Arnulf, king of Germany—His victory at Louvain over the Danes—His expedition to Italy—His troubles with his son Zwentibold—Approach of the Magyars—Reign of Lewis the Child—Internal anarchy, and disasters from Magyar invasions—Reign of Conrad of Franconia—His troubles and death.

Arnulf of Carinthia was base-born, the son of the Slavonic mistress of king Carloman, but he possessed a considerable share of the strength and vigour of his ancestors. For the twelve years of his reign the German realm made head against its enemies to north and east, and held the primacy among the states of Christendom. The Frankish empire had now fallen apart into five states: but the kings who held the other shares all came to seek out Arnulf and obtain his recognition of their rights. Odo the ruler of the West Franks was the first to appear before the German monarch and crave his friendship. "Supremacy of Arnulf in the Empire." It would almost appear that he recognised Arnulf as his superior and liege lord, for on his return to Neustria he had himself crowned for a second time at Rheims in the presence of German ambassadors, and with a diadem which Arnulf had given to him. Rudolf the ruler of Upper Burgundy was the next to visit the German court: he came to Regensburg, obtained recognition from Arnulf, and returned in peace. Berengar of Lombardy, already threatened with war by his competitor Wido of Spoleto, met the king of Germany at Trent, on the border of his realm, and promised to be his faithful supporter in all things. Lastly Hermengarde, the widow of Boso of Lower Burgundy (Arles), placed her young son Lewis under Arnulf’s protection, and besought him to undertake the regency of the ProvenÇal realm.

Though Arnulf had not obtained the imperial title he was for all practical purposes far more of a general suzerain and ruler of the whole Frankish realm than any of his relatives had been for the last fifty years. The best sign of his strength was that he succeeded in checking the inroads of the Vikings in a manner which made them for the future the least dangerous of the many enemies of Germany. In 891 the Danes came flooding into Austrasia in great force, and harried all the lands on the Meuse and Moselle. The local levies of Lotharingia were beaten, and Sunderold archbishop of Mainz, who had led them, fell on the field. "The Battle of Louvain, 891." But Arnulf, who had been far away in Bavaria, came flying westward on the news of this disaster, and chased the Danes as far as their great fortified camp at Louvain on the Dyle. There they had entrenched themselves with the river at their back and a marsh in their front, which rendered it impossible for the Frankish horsemen to approach them. But Arnulf bade all his warriors dismount, and taking axe in hand led them through the swamp and up to the Danish palisades. The Germans hewed down the breastwork, broke into the camp, and drove the Danes into the river, where most of them perished. This was the last first-class engagement which the Danes ever fought in the East Frankish realm. They continued to come on plundering excursions to Frisia and the lower Rhine, but never attempted again either to penetrate deep into the land or to set up any independent principality upon its borders.

"Arnulf in Italy." After defeating the Danes and putting down some risings of his eastern Slavonic vassals, the Czechs and Moravians, Arnulf undertook the unwise enterprise of conquering Italy, whence his friend and vassal Berengar had of late been expelled by Wido of Spoleto. Of the details of his two invasions of 894 and 895-6 we have spoken at length in our Italian chapter.^[66] Arnulf returned from Italy wearing the imperial crown, whose splendour seemed to ratify the primacy that he already possessed over his brother-kings; but he was broken in health by the fever that he had caught in the Roman campaign, and he left Italy behind him in a state of complete disorder, and mainly in the hands of Lambert of Spoleto.

After his Italian expedition Arnulf’s reign was much less fortunate. A fatal succession-difficulty arose in his own house, and caused endless trouble. For many years he had no lawful issue born to him: so he persuaded the national council of the Germans to allow him to designate his bastard son Zwentibold as his heir (889). Four years later he made this prince sub-king in Lotharingia. "Dynastic Troubles, 893-99." But the same year (893) his wedded wife Ota bore him a son, known in history as Lewis the Child, who was therefore recognised as the lawful heir to the empire, to the great grief and anger of the new king of Lotharingia. From this time forward Zwentibold, an unruly and turbulent young man, was a perpetual thorn in his father’s side. He grudged his infant brother the heritage of the German kingdom, and persistently stirred up strife. He fell into a long and bloody feud with some of the chief nobles of Lotharingia, and notably with Reginald-with-the-Long-Neck, count of Hainault and the Maasgau. In revenge for his tyranny Reginald and many others of the Austrasians called in to their aid Charles the Simple, the monarch of Neustria, and did homage to him as king of Lotharingia, handing over to him the old royal towns of Aachen and Nimuegen. The attempt to tear away Austrasia from Germany failed, not because of Zwentibold’s arms, but because Charles the Simple feared to face the whole force of the East Frankish realm, when Arnulf took up his son’s cause (898). He agreed to retire into his own states, and evacuated Austrasia.

