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unity of the Empire, momentarily restored under Charles the Fat, had, as we have seen, been once more and finally shattered in 888. As in 843, the long strip of territory lying between the Scheldt, the mouth of the Meuse, the Saône and the Cevennes on one hand, and the Rhine and the Alps on the other, was not re-included in France; but the German king was no more capable than his neighbour of keeping it as a whole under his authority. The entire district south of the Vosges slipped from his grasp, and for a moment he was even in danger of seeing a rival put in possession of the whole of the former kingdom of Lothar I.

In fact, very shortly after the Emperor Charles the Fat, abandoned on all hands, and deposed at Tribur, had made a wretched end at Neidingen, several of the great lay lords and churchmen of the ancient duchy of Jurane Burgundy assembled in the basilica of St Maurice d'Agaune, probably about the end of January 888, and proclaimed the Count and Marquess Rodolph king. Rodolph was a person of no small importance. His grandfather, Conrad the Elder, brother of the Empress Judith, count and duke in Alemannia, and his uncle, Hugh the Abbot, had played a prominent part in the time of Charles the Bald, while his father, Conrad, originally Count of Auxerre, had taken service with the sons of the Emperor Lothar about 861, and had received from the Emperor Louis II the government of the three Transjurane dioceses of Geneva, Lausanne and Sion, as well as the abbey of St Maurice d'Agaune. Rodolph had succeeded to this Jurane duchy which now chose and proclaimed him king.

The significance of the declaration was at first far from clear. Still, in the minds of Rodolph and his supporters it must necessarily have involved more than a mere change of style. The Empire, momentarily united, was once more falling apart into its earlier divisions, and