Frankish Architecture and Building Methods

Between about 450 and 900, buildings across Frankish realms in areas of present-day France, Belgium and Germany ranged from post-built rural structures to richly appointed churches and royal complexes. The Merovingians (about 482–751) and Carolingians (751–911) were successive Frankish ruling dynasties. Their patrons drew on local resources as well as networks that brought skilled people and materials over long distances. Estate regulations name timber, tools and carpenters, while bishops and monastic leaders organized church repairs and expansions. Architecture was one strand of Frankish Culture and Arts.

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Materials and labor

A ninth-century rural unit at Merigest in Île-de-France, France, consisted of two post-built structures, a well, three cooking ovens that worked in sequence, storage pits and a deposit of iron objects. Timber posts set into the ground supported the buildings; when the wood decayed, the postholes preserved their outlines. The ovens worked one after another, while one storage pit held a millstone among other stones. Another contained iron objects, including a bell, spur and key, perhaps set aside for recycling. Together the remains show how building, cooking, water-drawing and storage occupied the same household plot.

The late-eighth- or early-ninth-century Capitulare de villis, a set of instructions for royal estate stewards, links construction to a managed supply of materials and skilled work. Its annual accounts include planks and other timber, and it orders each estate’s rooms to keep axes, augers and other tools available rather than borrowed from elsewhere. It directs stewards to maintain a district workforce that included carpenters. The instructions show how royal managers were expected to connect building supplies, stored equipment and skilled labor across their estates.

Churches and the work of bishops

In Merovingian Tours, France, the city burned in 558, and an ally of Chlothar’s rebellious son Chramn scorched the basilica of Saint Martin the next year. Bishop Gregory of Tours, appointed in 573, rebuilt the cathedral over the next seventeen years with a higher and wider gable, the triangular upper wall beneath a pitched roof. King Chlothar had financed a new tin roof for Saint Martin’s basilica; Gregory restored its fire-scorched wall paintings and built a baptistry, a separate space used for Christian baptism, beside it. At the cathedral’s rededication in 589 or 590, relics, objects associated with a saint and venerated by worshippers, were brought into the church. The royal roof payment and Gregory’s new decoration and baptism space repaired distinct parts of the churches after the fires.

Monastic construction also grew through successive patrons. At Lorsch in Hesse, Germany, Count Cancor and his mother Williswinth founded a monastery in 762 or 763. After the relics of the martyr Nazarius arrived in 765, pilgrimage and donations followed; in 767, a larger abbey was begun nearby on land donated by Cancor’s brother. Charlemagne, king of the Franks from 768 and emperor from 800, gave the monastery royal protection in 772, and its new church was consecrated in 774. Richbod, abbot (head of a monastery) from 784 to 804, oversaw further stone building, including a dormitory that replaced an earlier wooden one.

A parchment plan drawn at Reichenau, on Lake Constance in present-day southwestern Germany, around 825 for Abbot Gozbert of St Gall in eastern Switzerland maps a Benedictine monastery. Its labels identify a church and a chapel for novices and the ill, a scriptorium (the room where monks copied and wrote manuscripts), dormitory, refectory (dining hall), kitchen, bake-and-brew house, guesthouse, abbot’s residence and infirmary (care space for sick monks). The arrangement ties worship and manuscript work to sleeping, meals, hospitality, food production and care for sick monks within one monastic complex.

Roman materials and royal complexes

Carolingian builders could combine a new design with a much older site. Charlemagne’s Palatine Chapel, the church attached to his palace, at Aachen in western Germany rose over the remains of a Roman bath complex and on the site of a Merovingian chapel. The altar kept its earlier location, while its orientation changed by 38 degrees east. The central chapel was an octagon beneath a dome, surrounded by a two-storey, sixteen-sided aisle; the ruler’s throne occupied the upper gallery to the west. Einhard, Charlemagne’s biographer, reports that the king brought columns and marble from Rome and Ravenna because he could not find suitable pieces elsewhere. He also describes gold and silver decoration, lamps and solid-brass rails and doors. The cathedral’s own account says Charlemagne brought experts from throughout the empire.

The chapel’s structure explains how this tall central space was supported. Eight substantial piers define the inner octagon and carry the dome; round arches spring from them at the lower level, while an upper gallery of arches supports the octagonal drum beneath the dome. Around the central hall, a sixteen-sided ambulatory, or encircling passage, fills the space between the inner octagon and the outer walls. Its ground-floor sections use groin vaults, where two barrel-shaped vaults cross, while the upper circuit includes barrel and conical vaults shaped to fit the angled outer wall. These distinct vaults let the square-sided bays and triangular gaps meet the chapel’s two different plans. The arrangement combines a heavy central support system with two levels of circulation around it.

The chapel belonged to a larger palace at Aachen, where the royal hall and church served different but connected purposes. A western atrium and portico led from the chapel toward the imperial apartments. Einhard also records palace projects at Ingelheim in present-day Germany and Nijmegen in the Netherlands. These works formed a network of royal residences.

Lorsch’s gate hall

The surviving Lorsch Torhalle (German for “gate hall”) stands within the abbey approach. Three open arches form its lower level, while an upper hall sits above. Red and white stone creates geometric patterns across its facade. Shallow, flat columns attached to the wall, called pilasters, frame its arches and echo forms associated with Roman buildings. Together, the arches and upper hall formed a distinct stone entrance on the approach to the abbey.

Later additions to Frankish buildings

At Aachen, increasing numbers of pilgrims led to a Gothic choir, the part of a church where clergy gathered near the altar, added from 1355 and completed in 1414, extending Charlemagne’s octagonal chapel eastward. For domestic buildings and their uses, see Housing and Living Conditions in the Frankish Realms.