"The Hungarians." Of even greater import of evil to Germany than Zwentibold’s unruliness was the arrival on the eastern frontier of the kingdom of a new race of enemies. These were the Ugrian tribe of the Magyars or Hungarians who appeared in 896 on the middle Danube and Theiss, where the decaying remnant of the Avars were now dwelling mixed among the Slavonic Moravians. The Magyars had been driven westward by another wild horde, the Tartar Petchenegs, who thrust them out of South Russia and forced them to find new homes. They were a race of light horsemen, mighty with the bow, skilful in sudden onsets and feigned retreats, but wanting the perseverance and steady strength in pitched battle which would have rendered them invincible. Their raids were even more rapid and destructive than those of the Northmen, but they were not such formidable foes to meet as the Vikings, for they never could learn to besiege a fortified place, or to defend themselves in entrenched camps, or to fight in regular line of battle. All their attacks were mere ambushes or sudden surprises, and they seldom allowed the heavy horsemen of Germany to fight them on equal terms and in the open field. Their custom was to ride through the open country burning defenceless monasteries and villages, but avoiding walled towns and always escaping in haste if the levies of the district came out against them in full force.

Arnulf himself was responsible for the first visit of the Magyars to the empire. During his Moravian war he hired some of their warriors to follow him to the field as auxiliary light horse. Thus they learnt the way into Moravia and Germany alike: during Arnulf’s own life they do not seem to have seriously molested his kingdom, for they were mainly occupied in evicting the Slavs from the plains by the Danube. But no sooner was the emperor dead than they began to extend their ravages into Bavaria and Thuringia. At an even earlier date they are found already harassing north Italy, and vexing the soul of king Berengar by ravaging his native duchy of Friuli (899).

"Death of Arnulf, 899." In December 899 Arnulf died, old before his time, and was buried in his favourite city of Regensburg. Then the dukes, counts, and bishops of Germany met at Forchheim and chose as king Lewis the Child, the six-year-old son of their deceased monarch. The reign of a minor was always dangerous to the old Teutonic kingdoms, and that of Lewis was no exception to the rule. The eleven years during which he nominally ruled as king of Germany were almost the most disastrous ever known in the history of the East Frankish realm. Hitherto the land had been fortunate in its rulers; of all the descendants of Charles the Great the German line had been by far the most able and vigorous; save the unhappy Charles the Fat,—who only reigned for five years—they had all proved strong and capable rulers. "Weakness of Lewis the Child." But now under the nominal sway of Lewis the Child all the evils that had been kept down by his father’s strong hand came to a sudden head. Germany was deprived of all central authority, and exposed to two evils at once, invasion by the enemy from without and civil war at home.

The first troubles came from Lotharingia, where king Zwentibold had made himself so hated that many of the Austrasian nobles determined to disavow their allegiance to him, and to acknowledge his boy-brother as immediate ruler as well as suzerain. While waging war on his rebellious subjects Zwentibold fell in battle; as he very happily left no male issue, his kingdom was at once reunited with the main body of the Germanic realm.

But worse was to come: in 902 there burst out the first of the great family feuds which were to be such a curse to Germany. During the last generation the succession to the posts of duke, count, and margrave throughout the land had been tending more and more toward hereditary right. It was growing quite usual to continue the son in the father’s office, and to give to brothers countships in each other’s close neighbourhood. Under a strong government this had not led to any danger. Arnulf had been powerful enough to keep all his vassals in order. But his son was a mere child without any grown relative at his side to act as protector, and not even provided with a strong Mayor of the Palace to vindicate the royal authority. So far as there was any central government at all, it was worked by two great bishops, Adalbero of Augsburg and Hatto of Mainz—the wicked prelate of German tales, of whom posterity persisted in believing that he was devoured alive by rats in divine punishment for his sins. But Hatto and Adalbero were not even formally acknowledged as regents by the national diet, and had no authority to use the royal name save to execute the behests of that council.

