Diocese of Gaul in the context of "Gallican rite"

The Kingdom or Domain of Soissons is the historiographical name for the de facto independent Roman remnant of the Diocese of Gaul, which existed during late antiquity as a rump state of the Western Roman Empire until its conquest by the Franks in AD 486. Its capital was at Noviodunum, today the town of Soissons in France.

The rulers of the rump state, notably its final ruler Syagrius, were referred to as "kings of the Romans" (Latin: rex Romanorum) by the Germanic peoples surrounding Soissons, with the polity itself being identified as the Regnum Romanorum, "Kingdom of the Romans", by the Gallo-Roman historian Gregory of Tours. Whether the title of king was used by Syagrius himself or was applied to him by the barbarians surrounding his realm (in a similar way to how they referred to their own leaders as kings) is unknown. However, it is most likely that they never referred to their leaders as kings because the Romans saw the word "king" or Rex in Latin as taboo because of its association with the tyrannical early Roman kings.

The Gallican Rite is a historical form of Christian liturgy and other ritual practices in Western Christianity. It is not a single liturgical rite but rather several Latin liturgical rites that developed within the Latin Church, which comprised the majority use of most of Western Christianity for the greater part of the 1st millennium AD. The rites first developed in the early centuries as the Syriac-Greek rites of Jerusalem and Antioch and were first translated into Latin in various parts of the Western Roman Empire Praetorian prefecture of Gaul. By the 5th century, it was well established in the Roman civil diocese of Gaul, which had a few early centers of Christianity in the south. Ireland is also known to have had a form of this Gallican Liturgy mixed with Celtic customs.