provinces, and appointing counts and deputies for the conduct of the affairs of justice, and clerks of the treasury for the management of the crown lands and the collection of imposts. The laws were confirmed by the popular assemblies (maifelder), in which every freeman had a share. 2. He promoted the cultivation of the land, and the education of the people. Agriculture and the breeding of cattle were encouraged, farms and villages sprang up, and barren heaths were converted into arable fields.
He founded conventual schools and cathedrals, had the works of the ancient Roman writers transcribed, and formed a collection of old German heroic ballads. Learned men, like the British monk, Alcuin, and the historian Eginhard, from the Odenwald, had ample reason to congratulate themselves on his encouragement and support. 3. He favored the clergy and the church. It was by his means that the former obtained their tithes and vast gifts and legacies; church music was improved, missionaries supported, and churches and monasteries erected. Ingelheim on the Rhine, and Aix, were his favorite places of residence. He lies buried in the latter town.
The son of Charlemagne, Louis the Denbonnaire (the Gentle), was better fitted for the repose of a cloister than for the government of a warlike nation. A too hasty division of his kingdom among his three sons, Lothaire, Pepin, and Louis, was the occasion of much sorrow to himself, and confusion to the empire. For when, at a later period, he proposed an alteration in favor of his fourth son, Charles the Bald, the fruit of a second marriage, the elder sons took up arms against their father. Louis, faithlessly deserted by his vassals on "the field of lies," near Strasburg, and betrayed to his own sons, was compelled by Lothaire to do penance in the church and to abdicate his throne; and was afterwards shut up for some time in a cloister. It is true that Louis procured his father's reinstatement; but when the weak emperor, after the death of Pepin, by a new division of the kingdom, deprived Louis of Germany, in favor of his brothers, Lothaire and Charles, Louis raised his standard against him. This broke the old emperor's heart. Full of sorrow, he ended his days on a small island of the Rhine, near Ingelheim. The hostile brothers now turned their arms against each other. A bloody civil war depopulated the country, so that at last, after a battle of three days' duration, at Fontenaille in Burgundy, the Frank nobility refused to obey the arriere-ban, and by this means brought about the treaty of partition of Verdun. By virtue of this treaty, Lothaire received the imperial dignity, together with Italy, Burgundy, and Lorraine; Charles the Bald, western Franconia (France); and Louis the German, the lands on the right bank of the Rhine—Spire, Worms, and Mayence.
This division was followed by a time of great confusion, during which Europe was severely harassed, on the south by the Arabs; on the east, by the Slavi; and on the north and west, by the Normans. To oppose these predatory inroads, the Carlovingian monarchs, who were all men of weak and narrow minds, were obliged to restore the ducal office in the different provinces, and to sanction the hereditary authority of the Margraves, so that, in a short time, all the power fell into the hands of the nobles. By the rapid deaths of most of the posterity of Louis the Denbonnaire, nearly the whole of the empire of Charlemagne devolved upon Charles the Fat, A. D. 876, a prince weak and indolent, and simple almost to imbecility. Incapable of resisting the valiant Normans, he purchased a disgraceful peace from them
