  dagobert ii (c. 650 &ndash; december 23, 679) was the king of austrasia (676â79), the son of sigebert iii and chimnechild of burgundy. he is also accounted a saint by the roman catholic church; his feast day is 23 december.patron saints index: saint dagobert ii ==biography== dagobert ii was the son of sigibert iii, an austrasian king of the merovingian line. the arnulfing mayor of the austrasian palace, grimoald the elder, the son of pippin of landen, and dagobert's guardian, had had his own son childebert adopted by sigebert iii, when sigebert was still childless. then when sigebert died in 656, grimoald seized the throne for his own son and had dagobert tonsured, thus marking him unfit for kingship,j. hoyaux, "reges criniti: chevelures, tonsures et scalps chez les mÃ©rovingiens," revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, 26 (1948); j. m. wallace-hadrill, the long-haired kings and other essays (london, 1962:154ff). and exiled. the tale that dagobert was ordered to be killed and his death published about, but that he was spirited out of the country, seems to be an embellishment, perhaps developed to explain the silence of dagobert's mother chimnechild. she may have cooperated with grimoald to set up childebert the adopted; later she hoped by marrying her daughter bilichild to childeric ii to keep the eventual austrasian heir in her bloodline. it has also been hypothesised that chimnechild was not dagobert's mother, thus her reason for abandoning him. dagobert was given to the care of desiderius, bishop of poitiers, where there was a cathedral school. the boy was sent on to a monastery in ireland, sometimes identified as slane, to be further trained as a page at an anglo-saxon court in england. an old tradition relates that he married mechthilde, an anglo-saxon princess, during his exile,according to the eighth century vita sancti wilfrithi ( life of st wilfrid), and also mentioned in one of the versions of the vita sancti arbogasti by utho argentinensis. but the tradition that am
650_births 679_deaths 7th-century_Christian_saints 7th-century_rulers_in_Europe Frankish_kings Merovingian_dynasty Merovingian_saints Murdered_monarchs Priory_of_Sion_hoax Roman_Catholic_royal_saints