TO THE DEPOSITION OF CHARLES THE FAT

Civil Wars following the death of Lothair I.—King Lewis and his rule in Germany—Troubles of Lothair II.—The Vikings in Neustria—The Edict of Pistres—Charles the Bald invades Austrasia—Treaty of Mersen—Charles made Emperor—Death of Lewis the German—War of his sons with Charles the Bald—Charles’s successors in Neustria—Disastrous reign of Charles the Fat—He unites Germany, France, and Italy—The siege of Paris—Charles the Fat dethroned.

Evil as had been the years which followed the fight of Fontenay and the Partition of Verdun, there were yet worse to come. It was the miserable peculiarity of the second half of the ninth century that it saw Christendom, for the first time since the commencement of the Dark Ages, begin to sink back towards primitive chaos and barbarism. After four hundred years of vacillating but permanent progress towards union, strength, and civilisation, it began to relapse, and to fall back into disunion, weakness, and ignorance. The reign of Charles the Great was to be for long years the high-water mark of progress. The succeeding age rapidly sinks away from it, and it is not till the middle of the tenth century that a rise is once more perceptible.

But of all the evil years those between 855 and 887 were to be the worst. The civil wars of the descendants of Lewis the Pious grew yet more numerous and ruinous; the raids of the Viking and the Saracen spread wider and wider; the rulers of the Frankish empire were struck by a blight, dying young or sinking into imbecility long before they attained middle age, till the race seemed destined to disappear from history with the fall of the cowardly, unwieldy, incompetent Charles the Fat in 887.

"Civil war on the death of Lothair I." The new troubles began immediately on the death of the emperor Lothair. His three sons could not agree in the partition scheme which divided their father’s realm. Lewis thought that his share—the kingdom of Italy—was far too small for the eldest son and the bearer of the imperial title; Lothair II. grudged the share of Burgundy which fell to his youngest brother Charles, and tried to seize the young man, in order to tonsure him and confine him in a monastery. Before any actual blow had been struck, pope Benedict III. succeeded in patching up a truce between the brothers, but they drew apart and sought alliances against each other, Lothair leaguing himself with his younger uncle Charles the Bald, while Lewis became the friend of his elder uncle and namesake Lewis of Germany. Two years later the family grudge led to war under the most disastrous circumstances. Charles and Lothair II. had united their forces for a decisive campaign against the Danes, whose main army, under a certain Jarl Biorn, had concentrated itself in central France, and burnt Paris, Chartres, and Blois (857). Before the united strength of Neustria and Austrasia the Vikings drew back, and stockaded themselves in a great camp on the Seine-island of Oissel.^[58] Charles blocked their way down the river by bringing up a fleet, which he had lately built, to the next reach, and determined to starve them out. After a siege of three months it seemed likely that he would achieve his purpose; the Danes could neither beat him nor escape him. But just as they were about to yield there came to the king of Neustria the dire news that his brother Lewis with the whole host of Germany had crossed the Rhine, and was marching against him. Charles straightway raised the siege of Oissel, allowed the Danes to burn his fleet and to escape, and turned eastward to resist king Lewis. Their armies met at Brienne-sur-Aube, but when Charles saw the overwhelming numbers of the Germans his heart failed him—as it often did in such a crisis—and he deserted his men and fled away into Burgundy. Deprived of their leader his vassals laid down their arms, and most of the Neustrian counts and bishops did homage to king Lewis. The German monarch was able to take possession of his brother’s realm, and to proclaim himself king of the West Franks. His nephew Lothair II. sent to beg for peace from him, and it seemed that Lewis would become the suzerain of all the realms north of the Alps. "Lewis the German wins and loses Neustria." But when he had sent away his German troops, and prepared to winter near Laon among the Neustrians, the instability of his power was suddenly shown. Charles the Bald had secretly raised a new army in Burgundy. He marched on Laon at mid-winter. The Neustrians refused to take arms against their old king, and Lewis, with a very small following, had to flee away into Germany, and abandon his lightly-won dominion over the West Franks. Eighteen months later the brothers made peace (860), but no treaty could undo the harm that the reckless ambition of Lewis had brought on all the Frankish realms. While the war was raging the Danes had swept unresisted across the land. One army had harried the Rhine-mouth and Flanders, another had sacked Amiens and Noyon; a third had entered the Mediterranean, sailed up the Rhone, and devastated the distant kingdom of Charles of Provence, the younger brother of Lothair II., a weakly youth racked by epileptic fits, who showed no power to defend his fertile land from the pirates. The last-named band had even extended their ravages to Italy, and sacked the flourishing port of Pisa in the realm of the emperor Lewis II.

