CHARLEMAGNE’S empire had been something more than an enlarged regnum Francorum: it had found in the old Greco-Roman tradition of imperium a pattern for a more civilized, centralized, peaceful rule of western Europe; but nevertheless the basis of Charlemagne’s power was his command of the Frankish army, and its spearhead, the east Frankish host. Charlemagne’s empire was to break up, not because there were, after his death, no counsellors to value imperial, unitary rule, and not even because Charlemagne’s descendants each fought for his own hand and to secure and increase his territories: but because none succeeded to undivided command of the Frankish host. Charlemagne had ruled Italy and Rome through his counts and missi: but he had lived at Aix, in the east Frankish homeland, among his vassals; his son Louis succeeded to his empire, but his youth had been spent in Aquitaine, and in Aquitaine were his personal councillors and vassals; he could never command the same personal loyalty of the east Frankish host. Lothar, his son, ruled Italy: and Italy, not the old Austrasia, was the centre of his power. Imperial rule could only continue under the shield of the undivided loyalty of the Frankish host: and this was lacking. Certain imperial theorists, including mainly scholar clerks but also the cold and brutal layman, the emperor Lothar himself, failed to recognize this.
Other causes have been held responsible for the break-up of the Carolingian empire, and did, indeed, contribute to it. Too much of the emperor Louis the Pious’ attention was given to the question of church reform; and though reform of the monasteries and clergy was a service to learning, provided a leisured class, and directly affected the civil service of the empire, yet it could not take the place of the military defence and policing of the empire. These, at the time, were a ruler’s primary duty.
Then again, the growing strength of the external enemies of the Frankish empire contributed to the defeat and discredit of Charlemagne’s descendants. The Slavs and the Bulgars were restive on the eastern frontier. The Saracens from Spain, Africa and the Mediterranean islands harried the southern coast of Aquitaine, the western coast of Italy, and Sicily itself. And above all, the northern pirates from Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula developed a technique of rapid sea raiding with which the Frankish army was quite unfitted to cope. The Frankish army could be moved great distances and fight great battles: but the campaign needed a lot of planning and could only start when there was enough spring grass for the horses. Reception of the news that the northmen had sacked Durstedt or Quentovic meant that their fleet had already sailed away with their plunder, and no defence or even retaliation was possible. Undivided command of the Frankish host by a young and vigorous ruler might have led to the only possible centralized defence against the northmen: the military conquest of Denmark and southern Scandinavia.
Though the history of the Carolingian empire can thus be considered under many aspects, that of its political divisions and subdivisions is primary and can be briefly stated. The partitions were nearly all impermanent and occasioned, not by the interests of different racial or economic groups, but by the personal ambitions and struggles of Charlemagne’s heirs; but out of them the old Merovingian kingdoms of Neustria and Austrasia, merged in Charlemagne’s empire, were to become distinct again by the end of the ninth century as the kingdoms of the west Franks and the east Franks: in the tenth century, Capetian France and the Ottoman empire. The landmarks in the century of impermanent partition are: the rule of Louis the Pious as emperor, from 814 till 840; the notable partition of Verdun in 843, between Louis the Pious’ three sons; and the worst period of Danish raids, from 855 till 888, ending with the deposition of the last Carolingian emperor, Charles the Fat, in 888.
The reign of Louis the Pious was, as it were, an epilogue to that of Charlemagne, for there was still one emperor, the missi were still sent out, and capitularies passed applying to the whole empire. But in the character and ability of the ruler there was a great change. Louis was thirty-six years old in 814, impulsive, passionate and weak. He entered Aix on 27 February 814, and proceeded to rule by the advice of his own Aquitanian councillors; his chancellor, Helisachar, became head of the palace chapel, the much trusted Burgundian monk, Benedict of Aniane, was given a new monastery, founded for him at Inda, near the palace itself. Louis proceeded to get rid of his father’s councillors and reform the disorderly conduct of the palace. Adalard had retired to his abbey of Corbie, from which he was now exiled to Noirmoutier at the mouth of the Loire; his brother Wala was sent to be a monk at Corbie. The princesses, Charles’s daughters, were sent off to nunneries, and a new ordinance issued about the conduct of the palace and the palace police. Louis’ nephew, Bernard, whose succession to the kingdom of Italy Charlemagne had sanctioned, was summoned to Aix to take a new oath of fidelity to Louis; and from the heading of his acta Louis dropped the titles of king of the Franks and king of the Lombards, which Charles had always retained, and described himself now simply as ‘Louis, by the order of divine providence, emperor and Augustus’. The ideal of imperial unity, raceless and Christian, found a yet more explicit expression in a letter of Agobard, bishop of Lyons: while making the facile demand that the old customary laws should be abolished, and only one law, the code of the Salian Franks, observed throughout the empire, he described as shocking the differences of procedure still to be found there: ‘where in name there was now neither Jew nor Gentile, barbarian nor Scythian, Aquitanian nor Lombard, Burgundian nor Aleman, bond nor free: there should be one Frankish law for all’.
