From the great Rhine crossing of 406 and the baptism of Clovis through the Merovingian wars, Charles Martel at Poitiers, Charlemagne's imperial coronation in Rome, the Treaty of Verdun, the Viking sieges of Paris, and the foundation of Normandy, to the election of Hugh Capet and the dawn of the Capetian century. Slide across the centuries to read the major events that forged Francia.
On the last day of 406, a confederation of Vandals, Alans, and Sueves crosses the frozen Rhine near Mainz. The Gallic provinces are pillaged for three years before the invaders pour on into Spain.
From the great Rhine crossing of 406 and the baptism of Clovis through the Merovingian wars, Charles Martel at Poitiers, Charlemagne's imperial coronation in Rome, the Treaty of Verdun, the Viking sieges of Paris, and the foundation of Normandy, to the election of Hugh Capet and the dawn of the Capetian century. Slide across the centuries to read the major events that forged Francia.
On the last day of 406, a confederation of Vandals, Alans, and Sueves crosses the frozen Rhine near Mainz. The Gallic provinces are pillaged for three years before the invaders pour on into Spain.
By treaty with the patrician Constantius, the Visigoths of Wallia are settled as Roman foederati in Aquitania Secunda, with Toulouse as their seat. A barbarian kingdom now sits inside the Gallic provinces.
The Roman general Aetius, allied with the Visigoth Theodoric I and Frankish, Burgundian, and Alan contingents, halts Attila's Huns near Châlons. Theodoric falls in the battle, but the Huns are checked and turn back across the Rhine.
The young Salian Frankish king Clovis crushes Syagrius — the last Roman ruler of the Domain of Soissons between the Loire and the Somme — and absorbs his territory. The Gallo-Roman political order north of the Loire is at an end.
After his victory over the Alemanni at Tolbiac, Clovis is baptised by bishop Remigius of Reims with three thousand warriors. He becomes the first Catholic king of a major Germanic people, while his rivals remain Arian heretics.
At Vouillé near Poitiers, Clovis defeats and kills the Visigothic king Alaric II. The Visigoths are driven beyond the Pyrenees, and Aquitaine, the richest of the Roman provinces of Gaul, passes to the Franks.
Clovis dies in his new capital, Paris, and is buried in the church of the Holy Apostles. His realm is divided among his four sons — Theuderic, Chlodomer, Childebert, and Chlothar — establishing the pattern of Merovingian partitions for two centuries.
On the death of Chlothar I, the kingdom is again partitioned. The murder of the Visigothic princess Galswintha at the order of her husband Chilperic ignites a forty-year war between Brunhild of Austrasia and the slave-queen Fredegund of Neustria.
The Austrasian and Burgundian magnates surrender the aged Queen Brunhild to Chlothar II of Neustria, who has her tortured and torn apart by horses. The Frankish kingdoms are reunited, and the aristocracies of each region win the formal right to their own mayors of the palace.
Pippin II, mayor of the palace of Austrasia and grandfather of Charles Martel, defeats the Neustrian king and his mayor Berchar at Tertry. The mayors of the palace, not the Merovingian rois fainéants, now rule the Franks in fact.
Between Tours and Poitiers, the Frankish mayor Charles Martel halts the Umayyad governor Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi, who is killed in the fighting. The deepest raid of the Arab conquest into Christian Europe is broken.
With the sanction of Pope Zacharias — 'better that he should be called king who has the power' — Pippin III deposes Childeric III, shaves the long royal hair of the Merovingian, and confines him to a monastery. Pippin is anointed king at Soissons.
Returning from an unsuccessful campaign against Saragossa, Charlemagne's rearguard is ambushed in the pass of Roncesvalles by Basques. The count of the Breton March, Hruodland, falls — and his death will become the founding epic of vernacular French literature.
On Christmas Day in St Peter's, Pope Leo III places a crown on Charlemagne's head and the people of Rome acclaim him as Imperator Romanorum. Three centuries after the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, a Roman emperor sits again in the West.
Charlemagne dies at Aachen in his seventy-second year and is buried in the palatine chapel. His one surviving son, Louis the Pious, takes the empire — already crowned co-emperor at Aachen the year before — and inherits a realm that stretches from the Ebro to the Elbe.
After three years of war among the sons of Louis the Pious, the Treaty of Verdun divides the Carolingian empire. Charles the Bald receives the western Francia, Louis the German the eastern, and the eldest Lothair the imperial title and the middle kingdom from the North Sea to Italy.
A great Norse fleet under a leader the Frankish annals call Ragnar sails up the Seine and sacks Paris on Easter Sunday. Charles the Bald buys the Vikings off with seven thousand pounds of silver — the first of the great Danegelds of West Francia.
Departing for an Italian campaign, Charles the Bald issues the Capitulary of Quierzy, recognising in practice that the counties of his magnates pass to their sons in his absence. The capitulary is read in later centuries as the legal birth of hereditary fiefs.
A Viking host of perhaps thirty thousand under Sigfred surrounds Paris, defended by Count Odo and bishop Gozlin from the Île de la Cité. The siege lasts almost a year. The poet-monk Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, an eyewitness, writes his Bella Parisiacae urbis.
After the Viking defeat at Chartres, King Charles the Simple grants the lands around the lower Seine to the Norse chieftain Rollo, on condition of baptism and homage. The duchy of Normandy is born.
On the death of Louis V, the magnates and Archbishop Adalbero of Reims pass over the Carolingian Charles of Lorraine and elect Hugh Capet, Duke of the Franks, king at Senlis. He is crowned at Noyon on 3 July. A dynasty that will rule France for eight hundred years is born.