sentences
stringlengths
1
39.3k
The 68060 shares most architectural features with the P5 Pentium.Both have a very similar superscalar in-order dual instruction pipeline configuration, and an instruction decoder which breaks down complex instructions into simpler ones before execution.However, a significant difference is that the 68060 FPU is not pipelined and is therefore up to three times slower than the Pentium in floating point applications.
In contrast to that, integer multiplications and bit shifting instructions are significantly faster on the 68060.The 68060 has the ability to execute simple instructions in the address generation unit (AGU) and thereby supply the result two cycles before the ALU.In the development of the 68060, large amounts of commercial compiled code were analyzed for clues as to which instructions would be the best candidates for performance optimization.
Against the Pentium, the 68060 can perform better on mixed code; Pentium's decoder cannot issue an FP instruction every opportunity and hence the FPU is not superscalar as the ALUs were.If the 68060's non-pipelined FPU can accept an instruction, it can be issued one by the decoder.This means that optimizing for the 68060 is easier
However, with properly optimized and scheduled code, the Pentium's FPU is capable of double the clock for clock throughput of the 68060's FPU.The 68060 is the last development of the 68000 family for general purpose use, abandoned in favor of the PowerPC chips.It saw use in some late-model Amiga machines and Amiga accelerator cards as well as some Atari ST clones and Falcon accelerator boards (CT60/CT63/CT60e, the latter of which was created in 2015), and very late models of the Alpha Microsystems multiuser computers before their migration to x86, but Apple Inc. and the Unix world had moved onto various RISC platforms by the time the 68060 was available.
The 68060 was introduced at 50 MHz on Motorola's 0.6 µm manufacturing process.A few years later it was shrunk to 0.42 µm and clock speed raised to 66 MHz and 75 MHz.Some users were managed to overclock rev6.
68060 CPU-s up to 120 or 133 MHz.Developments of the basic core continue, intended for embedded systems.Here they are combined with a number of peripheral interfaces to reduce the overall complexity and power requirements of a design.
A number of chips, each with different sets of interfaces, are sold under the names ColdFire and DragonBall.Model numbers with even second-to-last digit (68000, 68020, 68040, 68060) were reserved for major revisions to the 680x0 core architecture.Model numbers with odd second-to-last digit (68010, 68030) were reserved for upgrades to the architecture of the previous chip.
No 68050 or 68070 was ever produced by Motorola.For example, the Motorola 68010 (and the obscure 68012) is a 68000 with improvements to the loop instruction and the ability to suspend then continue an instruction in the event of a page fault, enabling the use of virtual memory with the appropriate MMU hardware.There were, however, no major overhauls of the core architecture.
Similarly, the Motorola 68030 represents a process improvement on the 68020 with the MMU and a small data cache (256 bytes) moved on-chip.The 68030 was released in speed ratings up to 50 MHz.The jump from the 68000/68010 to the 68020/68030, however, represents a major overhaul, with innumerable individual changes.
By the time the 68060 was in production, Motorola had abandoned development of the 68000 family in favor of the PowerPC.The 68060 is the last 68000 family processor from Motorola.Signetics (Philips) produced a 68000-based variant that they somewhat confusingly named the 68070.
It contains a modestly-improved 68000 CPU, a simple on-chip MMU and an I²C bus controller.It came out long before the 68060 and was used principally as an embedded processor in some consumer electronics items, notably CD-i consoles.The 68060 has a history in American broadcast television graphics.
Chyron's , Max!, and Maxine!series of television character generators use the 68060 as the main processor.These character generators were a fixture on many American television networks' affiliate stations.
In desktops, the 68060 is used in some variants of the Amiga 4000T produced by Amiga Technologies, and available as a third party upgrade for other Amiga models.It is also used in the Amiga clone DraCo non-linear video system.The Q60 extended the Sinclair QL design similarly from the slowest start to the ultimate pace of the 68K architecture's capabilities; these 68060-based motherboards—at 66 MHz for the full 68060 or a non-FPU 68LC060 option overclocked to 80 MHz—are more than 100 times faster than the Sinclair QL while running the same operating systems.
