THE DARKEST HOUR—A.D. 855-887
FROM THE DEATH OF LOTHAIR I.
TO THE DEPOSITION OF CHARLES THE FAT
Civil Wars following the death of Lothair I.—King Lewis and his rule in
Germany—Troubles of Lothair II.—The Vikings in Neustria—The Edict of
Pistres—Charles the Bald invades Austrasia—Treaty of Mersen—Charles
made Emperor—Death of Lewis the German—War of his sons with Charles
the Bald—Charles’s successors in Neustria—Disastrous reign of
Charles the Fat—He unites Germany, France, and Italy—The siege of
Paris—Charles the Fat dethroned.
Evil as had been the years which followed the fight of Fontenay and the
Partition of Verdun, there were yet worse to come. It was the miserable
peculiarity of the second half of the ninth century that it saw
Christendom, for the first time since the commencement of the Dark Ages,
begin to sink back towards primitive chaos and barbarism. After four
hundred years of vacillating but permanent progress towards union,
strength, and civilisation, it began to relapse, and to fall back into
disunion, weakness, and ignorance. The reign of Charles the Great was to
be for long years the high-water mark of progress. The succeeding age
rapidly sinks away from it, and it is not till the middle of the tenth
century that a rise is once more perceptible.
But of all the evil years those between 855 and 887 were to be the
worst. The civil wars of the descendants of Lewis the Pious grew yet
more numerous and ruinous; the raids of the Viking and the Saracen
spread wider and wider; the rulers of the Frankish empire were struck by
a blight, dying young or sinking into imbecility long before they
attained middle age, till the race seemed destined to disappear from
history with the fall of the cowardly, unwieldy, incompetent Charles the
Fat in 887.
[Sidenote: Civil war on the death of Lothair I.] The new troubles began
immediately on the death of the emperor Lothair. His three sons could
not agree in the partition scheme which divided their father’s realm.
Lewis thought that his share—the kingdom of Italy—was far too small for
the eldest son and the bearer of the imperial title; Lothair II. grudged
the share of Burgundy which fell to his youngest brother Charles, and
tried to seize the young man, in order to tonsure him and confine him in
a monastery. Before any actual blow had been struck, pope Benedict III.
succeeded in patching up a truce between the brothers, but they drew
apart and sought alliances against each other, Lothair leaguing himself
with his younger uncle Charles the Bald, while Lewis became the friend
of his elder uncle and namesake Lewis of Germany. Two years later the
family grudge led to war under the most disastrous circumstances.
Charles and Lothair II. had united their forces for a decisive campaign
against the Danes, whose main army, under a certain Jarl Biorn, had
concentrated itself in central France, and burnt Paris, Chartres, and
Blois (857). Before the united strength of Neustria and Austrasia the
Vikings drew back, and stockaded themselves in a great camp on the
Seine-island of Oissel.[58] Charles blocked their way down the river by
bringing up a fleet, which he had lately built, to the next reach, and
determined to starve them out. After a siege of three months it seemed
likely that he would achieve his purpose; the Danes could neither beat
him nor escape him. But just as they were about to yield there came to
the king of Neustria the dire news that his brother Lewis with the whole
host of Germany had crossed the Rhine, and was marching against him.
Charles straightway raised the siege of Oissel, allowed the Danes to
burn his fleet and to escape, and turned eastward to resist king Lewis.
Their armies met at Brienne-sur-Aube, but when Charles saw the
overwhelming numbers of the Germans his heart failed him—as it often did
in such a crisis—and he deserted his men and fled away into Burgundy.
Deprived of their leader his vassals laid down their arms, and most of
the Neustrian counts and bishops did homage to king Lewis. The German
monarch was able to take possession of his brother’s realm, and to
proclaim himself king of the West Franks. His nephew Lothair II. sent to
beg for peace from him, and it seemed that Lewis would become the
suzerain of all the realms north of the Alps. [Sidenote: Lewis the
German wins and loses Neustria.] But when he had sent away his German
troops, and prepared to winter near Laon among the Neustrians, the
instability of his power was suddenly shown. Charles the Bald had
secretly raised a new army in Burgundy. He marched on Laon at
mid-winter. The Neustrians refused to take arms against their old king,
and Lewis, with a very small following, had to flee away into Germany,
and abandon his lightly-won dominion over the West Franks. Eighteen
months later the brothers made peace (860), but no treaty could undo the
harm that the reckless ambition of Lewis had brought on all the Frankish
realms. While the war was raging the Danes had swept unresisted across
the land. One army had harried the Rhine-mouth and Flanders, another had
sacked Amiens and Noyon; a third had entered the Mediterranean, sailed
up the Rhone, and devastated the distant kingdom of Charles of Provence,
the younger brother of Lothair II., a weakly youth racked by epileptic
fits, who showed no power to defend his fertile land from the pirates.
The last-named band had even extended their ravages to Italy, and sacked
the flourishing port of Pisa in the realm of the emperor Lewis II.
