In the darkest ages of the fifth and sixth centuries Christianity alone kept hope alive. In the terrible welter and insecurity of Gaul, some men were weary to death of fighting, robbing, burning, thieving, snatching; they wanted peace and the stillness of the soul above all things. Then the monastic life suggested itself. Men seeking the life of the mind and spirit gathered together in the religious houses, or monasteries, where, shut off from the howling desert world, they could think, and write, and pray, and hope. They worked in their fields and kept some spots on the earth sunny and clear. They went among the people, helping, encouraging, teaching, keeping the soul alive and preventing men from sinking back into brutish emptiness. Their lives were a continued protest against the degraded, hopeless slavery of Roman Gaul. Man cannot live without hope, and it was the monks and priests who kept the hope alive in the countryside, the bishops and clergy who fed it in the towns.
At the same time the people mingled all kinds of superstitions with the Christian beliefs. If they had worshipped some strange pagan goddess at a well, a goddess to whom they brought flowers, then they put a statue of the Virgin Mary in place of the idol of the goddess, and it was Mary who performed miracles with the water, and whose voice was heard at night from the bubbling of the spring, and to whom flowers or even other sacrifices were offered. Many sacred trees of the Druids were cut down. But at other times a crucifix was nailed to a bough, and Jesus became the Son of the mystic Tree; or else a little chapel or shrine was built in the shade of the oak, and here the gifts to the terrible deity of the Druids were hung up in offering to the new God, the new golden bough, the golden Jesus. So the mistletoe was sacred to Jesus. And even now it is the symbol of the kiss of love and increase in our Christmas festivities. So the old and new religions mingled in the Gallic Christianity, the two spirits became one, Jesus is the fruit of the Tree.
Even this measure of peace was to be disturbed again. In the south the Visigothic and the Burgundian kingdoms were Christian, but they belonged to the eastern Christianity, not the Roman. In the north the German Franks were still pagan. The Franks had long been friends and allies of the Roman people. As allies of the Romans for many years they defended the left bank of the Rhine. As Roman power faded away, they came to possess these lands of the left side of the Rhine. These were the first Frankish lands, and always the centre of the Frankish people, the territories we now call Alsace, Lorraine, Luxemburg, Belgium. For the Franks did not like emigrating far from the Rhine.
The Franks were not a single tribe, but probably a confederacy of Germans from many tribes. Frank means a man armed with a franciscus, or axe: a German axe-fighter. They were a loose, brave, barbarous, pagan people, hardly united at all. One of their tribes to the north was the Salian. They were settled by the marshy Rhine mouths. The Salians were very brave, and had caused endless trouble by their ceaseless raids into Northern Gaul. They became the most important of the Franks. Their chiefs were the Merwings, one of the most considerable families in all the confederation. We know that a Merwig or Merwing led the Franks against Attila, and watched that king from the north, until he crossed the Rhine.
In the year 481 a boy of fifteen, Clovis, became heir to the kingship of the Salian Franks. His tribe was small, counting four thousand fighting men, but very brave, sprung from those Batavian Germans whom the Romans respected so deeply. Clovis was faithfully followed, and made headway. By the time he was twenty he was head of a large army of Franks, his own Salians forming the core of the fighting force.
At Soissons the shadow of the Roman name was kept up in the court of Syagrius. All Gaul was III the hands of barbarians, except Armorica (Brittany), and the land stretching from Brittany to the Frankish borders. Armorica was a free Gallic republic. Syagrius, in the Roman name, ruled over the broad district between the Loire and the Meuse, the district of which Paris is the real centre, but which Syagrius feebly governed from Soissons. He administered justice between the Germans and the Gauls, and hoped one day to gather all the north into a kingdom.
This was not destined to take place. In 486 the young Frank Clovis fell upon Syagrius. Syagrius fled south for his life, to Toulouse, the capital of the young Visigothic king Alaric. Clovis sent messengers and warriors down to the Mediterranean, to Alaric in Toulouse, demanding the surrender of Syagrius. Alaric, not seeing what a deadly neighbour he was bringing himself, delivered up Syagrius, who was promptly slain by Clovis.
The Franks now occupied the territories of the unfortunate Syagrius, and Clovis was possessed of a large district, bounded by the Rhine on the north, the Loire on the south, Burgundy on the east, and Armorica on the west. Gaul was now swallowed up by barbarians, the Gallo-Romans had no land of their own. Only Armorica, a corner, remained free.