The 68060 was used in Nortel Meridian 1 Option 51, 61 and 81 large office PBX systems, powering the CP3 and CP4 core processor boards.A pair of these boards each sporting a 68060 could be used to make the PBX fault tolerant.This was a logical application as previous Meridian 1 cores used other Motorola chips.
Nortel later changed the architecture to use Intel processors.The Motorola Vanguard 6560 multiprotocol router uses a 50 MHz 68EC060 processor.Motorola MVME-17x and Force Computer SYS68K VMEbus systems use a 68060 CPU.
The 68EC060 is a version of the Motorola 68060 microprocessor, intended for embedded controllers (EC).It differs from the 68060 in that it has neither an FPU nor an MMU.This makes it less expensive and it draws less power.
The 68LC060 is a low cost version of the Motorola 68060 microprocessor with no FPU.This makes it less expensive and it draws less power.ATC = Address Translation Cache
Motorola 6809 The Motorola 6809 (""sixty-eight-oh-nine"") is an 8-bit microprocessor CPU with some 16-bit features from Motorola.It was designed by Terry Ritter and Joel Boney and introduced in 1978.
It was a major advance over both its predecessor, the Motorola 6800, and the related MOS Technology 6502.Among the systems to use the 6809 are the TRS-80 Color Computer and Dragon 32/64 home computers, the Vectrex game system, and early 1980s arcade machines including "Star Wars", "Defender", "", "Joust", and "Gyruss".Series II of the Fairlight CMI digital audio workstation and Konami's "Time Pilot '84" arcade game each use dual 6809 processors.
Unlike the 6800 and 6502, the 6809 allows fully position-independent code and fully reentrant code in a simple and straightforward way.It was one of the first microprocessors with a hardware multiplication instruction, and it includes full 16-bit arithmetic and a fast interrupt system.Among the significant enhancements introduced in the 6809 are the use of two 8-bit accumulators (A and B, which can be combined into a single 16-bit register, D), two 16-bit index registers (X, Y) and two 16-bit stack pointers.
The index and stack registers allow advanced addressing modes.Program counter relative addressing allows for the easy creation of position-independent code, while a user stack pointer (U) facilitates reentrant code.The 6809 is assembler source-compatible with the 6800, though the 6800 has 78 instructions to the 6809's 59.
Some instructions were replaced by more general ones which the assembler translated into equivalent operations and some were even replaced by addressing modes.The instruction set and register complement were highly orthogonal, making the 6809 easier to program than the 6800 or 6502.Like the 6800, the 6809 includes an undocumented address bus test instruction which came to be nicknamed Halt and Catch Fire (HCF).
Unlike contemporary processors that often used a microcoded architecture (such as the 68000 and partly the 8086), the 6809's internal design was more similar to early simple CPU designs (and to some degree also the RISC machines that appeared in the mid 1970s and onwards).Like most 8-bit microprocessors, the 6809 implementation can in be viewed as a register-transfer level (RTL) machine, using a central PLA (less combinational logic) to implement much of the instruction decoding as well as parts of the sequencing.Just like the 6800 and 6502, the 6809 uses a two-phase clock to gate the latches.
This two phase clock cycle is used as a full machine cycle in these processors.Simple instructions can therefore execute in as little as two or three such cycles, although this also means that these cycles must be pretty slow.As a comparison, the higher resolution state machine of a CPU like the Z80 allows clock frequencies 3–5 times as high with the same speed memory chips, which was often the limiting factor.