Footnote 58:
An island or peninsula, enclosed by the Seine and its marshes, near
Bougival, close to Paris, in department Seine-et-Oise.
From the time of his wicked invasion of Neustria onward, king Lewis the
German, who had hitherto been the most fortunate of the Karling kindred,
began to meet with troubles to which he had as yet been a stranger.
While his attention had been directed to the West, his Slavonic vassals
in the East, the Abotrites, rose in rebellion: when he led a host
against them in 862, he encountered defeat and disaster. But a far worse
blow came from the bosom of his own family: his eldest son Carloman,
whom he had made governor in Carinthia and the Bavarian Ostmark, rose in
rebellion against him. [Sidenote: Family troubles of Lewis the German.]
Twice conquered and twice pardoned (861 and 863), the ungrateful prince
took arms for a third time in 864, and compelled his father to grant him
a share in the kingdom. Feeling old age closing in upon him, and hoping
to conciliate all his sons, Lewis the German now took the unwise step of
dividing his realm in his own lifetime, just as his father Lewis the
Pious had done. He made Carloman king of Bavaria and Carinthia,
designated his second son and namesake Lewis to be ruler of Saxony,
Thuringia, and Franconia, and his youngest born Charles the Fat to reign
in Suabia and Rhaetia (865). He must have felt that the hand of Heaven
was laid upon him in punishment for his own unfilial conduct to his
father Lewis the Pious, for his sons dealt with him just as he had dealt
with the old emperor thirty years before. They murmured about the
boundaries of their heritages, and often took arms both against him and
against each other. Four separate rebellions of one or another or all of
the princes are recorded between 865 and 876. But Lewis the German was
made of sterner stuff than his pious father. Time after time he beat
down the risings of his undutiful sons, and after each victory had the
constancy or the feebleness to restore them to their former honours.
In spite of these rebellions, and in spite of the successful revolt,
first of the Abotrites, and then of the Moravians, both of whom
succeeded in shaking off their dependence on the empire, Germany was yet
the most fortunate of the five Frankish realms. The subjects of the
three sons of Lothair I., who were now ruling the fragments of their
father’s ‘middle kingdom,’ all had evil times to endure. Of the troubles
of Lewis the emperor in Italy we shall speak elsewhere. His two younger
brothers fared even worse. The epileptic Charles of Provence was vexed
by Danish and Saracen pirates, as well as by the intrigues of his greedy
uncle Charles the Bald, who tried to add Provence to his own Neustrian
dominions, though he was entirely unable to protect even Neustria from
the Danes. Lothair II. in Austrasia—or Lotharingia, as men now began to
call it, after its ruler’s name—was sore vexed by the Vikings, who
pushed up the Rhine as far as Neuss and Köln. [Sidenote: The Bigamy of
Lothair II.] But he was far more incommoded by a trouble for which he
was himself entirely responsible. He drove from his court his wife
Teutberga, and openly married his concubine Waldrada. Not only did this
bigamy lead to the rebellion of Teutberga’s brother Hukbert,[59] abbot
of St. Maurice and duke of Transjurane Burgundy, but it brought on a
quarrel with the Papacy which embittered all Lothair’s remaining years.
Pope Nicolas I. set his face against the king’s unrighteous dealings
with his wife, and repeatedly summoned him to take her back to his
couch. He induced the nobles of Lotharingia to compel their king to
dismiss Waldrada for a season; but Lothair was passion’s slave, and soon
chased away his wife and again sent for his mistress. This brought on
him fresh thunders of ecclesiastical censure, and for the last ten years
of his life he lived under the ban of the Pope, till in 868 he was so
far humbled that he came in person before Hadrian II. and made a
complete surrender—one of the greatest triumphs that the Papacy had won
since the days of Gregory the Great.
Footnote 59:
Hukbert was one of the most extraordinary characters of the time, a
warlike abbot who maintained a whole harem of concubines at his
fastness of St. Maurice-en-Valais, and kept control of Vaud and Valais
against all comers, including his liege lord the king.
But though the other Frankish kingdoms fared ill, it was, as usual, the
realm of Charles the Bald which bore the brunt of the troubles of
Christendom. There were now permanent hosts of Danes established at the
mouth of each of the great rivers of France, the Somme, Seine, Loire,
and Garonne—the chronicles call them ‘_pagani Sequanenses_’ or ‘_pagani
Ligerenses_’ as a matter of course. Settled on islands or headlands at
the mouths of these rivers, each band devoted itself to the harrying of
the district which lay inland from its camp. Meanwhile, Charles the Bald
left the defence of his realm to the local counts, and busied himself in
futile schemes for seizing the realms of his nephews, Charles of
Provence and Lothair of Austrasia. He was not without his family
troubles; his children—like those of Lewis the German—were very unruly:
his second son Charles, who ruled Aquitaine for him, tried to make
himself an independent king, and his youngest son Carloman was detected
conspiring against his life, for which he was condemned to blinding and
perpetual imprisonment. But neither domestic troubles nor Viking raids
could keep Charles from his unending intrigues against his brother and
his nephews. When he did turn his attention to his own proper business,
his methods of dealing with the problems that lay before him were not
generally wise. No man of real intelligence would have conceived the
plan that Charles invented in 861 for getting rid of the Vikings by
bribing them to fight each other. The wily pirates took the king’s
subsidy, and then all united against him, as might have been expected.
