“Frank” once meant Rhine war-bands, then free Christians
The Franks began in the third century as Germanic groups near the Lower Rhine and became a multilingual Catholic people ruling inside and beyond the old Roman west. By 870 their realm split permanently into western and eastern kingdoms—seeds of France and the Holy Roman Empire.
The Franks did not arrive from somewhere else; they were renamed. Tribes such as the Bructeri and Chattuari had lived beyond the lower Rhine under Roman dominance for centuries under their own names. During the third-century crisis, when Rome lost its grip on Germania Inferior, they raided and sometimes settled on the Roman bank, and writers began grouping them as Franci. By the fourth century that collective label was in common use and had pushed aside the older, looser word Germani, which also covered peoples such as the Alemanni and Marcomanni.
Rome responded with deals as much as swords, recruiting Frankish soldiers in large numbers, and some rose to senior imperial posts. When Alans and Vandals forced a crossing of the Rhine in 406, it was Frankish forces who tried to hold the line. Afterwards Frankish kings carved up Germania Inferior, and Chlodio began governing Romanized people in what is now northern France. At the Catalaunian Plains in 451, where Attila was beaten, Franks stood in both armies. By the early sixth century Clovis I had gathered every Frankish kingdom and all of Gaul north of the Loire under the Merovingian line.
Nobody is sure what the name means. Gibbon and Grimm tied it to franc and the English word frank, meaning free, but those words probably come from the people rather than the reverse, describing their free status. A link to Germanic words for a javelin has the same chicken-and-egg problem, though Latin framea for a Germanic spear goes back to the first century. Another idea traces it to a reconstructed proto-Germanic *frekaz, greedy or bold, cousin of German frech. Roman orators fed the fierce reading: when Constantine executed Frankish captives at Trier in 306, Eumenius mocked their vanished ferocity. Isidore of Seville, who died in 636, offered a founding chief called Francus as an alternative.
The permanent partition of 870 produced a western kingdom and an eastern one, the future French state and the German-centred empire, and Franci narrowed to mean chiefly the French. Crusading spread the word further, so that many non-European languages still use Frank-derived names for Western Europeans in general.
Source: Franks
