440s, a very motley collection of Roman soldiers, German mercenaries, and Germanic federate troops. The Roman general Aëtius, who dominated military affairs in Gaul in those years, himself depended heavily on Hunnic troops; he used those Huns to destroy the Burgundian kingdom of the Rhine, and to re-establish the Burgundians in the area between Lyons and Geneva (' Burgundy') under a treaty which pledged Burgundian support for the Roman Empire. When Aëtius put together an alliance to defeat the invasion of Attila's Huns in 451 it was Visigothic, Burgundian, and Frankish troops who made up the bulk of the 'Roman' army. With the assassination of Aëtius by Valentinian III in 454 (and the subsequent assassination of Valentinian by Aëtius's loyal followers in 455) there was to be no clear Roman leadership in northern Gaul again.

A new direction in northern Gaul came with the emergence of Childeric as king of one group of Franks. Although our information about him is scanty, it seems that he collaborated with the Romans--or with one group of Romans--against the Visigoths and the Saxons of the Loire, that (although a pagan) he co-operated with the Gallic Church, and that he laid the foundations of the kingdom which his descendants were to rule for the following three centuries. In the confused years which followed the death of the last generally accepted western emperor in 455, and still more after the deposition of the last resident western emperor in 476, Childeric must have seemed a natural ruler to many in northern Gaul. He died in 48½ and was buried at Tournai, in a grave which reveals some aspects of his power: several hundred gold coins minted in Constantinople, sent perhaps as a subsidy, and a gold brooch like those worn by Roman generals.

Childeric was succeeded by his son Clovis, usually seen as the real founder of Frankish power in Gaul. The details of his reign, recorded for us by Bishop Gregory of Tours some seventy years after Clovis's death, are in some dispute, but his achievements are plain. He united the Romans of north Gaul under his rule, by force of arms and by the expedient of converting to their own religion, Catholic Christianity. He united

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