From the time of his wicked invasion of Neustria onward, king Lewis the German, who had hitherto been the most fortunate of the Karling kindred, began to meet with troubles to which he had as yet been a stranger. While his attention had been directed to the West, his Slavonic vassals in the East, the Abotrites, rose in rebellion: when he led a host against them in 862, he encountered defeat and disaster. But a far worse blow came from the bosom of his own family: his eldest son Carloman, whom he had made governor in Carinthia and the Bavarian Ostmark, rose in rebellion against him. "Family troubles of Lewis the German." Twice conquered and twice pardoned (861 and 863), the ungrateful prince took arms for a third time in 864, and compelled his father to grant him a share in the kingdom. Feeling old age closing in upon him, and hoping to conciliate all his sons, Lewis the German now took the unwise step of dividing his realm in his own lifetime, just as his father Lewis the Pious had done. He made Carloman king of Bavaria and Carinthia, designated his second son and namesake Lewis to be ruler of Saxony, Thuringia, and Franconia, and his youngest born Charles the Fat to reign in Suabia and Rhaetia (865). He must have felt that the hand of Heaven was laid upon him in punishment for his own unfilial conduct to his father Lewis the Pious, for his sons dealt with him just as he had dealt with the old emperor thirty years before. They murmured about the boundaries of their heritages, and often took arms both against him and against each other. Four separate rebellions of one or another or all of the princes are recorded between 865 and 876. But Lewis the German was made of sterner stuff than his pious father. Time after time he beat down the risings of his undutiful sons, and after each victory had the constancy or the feebleness to restore them to their former honours.

In spite of these rebellions, and in spite of the successful revolt, first of the Abotrites, and then of the Moravians, both of whom succeeded in shaking off their dependence on the empire, Germany was yet the most fortunate of the five Frankish realms. The subjects of the three sons of Lothair I., who were now ruling the fragments of their father’s ‘middle kingdom,’ all had evil times to endure. Of the troubles of Lewis the emperor in Italy we shall speak elsewhere. His two younger brothers fared even worse. The epileptic Charles of Provence was vexed by Danish and Saracen pirates, as well as by the intrigues of his greedy uncle Charles the Bald, who tried to add Provence to his own Neustrian dominions, though he was entirely unable to protect even Neustria from the Danes. Lothair II. in Austrasia—or Lotharingia, as men now began to call it, after its ruler’s name—was sore vexed by the Vikings, who pushed up the Rhine as far as Neuss and KÖln. "The Bigamy of Lothair II." But he was far more incommoded by a trouble for which he was himself entirely responsible. He drove from his court his wife Teutberga, and openly married his concubine Waldrada. Not only did this bigamy lead to the rebellion of Teutberga’s brother Hukbert,^[59] abbot of St. Maurice and duke of Transjurane Burgundy, but it brought on a quarrel with the Papacy which embittered all Lothair’s remaining years. Pope Nicolas I. set his face against the king’s unrighteous dealings with his wife, and repeatedly summoned him to take her back to his couch. He induced the nobles of Lotharingia to compel their king to dismiss Waldrada for a season; but Lothair was passion’s slave, and soon chased away his wife and again sent for his mistress. This brought on him fresh thunders of ecclesiastical censure, and for the last ten years of his life he lived under the ban of the Pope, till in 868 he was so far humbled that he came in person before Hadrian II. and made a complete surrender—one of the greatest triumphs that the Papacy had won since the days of Gregory the Great.

But though the other Frankish kingdoms fared ill, it was, as usual, the realm of Charles the Bald which bore the brunt of the troubles of Christendom. There were now permanent hosts of Danes established at the mouth of each of the great rivers of France, the Somme, Seine, Loire, and Garonne—the chronicles call them ‘pagani Sequanenses’ or ‘pagani Ligerenses’ as a matter of course. Settled on islands or headlands at the mouths of these rivers, each band devoted itself to the harrying of the district which lay inland from its camp. Meanwhile, Charles the Bald left the defence of his realm to the local counts, and busied himself in futile schemes for seizing the realms of his nephews, Charles of Provence and Lothair of Austrasia. He was not without his family troubles; his children—like those of Lewis the German—were very unruly: his second son Charles, who ruled Aquitaine for him, tried to make himself an independent king, and his youngest son Carloman was detected conspiring against his life, for which he was condemned to blinding and perpetual imprisonment. But neither domestic troubles nor Viking raids could keep Charles from his unending intrigues against his brother and his nephews. When he did turn his attention to his own proper business, his methods of dealing with the problems that lay before him were not generally wise. No man of real intelligence would have conceived the plan that Charles invented in 861 for getting rid of the Vikings by bribing them to fight each other. The wily pirates took the king’s subsidy, and then all united against him, as might have been expected.

