Before the there is a possible mention of the in the 6th-century Byzantine writer
Jordanes. In his account of the
Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451 AD he referred to the among the units fighting as auxiliaries under the Roman
Aetius, against
Attila. They are listed together with forces with ethnic designations including Franks,
Sarmatians,
Armoricans,
Burgundians,
Saxons.
Eugen Ewig argued that these are not from Cologne, but rather a military unit mentioned in the , who based on the
Rhône river in what is now southern France. Springer however argues against this interpretation, noting that at least three of those four units were naval units, the , the , and the . The legal code itself is generally seen as having been made in the 7th century, although it has been argued for example by Springer that it may have been made as late as the early 8th century. It was probably made in the context of the establishment of an Austrasian sub-kingdom by the Merovingians in 623 or 633 AD, possibly as part of a reorganization of the border defence of this kingdom on the Rhine. The Ribuarian area was referred to in Latin using different terms, , , and and it included the areas around Cologne, Bonn, the
Eifel, Zülpich, Jülich, and Neuss. It has been argued that the legal code reveals a deliberate process of "ethnic engineering", aiming to create a Romano-Frankish mixed civilization. According to Springer only the younger manuscripts of the Ribuarian Law Book refer to it as , named after a people, instead of , named after a country. Apart from the 7th-century legal code, the earliest narrative source definitely containing a form of the word for the people of Cologne is the
Liber Historiae Francorum, which was completed about 726/27 AD. The author uses the term to describe the land () around Cologne which were devastated in 612 AD by the Merovingian king
Theuderic II, who defeated his brother
Theudebert II at Zülpich and then pursued him to Cologne. After his victory there the author says that the king claimed that one of the "Ribuarians" () in Cologne shot at him. The word was therefore pronounced with a b-like sound at this time and used both as an adjective and a noun, referring to both the region of Cologne, and its inhabitants. Since the 1950s it has been widely accepted that the plural or , referring to Franks from the Cologne region, did not originate as the name of any Germanic tribe who moved in the so-called
Migration period before the 7th century. Instead the name seems to have been connected to the region they moved to. A traditional explanation for the first part of the word comes from Latin meaning a seashore or riverbank, which is believed to refer in this case to the river Rhine, which runs past Cologne. This explanation remains popular although there is ongoing debate among scholars, both about whether the name is purely derived from Latin, and about whether the name was really intended to refer to the Rhine riverbank. Latin formations such as , , and would all be possible Latin-derived words describing a person of the riverbank, but purely Latin explanations of the word are generally avoided among scholars, because the second part of the name seems to be the same as the suffix found in several other Germanic tribal names such as the
Ampsivarii,
Chasuarii, and
Angrivarii. This suffix is normally believed to come not originally from Latin, but from a
Germanic word meaning inhabitants. A version of this suffix is for example found in
Old English, in words like , meaning inhabitants of
Rome. Another reason to doubt direct borrowing from Latin is that the earliest spelling of the word uses a b instead of the p, which would be expected in classical Latin. Furthermore, later spellings show that the word was being pronounced by Germanic speakers with a w-like sound. Springer argued that this is evidence that the word came from
Gallo-Romance, the Latin-derived language from which modern French derives, where such changes from p to b were normal in this period. According to this account, Germanic speakers in the Cologne area pronounced the b as a w-like
voiced bilabial fricative, β. Frank, in contrast, notes that the move from p to b could also be explained as a typical sound change which happened among Germanic speakers in this time, but accepts that the word could have had a Gallo-Romance origin. Springer also questioned whether the word derived directly from the word from a river bank, noting that in various parts of the late Roman empire the word was used to refer to people with military or policing functions. Although the term is presumed to have derived originally from the word for a riverbank, because of the connection of these people to border regions, Springer and others note that well before the end of the Roman Empire it became a word for certain policing units, perhaps connected to toll collection, and the word was no longer always connected to rivers. Springer proposes therefore that the people of Cologne owed their special name to a unit of Roman border police who had been posted there before the Franks took over. Ripuarian designations were used in various sources from
Carolingian and post-Carolingian era, such as the
Annals of Saint Bertin, the
Annals of Fulda, and also in some other sources from those periods. An example of the terms being used to refer to a larger area is known from the 9th century. The
Annals of Xanten referred to king
Lothar II (855-869) as king of the Ripuarians, or of Ripuaria ( and ). His short-lived kingdom, that became known as
Lotharingia, was a new construction similar to Austrasia. Similarly, in the 11th century, when the term was becoming more unusual,
Wipo of Burgundy mentioned the inhabitants of
Lower Lotharingia as
Ripuarians (), and their
duke as
duke of the Ripuarians (). ==Kingdom of Cologne==