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68 which was often disturbed by the rivalry of two hostile clans who were contending for mastery in the country, that of Count Reginar, inaccurately called the "Long-necked," and that of Count Matfrid. But with regard to the latter object, Zwentibold, who was of a violent and hasty temper, seems to have been but little fitted to play the part of a pacificator. It was not long before he had given offence to the greater part of the magnates. At the assembly of Worms (May 897) Arnulf seemed for a moment to have restored peace between the King of Lorraine and his counts. But no later than next year disorder broke out afresh. Reginar, whom Zwentibold was attempting to deprive of his honours, made an appeal to Charles the Simple, who advanced as far as the neighbourhood of Aix-la-Chapelle. Thanks to the help of Franco, the Bishop of Liège, Zwentibold succeeded in organising a resistance sufficiently formidable to induce Charles to make peace and go back to his own kingdom.

The death of Arnulf (November or December 899) heightened the confusion. He left a son, Louis the Child, born in 893, whose right to the succession had been acknowledged by the assembly at Tribur (897). On 4 February 900, an assembly at Forchheim in East Franconia proclaimed him King of Germany. Some time afterwards in Lorraine the party of Matfrid, with the support of the bishops who resented the dissolute life of Zwentibold and the favour shewn by him to persons of low condition, abandoned their sovereign and appealed to Louis the Child. Zwentibold was killed in an encounter with the rebels on the banks of the Meuse (13 August 900). Louis remained until his death titular King of Lorraine, where he several times made his appearance, but where feudalism of the strongest type was developing. A few years later, civil war again broke out between Matfrid's family and the Frankish Count Gebhard, on whom Louis had conferred the title of Duke and the government of Lorraine. Nor did affairs proceed much better in the other parts of the kingdom, to judge by the few and meagre chronicles of the time. Outside, Louis had no longer the means of making good any claim upon Italy, where Louis of Provence was contending with Berengar for the imperial crown. Germany itself was wasted by the feuds between the rival Franconian houses of the Conradins and Babenberg. The head of the latter, Adalbert, in 906 defeated and killed Conrad the Old, head of the rival family, but being himself made prisoner by the king's officers, he was accused of high treason and executed in the same year (9 September). But the most terrible scourge of Germany was that of the Hungarian invasions. It was in 892 that the Hungarians, a people of Finnish origin who had been driven from their settlements between the Don and the Dnieper, made their first appearance in Germany as the allies of Arnulf in a war against the Moravians. A few years later they established themselves permanently on the banks of the Theiss. In 900 a band of them, returning from