While the king of Ripuaria was warring in Germany, his younger brothers had assaulted Burgundy. In 523 Childebert and Chlodomer attacked the unpopular king Sigismund, the slayer of his own son, as we have elsewhere related.[15] They beat him in battle, took him prisoner, and threw him with his wife and son down a well. [Sidenote: Frankish invasion of Burgundy.] But Gondomar, brother of Sigismund, restored the forture of war in the next year, and routed the Franks at Véséronce, in a battle where Chlodomer was slain (524). Before pursuing the Burgundian war the brothers of the dead man resolved to plunder his realm. The king of Orleans had only left infant children, so Childebert and Chlothar found no difficulty in overrunning his lands on the Loire. The three young boys, to whom the realm should have fallen, were captured and brought before their uncles. Childebert, the ruffian who was of a milder mood, proposed to spare their lives, but Chlothar actually dragged them away while they clung to his brother’s knees, and cut the throats of the two eldest with his own hands. The youngest was snatched up and hidden by a faithful servant, and lived to become a monk, and leave his name to the ‘monastery of Chlodovald’ (St. Cloud). Footnote 15: See p. 27. Of Chlodomer’s realm Childebert took the lands on the upper Loire and the capital city Orleans, Chlothar the Loire-mouth and the part of Aquitaine south of it. Hearing a false report that his eldest brother, Theuderich had fallen in battle with the Thuringians, Childebert now invaded East Aquitaine, a part of his brother’s heritage. But Theuderich returned in wrath, and the king of Paris and Orleans resolved to go instead against the Visigoths, and to drive them from the land between the Cevennes and the Pyrenees. The great Theodoric was just dead, so no help from Italy could be expected by the Visigothic king Amalric, the grandson of the departed hero. Childebert found his pretext in the complaint that his sister Chrotechildis, the wife of Amalric, had been debarred from the exercise of the Catholic religion and cruelly ill treated by her Arian husband. With this holy plea as his _casus belli_ he marched against Narbonne, defeated Amalric in battle, and drove him over the Pyrenees to the gates of Barcelona. [Sidenote: War with the Visigoths, 531.] There he was slain, either by the sword of the pursuing Franks, or by the Visigothic army, enraged at the cowardice which he had displayed in the struggle. On his death the Goths raised on the shield and saluted as king the aged count Theudis, the regent who had ruled Spain for Theodoric the Great during the minority of Amalric. Thus ended the race of the Baltings as rulers of the Visigoths; their succeeding kings were not of the old royal house. Theudis, who was suspected of having had some hand in his late pupil’s murder, soon justified the choice of the Goths, by recovering Narbonne and the other cities of Septimania from the Franks.