This is because the Z80 combines two full (but short) clock cycles into a "relatively" long memory access period compared to the clock, while the more asynchronous 6809 instead has "relatively" short memory access times
A key aspect of the 6809 design is a series of built-in features to allow position-independent code.This came about because the design team believed that future system integrators would look to off-the-shelf code in ROMs to handle common tasks.Libraries of common routines like floating point arithmetic, graphics primitives, Lempel-Ziv (LZ77 and LZ78) and so forth would be available for integrators to license, combine together along with their own code, and burn to ROM.
A larger example is found in Motorola's 6809 programming manual, which contains the full listing of "assist09", a so-called monitor, a miniature operating system intended to be burned in ROM.In this sort of "pick and place" programming environment, there was no way to predict where the code would end up in the ROM.Any instructions that referred to other locations in memory would normally have to be changed to reflect these changes in layout.
In contrast, the 6809 allowed code to be placed anywhere in memory without modification.The 6809 design also focused on supporting reentrant code, code that can be called from various different programs concurrently without concern for coordination between them, or that can recursively call itself.The design team's prediction was, ultimately, incorrect.
The market for pre-rolled ROM modules never materialized
The 6809 is sometimes considered to be the conceptual precursor of the Motorola 68000 family of processors, though this is mostly a misunderstanding
The Motorola 6809 was originally produced in 1 MHz, 1.5 MHz (68A09) and 2 MHz (68B09) speed ratings.Faster versions were produced later by Hitachi.With little to improve, the 6809 marks the end of the evolution of Motorola's 8-bit processors; Motorola intended that future 8-bit products would be based on an 8-bit data bus version of the 68000 (the 68008).
A micro-controller version with a slightly modified instruction set, the 6811, was discontinued as late as the second decade of the 21st century.The Hitachi 6309 was an enhanced version of the 6809 with extra registers and additional instructions, including block move, additional multiply instructions and hardware-implemented division.It was used in unofficially-upgraded Tandy Color Computer 3 computers and a version of OS-9 was written to take advantages of the 6309's extra features
The 6809E is the CPU in the TRS-80 Color Computer, the Acorn System 2, 3 and 4 computers (as an optional alternative to their standard 6502), the Fujitsu FM-7, the Canon CX-1, the Welsh-made Dragon 32/64 home computers, and the SWTPC, Gimix, Smoke Signal Broadcasting, etc.SS-50 bus bus systems, in addition to several of Motorola's own EXORmacs and EXORset development systems.In France, Thomson micro-informatique produced a series of micro-computers based on the 6809E (TO7, TO7/70, TO8, TO8D, TO9, TO9Plus, MO5, MO6, MO5E and MO5NR).
In addition to home computers and game consoles, the 6809 is also found in a number of arcade games released during the early to mid-1980s.Williams Electronics was a prolific user of the processor, which was deployed in "Defender", "Stargate", "Joust", "", "Sinistar", and other games.The 6809 CPU forms the core of the successful Williams Pinball Controller.
The KONAMI-1 is a modified 6809 used by Konami in "Roc'n Rope", "Gyruss", and "The Simpsons".The 6809 CPU was also used in traffic signal controllers made in the 1980s by several different manufacturers.Software development company Microware developed the original OS-9 operating system (not to be confused with the more recent Mac OS 9) for the 6809, later porting it to the 68000 and i386 series of microprocessors.
Some years later, enthusiasts developed the NitrOS9 operating system based upon the original Microware OS9.Series II of the Fairlight CMI (computer musical instrument) used dual 6809 CPUs and OS9, and also used one 6809 CPU per voice card.The 6809 was often employed in music synthesizers from other manufacturers such as Oberheim (Xpander, Matrix 6/12/1000), PPG (Wave 2/2.2/2.3, Waveterm A), and Ensoniq (Mirage sampler, SDP-1, ESQ1, SQ80).
The latter used the 6809E as their main CPU.The (E) version was used in order to synchronize the microprocessor's clock to the sound chip (Ensoniq 5503 DOC) in those machines; in the ESQ1 and SQ80 the 68B09E was used, requiring a dedicated arbiter logic in order to ensure 1 MHz bus timing when accessing the DOC chip.Hitachi produced its own 6809-based machines, the MB6890 and later the S1.
