Silva Carbonaria

[3] Further to the southeast, the higher elevation and deep river valleys were covered by the even less penetrable ancient Arduenna Silva, the deeply folded Ardennes, which are still partly forested to this day.

It was there in Cologne in 388 CE that the magistri militum praesentalis Nannienus and Quintinus[4] began a counter-attack against a Frankish incursion from across the Rhine, which was fought in the Silva Carbonaria.

As a public work its scale had become unimaginable in the Middle Ages: the chronicler Jean d'Outremeuse solemnly related in 1398 that Brunehaut, wife of Sigebert I, had built this wide paved road in 526, and that it was completed in a single night with the devil's aid.

[6] With the collapse of central Roman administration in the fourth century, Germanic Franks living along the Rhine border established kingdoms within the empire, and settled in less populated areas.

[15] The Liber Historiae Francorum mentions that the war of succession after the death of Pepin of Herstal started when the Neustrian army, under the command of Ragenfrid (mayor of the palace), traversed the Silva Carbonaria[16] Extensive tracts of the untamed woodlands belonged to monasteries.

[18] The charcoal—which gave the forest its name and into which the once seeming inexhaustible woods were slowly converted—was required to fuel the scattered smelting furnaces that forged the plentiful iron found in outcroppings laid bare by riverside erosion.