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Rh death in the fight at Brissarthe (866) the valour of "the Maccabacus of France" opposed substantial resistance to the invaders of Anjou and Maine.

In the affair of Lothar, neither Charles nor Hincmar would give way. The king of Western Francia had shewn himself determined strenuously to maintain the fight on behalf of the indissolubility of marriage, and declared that he would hold no further intercourse with his nephew until he should take back Theutberga. He repeated this resolution at the interview which he had with his brother Louis at Savonnières near Toul (November 862), to which Lothar had sent as his representatives several of the bishops of his kingdom. Charles accused his nephew of being a cause of double scandal to the Christian Church by the favour he had shewn to the guilty connexion between Baldwin and Judith, and by marrying Waldrada without waiting for the opinion of the Pope. He called for the assembling of a general council to pronounce definitively on both these questions. In the end, Lothar agreed, so far as Judith's case was concerned, but in the matter of the divorce he declared that he would await the decision of the Pope. Charles was obliged to be content with this reply, and to take leave of his brother, having done nothing more than renew the treaty of peace and alliance concluded in 860 at Coblence.

The death of Charles of Provence (25 January 863) made little change in the respective positions of the sovereigns. The dead man left no children; his heirs therefore were his two brothers, for Louis II does not appear to have recognised the treaty concluded in 858 between Charles and Lothar II, by which the latter was to succeed to the whole of the inheritance. Therefore the two rivals hastened to reach Provence, each being eager to win over the magnates of the country to his own side. The seemingly inevitable conflict was warded off, thanks to an agreement which gave Provence, strictly so-called, as far as the Durance to the Emperor, and to the king of Lorraine the Lyonnais and the Viennois, that is to say the Duchy of Lyons, of which Gerard of Roussillon was governor.

But the question of Theutberga was still not definitely settled, and for the years that followed, it remained the subject of difficult negotiations, on the one hand between the different Frankish sovereigns, and on the other between these sovereigns and the Pope. The situation was eminently favourable to a Pope of the character of Nicholas I, who, in 858 had taken the place of Benedict III on the papal throne. Being petitioned to intervene at once by Theutberga, Lothar, and the opponents of Lothar, he could take up the position of the arbiter of the Christian world. Meanwhile, without deciding the question himself, he resolved to hand over the settlement of it to a great council to be held at Metz at which not only the bishops of Lorraine should be present, but two representatives of the episcopate in each of the