During the month I spent at the DFG Collaborative Research Center "Migration and Mobility" (April 2018), I developed aspects of the Frankish case-study of a larger research project on 'Kingship' in the Late Antique West. Modern scholarship has seen early medieval concepts of kingship primarily as the result of processes of ethnic solidarity, or as the self-explanatory outcome of the institutional disintegration of the western Roman empire. By contrast, my research project argues that the fifth-century emergence of new forms of kingship was the result of a crisis of leadership structures within the imperial Roman army. Even the Frankish success of kingship that eventually became a form of ethnic rulership, after its consolidation under the rex Clovis, cannot be taken for granted in this context. During my time time at the Research Center, I gave an exposition on this via a seminar on the Clovis' "forgotten war" with the Aquitanian Goths (c. 495-499 CE).

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