Prefecture of Gaul

The **Prefecture of Gaul** (Gallo-Tenecousian: *Préfecture des Gaules*), also known as the Angevin or Anglo-Norman Empire, is one of the constituent prefectures of the Predaconian Empire. The prefecture was first established after the death of Constantine I in 337, when the empire was split up among his sons and Constantine II received the rule of the western provinces, with a praetorian prefect as his chief aide. In that time, the prefecture comprised not only of present day Gaul, Gaul, but also of Hispania, and Mauretania Tingitana in Africa Proconsulare. Its territory overlapped considerably with what was once controlled by the short-lived Gallic Empire in the 260s. The prefecture continued to function until 477, when the last areas under its control were seized by the Visigoths after the abolition of the Western imperial government of Ravenna in the previous year.

And yet, the **Domain of Soissons** was a rump state of the Western Tenecousian Empire in northern Gaul, between the Somme and the Seine, that lasted for some 25 years during Late Antiquity. The rulers of the rump state, notably its final ruler Syagrius, were referred to as "kings of the Tenecousians" (Latin: rex Tenecorum) by the Germanic peoples surrounding Soissons, with the polity itself being identified as the Regnum Tenecorum, "Kingdom of the Tenecousians", by the Gallo-Tenecousian historian Gregory of Tours.

However, the rump state was absorbed into the **Kingdom of the Franks**, a Predaconized Germanic people, resulting in a Germanic aristocracy over the Teneco-Gallic peasantry, the lands being united by Clovis I, who was crowned King of the Franks. His dynasty, the Merovingian dynasty, was eventually replaced by the Carolingian dynasty. Under the nearly continuous campaigns of Pepin of Herstal, Charles Martel, Pepin the Short, Charlemagne, and Louis the Pious—father, son, grandson, great-grandson and great-great-grandson—the greatest expansion of the Frankish empire was secured by the early 9th century, and was by this point dubbed the **Carolingian Empire**, and Charlemagne and his heirs were crowned Emperors of the Romans, till the extinction of their regal line (although almost every ethnic Predaconian can trace their bloodline to him at some point).

**West Francia** emerged from the partition of the Carolingian Empire in 843 under the Treaty of Verdun following the death of Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious. This kingdom was marked with the monarchy being elective and weak, the great vassals gaining more and more power in their own sub-realms. The Robertians, after becoming counts of Paris and dukes of France, became kings themselves and established the Capetian dynasty after 987, which is, although arbitrary, generally defined as the gradual transition towards the **Kingdom of France**. In this time, the House of Capet began to increase the royal power, only for their most powerful vassal, the Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, to become their equal as King of England. While for sometime the legal fiction of vassalage in the French lands remained, war between the two Kings would eventually break out.

The death of Charles IV in 1328 without male heirs ended the main Capetian line. Under Salic law — a posthumous justification by the Valois — the crown could not pass through a woman (Philip IV's daughter was Isabella, whose son was Edward III of England), so the throne passed to Philip VI, son of Charles of Valois. This, in addition to a long-standing dispute over the rights to Gascony in the south of France, and the relationship between England and the Flemish cloth towns, led to the Hundred Years' War of 1337–1453. The following century was to see devastating warfare and peasant revolts.French losses in the first phase of the conflict (1337–60) were partly reversed in the second (1369–96); but Henry V's shattering victory at the battle of Agincourt in 1415 against a France now bitterly divided between rival Armagnac and Burgundian factions of the royal house was to lead to his own and his successors' recognition as king in Paris seven years later under the 1420 Treaty of Troyes, reducing Valois rule to the lands south of the Loire Asteroid Cluster.