There were, however, two schemes for organising resistance against the Danes which were broached at Charles’s council board that are worthy of note, as foreshadowing the methods by which the invaders were ultimately to be checked. The great difficulty which the Franks had hitherto found in dealing with the Vikings came mainly from two reasons—the power of rapid movement which the enemy possessed, and the fact that walled towns were still very rare, and castles quite unknown in the Frankish realms, so that the inhabitants of the country-side had no secure shelter to seek. "The Edict of Pistres, 864." In the Edict of Pistres (864) Charles shows some appreciation of these two difficulties, and endeavours to dispose of them by very well judged measures. To cope with the swiftly moving Vikings, he determines to make the Frankish army more mobile also. He endeavours to substitute cavalry for the unwieldy masses of local levies by ordering that ‘omnes pagenses Franci qui equos habent aut habere possunt cum suis comitibus in hostem eant.’ The day of feudal cavalry was indeed just beginning, and from the military point of view this expedient was perfectly correct; unhappily for the monarchy, the day of the feudal horseman was also to be the day of feudal separation and disunion. The second measure ordered by the Edict of Pistres was one for the strengthening of the kingdom by means of fortifications. The particular plan which Charles most favoured was that of blocking the great rivers by fortified bridges. Towns lying beside the water were to throw a bridge across, with a fortified bridgehead on the opposite bank. Thus the Vikings would find their advance up the lines of the rivers completely checked, since their boats would not be able to pass under the bridges till the forts at either end of them were taken, a long matter in those days, when the art of poliorcetics had sunk so low. As the first fruits of this edict, a strong bridge was built at Pistres itself, low down the Seine, where the Eure flows into the great river. It was at the same time that the island on which old Paris lay was furnished with two fortified bridges, across the northern and southern branches of the Seine, joining it to the mainland. It was mainly owing to these defences that, when next attacked by the Vikings, Paris, though twice plundered before, held out successfully, and did not suffer capture and desolation after its third siege.

In 863 died Charles, king of Provence, the youngest son of the emperor Lothair I., carried off by the epilepsy that had always afflicted him. His little kingdom was divided between his brothers Lothair II. and Lewis the Emperor, to the great discontent of Charles the Bald, who would have liked to have a hand in the partition. But Charles was vexed for the moment not only by the Danes, but by his nephew Pippin the Younger, who had escaped from his monastery and raised a new rebellion in Aquitaine. While the king was dealing with his nephew, the Vikings of the Loire made the widest sweep round central France that any horde had yet carried out—burning Poictiers, AngoulÊme, Perigueux, Limoges, Clermont, and Bourges in one single incursion. "The end of Pippin of Aquitaine." The rebel Pippin joined himself to them, and is actually said to have cast aside his Christianity and worshipped Woden in their camp—ex monacho apostata factus, ritum paganorum servavit. He fell into his uncle’s hands before the year was out, and with the general approval of the Franks was condemned to perpetual solitary confinement.

For a short time after these events the West Frankish kingdom was destined to have a time of comparative respite from the inroads of the Northmen. In 867 all the Vikings of the West massed themselves for an attack on England, which had hitherto suffered comparatively little at their hands. From the capture of York in 868 down to Alfred’s great victory at Ethandune in 878, the main strength of the Danes was spent in winning a kingdom beyond the channel. The invasion of England was not for plunder but for conquest, and ‘the Great Army,’ led by two kings and five jarls, was composed of all the hordes who had been harrying the Continent for the last ten years. If they did not succeed in subduing the whole of England, they yet won the great Danelagh, the eastern half of the island, and settled down in the land they had subdued.

But the comparative immunity from Viking raids which the Franks obtained between 868 and 878 was not of much profit to them. In 869, Lothair II. died, as he was journeying home from Italy in a disconsolate mood, after making his peace with the Pope.^[60] From that time there was unending trouble between his two elderly uncles, as to which of them should inherit Austrasia, the old Frankish land between Scheldt and Rhine, the ancestral home of their race. At this moment began the struggle between France and Germany for the inheritance of the ‘middle kingdom’ which Lothair had ruled, a struggle which was to last for a thousand years. Who can say even yet if the final fate of Aachen and Trier and Metz and LiÉge and Strasburg has been settled?

