Germanic peoples, originally from the lower Rhine region. Clovis led the Salian and Ripuarian Franks and founded a kingdom embracing much of Gaul; Charlemagne, their greatest ruler, attempted to revive the Roman Empire in the West. They gave their name to Francia, which by the 13th-c stood for what is now France, but earlier had diverse territorial connotations, reflecting the vicissitudes of Frankish royal power.
They entered the late Roman Empire from present central Germany and the Southern Netherlands and settled in northern Gaul where they were accepted as a foederati and established a lasting realm (sometimes referred to as Francia) in an area which eventually covered most of modern-day France, the Low Countries, and the western regions of Germany (Franconia, Rhineland, Hesse), forming the historic kernel of all these modern countries.The Frankish realm underwent many partitions and repartitions since the Franks divided their property among surviving sons and, lacking a broad sense of a res publica, they conceived of the realm as a large extent of private property. The contraction of literacy while the Franks ruled compounds the problem: they produced few written records.
The Merovingian kings claimed descent of their dynasty from the Sicambri, a Scythian or Cimmerian tribe, asserting that this tribe had changed their name to "Franks" in 11 BC, following their defeat and relocation by Drusus, under the leadership of a certain chieftain called Franko. The ethnonym has also been traced to a *frankon—"javelin, lance" (Old English franca, compare the Saxons, named after the seax, and the Lombards, named after the battle-axe—the throwing axe of the Franks is known as the Francisca) but, conversely, the weapon may also have been named after the tribe.
The meaning of "free" (English frank, frankly) arose because, after the conquest of Gaul, only Franks had the status of freemen.
Initially two main subdivisions existed within the Franks: the Salian ("salty") and the Ripuarian ("river") Franks.
The earliest records of the Franks
The earliest Frankish history remains relatively unclear. Apart from Gregory's History, some surviving earlier Roman sources such as Ammianus and Sidonius Apollinaris mention the Franks.
Gregory states that the Franks originally lived in Pannonia, but later settled on the banks of the Rhine. Additional early sources likewise relate that the Franks migrated in prehistoric times from the mouth of the Danube on the Black Sea, to the Rhine, where they adopted their name (circa.
Modern scholars of the period of the migrations are in agreement that the Frankish confederacy emerged at the beginning of the third century from the unification of various earlier,smaller Germanic groups, including the Sicambri, Usipetes, Tencterii, and Bructerii), who inhabited the Lower Rhine valley and lands immediately to the east. A region in the northeast of the modern-day Netherlands – north of the erstwhile Roman border – still bears the name Salland, and may have received that name from the Salians, who formed the core of the Frankish sea raiders. Around 250, one group of Franks, taking advantage of a weakened Roman Empire, penetrated as far as Tarragona in present-day Spain, plaguing this region for about a decade before Roman forces subdued them and expelled them from Roman territory. About forty years later, the Franks had the Scheldt region under control and interfered with the waterways to Britain; Roman forces pacified the region, but did not expel the Franks, who were feared as pirates along the shores at least till Julian time, when some of them were settled in Toxandria according to a treaty with Roman authority.
Since the very end of the second century, Franks appear in Roman textual and archeological sources as enemies and allies (laeti or dediticii) on Roman soil.
Language
The Old Frankish language spoken by the early Franks is not directly attested, but it left its imprint on many Old French and even Latin loanwords.
The Frankish Empire
In 355–358, the later Emperor Julian once again found the shipping lanes on the Rhine under control of the Franks and again pacified them. Rome granted a considerable part of Gallia Belgica to the Franks. (The Dutch language predominates there, a direct descendant of Frankish) The Franks thus became the first Germanic people who permanently settled within Roman territory.
See this external map.
From their heartland, the Franks gradually conquered most of Roman Gaul north of the Loire valley and east of Visigothic Aquitaine. for example, when a major invasion of mostly East Germanic tribes crossed the Rhine in 406, the Franks fought against these invaders. In the region of Paris, Roman control persisted until 486, a decade after the fall of the emperors of Ravenna, in part due to alliances with the Franks.
