Clovis I

Clovis inherited a slice of northern Gaul from his father Childeric I in 481, one petty king among many. Five years later at Soissons he crushed the last Roman holdout under Syagrius and began folding rival Frankish territories into his own. He pushed east against the Alemanni, southwest into Visigothic Aquitania, and by his death in 511 controlled an arc from the southern Netherlands deep into what would become France and Germany. Somewhere between 498 and 506, urged by his wife Clotilde, he converted to Catholicism - not the Arian Christianity most Germanic tribes favored - and brought the Franks with him. That alignment with Rome set the template: his Merovingian dynasty ruled for two centuries, and the Frankish-Catholic partnership eventually put a crown on Charlemagne's head and seeded the Holy Roman Empire.