The moment that Charles the Bald heard of Lothair’s death, he crossed the Meuse at the head of the levies of Neustria, and had himself crowned at Metz as king of Lotharingia. The Bretons were in open revolt that year, and a stray Viking band was levying contributions on Tours and Angers, but for such minor distractions Charles cared little. Lewis the German was bedridden at the moment, and his sons were absent on an expedition against the Slavs. But next spring he took the field with all Germany at his back, whereupon Charles the Bald, always better at seizing than at fighting, drew back, and offered to negotiate. "Partition of Mersen, 870." Then followed the Partition of Mersen, by which Lotharingia was divided between the brothers: Charles took the Burgundian part of his deceased nephew’s realm, and western Austrasia as far as the Meuse; Lewis had Frisia and eastern Austrasia. To Charles, therefore, fell Lyons, Vienne, BesanÇon, Toul, Verdun, Cambrai, LiÉge, Tongern, Mecheln; to Lewis, Aachen, KÖln, Trier, Strasburg, Utrecht, Nimuegen, and Maestricht. (870.)

But the Treaty of Mersen was only to patch up matters for a short time. Five years of comparative rest followed, while the Vikings were still employed in England against the gallant kings of Wessex. But in 875 died the emperor Lewis II., the last of the three sons of Lothair I. Like his two brothers, he left no male heir, and there followed one more struggle between his aged uncles Lewis the German and Charles the Bald for the imperial title and the Italian realm. "Charles the Bald in Italy, 875." Now, as always, Charles moved with rash and inconsiderate haste, and was first in the field. Leaving Neustria to shift for itself, he posted into Italy at the head of a small army, and swooped down on the diet of the Lombard kingdom, which was sitting at Pavia, and disputing about the choice of a successor to their late monarch. He was acclaimed as king by some of the Lombards, and then made ready to march on Rome, where he knew that the Pope was ready to give him the imperial crown. But, meanwhile, Lewis the German was preparing to interfere. He first sent his youngest son Charles of Suabia—better known as Charles the Fat—to oppose the Neustrian king. But Charles, who always throughout his life consistently mismanaged everything that was intrusted to him, was easily scared by his uncle, and fled back into the Alps. Then the king of Germany sent down into Lombardy his unruly eldest born, Carloman the king of Bavaria, with an imposing array of Bavarian and Franconian levies. Charles the Bald feared to face this army, and proposed to Carloman that both the Neustrian and the German forces should withdraw from the peninsula, and allow the disputed succession to be settled by peaceful negotiation. The Bavarian prince was beguiled by his uncle’s specious offer, and betook himself homeward over the Brenner. But, instead of making a corresponding retreat towards the Cenis, Charles the Bald turned southward and made a dash for Rome. He reached it, and was duly crowned emperor by his friend John VIII. But he did not linger in Italy to help the Pope against the Saracens, as the latter besought him, but returned at once to Neustria to exhibit his new imperial crown at home.

"Death of Lewis the German, 876." At this moment died Lewis the German, now an old man of seventy-six; it was sixty years since he had been appointed king of Bavaria by his father, and thirty-three since he had obtained sway over the whole of Germany by the award of the Treaty of Verdun. He had been on the whole a successful ruler, in spite of the many revolts of his sons, and in spite of the fact that he had not been able to retain all his Slavonic vassals under his hand. To him more than to any other king Germany owed her organisation as a unified national kingdom. His long reign gave Saxon and Franconian, Bavarian and Suabian, time to grow together and to learn to regard themselves as a nation apart, not merely as provinces of the Frankish empire. But if to Germany his reign was one of unqualified good, history can not pardon him the two occasions in 854 and 858 when he deliberately sacrificed the general welfare of Christendom to private ambition, and attacked his Neustrian brother while Charles was in the thick of his Viking wars. These are the darkest spots on the reputation of the first king of Germany.

We have already related how Lewis, following the evil custom of his family, had divided his realm among his three sons Carloman, Lewis, and Charles, the kings of Bavaria, Saxony, and Suabia. They were not destined, however, to inherit their father’s realm in peace. No sooner did Charles the Bald hear that his elder brother was dead, than he made another vigorous attempt to seize Lotharingia, arguing that as emperor he was entitled to the imperial city of Aachen, and openly asserting that the oaths of Mersen had been ‘sworn to the father but not to the sons.’ At the head of a large army Charles entered Austrasia, and occupied Aachen and KÖln. Of the three young kings of Germany Lewis alone came out against him. Carloman was away far in the East fighting with rebellious Slavs, and Charles the Fat was, or purported to be, on a bed of sickness. "Charles the Bald beaten at Andernach." The fate of the lands between Rhine and Scheldt was settled by a battle at Andernach, in which the Neustrians, though superior in number, were completely defeated by the Franconians and Saxons of Lewis of Saxony. Charles the Bald was—as usual—the first to fly, and arrived in safety at LiÉge, though the greater part of his army was cut to pieces. He returned to his home to find a Danish fleet up the Seine, for the Vikings were just beginning to drift back from England. But such troubles moved him little, and though his Austrasian expedition had fared so ill, he started off with hardly a moment’s pause on an equally rash and ill-judged descent into Italy, where the imperial crown that he had so lightly gained in 875 was now in jeopardy. He sent the Vikings 5000 lbs. of silver to induce them to transfer their ravages from Neustria to his German nephew’s land, and hastened to Lombardy with a small and hastily equipped army, for the best of his men had been slain or captured at the battle of Andernach. Charles met his friend pope John VIII. at Pavia, and was about to proceed to Rome when he heard that his eldest nephew, Carloman of Bavaria, who possessed many supporters among the eastern Lombards, had crossed the Alps and was marching against him, eager to revenge the treachery to which he had been subjected in the preceding year. "Charles dies in Italy, 877." Charles hastily fled before the approaching forces of the Bavarian, but as he was crossing the Cenis he was stricken down by dysentery, and died suddenly in a miserable hut at the foot of the pass (877).

