Character of Lewis the Pious—He reforms the Frankish court—His ecclesiastical legislation—After a narrow escape from death he divides his kingdom among his sons—The partition of Aachen—Rebellion and death of Bernard of Italy—The second marriage of Lewis and its consequences—Second partition of the empire followed by rebellion of Lewis’ elder sons—Their repeated risings—The ‘LÜgenfeld’—Lewis twice deposed and restored—Continued troubles of his later years—He dies while leading an army against his son Lewis—Disastrous consequences of his reign.

Charles the Great left his throne and his empire to his only surviving son born in lawful wedlock, Lewis the Pious, as his own age named him, though later chroniclers style him Lewis the DÉbonnair. The heir of the great emperor was a devout prince, who proved—like our own Edward the Confessor—‘a sair saint for the crown.’ He was a weak, good-natured man, no longer in the first flower of his youth, whose meek virtues were far more suited to adorn a monastery than a palace. Utterly wanting in self-respect and determination, the slave of his wife, his chaplains, and bishops, a doting father and husband, and an over-liberal giver, he had one of those natures which are entirely unfit to bear responsibility, and are only happy when placed under the rule of a stronger will than their own. Lewis had before him the problems that had taxed his father’s iron nerve,—the task of ruling each of the nations that dwelt beneath the Frankish sceptre in the way that it needed, with the additional trial of being sorely vexed by the incursions of the Danes, whose first ravages Charles the Great had hardly lived to see. Enough was there to occupy his every moment, even had he been a man of ability. But he chose to add to his troubles the needless trial of a disputed succession and a spasmodic civil war. The main feature of his reign of twenty-six years is the weary tale of his unwise dealing with his undutiful sons, and of the evils that ensued therefrom.

The great realm which now fell to Lewis had been built up in despite of three main difficulties—the enormous extent of the conquered lands, and the slowness of communication between them, the national differences between the various peoples which inhabited them, and the old Teutonic custom which favoured the partition of a kingdom among all the sons of its ruler, just as if it were a private heritage. The first two dangers had not proved fatal. The personal energy and never-ending travels of Charles the Great had vanquished space and time. Racial divergences were less formidable than might have been expected, for true national feeling was not yet fully developed in Western Europe. It was neither the enormous extent of the Frankish empire nor the heterogeneous character of its inhabitants that proved the direct cause of its ruin, but the baleful practice of the partition of heritages among all the heirs of the reigning sovereign. Hitherto the empire had been fortunate in escaping the consequences of this evil. Charles the Hammer had broken up his realm, but the voluntary abdication of the elder Carloman had ere long reunited the Neustrian and Austrasian lands. Pippin, again, had divided his kingdom, but the co-heir, whose survival would have thwarted the life-work of Charles the Great, died young. And in the next generation, too, death had stripped the king of all his lawful issue save one, and Lewis the Pious received an undivided heritage.

But Lewis, unhappily for himself and for the empire, had already three half-grown sons when he succeeded to the empire, and was destined to see a fourth reach manhood ere he died. The custom of partition was now destined to have a fair trial and develop to its utmost extent.

Lewis was at DouÉ, in his kingdom of Aquitaine, when he received the news of the death of his aged father. Making such speed as he could, he arrived at Aachen after a journey of thirty days, and took possession of the reins of power. Without sending for the Pope to assist at his coronation, he celebrated his accession by taking the imperial crown off the altar in the cathedral of his capital city, and placing it on his own head, while the assembled counts and bishops shouted Vivat Imperator Ludovicus! The magnates also saluted him by the title of ‘the Pious,’ an appellation which he placed upon his coins, on whose other side appeared the legend, ‘Renovatio Regni Francorum.’ The ‘renewing’ of the kingdom found its first expression in the expulsion from office of the ministers who had administered affairs during the declining years of Charles the Great. Lewis came to Aachen with his own trusted servants at his back, and was determined not to put himself in the hands of his father’s favourites. There had been much in his father’s life and court which his own scrupulous conscience could not approve. As a man who led a singularly virtuous life himself, he could not abide the bishops and abbots who had connived at his father’s immoralities. "Accession of Lewis the Pious." The Frankish court, though teeming with ecclesiastics, had not been a model of soberness or chastity, and the old emperor himself had not set the best of examples. Lewis was determined that this should cease.