There were, however, two schemes for organising resistance against the
Danes which were broached at Charles’s council board that are worthy of
note, as foreshadowing the methods by which the invaders were ultimately
to be checked. The great difficulty which the Franks had hitherto found
in dealing with the Vikings came mainly from two reasons—the power of
rapid movement which the enemy possessed, and the fact that walled towns
were still very rare, and castles quite unknown in the Frankish realms,
so that the inhabitants of the country-side had no secure shelter to
seek. [Sidenote: The Edict of Pistres, 864.] In the Edict of Pistres
(864) Charles shows some appreciation of these two difficulties, and
endeavours to dispose of them by very well judged measures. To cope with
the swiftly moving Vikings, he determines to make the Frankish army more
mobile also. He endeavours to substitute cavalry for the unwieldy masses
of local levies by ordering that ‘_omnes pagenses Franci qui equos
habent aut habere possunt cum suis comitibus in hostem eant_.’ The day
of feudal cavalry was indeed just beginning, and from the military point
of view this expedient was perfectly correct; unhappily for the
monarchy, the day of the feudal horseman was also to be the day of
feudal separation and disunion. The second measure ordered by the Edict
of Pistres was one for the strengthening of the kingdom by means of
fortifications. The particular plan which Charles most favoured was that
of blocking the great rivers by fortified bridges. Towns lying beside
the water were to throw a bridge across, with a fortified bridgehead on
the opposite bank. Thus the Vikings would find their advance up the
lines of the rivers completely checked, since their boats would not be
able to pass under the bridges till the forts at either end of them were
taken, a long matter in those days, when the art of poliorcetics had
sunk so low. As the first fruits of this edict, a strong bridge was
built at Pistres itself, low down the Seine, where the Eure flows into
the great river. It was at the same time that the island on which old
Paris lay was furnished with two fortified bridges, across the northern
and southern branches of the Seine, joining it to the mainland. It was
mainly owing to these defences that, when next attacked by the Vikings,
Paris, though twice plundered before, held out successfully, and did not
suffer capture and desolation after its third siege.
In 863 died Charles, king of Provence, the youngest son of the emperor
Lothair I., carried off by the epilepsy that had always afflicted him.
His little kingdom was divided between his brothers Lothair II. and
Lewis the Emperor, to the great discontent of Charles the Bald, who
would have liked to have a hand in the partition. But Charles was vexed
for the moment not only by the Danes, but by his nephew Pippin the
Younger, who had escaped from his monastery and raised a new rebellion
in Aquitaine. While the king was dealing with his nephew, the Vikings of
the Loire made the widest sweep round central France that any horde had
yet carried out—burning Poictiers, Angoulême, Perigueux, Limoges,
Clermont, and Bourges in one single incursion. [Sidenote: The end of
Pippin of Aquitaine.] The rebel Pippin joined himself to them, and is
actually said to have cast aside his Christianity and worshipped Woden
in their camp—_ex monacho apostata factus, ritum paganorum servavit_. He
fell into his uncle’s hands before the year was out, and with the
general approval of the Franks was condemned to perpetual solitary
confinement.
For a short time after these events the West Frankish kingdom was
destined to have a time of comparative respite from the inroads of the
Northmen. In 867 all the Vikings of the West massed themselves for an
attack on England, which had hitherto suffered comparatively little at
their hands. From the capture of York in 868 down to Alfred’s great
victory at Ethandune in 878, the main strength of the Danes was spent in
winning a kingdom beyond the channel. The invasion of England was not
for plunder but for conquest, and ‘the Great Army,’ led by two kings and
five jarls, was composed of all the hordes who had been harrying the
Continent for the last ten years. If they did not succeed in subduing
the whole of England, they yet won the great Danelagh, the eastern half
of the island, and settled down in the land they had subdued.
But the comparative immunity from Viking raids which the Franks obtained
between 868 and 878 was not of much profit to them. In 869, Lothair II.
died, as he was journeying home from Italy in a disconsolate mood, after
making his peace with the Pope.[60] From that time there was unending
trouble between his two elderly uncles, as to which of them should
inherit Austrasia, the old Frankish land between Scheldt and Rhine, the
ancestral home of their race. At this moment began the struggle between
France and Germany for the inheritance of the ‘middle kingdom’ which
Lothair had ruled, a struggle which was to last for a thousand years.
Who can say even yet if the final fate of Aachen and Trier and Metz and
Liége and Strasburg has been settled?
Footnote 60:
See page 428.
