made
Text available under CC BY-SA 4.0: reuse it with a credit to The World Through Time and a link to this page. Passages drawing on the Wikipedia articles listed above are also licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by their contributors.
Border geometry for the map itself comes from Cliopatria v0.12 (Seshat Global History Databank, CC-BY-4.0).
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