No effort was made to follow such exuberant counsel: but in two respects Louis’ policy was guided by Frankish churchmen: he undertook a programme of church reform, and he loosened the Frankish control of the papacy.
Not only had Charlemagne provided for the officers of his chapel, and his clerical missi, by endowing them with abbeys and bishoprics: but military needs had brought about in many cases the granting out of church lands to lay vassals and there were complaints of impoverishment. Between 814 and 816 Louis made many new donations to churches; in 816 he summoned a council to Aix, and required the secular clergy to live according to the canons; in 817, under the presidency of Benedict of Aniane, monks were required to keep the Benedictine rule with a primitive strictness (see p. 52). In 819 these reforming measures were enforced in a general capitulary.
Away in Rome, Leo III neglected to take the oath of obedience to the new emperor, as required by Charlemagne’s ordinance: and Louis let the omission pass without protest. Leo III died in June 816, and the new pope, Stephen IV, though he required the Roman people to swear fealty to Louis as emperor, did not defer his coronation till he should have received Louis’ confirmation. There was no imperial protest: nor was there when Pascal I was consecrated without confirmation in January 817. Nevertheless, the traditional Franco-papal alliance was not broken, for the papal household needed defence against the Roman nobles: Stephen IV travelled to Reims and formally crowned Louis emperor, supplementing with the religious rite the lay coronation by Charles in 813: and in 817 Pascal sent the nomenclator Theodore to renew the traditional alliance. The new privilege granted by Louis on this occasion not only confirmed the pope in all his territories, but renounced imperial jurisdiction in Rome and all intervention in papal elections.
In the same year, 817, Louis made an Ordinatio or disposition of the empire. He had three sons, Lothar, aged about twenty-two, and two younger ones, Pepin and Louis, neither of whom had yet attained their majority, which the Carolingians reckoned according to Ripuarian law, as fifteen. At the general assembly which was engaged in reforming the monasteries of men, Louis announced his intention of issuing the Ordinatio, after three days of prayers and fasts. By its terms he ordained that:
Lothar should be associated with him as emperor forthwith, and should be the sole inheritor of the empire at his father’s death. The kingdom of Italy, adjudged to Bernard, Louis’ nephew, by Charlemagne, remained his, however.
Pepin should keep the kingdom of Aquitaine, given him by his father in 814: on attaining his majority, he should have also Gascony, the March of Toulouse and certain counties in northwest Francia.
Louis should rule Bavaria as king: both young kings acting under the general control of the emperor.
It was further laid down, that when Lothar should be sole emperor, he should allow his brothers the internal government of their kingdoms, together with the disposition of ‘honours’, and the right to taxes and revenue; he should, nevertheless, control their general policy. They must make him the customary annual gifts, and he must afford them military protection when necessary.
In Italy, however, no provision had been worked out to accommodate the positions of Bernard as king and Lothar as emperor, and Bernard felt his position imperilled. As the beginning of troubles, Bernard and his supporters made an unsuccessful rebellion. Louis set out with an army for Italy, but he was met at Chalons-sur-Saône by Bernard, who there made his submission. He was condemned to death, but though the sentence was commuted to blinding, he died (818) of the torment inflicted. In the same fit of panic over the Italian rebellion, Louis ordered Charles’s illegitimate children, Drogo, Hugh and Thierry, to be sent off to monasteries. The way was now clear for Lothar’s rule of Italy and the fulfilment of the Ordinatio of 817: but at this juncture Louis’ queen, Irmengard, died, and Louis married the beautiful and accomplished Alemannian princess, Judith. Her father, Welf, had great possessions in Bavaria and on the eastern frontier, and the match seemed politic; but long years of civil war were to befall the empire through Louis’ desire to upset the Ordinatio of 817 in order to provide his late-born child Charles, Judith’s son, with a portion at least equal to those of his brothers. Judith’s sole endeavour was directed to this end, and she soon had a predominating influence over her husband, especially after the death of Benedict of Aniane in 821. The very name given to the child hinted at his succession to Charlemagne; he has come down to history, however, with a disastrous record, as Charles the Bald.
