The Ten Kingdoms in the Dark Ages.
"THE appellation of great has often been bestowed and sometimes deserved, but CHARLEMAGNE is the only prince in whose favor the title has been indissolubly blended with the name. . . . The dignity of his person, the length of his reign, the prosperity of his arms, the vigor of his government, and the reverence of distant nations, distinguish him from the royal crowd; and Europe dates a new era from his restoration of the Western Empire."-Dec. and Fall, chap. 49, par. 21. It seems almost certain that Charlemagne really aspired to the restoration of the Roman Empire. But one life was too short, and there was no second Charlemagne. Besides this, the prophetic word was written that when once Rome was divided into its ten parts they should not be made to cleave one to another no more than could iron and clay. Charlemagne reigned forty-six years—forty-three from the death of Carloman—thirty-three of which were spent in almost ceaseless wars. He conducted, in all, fifty-three expeditions—thirty-one against the Saxons, Frisons, Danes, Slavs, Bavarians, and the Avars, in upper Germany, Bohemia, Noricum, and Pannonia; five against the Lombards in Italy; twelve against the Saracens, in Spain, Corsica, and Sardinia; two against the Greeks; and three in Gaul itself against the Aquitanians and the Britons. Thus Saxony, Bohemia, Bavaria, Pannonia (Hungary), the Lombard kingdom of Italy as far as the duchy of Beneventum, that part of Spain between the Pyrenees and the river Ebro, Burgundy, Alemannia, and all of Gaul, was subject to the sway of Charlemagne. He already wore the iron crown of Lombardy in addition to the kingship of all the Frankish dominions; but when on Christmas day, 800, in the church of St. Peter, Pope Leo III. placed a precious crown upon the head of this mighty king while the great dome resounded with the acclamations of the people: "Long life and victory to Charles, the most pious Augustus, crowned by God the great and pacific emperor of the Romans," the honor seems well deserved. "For fourteen years, with less of fighting and more of organization, Charles the Great proved that he was worthy of his high title and revived office of Emperor of the West." "And when in 801 an embassy arrived with curious presents from Harun al-Rashid, the great caliph who held in the East the same place as Charles in the West, men recognized it as a becoming testimony to the world-wide reputation of the Frankish monarchy." But this honor, this power, and this glory was short-lived. Charlemagne died at Aix-la-Chapelle, January 28, 814, and the unity of the empire which he had formed was at an end. "Like more than one great barbaric warrior, he admired the Roman Empire that had fallen,—its vastness all in one and its powerful organization under the hand of a single master. He thought he could resuscitate it, durably, through the victory of a new people and a new faith, by the hand of Franks and Christians. With this view he labored to conquer, convert, and govern. He tried to be, at one and the same time, Caesar, Augustus, and Constantine. And for a moment he appeared to have succeeded; but the appearance passed away with himself. The unity of the empire and the absolute power of the emperor were buried in his grave."-Guizot's France, chap. 11, end. Charlemagne was succeeded by his only surviving son, Louis the Pious, upon whom he had fixed the succession in 813, about six months before his death. Louis passed his life in a struggle with an ambitious second wife, and three undutiful sons who by constant rebellions abused his natural gentleness and goodness. In the quarrels and jealousies of his sons he was twice deposed and twice restored, and perhaps only escaped a third deposition, by his death June 20, 840. This set the sons free to wrangle among themselves, which they did till the fearful battle of Fontanet June 25, 841; and the treaty of Verdun, August, 843, put an end to their mutual struggles and "to the griefs of the age." Lothair, the eldest son, retained the title of emperor and received the Italian territory, with a long narrow strip stretching from the Gulf of Lyons to the North Sea, bounded on the east by the Alps and the Rhine, and on the west by the Rhone, the Saone, the Meuse, and the Scheldt. Charles the Bald had all the rest of Gaul. Louis the German received Alemannia and all the rest of the German lands east of the Rhine, with the towns of Mainz, Worms, and Spires, on the western bank of that river. This division, though counted as marking the real beginning of the history of France and Germany as separate kingdoms, lasted but a short time. For the Emperor Lothair died in 855, and was succeeded in his possessions to the north of Italy by Lothair II., who died in 869, when Charles the Bald seized upon his territory. But Louis the German disputed his seizure of the whole prize, and in 870 they signed the treaty of Mersen by which Louis became possessed of most of Lotharingia, or, as it was now called, Lorraine; Charles