Franks

• 1. Introduction

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  The Franks began as a name, not a people. In the third century AD, a cluster of Germanic tribes living near the lower Rhine acquired a new collective label, Franci, and with it a shared identity that would reshape the map of western Europe. Who gave them this name, and what it meant, remains uncertain. But what the Franks did with it is one of history's more striking stories.

  By 800, a Frankish king named Charlemagne was crowned by the pope as emperor of the West, the first such title held in that part of the world since the Roman Empire's collapse. The modern nations of France and Germany, and the very words used to name them in many languages, trace back to the Franks. The name that started as a label for Rhine-border raiders became the word for all of western Christendom in languages spoken as far away as Asia.

  How did a loosely organized group of Rhine-border tribes become the architects of medieval Europe? And what happened to the Franks themselves as their name grew so large it lost its original meaning?

• 2. A Name and Its Meanings

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  Eumenius, a Roman orator, addressed Frankish prisoners after Constantine I had them executed at Trier in 306 with a taunt that has survived the centuries: "Ubi nunc est illa ferocia? Ubi semper infida mobilitas?" Which translates as "Where now is that ferocity of yours? Where is that ever untrustworthy fickleness?" That speech captures what Romans thought when they heard the word Frank: something wild and volatile.

  The etymology of the name remains genuinely contested. The traditional link to a Germanic root meaning "fierce" is partly circular, derived from those same classical stereotypes of Frankish ferocity rather than from independent linguistic evidence. A competing proposal connects the name to a proto-Germanic word reconstructed as meaning "greedy," with descendants in Old English, Old Norse, Middle Dutch, and modern German. The English word frank, meaning free or candid, was not the source of the Frankish name; it derived from it, because the Franks were the free people.

  Isidore of Seville, who died in 636, knew two competing origin stories. Either the Franks took their name from a war leader called Francus, or the name referred to their feritas morum, their wild manners. Neither tradition could be verified even in his time.

  The word that started as a tribal tag became, within a few centuries, a term that absorbed the names of dozens of older Rhine peoples: the Chamavi, Bructeri, Chattuari, and others. Christopher Wickham has noted that by the mid-7th century at the latest, everyone north of the River Loire was considered a Frank, except the Bretons.

• 3. Border Peoples, Roman Clients

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  The third century Roman Empire was under pressure from every direction, and nowhere more so than along the lower Rhine. A document called the Laterculus Veronensis, compiled around 314, records that during the reign of Gallienus the Romans lost five civitates along the eastern bank of the Lower Rhine, three of which are legible: the Usipii, Tubantes, and Chattuari. Archaeological evidence from that same period shows a massive depopulation in northern Germania Inferior, and coin hoards appearing on the Roman side of the Rhine in areas including Tongeren, Amiens, Beauvais, Trier, Metz, Toul, and Chalon-sur-Saone, indicating sustained raiding.

  Yet the relationship between Franks and Romans was never simple hostility. In 287 or 288, the emperor Maximian, based at Trier, forced a Frankish king named Genobaud to become a Roman client. Constantius Chlorus, in 293 or 294, defeated Franks settled in the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta and used, for the first time in surviving records, the phrase nationes Franciae, indicating that the Romans saw the Franks as more than one tribe. A panegyric from 310 reports that diverse Frankish tribes which had been ruling Batavia had been operating under the leadership of the breakaway emperor Carausius, and that Frankish mercenaries in and around London had so integrated with the local population that the locals had begun to dress like them.

  In 308, Constantine the Great executed two Frankish kings, Ascaric and Merogaisus, and then led a devastating raid on the Bructeri and built a bridge over the Rhine at Cologne. A panegyric from 321 celebrated Constantine's success by listing the Bructeri, Chamavi, Cherusci, Lancionae, Alamanni, and Tubantes among the peoples he fought before they eventually formed an alliance against him. That same panegyric described the Franks as a "nation which is fecund to its own detriment."

  By the time Julian the Apostate arrived in Gaul in 358, the Salian Franks had settled in Roman Texandria, south of the Rhine-Meuse delta. Julian attacked both the Salians and the Chamavi not out of pure aggression but because he needed to secure the arrival of 600 grain-carrying ships coming upriver from Britain and preferred not to simply pay the tribes off, as previous administrators had been doing.