When the immediate danger from Bernard’s rebellion had ended with his death, Louis was gradually reconciled to those whom he had condemned as Bernard’s supporters. Adalard, the trusted counsellor of Charlemagne, was recalled from exile, given back his abbey of Corbie, and in 822, at the assembly of Attigny, Drogo and Hugh, Charlemagne’s sons, were recalled from banishment. Drogo was made bishop of Metz in 823: Hugh was given several abbeys. The influence of this little group, all imperialists in intention and standing for a return to the unitary rule of Charlemagne, seem to have inspired Louis’ surprising and disastrous penance at Attigny: their personal loyalty to Bernard blinded them to the harm likely to follow to imperial prestige. As the Royal Annals wrote under the year 822:
The lord emperor, having held council with his bishops and nobles, was reconciled with his brothers, whom he had made to receive the tonsure against their will: and for this deed and for those things that were done to Bernard, his brother Pepin’s son, and towards abbot Adalard and his brother Wala, he made a public confession and did penance. And this he did in the assembly which was held in August that same year (822) at Attigny, in the presence of his whole people.
In Italy, disorders had not ceased at Bernard’s death, and Louis’ son Lothar was now sent there to deal with them. As the eldest son, his interests coincided with the desires of the imperialists, and the tie was strengthened by his marriage to Irmengard, daughter of the count of Tours, one of the imperial group but not of the same ability or honesty as Adalard and Wala. Lothar had been trained to rule under the tutorship of Einhard, and under his guidance his stay in Italy between 822 and 823, and from 824 to 825, was marked by certain reforms in administration. It was marked also by steps to restore the Frankish control of the papacy.
In April 823 Lothar was crowned emperor by the pope: and immediately after he sat in judgment in a suit between the Lombard monastery of Farfa and the pope, giving his decision for the abbot of Farfa: the act asserted imperial jurisdiction over the patrimony.
A more startling act was to follow. Pope Pascal died in May 824, and through Wala’s influence the pro-Frankish party at Rome succeeded in electing Eugenius II. Lothar, on receipt of the news, set out for Rome, held an inquiry into the election, and issued the Constitutio Romana of 824, dealing with imperial relations with the holy see. A quasi-Byzantine control was asserted over it, explicable in the light of the contemporary imperialists’ view of the empire as one aspect of the Christian church and the emperor, by virtue of his office, another Constantine. The Constitutio thus asserted the inviolability of those under the protection of pope or emperor; imposed on each newly elected pope an oath of fealty (fidelity) to be made at the hands of an imperial missus, while requiring from all Romans at each election an oath of fealty to the emperor. It also placed the papal curia permanently in the charge of two Frankish missi, one of whom was expressly given the right of intervention if the pope failed to do justice. Imperialist policy had succeeded in Italy, and in August 825, imperialist counsels obtained the appearance of Lothar’s name, together with his father’s, at the head of all imperial acta.
Meanwhile, dangers to the imperialists were arising in other quarters. The Ordinatio of 817 had weakened the Frankish defence on the Spanish frontier by separating the Spanish March from the duchy of Toulouse; this trans-Pyrenean March, now called Septimania, was increasingly attacked by the Saracens. A Frankish force, attempting to extricate themselves from a fruitless attack on Pampeluna by the northern route, was in 824 attacked by the hostile Gascons in the pass of Roncesvalles. In 826 the Saracens besieged Barcelona: a Frankish army sent in charge of the chancellor Helisachar failed to relieve it, and the Frankish and imperialist counts, Hugh of Tours and Matfrid of Orleans, sent by Louis in a further relief expedition, accomplished nothing. It fell to Bernard of Septimania, son of the count William who had retired to Gellona, to retrieve the situation. The two Frankish counts were deprived of their counties and fell into disgrace.
