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Rh duchy of Aquitaine, a region never fully incorporated with the Frankish state. From 781 onwards Charlemagne had found himself obliged to form it into a separate kingdom, though subordinate to his own superior authority, for the benefit of his third son Louis the Pious. When the latter became Emperor in 814 the existence of the kingdom of Aquitaine had been respected, and down to 877 the Aquitanians had continued to live their own life under their own king. But at this date their king, Louis the Stammerer, having become King of France, formed the land into a duchy, a measure which, as may easily be imagined, did not contribute to bind it more closely to the rest of the kingdom. The ducal title, long disputed between the Counts of Toulouse, Auvergne and Poitiers, ended, in the middle of the tenth century, by falling to the latter, despite reiterated attempts on the part of Hugh the Great and Hugh Capet to tear it from their grasp. In the course of these struggles King Lothair several times appeared south of the Loire in the train of the Duke of the Franks. In 955 we find him laying siege with Hugh to Poitiers, and in 958 he was in the Nivernais, about to march against the Count of Poitou. Finally, in 979 Lothair took a decisive step, and restored the kingdom of Aquitaine, unheard-of for a century, for the benefit of his young son Louis V, whom he had just crowned at Compiègne. A marriage with Adelaide, widow of the Count of Gevaudan, was no doubt destined in his expectation to consolidate Louis's power. It was celebrated in the heart of Auvergne, in the presence of Lothair himself and of a brilliant train of magnates and bishops. But this attempt at establishing direct rule over Aquitaine led only to a mortifying check. Before three years had passed, Lothair found himself compelled to go in person and withdraw his son from Auvergne. In fact, no sooner was the Loire crossed than a new and strange France seemed to begin; its manners and customs were different, and when young Louis V tried to adopt them, the Northerners pursued him with their sarcasms. And later, when Robert the Pious married Constance, their indignation was aroused by the facile manners, the clothes, and customs which her suite introduced among them. Such things were, in their eyes, "the manners of foreigners." The true kingdom of France, in which its sovereigns felt themselves really at home, ended at the Aquitanian frontier.

To the north of that frontier the ties of vassalage which bound the counts and dukes to the sovereign were less relaxed than in the south. But the breaking-up of the State into a certain number of great principalities had gone forward here on parallel lines. Not counting Brittany, which had never been thoroughly incorporated, and thenceforward remained completely independent, the greater part of Neustria had split off, and since the ninth century had been formed into a March, continually increasing in extent, for the benefit of Robert the Strong and his successors. Francia, in its turn, reduced by the formation of Lorraine to the lands lying between the North Sea and the Channel,