The moment that he was firmly seated on the throne the new monarch dismissed from his court his sisters, whose life had been nothing less than scandalous during his father’s later years. Their paramours were banished or imprisoned—one was even deprived of his eyes. His next step was to send away the three chief ministers of Charles the Great. The Chancellor Helisachar, Abbot of St. Maximin, was relegated to his monastery. The two brothers, count Wala and abbot Adalhard,^[53] had harder measure dealt out to them. The emperor sent Adalhard to dwell in the lonely monastery of Hermoutier, on an island by the Loire-mouth. Count Wala was stripped of sword and armour, shorn, and immured as a monk in the cloister of Corbey.

These councillors were replaced by men whom Lewis had learnt to know while he was yet but king of Aquitaine. The chief were Ebbo, his own foster-brother, abbot Hildwin, and count Bernard of Septimania. Ebbo, though but the son of a serf, was dear to the emperor from early association; he had taken orders, and was made archbishop of Rheims by his patron at the earliest opportunity, amid the murmurs of many high-born Frankish ecclesiastics, who exclaimed that such preferment was not the meed of a man of servile extraction. Hildwin, the new chancellor, was a shameless pluralist, three abbots rolled into one, and ever seeking more preferment. Bernard, however, a clever, restless, intriguing Gascon, provoked even greater jealousy and bitterness among the old courtiers of Charles the Great, and seems to have been the best-hated man in the realm. But perhaps the most influential of all the advisers of Lewis was his wife, Hermengarde, the daughter of the count of the Hesbain, an ambitious and unscrupulous woman, who exercised such an influence over her uxorious spouse that she was even able to drive him once and again to deeds of ill-faith and cruelty very foreign to his mild and righteous disposition.

Charles the Great had left the frontiers of his great realm so well secured that in the earliest years of Lewis the Pious there was no foreign war to call the emperor into the field. It was a characteristic sign of the new rÉgime that things ecclesiastical took precedence of all others at the first meetings of the magnates of the empire. We hear of legislation against carnally-minded bishops and abbots, who shocked the pious by riding with cloak and sword and golden spurs like secular nobles. A modus vivendi was established between clerics of servile birth and their former lords, providing that on due compensation being paid the villein might go free. The emperor took the keenest interest in this question. Not only his favourite Ebbo, but several others of his counsellors had been serfs, and he was most anxious to defend them alike against claims of their ancient masters, and insults at the hands of the free-born clergy. "Ecclesiastical legislation." Another decree of Lewis’ dealt with the tenure of the lands of monasteries. After stipulating that fourteen great houses owed both military service and aids in money to the empire, and sixteen more the financial duty alone, he declared that all the other monastic establishments in his wide dominion should hold their property on the simple undertaking that they should ‘pray for the welfare of the emperor and his children and the empire.’ This threw a vast quantity of estates into tenure by what later ages called ‘frank almoin,’ and relieved of its natural responsibility to the State more land than could prudently be suffered to go scot-free.

"Lewis recrowned, 816." Another sign of Lewis’ extreme regard for the Church was given at the very commencement of his reign. When pope Leo III., the aged pontiff, who had crowned Charles the Great, died in 816 the Romans elected, in great haste, Stephen IV. as his successor. The new Pope was consecrated without the imperial sanction being sought, but Lewis made no objection, and showed no wrath at this disregard of his prerogative. So far was he from resentment that he allowed Stephen to represent to him that his coronation at Aachen had lacked the Church’s blessing, inasmuch as he had taken the crown from the altar with his own hands. To render Lewis’ position more like that of his great father, the Pope proposed to cross the Alps and recrown his master. Lewis took no offence at the slur thrown on the form of his election to the empire, but received Stephen in great state at Rheims, and was there crowned for the second time (816). Thus he loosened his own grasp on the Papacy in one year, and allowed the Pope to tighten his grasp on the empire in the next.

In 817 happened an accident which was to have the gravest consequences on the emperor’s character and fate. He was passing with all his train over a wooden gallery which connected the cathedral and the palace at Aachen, when the whole structure came crashing to the ground. Many of the courtiers were killed, and the emperor himself received injuries which confined him to his bed for many weeks. The shock and the narrow escape from death set Lewis meditating on the instability of life and the necessity for being always prepared for the grave. He had never been anything but sober and self-contained, but he now fell into a morbid and lugubrious frame of mind, which never left him till his dying day. If he had only hitherto been a daring sinner he might have salved his conscience by turning to a new manner of life: but being already a man of blameless and virtuous habits, his conversion only led him into an exaggerated asceticism. He abandoned the study of profane literature, which had hitherto soothed his leisure hours, and would for the rest of his life read nothing but theology. We are even told that he destroyed the collection of Old Frankish heroic poems which his father had made, because of the many traces of heathenism which he found in them. It was with difficulty that his councillors prevented him two years later from laying down his crown and retiring to a monastery.

