The record of this people, until the close of the fifth century, is dim and discursive. Up to that time they were more like a firework display than a people. They appear and disappear on the historic horizon confusingly, the only unifying condition being a general and most sacred sense of mission, the mission being the demolition of the universe. The first head upon which history steadily focusses its light is that of the great Clovis. He was lord of the small Salian tribe in Batavia and sacked and plundered all around him to such an extent that the other Frankish tribes who lived along the Belgic rivers were smitten with admiration and flocked to the standard of so virtuous a prince.... The pious Clovis was a born diplomatist. He was a sanguinary Teuton, a cultured Roman, and a Christian saint according to circumstances. He was great. After clearing Gaul of the Burgundians and other Germans who still barred his progress, and wiping out the Alemanni--those chronic foes whom Rome had found invincible--Clovis listened to the prayers of his Christian wife, Clotilde, and was baptised in Rheims Cathedral by St. Remigius with three thousand of his devoted Franks, who would probably have heard of it again had they made any trouble about the matter. He does not seem, however, to have grown any nicer or kinder on this account. St. Gregory of Tours, his biographer and panegyrist, who was somewhat modestly endowed with the sense of humour, tells us gravely that on one occasion, after dismissing with prayer a synod of the Gallican Church, he quietly proceeded to butcher all the Merovingian princes. Having pushed his arms into France, he fixed on Paris as his royal seat; conquered the Goths under Alaric, his only remaining rivals; and was invested with purple tunic in St. Martin’s church at Tours. Twenty-five years after his death the Emperor Justinian generously bestowed on his sons the provinces of Gaul, which they already possessed; and most gracefully absolved its inhabitants from their allegiance to himself, which had only existed in his own august imagination. Thus the French kingdom of the Merovingians, to the generation succeeding Clovis, already included all Gaul from western France to the Rhine and their suzerainty reached to the Alps and beyond them.