The moment that Charles the Bald heard of Lothair’s death, he crossed
the Meuse at the head of the levies of Neustria, and had himself crowned
at Metz as king of Lotharingia. The Bretons were in open revolt that
year, and a stray Viking band was levying contributions on Tours and
Angers, but for such minor distractions Charles cared little. Lewis the
German was bedridden at the moment, and his sons were absent on an
expedition against the Slavs. But next spring he took the field with all
Germany at his back, whereupon Charles the Bald, always better at
seizing than at fighting, drew back, and offered to negotiate.
[Sidenote: Partition of Mersen, 870.] Then followed the Partition of
Mersen, by which Lotharingia was divided between the brothers: Charles
took the Burgundian part of his deceased nephew’s realm, and western
Austrasia as far as the Meuse; Lewis had Frisia and eastern Austrasia.
To Charles, therefore, fell Lyons, Vienne, Besançon, Toul, Verdun,
Cambrai, Liége, Tongern, Mecheln; to Lewis, Aachen, Köln, Trier,
Strasburg, Utrecht, Nimuegen, and Maestricht. (870.)
But the Treaty of Mersen was only to patch up matters for a short time.
Five years of comparative rest followed, while the Vikings were still
employed in England against the gallant kings of Wessex. But in 875 died
the emperor Lewis II., the last of the three sons of Lothair I. Like his
two brothers, he left no male heir, and there followed one more struggle
between his aged uncles Lewis the German and Charles the Bald for the
imperial title and the Italian realm. [Sidenote: Charles the Bald in
Italy, 875.] Now, as always, Charles moved with rash and inconsiderate
haste, and was first in the field. Leaving Neustria to shift for itself,
he posted into Italy at the head of a small army, and swooped down on
the diet of the Lombard kingdom, which was sitting at Pavia, and
disputing about the choice of a successor to their late monarch. He was
acclaimed as king by some of the Lombards, and then made ready to march
on Rome, where he knew that the Pope was ready to give him the imperial
crown. But, meanwhile, Lewis the German was preparing to interfere. He
first sent his youngest son Charles of Suabia—better known as Charles
the Fat—to oppose the Neustrian king. But Charles, who always throughout
his life consistently mismanaged everything that was intrusted to him,
was easily scared by his uncle, and fled back into the Alps. Then the
king of Germany sent down into Lombardy his unruly eldest born, Carloman
the king of Bavaria, with an imposing array of Bavarian and Franconian
levies. Charles the Bald feared to face this army, and proposed to
Carloman that both the Neustrian and the German forces should withdraw
from the peninsula, and allow the disputed succession to be settled by
peaceful negotiation. The Bavarian prince was beguiled by his uncle’s
specious offer, and betook himself homeward over the Brenner. But,
instead of making a corresponding retreat towards the Cenis, Charles the
Bald turned southward and made a dash for Rome. He reached it, and was
duly crowned emperor by his friend John VIII. But he did not linger in
Italy to help the Pope against the Saracens, as the latter besought him,
but returned at once to Neustria to exhibit his new imperial crown at
home.
[Sidenote: Death of Lewis the German, 876.] At this moment died Lewis
the German, now an old man of seventy-six; it was sixty years since he
had been appointed king of Bavaria by his father, and thirty-three since
he had obtained sway over the whole of Germany by the award of the
Treaty of Verdun. He had been on the whole a successful ruler, in spite
of the many revolts of his sons, and in spite of the fact that he had
not been able to retain all his Slavonic vassals under his hand. To him
more than to any other king Germany owed her organisation as a unified
national kingdom. His long reign gave Saxon and Franconian, Bavarian and
Suabian, time to grow together and to learn to regard themselves as a
nation apart, not merely as provinces of the Frankish empire. But if to
Germany his reign was one of unqualified good, history can not pardon
him the two occasions in 854 and 858 when he deliberately sacrificed the
general welfare of Christendom to private ambition, and attacked his
Neustrian brother while Charles was in the thick of his Viking wars.
These are the darkest spots on the reputation of the first king of
Germany.
We have already related how Lewis, following the evil custom of his
family, had divided his realm among his three sons Carloman, Lewis, and
Charles, the kings of Bavaria, Saxony, and Suabia. They were not
destined, however, to inherit their father’s realm in peace. No sooner
did Charles the Bald hear that his elder brother was dead, than he made
another vigorous attempt to seize Lotharingia, arguing that as emperor
he was entitled to the imperial city of Aachen, and openly asserting
that the oaths of Mersen had been ‘sworn to the father but not to the
sons.’ At the head of a large army Charles entered Austrasia, and
occupied Aachen and Köln. Of the three young kings of Germany Lewis
alone came out against him. Carloman was away far in the East fighting
with rebellious Slavs, and Charles the Fat was, or purported to be, on a
bed of sickness. [Sidenote: Charles the Bald beaten at Andernach.] The
fate of the lands between Rhine and Scheldt was settled by a battle at
Andernach, in which the Neustrians, though superior in number, were
completely defeated by the Franconians and Saxons of Lewis of Saxony.
