The Historians' History of the World 07

The etymology of the name adopted by the new confederacy is also uncertain. The conjecture which has most probability in its favour is that adopted long ago by Gibbon,d and confirmed in recent times by the authority of Grimm,e which connects it with the German word

frank (free). The derivation preferred by Adelungf from frak

(in modern German frech, bold), with the inserted nasal, differs from that of Grimm only in appearance. No small countenance is given to this derivation by the constant recurrence in after times of the epithet truces, feroces, which the Franks were so fond of applying to themselves, and which they certainly did everything to deserve. Tacitus

b speaks of nearly all the tribes, whose various appellations were afterwards merged in that of Frank, as living in the neighbourhood of the Rhine. Of these the principal were the Sugambri (the chief people of the old Istævonian tribe), who, as there is reason to believe, were identical with the Salian Franks. The confederation further comprised the Bructeri, the Chamavi, Ansibarii, Tubantes, Marsi, and Chasuari, of whom the five last had formerly belonged to the celebrated Cheruscan league, which, under the hero Arminius, destroyed three Roman legions in the Teutoburg forest.

The strongest evidence of the identity of these tribes with the Franks, is the fact that, long after their settlement in Gaul, the distinctive names of the original people were still occasionally used as synonymous with that of the confederation. The Sugambri [or Sicambri] are known in Roman history for their active and enterprising spirit, and the determined opposition which they offered to the greatest generals of Rome. It was on their account that Cæsar bridged the Rhine in the neighbourhood of Bonn, and spent eighteen days, as he informs us with significant minuteness, on the German side of that river. Drusus made a similar attempt against them with little better success. Tiberius was the first who obtained any decided advantage over them; and even he, by his own confession, was obliged to have recourse to treachery. An immense number of them were then transported by the command of Augustus to the left bank of the Rhine, “that,” as the panegyristg expresses it, “they might be compelled to lay aside not only their arms but their ferocity.” That they were not, however, even then so utterly destroyed or expatriated as the flatterers of the emperor would have us believe, is evident from the fact that they appear again under the same name, in less than three centuries afterwards, as the most powerful tribe in the Frankish confederacy.

[12-240 A.D.]

The league thus formed was subject to two strong motives, either of which might alone have been sufficient to impel a brave and active people into a career of migration and conquest. The first of these was necessity,—the actual want of the necessaries of life for their increasing population,—and the second desire, excited to the utmost by the spectacle of the wealth and civilisation of the Gallic provinces.

Early Frankish Warriors

As long as the Romans held firm possession of Gaul, the Germans could do little to gratify their longings; they could only obtain a settlement in that country by the consent of the emperor and on certain conditions. Examples of such merely tolerated colonisation were the Tribocci, the Vangiones, and the Ubii at Colonia Agrippina (Cologne). But when the Roman Empire began to feel the numbness of approaching dissolution, and, as is usually the case, first in its extremities, the Franks were amongst the most active and successful assailants of their enfeebled foe: and if they were attracted towards the West by the abundance they beheld of all that could relieve their necessities and gratify their lust of spoil, they were also impelled in the same direction by the Saxons, the rival league, a people as brave and perhaps more barbarous than themselves. A glance at the map of Germany of that period will do much to explain to us the migration of the Franks, and that long and bloody feud between them and the Saxons, which began with the Chatti and Cherusci, and needed all the power and energy of a Charlemagne to bring to a successful close. The Saxons formed behind the Franks, and could only reach the provinces of Gaul by sea. It was natural therefore that they should look with the intensest hatred upon a people who barred their progress to a more genial climate and excluded them from their share in the spoils of the Roman world.