One of the first effects of Lewis’ morbid brooding over his latter end was that he determined to make a settlement of the inheritance of his wide dominions in view of his own possible death. He was now only forty-three, and his eldest son was but seventeen, but he resolved to take the untried boy into partnership and associate him with himself, so that his succession might be assured at his own death. At the same time he determined to give his younger sons appanages in the realm which would be their brother’s. The old German instinct for dividing the paternal heritage was still too strong to be resisted.

By this Partition of Aachen, the first of many partitions that we shall have to bear in mind, Lothair, the eldest of Lewis’ three sons, became co-emperor, and was allotted as his special province, during his father’s life, the kingdom of Italy. Pippin, the second son, was to inherit Aquitaine, his father’s original portion. Lewis, the third son, was assigned Bavaria, and the wild marches to its east along the Danube. Thus it was provided that at the emperor’s death his successor should hold the great bulk of the realm, containing both its capitals—Aachen and Rome—and including all the oldest Frankish lands, Neustria and Austrasia alike. "The Partition of Aachen." The kings of Aquitaine and Bavaria would be far too weak, even if united, to trouble him by rebellions, but Lewis ended his deed of gift by a solemn exhortation to the younger sons to obey their brother, visit his court once a year, and be his helpers in peace and war. In spite of the experience of elder generations of his house he hoped that his children might dwell together in amity.

There was one clause in the Partition of Aachen which was certain to cause instant trouble. It named Italy as the special portion of the young Lothair. Now, Italy was, and had been for seven years, under the government of the emperor’s nephew Bernard, son of that Pippin of Italy who died in 810. Charles the Great had placed him there, and while obeying Lewis as a loyal subject he looked upon the Cisalpine kingdom as his own appanage, and expected to retain it through all changes in the imperial succession. Bernard was determined not to be ousted from his realm; the moment that the news of the Partition of Aachen reached him he flew into rebellion. His rule had been popular, and the Lombards gladly took arms in his behalf and seized all the passes of the Alps. He even tried to stir up trouble in Gaul by the aid of his friend Theodulph bishop of Orleans.

Having gone so far, Bernard would have done wisely to abide altogether by the arbitrament of the sword. Instead of doing this he held back and negotiated. Relying on the emperor’s well-known character for justice and moderation Bernard left his army and went to a conference at Chalons-sur-SaÔne. He soon found that he had made a fatal mistake. He was treated as a criminal on trial, not as a prince who came to negotiate terms of peace. The conference adjoined to Aachen, and there Bernard and his chief adherents were judged and condemned. The council doomed the accused to death, but Lewis, half-mindful of the safe-conduct that his ambassadors had promised, commuted the sentence to blinding. "Death of Bernard of Italy, 818." The cruel order was executed, but so clumsily was it carried out, that Bernard died of the shock. Rumour added that it was the empress Hermengarde who had bribed the executioners to do their work so badly. The remorse that seized the emperor for his broken safe-conduct and the death of his nephew never ceased to vex his soul for all his remaining years. It was the only grave moral offence that he had ever committed, and his tender conscience would give him no rest.

Within a few months after Bernard’s death Lewis was visited by a calamity which he considered the first instalment of the divine vengeance for the deed. On his return from an expedition to Brittany he was met by the news of the death of his wife Hermengarde. It was whispered that she had been largely guilty in the matter of her nephew’s death, and that she was now paying the penalty. Lewis at any rate seems to have had this idea. He had been deeply attached to his imperious wife, and leant much on her guidance. Deprived of her he fell into a state of morbid melancholy, far worse than any he had yet experienced. He shut himself up with his grief, neglected state affairs, and talked of retiring into a cloister. After some months his ministers found the situation growing so impossible that they took every means to rouse him. It was, we are told, his bishops who took the strange step of urging on him that he must marry again as a public duty; his seclusion injured the realm, and he must remember that man was not meant to live alone. When the emperor would neither go to seek a wife nor take a princess whom he had not seen on another’s recommendation, his ministers brought to his court all the fairest of the daughters of the counts and nobles of his realm. The same scene was rehearsed that was a few years later to be seen at Constantinople when the widowed Theophilus took his second wife. Among the crowd of ladies presented before him, the eye of Lewis fixed upon Judith, a noble damsel from the Suabian Alps, daughter of Welf, count of Altdorf. Pressed hard by his courtiers he consented to take her to wife, and rued it all his remaining years. Judith was fair, wise, witty, and learned above all the women of her day, and soon acquired an empire over her melancholy spouse, not less than that which her predecessor had exercised. "Birth of Charles the Bald." Two years later she presented him with a son, whose birth was to cause unending evils to the empire. The boy was named Charles, after his great grandsire. (A.D. 822.)