Charles the Bald was still below the age of sixty, but he had been a king from his boyhood, and had reigned over the West Frankish realm which the treaty of Verdun gave him for thirty-four disastrous years. Of all the Karlings he was the man who wrought the empire the most harm: his birth had been a misfortune: the endowment of his youth cost the state a long civil war: his manhood was flighty, unscrupulous, eager, yet unstable. He started four several wars by reckless snatching at the heritages of his kinsmen, but when withstood and faced he always slunk away in rapid retreat. The condition of Neustria was a disgrace to his name: if half the bribes and subsidies that he had spent to buy the Danes’ departure, had been used in military preparations against them, they might easily have been driven off. But Charles was always busied with fantastic schemes of foreign conquest; and while his eyes were fixed abroad he allowed his realm to fall to pieces at his feet. History can find nothing to praise in the first king of France.

In the ten years which followed the death of Charles the Bald, a blight seemed to fall upon the house of the Karlings. King after king was swept away by an untimely death, some by accident, more by disease. In France and in Germany six reigning monarchs died without leaving a single child of legitimate birth, and by 887 the royal house was represented by one solitary male heir, and he a boy of only eight years old. Meanwhile the Danes had returned from England in full force, and the whole empire of these short-lived kings was enduring the worst crisis that had yet fallen upon it.

"Reign and death of Lewis the Stammerer, 877-879." Charles the Bald was succeeded in Neustria and Aquitaine, or France, as we may now call the Western realm, by his son Lewis II., better known as Lewis the Stammerer. The new king was a prudent and circumspect ruler, very unlike his flighty parent. He at once gave up all pretension to the kingdom of Italy and the imperial crown, though John VIII. urged him to reassert his father’s claims. He promptly made peace with his German cousins, renewing with them the terms of the Treaty of Mersen, by which eastern Lotharingia fell to Germany and western Lotharingia to France. He then took the field against the Danes, who had just returned once more to the mouth of the Loire, but while engaged with them he was stricken down by disease, and died a few months later, long before he had completed the second year of his reign (879). He left two sons, Lewis and Carloman, and a third child was born to him just after his death, and christened Charles. The counts and bishops of France, following the invariable and unhappy custom of the times, crowned both Lewis and Carloman as kings. The two lads—they were but seventeen and sixteen—were not to enjoy a quiet heritage. Alfred had just expelled from England those of the Danish ‘Great Army’ who had refused to settle down in the Danelagh and do him homage. "Accession of Lewis III. and Carloman, 879." The swarm of Vikings fell on Flanders, and burnt Ghent and St. Omer before the young kings’ reign was two months old. At the same time Lewis of Saxony, on whom the spirit of greed that had possessed Charles the Bald seemed now to have descended, invaded Neustria—summoned, it would appear, by some disloyal counts. But the West Franks rallied around their young masters, and Lewis the Saxon consented to retire on condition that Western Lotharingia—the lands that Charles the Bald had acquired by the Treaty of Mersen ten years before—should be ceded to him. So LiÉge, Namur, Cambrai, and Tongern became for the moment German and not French.

In another part of the West Frankish realm an equally serious loss was at the same time taking place. Since the death of the good emperor Lewis II. Provence and southern Burgundy had been united to Neustria (875-79). But Lewis’ only daughter, the princess Hermengarde, had now found a strong and ambitious husband in Boso, count of Vienne, one of the governors of Burgundy. Taking advantage of the crisis in Neustria, this count Boso resolved to assert his wife’s claim to her father’s heritage. In Italy he failed to win success, though the Pope would gladly have helped him, but in Provence and Lower Burgundy the nobles rallied to his standard. "Boso made king of Arles, 879." He was proclaimed king in October 879, and afterwards crowned at Lyons. His new realm of Arles, Provence, or Lower Burgundy—for it is found styled by all these names—was the first fraction of the empire of Charles the Great to pass away from the male heirs of the great royal line. Boso’s dominions nearly coincided in size with the kingdom of Provence as it had been held by Charles the son of the emperor Lothair I. They included the whole valley of the Rhone, from Lyons to the sea and the borders of Italy.