The Roman Church of Gaid was established in the north, in the territories of Syagrius. Rheims was the most famous bishopric. The bishops had now a new power to encounter; the Franks were upon them. The Franks were pagan, but then the bishops always had hopes of the wild, uncivilised Germanic tribes, for if they could convert them, they would have great influence over them. So the great desire of the Gallic bishops was to convert the Franks. If they could convert them they could use them, and establish the power of the Gallic Church upon them.
Remigius, Bishop of Rheims, was an astute man. Whilst Clovis was still very young, he had been very friendly to him. The friendship continued, but still Remigius dared not press the young pagan to desert his old faith. At last Clovis, having become more powerful, wished to marry, and to marry a princess. Remigius no doubt artfully suggested the fair Clotilde, a Christian of the Roman Church, and niece to the king of Burgundy. So Clovis married Clotilde.
Remigius had taught Clotilde carefully. He knew the Germans were always very soft and pliant towards their young wives. He knew also that women in his time depended on Christianity for their freedom and equality, for all pagans kept their wives in the background. If Clotilde had a Christian husband she would be a free Christian woman. If not, she would be an obscure pagan wife. It was no wonder that women were the most ardent missionaries in private life, in the first days.
But Clovis was still only a petty prince among the Franks. In 496 the Allemanni, the All-men, the famous German confederacy who had their home about the headwaters of the Rhine, pushed towards Gaul, and pressed on the Franks in Alsace. The Franks of the south called on the Franks of the north. Clovis came down with his Salian army. A great battle took place between the united Franks and the Allemanni. The battle was going against the Franks. In his wild excitement, feeling that he was losing, in the midst of battle Clovis thought of his queen at home. Without knowing what he was doing, he cried out as he fought that if the God of his Clotilde would grant him victory, he would accept her faith. So he swept on in a new rush, the tide of battle turned, the Allemanni were utterly routed.
In their joy nearly all the tribes in the confederation of Franks submitted to the overlordship of Clovis, and he had a great people under him. Now came the time to fulfil his vow. But in his cool mind he was unwilling to do so. He hesitated. Clotilde and Remigius persuaded and persuaded him. At last he consented. He was baptized in Rheims Cathedral, with three thousand of his warriors, whom he had commanded or exhorted to accept the new faith along with him. Remigius, or St. Remy as we now call him, was delighted. He performed the ceremony with all possible splendour, and it seemed to the barbarians as if they were entering heaven itself.
The bishops now handed over the relics of the old Roman legions, their standards and trophies, to Clovis, and Clovis became master of Northern Gaul, save only for Armorica. He was a Christian of the true Latin or Roman Church, as were all the Gallic clergy. But the Burgundians and the Goths were heretic Arians, belonging to the eastern form of Christianity. So the bishops hated them.
Clovis was the drawn sword of the bishops. First he attacked the Burgundians, and defeated their king Gondebald in 500. Then he ravaged Provence, the old Roman province just round Marseilles, and gave it to a friend, Theodoric the Ostrogoth. Then he looked at the great kingdom of the Goths, stretcliing away from the south to the Bay of Biscay and the Loire, a rich land.
‘ It much displeases me,’ said Clovis in 507, ‘ that the Goths, being Arians, should own a part of Gaul. Let us go and, God helping, seize their land.’ So they swooped down, the Frankish hosts on the Visigoths. Clovis met Alaric in single combat. Alaric was slain, his army routed. The Franks began to ravage the country. Theodoric the Ostrogoth came against his former friend, and saved just a strip of the Visigothic kingdom along the Mediterranean round Narbonne to the Pyrenees. This the Visigoths kept for three centuries longer. It was called Septimania.
The Franks treated the Visigothic land shamefully, and then, when weary of it, retired north, carrying off rich spoil and countless captives. The Gallo-Romans of Aquitaine, amazed at their orthodox friends from the north, conceived a hatred against them that lasted for hundreds of years, a hatred far surpassing anything they ever felt for their more humane conquerors the Goths.