For a space things seemed to be going well with Lewis, but three years after his second marriage the black shadow closed in again over the unfortunate emperor. Some cause, to us unknown, suddenly plunged him once more into a fit of misery and contrition. He remembered first that he had not pardoned all his enemies as a good Christian should. Forthwith all whom he had ever injured were recalled from exile. The brothers Wala and Adalhard were drawn out of their monasteries. The partisans of Bernard of Italy who had suffered blinding and imprisonment were sent back to their homes. So anxious was the emperor to atone for his harshness that he most unwisely proceeded to place the most important of the exiles in high posts of trust. He made Adalhard master of his household, and sent Wala to his son Lothair to be his first councillor. He had forgotten that others might not forgive as he could himself; these appointments placed in power men who at the bottom of their hearts could never pardon their years, of weariness and cloistered seclusion.

After doing what he could to recompense his victims for the indignities they had suffered, Lewis took another and a more startling step. "Penance of Attigny." He summoned a great council at Attigny, hard by the royal city of Soissons, and proceeded to do penance for his sins before the face of his magnates. Coming forth crownless and robed in sackcloth he recapitulated all the faults and misdeeds that had ever been committed, from the execution of Bernard of Italy down to many trifling transgressions, which most men counted as harmless failings, and all had long forgotten. He even rehearsed, with a somewhat unnecessary scrupulousness, all the crimes and short-comings of his great father the emperor Charles. Then he besought his bishops to lay on him such a meed of penance as might fit these many and grievous sins. Not unwilling to take advantage of their sovereign’s humiliation, the prelates prescribed to him a course of stripes and fasting and vigils, of prayer, almsgiving, and building of churches, all of which he conscientiously carried out. The astonished counts and courtiers saw their monarch baring his back to the lash, and discharging with exactitude all the humiliating burdens that the clergy laid upon him. It was the act of a saint, but not of an emperor.

Nothing could have done Lewis more harm than this outburst of laboured penitence. While his subjects marvelled at his Christian humility, they drew from his conduct the conclusion that as a sovereign he was no longer to be feared or obeyed. The Frankish nobles who remembered the high-handed Charles the Great, and had loved him in spite of all his harshness, felt more scorn than admiration for an emperor who wept and grovelled in public over deeds which few in that age considered sins at all. They muttered that Lewis was no better than a brain-sick, self-torturing monk. For the future there was an under-current of contempt for the emperor passing through the minds of most of his lay vassals. It needed but some small encouragement to turn this feeling into active disloyalty.

The year of the council of Attigny was the last year of good fortune for Lewis. It was followed by premonitory symptoms of evil all over his realm. The Moors of Spain, quiescent for more than twenty years, sent a sudden invasion into Septimania. The Danes drove out their king Harald, a protÉgÉ of Lewis and a favourer of Christianity, and began to ravage the Frisian coast. But there were worse foes than Saracen or Dane awaiting Lewis in his own household. His eldest son Lothair, under the tutelage of the unforgiving Wala, had begun to display an alarming amount of self-will and disregard for his father’s wishes and the common weal of the empire. He bore himself like an independent king at his court in Pavia.

In 829 the fatal civil wars of the ninth century began. Charles, the young son of Lewis and Judith, had now attained his seventh year, and his future had become the greatest concern of his father and mother. The emperor, always brooding over his own latter end, was convinced that he had not long to live: he was filled with fears as to the fate of the Joseph of his old age when he should fall into the hands of his brethren. Urged on by his wife he determined to make some provision for the boy in the event of his own early death. He set aside the duchy of Alamannia and the Swiss and Burgundian Alpine lands to the south of it, as a kingdom for his youngest son.

