Ripuarian Franks Erotic

The Ripuarian Franks were a Frankish people of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages who settled the Middle Rhine around Cologne from the fourth century, lost their independence to Clovis in the early sixth, and survive today mainly as the Rhinelanders of western Germany and in the Ripuarian dialects those Rhinelanders still speak. They were the eastern half of the Frankish world. Where the Salian Franks pushed west into Roman Gaul and produced the Merovingian dynasty, the Rhine Franks stayed on the river, took over the walled Roman city of Colonia Agrippina and its hinterland between Bonn, Aachen and the Eifel, and ran it as a kingdom of their own. The label Ripuarian is usually traced to Latin ripa, riverbank, though the word turns up in the sources later than the people it names, and contemporaries mostly called them Franks of the Rhine.

Their defining moment was also their ending. Around 496 their king Sigibert was wounded in the knee fighting the Alemanni at Zülpich, the battle Clovis's legend is built on, and history remembers him as Sigibert the Lame. Gregory of Tours tells what followed: Clovis encouraged Sigibert's son Chloderic to murder his father, then had Chloderic killed and arrived in Cologne as the wronged avenger. The Ripuarians raised him on a shield and made him king. From then on their country was the core of Austrasia, the eastern Frankish realm, and eventually the seat of Charlemagne at Aachen. Their separate legal identity outlived their independence by more than a century. The Lex Ripuaria, written down in the seventh century, priced a free Frank's life in wergild, ran trials on sworn oath-helpers, and, tellingly for a people ruling an old Roman city, let Romans, Burgundians and Alemanni living among them answer to their own law rather than Frankish custom. Its provision for freeing a slave by charter in church shows how far Christianity had settled in. The Rhine Franks began as pagans; Cologne had held a bishop under Rome, held one again under the Franks, and after Clovis's baptism the ruling class followed him into the Catholic church.

What they left is easier to hear than to see. The Ripuarian dialects, Kölsch among them, form a recognized branch of Central Franconian, bounded to the north by the Benrath line that separates High German speech from Low. In the ground, row-grave cemeteries with throwing axes, single-edged seaxes and paired brooches mark Frankish settlement from Cologne into Dutch and Belgian Limburg. The people stopped calling themselves Ripuarians and became Rhinelanders, but the old name still labels the speech of the river.