Moreover, on 13 June 823 Judith gave birth to her son, Charles. Lothar was requested to stand godfather, and even made to promise not to oppose his future territorial endowment. Nevertheless, while all Louis’ sons felt their interests threatened by Charles, Lothar and the imperialists were particularly uneasy. Hugh of Tours and Wala now attended Lothar’s court instead of that of Louis. While men like Wala, Adalard and Agobard of Lyons had far-sighted, if impracticable, views on the unity of the empire, Hugh and Matfrid were selfish scoundrels, and in addition, incapable. Material for opposition to Louis was, however, increasing: the Franks had received several checks from the Danes, the Slavs and the Bulgars, and the pagenses complained of the hardship of long campaigns and of bad harvests. Lands were misappropriated and there were complaints against lay abbots; Louis in 825 sent out a general admonition to all orders in connexion with these abuses and ordered a general inquiry. Nothing was achieved however and in 828 Wala reproached the emperor for the continuance of abuses. Synods at Mainz, Lyons, Paris and Toulouse uttered the same complaints in 829: Louis in that same summer issued from Worms three capitularies dealing with the abuses complained of and sent out more missi: but he had too little control over the territorial counts and dukes in his sons’ kingdoms to enforce reform.
At the assembly at Worms, in August 829, Louis made his first open move against the imperialists: he sent Lothar back to Italy, summoned count Bernard from Barcelona to be an imperial chamberlain, and, without consulting the assembly, endowed his son Charles with a territory in Alemannia including the family lands of Welf, sure to be loyal to Judith, and also Rhaetia, Alsace and part of Burgundy. Young Charles’s share was inferior to that of his brothers, nor was the royal title accorded to him; but suspicion was aroused because of the simultaneous enforced retirement of Lothar and the omission of his name henceforward from the imperial acta. Wala protested and was exiled to Corbie, from where he apparently led an opposition which went as far as accusing Louis and Judith of practising black magic and other scandalous crimes. After Wala’s death, Paschasius wrote an apology for him under the thin disguise of an Epitaph for Arsenius (whom the emperor Theodosius had appointed as tutor to his sons, Arcadius and Honorius). Wala, Paschasius wrote, was not accused by the good of not loving the king’s glory and the extension of his kingdom, but of loving them too much. ‘For he wished to secure that so glorious and Christian a kingdom should not be divided in parts, for the Saviour saith: Every kingdom divided against itself shall be brought to nought. For he wished to secure the unity and dignity of the whole empire, for the defence of the patria (Bede’s favourite word), and the liberties of the churches.’ Nevertheless, in spite of protests, Louis succeeded in clearing the palace of friends of the imperialists and giving their offices to friends of Judith and the chamberlain Bernard.
The following spring revolt broke out. An expedition against the rebellious Bretons had been planned to start unwontedly early, actually on 14 April 830, the day following on Holy Thursday, while it was still Lent. The host was to meet at Rennes, and there were complaints of the inconvenience and unsuitability of such a date and starting point; it was even murmured that an unnecessary campaign was being staged to Bernard’s advantage, and that efforts must be made to deliver Louis from his evil councillors. Lothar came hurrying from Italy, Pepin and Louis came to join, not the host, but the rebels. Bernard fled to Septimania, Judith took refuge in the convent of Laon: the rebels seized her and took her along with them to meet Louis at Compiègne. They pressed Louis to abdicate, and when he asked time for consideration sent Judith along to the nunnery of St Radegund at Poitiers and constrained her to take the veil. Lothar and Wala, however, judged the forcible deposition of Louis inopportune: they required from him promises of better government, had Lothar’s name restored to the acta, and withdrew. The only result of the revolt of 830 was that one court faction replaced another: east Frankish resistance to dominance by Lothar, whose real interests lay in Italy, had proved too strong for radical change.
Later that summer, in October 830, reaction set in, in favour of Louis. He held an assembly at Nymwegen, in the heart of the east Frankish lands, bade all his vassals to come unarmed, and was strong enough to dismiss Lothar’s adherents, sending the arch-chaplain Hilduin into exile at Paderborn and Wala back to Corbie. By the spring following, Louis’ supporters were yet stronger. He convened an assembly to meet at Aix on 2 February 831, and he had the empress Judith brought back to him at the palace, sending her son Charles and bishop Drogo to meet her. Before the assembly Judith swore to her own innocence, and Louis accused the authors of the plot of 830 as traitors: the assembly upheld him. Wala was sent off to the wilds of Rhaetia: Lothar was required to return to Italy and not to leave it again without special permission; his name again disappeared from the acta. Bernard was reinstated.