Meanwhile the Emperor of the East had sent an embassy to Clovis, bearing orders to confer the title of Consul Romanus on the barbarian. Clovis was pleased. With great pomp he celebrated the investiture. In the cathedral of Tours, Martin, Bishop of Tours, invested the Frankish chieftain with the purple tunic and mantle, and with a diadem. So Clovis rode through the streets, amid the acclamations of the people. He was a Roman Consul, as Julius Caesar had been before him. The Gallo-Romans were much moved, for they ever looked back to their days of Roman greatness.
Clovis was now raised above any other Germanic chief or king. He tried to establish himself more securely by killing off any head of a tribe he could lay his hands on. One after another he murdered them, and made himself king of their tribes. At last all the Meroving chiefs had perished, Clovis’ own relations, and he was sole head of the Franks, acknowledged by all.
4 Woe is me!’ he said at last,’ for I am left as a sojourner in the midst of strangers. I have now no kinsman to help me, if misfortune comes.’ But he said this like a cunning fox, hoping to draw forward any man who pretended to belong to his royal house. If any had come forward, Clovis would at once have dispatched him. But there was none to come.
Clovis and his Franks were no governors. They could not rule a country. They could only spoil it. The Gallic bishops clustered round his throne flattering him and cunningly using him. The Franks paid to their bishops all the reverential homage they had yielded to their mysterious pagan priests in the past. Clovis loaded the Church with gifts and lands, till it was said the Gallo-Romans recovered through their clergy what they lost through the wars. For the clergy and bishops were all Gallo-Romans. No Frank would dream of taking holy orders. A Frank would live by his sword. So the Gallo-Romans had the Church of Gaul entirely in their own hands, and in this indirect way they governed their own country. For bishops advised and instructed the Frankish princes.
So, in the towns, and on the great Church estates all over the country the Gallic bishops erected their palaces. Just as counts and dukes had had the cities in their power in late Roman days, so the bishops had them now. The bishops were the sole riders, magistrates, protectors of the towns. They were the established landed aristocracy. They really had the warlike, barbarian kings in their power. They became a proud, worldly, domineering race, most unchristian.
Clovis died in 511, and the territories in Gaul were roughly divided among his three sons. The settlement of the land went on slowly, for the Franks were very German in feeling; they kept returning to their old homes by the Rhine, and new bodies of Franks continually passed into Gaul.
When the Franks did settle it was in a very irregular manner. They avoided towns, for they disliked being crowded and shut up. The Gallo-Romans had the cities to themselves. The Franks dispersed themselves in little knots or groups in the countryside, each group almost separate and independent of all the others. The kings had great territories. On these lands they owned certain manor-houses, and with his whole court the king rode from one big farm to another. When he had exhausted the hunting and the provision of one manor or villa, he and his following mounted horse and rode away to camp in another. They caroused, gambled and hunted all day long, when no fighting was to be done. They also practised military sports, that kept them busy.
The king as we know gave large tracts of land to the bishops and to the Church. He also granted fiefs or estates to his friends, the warriors who fought with him, or the men whom he liked. The greater chiefs, however, who had followed the king independently, took greater lands for themselves, and assumed full, free power over it. So that after Clovis’ time we have the kings moving about to their various houses on their own territories, to hunt and sport; we have the more independent chiefs living with their own following on other territories; and we have the smaller estates which the king had given to his friends, and which he might any time take back again.
The Franks, indeed all the Germans, did not attach themselves to land. They counted the man everything, the land nothing. The Frankish king would not deign to call himself king of France or Francia. He was a king of men, king of the Franks. The land was only the hunting-ground and the provision-field of men.
So the king paid not the slightest heed to the cultivation of his territories. On the land which he reserved as his own, the Gallo-Romans were living and working. Most of these were left as they were, and only compelled to give tribute, to provide the king with all he wanted. It was the same on the territories of the great chiefs. Many of the Gallo-Roman gentlemen and freemen remained as they were, in their villas or huts, but they had to give tribute to the Frankish chieftain, yield up corn and cattle and service at his demand. Real tribute meant personal service, labour in the fields of the overlord. When a Frank was given a farm or manor of his own, if it were not occupied he took possession. If it were occupied he got rid of the occupant, installed himself, and worked the land with his captives or slaves. This Frank, having received his land from the king as reward for fighting services, was still a king’s man. He must fight for the king. But he paid no tribute, unless it were in certain provisions. He was almost independent. Only the great independent chiefs held their lands without paying any tribute at all. The commoner Franks who came into Gaul took their share of what they could get — captives, cattle, goods, money. With these they sheltered themselves under a great chieftain, and either asked him to give them a farm, for which they would pay tribute, or else some post in his household. Some of them sank very low, became mere servants or serfs; some remained free farmers.
