Salian Franks

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".

The Romans had inconsistent and incomplete control of the Rhine delta since the crisis of the third century. The population and agricultural activity had decreased dramatically, and the Romans had given it up as an area for normal taxation and governance. Some modern scholars believe the Salians attacked by Julian to be descendants of the Frankish dediticii who Constantius Chlorus allowed to remain in Batavia around 293-294 AD, when the Romans reasserted themselves there after the revolt of Carausius. They were probably also descended from the Franks who were later allowed to settle in Texandria by the brother of Constantius II, his co-emperor Constans, already in 342 AD, after fighting there in 341 AD. Julian also associated the usurper Magnentius, who had killed Constans and ruled the region in 350-353 AD, with the Franks and Saxons of this region. At the Battle of Mursa Major in 351 AD in present day Croatia many Roman soldiers with Frankish and Saxon backgrounds died fighting in this Roman civil war. Like Magnentius himself one of his main commanders Silvanus, who defected to Constantius, had Frankish ancestry. He was given the task of rebuilding defences in Gaul, but killed as a rebel in 355 AD. In the same year Julian was given the rank of Caesar, and assigned to rule Gaul under his cousin Constantius, and rebuild the Rhine defences against the Franks and Saxons who Magnentius had apparently coordinated with.

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 - 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". The conflict between Julian and Florentius itself appears to be part of a set of related disputes for fiscal control of northern Gaul, and Julian may have been disrupting a prior state of affairs which entailed integration of the Chamavi and the Salians into imperial systems of military taxation and supply.

Another turn of events which triggered this campaign was the entry of the Chamavi into the 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. He added: "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 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. The names of these units do not necessarily mean that they were made up of Salians, but the units were created by Julian. Zosimus (3.8) writing around 500 AD says, apparently using military lists of his own time, 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)".

Later mentions

In panegyric literature the Salians were only mentioned twice, but in both cases they were used as a trope and no specific events were described:

• In a poem from 400, Claudian celebrates Stilicho's pacification of the Germani near the Rhine using names of famous Rhineland peoples from history: "The Salian now tills his fields, the Sygambrian beats his straight sword into a curved sickle". The Sugambri were defeated by the Romans and disappeared from the historical record centuries earlier.
• In 456 AD in a panegyric praising his father-in-law Avitus by saying he was better than various famous barbarian warriors, Sidonius Apollonaris wrote that the "Heruli were outpaced in running, the Hun in the use of javelins, the Frank in the art of swimming, the Sarmatian in wielding a shield, the Salian in swiftness of foot, and the Geloni in handling the sickle sword". The Geloni, for example, had not been mentioned in historical records for centuries.

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 Frankish king named 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 remain unclear. He is said by Gregory of Tours (II.9) to have launched his attack on Tournai through the Carbonaria Silva in present day Belgium, from a nearby fort on the other side of the forest named Dispargum.

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 to him. Their dynasty, the Merovingians, were named after Childeric's father Merovech, whose birth was associated with supernatural elements. The earliest known legal code of the Merovingian kingdom in northern Gaul was called the Salic law and it applied to the Romance speaking country between the Loire and the Silva Carbonaria, a region the Franks later called Neustria. Childeric and Clovis were described as Kings of the Franks, and rulers of the Roman province of Belgica Secunda. Clovis became the overall ruler of a new kingdom of mixed Galloroman and Germanic populations 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

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 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.