The way the Franks told it, they had settled in Europe during the Bronze Age; their ancestors were a band of warriors who had left the Trojan War and wandered west.6 Whatever the case, from 460 they were a force to be reckoned with. Having settled west of the Rhine, they steadily imposed themselves on their neighbors—most notably the Visigoths and Burgundians—until by the seventh century they occupied all the territory of modern France, save the Breton peninsula and the coastal littoral between Arles and Perpignan