"Civil wars in Franconia." In the third year of Lewis two powerful family-groups of counts in Franconia began to wage open war on each other, not under any pretence of serving the crown but purely to settle a personal feud. Adalbert of Bamberg and his two kinsmen, who governed the land of the Saal and upper Main, fell upon Conrad and Eberhard, two brothers who ruled in Hesse and on the Lahn, and for four years central Germany was torn by their intermittent struggles. The meeting of the national council, and the anathemas of the bishops proved quite unable to bring the feud to an end. Presently the quarrel spread into western Lotharingia, where two other counts, Gerhard and Matfrid, espoused the cause of Adalbert and attacked his enemies in Hesse. It was only after four counts had fallen in battle, and the whole Main valley had been miserably ravaged, that a diet, summoned by bishop Hatto at Tribur, finally put its ban on Adalbert of Bamberg, as the fomenter of the war, and raised a great army against him. He was beleaguered by the national levy in his castle of Theres, captured and executed, while his friends Gerhard and Matfrid were exiled. But it had taken four years to induce the nation to move, and meanwhile other great counts and dukes had learnt the lesson that they might enjoy a long impunity, whatever turbulent enterprise they might take in hand. A few years later we find Burchard margrave of Rhaetia endeavouring to make himself duke of all Suabia by coercing the small governors in his neighbourhood; when he was put down and executed, by counsel of the bishops who surrounded the young king, popular sympathy was decidedly in favour of the feudal usurper and not of the central government. In Lotharingia too troubles never ceased; they culminated in a second attempt of count Reginald-with-the-Long-Neck to make over the Austrasian countries to the king of Neustria, Charles the Simple.

"Invasions of the Hungarians." But serious as were these civil broils, their importance was as nothing compared with the greater disasters caused by the Hungarians’ ravages on the eastern frontier. From the first year of king Lewis onward their attacks knew no intermission. They began by raids on Bavaria and Carinthia; a little later, while the Franconian civil war was in progress, we find them penetrating into Suabia and even into the distant Saxony. In 907 they defeated the whole levy of Bavaria, and slew its duke Luitpold together with the archbishop of Salzburg and the bishops of Freising and Seben. The consequence of this disaster was the temporary loss to Germany of its eastern frontier, the Bavarian ‘Ostmark,’ which we now know as Austria; the Magyars overran the whole of it as far as the Enns. In the very next year the victorious horde entered Thuringia and slew its duke together with the bishop of Wurzburg. In 910 the young king himself, now sixteen years old, took the field against them for the first time, and for once Bavarians, Suabians, and Franconians were found united under him for a common campaign against the invader. But the first fight of king Lewis was a disaster: his army was caught in an ambush and routed with great slaughter, only the Bavarian troops escaped the panic and succeeded in checking the outset of the victorious enemy.

How Lewis might have fared in future warfare against the Magyars we cannot say, for a year later, ere yet he had attained the threshold of manhood, he was carried off by disease. With him was extinguished the German line of the Carolingian house, for he left no male heir of any kind, whether brother, uncle, or cousin, to take up the heavy heritage of the Teutonic crown. (911.)

The only alternatives that now lay before the German nobles were either to elect as king one of the French branch of the Carolingian line, or else to follow the example of the Burgundians, Italians, and ProvenÇals and choose one of themselves as the new ruler. "Election of Conrad I., 911." After much hesitation the latter course commended itself to the diet, and at Forchheim the Franconians, Saxons, Suabians, and Bavarians joined in elevating to the throne Conrad, a count of lower Franconia, the son of that Conrad who had fallen in the war with Adalbert of Bamberg five years before. Only the Austrasians, faithful now as ever to the house of Charles the Great, refused to acknowledge the new king, and once more did homage to Charles the Simple, the weak but ambitious monarch of Neustria. Conrad seems to have been remotely descended in the female line from the house of St. Arnulf, but could not pretend to represent the old traditions of Frankish royalty. He was simply the most powerful, or almost the most powerful, man among the German noble houses, and was chosen purely for his military abilities.