The Franks kept the land in some sort of order, by the help of the clergy. Councils were held from time to time. There were courts of justice in each district, presided over by a count, whom the king appointed. But as a rule each great landlord made his men bring their disputes before him, and he settled all matters, with the help of his clerk or priest. The chiefs took no notice of the king’s court. Life was wild and disorderly. A good deal of land fell out of cultivation.
The Gallo-Romans were really better off under the Franks than under the later Roman government. The Franks never extorted exorbitant, ruinous taxes. They depended on free gifts. Again, the Germans had always a higher sense of individual freedom than the southerners. They never had personal slaves. They disliked slaves in their household, they could not endure the personal service of slaves. The sight of fields being worked by gangs of men under an overseer was displeasing to them. Already, when the Roman power broke down, the Gallo-Roinans had begun to be afraid of their slave-gangs. Already much land was divided into plots, with cottages or huts.
Now the old Roman villa with its splendours and its barracks for slaves disappeared. The manor-house took its place, with a dove-cot, a church near by, and then the cluster of huts where the labourers lived. The land round about the manor-house belonged to the lord of the manor. Beyond this, the estate was broken up into little plots, and each plot was worked by a freeman or a slave, or even by a poor Frank. So we see that the condition of the slave was much improved, he had his own house for himself and his family, and his own possessions, few as they were, and his own life to himself. But the condition of the freeman sank. Just like a slave, the freeman had to go to work in his master’s fields. For the master or lord kept no labourers. The broad lands round the manor were tilled by the men who lived in the village. Before they touched their own fields they must all, slave, freeman and poor Frank alike, put in so many days of work on the master’s estate. When the manor lands were finished, then the serf might begin on his own.
Still, each man had a soul of his own. The priests were all Gallo-Romans, as were most of the workers on the land. They helped their fellow-countrymen where they could. The Franks were careless task-masters. All went well in years of plenty. In times of bad harvest, many serfs with their families starved to death.
Thus the Gauls possessed their own land again, they had their own huts, each a piece of his mother-earth. But they were serfs. And they were to remain so for hundreds of years. The spirit of German independence and individual liberty had combined with the old Roman ideal of social unity, and the first signs of real European life appeared. But it was all crude and low.
The division of the country among the three sons of Clovis was a misfortune, for these three quarrelled. The Frankish kings even strove to keep up the war-spirit, for they despised a settled life as being fit only for women and churchmen. With their long yellow hair and their fierce ways, these kings were either warrior chiefs or nothing. So the fierce and endless fighting went on, trampling the face of Gaul, which might else have been a pleasant land again. For a hundred years the weary wreckage continucd, whilst the Gallo-Romans laboured and the priests and bishops tried to keep some order. But the bishops were almost as bad as the nobles, so greedy for land, so arrogant, so fierce and eager to make war.
In 628 the good king Dagobert became king of all Gaul, and pacified the land. When he died the old turmoil went on. The king of the north-east, Neustria, fought the king of the north-west, Austrasia. Further south, kings went for nothing, the nobles smashed at one another in endless fray. The land was weary and war-tattered.
In these days the first rude castles were built. The pleasant country houses and villas and open manors that remained from Gallo-Roman days were no use. The Frankish nobles built themselves strongholds with thick walls and unbreakable towers, dark, ugly dens with no windows and no warmth, bitter cold and unhealthy to live in, but secure. Most of the old pleasant houses were destroyed. New ugly buildings frowned from some strong position, huts clustered at their base or by the road not far off.
Churches also were built, and fine abbeys, in a new style, in which the Roman manner was modified by the German spirit. Everywhere the German spirit was pervading old forms, to give birth to a new world. More monasteries arose, refuge for war-wearv mortals. But these had to be built strong as fortresses, since bishops and abbots fought as ferociously as dukes and counts.
In G87 Pippin of Heristal won the battle of Testrv, over the western Franks, the Neustrians, and became chief of all the Frankish nation. He was a good fighter, and wise. He favoured the monks against the too-greedy and impudent bishops, and he proceeded to pacify the land. But no sooner was internal fighting hushed, than external enemies appeared. First the ferocious, pagan Saxons broke over the Rhine. Then the Mohammedans appeared.
