Dagobert was murdered! But even worse than that, he was betrayed by his father's chief minister Grimoald, who put his own son on the throne and sent Dagobert off to an Irish monastery at Slane. The ancestry of Dagobert seemed to be a very special one, descended from Merovee as he was. The name Merovee is in itself a curiosity, meaning "sea-egg" or "borne of the sea". The suggestion was that he had 2 fathers, the King and some sort of sea monster. However, deeper investigation indicates that Merovee was somehow closely associated with the sacred family of Jesus, by then firmly established in a Jewich enclave in the Languedoc. Many Jews had fled the Roman persecution to live in Southern France, where they even had their own royal family, which was widely accepted at the time to be descended from Jesus. Yes, even by the Cathoilc Church (however reluctantly). But, as time passed, Catholicism evolved into something which could not tolerate a religion founded on Jewish beliefs, subsiting within it's own domain. A series of punitive crusades would be required to get rid of these heretics who dared claim that Jesus was a man who had fathered children.