Lewis declared his purpose of erecting the kingdom of Alamannia at a great council held at Worms, to which no one of his three elder sons vouchsafed his presence. The moment that the edict was published murmuring and conspiracy began. The new kingdom was carved out of territory which would have ultimately fallen to Lothair, but his two brothers showed themselves quite as resentful at the partition as was the heir of the empire. Their wrath found vent in slanderous rumours: they did not shrink from asserting that Charles was no brother of theirs. Bernard of Septimania, they said, had betrayed their father and seduced the old man’s wife. The accusation was absolutely without foundation, but it met with wide belief. The chiefs of the higher clergy joined themselves to the royal princes; Wala found an opportunity of revenging himself by aiding the conspiracy; the ministers Ebbo and Hildwin, who had found themselves superseded in favour by count Bernard, had the ingratitude to join in the plot against the man who had raised them from the dust. "First Civil War, 829." The two chief prelates of Gaul, Agobard of Lyons and Jesse of Amiens, were also of the conspirators. A general revolt was planned before the unsuspecting Lewis had any notion that aught was amiss.

It burst out in the next spring. A new rising of the Bretons had called the emperor off into a remote corner of his realm. He summoned a small force to follow him, and was soon lost to sight on the distant western moors. But the very moment that the emperor was gone his enemies set to work to stir up rebellion. The implacable Wala harangued the west Frankish nobles, and sent letters to the chief ecclesiastics of Gaul in which he accused the emperor of ruining the unity of the Church and the empire, the one by his interference with things sacred, the other by his neglect of things secular. Lewis had become a mere tool in the hands of an adulterous wife and an unfaithful servant, and it was the duty of good Christians and patriotic Franks to rescue the empire from its shame. Pippin of Aquitaine soon gave point to the harangues of Wala by leading a Gascon army to Paris, where all the counts of Neustria joined him in arms, Lothair sent word from Italy that he was approaching at the head of a great host of Lombards. Presently Lewis came back from Brittany to find the land in arms behind him: he penetrated as far as CompiÈgne before he was surrounded by the forces of Pippin. Beset by an overwhelming host of enemies, the army of the emperor dispersed, and he himself fell into the hands of the rebels. His sons put him in confinement, pending the meeting of a grand council. The empress Judith they dragged from sanctuary and forced under the terror of death to take the veil at Poictiers. But when the great council of the empire assembled at Nimuegen in the next spring a reaction had followed the first success of the rebellion. The meeting was in the heart of the old Frankish land, where the rebels had few sympathisers, and the counts of the Rhineland and northern Germany came up to it with such a following of armed men and such a truculent aspect that the Neustrians and Lombards who accompanied Pippin and Lothair were quite overawed. Without a sword being drawn or a blow struck the tables were completely turned, and the old emperor found his rebel sons at his feet. He showed himself merciful—all too merciful—in the moment of his triumph. Lothair was despoiled of his imperial title, but permitted to keep his kingdom of Italy, and sent back unharmed to Pavia. Pippin returned to Aquitaine pardoned also. The rancorous Wala, the soul of the conspiracy, was sent back to his cloister at Corbey and bidden to live according to his rule, till his disloyal murmurings provoked the emperor into banishing him into a less comfortable seclusion on the shores of the Lake of Geneva. "Lewis dethroned and restored." The discomfiture of the rebels released the empress Judith from her nunnery; but Lewis thought it necessary to make her clear herself by compurgation from the cruel charges that had been brought against her, before she was released from her monastic vows.

Lewis was once more emperor, but the mercy with which he had treated his conquered enemies was destined to breed him unending troubles. His undutiful sons had been left as powerful as before, and instead of feeling grateful for their pardon, were only vexed at the mismanagement which had ruined their well-planned conspiracy. When they had returned to their kingdoms they merely took breath for a space, and then recommenced their intrigues. This time Lothair and Pippin took pains to enlist their younger brother, Lewis of Bavaria, in the plot. By his means they hoped to divide Germany, for the young king was very popular in his own realm, and counted many adherents beyond its bounds. His brothers promised him the Suabian lands of the boy Charles if he would join them in a fresh rebellion.

The new troubles broke out in the spring of 832. The first signal was given by Pippin of Aquitaine, who fled from his father’s court, refused to attend the Easter great council, and began to arm his Gascon subjects. The emperor determined to take warning by the events of 830 and not to be caught again unprepared. "Second Civil War." He summoned the whole force of the empire to meet for an invasion of Aquitaine. But next came the news that Lewis of Bavaria had raised an army, called in the Slavs of the Danube to his aid, and conquered Suabia. For once provoked to righteous wrath by his sons’ misdoings, the emperor proclaimed that Pippin and Lewis of Bavaria had forfeited their kingdoms. He announced that his favourite Charles should be crowned king of Aquitaine, and that Lothair—who had not yet made any hostile move, though he was really in secret agreement with Pippin and Lewis—should be the heir of the whole of the rest of the empire.

