Salian Franks

"Salians" redirects here. For the eleventh-century dynasty, see Salian dynasty. For the Roman priests, see Salii.

The Salian Franks, or Salians, sometimes referred to using the Latin word Salii (Ancient Greek: Σάλιοι, Salioi), were a Frankish people who lived in what was is now the Netherlands in the fourth century. A specific group of Franks was referred to by this name only once in written records, when they came into conflict with Roman forces led by Julian the Apostate in 358 AD. Their is some doubt about whether the name was really a tribal name, or a name which could be applied more widely to other Franks. According to one proposal they are also the ancestors or forerunners of the Franks who later who settled and eventually ruled in the fifth century in what is now northwestern France, at first under the leadership of Chlodio, and later under the leadership of the Merovingian dynasty.

Roman sources concerning the events of 358 AD describe the Salians as a Frankish people who had entered the empire from across the Rhine some generations earlier and settled with Roman knowledge in Batavia, a large island in the Rhine delta, which was on the northern boundary of the Roman Empire. They had subsequently been settling peacefully in the relatively unpopulated and infertile area of Texandria, south of the delta. When another people, the Chamavi, also crossed the Rhine and entered these areas, and began sending out raiding parties from Batavia, Julian entered the region with military force. After defeating the Chamavi and taking hostages he proclaimed new agreements with both peoples, authorizing the Salians to keep any lands they had settled without fighting, and obliging the Salians and Chamavi to contribute soldiers to the Roman military. Julian is known to have created several military units named after the Salians.

Much later, in the fifth century, the Salians are believed to have expanded their territory still further into present day Northern France under Merovingian rule. Until the 1950s it was even believed that the Salians even become one of two large divisions among the Franks in the fifth century, with the other group, the Ribuarian Franks, living to their east. This reasoning is based on the names of two distinct legal codes for the Franks ruled by the Merovingians. The older one, the so-called Salic Law (Lex Salica) was valid in what is now France, and its name might be related to the earlier Salians, although this is no longer considered certain. The later one, the Lex Ripuaria, in contrast, is associated with the region near Cologne in what is now Germany.

In the 21st century, historians don't believe that the term "Salic" in Salic law referred to any tribe by the 5th century, and some historians argue that it never did. It is also no longer widely accepted that the two Frankish legal codes were a reflection of two distinct Frankish peoples.

Etymology

Many etymologies have been proposed but the origins of the name remain somewhat uncertain, one of the challenges being that the name is so short, which means it can potentially be connected to a large number of potential words. When considering the possible etymologies, scholars also consider whether the word is really related to several other words including the name of the much later Frankish Salic law, the Frankish legal concept of terra salica (the demesne lands of the lord of the manor), the regional name Salland, north of the river delta in the Netherlands, or the name of the river IJssel which flows through Salland.

The proposal of Norbert Wagner and Matthias Springer is that the name has a Germanic etymology, connecting the name of the Salians to such words as modern German Saal, meaning a house or hall, and Geselle, meaning a companion or journeyman. It is argued that these two Germanic terms are related because companions shares accommodation. For scholars who accept this proposal the Salians in 358 AD may simply have been calling themselves a group of confederates or friends, and the much later Salic law may have had a meaning equivalent to "civil law". Less, widely accepted, Springer has even argued that the term Salii in 358 AD was misunderstood by Roman authors and was actually a Germanic term for the Franks in general.

• Based on the report of Zosimus that the Salians moved into the Roman Empire from somewhere north of the Rhine, older scholarship proposed that the name may have derived from the name of the IJssel river, formerly called Hisla or Isola in the oldest medieval documents.
• In contrast, another old proposal was that the Salians became a people only once they settled together on the island of Batavia, and that their name is therefore based upon an otherwise unknown Germanic word for "island", meaning they were "island dwellers".
• A connection has been proposed to words for "salt", which are similar in many languages, possibly because the early Salians lived near saltwater. An argument against this is that the Salians, and the regions where they might have lived, including Salland and the Ijssel, were not near saltwater during the Roman era.
• It has also been proposed that the name is related to an Indo-European word for jumping or leaping, such as the Latin verb salire, from which is derived the similar name of an order of leaping priests of Mars in Rome, called the Salii. There is however no explanation about why this would be their name.

