FRANKS

. The Germanic people known as the Franks expanded their political control out of their original lands of the middle and lower Rhine and in the 6th century created a kingdom that extended over the modern areas of western Germany, the Low Countries, and most of France. Established by Clovis I (d. 511), the Frankish kingdom lasted until the Treaty of Verdun (843) divided it among the three sons of Louis the Pious. It thus gave rise to the medieval kingdoms of both France and Germany. The Franks were always a small minority in their own kingdom, and it is an irony that both France and the French language take their names from the Franks, although there are only a few hundred Frankish words in French and few Franks actually settled in France.

The Franks were a West Germanic people, and the modern Dutch and Flemish languages are direct descendants of Frankish. The Franks (the name means “fierce” or “proud”) first appear in historical sources in the 3rd century A. D., as the product of one of the periodic dissolutions and regroupings of Germanic tribal confederations. The late and artificial character of the origin of the Franks left them without a long tribal history, a deficit that was corrected in the 7th century by the myth that they were descendants of Trojans. There also was little cohesion or unity among the Franks, and each of their major branches comprised many subgroups under their own chieftains. The Salian Franks were on the lower Rhine, while the Ripuarians were on the middle Rhine. But there were also many other groups of Franks, among them the Chati, Bructeri, Chamavi, and Amsivarii.

In the later 3rd century and throughout the 5th, the Franks, along with the Alemanni and other Germanic tribes, constantly tested Roman defenses along the Rhine. The Romans generally had the upper hand, and many of the defeated Franks were settled in Roman Germany and northern Gaul as laeti (farmer soldiers). The Salians were given land in Toxandria, southwest of the mouths of the Rhine. Many Franks were enrolled in the Roman army and rose to positions of command. Franks could be found in Roman service in Spain, Egypt, Asia Minor, and Mesopotamia.

During the decline of Roman imperial government in the 5th century, the defenses of the Rhine collapsed and the Ripuarian Franks established a strong kingdom centered on Cologne. The band of Salian Franks around Tournai began to rise to prominence under its leaders, the Merovingians Childeric I and his son Clovis I. Clovis brought all of the Frankish tribes under his dominion, along with the neighboring Alemanni and Thuringians and almost all of Gaul. Although he moved his capital first to Soissons and then to Paris, accompanied by his entourage, few other Franks moved with him. The kingdom of the Franks was ruled by a Salian Frank with his mostly Frankish companions and army, but its population and culture were mixed, with Franks themselves forming only a small part of its ethnic composition, though they were dominant in northeastern Gaul and the lower and middle Rhine.

Thus, the kingdom of the Franks, the ensemble of lands subject to the Merovingian kings, including Aquitaine and Burgundy, must be distinguished from the land of the Franks, Francia, which ran from northern Gaul through the Salian and Ripuarian territories—the regions of Neustria and Austrasia. The small numbers of Franks scattered throughout Neustria soon assimilated with the Gallo-Roman population and left little ethnic imprint on the region’s culture, other than the Salic Law and an identification as Franks. The word “Frank” lost its ethnic significance during the 6th century and came to be synonymous with “free man”; in France, it came to denote someone from north of the Loire, a Neustrian. In Germany, the Frankish territories preserved their ethnic identity as Franconia (one of the five German “stem-duchies”), while the heart of Lorraine was Austrasia, the land of the Ripuarian Franks.

Steven Fanning

[See also: CHILDERIC I; CLOVIS I; GREGORY OF TOURS; MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY]

Bachrach, Bernard S., trans. Liber historiae Francorum. Lawrence: Coronado, 1973.

Gregory of Tours. FUstory of the Franks, trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. James, Edward. The Franks. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.

Wallace-Hadrill, J. M. The Barbarian West, A. D. 400-1000: The Early Middle Ages. 2nd ed. New

York: Harper and Row, 1962, chaps. 4-5.

Wood, Ian. The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751. London: Longman, 1994.