Clovis (Latin: Chlodovechus; reconstructed Frankish: *Hldowig;[1] c. 466 c.

511) w
as the first king of the Franks to unite all of the Frankish tribes under one ru
ler, changing the form of leadership from a group of royal chieftains to rule by
a single king and ensuring that the kingship was passed down to his heirs.[2] H
e is considered to have been the founder of the Merovingian dynasty, which ruled
the Frankish kingdom for the next two centuries.
Clovis was the son of Childeric I, a Merovingian king of the Salian Franks, and
Basina, a Thuringian princess. In 481, at the age of fifteen,[3] Clovis succeede
d his father. He conquered the remaining rump state of the Western Roman Empire
at the Battle of Soissons (486), and by his death in 511 he had conquered much o
f the northern and western parts of what had formerly been Roman Gaul.
Clovis is important in the historiography of France as "the first king of what w
ould become France".[4] His name is Germanic, composed of the elements hlod ("fa
me") and wig ("combat"), and is the origin of the later French given name Louis,
borne by 18 kings of France. Dutch, the most closely related modern language to
Frankish, reborrowed the name as Lodewijk from German in the 12th century.[5]
Clovis is also significant due to his conversion to Christianity in 496, largely
at the behest of his wife, Clotilde, who would later be venerated as a saint fo
r this act, celebrated today in both the Roman Catholic Church and Eastern Ortho
dox Church. Clovis was later baptized on Christmas Day in AD 508.[6] The adoptio
n by Clovis of Catholicism (as opposed to the Arianism of most other Germanic tr
ibes) led to widespread conversion among the Frankish peoples, to religious unif
ication across what is now modern-day France, Belgium and Germany, and three cen
turies later to Charlemagne's alliance with the Bishop of Rome and in the middle
of the 10th century under Otto I the Great to the consequent birth of the early
Holy Roman Empire.