The campaign of Julian in 358 AD

Of all the surviving classical sources who describe the campaign of Julian in 358 AD which involved the Salians, only one much later source, Zosimus, who wrote around 500 AD, described something of their past. Zosimus describes them as a people detached or separated from the Franks (Φράγκων ἀπό-μοιρον), who had been expelled from their own country by the Saxons and settled at some time prior to 357 AD on the large island of Batavia, between two branches of the Rhine. He notes that although this island had once been governed by the Romans on their own it was by 357 AD governed by the Salians. He describes these Saxons, as by far the strongest of all the barbarians dwelling in that Rhine delta region, believing themselves to surpass all others in courage, strength, and endurance in battle. A more contemporary source, Ammianus Marcellinus, also associated the Salians with the Franks, calling them Franks "whom custom calls the Salii". He describes their background only by saying that they "had once dared to unlawfully establish their dwellings on Roman soil in the region of Toxandria", a Roman-controlled region to the south of the delta.

Julian's campaign against the Salains was at least partly triggered by a Roman concern with getting grain shipments from Britain safely up the Rhine, without being impeded by the Salians and other Rhine delta peoples. Libanius (Oration 18.83) an orator who corresponded with Julian and wrote his funeral oration, described how barbarians on the Rhine were blocking shipments. Both Libanius and Zosimus (3.5) reported that Julian, wanting to supply Roman areas where cultivation had been ruined by other conflicts, built a fleet on the Rhine and began shipping grain up the river to Roman cities. In his letter to the Athenians Julian however complained of the disgrace that despite quickly building this fleet, the praetorian prefect Florentius sent to Gaul by Constantius II in 357, "promised to pay the barbarians a fee of two thousand pounds weight of silver in return for a passage". Julian boasted to the Athenians that this payment to the barbarians was not made, and instead he marched against the barbarian tribes - specifically the Salians and Chamavi. His account of this is compressed. "I received the submission of part of the Salian tribe, and drove out the Chamavi and took many cattle and women and children. And I so terrified them all, and made them tremble at my approach that I immediately received hostages from them and secured a safe passage for my food supplies."

Another turn of events which triggered this campaign was the entry of the Chamavi into Roman region south of the Rhine. According to Zosimus the barbarians of the delta region were losing all hope because of Julian's policies as governor, and they were expecting the complete destruction of everyone who still lived there. Apparently in reaction to this, the Saxons sent a faction of a Saxon people called the "Quadi", into the land held by the Romans. (The Quadi are however a very well-known enemy of the Romans who lived far away, in the area of modern Slovakia. They are in fact mentioned by Zosimus and Ammianus in other parts of their works. Scholars therefore believe this particular passage of Zosimus is faulty, and that he means the Chamavi, a people from north of the delta who were named as the second people involved during these events by more contemporary sources such as Ammianus, Eunapius and Julian himself.)

According to Zosimus, these "Quadi" (Chamavi) used boats on the Rhine to get around Frankish tribes who effectively protected the Roman frontier, and into the Roman river delta, where they expelled the Salians from Batavia and established a base for themselves. In contrast to Ammianus then, who simply says that the Chamavi were attempting to do something similar to the Salians, Zosimus describes the Salians as friends of Rome who were forced into the territories still nominally controlled by Rome. He claims that Julian gave instructions to attack the "Quadi" (Chamavi) speedily, but not to kill Salians, or to prevent them from entering Roman territory, because they had not come as enemies, but had been forced there. "As soon as the Salii heard of the kindness of Julian, 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."