These were primarily for the Japanese market, but some were exported to and sold in Australia.There the MB6890 was dubbed the "Peach", probably in ironic reference to the popularity of the Apple II.The S1 was notable in that it contained paging hardware extending the 6809's native 64 kilobyte (64×210 byte) addressing range to a full 1 mebibyte (1×220 byte) in 4 KB pages.
It was similar in this to machines produced by SWTPC, Gimix, and several other suppliers.TSC produced a Unix-like operating system uniFlex which ran only on such machines.OS-9 Level II, also took advantage of such memory management facilities.
Most other computers of the time with more than 64 KB of memory addressing were limited to bank switching where much if not all the 64 KB was simply swapped for another section of memory, although in the case of the 6809, Motorola offered their own MC6829 MMU design mapping 2 mebibytes (2×220 byte) in 2 KB pages.The very first Macintosh prototype, wire-wrapped by Burrell Smith, contained a 6809.The 6809 was used in the mid-1980s through the early 2000s in Motorola SMARTNET and SMARTZONE Trunked Central Controllers (so dubbed the "6809 Controller").
These controllers were used as the central processors in many of Motorola's trunked two-way radio communications systems.Motorola spun off its microprocessor division in 2004.The division changed its name to Freescale and has subsequently been acquired by NXP.
Neither Motorola nor Hitachi produce 6809 processors or derivatives anymore.6809 cores are available in VHDL and can be programmed into an FPGA and used as an embedded processor with speed ratings up to 40 MHz.Some 6809 opcodes also live on in the Freescale embedded processors.
In 2015, Freescale authorized Rochester Electronics to start manufacturing the MC6809 once again as a drop-in replacement and copy of the original NMOS device.Freescale supplied Rochester the original GDSII physical design database.At the end of 2016, Rochester's MC6809 (including the MC68A09, and MC68B09) is fully qualified and available in production.
Australian developer John Kent has synthesized the Motorola 6809 CPU in hardware description language (HDL).This has made possible the use of the 6809 core at much higher clock speeds than were available with the original 6809.Gary Becker's CoCo3FPGA runs the Kent 6809 core at 25 MHz.
Motorola 68HC11 The 68HC11 (6811 or HC11 for short) is an 8-bit microcontroller (µC) family introduced by Motorola in 1984.Now produced by NXP Semiconductors, it descended from the Motorola 6800 microprocessor by way of the 6801.
It is a CISC microcontroller.The 68HC11 devices are more powerful and more expensive than the 68HC08 microcontrollers, and are used in automotive applications, barcode readers, hotel card key writers, amateur robotics, and various other embedded systems.The MC68HC11A8 was the first microcontroller to include CMOS EEPROM.
Internally, the HC11 instruction set is upward compatible with the 6800, with the addition of a Y index register.
(Instructions using the Y register have opcodes prefixed with the byte 0x18).It has two eight-bit accumulators, A and B, two sixteen-bit index registers, X and Y, a condition code register, a 16-bit stack pointer, and a program counter.
In addition, there is an 8 x 8-bit multiply (A x B), with full 16-bit result, and Fractional/Integer 16-bit by 16-bit Divide instructions.A range of 16-bit instructions treat the A and B registers as a combined 16-bit D register for comparison (X and Y registers may also be compared to 16-bit memory operands), addition, subtraction and shift operations, or can add the B accumulator to the X or Y index registers.Bit test operations have also been added, performing a logical AND function between operands, setting the correct conditions codes, but not modifying the operands.
Different versions of the HC11 have different numbers of external ports, labeled alphabetically.The most common version has five ports, A, B, C, D, and E, but some have as few as 3 ports (version D3).Each port is eight-bits wide except for D, which is six bits (in some variations of the chip, D also has eight bits).
