and military tyranny, and the incompatibility of a vast empire with a too primitive governmental system, that wrecked the work of Charlemagne.
The Empire fell to Louis the Pious, sole survivor of his three sons. At the Aix assembly in 813 his father had crowned him with his own hand, thus avoiding the papal sanction that had been almost forced upon himself in 800. Louis was a gentle and well-trained prince, but weak Louis the Pious (814–840). and prone to excessive devotion to the Church. He had only reigned a few years when dissensions broke out on all sides, as under the Merovingians. Charlemagne had assigned their portions to his three sons in 781 and again in 806; like Charles Martel and Pippin the Short before him, however, what he had divided was not the imperial authority, nor yet countries, but the whole system of fiefs, offices and adherents which had been his own patrimony. The division that Louis the Pious made at Aix in 817 among his three sons, Lothair, Pippin and Louis, was of like character, since he reserved the supreme authority for himself, only associating Lothair, the eldest, with him in the government of the empire. Following the advice of his ministers Walla and Agobard, supporters of the policy of unity, Louis the Pious put Bernard of Italy, Charlemagne’s grandson, to death for refusing to acknowledge Lothair as co-emperor; crushed a revolt in Brittany; and carried on among the Danes the work of evangelization begun among the Slavs. A fourth son, Charles, was born to him by his second wife, Judith of Bavaria. Jealousy arose between the children of the two marriages. Louis tried in vain to satisfy his sons and their followers by repeated divisions—at Worms (829) and at Aix (831)—in which there was no longer question of either unity or subordination. Yet his elder sons revolted against him in 831 and 832, and were supported by Walla and Agobard and by their followers, weary of all the contradictory oaths demanded of them. Louis was deposed at the assembly of Compiègne (833), the bishops forcing him to assume the garb of a penitent; but he was re-established on his throne in St Etienne at Metz, the 28th of February 835, from which time until his death in 840 he fell more and more under the influence of his ambitious wife, and thought only of securing an inheritance for Charles, his favourite son.
Hardly was Louis buried in the basilica of Metz before his sons flew to arms. The first dynastic war broke out between Lothair, who by the settlement of 817 claimed the whole monarchy with the imperial title, and his brothers Louis and Charles. Lothair wanted, with the Empire, The sons of Louis the Pious. the sole right of patronage over the adherents of his house, but each of these latter chose his own lord according to individual interests, obeying his fears or his preferences. The three brothers finished their discussion by fighting for a whole day (June 25th, 841) on the plain of Fontanet by Auxerre; but the battle decided nothing, so Charles and Louis, in order to get the better of Lothair, allied themselves and their vassals by an oath taken in the plain of Strassburg (Feb. 14th, 842). This, the first document in the vulgar tongue in the The Strassburg oath. history of France and Germany, was merely a mutual contract of protection for the two armies, which nevertheless did not risk another battle. An amicable division of the imperial succession was arranged, and after an assessment of the empire which took almost a year, an agreement was signed at Verdun in August 843.
This was one of the important events in history. Each brother received an equal share of the dismembered empire. Louis had the territory on the right bank of the Rhine, with Spires, Worms and Mainz “because of the abundance of wine.” Lothair took Italy, the valleys of the Partition of the Empire at Verdun (843). Rhône, the Saône and the Meuse, with the two capitals of the empire, Aix-la-Chapelle and Rome, and the title of emperor. Charles had all the country watered by the Scheldt, the Seine, the Loire and the Garonne, as far as the Atlantic and the Ebro. The partition of Verdun separated once more, and definitively, the lands of the eastern and western Franks. The former became modern Germany, the latter France, and each from this time forward had its own national existence. However, as the boundary between the possessions of Charles the Bald and those of Louis was not strictly defined, and as Lothair’s kingdom, having no national basis, soon disintegrated into the kingdoms of Italy, Burgundy and Arles, in Lotharingia, this great undefined territory was to serve as a tilting-ground for France and Germany on the very morrow of the treaty of Verdun and for ten centuries after.
Charles the Bald was the first king of western France. Anxious as he was to preserve Charlemagne’s traditions of government, he was not always strong enough to do so, and warfare within his own dominions was often forced on him. The Norse pirates who had troubled Charlemagne Charles the Bald (843–877). showed a preference for western France, justified by the easy access afforded by river estuaries with rich monasteries on their shores. They began in 841 with the sack of Rouen; and from then until 912, when they made a settlement in one part of the country, though few in numbers they never ceased attacking Charles’s kingdom, coming in their ships up the Loire as far as Auvergne, up the Garonne to Toulouse, and up the Seine and the Scheldt to Paris, where they made four descents in forty years, burning towns, pillaging treasure, destroying harvests and slaughtering the peasants or carrying them off into slavery. Charles the Bald thus spent his life sword in hand, fighting unsuccessfully against the Bretons, whose two kings, Nomenoé and Erispoé, he had to recognize in turn; and against the people of Aquitaine, who, in full revolt, appealed for help to his brother, Louis the German. He was beaten everywhere and always: by the Bretons at Ballon (845) and Juvardeil (851); by the people of Aquitaine near Angoulême (845); and by the Northmen, who several times extorted heavy ransoms from him. Before long, too, Louis the German actually allied himself with the people of Brittany and Aquitaine, and invaded France at the summons of Charles the Bald’s own vassals. Though the treaty of Coblenz (860) seemed to reconcile the two kings for the moment, no peace was ever possible in Charles the Bald’s kingdom. His own son Charles, king of Aquitaine, revolted, and Salomon proclaimed himself king of Brittany in succession to Erispoé, who had been assassinated. To check the Bretons and the Normans, who were attacking from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, Charles the Bald found himself obliged to entrust the defence of the country to Robert the Strong, ancestor of the house of Capet and duke of the lands between Loire and Seine. Robert the Strong, however, though many times victorious over the incorrigible pirates, was killed by them in a fight at Brissarthe (866).
Despite all this, Charles spoke authoritatively in his capitularies,
and though incapable of defending western France, coveted
other crowns and looked obstinately eastwards.
He managed to become king of Lorraine on the death
of his nephew Lothair II., and emperor and king of
Division of the kingdom into
large fiefs.
Germany on that of his other nephew Louis II. (875);
though only by breaking the compact of the year 800.
In 876, the year before his death, he took a third crown, that of
Italy, though not without a fresh defeat at Andernach by Louis
the German’s troops. His titles increased, indeed, but not his
power; for while his kingdom was thus growing in area it was
falling to pieces. The duchy with which he rewarded Robert
the Strong was only a military command, but became a powerful
fief. Baldwin I. (d. 879), count of Flanders, turned the country
between the Scheldt, the Somme and the sea into another feudal
principality. Aquitaine and Brittany were almost independent,
Burgundy was in full revolt, and within thirty years Rollo,
a Norman leader, was to be master of the whole of the lower
Seine from the Cotentin to the Somme. The fact was that
between the king’s inability to defend the kingdom, and the
powerlessness of nobles and peasants to protect themselves from
pillage, every man made it his business to seek new protectors,
and the country, in spite of Charles the Bald’s efforts, began to be
covered with strongholds, the peasant learning to live beneath
the shelter of the donjon keeps. Such vassals gave themselves
utterly to the lord who guarded them, working for him sword
