Franks

The Franks were a Western European people who first appeared under this name in the third century AD as a group of Germanic tribes living near the Rhine River, and who gradually became a larger, multilingual, Catholic Christian people, in control of large territories both inside and outside the former Roman Empire. Much of what is now the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and in a broader sense much of the population of medieval Western Europe, could eventually be described as Franks in some contexts.