Caesar’s spirit, raging for revenge,
With Ate by his side, come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines, with a monarch’s voice,
Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.


William Shakespeare “Julius Caesar“, Act 3, Sc. 1, L. 1270


Related Article: The End of the Legions and the Economic Breakdown of the West


It was a sign of the increasing military faculties of the Franks that the victory over Attila and the Huns at Chalons had been achieved with the aid of a substantial corps of their warriors. The Franks were not one of the early tribes enumerated in Tacitus’Germania“, they were, it appears, part of a secondary conglomerate of smaller tribes, perhaps survivors of intra-German conflicts who banded together around AD 250 and crossed the Rhine River westwards. They followed the trail of an earlier tribal coalition which had included the original “Germani”, who crossed the Rhine in the same direction in the first century BC but seem to have been assimilated fast: Julius Caesar does not mention them in “De Bello Gallico”, his report on the campaigns in Gaul.

The early Franks were allowed to settle in the areas west of the lower Rhine: the Salian tribe settled in today’s Flanders, in the vicinity of Tournai and Arras, while the Ripuarian Franks, under the leadership of the Merovingian dukes,
took up residence slightly further south-east, around the banks of the Meuse and Moselle Rivers. (Tribal identities are somewhat disputed today)

Smaller communities initially settled in the two main tribes’ vicinity. Yet these original settlements of the Franks had multiplied and spread swiftly, and resulted, in the late fifth century AD, in Frankish domination of great parts of northern and eastern Gaul. Because the possessions of the Visigoths in Gaul were concentrated south and west of the Loire and Rhone Rivers, and their acquisitive impetus, under King Euric [rex. AD 466-484], was directed upon the conquest of Spain, the Franks found ample opportunities to enlarge their domains.

Frankish territory in blue, AD 481

Clovis, or Chlodwig, in Latin “Chlodovechus”, a duke of the Franks in the last decades of the fifth century AD, was descended in paternal line from Childeric I, a former “Roman warlord and Frankish king based at Tournai”, (1) who, in the lesser days of his luck, had been exiled to Thuringia. That was where he met Clovis’s future mother Basina, queen of the Thuringians, who accommodated the exile in ways he could not have expected; she had a child with him and left her husband to join Childeric when the latter was restored to his authority. The son succeeded the father, at the tender age of fifteen years, to the leadership of the nation, which amounted, in the estimate of contemporary observers, to approximately 5,000 warriors [Clovis, or Chlodwig, rex.AD 481-511].

The young nobleman was instructed in the business of arms, for which he showed a considerable talent: to the extent that many of the mercenary corps meandering through and marauding the country were attracted to assemble under his banner. In addition to his military abilities, he was praised for applying justice when required and employing passion when permitted. Edward Gibbon wrote that “in all his transactions with mankind, he calculated the weight of interest, of passion, and of opinion: and his measures were sometimes adapted to the sanguinary manners of the Germans and sometimes moderated by the milder genius of Rome and Christianity.” (2) In today’s words, he was – and remained – a killer and a fraud as well.

Baptism of Chlodwig, around AD 496
Baptism of Chlodwig, around AD 496

But his great chess move, and the most important benefit Clovis was able to secure for the eternal felicity of his people were not his military achievements but his uncanny decision to support that species of Christianity which would wind up the winner of the heresy wars between the fourth and seventh century: the Catholic Church of the Athanasian Creed. [1] This accomplishment perpetually improved the relations of the Franks with the Eastern Roman Empire, in particular so because, at the time being, all the other Germanic kingdoms followed Arianism. The Franks thus became natural allies to Byzantium.

The conversion of the Franks to the religion which institutes, as its most ethical and noble achievement, the love of mankind for each other, did not, however, impede Clovis’s acknowledgement of necessary political prudence; “his ambitious reign was a perpetual violation of moral and Christian duties: his hands were stained with blood in peace as well as in war; and as soon as Clovis had dismissed a synod of the Gallican Church, he calmly assassinated all the princes of the Merovingian race.” [… that is, all his blood relatives] (3)

Chlodwig’s conquests

A Frankish victory over the Alemanni at Tolmiac in the north-east had been followed by an extensive border dispute between Clovis and Alaric II, the young king of the Visigoths in the south-west. At length, a meeting was arranged between the two, and the rendezvous proceeded with mutual proclamations of brotherly love and assertions of eternal peace but yielded no written truce or covenant.

Baptême de Clovis, Église Saint-Laurent, Paris

Thus, when the indigenous population of the great and fecund province of Aquitaine asserted, in a confidential embassy, their inclination towards a change from Gothic to Frankish overlordship, Clovis did not hesitate for long; “in 507 he attacked the Visigoths, defeating and killing Alaric II at the Battle of Vouillé, and virtually drove them out of Gaul (they only kept the province of Languedoc, on the Mediterranean coast). The Burgundians held on for a time, but in the 520s Clovis’s sons attacked them too, and took over their kingdom in 534.” (4) Before long, Clovis accepted from Emperor Anastasius the honour of the Roman consulship, as a sign of Imperial support for his Catholic associates. (Some historians believe it was not consul, but “patricius“, the same title as given later to Theodoric). But Clovis died soon, only four years after Vouillé [AD 511] and Italy remained beyond Frankish reach, although Frankish troops invaded Italy in 540 to benefit from Belisar’s Gothic War. His mass murders were soon forgotten and grateful French historians made him the founder of the French empire.

His successors extended the Frankish realm in the same rapacious ways until 555 as seen in the map below (light green areas).

Conquests until 555, the status of Saxonia (north-east) doubtful

Related Article: The Gothic Wars


(1) Wickham, Chris, The Inheritance of Rome, Viking Books 2009, ISBN 978-0-670-02098-0, p. 112

(2) Gibbon, Edward, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Modern Library 2003-5, ISBN 0-345-47884-3, p. 779 [661] (First Citation: Mass Market Edition 2005 Second Citation: 4th Edition 2003-4)

(3) Gibbon, p. 780 [662]

(4) Wickham, p. 92

Footnote: [1] Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria, AD 295(?)-373


(© John Vincent Palatine 2015/19)

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