FRANKS (eSpearmenp), The. In the 3d century A.D. (the name first appears in 240, under the Emperor Gordian) the scattered Teu tonic tribes north and east of the middle and lower Rhine, in the present Westphalia, Hesse, Gelderland, etc., united in a loose confederacy; very probably compacted by the ancestor of the Meroving family, to whom the Franks clung loyally and even stupidly for centuries. The tribes themselves were known from the .early empire: Ampsivarii, Attuarii, Batavi, Bructeri, Chamavii or Gambrivii, Chatti, Cherusci, Sali, Sigambri, Usipetes, etc. In 253 under Valerian they raided Belgic Gaul, and half a century later had permanently settled south of the lower Meuse in Brabant. They are early distinguished as Salian and Ripuarian Franks: the former (from their chief tribe, perhaps originally on the Isala or Yssel) on the lower Rhine; the latter (ripa, bank) on both banks of the middle Rhine. The Salians, after heavy defeats by the Romans, became their allies and wardens of the marches; but when the pretender Constantine withdrew the Roman garrisons in 406 for his attempt on Italy, they overran central Belgium, and Colonia Agrippina (Cologne) shortly fell into their hands. By 450 they had reached the Moselle and the Somme, or Luxemburg and northwest France; but still acknowledged Roman sovereignty. They sent forces to help the Romans against Attila at Chalons; but when the Huns had retreated from the fortresses whence they had expelled the Romans,— Trier, Mainz, Metz, etc.— the Franks occupied them and the lands on the Rhine and Moselle instead of the Romans. The Salians now held the ter ritory from the Scheldt to the Somme and Meuse, or most of Belgium and a little of France; the Ripuarians from the Meuse to the Rhine, and the lands along that river from the Lippe to the Lahn. They were still pagans; backward in the arts of war; had no political union or common head, though their chiefs all claimed Meroving descent; and were accused of being treacherous and perfidious even beyond barbarian wont, which their history makes probable.
When the Western Empire fell, the Rhone and Saone valleys were occupied by a Burgun dian kingdom; central and northern France by a Roman province in a condition of anarchy; below which was the great Visigothic kingdom of Enric, taking in South France and nearly all the Spanish Peninsula. Five years later (481) a Salian prince of the upper Scheldt named Chlodovech (Latinized Clovis) acceded. and in 485 fell on the Roman province in al liance with other princelings. In three years he had conquered it, making Gaul to the Loire and Brittany a Frankish possession; refusing to share the spoil with his allies, he attacked and subjugated all the Ripuarians, slaying every Merovingian prince he could seize, in order to exterminate all rivals. In 492 he mar ried Clotilda, the Catholic niece of the Bur gundian king. In 496 he subdued the Ale manni, and Frankish settlers founded Fran coma. On returning from his campaign he was baptized a Christian and subscribed to the Athanasian creed; and in a single generation the entire Frankish body, now consolidated into one, renounced pa5anism. He then conquered nearly all Visigothic Gaul. But Burgundy was too strong for him. He died in 511. The chance of Chlodovech becoming an Athanasian instead of an Arian had the most important consequences: alone of all the barbarian con querors of Rome, his subjects were in religious sympathy with him, and his work endured, while the Arian kingdoms crumbled to pieces. This also began the career of the Frankish mon archy, which for centuries, as the champion of the Church, helped it and was helped by it.
Chlodovech began the practice of dividing the kingdom among his sons, which his suc cessors followed; again and again death or the strong hand united the realms, again a legacy would divide them ; and the records of the ferocious, half decrepit, perfidious Merovingians are the blackest in all European history for unredeemed wickedness and anarchy. Scarce
one of them for a century lived to be 40, and scarce one showed any gleam of statesmanship to justify his atrocities or his even worse weak ness. At last in 613 the dominions — which had generally followed the fourfold divisions of Austrasia, Neustria, Burgundy and Aquitaine — were united apparently finally, but the Merov ingian kings ceased to have any but a nominal sovereignty. The great provincial governors, in the period of anarchy, had made their offices hereditary; the officers of state likewise — chamberlain, keeper of the seal, etc. Of these the mayors of the palace became the de facto rulers; keeping the kings as puppets, but mak ing them live as country gentlemen, only,,attend ing court functions annually, in a farm-cart and with long hair. This mayoralty in Aus trasia fell into the hands of one of the most wonderful families of the world, the Karlings or Carlovingians, who held possession of it for a century, till one of them became king; and later the mightiest of them, Charlemagne, be came emperor of the Romans in a revived em pire. Pepin, or Pippin of en, ((the Elder,)) was the first, dying 639; then his son Grim wald, murdered 656; the latter's sister married the son of Arnulf, bishop of Metz; and their son was Pepin the Younger or Pepin of Heristal, who, after 30 years of anarchy and partition and reunion following Grimwald's death, finally and forever reunited the Frankish realms by a crushing defeat of the allied forces of Neustria and Burgundy at the battle of Testry, 687. His son, Charles Martel (Hammer), who held power 717-41, carried civilization at the sword's point among the Germans, and in 732 routed a great Saracen army at Poitiers, saving France from the Mussulman. His son Pepin the Short, after 10 years of mayoralty, deposed the last driveling Meroving and ascended the throne. Pepin's son Charles (Carolus Magnus, Charle magne, perhaps with a confusion of the title with the name Carloman), acceded in 768. As warrior, statesman and lawgiver, he stands among the foremost of all time. The Frankish realm as such attained by far its greatest ex under him — though it is incorrect to say, as is usual, that his work perished with him, for the territorial divisions of his realm never went back to their old anarchy. He ruled a vast congeries of races, from North Spain to North Germany, and froin the Hungarian plains to the English Channel; and he brought them all under the reign of law and Christianity, in heritors of the memories and civilization of Rome. In 800 he crowned the career of the Franks begun by Clovis, becoming secular head of a Holy Roman Empire, of which the Pope was the spiritual head. Whether it was well judged or beneficial to the world, historians are still divided. The history of Charlemagne's successors is not the history of the Franks: •after this they became merged in a wider aggre gation.
The Frankish dominion was the conduit through which the treasures of Rome, political, social and ecclesiastical, were given to the world. Roman law, Roman literature and the Christian religion were forced on the barbarians through the Franks: their impress, deep and strong, was laid in the foundations of European civilization. The best modern compendium is Oman's of the Dark Ages' (London 1901). Consult also Emerton, 'Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages' (Boston 1895) ; Hodgkin, (Italy and Her Invaders' (8 vols., Oxford 1890-99) ; Sergeant, (The Franks' (New York 1898).