"river people", but the exact way in which the name developed is unclear and may have involved both Latin and Germanic. The regular Latin form would be Riparii, meaning "[men] of the river bank". The term "milites rip(ari)ensis" was a Latin term used for border soldiers on river frontiers, at least on the Danube and Rhône. Jordanes referred to soldiers described this way from Gaul, fighting under Aetius, but Eugen Ewig has argued that these soldiers can be found in the Notitia Dignitatum based on the Rhône river. In the 7th century, the country around Cologne was described as "ripa Rheni", and so it seems clear that the Latin word for a riverbank was sometimes used to describe the region. The form Ripuarii is irregular, however, and has been explained by a hypothetical native (Germanic) name underlying the Latin. This hypothetical self-designation might be restored as either *hreop-waren, *hrepa-waren "river[-bank] people". or *hreop-wehren, *hrepa-wehren "river[-bank] defenders". Conversely, the form Ripuarii may also be due to a loan of the Latin Riparii into Germanic. This view is based on a word-pair given in the Summarium Heinrici, an 11th-century revision of Isidore of Seville, stating the Old High German equivalents of some Latin words, including Ripuarii: Riphera. The latter is textually reconstructed to *ripfera, except that "phonetically *ripf- cannot come from rip-;" A third possibility is that the name Ripuarii was a mixed word to begin with, perhaps *ripwarjoz. It seems to be analogous to the later formation, Ribuarius, in which Gallo-Roman *ribbar replaces Roman ripa. From the Gallo-Roman came the French rive, "bank," and a group of words based on it. History The term Franks first appears in the 3rd century on the right bank of the Rhine. Tribes who had lived in the same area in Roman times included the Sicambri, Chamavi, Bructeri, Chattuarii, and Tencteri. The Franks replaced those older tribes in the record and most probably represent a new alliance of all or some of them. These independent Franks crossed the Rhine frequently to establish bases there from which they raided further into the Roman empire. The Romans eventually bought peace by exchanging freedom to settle on the left bank for cooperation in maintaining the peace. Many of these Franks rose to high office in the empire. In the area of the Ripuarii, the Rhine had been defined as a border of the Roman empire under the early