Charles the Bald was—as usual—the first to fly, and arrived in safety at
Liége, though the greater part of his army was cut to pieces. He
returned to his home to find a Danish fleet up the Seine, for the
Vikings were just beginning to drift back from England. But such
troubles moved him little, and though his Austrasian expedition had
fared so ill, he started off with hardly a moment’s pause on an equally
rash and ill-judged descent into Italy, where the imperial crown that he
had so lightly gained in 875 was now in jeopardy. He sent the Vikings
5000 lbs. of silver to induce them to transfer their ravages from
Neustria to his German nephew’s land, and hastened to Lombardy with a
small and hastily equipped army, for the best of his men had been slain
or captured at the battle of Andernach. Charles met his friend pope John
VIII. at Pavia, and was about to proceed to Rome when he heard that his
eldest nephew, Carloman of Bavaria, who possessed many supporters among
the eastern Lombards, had crossed the Alps and was marching against him,
eager to revenge the treachery to which he had been subjected in the
preceding year. [Sidenote: Charles dies in Italy, 877.] Charles hastily
fled before the approaching forces of the Bavarian, but as he was
crossing the Cenis he was stricken down by dysentery, and died suddenly
in a miserable hut at the foot of the pass (877).
Charles the Bald was still below the age of sixty, but he had been a
king from his boyhood, and had reigned over the West Frankish realm
which the treaty of Verdun gave him for thirty-four disastrous years. Of
all the Karlings he was the man who wrought the empire the most harm:
his birth had been a misfortune: the endowment of his youth cost the
state a long civil war: his manhood was flighty, unscrupulous, eager,
yet unstable. He started four several wars by reckless snatching at the
heritages of his kinsmen, but when withstood and faced he always slunk
away in rapid retreat. The condition of Neustria was a disgrace to his
name: if half the bribes and subsidies that he had spent to buy the
Danes’ departure, had been used in military preparations against them,
they might easily have been driven off. But Charles was always busied
with fantastic schemes of foreign conquest; and while his eyes were
fixed abroad he allowed his realm to fall to pieces at his feet. History
can find nothing to praise in the first king of France.
In the ten years which followed the death of Charles the Bald, a blight
seemed to fall upon the house of the Karlings. King after king was swept
away by an untimely death, some by accident, more by disease. In France
and in Germany six reigning monarchs died without leaving a single child
of legitimate birth, and by 887 the royal house was represented by one
solitary male heir, and he a boy of only eight years old. Meanwhile the
Danes had returned from England in full force, and the whole empire of
these short-lived kings was enduring the worst crisis that had yet
fallen upon it.
[Sidenote: Reign and death of Lewis the Stammerer, 877-879.] Charles the
Bald was succeeded in Neustria and Aquitaine, or France, as we may now
call the Western realm, by his son Lewis II., better known as Lewis the
Stammerer. The new king was a prudent and circumspect ruler, very unlike
his flighty parent. He at once gave up all pretension to the kingdom of
Italy and the imperial crown, though John VIII. urged him to reassert
his father’s claims. He promptly made peace with his German cousins,
renewing with them the terms of the Treaty of Mersen, by which eastern
Lotharingia fell to Germany and western Lotharingia to France. He then
took the field against the Danes, who had just returned once more to the
mouth of the Loire, but while engaged with them he was stricken down by
disease, and died a few months later, long before he had completed the
second year of his reign (879). He left two sons, Lewis and Carloman,
and a third child was born to him just after his death, and christened
Charles. The counts and bishops of France, following the invariable and
unhappy custom of the times, crowned both Lewis and Carloman as kings.
The two lads—they were but seventeen and sixteen—were not to enjoy a
quiet heritage. Alfred had just expelled from England those of the
Danish ‘Great Army’ who had refused to settle down in the Danelagh and
do him homage. [Sidenote: Accession of Lewis III. and Carloman, 879.]
The swarm of Vikings fell on Flanders, and burnt Ghent and St. Omer
before the young kings’ reign was two months old. At the same time Lewis
of Saxony, on whom the spirit of greed that had possessed Charles the
Bald seemed now to have descended, invaded Neustria—summoned, it would
appear, by some disloyal counts. But the West Franks rallied around
their young masters, and Lewis the Saxon consented to retire on
condition that Western Lotharingia—the lands that Charles the Bald had
acquired by the Treaty of Mersen ten years before—should be ceded to
him. So Liége, Namur, Cambrai, and Tongern became for the moment German
and not French.
In another part of the West Frankish realm an equally serious loss was
at the same time taking place. Since the death of the good emperor Lewis
II. Provence and southern Burgundy had been united to Neustria (875-79).
But Lewis’ only daughter, the princess Hermengarde, had now found a
strong and ambitious husband in Boso, count of Vienne, one of the
governors of Burgundy. Taking advantage of the crisis in Neustria, this
count Boso resolved to assert his wife’s claim to her father’s heritage.