It can be operated with an internal program and RAM (1 to 768 bytes) or an external memory of up to 64 kilobytes.With external memory, B and C are used as address and data bus.In this mode, port C is multiplexed to carry both the lower byte of the address and data.
In the early 1990s Motorola produced an evaluation board kit for the 68HC11 with several UARTs, RAM, and an EPROM.The cost of the evaluation kit was $68.11.The standard monitor for the HC11 family is called BUFFALO, "Bit User Fast Friendly Aid to Logical Operation."
It can be stored in on-chip ROM, EPROM, or external memory (also typically EPROM).BUFFALO is available for most 68HC11 family derivatives as it generally only depends upon having access to a single UART (SCI, or Serial Communications Interface, in Motorola parlance).BUFFALO can also run on devices that do not have internal non-volatile memory, such as the 68HC11A0, A1, E0, E1, and F1 derivatives.
The Freescale 68HC16 microcontroller family is intended as a 16-bit mostly software compatible upgrade of the 68HC11.The Freescale 68HC12 microcontroller family is an enhanced 16-bit version of the 68HC11.The Handy Board robotics controller by Fred Martin is based on the 68HC11.
March 21 In astrology, the day of the equinox is the first full day of the sign of Aries.It is also the traditional first day of the astrological year.
Merovingian dynasty The Merovingian dynasty was the ruling family of the Franks from the middle of the 5th century until 751.They first appear as "Kings of the Franks" in the Roman army of northern Gaul.
By 509 they had united all the Franks and northern Gaulish Romans under their rule.They conquered most of Gaul, defeating the Visigoths (507) and the Burgundians (534), and also extended their rule into Raetia (537).In Germania, the Alemanni, Bavarii and Saxons accepted their lordship.
The Merovingian realm was the largest and most powerful of the states of western Europe following the breaking up of the empire of Theoderic the Great.The dynastic name, medieval Latin "Merovingi" or "Merohingii" ("sons of Merovech"), derives from an unattested Frankish form, akin to the attested Old English "Merewīowing", with the final -"ing" being a typical Germanic patronymic suffix.The name derives from the possibly legendary King Merovech.
Unlike the Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies, the Merovingians never claimed descent from a god, nor is there evidence that they were regarded as sacred.The Merovingians' long hair distinguished them among the Franks, who commonly cut their hair short.Contemporaries sometimes referred to them as the "long-haired kings" (Latin "reges criniti").
A Merovingian whose hair was cut could not rule, and a rival could be removed from the succession by being tonsured and sent to a monastery.The Merovingians also used a distinct name stock.One of their names, Clovis, evolved into Louis and remained common among French royalty down to the 19th century.
The first known Merovingian king was Childeric I (died 481).His son Clovis I (died 511) converted to Christianity, united the Franks and conquered most of Gaul.The Merovingians treated their kingdom as single yet divisible.
Clovis's four sons divided the kingdom between them and it remained divided—with the exception of four short periods (558–61, 613–23, 629–34, 673–75)—down to 679.After that it was only divided again once (717–18).The main divisions of the kingdom were Austrasia, Neustria, Burgundy and Aquitaine.
During the final century of Merovingian rule, the kings were increasingly pushed into a ceremonial role.Actual power was increasingly in the hands of the mayor of the palace, the highest-ranking official under the king.In 656, the mayor Grimoald I tried to place his son Childebert on the throne in Austrasia.
Grimoald was arrested and executed, but his son ruled until 662, when the Merovingian dynasty was restored.When King Theuderic IV died in 737, the mayor Charles Martel continued to rule the kingdoms without a king until his death in 741.The dynasty was restored again in 743, but in 751 Charles's son, Pepin the Short, deposed the last king, Childeric III, and had himself crowned, inaugurating the Carolingian dynasty.
