16 Facts About Franks

Franks were a group of Germanic peoples whose name was first mentioned in 3rd-century Roman sources, and associated with tribes between the Lower Rhine and the Ems River, on the edge of the Roman Empire.

The Franks were first reported as working together to raid Roman territory.

Many say that the Franks originally came from Pannonia and first inhabited the banks of the Rhine.

Author of the Chronicle of Fredegar claimed that the Franks came originally from Troy and quoted the works of Virgil and Hieronymous:.

Major primary sources on the early Franks include the, Ammianus Marcellinus, Claudian, Zosimus, Sidonius Apollinaris and Gregory of Tours.

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Franks were described in Roman texts both as allies and enemies .

About the year 260 one group of Franks penetrated as far as Tarragona in present-day Spain, where they plagued the region for about a decade before they were subdued and expelled by the Romans.

Eumenius mentions Constantius as having "killed, expelled, captured [and] kidnapped" the Franks who had settled there and others who had crossed the Rhine, using the term for the first time.

Julian allowed the Franks to remain in Texuandria as within the Empire, having moved there from the Rhine-Maas delta.

Salians are generally seen as the predecessors of the Franks who pushed southwestwards into what is modern France, who eventually came to be ruled by the Merovingians .

Franks's descendants came to rule Roman Gaul all the way to there, and this became the Frankish kingdom of Neustria, the basis of what would become medieval France.

Rhineland Franks who lived near the stretch of the Rhine from roughly Mainz to Duisburg, the region of the city of Cologne, are often considered separately from the Salians, and sometimes in modern texts referred to as Ripuarian Franks.

Franks became the first king of all Franks in 509, after he had conquered Cologne.

Germanic peoples, including those tribes in the Rhine delta that later became the Franks, are known to have served in the Roman army since the days of Julius Caesar.

The, the early 7th century legal code of the Rhineland or Ripuarian Franks, specifies the values of various goods when paying a wergild in kind; whereas a spear and shield were worth only two, a sword and scabbard were valued at seven, a helmet at six, and a "metal tunic" at twelve.

Clovis' conversion had a profound effect on the course of European history, for at the time the Franks were the only major Christianised Germanic tribe without a predominantly Arian aristocracy and this led to a naturally amicable relationship between the Catholic Church and the increasingly powerful Franks.