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Frankish Northern Gaul

100,000 or so Franks.

10,000,000 or so Gauls. Cut that in half for only the northern half, roughly.

And Franks who only hold half Gauls would have to face much bigger legitimacy issues as well as being pressed by neighbouring attacks much harder.

Why would they want to, anyway? The Gallo-Roman culture and administrative system was clearly attractive to them as a way to rule conquered lands.
 
You'd need them to go even smaller for that to happen.

I wonder if a slightly stronger Gallo-Roman remnant that wins a battle or two could shove them into a Normandy style deal where they only take a region and settle it?
 
100,000 or so Franks.

10,000,000 or so Gauls. Cut that in half for only the northern half, roughly.

And Franks who only hold half Gauls would have to face much bigger legitimacy issues as well as being pressed by neighbouring attacks much harder.

Why would they want to, anyway? The Gallo-Roman culture and administrative system was clearly attractive to them as a way to rule conquered lands.

You'd need them to go even smaller for that to happen.

I wonder if a slightly stronger Gallo-Roman remnant that wins a battle or two could shove them into a Normandy style deal where they only take a region and settle it?

In our timeline, the Franks did manage to Germanize some Romance areas, ie the Rhineland, Alsace-Lorraine and Flanders.
 
The amount of Frankish settlement South of the Loire after they defeated and expelled/ conquered the Visigothic kingdom S of it in 507 is thought by most historians to have been limited in any case. It was mostly 'elite' and administrative, with senior Frankish warriors trusted by their kings ruling as 'counts' (then a term used for a senior-ranking military rank , originally in the Roman army, with increasing local admin duties too if and when the Roman civilian administrative hierarchy collapsed in the C5th) over specific, limited regional areas - mostly towns and cities. These would then act as the kings' 'eyes and ears' there, command local troops, and collect taxes ; and they and their families often had lands granted to them there too, to provide food to feed their households and their personal bodyguards.
But this was not intended as a large-scale settlement, just as establishing political control and harnessing the region's taxes and soldiers for the new Frankish rulers (whose 'home cities' after which their kingdoms were called in the mid-late C6th were all N of the Loire, eg Paris and Soissons and Rheims). S of the Loire the Frankish presence was limited in numbers, and mostly small-scale, administrative plus personal military entourages of the said commanders. The divergance in language and culture between the 'Langue d'Oeiul' in the N of France and the 'Langue d'Oc' in the S has been traced to this effective cultural/ ethnic division, with the previous Latinate/ Romance language used all over Gaul pre-conquest surviving stronger in the S due to fewer Franks living there in the C6th and C7th. Also, there was a distinct separatist identity to Aquitaine (previously a separate Roman province based on Burdigala/ Bordeaux ) and to Septimania/ Provence (which remained Visigothic to the Arab conquest in the 720s) well into the C8th, with resistance by the dukes of Aquitaine to the rule of the Merovingian and later Carolingian rulers.

As far as Alt Hist goes, if the Arabs do not conquer Spain and Septimania and pressurise Aquitaine from the S, would the region have been more secure and militarily able to survive on its own (no raids or invasions from the S after 711) and so able to fend off the Carolingians? I have played with the idea of a stronger Eastern Roman presence in Italy (eg if there was a quick Ostrogothic collapse in the 530s , Belisarius killed Totila quickly in 542, or there was no plague in the mid-540s) enabling Justinian to send troops into Provence and as far as Narbonne or even Toulouse in the 540s, thus detaching the Mediterranean-centred economic and cultural world of SE Gaul from 'Francia' for centuries to come. This was after all the urbanised, Meditt-centred original Roman province of Gaul before Caesar moved North to annex the entire 'France' area in 58 BC; its detachment from the N was nothing new. It had a surviving stratum of Gallo-Roman landowners and clergy through the C6th even under the Franks in OTL; its main problem as a 'Byz province' long-term would have been its lack of a secure geographical barrier to attack from the North if the Byz did not hold Lyons and the entire Rhone valley or have a strong force around the upper Garonne (or if the locals resented playing Byz taxes).
 
