Page:William of Malmesbury's Chronicle.djvu/121

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a.d. 855.]
Successors of Charlemagne.
101

thirty-third. Charles his son, who governed Provence, survived him eight years, and then Louis, emperor of the Romans, and Lothaire his brother, shared his kingdom of Provence. But Louis king of the Norici, that is, of the Bavarians, the son of Louis the emperor, in the year of our Lord's incarnation 865, after the feast of Easter, divided his kingdom between his sons. To Caroloman he gave Norica, that is, Bavaria, and the marches bordering on the Sclavonians and the Lombards; to Louis, Thuringia, the Eastern Franks, and Saxony; to Charles he left Alemannia, and Curnwalla, that is, the county of Cornwall.[1] Louis himself reigned happily over his sons, in full power for ten years, and then died in the year of our Lord's incarnation 876, when he had reigned fifty-four years. Charles king of the West Franks, in the thirty-sixth year of his reign, entering Italy, came to offer up his prayers in the church of the apostles, and was there elected emperor by all the Roman people, and consecrated by pope John on the 20th of December, in the year of our Lord's incarnation 875. Thence he had a prosperous return into Gaul. But in the thirty-eighth year of his reign, and the beginning of the third of his imperial dignity, he went into Italy again, and held a conference with pope John; and returning into Gaul, he died, after passing Mount Cenis, on the 13th of October, in the tenth of the Indiction, in the year of our Lord 877, and was succeeded by his son Louis. Before the second year of his reign was completed this Louis died in the palace at Compeigne, on the sixth before the Ides of April, in the year of our Lord 879, the twelfth of the Indiction. After him his sons, Louis and Caroloman, divided his kingdom. Of these, Louis gained a victory over the Normans in the district of Vimeu, and died soon after on the 12th of August, in the year of our Lord 881, the fifteenth of the Indiction, having reigned two years, three months, and twenty-four days. He was succeeded in his government by his brother Caroloman, who, after reigning three years and six days, was wounded by a wild boar[2] in the forest of Iveline, in Mount Ericus.

  1. Cornu-guallia, i.e. the Horn of Gaul from the projection of Brittany.
  2. Some pretend that he was accidentally wounded by Bertholde, one of his attendants; and that the story of the boar was invented in order to