The Franks are a West Germanic tribal confederation first attested in the third century as living north and east of the Lower Rhine River.

From the third to fifth centuries some Franks raided Roman territory while other Franks joined the Roman troops in Gaul.

Only the Salian Franks formed a kingdom on Roman-held soil that was acknowledged by the Romans after 357.

In the climate of the collapse of imperial authority in the West, the Frankish tribes were united under the Merovingians and conquered all of Gaul except Septimania in the 6th century.

The Salian political elite would be one of the most active forces in spreading Christianity over western Europe.The Merovingian dynasty, descended from the Salians, founded one of the Germanic monarchies which replaced the Western Roman Empire from the fifth century.

The Frankish state consolidated its hold over large parts of western Europe by the end of the eighth century, developing into the Carolingian Empire which dominated most of Western Europe.

This empire would gradually evolve into France and the Holy Roman Empire.Contemporary definitions of the ethnicity of the Franks vary by period and point of view.

The word 'Frankish' quickly ceased to have an exclusive ethnic connotation.

Within Francia itself everyone north of the Loire seems to have been considered a Frank by the mid-seventh century at the latest; 'Romans' were essentially the inhabitants of Aquitaine after that.

Many in the East used the term "Franks" to describe or refer to Western Europeans and Roman Catholic Christians in general.

It is unclear, though, to what extent different Western European groups described or referred to themselves as the Franks.The linguistic descendants of the Franks, the modern Dutch-speakers of the Netherlands and Flanders seem to have broken with this endonym around the 9th century.

By this time Frankish identity had changed from an ethnic identity to a national identity, becoming localized and confined to the modern Franconia and principally to the French province of Île-de-France, originally the Western Franks' seat of power.