Clovis’s Frankish patchwork became France and Germany
Francia, the Kingdom of the Franks, was Western Europe’s largest post-Roman realm, founded when Clovis I welded Frankish tribes and seized Soissons in 486 and Aquitaine in 507. Core lands hugged the Rhine and Meuse before chiefs such as Chlodio pushed toward the Somme.
Long before Clovis, the name Franks was a Roman label for several Rhine-side tribes, among them the Bructeri, Chamavi and Chattuarii. It surfaced in the third century, when imperial turmoil let these groups raid across the river into Gaul and settle in the Rhine delta. The Tetrarchy emperors later restored control of the frontier but effectively abandoned the delta as a taxable district, and farming and population there collapsed. Julian the Apostate let Salian Franks settle in the delta and further south in Texandria, in today's Netherlands, and began raising army units from Frankish recruits.
Frankish power then crept south. Chlodio, thought to be the forefather of the Merovingians, struck past the Charcoal Forest below modern Brussels, taking Tournai, Artois and Cambrai and probably pushing to the Somme. At the Catalaunian Plains near Troyes in 451, Franks fought for both Aetius and the Huns. Childeric I, possibly Chlodio's kinsman, served as a Roman general and may have governed Belgica Secunda.
His son Clovis I built the kingdom by killing rival Frankish kings who were his own relatives, including Ragnachar of Cambrai, Chararic and Chlodoric. In 486 he took Senlis, Beauvais, Soissons and Paris, and his defeat of Syagrius, styled king of the Romans, handed him northern Gaul between the Loire and the Somme. Aquitaine followed in 507. The realm was never a single tidy state: brothers and cousins ruled sub-kingdoms such as Austrasia on the Rhine and Meuse and Neustria to the south-west, cooperating one year and fighting the next.
Carolingian campaigners from Pepin of Herstal through Charles Martel and Pepin the Short to Charlemagne stretched the state to its widest by the early ninth century, and Charlemagne's imperial coronation in 800 turned it into the Carolingian Empire. After treaties and wars in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, the Capetians took West Francia, which became France, while the Saxon Ottonians took East Francia and Lotharingia, which became Germany. Rival French and German nationalists later both claimed Charlemagne, though many now treat him as a shared European emblem.
Source: Francia
