This would have been cause enough for revenge, but a worse was to follow. Chilperich and Sigibert had married two sisters, the daughters of the Visigothic king, Athanagild. Galswintha was the spouse of Chilperich, Brunhildis of Sigibert. They were princesses famed all over the Western world for their beauty and abilities no less than for the enormous dowries which their father had bestowed upon them. [Sidenote: Murder of Galswintha, 567.] Before his marriage Chilperich had kept a perfect harem of concubines, though on the arrival of Galswintha he had for the moment banished them. But Fredegundis, the chief among his former favourites, retained such an empire over him that after a few months he openly brought her back to the palace, and insulted the queen by her presence. When Galswintha indignantly declared that she should return to her father, the wicked king had her murdered, and publicly married Fredegundis within a few days (567). Brunhildis, the sister of the murdered queen, and the spouse of Chilperich’s elder brother the king of Ripuaria, devoted the rest of her life to the task of avenging Galswintha’s death on the king of Soissons and his paramour. She was a strong-willed, fearless, able woman, and her influence over her husband was unbounded. For forty years the houses of Sigibert and Chilperich and their unhappy subjects were destined to shed their blood on the battle-field that the slaughter of Galswintha might be atoned for. It is in these wars that the final partition of the Frankish realm into its two permanent divisions took shape, and that new names for these divisions came into use. The Ripuarian realm of king Sigibert, from the borders of Bavaria and Thuringia as far as the Meuse and Scheldt, is for the future known as Austrasia—the Eastern kingdom; Chilperich’s less purely Teutonic realm, from the Meuse and Scheldt as far as the Loire, gets the name of Neustria, the New kingdom, or the New West kingdom, as others interpret it.[24] Footnote 24: Neustria, Neuster, Neustrasia, Neutrasia, Niwistria are all found as forms of the name. It is disputed whether it means merely the realm of the ‘New Franks’ in Gaul as opposed to the ‘Old Franks’ on Meuse and Rhine, or whether New and West are compressed together in the word. The _Annals of Metz_ say, ‘Occidentales Franci qui Niwistrii dicuntur.’ Its boundaries were the Scheldt, the _Silva Carbonaria_ about Namur and Mons, and the Upper Meuse. Verdun is the westernmost Austrasian town; Langres the northernmost Burgundian town.