This new project of partition only did harm. It did not win the aid of Lothair; it provoked the Bavarians and Gascons, both of whom were much attached to their young kings; worst of all, it caused the whole empire to exclaim that it was the emperor’s unreasonable fondness for his youngest son that was at the bottom of all the trouble. Why should the whole empire be upset merely in order that Charles might add Aquitaine to Suabia?

Matters soon went from bad to worse. Lewis the Pious lay at Worms gathering the levies of Austrasia and Saxony, when it was announced not only that Pippin and Lewis of Bavaria were approaching, but that Lothair had taken the field with the forces of Italy, and had crossed the Alps, bringing in his train pope Gregory IV., a pontiff whose election he had confirmed without his father’s leave some years before.

Lewis marched southward to meet his rebellious sons. The hosts faced each other in the plains of the Rothfeld, and a battle appeared imminent. But the pious emperor was still loth that blood should be shed in the quarrel: he held back from the fight and offered to treat with his sons. The princes knew their father’s weakness, and learnt that his army was much discouraged and demoralised. They determined to try fraud rather than force, and assented to the proposal to negotiate. Pope Gregory lent himself to their plans, and presented himself before the emperor in the character of an impartial mediator. But he had not been long in the old man’s camp before the imperial army began to melt away. To all appearance the Pope had sold himself to his patron king Lothair, and used his opportunities to persuade the counts and bishops who still remained loyal that they were adhering to a doomed cause. There soon were agents of all kinds passing between the two camps, and their influence was fatal. One after another the chief leaders of the emperor’s host fled away by night to their homes, or with still greater baseness took their soldiery over to the hostile encampment. At last a mere handful mustered under the imperial banner. "The LÜgenfeld, 833." Looking round on their scanty ranks the emperor exclaimed, half in sarcasm, half in Christian resignation, ‘Go ye also to my sons: it would be a pity if any man lost life or limb on my account.’ The counts wept, but they departed, and Lewis was left standing alone in the door of his tent, with his wife at his side and his son Charles clinging to his hand. From that day the plain of the Rothfeld was called by the Franks the Field of Lies—the LÜgenfeld, the ‘Campus Mendacii ubi plurimorum fidelitas extincta est.’ (June 833.)

At once the sons of the emperor swooped down on their helpless prey. They promptly rode over to the empty camp of Lewis, and after saluting their father with feigned respect set a guard over his tent. Judith was reinvested with the veil, and sent over the Alps to Lothair’s fortress of Tortona. The boy Charles was consigned to the monastery of PrÜm: his extreme youth saved him both from blinding and ordination. The old emperor was forwarded to the abbey of St. MÉdard at Soissons, and placed in confinement in its tower. The most strenuous efforts were made to induce him to abdicate and take the monastic vows. But though he would have been willing enough to do so if unconstrained, Lewis refused to lay down his crown when force and threats were employed. Failing to induce him to resign, Lothair and archbishop Ebbo assembled an ecclesiastical council of the bishops of Gaul and formally declared the emperor deposed for incapacity and evil government. The unthinking Lothair was indeed preparing a rod for the back of all future emperors when he allowed the clergy to usurp such power!

Though Lewis would not acknowledge that he was legally dethroned, to do penance he was now, as always, only too ready, and Lothair at last resolved to be contented with this. His father’s humiliation could not have been greater if he had formally resigned the crown. The old emperor came before the altar of St. MÉdard with his sword and wearing the jewelled imperial dalmatic. Then laying the weapon and robe upon the altar he cast round himself a cloak of sackcloth and read a declaration in eight articles, whereby he accused himself of being, by his sins, the sole cause of the disorders of the empire. He began with deploring the death of Bernard of Italy, the sole crime of which he can fairly be held guilty. "The Penance of St. MÉdard." Then he went on to accuse himself of many futile offences—such as that of summoning an army to meet during the holy season of Lent. He was even mean enough to own that he had done evil in permitting his wife to throw off the monastic veil, and clear herself by compurgation from the charges brought against her: in so doing, he confessed, he might have abetted perjury.

