Burgundians
The Burgundians are one of the peoples of the East Germanic group. Identified as such, they belong to the cultural area of the Early Germanic Iron Age. Hypothetically originating from the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, their ethnogenesis would date back to the Danish Bronze Agenote 1.[1]
In the first century, they migrated to present-day Pomerania at the mouths of the Oder, then settled in the first century in Silesia at the sources of the Vistula. At the end of the second century, they moved to the Elbe and then the Main. At the end of the fourth century, they were established on the banks of the Rhine in Upper Germania, following the migration of the Vandals and Alans to Roman Gaul, without being politically subject to the Western Roman Empire. They formed a first kingdom in 413, before being defeated in 436 by the Huns in lower Germania. This epic of the Burgundians is legendarily retraced by the Nibelungen Song.
At the end of the Germanic migrations at the end of Antiquity, the Burgundians established themselves permanently in central-eastern Gaul as a federated people of the Western Roman Empire. When the Empire collapsed in the 5th century, they founded a kingdom that initially covered all or part of the following regions Burgundy, Franche-Comté, Savoy, Lyonnais, Dauphiné and French-speaking Switzerland. As early as 534, the Burgundian kingdom was integrated into the Merovingian area as Regnum Burgundorum, the future kingdom of Burgundy.