Ripuarian Franks

Until the 1950s the Ribuarii were seen as the easternmost of two distinct "sub tribes" of the Franks who ruled two large neighbouring regions in northern Gaul after the collapse of the Roman empire in the fifth century AD.

The Lex Ripuaria itself is now seen mainly as a law code of the Cologne Rhineland covering such neighbouring towns as Bonn, Zülpich, Jülich and Neuss.

In his account of the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451 AD he referred to the Riparii among the units fighting as auxiliaries under the Roman Aetius, against Attila.

Eugen Ewig has argued that these Riparii are not from Cologne, but rather a military unit mentioned in the Notitia Dignitatum, who based on the Rhône river in what is now southern France.

It was probably made in the context of the establishment of an Austrasian sub-kingdom by the Merovingians in 623 or 633 AD, possibly as part of a reorganization of the border defence of this kingdom on the Rhine.

[3] Apart from the 7th-century legal code, the earliest narrative source definitely containing a form of the word ribuarius for the people of Cologne is the Liber Historiae Francorum, which was completed about 726/27 AD.

[4] Since the 1950s it has been widely accepted that the plural Ripuarii or Ribuarii, referring to Franks from the Cologne region, did not originate as the name of any Germanic tribe who moved in the so-called Migration period before the 7th century.

A traditional explanation for the first part of the word comes from Latin rīpa meaning a seashore or riverbank, which is believed to refer in this case to the river Rhine, which runs past Cologne.

Springer proposes therefore that the people of Cologne owed their special name to a unit of Roman border police who had been posted there before the Franks took over.

Similarly, in the 11th century, when the term was becoming more unusual, Wipo of Burgundy called the Lower Lotharingians Ribuarii and their duke dux Ribuariorum.

Without naming the people as Ripuarian, but referring to Cologne and its vicinity, Gregory of Tours explains how they voluntarily gave up their sovereignty to Clovis.

Whatever Clovis may have meant, as Sigobert was sleeping at noon in his tent in the forest across the Rhine from Cologne after a walk, Chloderic's hired assassins killed him.

Arriving in person Clovis assembled the citizens of Cologne, denied the murders, saying "It is not for me to shed the blood of one of my fellow kings, for that is a crime …" He advised them to place themselves under his protection, after which he was shouted into office by a voice vote and raised up on their shields in a ceremony of installation.