The Franks were one of the more backward of the Teutonic races, in spite of their long contact with Roman civilisation along the Rhine. Kings and people were still heathens. They had not learnt like the Goths to wear armour or fight on horseback, but went to war half-naked, armed only with a barbed javelin, a sword, and a casting-axe or tomahawk, called the Francisca after the name of its users. Unlike Goth and Vandal they had not learnt the advantages of political union, but obeyed many petty princes instead of one great lord. All Roman writers reproach them for a perfidy which exceeded that of the other barbarians. The Saxons, we are told, were cruel, the Alamanni drunken, the Alans rapacious, the Huns unchaste, but the special sin of the Frank was treachery and perjury. At the time of the deposition of Romulus Augustulus by Odoacer, the Salian Franks held the old Roman towns of Cambrai, Arras, Tournay, and Tongern, while the Ripuarians occupied Köln, Trier, Mainz, and Metz. [Sidenote: Divisions of Gaul in 481.] South of the Ripuarians lay the new Burgundian kingdom which Gundobad had founded in the valleys of the Rhone and Saône. South of the Salians was a district of Roman Gaul which had to the last acknowledged the supremacy of the ephemeral emperors of the West, and kept itself free from barbarian invaders under the patrician Ægidius. After his death in 463 his son Syagrius succeeded to his power, and ruled at Suessiones (Soissons) over the whole Seine valley, and the plain of central Gaul as far as Troyes and Orleans. After the disappearance of the last Western Emperor, Syagrius had no over-lord, but was so much his own master that the Franks called him ‘king of the Romans,’ though he himself took no title but that of patrician. South of the realm of Syagrius lay the Visigothic kingdom of Euric, a vast state extending from the Loire to Gibraltar, and from the Bay of Biscay to the Maritime Alps. Its king dwelt at Toulouse, and the Gaulish rather than the Spanish half of his dominion was considered the more important. Indeed his rule in Spain was still incomplete, as the Suevi held its north-western corner, the land which we now call Galicia and north Portugal, and the Basques maintained their independence in the western Pyrenees. In the third quarter of the fifth century the most important of the Frankish chiefs of the Merovingian line was a prince of the Salians, named Childerich, who dwelt at Tournay, and ruled in the valley of the upper Scheldt. He died in 481, leaving his throne to his sixteen-year-old son and heir, a prince named Chlodovech or Chlodwig, who was destined to found the great Frankish kingdom, by extinguishing the other Frankish principalities, and conquering southern and central Gaul.