Having read this humiliating document, the old man laid the parchment on the altar, and retired again to his prison-tower. But the degrading scene had not the effect that Lothair had hoped. Men felt more indignation against the son who could force his father to such humiliation, than contempt for the father who could submit to it. The crowd outside the church tried to mob Lothair. The counts of Austrasia and Saxony began to gather armed bands against him. Scared at their approach the younger king fled away into Burgundy. "Lewis again restored, 834." The German counts at once drew Lewis out of his confinement, girt him once more with the sword of empire, and proclaimed him sole ruler of the Frankish realm. A considerable army set out to pursue Lothair, and though he checked its pursuit at a skirmish near Chalons-sur-SaÔne, he none the less withdrew from Gaul, and took refuge in his own kingdom of Lombardy. This was the first blood actually shed in battle in the civil war.

The vengeance of Heaven seemed to pursue the undutiful son and his adherents. Soon after he had reached Italy a pestilence smote his army, and slew his chief councillors, the aged Wala and Jesse of Amiens together with Matfrid, count of Orleans, the chief of his men of war. Lothair himself was stricken down, and lay for many weeks at the gate of death, but he struggled through to give many more troublous years to the empire. The two great ecclesiastics who had shared with Wala the guilt of the illegal deposition of the old emperor, Ebbo of Rheims and Agobard of Lyons, fell into the hands of the partisans of Lewis. Both were deposed from their archbishoprics, and Ebbo the ungrateful foster-brother of the emperor was put into solitary confinement in the abbey of Fulda in the heart of Germany.

Still untaught by his misfortunes, Lewis now took the one step most certain to alienate his newly recovered popularity. He summoned a diet at CrÉmieux, near Lyons, and proposed in it a new division of his realm. Lothair was to be punished by being deprived of all his dominions save Italy. The greater part of the confiscated land—Burgundy, Provence, and the old Austrasian realm about Metz and Trier—was to go to the dearly-loved Charles, now a boy of fourteen years of age.

This project pleased nobody. It rendered Lothair desperate, did not please Lewis and Pippin, and disgusted the whole of the Franks, who exclaimed that the sole cause of the wars was to be found in the emperor’s doting affection for his youngest son. It is probable that another war would have broken out, if a new disaster had not fallen upon the realm. The first great Viking invasion was just about to descend upon the empire. The men of the North had seen its forces turned aside into fratricidal civil war, and took the opportunity to make havoc of the undefended coastland. In 835 when Lothair was being driven back towards Italy, they landed in great force in Frisia and sacked Utrecht, its metropolitan city, and Dorstad, the great harbour and mart of the province—the predecessor in commercial history of Rotterdam. In 836 while Lewis had been planning the redivision of his empire to the prejudice of Lothair at the diet of CrÉmieux, the Danes harried Flanders and burnt the new city of Antwerp. Now in 837 they fell upon the island of Walcheren, wasted it, and worked up the Rhine-mouth with fire and sword as far as Nimuegen. "The Danes on the Rhine, 836." Relinquishing his plans against Italy, Lewis the Pious turned against the heathen of the North, and marched rapidly towards the scene of their ravages. But the Danes did not yet dare to face the full imperial army of Frankland, and fled away to their ships leaving nothing in front of the emperor but ravaged fields and burning villages.

Lewis returned at once to his unwise schemes for endowing his well-beloved Charles. At a great council at Aachen in 837 he girt the boy, now aged fifteen, with the royal sword, crowned him with his own hands, and bestowed on him not only the Suabian and Burgundian lands that he had been promised at the diet of CrÉmieux, but a great tract of German land up to the borders of Saxony, which had been previously allotted to Lewis of Bavaria. The counts and prelates of the new realm were bidden to do homage to their young ruler, and become his men.

Lewis of Bavaria, however, was determined not to give up his promised inheritance in Germany, and found support among all the Teutonic peoples east of the Rhine, who had no wish to be handed over to the boy Charles. He mustered an army, sent to beg the help of his brother Lothair, and stood on the defensive. The old emperor replied by summoning a great council at CÉrisy-sur-Oise, at which he declared Lewis deprived of all his lands save Bavaria, and conferred them on the young Charles. Immediately afterwards Pippin of Aquitaine died, and the emperor put the finishing touches to his unwisdom by handing over the whole of Pippin’s realms to his darling. If this plan had been carried out, Lewis would have left all the Frankish empire north of the Alps, save the single duchy of Bavaria, to his youngest child. The worst point in the project was that Pippin left sons, and the eldest of them—his father’s namesake—was a growing boy of about the same age as Charles. The majority of the people of Aquitaine would have nothing to say to the transfer of their allegiance, and proclaimed Pippin the younger king in his father’s room. The emperor, with transparent injustice, declared the boy too young to reign, and bade the Aquitanians send him to Aachen to be trained up at his court and learn the art of government—an art which Lewis was so competent to teach! When the young Pippin did not appear, Lewis threatened his southern subjects with invasion.