In Italy he failed to win success, though the Pope would gladly have
helped him, but in Provence and Lower Burgundy the nobles rallied to his
standard. [Sidenote: Boso made king of Arles, 879.] He was proclaimed
king in October 879, and afterwards crowned at Lyons. His new realm of
Arles, Provence, or Lower Burgundy—for it is found styled by all these
names—was the first fraction of the empire of Charles the Great to pass
away from the male heirs of the great royal line. Boso’s dominions
nearly coincided in size with the kingdom of Provence as it had been
held by Charles the son of the emperor Lothair I. They included the
whole valley of the Rhone, from Lyons to the sea and the borders of
Italy.
While the West Frankish kingdom was being cut short to north and south,
Germany was on the whole in better condition. The three sons of Lewis
the German, unlike most royal brothers of the time, dwelt together in
harmony. The two elder brothers had come to an agreement that Carloman
should prosecute his fortunes in Italy, while Lewis sought to aggrandise
himself in Lotharingia. But Carloman, after driving Charles the Bald out
of Lombardy, and mastering most of the land north of the Po, was
stricken down with a fever which terminated in a paralytic stroke. He
was carried back to Bavaria, and survived for two years, but never rose
from his couch again. Feeling the hand of death upon him, he handed over
the administration of his realm to his brother Lewis, only stipulating
that the frontier duchy of Carinthia should be given to his own
illegitimate son Arnulf, the child of a Slavonic princess whom he had
taken as his concubine. Carloman lived out another year, and died in 880
before he had passed the limits of middle age.
[Sidenote: Charles the Fat, king of Italy, 879.] Meanwhile, his place in
Italy had been taken by his shiftless younger brother, the king of
Suabia. Charles the Fat entered Italy in the autumn of 879, was
everywhere recognised as king, and solemnly received the Lombard crown
from John VIII. at Ravenna. But his new kingdom saw little of him:
though he was earnestly besought to oppose the Saracen invaders of the
south he did nothing of the kind, but went ingloriously home to Suabia.
The Danes were by this time mustering in greater strength than ever for
an assault on the Frankish empire. They had gathered together from all
the shores of the West, and this time threw themselves on the Eastern
realm, not on their old prey in Neustria. [Sidenote: Great Danish
Invasion, 880.] The year 880 was long remembered by the Germans for the
awful defeat suffered on the Lüneburg Heath near Hamburg by the levies
of Saxony and Thuringia. Bruno, duke of Saxony, two bishops, with no
less than twelve counts, were left dead upon the field, and the
victorious Vikings ravaged the whole valley of the Elbe without further
resistance. Almost at the same moment another Danish army appeared in
Austrasia, fought an indecisive battle with king Lewis, and though they
left him the field were able to establish themselves permanently on the
Scheldt, at a great camp near Courtray, threatening Neustria and
Austrasia alike.
[Sidenote: Battle of Saucourt, 881.] In the spring of 881 they made up
their minds that the Western realm should first be their spoil. Marching
on Beauvais, they met at Saucourt the young king of France and his
levies. To the joy and surprise of all Western Christendom Lewis III.
inflicted a crushing defeat on the invaders, slew 8000 of them, and
chased them as far as Cambrai, beyond the borders of his own kingdom.
This was the only pitched battle of first-rate importance that the
Franks had won over the Vikings, and great hopes were entertained that
in Lewis III. Europe might find a saviour from the sword of the pagans.
But ere a year was out the gallant young king met his death in a foolish
frolic,[61] and left the Neustrian throne to his brother Carloman.
Footnote 61:
Lewis was a sprightly youth and given to affairs of love, ‘and it
chanced one day that in sport he chased a certain damsel, the daughter
of Germund. She fled in at her father’s gate, and the king followed
her, laughing. But he forgot to stoop sufficiently at the portal, and
was crushed between the roof and the high pommel of his saddle, so
that he died within a few days.’
The Danish army which had been defeated at Saucourt retired to Ghent,
where it was strengthened by newly-arrived bands under two famous
sea-kings, Siegfred and Godfred. Then the host threw itself on Austrasia
as the autumn was closing. The levies of the old royal land of the
Franks were beaten: their king, Lewis of Saxony, was far away, and the
winter months of 881-2 saw the whole country-side harried, from the
Scheldt-mouth to the Eifel. [Sidenote: Austrasia harried by the Danes.]
The inland parts of Austrasia had hitherto been exceptionally fortunate
in escaping the Danish sword, but in this fatal winter Liége,
Maestricht, Tongern, Köln, Bonn, Neuss, Zülpich, Malmédy, Nimuegen, and
every other town in the district was pillaged. Most heartrending of all
was the sacking of the royal city of Aachen: the Danes plundered the
palace, stabled their horses in the cathedral, and broke the shrine and
image above the tomb of Charles the Great.
To the despair of all Germany, king Lewis the Saxon, whose task it
should have been to attack the invaders in the next spring, died on
January 20th, 882—the fourth Carolingian monarch who had been carried to
the grave within three years. His subjects found nothing better to do
than to elect his only surviving brother, Charles the Fat, the king of
Suabia and of Italy, as his successor.
