Franks (Frankish peoples) — early medieval West Germanic confederation

The Lower Germanic Limes was the border between the Roman province of Germania inferior on the left bank of the Rhine and the barely controlled Germania Magna on the right bank at the turn of the century. This section of the limes, beginning at about the present-day Bad Breisig and ending at the mouth of the Altrhein into the North Sea, was determined primarily by the course of the river itself, rather than by ramparts or walls. Roman forts and fortifications stretched along the river via Nijmegen, Xanten, Neuss, Cologne to Bonn, where the Upper Germanic Limes began somewhat upstream on the opposite side of the Rhine. In this protective zone, a large number of Roman estates (villae rusticae) and settlements (vici) were built in the hinterland on the left bank of the Rhine; the imperial city of Trier functioned as an important sign of Roman power in the Gallo-Roman-Germanic borderland.

In the large area between the Rhine and the Ardennes, however, there were also Germanic villages and settlements that lived in dependence on Roman institutions. The Germanic tribes settling to the right and left of the Rhine were thus familiar with Roman culture, civilization and military technology; Germanic tribes were active to varying degrees in the service of the Romans, not infrequently as military alliance troops. The tribe of the Ubians was settled by the Romans around 15 BC in what is now Cologne and gradually Romanized - this also applied to the Batavians in the Dutch Betuwe. There were repeated raids by Germanic groups against Roman establishments, which could also escalate into larger conflicts.

Rome's internal problems with tributary emperors and counter-emperors in the 3rd century (see Imperial Crisis of the 3rd Century) had also had a destabilizing effect on the situation in Gaul and Germania. This was later compounded by the unrest of the incipient Migration Period and the conflicts of the Romans with Goths and other Germanic tribes. This was the period in which Germanic groups and tribes of the Germania Magna on the right bank of the Rhine first formed into action communities, then into tribal confederations and finally into new peoples - this applies to the Franks as well as to the Saxons, Alamanni, Thuringians, Bavarians and Burgundians.

The (proto)Frankish tribes or associations initially settled on the right bank of the Rhine, often changing their settlement area and repeatedly advancing into Gallo-Roman territory on raids. Although the demarcation of the sub-tribes from each other and from other Germanic tribes is sometimes fraught with uncertainty, the Frankish tribes appeared to the Romans as a linguistic and ethnic unit that went beyond the narrow tribal name.

The "inner perception" of the tribes among themselves, however, was at first more differentiated. In the beginning they formed only loose alliances, as they were suitable for raids or defensive measures. In the course of time, this "tribal swarm" gave rise to a tribal federation or tribal confederation (of which, according to Zöllner, it is essential to speak) and only in the course of time finally to the people. In recent research (Patrick Geary, Michael Kulikowski et al. ) it is increasingly assumed that the union of the Franks was initially promoted by the Romans, who wanted to bring the Limes foreland under control in this way.

When the Imperium Romanum went through a period of weakness in the 3rd century, however, Franks, Alamanni and Saxons took advantage of this to launch raids. The first known Frankish raids into Roman territory took place in 257/59 and increased more and more in the following period. However, the mention for these first Frankish raids is found in a later late antique source in Aurelius Victor (c. 360); the first mention of the Franks in a contemporary source is again found in a Panegyricus from 291. When the Roman Empire had stabilized again, many Franks served in the Roman military and some rose to high positions. The expansion of the Franks from the northwest and east across the Rhine created a certain pull for the Germanic tribes (Frisians, especially Saxons, also Thuringians), which always provided points of contact, fighting, but also small alliances across tribes.

In a Roman road map from the middle of the 4th century - the Tabula Peutingeriana - the "Francia" (the land of the Franks) on the right side of the Rhine was already explicitly marked.

Whether one can speak of Frankish "tribes" in this period is controversial; some scholars (Guy Halsall et al.) regard the groupings rather as mercenary troops. In any case, Frankish ethnogenesis was a process drawn out over a long period of time. From when on the development to a common "people feeling" was completed cannot be exactly determined historically; however, during the time of the initially spatially separated actions of Salian Franks and Rhenish Franks there were always contacts between the federations and joint actions against common enemies. For the Merovingian Clovis I it was therefore easy in 509, after the elimination of the Ripuarian rex Sigibert of Cologne, to place himself also at the head of the federation of the Rhine Franks, since these saw him, like themselves, as "Franks".