The Franks were still German in speech, German in spirit and in manners. Indeed, from the banks of the Rhine to the Seine the land was rather West Germany than Northern France. The Gallo-Romans of the south hated the northerners. But the worst enemies of the Franks were no longer the Visigoth of the south or the Burgundian of the east, but the wild Saxon of the north, and the Mohammedan from Spain.
Again Gaul was between two fires. No sooner were the Saxons driven over the Rhine than the Mohammedans appeared over the Pyrenees. By 718 the Arabs or Moors had finally defeated the Visigoths in Spain. Then the dark armies poured into Southern Gaul. They defeated the Visigoths there, sacked Bordeaux, marched on Tours.
Charles Martel, chief of all the Franks, came down to Aquitaine against the great Arab general Abd-el-Rahman. Beliind Abd-el-Rahman the Arabs were drawn up on their swift and beautiful horses, glittering with armour of fine, thin steel, their faces dark and fierce, their dark beards flowing. They were a great, beautiful host. Behind Charles Martel stood the ranks of tall, blond Franks, Germans, armed with their huge battle-axes. The dark sons of Arabia and Africa faced the young power of Europe. The long and bloody battle of Tours was fought between the two. But the light Arabs with their scimitars could not stand against the whirling battle-axes of the Franks. There was monstrous slaughter, and the Arabs fell back towards the south. But they were not driven out of Francc. For years they held the south of Aquitaine and Septimania, along the Mediterranean.
In 768 Charles, afterwards called Charlemagne, became king of the Franks. Charlemagne is one of the most famous figures in all history. He was a true Frankish-German, tall, with beautiful bright hair and fresh colouring. German was his native tongue, German the language of his household. But he spoke Latin, and understood Greek. He wore the Frankish dress: that is, a linen shirt and drawers next his skin; above these, a tunic with a silken hem, and breeches of the same stuff as the tunic; then he wrapped his knees and legs down to the ankles with strips of linen; in winter he had a loose overcoat of fur, ermine or otter, short but warm; and over this he wore a coloured Frankish cloak, and slung across him by a gold or silver belt, a scabbarded sword. He hated foreign dress. He lived and ate among the Franks just as one of themselves, without show.
Yet he was one of the greatest of men. As a fighter and vast conqueror he is to be compared only with Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon. He fought against twelve nations, and spread his great empire from the Elbe to the Pyrenees, and away south down Italy as far as Rome. The great Haroun el Raschid, greatest of the Arab Caliphs, wished to be the friend of so splendid a conqueror, though he despised all other Europeans.
But Charlemagne was great in many ways. He was learned, and did all he could for education in Francia. He built many fine buildings, bridges, roads. He tried to encourage agriculture, and prevent famine. He was much beloved by all his subjects; and he seemed to stand alone in the world in his greatness. Only the great Haroun el Raschid could compare with him, of all men living at that day.
Amid the squalor of misery and discord in Italy in the Dark Ages, the popes, bishops of Rome, gradually rose to power. The Pope was head of the Church, and in every land the Church was growing stronger and stronger. Kings depended on bishops, and were afraid of them. The Frankish kings, wisely, had been friends of the popes.
In 799, however, the Roman citizens rose against Pope Leo III., and would have destroyed him for his many crimes. Leo had already shown himself submissive to the Frankish king. Now he fled to Charles. The king received him gladly, and they agreed to give one another kindness for kindness. Charles with his armies restored the Pope to Rome. In return, whilst he was celebrating mass at the Vatican on Christmas Day of the year 800, Pope Leo suddenly stepped forward, poured a vial of oil over Charles’s head, and crowned him with a golden crown. All the greatest Franks and Romans were present. No doubt they knew what was to happen, for immediately they cried aloud: ‘Hail, Charles Augustus, crowned of God, great and peaceful Emperor of the Romans! Long life and victory!’
Thus once more a great leader was hailed as Augustus in Rome. The empire of the West had vanished. There was nothing truly Roman left. And yet, in Rome itself, a Christian priest crowned a German soldier, and gave him the title that Nero and Hadrian had borne. This strange event shows what power Rome still had over the minds of men. This was really the beginning, also, of the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted almost to our own day.