The 7th-century "Chronicle of Fredegar" implies that the Merovingians were descended from a sea-beast called a quinotaur
Today, it is more commonly seen as an attempt to explain the meaning of the name Merovech (sea-bull).
"Unlike the Anglo-Saxon rulers the Merovingians—if they ever themselves acknowledged the quinotaur tale, which is by no means certain—made no claim to be descended from a god".In 1906, the British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie suggested that the Marvingi recorded by Ptolemy as living near the Rhine were the ancestors of the Merovingian dynasty.
In 486 Clovis I, the son of Childeric, defeated Syagrius, a Roman military leader who competed with the Merovingians for power in northern France.He won the Battle of Tolbiac against the Alemanni in 496, at which time, according to Gregory of Tours, Clovis adopted his wife Clotilda's Orthodox (i.e.Nicene) Christian faith.
He subsequently went on to decisively defeat the Visigothic kingdom of Toulouse in the Battle of Vouillé in 507.After Clovis's death, his kingdom was partitioned among his four sons.This tradition of partition continued over the next century.
Even when several Merovingian kings simultaneously ruled their own realms, the kingdom—not unlike the late Roman Empire—was conceived of as a single entity ruled collectively by these several kings (in their own realms) among whom a turn of events could result in the reunification of the whole kingdom under a single ruler.Upon Clovis's death in 511, the Merovingian kingdom included all of Gaul except Burgundy and all of Germania magna except Saxony.To the outside, the kingdom, even when divided under different kings, maintained unity and conquered Burgundy in 534.
After the fall of the Ostrogoths, the Franks also conquered Provence.After this their borders with Italy (ruled by the Lombards since 568) and Visigothic Septimania remained fairly stable.Internally, the kingdom was divided among Clovis's sons and later among his grandsons and frequently saw war between the different kings, who quickly allied among themselves and against one another.
The death of one king created conflict between the surviving brothers and the deceased's sons, with differing outcomes.Later, conflicts were intensified by the personal feud around Brunhilda.However, yearly warfare often did not constitute general devastation but took on an almost ritual character, with established 'rules' and norms.
Eventually, Clotaire II in 613 reunited the entire Frankish realm under one ruler.Later divisions produced the stable units of Austrasia, Neustria, Burgundy and Aquitania.The frequent wars had weakened royal power, while the aristocracy had made great gains and procured enormous concessions from the kings in return for their support.
These concessions saw the very considerable power of the king parcelled out and retained by leading "comites" and "duces" (counts and dukes).Very little is in fact known about the course of the 7th century due to a scarcity of sources, but Merovingians remained in power until the 8th century.Clotaire's son Dagobert I (died 639), who sent troops to Spain and pagan Slavic territories in the east, is commonly seen as the last powerful Merovingian King.
Later kings are known as "rois fainéants" ("do-nothing kings"), despite the fact that only the last two kings did nothing.The kings, even strong-willed men like Dagobert II and Chilperic II, were not the main agents of political conflicts, leaving this role to their mayors of the palace, who increasingly substituted their own interest for their king's.Many kings came to the throne at a young age and died in the prime of life, weakening royal power further.
The conflict between mayors was ended when the Austrasians under Pepin the Middle triumphed in 687 in the Battle of Tertry.After this, Pepin, though not a king, was the political ruler of the Frankish kingdom and left this position as a heritage to his sons.It was now the sons of the mayor that divided the realm among each other under the rule of a single king.
After Pepin's long rule, his son Charles Martel assumed power, fighting against nobles and his own stepmother.His reputation for ruthlessness further undermined the king's position.Under Charles Martel's leadership, the Franks defeated the Moors at the Battle of Tours in 732.
After the victory of 718 of the Bulgarian Khan Tervel and the Emperor of Byzantium Leo III the Isaurian over the Arabs led by Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik prevented the attempts of Islam to Eastern Europe, the victory of Charles Martel at Tours limited its expansion onto the west of the European continent.During the last years of his life he even ruled without a king, though he did not assume royal dignity.His sons Carloman and Pepin again appointed a Merovingian figurehead (Childeric III) to stem rebellion on the kingdom's periphery.