Conrad’s reign of seven years (911-918) was one continuous story of rebellion and disaster. Under a ruler of a new line, whom they regarded merely as one of themselves, the local governors became even more insolent to the central power than before. They made war on each other at their good pleasure, and each endeavoured to put down his weaker neighbours and make their possessions his own. Each of the ancient divisions of the German realm, the original tribal unities of Suabian and Bavarian, Saxon and Frank, showed a tendency to draw apart from its fellows. Each sought to reassert its individuality under some new ruler of its own, to hail its strongest noble as duke and follow him even against the king. It required a strong and persevering monarch to keep this separatist tendency under, and to prevent it from splitting up the realm.

Conrad I. was deficient neither in energy nor in perseverance. His whole reign was filled with struggles against the usurpations of the greater nobles, but he was still far from having won a victory when he died. Except from his fellow-countrymen in Franconia, and from the higher clergy, he got little assistance in the strife, and his own last words were a warning to the Germans that they must choose a stronger king than himself if their kingdom was to survive.

"Rebellions against Conrad I." It would be wearisome to relate the many campaigns of Conrad against his too-powerful subjects, to tell how the Palatine count Erchanger tried to make himself duke in Suabia; how Arnulf, the son of that Luitpold whom the Hungarians had slain, claimed the ducal power in Bavaria; how the great Saxon Henry, son of duke Otto—to be better known a few years later as king Henry the First—defied his liege lord to drive him out of Saxony. Conrad was generally unsuccessful in his strife against the rebels; it is true that he defeated, captured, and executed the would-be duke of Suabia, and that he drove Arnulf the Bavarian into exile for a time. But he utterly failed in his attempt to win back Austrasia from Charles the Simple, and his expedition into Saxony against duke Henry came to a disastrous end, so that he was compelled to make peace and to recognise Henry’s ducal power over the whole country. It is said that Hatto, the great archbishop of Mainz, died of sheer anger and disgust on hearing of the triumph of the Saxon, against whom he had a personal grudge. Hatto had been the chief supporter of the central government in the reign of Conrad, as in the reign of Lewis the Child, and could not bear to see the forces of disunion finally victorious.

"Further Magyar inroads." It need hardly be added that while civil war raged all over the German kingdom, the foreign enemy was more active than ever. Instead of afflicting only the eastern border of the land, the Magyars came flooding in over its whole extent. They even reached the Rhine: in 913 we find them before the walls of Coblenz: in 917 they surprised and burnt Basel, the south-westernmost of all the cities of the realm. Meanwhile the Suabians and Bavarians were too much occupied in resisting the king to be able either to unite or defend themselves.

"Death of Conrad, 918." In this melancholy position of affairs Conrad I. died on the 23d of December 918. His last act was to assemble his brothers and his chief councillors at his bedside, and to warn them that if Germany was to be saved they must find a stronger man than himself to crown as king. He advised them not to look within his own family, but to elect his rival the powerful duke Henry of Saxony. Though Henry was an obstinate enemy of his own, Conrad considered him the strongest and most capable statesman in the realm, and putting aside all personal enmity gave his vote in the Saxon’s favour. His advice was taken and the happiest results ensued.

Here then we must leave Germany, still in evil plight, but on the eve of better things. She had yet to solve the question whether the work of Charles the Great—the blending of Frank, Saxon, Suabian, and Bavarian into a single nationality—was to endure, or whether the disruptive tendencies were still too strong. Fortunately for her there were two great forces at work in favour of unity. The Church owed her rise and growth in Germany to the protection of the great Frankish kings, and in gratitude always fought upon the side of royalty and union. But even more important was the pressure of hostile neighbours from without: it had become evident since the death of king Arnulf to even the most turbulent of the Suabian counts and the most unruly of the Saxon tribes, that if Germany was to survive she must submit herself to a single ruler. If the reigns of Lewis the Child and Conrad the Franconian had been disastrous failures, it was because the one was too young and the other too destitute both of heriditary claims and of personal followers. When a strong man with one of the great duchies at his back took Conrad’s place, the problem of saving Germany was found not to be insoluble.