Ripuarian Franks

The Rhineland or Ripuarian Franks (Latin: Ribuarii, and sometimes Ripuarii starting in the 8th century) were the Franks who established themselves in and around the formally Roman city of Cologne, on the Rhine river in what is now Germany. Until the 1950s they were seen as the easternmost of two distinct "sub tribes" of the Franks who entered the collapsing Roman empire in the fifth century AD. According to this vision, which continues to be influential, their western counterparts are the Salii, or "Salian Franks". This idea, and the names of these two groups, are based mainly on the names of two 7th century Frankish legal codes, the Lex Ripuaria and Lex Salica, which had eastern and western jurisdictions with a boundary between them in the Ardennes and Silva Carbonaria in what is now southern Belgium.

The predecessors of the Rhineland Franks originally lived on the eastern bank of the Rhine facing Cologne, where there had been a long history of interaction with the Roman empire. The term "Frank" first started being used as a collective name for various tribes facing the Romans across the northern Rhine in the third century. Much later, in the chaotic years after the definitive collapse of Roman power in western Europe, Franks managed to occupy the Roman city of Cologne, and the lower and middle Rhineland in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia.

Little is known about these Franks before the Rhineland became an important part of the Merovingian Frankish empire in the sub-kingdom known as Austrasia. Austrasia included not only the Rhineland-Palatinate, but apparently the whole of what had been the Roman provinces of Germania Inferior (re-named in the Late Roman Empire as Germania II) and Gallia Belgica II. The Ripuarian legal code applied in Austrasia, while the Salic law applied in the Frankish kingdom of Neustria in what is now northern France.