Ammianus and Zosimus agree that in the winter of 357/8 AD, a deputation of the Salians came to the Roman city of Tongeren. However Ammianus portrays them not as supplicants but as offering their terms: as long as they remained quiet they should be treated as if they were in their own lands, and no one should harass or attack them. Julian gave the envoys gifts, dismissed them, and then sent his general Severus along the Maas river in order to attack the Salians suddenly "like a thunderstorm" ("tamquam fulminis turbo", a whirlwind of lightning). According to Ammianus it is only then that the Salians were in the position of begging for mercy rather than offering peace terms. Ammianus wrote that Julian, with "victory already assured", now "inclined toward mercy and accepted their surrender". He took property and children as part of the surrender. Libanius (18.75-76) does not name the tribes involved but also describes this first lightning strike along the river (περὶ τὸν ποταμὸν ἀστράψας), and, consistent with Ammianus and Zosimus, "he struck an entire nation with such terror that they deemed it better to relocate and become part of his kingdom, considering life under his rule more desirable than their own. They requested land, and they received it. He skilfully used barbarians against barbarians, as they found it far better to pursue the enemy alongside him than to flee with them". While this was accomplished without battle according to Libanius, Julian realized that he needed to cross the river, and because he had no boats he forced his cavalry and infantry to swim. The unnamed people on the other bank came as supplicants to Julian before their houses were all burnt down.

Following the conquest of the Salians, they assisted Julian against the Chamavi, together with the specialized guerrilla forces of Charietto who, according to Zosimus (3.6), were brought into the conflict because the Chamavi did not dare direct engagement with the Romans, and chose instead to make stealthy attacks into Roman lands. Charietto's approach worked, and he captured the son of the Chamavi king.

The Salians were then brought into Roman units defending the empire from other Frankish raiders. The Notitia dignitatum, listing Roman military units at the end of the 4th century mentions the Salii iuniores Gallicani based in Hispania, the Salii seniores based in Gaul. There is also record of a numerus Saliorum.

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". (The Sugambri had apparently long ago been defeated and moved by the Romans.)

Possible continuation

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. These Franks, headed by a certain Chlodio, conquered an area which included Turnacum (the modern Belgian city of Tournai) and Cameracum (the modern French city of Cambrai). According to Lanting & van der Plicht (2010), this probably happened in the period 445–450. Chlodio is never referred to as Salian, only Frankish, and his origins unclear. He is said by Gregory of Tours (II.9) to have launched his attack on Tournai through the Carbonaria Silva from a fort named Dispargum, which was in "Thuringia". The most common interpretations of these names are neither in Salian Batavia nor in Toxandria.

In 451, Chlodio's opponent Flavius Aëtius, de facto ruler of the Western Roman Empire, called upon his Germanic allies on Roman soil to help fight off an invasion by Attila's Huns. 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.

Signet ring of Childeric I, king of the Salian Franks from 457 to 481. Inscription CHILDIRICI REGIS ("of Childeric the king"). Found in his tomb at Tournai, now in the Monnaie de Paris

While their relationship to Chlodio is uncertain, Childeric I and his son Clovis I, who gained control over Roman Gaul were said to be related, and the legal code they published for the Romance speaking country between the Loire and the Silva Carbonaria, a region the Franks later called Neustria, was called the Salic law. Their dynasty, the Merovingians, were named after Childeric's father Merovech, whose birth was associated with supernatural elements. Childeric and Clovis were described as Kings of the Franks, and rulers of the Roman province of Belgica Secunda. Clovis became the absolute ruler of a Germanic kingdom of mixed Galloroman-Germanic population in 486. He consolidated his rule with victories over the Gallo-Romans and all the other Frankish tribes and established his capital in Paris. After he had defeated the Visigoths and the Alemanni, his sons drove the Visigoths to Spain and subdued the Burgundians, Alemanni and Thuringians. After 250 years of this dynasty, marked by internecine struggles, a gradual decline occurred. The position in society of the Merovingians was taken over by Carolingians, who came from a northern area around the river Meuse in what is now Belgium and the southern Netherlands.

In Gaul, a fusion of Roman and Germanic societies was occurring. 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. Unlike their Gothic, Burgundic and Lombardic counterparts, who adopted Arianism, the Salians adopted Catholic Christianity early on; giving them a relationship with the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and their subjects in conquered territories.

