Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/168

 156 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES years. In Germany Conrad of Franconia was succeeded as king by Henry called the Fowler, Duke of the Saxons. His son Otto the- Great re-established the Roman Empire when he was crowned emperor at Rome in 962. Among West and East Franks alike the power of the great dukes and counts limited the power of the king. In France, in the long-run, one great noble took possession of the Crown and made it hereditary in his family. In Germany the Crown passed from the Carolingians to a duke of Franconia, from Franconia to the dukes of Saxony, from the Saxon line back to the Franconian line, and did not for several centuries become the hereditary possession of one family. While the grandsons of Charlemagne were quarrelling with each other, the incursions of the Norsemen became fiercer and The more extensive. They sailed up the Rhine, the Northmen. Scheldt, the Seine, the Loire, the Garonne. Their invasions of Germany were finally checked by Arnulf. In France they would have captured Paris, which was becoming the centre of the kingdom, but for the valour of Count Robert the Strong, and of his son Odo, who was named king on the death of Charles the Fat. Odo held them at bay. On Odo's death Charles the Simple was allowed to become king, Odo's brother Robert contenting himself with a role very much like that of the Mayors of the Palace in the Merovingian time. But even before the death of Charles the Bald a Norse chief, Rolf Normandy. or Rollo, had secured a permanent footing at Rouen, and he gradually waxed so strong that Charles the Simple and Duke Robert made a treaty with him ; and the lands afterwards known as Normandy were assigned to him as a dukedom, while he acknowledged himself the vassal of the King of France and paid him homage. This treaty of St. Claire-sur-Ept came only a few years after what was really the very similar treaty of Wedmore The between the English king Alfred the Great and the Danelagh. Danes, who were established in the Danelagh. Both in France and England the Danes and Northmen accepted Christianity, and from the time that they were acknowledged as territorial lords the ravages of the Vikings were very much diminished in both countries.