for some distance dismayed the Britons, and many of them fled, seeking
where they might hide themselves. Morvan, beside himself with rage and
at the head of his most devoted followers, rushed down upon the Franks
as if to demolish them at a single stroke; and many fell beneath his
blows. He singled out a warrior of inferior grade, toward whom he made
at a gallop, and, insulting him by word of mouth, after the ancient
fashion of the Celtic warriors, cried: "Frank, I am going to give thee
my first present, a present which I have been keeping for thee a long
while, and which I hope thou wilt bear in mind;" and launched at him a
javelin which the other received on his shield. "Proud Briton," replied
the Frank, "I have received thy present, and I am going to give thee
mine." He dug both spurs into his horse's sides and galloped down upon
Morvan, who, clad though he was in a coat of mail, fell pierced by the
thrust of a lance. The Frank had but time to dismount and cut off his
head when he fell himself, mortally wounded by one of Morvan's young
warriors, but not without having, in his turn, dealt the other his
deathblow. It spreads on all sides that Morvan is dead; and the Franks
come thronging to the scene of the encounter. There is picked up and
passed from hand to hand a head all bloody and fearfully disfigured.
Ditcar the monk is called to see it, and to say whether it is that of
Morvan; but he has to wash the mass of disfigurement, and to partially
adjust the hair, before he can pronounce that it is really Morvan's.
There is then no more doubt; resistance is now impossible; the widow,
the family and the servants of Morvan arrive, are brought before Louis
the Debonair, accept all the conditions imposed upon them, and the
Franks withdraw with the boast that Brittany is henceforth their
tributary.
On arriving at Angers, Louis found the empress Hermengarde dying; and
two days afterward she was dead. He had a tender heart which was not
proof against sorrow; and he testified a desire to abdicate and turn
monk. But he was dissuaded from his purpose; for it was easy to
influence his resolutions. A little later, he was advised to marry
again, and he yielded. Several princesses were introduced; and he chose
Judith of Bavaria, daughter of Count Welf (Guelf), a family already
powerful and in later times celebrated. Judith was young, beautiful,
witty, ambitious, and skilled in the art of making the gift of pleasing
subserve the passion for ruling. Louis, during his expedition into
Brittany, had just witnessed the fatal result of a woman's empire over
her husband; he was destined himself to offer a more striking and more
long-lived example of it. In 823, he had, by his new empress Judith, a
son, whom he called Charles, and who was hereafter to be known as
Charles the Bald. This son became his mother's ruling, if not exclusive,
passion, and the source of his father's woes. His birth could not fail
to cause ill-temper and mistrust in Louis' three sons by Hermengarde,
who were already kings. They had but a short time previously received
the first proof of their father's weakness. In 822, Louis, repenting of
his severity toward his nephew, Bernard of Italy, whose eyes he had
caused to be put out as a punishment for rebellion, and who had died in
consequence, considered himself bound to perform at Attigny, in the
church and before the people, a solemn act of penance; which was
creditable to his honesty and piety, but the details left upon the minds
of the beholders an impression unfavorable to the Emperor's dignity and
authority. In 829, during an assembly held at Worms, he, yielding to his
wife's entreaties, and doubtless also to his own yearnings toward his
youngest son, set at naught the solemn act whereby, in 817, he had
shared his dominions among his three elder sons; and took away from two
of them, in Burgundy and Alemannia, some of the territories he had
assigned to them, and gave them to the boy Charles for his share.
Lothair, Pépin, and Louis thereupon revolted. Court rivalries were added
to family differences. The Emperor had summoned to his side a young
southron, Bernard by name, duke of Septimania and son of Count William
of Toulouse, who had gallantly fought the Saracens. He made him his
chief chamberlain and his favorite counsellor. Bernard was bold,
ambitious, vain, imperious, and restless. He removed his rivals from
court, and put in their places his own creatures. He was accused not
only of abusing the Emperor's favor, but even of carrying on a guilty
intrigue with the empress Judith. There grew up against him, and, by
consequence, against the Emperor, the Empress, and their youngest son, a
powerful opposition, in which certain ecclesiastics, and, among them,
Wala, abbot of Corbie, cousin-german and but lately one of the privy
counsellors of Charlemagne, joined eagerly. Some had at heart the unity
of the empire, which Louis was breaking up more and more; others were
concerned for the spiritual interests of the Church, which Louis, in
spite of his piety and by reason of his weakness, often permitted to be
attacked. Thus strengthened, the conspirators considered themselves
certain of success. They had the empress Judith carried off and shut up
in the convent of St. Radegonde at Poitiers; and Louis in person came to
deliver himself up to them at Compiègne, where they were assembled.
