Origins and Name
From the beginning of the seventh century, the name Francos Salios (or salii in Latin) is used in contrast to the Ripuarian Franks. Salii must be derived from the name of the medieval swampy region of Sall zee, indicating this region as the original residence of the Salians. To this day this region is called Salland. The name may possibly be a reference to salt and, by extension, to the sea, referring to the coastal location.
The language of the Salian Franks, the Franconian language, belongs to the family of the low Franconian dialects. The Salian Franks are one of the founders of the old Dutch culture and society. After establishing themselves within the Roman territory, they developed an organized society that cultivated the earth and that did not offer any threat to its Roman neighbors.
The tribes constituted a free confederation, which rose together to negotiate with the Roman authority. Each tribe was composed of extended family groups, gathered around a particular family, seen as especially renowned and noble. The importance of such a family connection was made clear in the Salic Law, which decreed that an individual was not entitled to protection if he did not belong to a family.
Their mythology and religion was pagan and Germanic. Polytheistic beliefs flourished among the Salian Franks until Clovis’s conversion to Christianity. After this paganism slowly dissolved.
History
The original proximity of the Salian Franks to the sea is confirmed in the earliest historical records. Around 286, Roman military commander Carausio was charged with defending the coast of the Straits of Dover against Saxon and Frankish pirates. This changed when the Saxons led them south into Roman territory.
Among others, its history is confirmed by Amiano Marcelino and Zósimo, who described their migrations toward the south of the Netherlands and Belgium. They initially crossed the Rhine during Roman revolts and subsequent Germanic penetration in AD 260. Once the peace was restored, the Emperor of the Romans Constantius Chlorus allowed the Franks to settle in the year 297 AD among the Batavos, where they soon dominated the island region bumping into the Rhine delta. It is not known whether the people were obliged to serve the Roman army like the Batavians before them, or if for them the territory next to the Black Sea was determined, for thus the origins of the maritime Franks whose history had been written during the reign of Emperor Probo (276-282), are not clear.
One story tells of a very large group of Franks that decided to steal some Roman ships, reaching their homes in the Rhine, passing through Greece, Sicily and Gibraltar, causing disorder along the way. The Franks stopped being associated with the sea when other Germanic tribes, probably Saxons, pushed them towards the south.
The Salians received protection from the Romans and in turn were recruited by Constantius Galo – along with the other inhabitants of the island. However, this did not prevent the attack of the Germanic tribes to the north, especially of the Camavos. Their settlement within the Roman territory was rejected by the future Roman emperor Julian the Apostate who later attacked them. The Salians surrendered to him in 358, accepting the Roman terms.
A particular Salian family arose in Frankish history at the beginning of the fifth century at the appropriate time to become Merovingians – Salian kings of the Merovingian dynasty – named after the mythical Meroveus, the father of Childeric, whose birth was attributed to supernatural elements. From the decade of 420 onwards, led by a certain Clodius, they expanded their territory to the Somme in the north of France. They formed a kingdom in that area with the Belgian city of Tournai becoming the center of their dominions. This kingdom was extended later by Childeric I and especially by Clovis I, that gained control of the Roman Gaul.
In 451, Flavius Aetius, de facto ruler of the Roman Empire of the West, summoned his Germanic allies to the Roman soil to help him fight an invasion of the Huns of Attila. The Salian Franks fought together in the battle of the Catalaunian Fields, in a temporary alliance with Romans and Visigoths, which actually ended the Huns threat to Western Europe.
Clovis, king of the Salian Franks, became the absolute ruler of a Germanic kingdom of mixed Roman-Germanic peoples in 486. He consolidated his rule with victories and dominance over the Gallo-Romans and all other Frankish tribes, later establishing his capital in Paris. After overcoming the Visigoths and the Alamanians, their sons pushed the Visigoths to the Iberian Peninsula and dominated the Burgundians, the Alamanians and the Thuringians.
After 250 years of this dynasty, marked by mutually destructive fights, a gradual decline occurred and their Merovingian society was taken by the Carolingians. They also came from a region to the north near the Maas River, in what is now Belgium and the South of the Netherlands.
In Gaul, a merger of Roman and Germanic societies was taking place. With the Merovingian dynasty, the Franks began to adopt Christianity, from the baptism of Clovis I in 496, an event that formed alliance between the Frankish kingdom and the Roman Catholic Church. The Goths and Lombards adopted Arianism, the Salians adopted Catholic Christianity.
Sources:
Ammianus Marcellinus, History of the Later Roman Empire.
Chisholm, Hugh (1910). Franks, In The Encyclopædia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information
Musset, Lucien: The Germanic Invasions: The Making of Europe, Ad 400-600
Orrin W. Robinson, Old English and its closest Relatives – A Study of the Earliest Germanic Languages.
Perry, Walter Copland (1857). The Franks, from Their First Appearance in History to the Death of King Pepin
Wood, Ian, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 AD
Zosimus (1814): New History, London, Green and Chaplin. Book 1.