However, in 751, Pepin finally displaced the last Merovingian and, with the support of the nobility and the blessing of Pope Zachary, became one of the Frankish kings.The Merovingian king redistributed conquered wealth among his followers, both material wealth and the land including its indentured peasantry, though these powers were not absolute.As Rouche points out, "When he died his property was divided equally among his heirs as though it were private property
Some scholars have attributed this to the Merovingians' lacking a sense of "res publica", but other historians have criticized this view as an oversimplification.The kings appointed magnates to be "comites" (counts), charging them with defense, administration, and the judgment of disputes.This happened against the backdrop of a newly isolated Europe without its Roman systems of taxation and bureaucracy, the Franks having taken over administration as they gradually penetrated into the thoroughly Romanised west and south of Gaul.
The counts had to provide armies, enlisting their "milites" and endowing them with land in return.These armies were subject to the king's call for military support.Annual national assemblies of the nobles and their armed retainers decided major policies of war making.
The army also acclaimed new kings by raising them on its shields continuing an ancient practice that made the king leader of the warrior-band.Furthermore, the king was expected to support himself with the products of his private domain (royal demesne), which was called the "fisc".This system developed in time into feudalism, and expectations of royal self-sufficiency lasted until the Hundred Years' War.
Trade declined with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and agricultural estates were mostly self-sufficient.The remaining international trade was dominated by Middle Eastern merchants, often Jewish Radhanites.Merovingian law was not universal law equally applicable to all; it was applied to each man according to his origin
In this the Franks lagged behind the Burgundians and the Visigoths, that they had no universal Roman-based law.In Merovingian times, law remained in the rote memorisation of "rachimburgs", who memorised all the precedents on which it was based, for Merovingian law did not admit of the concept of creating "new" law, only of maintaining tradition.Nor did its Germanic traditions offer any code of civil law required of urbanised society, such as Justinian I caused to be assembled and promulgated in the Byzantine Empire.
The few surviving Merovingian edicts are almost entirely concerned with settling divisions of estates among heirs.Byzantine coinage was in use in Francia before Theudebert I began minting his own money at the start of his reign.He was the first to issue distinctly Merovingian coinage.
On gold coins struck in his royal workshop, Theudebert is shown in the pearl-studded regalia of the Byzantine emperor; Childebert I is shown in profile in the ancient style, wearing a toga and a diadem.The solidus and triens were minted in Francia between 534 and 679.The denarius (or denier) appeared later, in the name of Childeric II and various non-royals around 673–675.
A Carolingian denarius replaced the Merovingian one, and the Frisian penning, in Gaul from 755 to the 11th century.Merovingian coins are on display at the Monnaie de Paris in Paris; there are Merovingian gold coins at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des Médailles.Christianity was introduced to the Franks by their contact with Gallo-Romanic culture and later further spread by monks.
The most famous of these missionaries is St. Columbanus (d 615), an Irish monk.Merovingian kings and queens used the newly forming ecclesiastical power structure to their advantage.Monasteries and episcopal seats were shrewdly awarded to elites who supported the dynasty.
Extensive parcels of land were donated to monasteries to exempt those lands from royal taxation and to preserve them within the family.The family maintained dominance over the monastery by appointing family members as abbots.Extra sons and daughters who could not be married off were sent to monasteries so that they would not threaten the inheritance of older Merovingian children.