While the West Frankish kingdom was being cut short to north and south, Germany was on the whole in better condition. The three sons of Lewis the German, unlike most royal brothers of the time, dwelt together in harmony. The two elder brothers had come to an agreement that Carloman should prosecute his fortunes in Italy, while Lewis sought to aggrandise himself in Lotharingia. But Carloman, after driving Charles the Bald out of Lombardy, and mastering most of the land north of the Po, was stricken down with a fever which terminated in a paralytic stroke. He was carried back to Bavaria, and survived for two years, but never rose from his couch again. Feeling the hand of death upon him, he handed over the administration of his realm to his brother Lewis, only stipulating that the frontier duchy of Carinthia should be given to his own illegitimate son Arnulf, the child of a Slavonic princess whom he had taken as his concubine. Carloman lived out another year, and died in 880 before he had passed the limits of middle age.

"Charles the Fat, king of Italy, 879." Meanwhile, his place in Italy had been taken by his shiftless younger brother, the king of Suabia. Charles the Fat entered Italy in the autumn of 879, was everywhere recognised as king, and solemnly received the Lombard crown from John VIII. at Ravenna. But his new kingdom saw little of him: though he was earnestly besought to oppose the Saracen invaders of the south he did nothing of the kind, but went ingloriously home to Suabia.

The Danes were by this time mustering in greater strength than ever for an assault on the Frankish empire. They had gathered together from all the shores of the West, and this time threw themselves on the Eastern realm, not on their old prey in Neustria. "Great Danish Invasion, 880." The year 880 was long remembered by the Germans for the awful defeat suffered on the LÜneburg Heath near Hamburg by the levies of Saxony and Thuringia. Bruno, duke of Saxony, two bishops, with no less than twelve counts, were left dead upon the field, and the victorious Vikings ravaged the whole valley of the Elbe without further resistance. Almost at the same moment another Danish army appeared in Austrasia, fought an indecisive battle with king Lewis, and though they left him the field were able to establish themselves permanently on the Scheldt, at a great camp near Courtray, threatening Neustria and Austrasia alike.

"Battle of Saucourt, 881." In the spring of 881 they made up their minds that the Western realm should first be their spoil. Marching on Beauvais, they met at Saucourt the young king of France and his levies. To the joy and surprise of all Western Christendom Lewis III. inflicted a crushing defeat on the invaders, slew 8000 of them, and chased them as far as Cambrai, beyond the borders of his own kingdom. This was the only pitched battle of first-rate importance that the Franks had won over the Vikings, and great hopes were entertained that in Lewis III. Europe might find a saviour from the sword of the pagans. But ere a year was out the gallant young king met his death in a foolish frolic,^[61] and left the Neustrian throne to his brother Carloman.

The Danish army which had been defeated at Saucourt retired to Ghent, where it was strengthened by newly-arrived bands under two famous sea-kings, Siegfred and Godfred. Then the host threw itself on Austrasia as the autumn was closing. The levies of the old royal land of the Franks were beaten: their king, Lewis of Saxony, was far away, and the winter months of 881-2 saw the whole country-side harried, from the Scheldt-mouth to the Eifel. "Austrasia harried by the Danes." The inland parts of Austrasia had hitherto been exceptionally fortunate in escaping the Danish sword, but in this fatal winter LiÉge, Maestricht, Tongern, KÖln, Bonn, Neuss, ZÜlpich, MalmÉdy, Nimuegen, and every other town in the district was pillaged. Most heartrending of all was the sacking of the royal city of Aachen: the Danes plundered the palace, stabled their horses in the cathedral, and broke the shrine and image above the tomb of Charles the Great.

To the despair of all Germany, king Lewis the Saxon, whose task it should have been to attack the invaders in the next spring, died on January 20th, 882—the fourth Carolingian monarch who had been carried to the grave within three years. His subjects found nothing better to do than to elect his only surviving brother, Charles the Fat, the king of Suabia and of Italy, as his successor.

