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, were a Frankish people who lived in what was is now the Netherlands in the fourth century. They are only mentioned under this name in historical records relating to this one period, when they came into conflict with Roman forces led by Julian the Apostate in 358 AD, during the period when Julian ruled in Gaul as Caesar, under his cousin the emperor Constantius II. There 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 perhaps even all Franks. According to older proposals they are the forerunners of the Franks who later who settled, and eventually ruled, what is now northwestern France - at first under the leadership of Chlodio in the 5th century, and later under the leadership of the Merovingian dynasty.

Roman sources describing the events of 358 AD indicate that the Salians were a Frankish people who had entered the empire from across the Rhine some time earlier and settled with Roman acceptance in Batavia, a large island in the Rhine delta, which was on the northern boundary of the Roman Empire. They had subsequently been settling in the relatively unpopulated and infertile area of Texandria, south of the delta, which was still considered to be under direct Roman control. They were also demanding money from the Roman government for the safe passage of grain shipments up the Rhine, along with another people, the Chamavi, who had more recently crossed the Rhine. Julian, seeking to end the payments, entered the region with military force. After defeating both peoples and taking hostages he proclaimed new agreements with them, authorizing the Salians to keep any lands they had settled without fighting, forcing many of the Chamavi to return to their homeland, and obliging both the peoples to contribute soldiers to the Roman military. Julian is known to have created several military units named after the Salians.

Until the 1950s it was also believed that the Salians become one of two large divisions among the Franks in the fifth century, with another large group, the Ribuarian Franks, living to their east. This reasoning was 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 name of 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 for the word Sali have been proposed, but the origins of the name remain uncertain. One of the challenges that the name is so short, which means there are many similar sounding words. When considering the possible etymologies, scholars are also confronted with the questions about whether the word is related to much later terms including 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 Geselle, meaning a companion or journeyman. It is argued by Wagner that this is furthermore related to Saal, meaning a house or hall, because companions share accommodation. For scholars who accept such proposals 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.

Other possible etymologies include these:

• 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

Only Zosimus, who wrote around 500 AD, gives information about the Salians before 357 AD. He 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. Although Batavia was within the boundaries once governed by the Romans, the Salians were governing it by 357 AD. He describes the Saxons who forced them there as the strongest of all the barbarians dwelling near that Rhine delta region. A more contemporary source, Ammianus Marcellinus, also associated the Salians with the Franks, calling them Franks "whom custom calls the Salii".

Julian's campaign against the Salians was at least partly triggered by a Roman concern with bringing 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, emphasizes the problems caused by barbarians on the Rhine blocking such grain shipments. Both Libanius and Zosimus (3.5) reported that Julian, wanting to supply inland 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 quick construction of a large 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 decided that this payment to the barbarians should not be made, and instead he marched against these barbarian tribes involved - specifically the Salians and Chamavi. His account of the campaign itself 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 on the Rhine, 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" (by which he apparently meant the Chamavi), into the land held by the Romans. 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. Ammianus simply says that the Salians dared to start building homes within Roman territory in Texandria, and that the Chamavi attempted to do something similar. Zosimus, in contrast, describes the Salians as friends of Rome who were forced by the Chamavi into these Roman territories. 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", he wrote.

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 these 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". According to Libanius, Julian realized that he also needed to cross the river, and because he had no boats he forced his cavalry and infantry to swim. The people there were attacked but 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 the Roman lands. Charietto's approach worked, and he captured the son of the Chamavi king alive, and this was later revealed to the Chamavi king in the final negotiations which Julian conducted via translator while standing on a boat in the river.

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. Zosimus (3.8) writing around 500 AD says that "Caesar stationed the Salians, a portion of the Quadi, and some of those on the island of Batavia in military units, which even in our time still seem to be preserved (δοχεῖ περισώζεσϑαι).

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