Looking back at this thread, I don't see why Northern Gaul couldn't have been Germanized. South Tyrol, which is south of the Alps, was Germanized. Lots of similarly populated regions have switched languages fairly quickly. Look at the Slavicization of the Balkans or at the Arabization of Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt. More importantly, Neustria was bilingual until the Treaty of Verdun. Indeed, I have even seen it argued that if Neustria had been attached to Saxony instead of Aquitaine, the Frankish language would have prevailed.
 
Looking back at this thread, I don't see why Northern Gaul couldn't have been Germanized. South Tyrol, which is south of the Alps, was Germanized. Lots of similarly populated regions have switched languages fairly quickly. Look at the Slavicization of the Balkans or at the Arabization of Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt. More importantly, Neustria was bilingual until the Treaty of Verdun. Indeed, I have even seen it argued that if Neustria had been attached to Saxony instead of Aquitaine, the Frankish language would have prevailed.

What you need to remember is that the "official" languages are just a thing of the nobility anyway, in that era. The peasants all spoke their local patois and who their overlord was isn't going to change it. You'd need to actually settle large enough numbers of lower class Franks to have an impact on that.

Frankish nobles retaining a distinct language like the British nobility did under the Normans? Yeah that I could see.
 
What you need to remember is that the "official" languages are just a thing of the nobility anyway, in that era. The peasants all spoke their local patois and who their overlord was isn't going to change it. You'd need to actually settle large enough numbers of lower class Franks to have an impact on that.

Frankish nobles retaining a distinct language like the British nobility did under the Normans? Yeah that I could see.

I cited several cases of similarly populated regions switching languages fairly quickly, to which I can add the Turkification of Anatolia. Also, again, Neustria was bilingual until the Treaty of Verdun attached it to Aquitaine, which was almost entirely Romance speaking.
 
One idea I had years ago is the Germanics inventing the stirrup, and thus enabling them to develop horse armies in the vein of the later Steppe Armies that could-and did-depopulate large areas. Reach a certain critical mass and language (as well as cultural and maybe religious) change will follow.
 
I cited several cases of similarly populated regions switching languages fairly quickly, to which I can add the Turkification of Anatolia. Also, again, Neustria was bilingual until the Treaty of Verdun attached it to Aquitaine, which was almost entirely Romance speaking.

And again, I'll insist that "bilingual" and "switching languages" are just looking at the surface layer and never accurately describe the lower classes well. Which country you attach a region to has almost no bearing on this because policy just didn't reach that low.

The Turkish settlement in Anatolia is a very different beast because Turkish people were entire migratory tribes settling in, and because religion creates another layer entirely, which is more likely to reach into lower classes than language.
 
And again, I'll insist that "bilingual" and "switching languages" are just looking at the surface layer and never accurately describe the lower classes well. Which country you attach a region to has almost no bearing on this because policy just didn't reach that low.

The Turkish settlement in Anatolia is a very different beast because Turkish people were entire migratory tribes settling in, and because religion creates another layer entirely, which is more likely to reach into lower classes than language.

There was heavy Frankish settlement north of the Loire. In our timeline, the border between Romance and Germanic languages was already moved southwards and westwards.
 
There was heavy Frankish settlement north of the Loire. In our timeline, the border between Romance and Germanic languages was already moved southwards and westwards.

Here's an idea: Theodosius II (Eastern Roman Emperor) doesn't die in 450, and thus the Second Council of Ephesus from 449 isn't overturned. Marcian and Pulcheria are averted, resulting in the Council of Chalcedon and Dyophysitism being avoided in favor of Miaphysitism becoming the official creed of the ERE. This effectively results in an early schism, reducing the authority of the Western Church and the disunity causing all sorts of chaos, with the end result being the Franks remain Arians. The Eastern Romans, religious unified, are still strong enough to go on a Justinian-style reconquest in the West, reclaiming Italy much easier than historically and are able to take Aquitaine like @heraclius suggested. The Ostrogoth remnants and later the Lombards are deflected by the Romans into Northern Gaul, helping to further Germanize the place.

End result is the Loire-Rhone is the demarcation between Germanic and Latin Europe, with the exception of Brittany. Perhaps too you can add to this the Romano-Britons repelling the Angles and Saxons, adding more Germans to Northern Gaul.
 
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