A new act of partition was now issued, setting aside the Ordinatio of 817. In this instrument, all reference to Lothar as emperor was omitted, as was indeed his position in Italy; apart from Italy, tacitly ignored, the empire was divided between the emperor’s three sons, Pepin, Louis and young Charles. Pepin’s kingdom of Aquitaine was enlarged by the addition of a series of Neustrian counties north of the Seine, while to Louis’ share, the kingdom of Bavaria, was added all the north German lands, the modern Netherlands, and certain districts of north France. Charles received, in addition to the lands allocated to him in 829, more of Burgundy, Provence, Gothia (which gave him a corridor to Bernard’s March of Septimania) and certain important districts in north France, where the Carolingian fisc had great estates: regions round Laon, Reims, Trier, etc. The emperor himself appeared to be left with very slender resources: but this partition was only, in fact, to come into force at his death. Charles was still only seven years old: his elder brothers distrusted him, each other, and the emperor. At the end of 831 Pepin was openly in revolt; in 832 Louis of Bavaria invaded Alemannia without success; and Louis the Pious, after an abortive expedition into Aquitaine, declared Pepin deposed and Charles king of Aquitaine. From henceforth, whatever civil wars agitated the empire, the inhabitants of Aquitaine were divided in their adherence to the two claimants, Charles and Pepin.
In 833 the exasperated imperialists broke into a second revolt, under the leadership this time of Louis the Bavarian, Pepin and Lothar; to give an appearance of legitimacy to the rebellion, Lothar induced pope Gregory IV to intervene in the cause of peace and the unity of Christendom: the supporters of the emperor were disturbed in their loyalty to Louis by that owed to the pope, who in his letters in the cause of peace appeared to be supporting Lothar and the rebels. Louis collected his army at Worms and the German bishops wrote reproaching Gregory for forgetting his loyalty to the emperor: the pope and the imperialists wrote letters accusing Louis of breaking the peace by upsetting the Ordinatio of 817. On 24 June the imperial and the rebel hosts met at Rotfeld near Colmar; Louis made the mistake of negotiating instead of fighting and gradually his vassals melted away and joined the other camp, breaking their solemn oath of vassalage and turning what should have been a field of battle into a field of lies (Lügenfeld). Louis was left alone and surrendered: Lothar proclaimed his father’s downfall and announced a new partition of the empire —Louis the Bavarian’s German lands were increased; Pepin received, beside Aquitaine, the counties between Loire and Seine; Charles was left portionless, and shut up at Prüm; the emperor Louis was kept a prisoner at Saint-Médard and exhorted to take the monastic habit in penitence; Judith was sent off to Italy, and pope Gregory went sadly back to Rome.
In the late autumn, however, the indignities suffered by Louis provoked a reaction, especially among the Germans: Raban Maur, abbot of Fulda, wrote in Louis’ favour. In 834 Louis of Bavaria, ‘Louis the German’, led an army to rescue his father; Pepin was won over, and Bernard of Septimania brought help. Lothar now had his father and young Charles at Aix: but he was not strong enough to prevent Louis’ reconciliation with the church, and after a summer’s campaigning against his brothers, he withdrew to Italy. From the autumn of 834 till his death in 840 Louis ruled the empire outside Italy nominally as emperor: he was recrowned at Metz in 835: his whole ambition was to secure from the two sons who had supported him a worthy kingdom for his son Charles.
In 837 Louis felt himself strong enough to make a fresh partition in favour of Charles, whose original estates had by now mainly passed into the control of Louis the German. He gave him a peripheral territory stretching from Frisia, the lands on the lower Rhine, and the Meuse to the Seine, and beyond the Seine to Auxerre and Troyes. Louis the German protested and attacked Frankfurt: his father in return invaded Bavaria in 839. Young Charles had come of age in 838 and been crowned by his father; Pepin of Aquitaine had died that same year: but the old emperor did not feel himself or Charles secure. He made overtures of peace to Lothar, who came to him at Worms in the spring of 840 and made with him the last partition of Louis’ reign. While Louis the German was restricted to Bavaria alone (from which it would have needed a serious war to dislodge him), the rest of the empire was divided between Lothar and Charles. Lothar’s share, outside Italy, was to lie to the east of the Rhone, Saône and Meuse: Charles’s to the west of these rivers. Charlemagne’s empire, when Louis died in the summer of 840 on an island in the river by Ingelheim, seemed hopelessly divided. In Italy, Lothar ruled with some security, but in his trans-alpine territories his brother Louis was firmly ensconced in Bavaria: while Charles (the Bald) had no security in Aquitaine, because some of the vassals supported Pepin’s son, now king Pepin II.
