Who Are the Franks?

Hearing the name “Franks,” one naturally thinks they must be the forerunners of the French which is not entirely accurate.  The Franks founded France, but originated in Germany.  They emerged during a tumultuous time in Europe.  Barbarian tribes were running amok as the Roman Empire staggered toward collapse.  After Rome fell, European order disintegrated.  Powers in and outside of Europe attempted to fill the vacuum.  It would be one of those barbarian tribes, the Franks, who confronted invaders, returned stability and began pulling Europe from the Dark Ages.

Frankish Origins

The fall of the Roman Empire has generated scholarly debate for centuries beginning with 18^th century historian Edward Gibbon’s groundbreaking work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  We will forego that controversy and focus on events and outcomes.  Rome began tottering in the 4^th Century AD.  The Empire was divided between East and West with separate capitals, Constantinople and Rome (later Ravenna).  With such far flung borders, outside groups threatened the Western Empire.  The Romans increasingly relied on barbarian tribes such as the Franks and Goths as military allies.

The Franks moved west from the lower Rhine region into Roman held northern Europe (modern Holland and Belgium) in the 4^th century in exchange for providing troops to the Empire.  Like many barbarian tribes, the Franks were not a single entity, but a confederation of tribes who shared cultural habits and a common language.  They absorbed the Roman populations in Holland/Belgium gradually adopting Roman customs.

The Fall of Rome and Ensuing Chaos

Attila the Hun invaded from central Europe devastating the Western Empire in the 5^th century.  Roman General Flavius Aetius formed an army of Romans, Goths and Frankish allies to repel the Huns in 451.  After Roman Emperor Valentinian III assassinated Aetius in 454, the Western Empire was on borrowed time.  The Vandals sacked Rome twice, with Vandal King Odoacer ending the Empire in 476.  The Eastern Empire survived as the Byzantine Empire.

Ostrogoth ruler Theodoric attempted to revitalize the Western Empire.  He defeated the Vandals killing Odoacer and created a Gothic kingdom in Italy and the surrounding lands.  After Theodoric died, his kingdom fell into turmoil.  Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great invaded Italy and North Africa managing to re-form the Roman Empire temporarily but could not maintain his hold.  The Catholic Church during this time restored some sense of common identity successfully converting many previously pagan barbarian tribes.  Christianity had become well enough established to be key to maintaining order.  Aspiring conquerors converted to Catholicism as a means to increase influence.

Clovis Conquers and Christianizes Gaul

With the chaos of the collapse of the Western Empire came opportunity.  In 480, the ambitious Clovis ascended to the Frankish throne.  He conquered most of northwestern Gaul (modern France) establishing a large kingdom in central Europe.   Clovis baptized himself as Catholic beginning the conversion of the Franks and the newly conquered Gauls to Christianity.  Over the next century, Clovis and his successors brought stability to northcentral Europe assimilating the many barbarian tribes with former Roman citizens.

Frankish ruler Charles Martel came to power in 718 at a precipitous moment.  As the Franks consolidated their control of Gaul, the Muslim Umayyad Caliphate swept across former Roman North African provinces from Egypt to Gibraltar employing a new unstoppable army of armored cavalrymen.  In 711 they invaded Spain.  The Umayyad crossed the Pyrenees Mountains into Frankish lands in the 720s forcibly converting Christians to Islam as they went.  All of western Christendom was threatened.  Martel had no cavalry but delayed confrontation while building an army.  He had no time to train or equip mounted soldiers and instead relied on infantry.  Miraculously, by holding his infantry in tight formation atop a hill, Martel defeated the Umayyad at the Battle of Tours and later at Poitiers in 732 ending the Muslim threat to Europe.

The Carolingian Renaissance

Martel’s grandson Charlemagne doubled Frankish territory in the 8th and 9th centuries founding the Holy Roman Empire.  He opened universities, libraries and encouraged literacy even though Charlemagne himself could not read.  He also sponsored the arts, new forms of architecture and music.  In forging a strong bond with the papacy, Charlemagne finalized the conversion of Europe to Christianity.  With universal Catholicism, came a bond that crossed borders and ethnicities.

During Charlemagne’s reign Europe began emerging from the Dark Ages.  Slowly, scholars, clergy and regents re-discovered and preserved knowledge, law, trade routes, art, and other lost features of the Roman Empire.   The recovery was not totally internal.  The Umayyad successor, the Abbasid Caliphate, was foremost in learning and science in the Middle Ages.  Crusaders later imported Muslim knowledge to complete a jigsaw puzzle of classical philosophy, art literature, math and science allowing the Renaissance to flower.  The Vikings also played an important role.  Their raiding caused much misery, but eventually resulted in much greater European trade and interconnectivity.

When Charlemagne died, he followed Frankish tradition dividing his kingdom among his sons.  His descendants fought each other and when none could prevail, they divided Charlemagne’s former empire into two kingdoms. The first, West Francia, became the modern state of France under Frankish rulers.  East, the Holy Roman Empire continued and eventually split into Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Over time different languages and customs caused the evolution of distinct French and German cultures.  The divide created flashpoints of conflict from the Protestant Reformation to numerous wars between France and Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries.  The Franco-German division shaped European history which continues today

So who were the Franks?  They turn out to be pretty important.  They forged bonds of unity in Christianized and re-stabilized northern Europe .  Charles Martel stood as the last line of defense against a Muslim invasion that would have fundamentally changed the face of Europe.  The Franks initiated the rise out of the Dark Ages, but also created a cultural divide between French and German states that has changed the course of history for over 1,500 years.