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Rh did not hesitate to plot his ruin. A whole series of obscure letters, with a hidden meaning, often written on a system agreed upon beforehand, were exchanged between Adalbero and Gerbert and the party of Otto III. Hugh Capet was won over to the imperial cause, and a skilful system of espionage was organised around Lothair.

The latter, nevertheless, defended himself with remarkable courage and firmness. He contrived to recruit followers even among the vassals of Hugh Capet, threw himself upon Verdun, surprised the place, and so took captive several Lorraine nobles of Adalbero's kindred who had shut themselves up there. Finally he summoned Adalbero on a charge of high treason before the general assembly to be held at Compiègne on 11 May 985. Unfortunately, all these exertions were in vain; Hugh Capet came up with an army and dispersed the assembly at Compiègne. Not long after the king took a chill and died suddenly on 2 March 986.

Lothair had taken the precaution, as early as 979, to have his son Louis V acknowledged and crowned king. The latter, who was nineteen years of age, succeeded him without opposition. He was about to take up his father's policy with some vigour, and had just issued a fresh summons to Adalbero to appear before an assembly which was to meet at Compiègne, when a sudden fall proved fatal (21 or 22 May 987).

Louis left no children. There remained, however, one Carolingian who might have a legitimate claim to the crown, Charles, brother of the late King Lothair. After a quarrel with his brother, Charles, in 977, had taken service with the Emperor, who had given him the duchy of Lower Lorraine. From that time Charles had taken up the position of a rival to Lothair; in 978 he had accompanied Otto II on his expedition to Paris and perhaps had even tried to get himself recognised as king. But soon there was a complete change; Charles had become reconciled to his brother in order to plot against Otto III. At the same time he had fallen out with Adalbero, and when the succession to the French crown was suddenly thrown open in 987, his prospects of obtaining it seemed from the first to be gravely compromised.

The truth was that for a century past political conceptions had gradually been transformed. Although the kingship had never ceased, even in Charlemagne's day, to be considered as in theory elective, it seemed, up to the time when Odo was called to the throne, that only a Carolingian could aspire to the title of king. The theory of the incapacity of any other family to receive the crown was still brilliantly sustained during the last years of the ninth century by Fulk, Archbishop of Rheims. In a very curious letter of self-justification, which he wrote in 893, he laid it down that Odo, being a stranger to the royal race, was a mere usurper; that the King of Germany, Arnulf, having refused to accept the crown which he himself and his supporters offered