[Sidenote: Charles the Fat, king of Germany.] Thus began the unhappy
reign of Charles, the last Carolingian emperor of the full blood. He was
at this moment in Italy, where he had been visiting Rome and receiving
the imperial crown. Making a leisurely journey homeward,—the Danes were
meanwhile sacking Trier and Metz,—he reached the Rhine in July, and
summoned to him the levies of Saxony, Suabia, Bavaria and Franconia: he
had brought a Lombard army in his train. With this great host, the
largest that had been seen since the death of Charles the Great, he
moved against the Danes. Godfred and Siegfred retired before him to a
great camp which they had built at Elsloo on the Meuse. The
faint-hearted emperor faced them for twelve days, and then instead of
ordering his vast army to assault the camp, began to negotiate with the
enemy. A few days later his soldiery heard to their dismay and disgust,
that Charles had consented to allow the Vikings to withdraw with all
their plunder, to pay them 2000 lbs. of silver, and to grant king
Godfred a great duchy by the Rhine-mouth, with the hand of his cousin
Gisela, an illegitimate daughter of king Lothair II. In return the Dane
consented to be baptized and to do homage to the emperor. [Sidenote:
Treaty of Elsloo, 882.] This expedient for buying off Godfred was
probably suggested by the way in which Alfred of England had dealt with
Guthrum four years before at the peace of Wedmore. Unfortunately Charles
forgot that while Alfred was strong enough to compel Guthrum to keep
faith, his own character was hardly likely to have a similar influence
on Godfred.
King Siegfred, with those of the Danes who did not wish to settle down
by the Rhine-mouth, took their way from Elsloo into Neustria. Charles
the Fat had merely stipulated for the evacuation of his own kingdom, and
cared nought for what might happen to his cousin Carloman. The winter of
882-3 was as disastrous for northern France as that of 881-2 had been
for the Rhineland. From Rheims to Amiens and Courtray, the whole
country-side was harried: king Carloman and his nobles, instead of
copying the conduct of Lewis III., and remembering the triumph of
Saucourt, followed the miserable example of Charles the Fat, and paid
the invaders the enormous bribe of 12,000 lbs. of silver to induce them
to transfer themselves to Austrasia, England, Ireland, or any other
realm that they might choose. In the moment of rest obtained by the
temporary departure of the pirates, Carloman died, ere yet he had
reached his twentieth year. He was accidentally slain by one of his
companions, while hunting the boar in a forest near Les Andelys (884).
The Carolingian line was now well-nigh spent: five kings had died in
five years, and the only males surviving were the shiftless emperor
Charles the Fat, and Carloman’s younger brother, a child of five, the
posthumous son of Lewis the Stammerer, the prince whom the next
generation was to know as Charles the Simple.
[Sidenote: Charles the Fat inherits Neustria, 884.] Rather than face the
horrors of a minority, the West Franks sent to the emperor and besought
him to take up the kingship of Neustria. All the empire that had obeyed
Charles the Great was therefore united once more beneath a single
sceptre, save the little realm of king Boso, in Provence. But Charles
the Fat was a sorry substitute for his great namesake. The three years
of his reign over the whole of the Frankish kingdoms (884-7) were fated
to shatter the last remnants of loyalty in the breasts of the subjects
of the empire, and to cause them to cast away the old royal house in
despair, and seek new saviours and new kings.
The history of these three evil years is easily told. Hearing of the
death of Carloman, the Danes flocked back to Neustria: ‘oaths sworn to a
dead man,’ they said, ‘did not count.’ But their return was chiefly
caused by a thorough beating which their main body had suffered at
Rochester from the strong hand of king Alfred. At the same time the
converted Viking Godfred rose in rebellion on the Lower Rhine. He
impudently bade the emperor give him the rich lands about Bonn and
Coblenz, ‘because his duchy had no vineyards to yield him wine.’ Charles
did not take arms against him, but sent ambassadors to lure him to a
conference. When the Dane appeared, the counts Henry and Eberhard
treacherously cut him down, and massacred his retinue. The army of
Godfred broke up; some of his warriors went plundering in Saxony, where
they were cut to pieces, the rest joined king Siegfred, who was just
about to invade Neustria (885).
[Sidenote: Great Siege of Paris.] The great host of the Vikings had once
more united itself under Siegfred, and entered north France, as if
designing to subdue the whole country and settle down therein. But they
met with an unexpected resistance at Paris, where the local count and
bishop, Odo and Gozelin, had gathered together all the best warriors of
Neustria. The defence of Paris was the bravest feat of arms which the
Franks had wrought since the battle of Saucourt. They maintained the
isle of Paris, with its two fortified bridge-heads over the two branches
of the Seine, for more than eleven months, against all the assaults of
the Northmen (Nov. 885-Oct. 886). Seven hundred Viking keels were drawn
ashore on the flat land where the _Champ de Mars_ now lies, and 40,000
Vikings beset the city on all sides. But though shamefully abandoned by
the emperor—who chose the time as suitable for a journey to Italy—Odo
and Gozelin refused to despair, even when the northern bridge-head was
cut off from the city by an inundation, and burnt by the besiegers.