At once the civil war burst out in East and West and South. Lewis of Bavaria broke into Suabia; the Gascon followers of Pippin the Young marched on the Loire. At the same time the Danes who had been narrowly watching their opportunity returned to the Frisian coast, destroyed Dorstad for the second time and harried all the lands about the Rhine mouth. (Spring of 839.) At his wit’s end to know which foe he should first attack, the emperor resolved to seek aid in the only place where it might still be found. Consigning to oblivion all memories of the LÜgenfeld, and the humiliations before the altar of St. MÉdard, he besought the help of his eldest son. Lothair on his side was anxious to recover his birthright, and to be recognised once more as heir to the empire. He hurried from Pavia to Worms, to place himself at his father’s disposition. Kneeling before the old man in full meeting of the great council, he confessed his ingratitude and repeated treasons, and asked for pardon. But while ostensibly craving for forgiveness only, he had secretly stipulated for reward. Accordingly Lewis the Pious now proclaimed the last of the many partitions of the empire which had been the bane of his life. The Placitum of Worms stated that Lewis of Bavaria should retain his original Bavarian duchy alone, that the younger Pippin should be wholly disinherited, and that Lothair and Charles should divide the empire. The eldest son and heir took Italy, Saxony, Suabia, all the Frankish lands on the Meuse and Rhine, and the Burgundian and ProvenÇal realms along the Rhone. The dearly-loved Charles was given Neustria and Aquitaine, the two kingdoms whose union roughly represents the modern land of France.^[54]

"Third Civil War, 839." The year 840 saw the commencement of the civil war, with a new arrangement of combatants. Lewis the elder, Lothair, and Charles, against Lewis the young, and Pippin. Fortune favoured the old man for once. He first marched into Aquitaine, drove the rebels before him, and forced the bishops and counts of the land beyond the Loire to do homage to Charles at Clermont in Auvergne. Contrary to his usual custom the emperor did not pardon all his enemies, but beheaded several of the chief partisans of the young Pippin.

Aquitaine was no sooner overrun, than Lewis, with a vigour which he had never shown before—it was the dying flash of his life’s energy—wheeled his army northward and marched against his son the king of Bavaria. So rapid was the attack that the younger Lewis was driven out of Suabia, chased along the Bavarian bank of the Danube, and forced to take refuge in the far Ost-Mark on the Slavonic border. The emperor had now vindicated by the force of arms the partition of Worms: Pippin was disinherited, and Lewis driven back into a narrow corner of Germany. A great council was summoned to meet in July, and the emperor came back by slow stages towards the Rhine to preside over it. But the double campaign of the spring had been too much for him. For some years his lungs had been affected, and the chills of a March and April spent in arms in the open field brought on a rapid consumption. At Frankfort-on-Main he dismissed his army and took to his couch. His strength dwindled as the weeks passed away, and at last he bade his attendants place him in a boat and row him down to the Rhine, to a spot which he loved well, the island in mid-stream hard by his palace at Ingelheim, where the tower of the Pfalz now rises from the rapid rushing waters. Then it contained only a rough hunting lodge thatched with reeds, and in that poor shelter the dying emperor lingered out the midsummer weeks, lying for hours motionless on his couch with a little cross clasped to his breast. His wife and his son Charles were far away at Poictiers, in Aquitaine, and did not arrive in time to receive his dying blessing. But a crowd of bishops and monks mustered around the emperor’s deathbed, to watch over his edifying end. "Death of Lewis, 840." On June 25th the old man’s last agony seized him; he started up in bed, cried in a loud voice ‘Out! Out!’ and fell back dead, leaving the clerical throng around to debate whether his last words bade some evil spirit depart from his presence, or referred to his own setting out for a better world. So ended king Lewis,

He left the empire which he had done so much to dismember to be fought for by his three sons and his grandson. He left the imperial dignity fatally injured by his grovelling penances at Attigny and Soissons. He had allowed the Danes to spy out the nakedness of the land in the North; while the Saracens had already landed in Italy to the South. He had suffered the clerical power again and again to usurp authority over secular things, as none of his predecessors of the Frankish race, Meroving or Karling, had ever done. Yet in spite of all, his piety and conscientious desire to do right—often as it was misled—gave him a greater claim to the respect of his subjects than did the personal character of any of his successors. Ere long men came to look back to the time of Lewis the Pious as to an age of comparative quiet and prosperity.