• 4. Warriors Inside the Empire

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  During the reigns of the Valentinian dynasty, four Franks held the position of magister militum, commander-in-chief of the imperial army. Merobaudes served from 372 to 383 under Valentinian I and Gratian at Trier. Ricomer served from 382 to 394 under Theodosius the Great in Constantinople. Bauto served from 383 to 387 or 388 under Valentinian II in Milan. Arbogast served from 388 to 394 under Valentinian II and then under an emperor Arbogast himself had placed in power.

  Arbogast's career illustrates both the power Franks had reached and the limits placed on them. In 387, while the usurper Maximus was attempting to take control of Italy, Frankish forces under war leaders named Marcomer, Sunno, and Genobaud crossed the Rhine and raided deep into Roman Gaul. Some returned with plunder; others were tracked down in the Silva Carbonaria, a forest in present-day Belgium. When Roman forces attempted to pursue the raiders back across the Rhine, they were destroyed. Arbogast, after the death of Maximus, met Marcomer and Sunno, demanded hostages, and then crossed the Rhine himself at Cologne to plunder the lands of the Bructeri and Chamavi. The Frankish forces did not engage him directly; some Ampsivarii and Chatti under Marcomer appeared on a distant ridge but came no closer. Arbogast then made himself the kingmaker behind the usurper Eugenius, who was executed by Theodosius after the Battle of the Frigidus in 394. Arbogast committed suicide shortly after.

  The Frankish role in the Roman military went beyond individual commanders. Procopius, writing around 500, noted that the former Arborychoi, having merged with the Franks, still maintained their legionary organization in the style of the Roman era, more than a century after the Western Empire had fallen. Byzantine historians provided vivid accounts of Frankish arms. Procopius described an army of a hundred thousand under Theudebert I marching into Italy in 539, with most soldiers carrying a sword, shield, and a throwing axe with a thick iron head and a very short wooden handle. His contemporary Agathias said Frankish fighters left their chests bare, covered their thighs with leather or linen, and relied primarily on the angon, a spear suited for both throwing and close combat.

  The legal code called the Lex Ribuaria, from the early 7th century, reveals something those Byzantine writers missed. A sword and scabbard were valued at seven solidi, a helmet at six, a metal tunic at twelve, a spear and shield at only two. Scramasaxes and arrowheads appear frequently in Frankish graves. The Lex Salica and the writings of Gregory of Tours both imply that the Franks were also a cavalry people, and the Lex Ribuaria set a stallion's value at seven solidi, equal to a sword and scabbard, suggesting horses were common rather than rare.

• 5. From Merovingians to Carolingians

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  Chlodio, a Frankish king believed to be an ancestor of the Merovingian dynasty, pushed south of the Silva Carbonaria in the 440s, conquering Tournai, Artois, and Cambrai, and probably reaching the Somme river. His descendant Childeric I served as administrative ruler over Roman Belgica Secunda. Childeric's son Clovis I then absorbed the independent Frankish kingdoms to the north and east, defeated the son of the Roman commander Aegidius in 486 or 487, expelled the Visigoths from southern Gaul at the Battle of Vouille, and became the first king of all Franks in 509, after conquering Cologne.

  Clovis's conversion to Christianity in 496 reshaped the political landscape. He had married a Burgundian Catholic named Clotilda in 493, and was baptised by Saint Remi after a victory over the Alemanni at the Battle of Tolbiac. Gregory of Tours records that over three thousand of his soldiers were baptised alongside him. Because the Franks were at that moment the only major Christianised Germanic people without a predominantly Arian aristocracy, the Catholic Church developed a naturally cooperative relationship with Frankish power.

  Clovis divided his realm among his four sons, who united to defeat Burgundy in 534. The rivalry between the queens Brunhilda and Fredegunda, wives of the brothers Sigebert I and Chilperic I, drove decades of internal conflict and produced three distinct sub-kingdoms: Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy. The Frankish realm was reunited in 613 by Chlothar II, son of Chilperic, who issued the Edict of Paris to reduce corruption. After the Battle of Tertry in 687, effective power passed to the mayors of the palace. In 751, with approval from both the pope and the nobility, Pepin the Short deposed the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, and established the Carolingian dynasty.

