[42] Alaric II., king of the Visigoths, 485-507.
[43] The battle of Soissons in 486, with the defeat and death of Syagrius, insured for the Franks undisputed possession southward to the Loire, which was the northern frontier of the Visigothic kingdom.
[44] The Campus Martius was the "March-field," i.e., the assembling place of the Frankish army. It was not regularly in any one locality but wherever the king might call the soldiers together, as he did every spring for purposes of review. In the eighth century the month of May was substituted for March as the time for the meeting.
[45] In the words of Hodgkin (Charles the Great, p. 12), "the well-known story of the vase of Soissons illustrates at once the German memories of freedom and the Merovingian mode of establishing a despotism. As a battle comrade the Frankish warrior protests against Clovis receiving an ounce beyond his due share of the spoils. As a battle leader Clovis rebukes his henchman for the dirtiness of his accoutrements, and cleaves his skull to punish him for his independence."
[46] The Alemanni were a German people occupying a vast region about the upper waters of the Rhine and Danube. They had been making repeated efforts to acquire territory west of the Rhine—an encroachment which Clovis resolved not to tolerate.
[47] The battle was fought near Strassburg, in the upper Rhine valley.
[48] The ultimate result of the defeat of the Alemanni was that the Frankish kingdom was enlarged by the annexation of the great region known in the later Middle Ages as Suabia, comprising modern Alsace, Baden, Würtemberg, the western part of Bavaria, and the northern part of Switzerland. The Alemanni as a people disappeared speedily from history, being absorbed by their more powerful neighbors. Their only monument to-day is the name by which the French have always known the people of Germany—Allemands.
[49] The Loire was the boundary between the dominions of the two kings. There have been many famous instances in history of two sovereigns coming together to confer at some point on the common border of the territories controlled by them, notably the interview of Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I. on the Niemen River in 1807. The Franks and the Visigoths had been enemies ever since by Clovis's defeat of Syagrius their dominions had been brought into contact (486), and the present jovial interview of the two kings did not long keep them at peace with each other.
[50] St. Hilary was bishop of Poitiers in the later fourth century. He was a contemporary of St. Martin of Tours and a co-worker with him in the organization of Gallic Christianity.
[51] The plain of Vouillé was ten miles west of Poitiers.