Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/166

 i 5 4 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES The rule of Primogeniture was not yet recognised ; that is to say, great estates, kingdoms as well as others, were habitually Louis the divided among the monarch's sons at his death, Pious, 814- instead of passing undivided to the eldest son. 840, Charlemagne himself would have so divided his empire into kingdoms, though one king was to have been as Roman emperor supreme head of the whole. But one son only survived him, and the disruption of the great dominion was deferred. For sixteen years Louis, to give him his French title, called the ' pious ' or the ' debonnaire,' ruled successfully enough. But he had already made his three sons into sub- ordinate kings; and when he married a second time, and a fourth son was borne to him, he deprived his other sons of territory assigned to them in order to provide an appanage for the youngest. Thereupon his sons rose up against him. For ten years Louis and his sons were engaged in a series of wars, and compacts broken by fresh wars, which were ended by the emperor's death, only to be renewed in the strifes of the three sons who survived him. These three, Lothar the eldest, Ludwig or Lewis, called the German, and the youngest, Charles, called the Bald, divided Partition of the great dominion. Charles had the west with the Empire, the Scheldt and the Rhone as his eastern boundary. Ludwig had the east with the Rhine for his western boundary. Lothar held the centre, including Italy, and along with it the Imperial Crown. From him the northern portion of his kingdom got the name of Lotharingia, which survives as Lorraine. Most of the southern half, outside of Italy, comes under the name of Burgundy. This was the division arrived at by the treaty of Verdun in 843. In all subsequent partitions Italy goes along with the Imperial Crown whosoever the emperor may happen to be. In 877 a.d. Lothar's line had died out altogether, and his two brothers were both dead. Eleven years later the legitimate line End of the °*" Lewis the German came to an end, in the Eastern person of Charles the Fat, who was emperor and Carolingians. for a t j me k j ng f t ^ e wno le dominion both of West and East Franks. Charles was succeeded in the German