Charles was now the Emperor Charles the Great. He ruled as emperor over a great part of Europe. And the rest of his reign passed fairly quietly. He had to go out against the Northmen or Danes, who were ravaging North Germany. He repressed them so strongly that the Danes were forced to depend more on their ships, and thus began their invasions of Britain, France, and the Mediterranean lands.
The Emperor tried hard to settle his land of France peacefully and well. Every town had its two governors, the bishop and the count, whilst through the country were sent commissioners, before whom all wrong could be laid. They judged even the counts. Charlemagne made himself head of the Church, to keep the bishops in check.
But it was not much use. The poorer freemen were at the mercy of the greedy, fighting chieftains and bishops. The poorer Franks, who had come to Gaul as free warriors, and who had remained proud and independent, having free farms or small estates of their own, now sank again. Many were killed in the wars. Those remaining were threatened all the time by rich landowners. So they put themselves under the protection of some lord, and paid tribute of service. The same was the case with Gallic freemen. They all became bond, sinking down towards serfdom. This process seemed inevitable in the Dark Ages. It seemed as if the mass of men must be serfs or slaves, at the mercy of the few. In Charlemagne’s day nine-tenths of the people of Gaul were serfs, one-tenth only were free, and many of these were priests and monks. When Charles gave the learned Englishman Alcuin the present of an estate, we learn that 20,000 serfs went with the land, and were included in the gift. Yet this was not a large estate. So low was the value of men.
The serfs on the estates of churchmen and on the king’s own land were not so badly off. They were not badly treated, some even came to hold property and to be deemed worthy to be warriors. In years of plenty they were content. But agriculture was very badly managed, and some years there was terrible scarcity. In 805 and 806 thousands of serfs with their families just starved to death. During times like these, many men begged to be admitted into monasteries, to become monks: so many, indeed, that the king had to forbid further admissions.
We are bound to feel that these Gallo-Romans, ancestors of the modern French, were during this period spiritless, made for slavery. The Franks never levied armies from the Gallic people — evidently considering them unfit for military purposes. Charlemagne struggled to improve the condition of the great servile masses of these serfs or villeins. But they were too apathetic, and the Franks were too contemptuous of them altogether to trouble about them. The Gallo-Romans dragged on their degraded existence, caring nothing for freedom, filled with strange and sometimes horrible superstitions, loving to make pilgrimages to shrines, neglecting all work, desiring to inflict strange penances on themselves, and performing mysterious rites before trees and groves and springs, using charms and practising magic, and willing to commit strange crimes.
Charlemagne died in 814, and was buried in his own town of Aix-la-Chapelle. His great empire soon fell to pieces, the old darkness sank over the lands. Great lords warred on one another, the lesser lords were killed off. The descendants of Charlemagne, emperors they called themselves, tried to reign. But they were weak and effortless.
Gradually the Franks dropped their German speech. The bishops and clergy, the teachers, the instructors, were all Gallo-Romans, and spoke a sort of Latin. It was easier for the Franks to learn the Gallic language, the ‘ Romana Rustica ‘ as it was called, the Rustic Latin, than for the Gauls to learn the difficult German. At one time all intelligent Franks spoke both languages. Then gradually the German was forgotten; by 850 or 900 the Romance language was the language of the Franks in Gaul, as well as of the Gallo-Romans.
As kings grew weaker, dukes and counts grew stronger, till they were really independent lords of their own great lands. Great dukes of Gothia, Gascony, Burgundy, Brittany, Aquitaine, counts of Toulouse, Flanders, Vermandois — these were stronger than any poor Caroling king, in their own regions. Thus the Feudal System begins. In the ninth century the terrible Northmen began to invade France, and the dukes and lords began to build the huge feudal castles against them. In the tenth century the Northmen settled along the Seine. Their land became Normandy: there was a new duke, Duke of Normandy: and soon the Normans were speaking French, they were more French than the Frenchmen. Yet they were pure Germans by blood, Danes.
An adventurer, Robert the Strong, became Duke of France, that is of the small middle region round Paris. In 987 the Carolingian line died out and Hugh Capet, Duke of France, was proclaimed King of France: that is, he was mere war-leader or war-lord of all the dukes and counts, who remained independent as before. And so now at last, with Hugh Capet, the real kingdom of France begins, separate from Germany altogether, separate from Italy and Rome, the French lords having one head, one leader.