The internal divisions of the Frankish lands were not unnoticed by outside enemies. In 837 the noble Breton, Nominoë, had risen in rebellion and a Frankish army had occupied his territory; on the eastern frontier, the Slavs penetrated Saxony, and in 838 Frankish armies had to march against the Wilzes and the Obotrites, the Sorbs and the Bulgars, while the most dangerous enemies of all, the Nortmanni or northmen, had made bad raids from 830 to 840 along the coast of the North Sea and the Channel. Frisia was the special object of their expeditions; Durstedt, the chief port for the sea trade of western Europe, was sacked four times between 834 and 837, and never recovered.
The partition arranged by Louis the Pious before his death could never be enforced: it took three years of struggle between his sons before the more famous Partition of Verdun could be agreed upon. In the shifting fortunes of the campaigns between Lothar and his two brothers, and also between them and their rebellious vassals and rivals for power, two factors remained constant. Lothar openly proclaimed his right to empire, as in the Ordinatio of 817, in disregard of all the engagements that he had made since for territorial partition: such a claim opened the door for Louis the German to claim much larger territories than he had been allowed in 840. The whole question of partition was reopened and had more practical importance for the combatants than any claim of Lothar to unitary rule, which must, in any case, have been a matter of prestige and protocol only. Secondly, the structure of society had by now come to depend upon the oath of vassalage (see p. 557): the palace officials, the local counts and a great number of holders of benefices out in the countryside were held to their king (or to some great lord) by this personal oath, accompanied by the ceremony of homage: the vassal’s oath was utterly solemn and binding. Yet the obligations of the vassal to his lord when they conflicted with his obligations to the king (unless the vassal were a king’s vassal) had not as yet been worked out: still less the vassal’s obligation to the emperor when they ran counter to his obligations to his own king. In Charlemagne’s day, vassalage to one of his sons had not conflicted with a superior obligation to the emperor; now, such a final obligation had become shadowy as compared to the vassal’s personal oath to his king. It followed that in this, as in the earlier struggles between Charlemagne’s descendants, it was possible for a vassal to interpret his obligations to emperor or king according to his own interests, and the promises of reward held out to him. The claims put forward by Lothar and his brothers were made in the hope that a sufficient number of vassals would support them. As it turned out, while Lothar could rely on his Italian vassals and those round Aix and the Rhine mouth where the imperial tradition coincided with local prosperity: and while Louis the German retained the loyalty of the east Franks and Germans: Charles the Bald had no territories of proved loyalty. Aquitaine was loyal to Pepin II, despite his youth: Paris and Neustria had no personal loyalty to Charles, though large estates of the Carolingian fisc had long been administered by the officials of Louis the Pious, who were ready to regard Charles as Louis’ successor; these demesnes were useful supports of his power, but did not supply him with good, fighting vassals.