There they passed a decree to the effect that the power and title of
emperor were transferred from Louis to Lothair, his eldest son; that the
act whereby a share of the empire had but lately been assigned to
Charles was annulled; and that the act of 817, which had regulated the
partition of Louis' dominions after his death, was once more in force.
But soon there was a burst of reaction in favor of the Emperor;
Lothair's two brothers, jealous of his late elevation, made overtures to
their father; the ecclesiastics were a little ashamed at being mixed up
in a revolt; the people felt pity for the poor, honest Emperor; and a
general assembly, meeting at Nimeguen, abolished the acts of Compiègne,
and restored to Louis his title and his power. But it was not long
before there was revolt again, originating this time with Pépin, King of
Aquitaine. Louis fought him, and gave Aquitaine to Charles the Bald. The
alliance between the three sons of Hermengarde was at once renewed; they
raised an army; the Emperor marched against them with his; and the two
hosts met between Colmar and Bâle, in a place called _le Champ rouge_
("the Field of Red"). Negotiations were set on foot; and Louis was
called upon to leave his wife Judith and his son Charles, and put
himself under the guardianship of his elder sons. He refused; but, just
when the conflict was about to commence, desertion took place in Louis'
army; most of the prelates, laics, and men-at-arms who had accompanied
him passed over to the camp of Lothair; and the "Field of Red" became
the "Field of Falsehood" (_le Champ du Mensonge_). Louis, left almost
alone, ordered his attendants to withdraw, "being unwilling," he said,
"that any one of them should lose life or limb on his account," and
surrendered to his sons. They received him with great demonstrations of
respect, but without relinquishing the prosecution of their enterprise.
Lothair hastily collected an assembly, which proclaimed him Emperor,
with the addition of divers territories to the kingdoms of Aquitaine and
Bavaria: and, three months afterward, another assembly, meeting at
Compiègne, declared the emperor Louis to have forfeited the crown, "for
having, by his faults and incapacity, suffered to sink so sadly low the
empire which had been raised to grandeur and brought into unity by
Charlemagne and his predecessors." Louis submitted to this decision;
himself read out aloud, in the Church of St. Médard at Soissons, but not
quite unresistingly, a confession, in eight articles, of his faults,
and, laying his baldric upon the altar, stripped off his royal robe, and
received from the hands of Ebbo, archbishop of Rheims, the gray vestment
of a penitent.
Lothair considered his father dethroned for good, and himself henceforth
sole Emperor; but he was mistaken. For years longer the scenes which
have just been described kept repeating themselves again and again;
rivalries and secret plots began once more between the three victorious
brothers and their partisans; popular feeling revived in favor of Louis;
a large portion of the clergy shared it; several counts of Neustria and
Burgundy appeared in arms, in the name of the deposed Emperor; and the
seductive and able Judith came afresh upon the scene, and gained over to
the cause of her husband and her son a multitude of friends. In 834, two
assemblies, one meeting at St. Denis and the other at Thionville,
annulled all the acts of the assembly of Compiègne, and for the third
time put Louis in possession of the imperial title and power. He
displayed no violence in his use of it; but he was growing more and more
irresolute and weak, when, in 838, the second of his rebellious sons,
Pépin, king of Aquitaine, died suddenly. Louis, ever under the sway of
Judith, speedily convoked at Worms, in 839, once more and for the last
time, a general assembly, whereat, leaving his son Louis of Bavaria
reduced to his kingdom in Eastern Europe, he divided the rest of his
dominions into two nearly equal parts, separated by the course of the
Meuse and the Rhone. Between these two parts he left the choice to
Lothair, who took the eastern portion, promising at the same time to
guarantee the western portion to his younger brother Charles. Louis the
Germanic protested against this partition, and took up arms to resist
it. His father, the Emperor, set himself in motion toward the Rhine, to
reduce him to submission; but, on arriving close to Mayence, he caught a
violent fever, and died on the 20th of June, 840, at the castle
Ingelheim, on a little island in the river. His last acts were a fresh
proof of his goodness toward even his rebellious sons and of his
solicitude for his last-born. He sent to Louis the Germanic his pardon,
and to Lothair the golden crown and sword, at the same time bidding him
fulfil his father's wishes on behalf of Charles and Judith.
