
The Gallo-Romans were the Romanized and Roman inhabitants of Gaul during the rule of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire in Gallia from the 1st century BC to the 5th century AD. The Celtic Gauls of northern Italia had earlier been Romanized following the conquest of the Boii in 191 BC and the Ligures in 155 BC, to such an extent that the Romna province of Cisalpine Gaul had been nicknamed Gallia Togata, or "toga-wearing Gaul", in reference to the native Celts adopting the Roman style of dress. The Romans later founded cities such as Lugdunum (Lyon) and converted existing Gallic towns such as Lutetia (Paris) into centers of Roman civilization in Western Europe. Over the next several decades and centuries, increasing numbers of Gauls were Romanized and granted Roman citizenship, and, in 212 BC, all free-born men across the Empire were granted Roman citizenship by order of the Roman emperor Caracalla. From 260 to 274 AD, the Gallo-Romans formed the Gallic Empire in response to the inactivity of the central Roman government over Alemannic raids into Gallia amid the Crisis of the Third Century, but the Roman emperor Aurelian defeated the Gallic emperor Tetricus I at Chalons in 274 and reconquered Gaul for Rome. At around the same time, Christianity had taken root in some parts of Gaul, gradually replacing the syncretic Gallo-Roman religion. By the 5th and 6th centuries, Christianity had come to dominate all of Gaul's urban centers as a result of the establishment of the Imperial Roman Church as the state religion of the Roman Empire by Emperor Theodosius I. In 418, the Visigoths conquered southern Gaul, while the Burgundii settled in eastern Gaul and the Franks in northern Gaul, conquering the Gallo-Roman Domain of Soissons in 486 AD and ending Syagrius' rump state of the defeated Western Roman Empire. Under Frankish and Visigothic rule, Romans continued to make up a majority in many areas of Gaul, and they were governed according to Roman law, while the Germanic settlers had separate customs. Until 600 AD, most Latin Christian bishops in Gaul held Roman or Biblical names, but, after 600, the vast majority of bishops had Frankish names. The merger of the Frankish and Latin languages into Old French, a "Romance" language, also helped to erase the distinctions between the Franks and Romans of Francia, and the people of Francia began to identify themselves by their regions (i.e. Provence or Aquitaine) rather than by ancestry. Roman identity had virtually disappeared from Western Europe (even in regions where the descendants of ethnic Romans made up a majority of the population) by the time of Charlemagne, with their descendants adopting other names and identities. By 800 AD, when Charlemagne was crowned "Holy Roman Emperor" by the Pope, the term "Roman" had come to refer to the Roman Catholic Church and no longer to a separate cultural or ethnic group.