told, "he was saluted as Consul and Augustus".

The name of Clovis does not, like that of Theodoric, appear in the
_Fasti_ of Imperial Rome, and what the precise nature of the consulship
conferred by the "codicils" may have been, it is not easy to
discover.[110] But there is no doubt that the authority which Clovis up
to this time had exercised by the mere right of the stronger, over great
part of Gaul, was confirmed and legitimised by this spontaneous act of
the Augustus at Constantinople, nor that this eager recognition of the
royalty of the slayer of Alaric was meant in some degree as a
demonstration of hostility against Alaric's father-in-law, with whom
Anastasius had not then been reconciled.

[Footnote 110: Perhaps the simplest explanation is that Clovis was not
"Consul ordinarius", but "Consul suffectus". Junghans suggests that he
was Proconsul of one or more of the Gaulish provinces, and Gaudenzi,
accepting this idea, is inclined to call him Proconsul of Narbonese
Gaul.]

The coalition of Eastern Emperor and Frankish King boded no good to
Italy. Perhaps could the eye of Anastasius have pierced through the
mists of seven future centuries, could he have foreseen the insults, the
extortions, the cruelties which a Roman Emperor at Constantinople was to
endure at the hands of "Frankish" invaders,[111] he would not have been
so eager in his worship of the new sun which was rising over Gaul from
out of the marshes of the Scheldt.

[Footnote 111: In the Fourth Crusade, 1203.]

The remainder of the life of Clovis seems to have been chiefly spent in
removing the royal competitors who were obstacles to his undisputed sway
over the Franks. Doubtless these were kings of a poor and barbarous
type, with narrower and less statesmanlike views than those of the
founder of the Merovingian dynasty; but the means employed to remove
them were hardly such as we should have expected from the eldest Son of
the Church, from him who had worn the white robe of a catechumen in the
baptistery at Rheims. His most formidable competitor was Sigebert, king
of the Ripuarian Franks, that is the Franks dwelling on both banks of
the Rhine between Maintz and Koln, in the forest of the Ardennes and
along the valley of the Moselle. But Sigebert, who had sent a body of
warriors to help the Salian king in his war against the Visigoths, was
now growing old, and among these barbarous peoples age and bodily
infirmity were often considered as to some ex