object, for the Burgundian King made a timely feint of conversion to
orthodoxy and otherwise conciliated the Gallo-Roman population. But over
Alaric II the Visigoth, who had been so impolitic as to persecute
orthodox bishops, the Franks secured an easy and dramatic triumph. "It
irks me," said Clovis to his army, "that these Arians should rule in
Gaul." The Aquitanians welcomed him as a Crusader; Alaric, after a
single defeat, took refuge in his Spanish dominions, where he was left
to rule in peace. At one stroke the power of the Franks had advanced
from the Loire to the Pyrenees (507). The latter days of Clovis were
prosperously occupied in exterminating rival Frankish dynasties and the
more dangerous of his own kindred. He died, after a reign of thirty
years, in the odour of sanctity: "God increased his kingdom every day,
because he walked with an upright heart and did what was pleasing in the
eyes of God." He was buried in the Gallo-Roman part of his dominions, at
Paris, which he had chosen as his capital. The province of Syagrius,
later known as Neustria or Western Francia, was the natural centre of
the Frankish state, nor was Clovis indifferent to the traditions and the
luxury of an older civilisation. In Aquitaine he posed as the
representative of the Empire, and he rode through the streets of Tours
in the purple robe of a consul, which he had received from the Emperor
Anastasius. The hope at Constantinople was that he would treat Theodoric
the Ostrogoth as he had already treated Alaric; this was the first of
many occasions on which the network of imperial diplomacy was woven
round a Frankish king. Church and Empire conspired to inflame the
ambitions and enlarge the schemes of Merovingian and Carolingian
conquerors.

But the Franks, more faithfully than any of their rivals, held to the
barbarian usage of dividing a kingdom, in the manner of a family estate,
equally between the sons of a dead sovereign. Logically pursued this