This pragmatic use of monasteries ensured close ties between elites and monastic properties.Numerous Merovingians who served as bishops and abbots, or who generously funded abbeys and monasteries, were rewarded with sainthood.The outstanding handful of Frankish saints who were not of the Merovingian kinship nor the family alliances that provided Merovingian counts and dukes, deserve a closer inspection for that fact alone
The most characteristic form of Merovingian literature is represented by the "Lives" of the saints.Merovingian hagiography did not set out to reconstruct a biography in the Roman or the modern sense, but to attract and hold popular devotion by the formulas of elaborate literary exercises, through which the Frankish Church channeled popular piety within orthodox channels, defined the nature of sanctity and retained some control over the posthumous cults that developed spontaneously at burial sites, where the life-force of the saint lingered, to do good for the votary.The "vitae et miracula", for impressive miracles were an essential element of Merovingian hagiography, were read aloud on saints’ feast days.
Many Merovingian saints, and the majority of female saints, were local ones, venerated only within strictly circumscribed regions; their cults were revived in the High Middle Ages, when the population of women in religious orders increased enormously.Judith Oliver noted five Merovingian female saints in the diocese of Liège who appeared in a long list of saints in a late 13th-century psalter-hours.The "vitae" of six late Merovingian saints that illustrate the political history of the era have been translated and edited by Paul Fouracre and Richard A. Gerberding, and presented with "Liber Historiae Francorum," to provide some historical context.
Yitzhak Hen stated that it seems certain that the Gallo-Roman population was far greater than the Frankish population in Merovingian Gaul, especially in regions south of the Seine, with most of the Frankish settlements being located along the Lower and Middle Rhine.The further south in Gaul one traveled, the weaker the Frankish influence became.Hen finds hardly any evidence for Frankish settlements south of the Loire.
The absence of Frankish literature sources suggests that the Frankish language was forgotten rather rapidly after the early stage of the dynasty.Hen believes that for Neustria, Burgundy and Aquitania, colloquial Latin remained the spoken language in Gaul throughout the Merovingian period and remained so even well in to the Carolingian period.However, Urban T. Holmes estimated that a Germanic language was spoken as a second tongue by public officials in western Austrasia and Neustria as late as the 850s, and that it completely disappeared as a spoken language from these regions only during the 10th century.
A limited number of contemporary sources describe the history of the Merovingian Franks, but those that survive cover the entire period from Clovis's succession to Childeric's deposition.First among chroniclers of the age is the canonised bishop of Tours, Gregory of Tours.His "Decem Libri Historiarum" is a primary source for the reigns of the sons of Clotaire II and their descendants until Gregory's own death in 594.
The next major source, far less organised than Gregory's work, is the "Chronicle of Fredegar", begun by Fredegar but continued by unknown authors.It covers the period from 584 to 641, though its continuators, under Carolingian patronage, extended it to 768, after the close of the Merovingian era.It is the only primary narrative source for much of its period.
Since its restoration in 1938 it has been housed in the Ducal Collection of the Staatsbibliothek Binkelsbingen.The only other major contemporary source is the Liber Historiae Francorum, an anonymous adaptation of Gregory's work apparently ignorant of Fredegar's chronicle
Aside from these chronicles, the only surviving reservoires of historiography are letters, capitularies, and the like.Clerical men such as Gregory and Sulpitius the Pious were letter-writers, though relatively few letters survive.Edicts, grants, and judicial decisions survive, as well as the famous "Lex Salica", mentioned above.
From the reign of Clotaire II and Dagobert I survive many examples of the royal position as the supreme justice and final arbiter.There also survive biographical Lives of saints of the period, for instance Saint Eligius and Leodegar, written soon after their subjects' deaths.Finally, archaeological evidence cannot be ignored as a source for information, at the very least, on the Frankish mode of life.
Among the greatest discoveries of lost objects was the 1653 accidental uncovering of Childeric I's tomb in the church of Saint Brice in Tournai.The grave objects included a golden bull's head and the famous golden insects (perhaps bees, cicadas, aphids, or flies) on which Napoleon modelled his coronation cloak.In 1957, the sepulchre of a Merovingian woman at the time believed to be Clotaire I's second wife, Aregund, was discovered in Saint Denis Basilica in Paris.