fought in the battle of the Catalaunian Fields in a temporary alliance with Romans and Visigoths, which de facto ended the Hunnic threat to Western Europe. The Notitia dignitatum listing Roman military units in the 5th century mentions the Salii iuniores Gallicani based in Hispania, the Salii seniores based in Gaul. There is also record of a numerus Saliorum. While their relationship to Chlodio is uncertain, Childeric I and his son Clovis I, who gained control over Roman Gaul were said to be related, and the legal code they published for the Romance speaking country between the Loire and the Silva Carbonaria, a region the Franks later called Neustria, was called the Salic law. Their dynasty, the Merovingians, were named after Childeric's father Merovech, whose birth was associated with supernatural elements. Childeric and Clovis were described as Kings of the Franks, and rulers of the Roman province of Belgica Secunda. Clovis became the absolute ruler of a Germanic kingdom of mixed Galloroman-Germanic population in 486. He consolidated his rule with victories over the Gallo-Romans and all the other Frankish tribes and established his capital in Paris. After he had beaten the Visigoths and the Alemanni, his sons drove the Visigoths to Spain and subdued the Burgundians, Alemanni and Thuringians. After 250 years of this dynasty, marked by internecine struggles, a gradual decline occurred. The position in society of the Merovingians was taken over by Carolingians, who came from a northern area around the river Meuse in what is now Belgium and the southern Netherlands. In Gaul, a fusion of Roman and Germanic societies was occurring. During the period of Merovingian rule, the Franks began to adopt Christianity following the baptism of Clovis I in 496, an event that inaugurated the alliance between the Frankish kingdom and the Roman Catholic Church. Unlike their Gothic, Burgundic and Lombardic counterparts, who adopted Arianism, the Salians adopted Catholic Christianity early on; giving them a relationship with the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and their subjects in conquered territories. The division of the Frankish kingdom among Clovis’s four sons (511) was an event that would repeat in Frankish history over more than four centuries. By then, the Salic Law had established the exclusive right to succession of male descendants. This principle turned out to be an exercise in interpretation, rather than the simple implementation of a new model of succession. No trace of an established practice of territorial