Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Cultures

Franks

Also Known As Frankish
Peoples

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The Franks were a Germanic people who settled the lower Rhine and went on to rule Gaul, giving France its name. Their king Clovis accepted Catholic rather than Arian Christianity around the turn of the sixth century, a choice that aligned the Frankish kingdom with the bishops of Gaul and shaped the church of western Europe. Under the Carolingians they took up the reform of liturgy, script and learning that carried Latin Christianity into the middle ages.

Facts
Origins
Origin Region
The lower Rhine, from which the Franks moved into Gaul and gave France its name. 1
Language Family
Frankish, West Germanic within Indo-European, which left its mark on the Romance speech of Gaul rather than surviving as a language there. 2
Traditions
Principal Religious Traditions
A Germanic religion attested only indirectly; then Catholic rather than Arian Christianity, accepted by Clovis around the turn of the sixth century, a choice that aligned the kingdom with the bishops of Gaul and shaped the western church for centuries. 3
Practice
Practice Status
Reconstructed in the modern era and openly practised 3
Learn More
Clovis, the Baptism at Reims and a Catholic Kingdom

Frankish religion before the conversion is thinly attested and hostile in transmission. Gregory of Tours, writing in the later sixth century, is the principal witness, and he is a bishop describing what he wants replaced, so his notices of idols, of sacred trees and of the beast in the Frankish origin story are notices of what was being suppressed rather than descriptions from within.

The event the whole tradition turns on is the baptism of Clovis at Reims, placed by Gregory after a battlefield vow. Its significance is less the personal conversion than the confession chosen. The other Germanic kingdoms of the west, Visigothic, Ostrogothic, Burgundian and Vandal, had accepted Christianity in its Arian form and so stood apart from their Roman provincial subjects and from the bishops of those subjects. Clovis took the Catholic side, and the Frankish kings therefore acquired the Gallo-Roman episcopate as an instrument of government rather than as a rival to it.

What followed was a religion of saints and relics organised around cities. Martin of Tours became the kingdom's patron, and his cloak, the cappa, gave the words chapel and chaplain to Europe. Royal power was displayed by founding monasteries, endowing shrines and holding relics; oaths were sworn on them, and Gregory's miracle collections show how completely the saint had taken over the position of the older local power at the spring or the tomb.

From the Rhine to Charlemagne

The Franks appear in Roman sources in the third century as a grouping of peoples on the lower Rhine, serving in the empire and raiding it by turns. Ian Wood's study of the Merovingian kingdoms describes the century after Clovis as the construction of a genuine state out of that material: a partible inheritance that split the realm among sons at every succession, an aristocracy holding land and office together, and bishops who were very often members of it.

Religion supplied both administration and frontier. Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries, Columbanus and later Boniface among them, founded monasteries across Frankish territory and pushed the church eastward into Frisia and Thuringia with Frankish military backing behind them. Boniface was killed in Frisia in 754 and became a martyr of that expansion.

The dynasty changed in 751, when Pippin, the mayor of the palace, took the crown with papal endorsement, and his son Charlemagne turned the arrangement into an empire, crowned at Rome in 800. The Saxon wars that filled much of his reign made conversion a condition of surrender, with capitularies imposing death for refusing baptism, and the alliance of Frankish arms with the papacy set the shape of western European Christendom for centuries afterwards. The name of the people became the name of a country it no longer governed.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Franks directly: "Frank Griffel is a scholar of Islamic intellectual history at Yale University, and this Oxford University Press book is his definitive academic study of the thought of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, the..."

Source Al-Ghazali's Philosophical TheologyFrank Griffel

This source names Franks directly: "Northumbrian inscriptions such as the Franks Casket and the Ruthwell Cross carry it into a Christian context, and its everyday use faded after the Norman Conquest as the Roman alphabet displaced it."

This source names Franks directly: "Frank Waters's Book of the Hopi, published by Viking Press in 1963, compiled by a non-Hopi author from interviews with a small number of Hopi collaborators, is the most widely circulated printed..."

Source Book of the HopiFrank Waters, with Oswald "White Bear" Fredericks

This source names Franks directly: "Libri Historiarum, or History of the Franks, is the primary sixth century chronicle by the bishop of Tours who wrote as a participant in and near contemporary observer of the events of early..."