At last, in the summer of 886, Charles the Fat so far bestirred himself
as to raise the national levies of the whole empire, and march to the
relief of Paris with an army not less than that which he had led four
years earlier against the camp of Elsloo. But when his vanguard received
a check, and its leader, Henry, duke of Franconia, was slain, the
emperor refused to risk an attack on the Danes. [Sidenote: Charles the
Fat bribes the Danes.] Once more the disgraceful scene of Elsloo was
renewed: Charles paid the Danes 700 lbs. of silver, and gave them
permission to pass up the Seine into Burgundy, and work their will
there. He was angry with the Burgundians for refusing him obedience and
leaning to the cause of Boso, the king of Arles, and chose this
despicable means of wreaking his vengeance on them.
Paris was saved, and the reputation of its gallant defender, count Odo,
raised to the highest pitch. But the emperor had thrown away his last
chance, and forfeited the respect of even the meanest of his subjects.
His remaining days were few and evil. Attacked by softening of the
brain, and burdened by an ever-increasing corpulence, he retired to
Germany after the disgraceful treaty of Paris. There his doom was
awaiting him: the counts and dukes of the East Frankish realm conspired
against him, headed by his illegitimate nephew Arnulf, duke of
Carinthia, the son of king Carloman. In 887 the young duke took up arms,
openly announcing that he was about to march on Frankfurt and depose his
uncle. [Sidenote: Abdication of Charles the Fat.] Charles tried to raise
an army, but none of his vassals would lend him aid: in sheer despair he
sent his royal crown and robes to Arnulf, abandoning the kingdom, and
craving only five manors in his native Suabia to maintain him for his
few remaining days. This boon the duke granted, and the unwieldy
ex-Caesar dragged himself away to a royal villa at Neidingen, where he
died less than three months after, worn out by the bodily ills which
form the only possible excuse for his shiftless and cowardly conduct
during the last three years.
Meanwhile Arnulf entered Frankfurt, and was there hailed as king by all
the counts and dukes of Germany. He was known as a brave and able young
man, and though he was [Sidenote: Arnulf, king of Germany, 888-899.] but
a Karling of bastard blood, the East Franks gladly intrusted themselves
to the protection of his arm. But the other parts of the empire did not
consider themselves bound to follow the lead of Germany. In each of the
kingdoms a noble of great local note and power stepped forward to claim
the crown of his native land.
[Illustration:
WESTERN EUROPE
in 890.
]
In Neustria there still survived one Karling of the direct line, the boy
Charles the Simple, Carloman’s youngest brother; but he had only reached
the age of eight, and when Paris was but just saved, and the Danes were
still on the Seine, it was no time to give the crown to children.
[Sidenote: Odo, king of France.] Two claimants appeared for the
Neustrian throne, Wido duke of Spoleto, an Italian noble whose mother
had been a daughter of the emperor Lothair, and Odo count of Paris, the
hero who had saved his city from the Danes in the past year. Though he
could boast of no Carolingian blood in his veins, Odo easily carried the
day against his rival; he was crowned king at Compiègne by Walter,
archbishop of Sens, and soon forced Wido to leave France and retire to
Italy.
We shall relate in another chapter how Berengar of Friuli was chosen
king of Italy, and how he was obliged to fight hard for his crown with
Wido, when the latter returned from his unsuccessful expedition to
France.
[Sidenote: Rudolf, king of Upper Burgundy.] A fourth kingdom was
established in the Jura and the western Alps by count Rudolf, one of the
governors of Upper Burgundy. He first got himself crowned at St. Maurice
by the counts and bishops of Helvetia, and then, pushing beyond the
Jura, was again proclaimed king at Toul. But Rudolf never got any firm
footing in Lotharingia: his realm was limited to the lands north of the
Alps, west of the Aar, and east of the Saone. The chief towns of
this—the smallest of the fractions of the Carolingian realm—were
Lausanne, Geneva, St. Maurice, and Besançon.
Boso’s kingdom of Arles or Lower Burgundy was now in the ninth year of
its existence; its founder had died in 887, but his son Lewis—a
Carolingian on the female side through his mother Hermengarde, the
daughter of the emperor Lewis of Italy, had succeeded without trouble to
his father’s throne.
Thus the Frankish empire was cut up into five states, not ephemeral
creations of a heritage-partition, like the many kingdoms which we have
seen rising and falling from the days of the Merovingians onward, but
more permanent divisions, three of which represented real national
differences, while even the other two—the Upper and Lower Burgundy—had a
certain national coherence and individuality of their own, and were
destined to last for several generations. One of the five realms was
ruled by a bastard Carolingian; two by two princes who boasted a
Carolingian descent on the spindle side: only France and Upper Burgundy
were in the hands of monarchs who could lay claim to no drop of the
ancient royal blood.[62]
Footnote 62:
Rudolf of Upper Burgundy was connected by marriage with the Karlings.
He was nephew of the empress Judith, the mother of Charles the Bald,
and therefore cousin to all the Neustrian Karlings.
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