Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/165

 FROM CHARLEMAGNE TO HILDEBRAND 153 homage as his men ; the lesser lords held their lands of the greater lords, and so on, down to the smallest holders of land. Every man was bound to have some lord, except the king himself, to whom the whole land of the kingdom was supposed to belong. But the general rule was that the King and vassal paid homage only to his own immediate Nobles, overlord, not to his lord's overlord; so that when a baron defied the king his vassals were pledged to follow him against the king. The justice or injustice of their lord's quarrel did not concern the vassals. The natural result was that a king was apt to be very much at the mercy of the great barons, who were strong enough to hold their own against their neighbours j whereas a great baron's vassals were none of them, as a rule, strong enough to set their lord at defiance. Hence every great baron came near to being an independent prince. This was the condition of affairs which was developing during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, by the end of which it had become thoroughly established. Charles the Great at his death left an empire which extended from the river Elbe on the east to the Atlantic on the west, thus taking in great German districts which had 3 Break-up been altogether outside the Roman Empire, be- of the sides so much of the old empire itself as lay m P ire - west of this boundary line. But from this general statement we must exclude nearly the whole of Spain, the greater part of which was held by the Moors, the British Isles, Europe and the south of Italy. On the north lay the ^ 8 1*- Scandinavian Teutons who had not yet built up states. On the east between the Baltic Sea and the Danube were tribes either Slavonic or Mongol. South of the Danube was the eastern empire, the western portion of which had already become Slavonic; while in the basin of the Lower Danube the Mongol Bulgars had established a kingdom which was presently to become more Slavonic than Bulgarian, though it retained the Bulgarian name. What we have to study next is the partition of Charlemagne's empire into France on the west, and the German or Holy Roman Empire on the east.