Clovis "the Riparian", King of the Franks

This is Clovis the Riparian (died 428). Do not confuse him with Clovis the Great (died 511).

He is a shadowy figure:

"Clovis the Riparian, supposedly King at Koln ca. 420, can be traced back, in English, to a 1940s article by G. Andrews Moriarty in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register. (My papers are in disarray, so I speak -- this is a warning -- from memory.) He, however, was summarizing his understanding of a series of 1920s articles by a scholar named Depoin, published in a French periodical called the Revue Mabillon. What Depoin actually theorized in this article, on the basis of much later and rather confused saints' lives, was that Sigebert the Lame of Cologne (real, fl. prob. ca. 500, give or take a bit) was younger brother of his predecessor, Childebert, and that both were sons and successors of a Clovis who was not the same man as Clovis the Great of the Salic Franks. Mori- arty apparently read or remembered this incorrectly, for he made Sigebert the Lame SON of Childebert, and GRANDSON of this 'other Clovis.' Having done so, he guessed 'fl.' dates for the supposed three generations, at 30 years each.
"Actually, the saint's life in question is a late and shaky document upon which to found a genealogy; while it's barely possible that the genealogy as Depoin extracted it is valid (Moriarty's would be less so, since its alteration from Depoin's version is apparently accidental), nothing even remotely contemporary documents the Riparian kings back of Sigebert of Cologne. Assuming that there were any, it seems likely that they were in some degree akin to Clovis the Great, but impossible to specify how. (This is not for want of trying, often of an original and inventive cast, by many hands over many decades; but the original documentation being so very thin, they are unlikely to approximate the historical truth, whatever it was.)"

Source

• "CLOVIS THE RIPARIAN (REPARIAN)" at soc.genealogy.medieval (Feb. 17, 1998)