BURGUNDIANS. - The first mention of the B. is in Pliny (Nat. Hist., IV, 99), before their settling beyond the Vistula. Of perhaps Scandinavian origin, certainly of Germanic stock, their migration toward richer and warmer regions took place in the 3rd century: they clashed with the Gepids and Vandals, and from that clash they were pushed onto the Danube and the Rhine; around the middle of the century, amid continuous struggles with Romans, Alemanni and Chatti, often as auxiliaries of the empire, the B. were settled in the region of the Main, outside the borders of the empire. But, drawn into the wake of the barbarian avalanche — of Alans, Vandals, Suebi — that at the end of the 4th century burst into Gaul, they too crossed those borders and settled in the Rhenish region, around Mainz and Worms, where the imperial proclamation of Jovinus, in 411, found them. For having crossed into Belgica, into the counties of Metz and Trier, in 437 they were punished by Aetius, who defeated them, killing their king Gundikar, or Gunter, according to the saga of the Nibelungs. However, in 443, while some of the surviving bands passed into Spain with the Visigoths, others obtained from Aetius himself permission to settle in the region around Lake Geneva. Federates of the empire at first, they erected their kingdom there, having extorted from the original Romans the "tertia" of the lands and of the slave cultivators. Having become Latinized and converted to Catholicism, they left their name to the region (Burgundia or Burgundy). Christianity entered among the B. with an Arian tinge, but very soon, through the work of St. Avitus of Vienne (v.), they became Catholics. Clotilde, daughter of the king of the B., was a Catholic when she became the wife of Clovis, king of the Franks, and probably had a part in the conversion of her husband and of his people, which took place in 496.
The expansionist tendency of the B. led them to seize, in the middle of the 5th century, Lyon, from which Majorian expelled them shortly afterward, but only for a short time. The year that chronology gives as the last of the Western empire sees the Burgundians, as allies of the Romans, to fight together against the Visigoths of Enrico.
A population, among those Germanic invaders, not among the strongest, as their scant power shows, it was also and perhaps above all so because of the constitutional weakness of royal power: caused by the control of the companions-in-arms and the patrimonial divisions within the same royal family. Nevertheless, toward the end of the 5th century, the Burgundians managed to extend the territory in which they had settled: one of their incursions into Liguria, in 490, was repelled by the Ostrogoths. But then the growing power of the two neighboring kingdoms, the Franks and the Goths, and the ties of kinship established with the Frankish king, Clovis, and his intervention, undermined the Burgundian kingdom. For a few years, Gundobad managed to reconstitute power in his own hands: then, immediately, the fortunes of the kingdom declined, caught ever more in the coils of the vast Franco-Gothic game. Having drawn close to the Franks, continuing his father's policy, Sigismund, son of Gundobad, was taken prisoner in battle by the sons of Clovis, while Theodoric attacked the kingdom from the south. A few more years: and the Franks, returning to the attack, dispossessed the last king and divided, among the heirs of Clovis, the Burgundian kingdom. Alongside Austrasia and Neustria, "Burgundia" or Burgundy, would from then on be an integral part of the Merovingian kingdom, thus flowing into the formation of France.
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Pier Fausto Palumbo