Ripuarian Franks

For other uses, see Ripuarian (disambiguation).

Roman Cologne, chief city of the Ripuarian Franks

The Rhineland or Ripuarian Franks (Latin: Ribuarii, and sometimes Ripuarii starting in the 8th century) were the Franks who established themselves in and around the formally Roman city of Cologne, on the Rhine river in what is now Germany.

Until the 1950s the Ribuarii were seen as the easternmost of two distinct "sub tribes" of the Franks who lived in the collapsing Roman empire in the fifth century AD, both of whom inhabited very large regions. According to this tradition, which continues to be influential, the Ribuarii inhabited not just the Rhineland area near Cologne, but whole of what would later become the Austrasian or Lotharingian region – stretching from present day southern Belgium to the Rhine. Their western counterparts would be the Salii, or "Salian Franks", who inhabited present day northern France. This idea, including the names of these two groups, and the definitions of their territories, is based mainly on two 7th century Frankish legal codes, the Lex Ripuaria and Lex Salica, which had eastern and western jurisdictions with a boundary between them in the Ardennes and Silva Carbonaria in what is now southern Belgium.

The term "Frank" first started being used as a collective name for various tribes facing the Romans across the northern Rhine in the third century. While some of these peoples lived further north near the Rhine delta, others lived east of the Roman-occupied Rhineland and had a long history of interaction with the Roman city of Cologne. Much later, in the period after the definitive collapse of Roman power in western Europe, Franks crossed the river permanently and managed to occupy the Roman city of Cologne, and the lower and middle Rhineland in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia.

Name

The name Ripuarii clearly has a meaning of "river people", but the exact way in which the name developed is unclear and may have involved both Latin and Germanic.

The regular Latin form would be Riparii, meaning "[men] of the river bank". The term "milites rip(ari)ensis" was a Latin term used for border soldiers on river frontiers, at least on the Danube and Rhône. Jordanes referred to soldiers described this way from Gaul, fighting under Aetius, but Eugen Ewig has argued that these soldiers can be found in the Notitia Dignitatum based on the Rhône river. In the 7th century, the country around Cologne was described as "ripa Rheni", and so it seems clear that the Latin word for a riverbank was sometimes used to describe the region.

The form Ripuarii is irregular, however, and has been explained by a hypothetical native (Germanic) name underlying the Latin. This hypothetical self-designation might be restored as either *hreop-waren, *hrepa-waren "river[-bank] people". or *hreop-wehren, *hrepa-wehren "river[-bank] defenders".

Conversely, the form Ripuarii may also be due to a loan of the Latin Riparii into Germanic. This view is based on a word-pair given in the Summarium Heinrici, an 11th-century revision of Isidore of Seville, stating the Old High German equivalents of some Latin words, including Ripuarii: Riphera. The latter is textually reconstructed to *ripfera, except that "phonetically *ripf- cannot come from rip-;"

A third possibility is that the name Ripuarii was a mixed word to begin with, perhaps *ripwarjoz. It seems to be analogous to the later formation, Ribuarius, in which Gallo-Roman *ribbar replaces Roman ripa. From the Gallo-Roman came the French rive, "bank", and a group of words based on it.

History

Apart from the 7th-century (or possibly 8th-century) legal code, the earliest narrative source containing the word ribuarius is the Liber Historiae Francorum, which was completed about 726/27 AD. The author uses the term terra Riboariense to describe the lands around Cologne which were devastated in 612 AD by the Merovingian king Theuderic II, who defeated his brother Theudebert II at Zülpich and then pursued him to Cologne. After his victory the author says that the king was claimed that "Someone from these perjured Ribuarians (Riboariis) has shot at me". The word was therefore spelled with a "b" at this time and used both as an adjective and a noun, referring to the both the region of Cologne, and its inhabitants.

Kingdom of Cologne

The Frankish kingdom of Cologne lost its independence almost as soon as it entered the historical record, being subsumed in the Frankish core province of Austrasia. Apart from Roman military lists and mention by Jordanes in Getica of some unknown Ripuarii who fought as auxiliaries of Flavius Aetius in the Battle of Chalons in 451, the first mention of the Cologne kingdom comes from Gregory of Tours, in Historia Francorum. He says that the Salian Frank Clovis, first king of all the Franks and first king to convert to Christianity, subjected the previously Franks from the Cologne region.

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. The region of Cologne was under the rule of Sigobert the Lame, an old campaigner who had fought side by side with Clovis in the wars against the Alamanni. He was called "the lame" because of a wound he had received at the Battle of Tolbiac, 496, the same year as Clovis' conversion to Catholicism. Clovis believed he had won by calling on the name of Christ and now had a mandate from God to Christianize all Neustria. This was a long process not free from resistance.

In 509 he sent a messenger to Chloderic to state that if his father, Sigobert, were to die, he, Clovis, would ally himself to Chloderic. 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. Chloderic sent to Clovis offering some of Sigobert's treasury as enticement. Clovis sent messengers refusing the treasure but asked to see it. Complying with their request to sink his arms into it so that they could see how deep it was, Chloderic was dispatched by the blow of an axe, unable to defend himself.

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. Thus the independent kingdom of the Cologne Franks was voted out of existence by the people at a single assembly in 509.

Language

Further information: Old Frankish language

There are no direct attestations of the early Frankish language. Of some 1,400 Latin inscriptions in Roman Germania Inferior a little over 100 are from the rural lands of the Germanic Ubii, into whose lands the Ripuarii would move. The inscriptions are most frequent in the 3rd century. Most are from the major cities of Germania Inferior. The right bank of the Rhine, where the Ripuarii originated, does not have such a wealth of Latin inscriptions. The High German consonant shift occurred south of an east-west zone called the Benrath Line. The Rhine crosses it in the vicinity of Düsseldorf. The section of the Rhine including Cologne forms the so-called "Rhenish Fan", where dialects are found which form intermediate stages between Dutch and High German.

Ripuarian laws

Main article: Lex Ripuaria

In the first half of the 7th century the Ripuarians received the Ripuarian law (Lex Ripuaria), a law code applying only to them, from the dominating Salian Franks. The Salians, following the custom of the Romans before them, were mainly re-authorizing laws already in use by the Ripuarians, so that the latter could retain their local constitution.

See also

• Franks
• Salian Franks
• List of Germanic tribes

References

• Frank, Irmgard (2003), "Ribuarier", in Beck, Heinrich; Geuenich, Dieter; Steuer, Heiko (eds.), Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, vol. 24 (2 ed.), De Gruyter, pp. 563–568, ISBN 978-3-11-017575-2
• Rivers, Theodore John. (1986) Laws of the Salian and Ripuarian Franks. New York: AMS Press, 1986.
• Springer, Matthias (1998), "Riparii - Ribuarier - Rheinfranken", in Geuenich, Dieter (ed.), Die Franken und die Alemannen bis zur "Schlacht bei Zülpich" (496/97) (in German), Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, pp. 200–268, ISBN 978-3-11-015826-7
• Springer, Matthias (2003), "Ribuarier", in Beck, Heinrich; Geuenich, Dieter; Steuer, Heiko (eds.), Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, vol. 24 (2 ed.), De Gruyter, pp. 569–574, ISBN 978-3-11-017575-2
• Wiggers, Heiko (2007). Reevaluating diglossia: Data from Low German (Dissertation). Ann Arbor.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

External links

• "France: History: Origins: Early Frankish Period". Britannica Online. Archived from the original on 10 August 2006. Retrieved 1 November 2007.
• "Franci Ripuarii in 400". euratlas. 2009.