Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/170

 158 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES the German kingdom, roused resistance and rebellion which he was strong enough to suppress. He carried out his father's policy of organising the frontiers against the Great, Slavonic tribes; and he decisively broke a great German King, wave, the last for some centuries, of Mongol in- 936 • vasion. The tribes of the Magyars or Ungrians (whence come the names Hungary and Hungarian) poured into Europe from the east, and occupied what had once been the kingdom or empire of their kinsmen the Avars and Huns. They had indeed penetrated much further, carrying desolation before them. They had been checked by Henry the Fowler, but now they were decisively hurled back in the great rout at Lechfeld by Otto in 955 ; a battle which ranks, as a day of deliverance, with the repulse of the Saracens by Leo the Isaurian before Constantinople, and by Charles Martel at Poictiers. The Magyars were forced back into Hungary where they established themselves, adopted Christianity, and later became a bulwark of Christendom against their Mongol kinsmen the Turks and the Tartars. But Otto was not content with strengthening the German kingdom. He intended to revive the ideal of empire derived 4. The Empire fr° m Charlemagne himself. There were two heads Revived. f Christendom, temporal and spiritual, the empire and the papacy. The papacy must be subordinate to the empire, but the two must work together. With the disappearance of the line of Lothar, the southern portion of the central kingdom, Burgundy and Italy, had passed out of the control of the Carolingians without forming a third kingdom like those of the West and East Franks, France and Germany. Burgundy, as Provence, had formed an independent kingdom ; Italy was rent between rival dukes who tried to dominate the papacy. The papal elections became a farce. Pope Nicholas 1. had taken advantage of the dissensions of the Carolingians to assert the papal claim to a higher authority than that of emperors or princes; one of his successors bestowed the Decline of unappropriated Imperial Crown on an Italian duke, the Papacy. Berengar of Spoleto. But there was no ruling hand in Italy ; Papal elections were conducted in a spirit of violent