The division of the Frankish kingdom among Clovis’s four sons (511) was an event that would repeat in Frankish history over more than four centuries. By then, the Salic Law had established the exclusive right to succession of male descendants. This principle turned out to be an exercise in interpretation, rather than the simple implementation of a new model of succession. No trace of an established practice of territorial division can be discovered among Germanic peoples other than the Franks.

The later Merovingian kings responsible for the conquest of Gaul are thought to have had Salian ancestry, because they applied so-called Salian law (Lex Salica) in their Roman-populated territories between the Loire and Silva Carbonaria, although they also clearly had connections with the Rhineland or Ripuarian Franks. The Lex Ripuaria originated about 630 and has been described as a later development of the Frankish laws known from Lex Salica. On the other hand, following the interpretation of Springer the Lex Salica may simply have meant something like "Common Law".

Culture

See also: Frankish mythology

Apart from some isolated fragments, there is no record of the Salian Frankish language but it is presumed to be ancestral to the modern family of Low Franconian dialects, which are represented today by Dutch and Flemish dialects, and Afrikaans. There are some early runic scripts been found in the Netherlands which might represent an early Frankish language, one of which is the Rune inscription of Bergakker. This inscription has led to much discussion among linguists. It is assumed that the inscription dates from around 425-450.

Before the Merovingian takeover, the Salian tribes apparently constituted a loose confederacy that only occasionally banded together, for example to negotiate with Roman authority. Each tribe consisted of extended family groups centered on a particularly renowned or noble family. The importance of the family bond was made clear by the Salic Law, which ordained that an individual had no right to protection if not part of a family.

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. On the other hand it is possible many Salians in Gaul were already Arian Christians, like contemporary Germanic kingdoms.

Bibliography

• Anderson, Thomas. 1995. "Roman Military Colonies in Gaul, Salian Ethnogenesis and the Forgotten Meaning of Pactus Legis Salicae 59.5". Early Medieval Europe 4 (2): 129–44.
• Dierkens, Alain; Périn, Patrick (2003), "The 5th-century advance of the Franks in Belgica II: history and archaeology", Essays on the Early Franks, Barkhuis, pp. 165–193
• Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Franks" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 11 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 35–36.
• Halsall, Guy (2007). Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376-568. Cambridge University Press.
• James, Edward (1988). The Franks. The Peoples of Europe. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-17936-4.
• Lanting, J. N.; van der Plicht, J. (2010). "De 14C-chronologie van de Nederlandse Pre- en Protohistorie VI: Romeinse tijd en Merovische periode, deel A: historische bronnen en chronologische thema's". Palaeohistoria (in Dutch). Vol. 51/52 (2009/2010). Groningen: Groningen Institute of Archaeology. ISBN 9789077922736.
• Nonn, Ulrich (2010). Die Franken. Kohlhammer.
• Reichert, Hermann (2004), "Salier § 1. Zum Namen", in Beck, Heinrich; Geuenich, Dieter; Steuer, Heiko (eds.), Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, vol. 26 (2 ed.), De Gruyter, pp. 343–345, ISBN 978-3-11-017734-3
• Reimitz, Helmut (2004), "Salier § 2. Historisches", in Beck, Heinrich; Geuenich, Dieter; Steuer, Heiko (eds.), Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, vol. 26 (2 ed.), De Gruyter, pp. 345–347, ISBN 978-3-11-017734-3
• Springer, Matthias (1997), Geuenich, Dieter; Haubrichs, Wolfgang; Jarnut, Jörg (eds.), "Gab es ein Volk der Salier?", Nomen et gens. Zur historischen Aussagekraft frühmittelalterlicher Personennamen, Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde - Ergänzungsbände, vol. 16, De Gruyter, ISBN 978-3-11-015809-0
• Wagner, Norbert (1989), "Der Stammesname der Salier und die 'westgermanische' Konsonantengemination", Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, 118: 34–42, JSTOR 20657886
• Wood, Ian (1994). The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–751 AD.

Primary sources

• Ammianus Marcellinus, History of the Later Roman Empire.
• Gregory of Tours, Decem Libri Historiarum (Ten Books of Histories, better known as the Historia Francorum).
• Zosimus (1814): New History, London, Green and Chaplin. Book 1.[1]
• Panegyrici Latini