This source names Franks directly: "The elemental composition of rock, pigment and metal determined by systematic chemical analysis, given its foundational reference in Frank Wigglesworth Clarke's 1908 Data of Geochemistry."

This source names Franks directly: "A musical with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and a book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, based on Damon Runyon's short stories "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown" and "Blood Pressure." Premiered on..."

Source Guys And Dolls (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Franks directly: "Wikipedia's dedicated article on Guys and Dolls, stating the musical premiered on Broadway November 24, 1950, with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and a book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, based..."

Source Guys And Dolls (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Franks directly: "Hosay Trinidad: Muharram Performances in an Indo Caribbean Diaspora, Frank J."

This source names Franks directly: "Frank Bartleman's How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles, self published in 1925, is a primary eyewitness memoir of the 1906 Azusa Street revival that is widely regarded as the founding event of modern..."

Source How Pentecost Came to Los AngelesFrank Bartleman

This source names Franks directly: "Frank Willett's Ife in the History of West African Sculpture, published by Thames and Hudson in 1967, is a scholarly study of the naturalistic bronze and terracotta sculptural tradition of Ife, the..."

This source names Franks directly: "Joe Karetak, Frank Tester and Shirley Tagalik edited this academic volume, published by Fernwood Publishing, gathering Inuit elders, knowledge holders and scholars to document Inuit..."

Source Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: What Inuit Have Always Known to Be TrueJoe Karetak, Frank Tester and Shirley Tagalik (eds.)
John King, Figures

This source names Franks directly: "John King was the most widely claimed "spirit control" of nineteenth century physical mediumship, first manifesting through the Davenport Brothers in the 1850s and later claimed by mediums including..."

Source Man, Myth and MagicRichard Cavendish (ed.)

This source names Franks directly: "Manual of Psychometry: The Dawn of a New Civilization, Joseph Rodes Buchanan's 1885 book from Frank H."

This source names Franks directly: "Frank Podmore was a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research, and this Methuen book is his own early twentieth century history and skeptical critique of the Spiritualist movement..."

This source names Franks directly: "De Iside et Osiride is the Greek philosopher Plutarch's own retelling and philosophical interpretation of the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris, written in the late first or early second century CE..."

Source Moralia, Volume V: Isis and Osiris (De Iside et Osiride)Plutarch; Frank Cole Babbitt (translator)

This source names Franks directly: "SBS News's report of Brian Houston's 17 August 2023 acquittal at Sydney's Downing Centre Local Court on a charge of concealing his late father Frank Houston's child sexual abuse."

This source names Franks directly: "Phantasms of the Living is the Society for Psychical Research's own founding study, written jointly by Edmund Gurney, Frederic W."

Source Phantasms of the LivingEdmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers, Frank Podmore

This source names Franks directly: "The Report on the Census of Hallucinations is a large scale survey conducted by Henry Sidgwick, Eleanor Sidgwick, Frederic W."

Source Report on the Census of HallucinationsHenry Sidgwick, Eleanor Sidgwick, Frederic W. H. Myers, Frank Podmore, Alice Johnson

This source names Franks directly: "An essay by a named historian arguing the painting was revolutionary for showing the Roman god as, in the essay's words, a man of the people rather than an idealized classical figure, dirt under the..."

Clovis accepted Catholic rather than Arian Christianity around the turn of the sixth century, aligning the kingdom with the bishops of Gaul.

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

This source names Franks directly: "An independent literary history article by Debi Simons, published February 9, 2021, tracing the musical's roots to Damon Runyon's short stories of 1920s and 1930s New York gamblers and gangsters..."

This source names Franks directly: "including the Christianization of the Franks."

Thomas Becket, Sources

This source names Franks directly: "Frank Barlow's Thomas Becket, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in London in 1986, is a scholarly biography of the twelfth century Archbishop of Canterbury whose murder in his own cathedral in..."

Source Thomas BecketFrank Barlow

Contained In

Originated In

France, Countries
Germany, Countries
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
2. The Germanic Languages
Wayne Harbert, Cambridge University Press, 2007View the Source
3. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source
Decem Libri Historiarum (The History of the Franks)
Gregory of Tours
The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751
Ian Wood, Longman, 1994
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