the Bald the rest of it, and Lothair's brother, Louis II., was allowed to retain the possessions of his father in Italy. Louis II. died in 875, and Charles the Bald managed to secure the imperial crown and aimed at the possession of the whole empire with it. But Louis the German, at his death in 876, had divided Germany among his three sons,—Carlman, Louis, and Charles—the second of whom, Louis, met Charles the Bald on the field of Andernach and gained such a victory over him as to not only put an effectual damper upon his imperial aspirations, but to force him to give up the portions of Lorraine that had been ceded to his father by the treaty of Mersen. Carlman and Louis both soon died, and the German kingdom passed to Charles surnamed "the Fat," the youngest of the three sons of Louis the German. Charles the Fat, incompetent, indolent, and gluttonous, became, without any effort of his own, sovereign of all the dominions of Charlemagne, except Burgundy which now became again an independent state. Alemannia—Swabia—he inherited from his father in 876; by the death of his brother Carlman, he received Bavaria and became king of Italy, in 880; he was crowned emperor in 881; the death of his brother Louis of Saxony gave him all the rest of the Germanic possessions; and as Charles the Bald had died in 877, and had no successor who could relieve France from the scourge of the Northmen, Charles the Fat was invited to become the king of France, at the death of Carloman in 885. But instead of boldly meeting the Northmen with an army, he adopted the policy of buying off these bold savages who had plundered Cologne and Treves, and had led their horses over the very grave and in the beautiful basilica of Charlemagne. And when they laid siege to Paris and he still pursued the same cowardly course, his disgusted subjects, under the leadership of his nephew Arnulf, deposed him in 887, and in a week or two afterwards he died. Charles the Fat was the last ruler who ever reigned over both France and Germany. After his deposition the history of these two countries is distinct. It will be seen that the boundaries of France under the treaty of Verdun are very nearly the same as at present with the exception of that part between the Rhone and Saone, and the Alps. And so having traced the kingdom of the Franks to its permanent bounds, there we leave it. We must now resume the history of the Alemanni, and sketch their fortunes through the tumults of the Dark Ages. We have seen that the Alemanni and their Suevic brethren that followed them in the invasion of the Roman Empire, took possession of all Rhaetia as far south as the country about the lake of Constance and the northern border of Switzerland; and that part of Gaul which lay between the Rhine and Moselle, and the head waters of the Seine. Thus they occupied the country which now comprises Alsace, Lorraine, Baden, Wurtemburg, greater part of Bavaria, and the southern of the large divisions of Hesse-Darmstadt. When they were defeated by Clovis, their Gallic possessions became the prize of the conqueror, but all the rest they were allowed to occupy, and were permitted by Clovis and his successors "to enjoy their peculiar manners and institutions, under the government of official, and at length of hereditary, dukes."-Gibbon, chap. 36, par. 5; chap. 38, par. 5. These, as well as the other German conquests of Clovis, "soon became virtually free. They continued to acknowledge Frankish supremacy; but the acknowledgment was only formal. At the head of each confederation was its own herzog or duke. These rulers were at first appointed by the Frankish kings, or received their sanction; but in course of time the office became hereditary in particular families."-Encyc. Brit., art. Germany, p. 477. Of the Alemanni there were two dukedoms, Swabia and Bavaria, and it is under these two names that their future history is found. But as Swabia is the original, and as it has exerted a greater influence in the affairs of Germany than has any other confederation, it is the one about which most must be said; for the history of it is, in a measure, the history of Germany, especially after the treaty of Verdun. Thassilo, duke of Bavaria, had been on ill terms with Pepin, the father of Charlemagne, and when Charlemagne came to the throne, Thassilo rendered very indifferent service, and his repeated acts of treachery caused Charlemagne to remove him, and Bavaria was placed under the authority of the margrave of Ostreich (Austria). The "margraves" were "lords of the marches," and the "marches" were formed of the border countries, by Charlemagne, over which he appointed "margraves" (markgrafen) "whose duty was to administer justice in his name, to collect tribute, and extend his conquests." Bavaria was ruled by margraves till about 900, when it again became a dukedom. The margraviate of Ostreich continued till 1156, when it, too, was made a duchy, and thus the march of Ostreich, formed by Charlemagne, was the origin of what is now the empire of Austria.