Salian Franks
According to such accounts the Salians were one of the two main divisions of the Franks living in the Roman empire in the fifth century, alongside the Ripuarians to the east.
The Lex Ripuaria, in contrast, applied to a region of older Frankish settlement near the Rhine, and including Cologne.
Alternatively, the name may derive from a proposed Germanic word *saljon meaning friend or comrade, indicating that the term initially implied an alliance.
[4] Ammianus, who served in the Roman military, reported that the Salii were pushed from their home in Batavia (the civitas of Nijmegen), into Toxandria (both within the empire), by the non-Roman Chamavi.
)[5] In 358, the Salians came to some form of agreement with the Romans, which allowed them to keep settlements south of the delta in Toxandria, between the rivers Scheldt, Meuse, and Demer, roughly the area of the Campine, which contains the modern Dutch province of North Brabant, and adjacent parts of the two bordering Belgian Limburg and Antwerp Provinces.
The first mention of Franks in the area was about 286 AD, during the reign of emperor Probus (276–282), when Carausius was put in charge of defending the coasts of the Straits of Dover against Saxon and Frankish pirates.
[6] In the time of Probus there is also record of a large group who decided to hijack some Roman ships and return with them from the Black Sea – reaching the Atlantic after causing chaos through Greece, Sicily and Gibraltar.
[8] Centuries before the Vikings, the term "Saxon" came to refer to coastal Germanic groups specialised in raiding Roman territories by boat, whereas the Franks were strongly associated with the inland Rhine region.
Whatever their origins, Zosimus says they were being pushed out of Batavia by a Saxon group known as the "Kouadoi", a Greek spelling of "Quadi" which some authors believe might be a misunderstanding for the Frankish Chamavi, who were mentioned by Ammianus.
After the emperor Julian the Apostate expelled the invaders, he took the opportunity to allow the Salii to settle in Toxandria, south of Batavia, where they had previously been expelled: "[Julian] The Saxons, who surpassed all the barbarians in those parts in courage, strength, and hardiness, sent out the Quadi, a portion of their own body, against the Roman dominions.
As soon as the Salii heard of the kindness of emperor Julian the Apostate, some of them went with their king into the Roman territory, and others fled to the extremity of their country, but all humbly committed their lives and fortunes to Caesar's gracious protection.
[11] In a poem from 400, Claudian celebrates Stilicho's pacification of the Germani using names of people which may only be poetic: "Salian now tills his fields, the Sygambrian beats his straight sword into a curved sickle".
)[12] Ammianus Marcellinus (late 4th century), mentions the Chamavi, as a Germanic tribe who had also entered the empire in this area at this time.
[13] From the first half of the fifth century onwards, a group of Franks pushed south west through the boundary of the Roman inhabited Silva Carbonaria and expanded their territory to the Somme in northern France.
Franks answered the call and fought in the battle of the Catalaunian Fields in a temporary alliance with Romans and Visigoths, which temporarily ended the Hunnic threat to Western Europe.
During the period of Merovingian rule, the Franks began to adopt Christianity following the baptism of Clovis I in 496, an event that inaugurated the alliance between the Frankish kingdom and the Roman Catholic Church.
[citation needed] Before the Merovingian takeover, the Salian tribes apparently constituted a loose confederacy that only occasionally banded together, for example to negotiate with Roman authority.
While the Goths or the Vandals had been at least partly converted to Christianity since the mid-4th century, polytheistic beliefs are thought to have flourished among the Salian Franks until the conversion of Clovis to Catholicism shortly before or after 500, after which paganism diminished gradually.
