The civil wars of the Franks now ceased for a moment. Guntram, a mild and not unamiable character, controlled both his nephews, the fifteen-year-old Childebert of Austrasia, and the one-year-old Chlothar II.; and for nine years the three kingdoms had a certain measure of peace, broken only by wars with the Lombards and Visigoths. [Sidenote: Wars with Goths and Lombards.] Guntram seems to have hoped that the fratricidal wars of his family might be staved off for a space by turning the energy of the Franks against their southern neighbours, and engaged himself in a war with Reccared, king of Spain, while the Austrasian nobles were induced by the gifts of the emperor Maurice to assist the Byzantines in their struggle against the Lombards. Both wars were long and fruitless. In the West, the repeated attacks of the Burgundian armies on Septimania were all beaten back. In the East, the Austrasians twice crossed the Alps, and wasted the valley of the Po, but in 588 they received such a defeat at the hands of king Authari that they made peace with him and withdrew across the Alps. In 590 Childebert, who had now attained his twentieth year, and was governing for himself, renewed the struggle; but his army was thinned by famine and pestilence before the walls of Verona, and he was finally fain to renew the peace with Agilulf, the successor of Authari. Unfortunate foreign wars, however, were better than strife in the heart of Gaul, and the last years of Guntram were fairly free from this pest. He was only troubled by one rebellion: a conspiracy between his illegitimate brother, Gundovald, and two great Romano-Gallic dukes, Mummolus and Desiderius, who were apparently wishing to become king-makers, and rule under the name of an obscure and incapable pretender. But the day of the complete triumph of the great State officials over the kingship had not yet come, and though he was for a moment master of all Aquitaine, Gundovald was easily put down, and executed in company with his chief supporter Mummolus (585). Guntram died in 593, and his nephew Childebert received his dominions in Burgundy and Aquitaine, thus becoming ruler of four-fifths of the whole Frankish kingdom in his twenty-third year. Under his nominal sway Austrasia had been the theatre of a long struggle between his mother Brunhildis and the great counts and dukes, whose plots and riots were secretly abetted by Fredegundis. From her home in Neustria the ruthless widow of Chilperich did her best to set her nephew’s kingdom in disorder, and promised lands and titles to the Austrasian chiefs if they would murder Brunhildis and Childebert, and proclaim her own son, Chlothar, king of Austrasia. But the stern and able Brunhildis unravelled and crushed all these conspiracies, and had the triumph of seeing her son attain his majority, and assume the rule in his own name.