On the receipt of news of his father’s death, Lothar at once sent messengers to Germany claiming the imperial supremacy, as provided for in 817. Three learned ecclesiastics supported his claim: bishop Drogo of Metz, Raban Maur, abbot of Fulda, and Walafrid Strabo of Reichenau: they upheld the old Carolingian tradition. Lothar tried to restore his supporter, bishop Ebbo to the archbishopric of Reims, vacant since his deposition by Louis the Pious in 835; but the pope would not confirm the restoration. Lothar had more success, however, in winning a number of lay vassals over from their allegiance to Louis the German, who was likely to prove his chief enemy. Lothar had to face, nevertheless, the need to defeat two armies: those of Louis the German and Charles the Bald. He crossed the Rhine to attack Louis at Frankfurt: but Louis’ army was strong, stronger, Lothar reckoned, than that of Charles. He therefore made an armistice with Louis, hoping to defeat Charles first; he drove him back from the Quierzy region to the banks of the Loire, and received the submission of many of Charles’s vassals, including that of Nominoë of Brittany. He met Charles’s army near Orleans: but again both leaders feared to exhaust their armies in a battle which would leave the advantage to the third leader whose forces would be still intact. Another armistice was made: but the triangular campaign was at once renewed. Lothar attacked Louis and tried to confine him to Bavaria; Charles crossed the Seine and by May 841 had retaken Paris, Troyes and Châlons-sur-Marne. He sent a message to Louis that he was coming to his help, and the armies of the two younger brothers met near the Rhine. Lothar meanwhile had joined forces with Pepin II, the rival of Charles the Bald in Aquitaine: the chances of victory in a decisive battle seemed relatively even. On 25 June 841 the opposing forces met at Fontenoy, near Auxerre, and after an exhausting battle, the advantage lay with Charles and Louis. Even now, Lothar did not recognize defeat, and continued to intrigue with his brothers’ vassals, plan a new campaign, try to stir up the old spirit of pagan resistance among the Saxons against Louis, and win the adherence of the northmen by giving the island of Walcheren as a benefice to their leader, Harald; but the autumn and winter of 841 showed that strength was too evenly divided for an imperial victory.
The two younger brothers realized the need for a particularly solemn alliance, if they were to withstand the arms and the intrigues of Lothar. On 14 February 842 they made to each other the famous oath of Strasbourg, binding themselves in a solemn alliance against Lothar. The language of the east Franks was now distinguishable from that of the west Franks as the ancestor of modern German as against modern French; each brother swore before the other’s host, and in the tongue of that host, that he would, for their common safety, succour and help his brother in all respects, as was just: and that he would never make with Lothar any arrangement that might be harmful to his brother. After which, a representative of each host swore in his own language that he would never aid the brother who should break this oath, even if the oath-breaker were his own lord; the oath of Strasbourg was made more binding than the oath of vassalage itself.
In March 842 Charles and Louis had some military success against Lothar, who withdrew to Lyons, possibly en route for Italy; after which the two younger brothers prevailed upon the clergy to declare Lothar deposed. But to enforce a complete deposition and expropriation was beyond their power. They followed Lothar to the Rhone valley, and there met Eberhard, count of Friuli, who proposed partition. The Frankish magnates indeed were by now anxious for peace; the campaigns had left the Franks weak against their external enemies and Fontenoy had been a very bloody battle. Yet another partition was planned: its terms to be decided, not merely by the three brothers, but by 120 commissioners, who were to meet at Metz. Lothar still resisted such an acknowledgment of the defeat of his claim to empire; but Louis strengthened himself by crushing the Saxon resistance, Charles raided the garrisons of Pepin II in Aquitaine, and Lothar had finally to allow the commissioners to meet at Verdun. The danger from the northmen was by now acute: they had sacked Quentovic and Rouen, and in the summer of 843 they sacked Nantes and raided the mouth of the Loire, fortifying the island of Noirmoutier as a base.
The partition conference was held at Verdun in August 843. It was agreed that Lothar should hold Italy, the Carolingian homelands round Aix and the Rhine mouth, and a corridor joining the two territories: its western frontier to run from Antwerp to the Somme, up the banks of the Meuse to the headwaters of the Saône and down the Saône and Rhone to Arles, while the eastern frontier skirted Frisia to the Rhine, up the Rhine to Rhaetia, eastward along the Alpine crests to Bozen, and southwards to include in Lothar’s territory Istria and Aquileia. Charles the Bald received the Frankish lands to the west of Lothar’s corridor, and Louis the German those to the east. Though the corridor was to form no later state itself, its existence for even a short period tended to separate the eastern and western kingdoms of the Franks. The curious territorial division was due to the fact that each brother was actually in possession of the lands composing his share, or the greater part of them, at the time, and to the desire for equality of revenue. No share had racial unity, identity of language, or natural frontiers. No further unity of the populus Christianus could be postulated after the Partition of Verdun: the deacon Florus of Lyons wrote in sorrow that there was no more an emperor, only kinglets: no more a regnum, only fragmina regni The bishops still yearned for at least a semblance of unity, for ‘confraternal rule’, for conference and co-operation: but when, on occasion, such conferences were held, only declarations in the most general terms were issued: scarcely even in the pressing danger of the raids of the northmen were definite defensive measures taken in common.