"Charles the Fat, king of Germany." Thus began the unhappy reign of Charles, the last Carolingian emperor of the full blood. He was at this moment in Italy, where he had been visiting Rome and receiving the imperial crown. Making a leisurely journey homeward,—the Danes were meanwhile sacking Trier and Metz,—he reached the Rhine in July, and summoned to him the levies of Saxony, Suabia, Bavaria and Franconia: he had brought a Lombard army in his train. With this great host, the largest that had been seen since the death of Charles the Great, he moved against the Danes. Godfred and Siegfred retired before him to a great camp which they had built at Elsloo on the Meuse. The faint-hearted emperor faced them for twelve days, and then instead of ordering his vast army to assault the camp, began to negotiate with the enemy. A few days later his soldiery heard to their dismay and disgust, that Charles had consented to allow the Vikings to withdraw with all their plunder, to pay them 2000 lbs. of silver, and to grant king Godfred a great duchy by the Rhine-mouth, with the hand of his cousin Gisela, an illegitimate daughter of king Lothair II. In return the Dane consented to be baptized and to do homage to the emperor. "Treaty of Elsloo, 882." This expedient for buying off Godfred was probably suggested by the way in which Alfred of England had dealt with Guthrum four years before at the peace of Wedmore. Unfortunately Charles forgot that while Alfred was strong enough to compel Guthrum to keep faith, his own character was hardly likely to have a similar influence on Godfred.

King Siegfred, with those of the Danes who did not wish to settle down by the Rhine-mouth, took their way from Elsloo into Neustria. Charles the Fat had merely stipulated for the evacuation of his own kingdom, and cared nought for what might happen to his cousin Carloman. The winter of 882-3 was as disastrous for northern France as that of 881-2 had been for the Rhineland. From Rheims to Amiens and Courtray, the whole country-side was harried: king Carloman and his nobles, instead of copying the conduct of Lewis III., and remembering the triumph of Saucourt, followed the miserable example of Charles the Fat, and paid the invaders the enormous bribe of 12,000 lbs. of silver to induce them to transfer themselves to Austrasia, England, Ireland, or any other realm that they might choose. In the moment of rest obtained by the temporary departure of the pirates, Carloman died, ere yet he had reached his twentieth year. He was accidentally slain by one of his companions, while hunting the boar in a forest near Les Andelys (884). The Carolingian line was now well-nigh spent: five kings had died in five years, and the only males surviving were the shiftless emperor Charles the Fat, and Carloman’s younger brother, a child of five, the posthumous son of Lewis the Stammerer, the prince whom the next generation was to know as Charles the Simple.

"Charles the Fat inherits Neustria, 884." Rather than face the horrors of a minority, the West Franks sent to the emperor and besought him to take up the kingship of Neustria. All the empire that had obeyed Charles the Great was therefore united once more beneath a single sceptre, save the little realm of king Boso, in Provence. But Charles the Fat was a sorry substitute for his great namesake. The three years of his reign over the whole of the Frankish kingdoms (884-7) were fated to shatter the last remnants of loyalty in the breasts of the subjects of the empire, and to cause them to cast away the old royal house in despair, and seek new saviours and new kings.

The history of these three evil years is easily told. Hearing of the death of Carloman, the Danes flocked back to Neustria: ‘oaths sworn to a dead man,’ they said, ‘did not count.’ But their return was chiefly caused by a thorough beating which their main body had suffered at Rochester from the strong hand of king Alfred. At the same time the converted Viking Godfred rose in rebellion on the Lower Rhine. He impudently bade the emperor give him the rich lands about Bonn and Coblenz, ‘because his duchy had no vineyards to yield him wine.’ Charles did not take arms against him, but sent ambassadors to lure him to a conference. When the Dane appeared, the counts Henry and Eberhard treacherously cut him down, and massacred his retinue. The army of Godfred broke up; some of his warriors went plundering in Saxony, where they were cut to pieces, the rest joined king Siegfred, who was just about to invade Neustria (885).

"Great Siege of Paris." The great host of the Vikings had once more united itself under Siegfred, and entered north France, as if designing to subdue the whole country and settle down therein. But they met with an unexpected resistance at Paris, where the local count and bishop, Odo and Gozelin, had gathered together all the best warriors of Neustria. The defence of Paris was the bravest feat of arms which the Franks had wrought since the battle of Saucourt. They maintained the isle of Paris, with its two fortified bridge-heads over the two branches of the Seine, for more than eleven months, against all the assaults of the Northmen (Nov. 885-Oct. 886). Seven hundred Viking keels were drawn ashore on the flat land where the Champ de Mars now lies, and 40,000 Vikings beset the city on all sides. But though shamefully abandoned by the emperor—who chose the time as suitable for a journey to Italy—Odo and Gozelin refused to despair, even when the northern bridge-head was cut off from the city by an inundation, and burnt by the besiegers.

