his subjects. For
he, too, was by profession an Arian, though of a tolerant type, and
though he sometimes seemed on the point of crossing the abyss and
declaring himself a convert to the Nicene faith. Theudegotho, sister of
Arevagni, was given by her father, Theodoric in marriage to Sigismund,
the son and heir of Gundobad.

The event which intensified the fears of all these Arian kings, and
which left to each one little more than the hope that he might be the
last to be devoured, was the conversion to Catholicism of Clovis,[93]
the heathen king of the _Franks_, that fortunate barbarian who, by a
well-timed baptism, won for his tribe of rude warriors the possession of
the fairest land in Europe and the glory of giving birth to one of the
foremost nations in the world.

[Footnote 93: I call the Frankish king by the name by which he is best
known in history, though no doubt the more correct form is either
Hlodwig or Chlodovech. It is of course the same name with Ludovicus or
Louis I do not know whether the barbarian sound of Hlodwig offended the
delicate taste of Cassiodorus, but in the "Various Letters" he addresses
the king of the Franks as Ludum. It seems probable that there was some
harsh guttural before the L which Gregory of Tours endeavoured to
represent by Ch (Chlodovech), while Cassiodorus, receiving the name from
the Frankish barbarians, thought it safer to leave it unrepresented
(Ludum). In any case his _n_ must have been due to some defective
understanding of the final sound.]

As we are here come to one of the common-places of history, I need but
very briefly remind the reader of the chief stages in the upward course
of the young Frankish king. Born in 466, he succeeded his father,
Childeric, as one of the kings of the Salian Franks in 481. The lands of
the Salians occupied but the extreme northern corner of modern France,
and a portion of Flanders, and even here Clovis was but one of many
kinglets allied by blood but frequently engaged in petty and inglorious
wars one with another.

For five years the young Salian chieftain lived in peace with his
neighbours. In the twentieth year of his age (486) he sprang with one
bound into fame and dominion by attacking and overcoming the Roman
Syagrius, who with ill-defined prerogatives, and bearing the title not
of Emperor or of Prefect, but of King, had succeeded amidst the wreck of
the Western Empire in preserving some of the fairest districts of the
north of Gau