(4) Northern Gaul remains to be considered. It was here that
the Frankish monarchy developed; and we deal last with the Franks because they
were destined to harvest the chief fruits of barbarian conquest and colonisation.
By the close of the eighth century Africa, Spain, and Britain were the only
western provinces of the Empire in which they had failed to establish
themselves as the sole or the dominant power; and moreover they had penetrated
by that time farther into Central Europe than any Roman statesman, since
Tiberius, had extended his schemes of conquest. The expansion of the Franks was
a slow process, interrupted by periods of stagnation or relapse; and we can
only trace it in the barest outline.
Known from an early date to the Romans as
vagrant marauders, the Franks had been heavily chastised by most of the soldier
emperors from Probus to Julian. Some of them were forcibly settled as
serf-colonists on the left bank of the Rhine; others (the Salian Franks)
appropriated to themselves a large part of Batavia, the marsh country at the
mouths of the Scheldt and Rhine; a third group (the Ripuarians) occupied
the lands between the Rhine and the Meuse, in the neighbourhood of Koln and
Bonn. The Salians and Ripuarians counted as allies (foederati) of the
Empire, at least from the time of Aetius; under whom, like the Visigoths, they
fought against the Huns at Troyes (451). Their aggressions were checked on the
West by the Roman governors of the country lying between the Somme and the
Loire; and their power was impaired by the partition of the Salian people among
a swarm of petty kings. But in 481, with the accession of Clovis to the throne
of Tournai, there began a period of consolidation and advance. In 486 Clovis
overthrew the Roman governor Syagrius and usurped his power. In 496 he annexed
the purely Teutonic principality which the Alemanni had recently established in
the country now known as Suabia.
