Such an event seemed most unlikely at the time of Chlodovech’s accession, when the dominant power in the land was that of the fierce and able king Euric the Visigoth. It was Euric who had brought the Visigothic kingdom up to its largest extent, by driving the Sueves into a corner of Spain, conquering the last Roman provinces in central Gaul, and receiving Provence from the hands of Odoacer, king of Italy. He was the first Visigothic king to publish a code of laws, and would have left a good name in history but for his assassination of his brother Theodoric, and his persecutions of the Catholics. Though not such an oppressor as the Vandals Gaiseric and Hunneric, he had made himself hated by refusing to allow the election of Catholic bishops, and by closing or handing over to his favourites, the Arians, many of the churches of the orthodox. Euric died in 485, just as Chlodovech was about to commence his conquering career in northern Gaul, a career which the Visigoth would probably have checked if a longer life had been granted him. He was succeeded by his son Alaric, a boy of only sixteen or seventeen years. It was in the very year of Euric’s death that Chlodovech, now aged twenty-one, set out on the first of his warlike expeditions. In company with his kinsman Ragnachar, king of Cambrai, he invaded the realm of the Roman patrician Syagrius. The Gaulish troops were unable to resist the onset of the Franks, and their leader, after a short struggle, abandoned his home, and fled for safety to the court of Alaric the Visigoth. The councillors of Alaric, either wishing to gratify their Teutonic neighbours, or fearing the event of a war while their king was yet so young, threw the patrician into bonds, and sent him back to Chlodovech, who promptly put him to death. [Sidenote: Chlodovech conquers Syagrius, 486.] The Seine valley and the great towns of Soissons, Paris, Rouen, and Rheims now fell into the hands of the Frankish king, and, in the course of the next three years, he extended his power up to the Loire and boundary of Armorica, where the Romano-Celts of the extreme west still succeeded in holding out. Chlodovech took all the spoils for himself, none fell to his neighbours, the other kings of the Salian Franks. It was these princes who were next to feel the force of his arm. He picked quarrels with his kinsmen the kings of Cambrai and Térouanne, the one for not helping him against Syagrius, the other for claiming part of the spoil of the Roman, and slew them both, the one by treachery, the other in open battle. The remaining Merovingian princes of the Belgic plains soon shared their fate; then Chlodovech pressed eastward against the Ripuarian Franks, and conquered the Thoringi, their chief tribe, in the year 491. In a short time he had won all the Frankish kingdoms save that of his ally Sigebert the Lame, king of Köln. He remorselessly slew every prince of Meroving blood who fell into his