At last, in the summer of 886, Charles the Fat so far bestirred himself as to raise the national levies of the whole empire, and march to the relief of Paris with an army not less than that which he had led four years earlier against the camp of Elsloo. But when his vanguard received a check, and its leader, Henry, duke of Franconia, was slain, the emperor refused to risk an attack on the Danes. "Charles the Fat bribes the Danes." Once more the disgraceful scene of Elsloo was renewed: Charles paid the Danes 700 lbs. of silver, and gave them permission to pass up the Seine into Burgundy, and work their will there. He was angry with the Burgundians for refusing him obedience and leaning to the cause of Boso, the king of Arles, and chose this despicable means of wreaking his vengeance on them.

Paris was saved, and the reputation of its gallant defender, count Odo, raised to the highest pitch. But the emperor had thrown away his last chance, and forfeited the respect of even the meanest of his subjects. His remaining days were few and evil. Attacked by softening of the brain, and burdened by an ever-increasing corpulence, he retired to Germany after the disgraceful treaty of Paris. There his doom was awaiting him: the counts and dukes of the East Frankish realm conspired against him, headed by his illegitimate nephew Arnulf, duke of Carinthia, the son of king Carloman. In 887 the young duke took up arms, openly announcing that he was about to march on Frankfurt and depose his uncle. "Abdication of Charles the Fat." Charles tried to raise an army, but none of his vassals would lend him aid: in sheer despair he sent his royal crown and robes to Arnulf, abandoning the kingdom, and craving only five manors in his native Suabia to maintain him for his few remaining days. This boon the duke granted, and the unwieldy ex-Caesar dragged himself away to a royal villa at Neidingen, where he died less than three months after, worn out by the bodily ills which form the only possible excuse for his shiftless and cowardly conduct during the last three years.

Meanwhile Arnulf entered Frankfurt, and was there hailed as king by all the counts and dukes of Germany. He was known as a brave and able young man, and though he was "Arnulf, king of Germany, 888-899." but a Karling of bastard blood, the East Franks gladly intrusted themselves to the protection of his arm. But the other parts of the empire did not consider themselves bound to follow the lead of Germany. In each of the kingdoms a noble of great local note and power stepped forward to claim the crown of his native land.

In Neustria there still survived one Karling of the direct line, the boy Charles the Simple, Carloman’s youngest brother; but he had only reached the age of eight, and when Paris was but just saved, and the Danes were still on the Seine, it was no time to give the crown to children. "Odo, king of France." Two claimants appeared for the Neustrian throne, Wido duke of Spoleto, an Italian noble whose mother had been a daughter of the emperor Lothair, and Odo count of Paris, the hero who had saved his city from the Danes in the past year. Though he could boast of no Carolingian blood in his veins, Odo easily carried the day against his rival; he was crowned king at CompiÈgne by Walter, archbishop of Sens, and soon forced Wido to leave France and retire to Italy.

We shall relate in another chapter how Berengar of Friuli was chosen king of Italy, and how he was obliged to fight hard for his crown with Wido, when the latter returned from his unsuccessful expedition to France.

"Rudolf, king of Upper Burgundy." A fourth kingdom was established in the Jura and the western Alps by count Rudolf, one of the governors of Upper Burgundy. He first got himself crowned at St. Maurice by the counts and bishops of Helvetia, and then, pushing beyond the Jura, was again proclaimed king at Toul. But Rudolf never got any firm footing in Lotharingia: his realm was limited to the lands north of the Alps, west of the Aar, and east of the Saone. The chief towns of this—the smallest of the fractions of the Carolingian realm—were Lausanne, Geneva, St. Maurice, and BesanÇon.

Boso’s kingdom of Arles or Lower Burgundy was now in the ninth year of its existence; its founder had died in 887, but his son Lewis—a Carolingian on the female side through his mother Hermengarde, the daughter of the emperor Lewis of Italy, had succeeded without trouble to his father’s throne.

Thus the Frankish empire was cut up into five states, not ephemeral creations of a heritage-partition, like the many kingdoms which we have seen rising and falling from the days of the Merovingians onward, but more permanent divisions, three of which represented real national differences, while even the other two—the Upper and Lower Burgundy—had a certain national coherence and individuality of their own, and were destined to last for several generations. One of the five realms was ruled by a bastard Carolingian; two by two princes who boasted a Carolingian descent on the spindle side: only France and Upper Burgundy were in the hands of monarchs who could lay claim to no drop of the ancient royal blood.^[62]

62.Rudolf of Upper Burgundy was connected by marriage with the Karlings. He was nephew of the empress Judith, the mother of Charles the Bald, and therefore cousin to all the Neustrian Karlings.