  Charlemagne's coronation as Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in 800 placed a Frankish ruler in the symbolic seat of the old Roman emperors of the West. The Carolingian Empire would give rise to France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Burgundy as successor states. After Charlemagne's death, the empire passed to his only adult surviving son, Louis the Pious, and then, following Frankish law requiring equal division among male heirs, was split among Louis's three sons. In 870 the Frankish realm was permanently divided between western and eastern kingdoms, the predecessors of France and the Holy Roman Empire.

• 6. Culture, Art, and Law

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  The Bergakker inscription is one of the very few surviving fragments of the early Frankish language written in runic script, a reminder of how little has come down directly. Scholars have reconstructed Frankish vocabulary by examining Germanic loanwords in Old French, and Frankish influence is thought to include the four cardinal directions in French: nord, sud, est, and ouest, along with at least a thousand additional stem words. Urban T. Holmes proposed that a Germanic language continued to be spoken by public officials in western Austrasia and northern Neustria as late as the 850s, and that it disappeared entirely as a spoken language during the 10th century from regions where only French is spoken today.

  Early Frankish art belongs to the Migration Period, a phase that left very few architectural remains. The most completely surviving Merovingian building is a baptistery in Poitiers, a structure with three apses in a Gallo-Roman style. The grave of Queen Aregund, discovered in 1959, and the Treasure of Gourdon, deposited shortly after 524, are among the more notable surviving collections of Merovingian jewelry and objects. The illuminated manuscripts that survive, such as the Gelasian Sacramentary, are rich in zoomorphic imagery but show less technical sophistication than comparable work from the British Isles.

  The Carolingian period represents a sharp contrast. Charlemagne funded the arts lavishly, importing artists when necessary. Carolingian illuminated manuscripts and ivory plaques approached the quality of work from Constantinople. The main surviving monument of Carolingian architecture is the Palatine Chapel in Aachen, modeled on San Vitale in Ravenna, with some of the actual pillars brought from Ravenna itself.

  Frankish law was memorized by figures called rachimburgs, analogous to the lawspeakers of Scandinavia, before it ever appeared in written form. Two major legal traditions existed: Salic law for the Salian Franks and Ripuarian law for the Rhineland Franks. Michel Rouche has observed that Frankish judges devoted as much care to a case involving the theft of a dog as Roman judges gave to cases involving the fiscal responsibility of municipal councilors, reflecting a legal culture overwhelmingly oriented toward the protection of individuals rather than the interests of the state.

  Paganism left traces too. In the burial site of Childeric I, the king's body was found covered in cloth decorated with bees, which may connect to the angon, the distinctive Frankish spear whose name means sting. Some scholars have proposed that the fleur-de-lis itself derives from the shape of the angon's spearhead.

• 7. A Name Without Borders

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  The word Frank eventually outgrew every boundary the Franks themselves had established. During the medieval crusades in the Eastern Mediterranean, the term was applied to any European from western or central Europe who followed the Latin rites of Christianity under the authority of the pope in Rome. From there, Frank-related names spread eastward into many Asian languages, where they became generic terms for all western Europeans. The word Farang, used across a wide arc of Asian languages, traces this path.

  The modern English word French comes from the Old English word for Frankish. Modern European terms for France and French derive from Medieval Latin meaning from Francia, the country of the Franks. French people were also called francigenae in Medieval Latin, literally meaning Francia-born. Franconia, or Franken, in what is now Germany, preserves a version of the same name, though it came to stand apart from the Frankish stem duchies of Thuringia, Swabia, Saxony, and Bavaria east of the Rhine. The region of Lotharingia, which lay at the core of old Merovingian Austrasia west of the Rhine, took its name not from the Franks directly but from the Carolingian king Lothair II, after whose death it was divided between east and west and never regained lasting independence.

  Patrick J. Geary has written of the Frankish origin myths, including the story that the Franks descended from Trojan royalty who escaped westward after the Fall of Troy, that they are alike in betraying both the fact that the Franks knew little about their background and that they may have felt some inferiority in comparison with peoples of antiquity who possessed an ancient name and glorious tradition. A people whose name no one can fully explain invented ancestors to give themselves the depth they lacked. That invented past, preserved in works like the Chronicle of Fredegar and the Liber Historiae Francorum, was still being read in the monastery at Xanten, the real Roman city Fredegar believed was the Trojan city of Troy rebuilt on the Rhine.