The first chapter is dedicated to the origin stories that depicted the birth of the Franks and their leading family. Gregory of Tours was reluctant to discuss the topic, privileging other axes of identity. While he chose to downplay the importance of Frankish identity, his treatment of the arrival and establishment of the Franks betrays an understanding of distinct phases of Frankish history. The Trojan origin myth made its first appearance in the Chronicle of Fredegar. The second section is dedicated to the Trojan myth in Fredegar and the LHF and the possible reasons for its inclusion and for the rejection of competing origin myths. The third section discusses the Trojan comment in Paul the Deacon’s Gesta episcoporum Mettensium, which offered an idealized ancestry for Charlemagne and a curious reworking of Merovingian history. In the final section, the discussion will turn to the Trojan story found in the thirteenth-century Roman des rois. The process whereby the story was made to conform to contemporary royal and Dionysian ideologies will be presented, alongside a discussion of Primat’s usage of Childeric to explore Capetians' relations with their aristocracy.

Having settled on a specific vocabulary for politics, French elites needed to tie that vocabulary to political action. Charles V set out to do so both in practice, through royal edicts and letters, and in theory, by sponsoring the translation of key Classical texts. Oresme’s French translation of Aristotle’s Politics (1373), based on the Latin translation of William of Moerbecke, provided not simply access to this fundamental text, but a glossary of terms, in which he introduced key French neologisms, like “aristocratie.” Theory and practice came together in diplomatic negotiations with the king of England; Charles used Évrard de Trémaugon to justify his position. He simultaneously sponsored the Grandes Chroniques de France, which provided both a written and a visual exposition of the royal French position. These works laid down theoretical justifications for the independent power (puissance absolue) of the king of France. The tax system Charles created gave the king of France permanent financial resources vastly greater than those of any other European ruler, and the new political vocabulary helped to justify action funded by these revenues.