There is no telling whether, in the credulousness of his good nature,
Louis had, at his dying hour, any great confidence in the appeal he made
to his son Lothair, and in the impression which would be produced on his
other son, Louis of Bavaria, by the pardon bestowed. The prayers of the
dying are of little avail against violent passions and barbaric manners.
Scarcely was Louis the Debonair dead, when Lothair was already
conspiring against young Charles, and was in secret alliance, for his
despoilment, with Pépin II, the late King of Aquitaine's son, who had
taken up arms for the purpose of seizing his father's kingdom, in the
possession of which his grandfather Louis had not been pleased to
confirm him. Charles suddenly learned that his mother Judith was on the
point of being besieged in Poitiers by the Aquitanians; and, in spite of
the friendly protestations sent to him by Lothair, it was not long
before he discovered the plot formed against him. He was not wanting in
shrewdness or energy; and, having first provided for his mother's
safety, he set about forming an alliance, in the cause of their common
interests, with his other brother, Louis the Germanic, who was equally
in danger from the ambition of Lothair. The historians of the period do
not say what negotiator was employed by Charles on this distant and
delicate mission; but several circumstances indicate that the empress
Judith herself undertook it; that she went in quest of the King of
Bavaria; and that it was she who, with her accustomed grace and address,
determined him to make common cause with his youngest against their
eldest brother. Divers incidents retarded for a whole year the outburst
of this family plot, and of the war of which it was the precursor. The
position of the young king Charles appeared for some time a very bad
one; but "certain chieftains," says the historian Nithard, "faithful to
his mother and to him, and having nothing more to lose than life or
limb, chose rather to die gloriously than to betray their King." The
arrival of Louis the Germanic with his troops helped to swell the forces
and increase the confidence of Charles; and it was on the 21st of June,
841, exactly a year after the death of Louis the Debonair, that the two
armies, that of Lothair and Pépin on the one side, and that of Charles
the Bald and Louis the Germanic on the other, stood face to face in the
neighborhood of the village of Fontenailles, six leagues from Auxerre,
on the rivulet of Audries. Never, according to such evidence as is
forthcoming, since the battle on the plains of Châlons against the Huns,
and that of Poitiers against the Saracens, had so great masses of men
been engaged. "There would be nothing untruthlike," says that scrupulous
authority, M. Fauriel, "in putting the whole number of combatants at
three hundred thousand; and there is nothing to show that either of the
two armies was much less numerous than the other." However that may be,
the leaders hesitated for four days to come to blows; and while they
were hesitating, the old favorite, not only of Louis the Debonair, but
also, according to several chroniclers, of the empress Judith, held
himself aloof with his troops in the vicinity, having made equal promise
of assistance to both sides, and waiting, to govern his decision, for
the prospect afforded by the first conflict. The battle began on the
25th of June, at daybreak, and was at first in favor of Lothair; but the
troops of Charles the Bald recovered the advantage which had been lost
by those of Louis the Germanic, and the action was soon nothing but a
terribly simple scene of carnage between enormous masses of men,
charging hand to hand, again and again, with a front extending over a
couple of leagues. Before midday the slaughter, the plunder, the
spoliation of the dead--all was over; the victory of Charles and Louis
was complete; the victors had retired to their camp, and there remained
nothing on the field of battle but corpses in thick heaps or a long
line, according as they had fallen in the disorder of flight or steadily
fighting in their ranks.... "Accursed be this day!" cries Angilbert, one
of Lothair's officers, in rough Latin verse; "be it unnumbered in the
return of the year, but wiped out of all remembrance! Be it unlit by the
light of the sun! Be it without either dawn or twilight! Accursed, also,
be this night, this awful night in which fell the brave, the most expert
in battle! Eye ne'er hath seen more fearful slaughter: in streams of
blood fell Christian men; the linen vestments of the dead did whiten the
champaign even as it is whitened by the birds of autumn!"
