Frankish Empire

Frankish Empire (Latin: imperium Francorum), Frankish Kingdom (Latin: regnum Francorum, "Kingdom of the Franks"), Frankish Realm or occasionally Frankland, was the territory inhabited and ruled by the Franks from the third to the tenth century. The Frankish realm was ruled as one polity subdivided into several regna (kingdoms or subkingdoms). The geography and number of subkingdoms varied over time, but the term eventually came to refer to just one regnum, that of Austrasia, centered on the Rhine River. Sometimes the term was used to encompass Neustria north of the Loire and west of the Seine as well, but in time the designation settled on the region of the Seine basin around Paris, which still bears the name today as Île-de-France and which gave the name to the entire Kingdom of France and to the modern nation-state. The Frankish Empire dates from the end of the Roman Empire and in the ninth century its rulers were the first to bear the title Holy Roman Emperor before it passed to the rulers of the German confederacy.