page_title: Roman people
section_title: Disappearance of the Romans
hierarchical_section_title: Roman people / Later history in Western Europe / Disappearance of the Romans
caption_attribution_description: English: Clovis I, the King of the Franks, in the midst of the Military Chiefs who formed his Treuste, or armed Court, dictates the Salic Law (Code of the Barbaric Laws). -- Fac-simile of a Miniature in the "Chronicles of St. Denis," a Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century (Library of the Arsenal).
context_page_description: The Romans were a cultural group, variously referred to as an ethnicity or a nationality, that in classical antiquity, from the 2nd century BC to the 5th century AD, came to rule large parts of Europe, the Near East and North Africa through conquests made during the Roman Republic and the later Roman Empire. The Romans themselves did not see being "Roman" as something based on shared language or inherited ethnicity, but saw it as something based on being part of the same larger religious or political community and sharing common customs, values, morals and ways of life.
  The city of Rome is traditionally held to have been founded in 753 BC, its early inhabitants constituting just one group of the many Italic peoples in the Italian peninsula. As the land under Roman dominion continued to increase, citizenship was gradually granted to the various peoples under Roman rule. The number of Romans rapidly increased due to the creation of colonies throughout the empire, through grants of citizenship to veterans of the Roman army, and through personal grants by the Roman emperors.
context_section_description: There is substantial evidence that the meaning of "Roman" changed significantly during the 6th century. In the East, being Roman became defined not only by loyalty to the emperor but also increasingly by religious orthodoxy (though what that explicitly meant also changed through the ages). The Gothic Wars in Italy had split the Roman elite unto those who supported the Goths and later enjoyed Lombard rule and those who supported the emperor and later withdrew to regions still governed by the empire. With this, Roman identity no longer provided a sense of social cohesion. This, combined with the abolition of the senate in Rome itself, removed groups of people who had previously always set the standard for what "Roman" was supposed to mean. Through the centuries that followed, the division between the non-Roman and Roman parts of the population faded in the west as Roman political unity collapsed.
  This decline in people identifying as Romans in the west can be prominently seen in northern Gaul. In the 6th century, the personnel of churches in northern Gaul had been dominated by people with Roman names, for instance only a handful of names of non-Roman and non-Biblical origin are recorded in the episcopal list of Metz from before the year 600, a situation that is reversed after 600 when bishops had predominantly Frankish names. The reason for this change in naming practices might be a change in naming practices in Gaul, that people entering church services no longer adopted Roman names or that the Roman families which had provided the church personnel dropped in status.
  In Salic law, produced under Clovis I around the year 500, the Romans and the Franks are two parallel major populations in the Frankish kingdom and although the Franks have somewhat of an advantage, both have well-defined legal statuses. A century later in the Lex Ripuaria, the Romani are just one of many smaller semi-free populations, restricted in their legal capacity. This legal arrangement would have been unthinkable during the rule of the Roman Empire, and even under the reign of Clovis.
  Through the early Middle Ages, the legal significance of having Roman status also faded away in Western Europe and spoken Latin fragmented and split into what would develop into the modern Romance languages. The unifying and sometimes contradictory Roman identity was replaced with local identities based on the region one was from (such as Provence or Aquitania). Where Romans had once been accepted as making up the majority of the population, such as in Hispania and Gaul, they quietly faded away as their descendants accepted other names and identities. The benefit of abandoning the identity as Roman and reverting to more local identities was that local identities were not binary opposed to the identity as a "Frank" or "Goth" and could exist together with them, providing legal advantages that "Roman" no longer did. Furthermore, it is possible that people who identified as "Romans" were victims of anti-Roman sentiments, as experienced by the 7th century Saint Goar of Aquitaine. Although Roman identity would linger on in Western Europe in some places, mostly being restricted to a few minorities in the alpine regions, some residual meanings of "Roman" would remain important through the Middle Ages, such as "Roman" as a citizen of the Byzantine Empire or "Roman" as a citizen of the city of Rome or representative of the Roman Catholic Church.
  The significance of being a Roman thus eventually completely disappeared in Western Europe, together with the Roman identity itself. 8th century sources from Salzburg still reference that there was a social group in the city called the Romani tributales but Romans at this time mostly merged with the wider tributales (tributary peoples) distinction rather than having a separate Roman distinction in Frankish documents. Throughout most of former Gaul, the Roman elite which had lingered for centuries merged with the Frankish elite and lost their previously distinct identity and though "Romans" continued to be a dominant identity in regional po
caption: King Clovis I of the Franks dictates the Salic Law surrounded by his military chiefs. In Salic Law, the Romans were recognized as a parallel population alongside the Franks within Clovis's Frankish Kingdom.
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