In spite of this battle, which appeared a decisive one, Lothair made
zealous efforts to continue the struggle; he scoured the countries
wherein he hoped to find partisans; to the Saxons he promised the
unrestricted reëstablishment of their pagan worship, and several of the
Saxon tribes responded to his appeal. Louis the Germanic and Charles the
Bald, having information of these preliminaries, resolved to solemnly
renew their alliance and, seven months after their victory at
Fontenailles, in February, 842, they repaired both of them, each with
his army, to Argentaria, on the right bank of the Rhine, between Bâle
and Strasburg, and there, at an open-air meeting, Louis first,
addressing the chieftains about him in the German tongue, said: "Ye all
know how often, since our father's death, Lothair hath attacked us, in
order to destroy us, this my brother and me. Having never been able, as
brothers and Christians, or in any just way, to obtain peace from him,
we were constrained to appeal to the judgment of God. Lothair was beaten
and retired, whither he could, with his following; for we, restrained by
paternal affection and moved with compassion for Christian people, were
unwilling to pursue them to extermination. Neither then nor aforetime
did we demand aught else save that each of us should be maintained in
his rights. But he, rebelling against the judgment of God, ceaseth not
to attack us as enemies, this my brother and me; and he destroyeth our
peoples with fire and pillage and the sword. That is the cause which
hath united us afresh; and, as we trow that ye doubt the soundness of
our alliance and our fraternal union, we have resolved to bind ourselves
afresh by this oath in your presence, being led thereto by no prompting
of wicked covetousness, but only that we may secure our common advantage
in case that, by your aid, God should cause us to obtain peace. If,
then, I violate--which God forbid--this oath that I am about to take to
my brother, I hold you all quit of submission to me and of the faith ye
have sworn to me."
Charles repeated this speech, word for word, to his own troops, in the
Romance language, in that idiom derived from a mixture of Latin and of
the tongues of ancient Gaul, and spoken, thenceforth, with varieties of
dialect and pronunciation, in nearly all parts of Frankish Gaul. After
this address, Louis pronounced and Charles repeated after him, each in
his own tongue, the oath couched in these terms: "For the love of God,
for the Christian people and for our common weal, from this day forth
and so long as God shall grant me power and knowledge, I will defend
this my brother and will be an aid to him in everything, as one ought to
defend his brother, provided that he do likewise unto me; and I will
never make with Lothair any covenant which may be, to my knowledge, to
the damage of this my brother."
When the two brothers had thus sworn, the two armies, officers and men,
took, in their turn, a similar oath, going bail, in a mass, for the
engagements of their kings. Then they took up their quarters, all of
them, for some time, between Worms and Mayence, and followed up their
political proceeding with military fêtes, precursors of the knightly
tournaments of the Middle Ages. "A place of meeting was fixed," says the
contemporary historian Nithard, "at a spot suitable for this kind of
exercises. Here were drawn up, on one side, a certain number of
combatants, Saxons, Vasconians, Austrasians, or Britons; there were
ranged, on the opposite side, an equal number of warriors, and the two
divisions advanced, each against the other, as if to attack. One of
them, with their bucklers at their backs, took to flight as if to seek,
in the main body, shelter against those who were pursuing them; then
suddenly, facing about, they dashed out in pursuit of those before whom
they had just been flying. This sport lasted until the two kings,
appearing with all the youth of their suites, rode up at a gallop,
brandishing their spears and chasing first one lot and then the other.
