Gaul, << gawl, >> is the English name for the region called Gallia by the Romans. Gaul occupied an area that now consists of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland.
The Roman general Julius Caesar, in his Commentaries on the Gallic War, described Gaul as being inhabited by three groups. These were the Belgae in the north; the Aquitani in the southwest; and the Gauls, also called Celts, in the vast central part. The Gauls made up the dominant group. Most peoples of Gaul spoke forms of Celtic. Greek colonies—starting with Massalia (now Marseille), founded about 600 B.C. on Gaul’s Mediterranean coast—had a major influence on the culture of Gaul.
In the 400’s and 300’s B.C., Gallic peoples crossed the Alps and migrated into Italy. The last of these peoples, the Senones, displaced the Etruscans in the Po River Valley and led occasional raids into central Italy. A famous raid occurred in 390 B.C., when Senones looted and burned Rome. The Romans began to call the Po Valley area Cisalpine Gaul, or Gaul on this side of the Alps. They called the original Gaul region Transalpine Gaul, or Gaul across the Alps.
In the 200’s and 100’s B.C., the Romans defeated the Gauls in Italy, capturing the Gallic city of Mediolanum (now Milan) in 222 B.C. In the 100’s B.C., the Romans gained control of the strip of Gaul along the Mediterranean Sea, an area today known as Provence. Julius Caesar conquered the rest of Transalpine Gaul in the 50’s B.C. The peoples of Gaul gradually adopted Roman customs and laws, as well as Latin, the Roman language.
The emperor Augustus organized Gaul into four provinces. Later, it was subdivided into 17 regions. In the A.D. 200’s and 300’s, Gaul suffered heavily from foreign invasions and civil wars. The Visigoths, Burgundians, and Franks established kingdoms in Gaul independent of Rome. As the Roman Empire grew weaker, the Franks became the dominant group. In 486, the Frankish king Clovis I defeated the Roman governor of Gaul. In 507, Clovis defeated the Visigoths and drove them into Spain. Gradually, most of Gaul came to be called Francia, and later France, after the Franks.