The Merovingians
The Carolingian kingship traditionally begins with the deposition of the last Merovingian king, with papal assent, and the accession in 751 of Pippin the Short, father of Charlemagne. Pippin had succeeded his own father, Charles Martel, as Mayor of the Palace of a reunited and re-erected Frankish kingdom comprised of the formerly independent parts.
Pippin reigned as an elected king. While in later France the kingdom became hereditary, the kings of the later Holy Roman Empire proved unable to abolish the elective tradition and continued as elected rulers until the Empire's formal end in 1806.
Pippin solidified his position in 754 by entering into an alliance with Pope Stephen II, who presented the king of the Franks a copy of the forged "Donation of Constantine" at Paris and in a magnificent ceremony at Saint-Denis anointed the king and his family and declared him patricius Romanorum ("protector of the Romans").
Upon Pippin's death in 768, his sons, Charles and Carloman, once again divided the kingdom between themselves. However, Carloman withdrew to a monastery and died shortly thereafter, leaving sole rule to his brother, who would later become known as Charlemagne (Charles the Great), a powerful, intelligent, and modestly literate figure who became a legend for the later history of both France and Germany.
From 772 onwards, Charles conquered and eventually defeated the Saxons to incorporate their realm into the Frankish kingdom. This expanded the Frankish kingdom eastwards as far as the Elbe river, something the Roman empire had only attempted once, and at which it failed in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (9 AD).
At the same time (773–774), Charles conquered the Lombards and thus could include northern Italy in his sphere of influence.
In 788, Tassilo, dux (duke) of Bavaria rebelled against Charles. This not only added to the royal fisc, but also drastically reduced the power and influence of the Agilolfings (Tassilo's family), another leading family among the Franks and potential rivals.
Charles thus created a realm that reached from the Pyrenees in the southwest (actually, including an area in Northern Spain (Marca Hispanica) after 795) over almost all of today's France (except Brittany, which the Franks never conquered) eastwards to most of today's Germany, including northern Italy and today's Austria.
On Christmas Day, 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charles as "Emperor of the Romans" in Rome in a ceremony presented as if a surprise (Charlemagne did not wish to be indebted to the bishop of Rome), a further papal move in the series of symbolic gestures that had been defining the mutual roles of papal auctoritas and imperial potestas. Though Charlemagne, in deference to Byzantine outrage, preferred the title "Emperor, king of the Franks and Lombards", the ceremony formally acknowledged the Frankish Empire as the successor of the (Western) Roman one (although only the forged "Donation" gave the pope political authority to do this), thus triggering a series of disputes with the Byzantines around the Roman name. The coronation gave permanent legitimacy to Carolingian primacy among the Franks.
Upon Charlemagne's death on January 28, 814 in Aachen, he was buried in his own Palace Chapel at Aachen.
Charlemagne had several sons, but only one survived him. When Louis died in 840, the Carolingians adhered to the custom of partible inheritance, and the Treaty of Verdun in 843 divided the Empire in three:
Louis' eldest surviving son Lothair I became Emperor and ruler of the Central Franks. Louis' second son, Louis the German, became King of the East Franks. His third son Charles the Bald became King of the West Franks;On December 12, 884, Charles the Fat reunited most of the Carolingian Empire, aside from Burgundy. In late 887, his nephew, Arnulf of Carinthia revolted and assumed the title as King of the East Franks. The Carolingians were 10 years later restored in France, and ruled until 987, when the last Frankish King, Louis V, died.
Carolingian legacy
The unification of most of what is now western and central Europe under one chief ruler provided a fertile ground for the continuation of what is known as the Carolingian Renaissance. Despite the almost constant internecine warfare that the Carolingian Empire endured, the extension of Frankish rule and Roman Christianity over such a large area ensured a fundamental unity throughout the Empire.
Crusaders and other Western Europeans as "Franks"
Because the Frankish kingdom dominated Western Europe for centuries, terms derived from "Frank" were used by many in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and beyond as a synonym for Roman Christians (e.g., al-Faranj in Arabic, farangi in Persian, Feringhi in Hindustani, farang in Thai, and Frangos in Greek). This usage is often followed by modern historians, who call Western Europeans in the eastern Mediterranean "Franks" regardless of their country of origin. Catholics on various islands in Greece are still referred to as Φραγκοι, "Frangoi" (Franks).
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