It was a fine sight to see so much temper among so many valiant folk,
for, great as was the number and the mixture of different nationalities,
no one was insulted or maltreated, though the contrary is often the case
among men in small numbers and known one to another."
After four or five months of tentative measures or of incidents which
taught both parties that they could not, either of them, hope to
completely destroy their opponents, the two allied brothers received at
Verdun, whither they had repaired to concert their next movement, a
messenger from Lothair, with peaceful proposals which they were
unwilling to reject. The principal was that, with the exception of
Italy, Aquitaine, and Bavaria, to be secured without dispute to their
then possessors, the Frankish empire should be divided into three
portions, that the arbiters elected to preside over the partition should
swear to make it as equal as possible, and that Lothair should have his
choice, with the title of emperor. About mid-June, 842, the three
brothers met on an island of the Saône, near Châlons, where they began
to discuss the questions which divided them; but it was not till more
than a year after, in August, 843, that assembling, all three of them,
with their umpires, at Verdun, they at last came to an agreement about
the partition of the Frankish empire, save the three countries which it
had been beforehand agreed to accept. Louis kept all the provinces of
Germany of which he was already in possession, and received besides, on
the left bank of the Rhine, the towns of Mayence, Worms, and Spire, with
the territory appertaining to them. Lothair, for his part, had the
eastern belt of Gaul, bounded on one side by the Rhine and the Alps, on
the other by the courses of the Meuse, the Saône, and the Rhone,
starting from the confluence of the two latter rivers, and, further, the
country comprised between the Meuse and the Scheldt, together with
certain countships lying to the west of that river. To Charles fell all
the rest of Gaul: Vasconia or Biscaye, Septimania, the marshes of Spain,
beyond the Pyrenees; and the other countries of Southern Gaul which had
enjoyed hitherto, under the title of the kingdom of Aquitaine, a special
government subordinated to the general government of the empire, but
distinct from it, lost this last remnant of their Gallo-Roman
nationality, and became integral portions of Frankish Gaul, which fell
by partition to Charles the Bald, and formed one and the same kingdom
under one and the same king.
Thus fell through and disappeared, in 843, by virtue of the treaty of
Verdun, the second of Charlemagne's grand designs, the resuscitation of
the Roman Empire by means of the Frankish and Christian masters of Gaul.
The name of _emperor_ still retained a certain value in the minds of the
people, and still remained an object of ambition to princes; but the
empire was completely abolished, and, in its stead, sprang up three
kingdoms, independent one of another, without any necessary connection
or relation. One of the three was thenceforth France.
In this great event are comprehended two facts: the disappearance of the
empire and the formation of the three kingdoms which took its place. The
first is easily explained. The resuscitation of the Roman Empire had
been a dream of ambition and ignorance on the part of a great man, but a
barbarian. Political unity and central, absolute power had been the
essential characteristics of that empire. They became introduced and
established, through a long succession of ages, on the ruins of the
splendid Roman Republic destroyed by its own dissensions, under favor of
the still great influence of the old Roman senate though fallen from its
high estate, and beneath the guardianship of the Roman legions and
Imperial praetorians. Not one of these conditions, not one of these
forces, was to be met with in the Roman world reigned over by
Charlemagne. The nation of the Franks and Charlemagne himself were but
of yesterday; the new Emperor had neither ancient senate to hedge at the
same time that it obeyed him, nor old bodies of troops to support him.
Political unity and absolute power were repugnant alike to the
intellectual and the social condition, to the national manners and
personal sentiments of the victorious barbarians. The necessity of
placing their conquests beyond the reach of a new swarm of barbarians
and the personal ascendency of Charlemagne were the only things which
gave his government a momentary gleam of success in the way of unity and
of factitious despotism under the name of empire. In 814 Charlemagne had
made territorial security an accomplished fact; but the personal power
he had exercised disappeared with him. The new Gallo-Frankish community
recovered, under the mighty but gradual influence of Christianity, its
proper and natural course, producing disruption into different local
communities and bold struggles for individual liberties, either one with
another, or against whosoever tried to become their master.