Or Sigambri; a tribe in Taxandria in late antiquity, on the east bank of the Rhine, just at the rivermouth. Like so many other tribes, they are mentioned first in de Bello Gallico; there, they savage first the remains of the defeated Eburones, then one of the legions which defeated that revolt.

The name was subsequently used as a poetic archaism. Although Strabo calls them Germanic, it's likely or at least possible that the Sicambri were Celtic, as their chieftains had Gaulish names, and so they quite probably bore no real relation to the Franks; nevertheless, it was to the Salian Franks the name was applied as a genteel locution. Its best-known usage in this way is that immortalized by the bishop Gregory of Tours in his History of the Franks: When Chlodovech came to be baptized at Rheims, the bishop, Saint Remigius, told him to »bend thy head humbly, Sicambrian; venerate what thou hast burned, and burn what thou hast venerated!« But, Bengtsson remarks drily, it is questionable whether Chlodovech had ever before venerated anything; likewise whether he did so after, for more likely he retained his original and tested faith in a different trinity: that of his cunning, his main strength, and the persuasive power of his good francisca.


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