Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/82

70 70 HOLLAND [HISTORY. rank of great captains. He declared for Vespasian against Vitellius, and grouped together Celt and Teuton in an effort to sweep the tyrant Roman out of Gaul. At first all went well with them, and the Romans were driven out of all modern Holland, Belgium, and from the left bank of the Rhine as far as Alsace. Then the Roman power began to assert itself once more. An able general, Cere- alis, was sent into the north-west, and after a chequered and exhausting struggle, in which both suffered greatly, the Batavian hero gave way. Peace was made on easy terms; Civilis laid down arms, and the Batavians sub mitted and resumed their old position towards Rome. The Batavian island was lined with forts, and became for the Romans the frontier between Gaul and German; much as in far later days the Spanish Netherlands were the barrier between the Dutch and the French. The For a time all was quiet on this north-western fron- tYanks. tier, till late in the 3d century the Franks appeared (see FRANKS). In the course of the 5th century the Salian Franks had occupied a great part of the Netherlands, and when Hlodowig (Clovis) was lifted (481) on his warriors shields, they were possessors of South Holland, the Veluwe, Utrecht, Brabant, Antwerp, Limburg, Li6ge, Hainault, Namur, and Luxembourg. After his death (511) these districts for the most part belonged to the Austrasian kingdom. Behind the Salians came the Saxons, who had made themselves felt in the Batavian island by the middle of the 4th century; in the course of the 5th and 6th centuries they had settled firmly in Overyssel and Drenthe, lying between the Frisians to the north and the Franks to the south. There they shared, in alliance with the Frisians, the varying fortunes of that struggle against the Frankish power which lasted 400 years, and was ended only by the genius and persistency of Charles the Great. Spread of The first Christian church in the Netherlands was founded Ohristi- in the time of Dagobert I., who had reduced the Frisians amty and Saxons at the town of Wiltenberg, afterwards Utrecht, between 622 and 632. But the true apostle of the Nether lands was Willibrord the Northumbrian, first bishop of that see (695). He made Uti jcht the centre from which Christian light spread across a wide circle of heathendom; and under the protection of Pippin of Heristal, the new faith was so firmly planted in those parts, that when Willibrord died Limburg, North Brabant, Utrecht, and other districts had accepted the faith of the Franks. After Willibrord, Christianity had in that part of Europe another stout champion, Wolfram of Sens, who had nearly persuaded the Frisian king, Radbod, to be a Christian; and lastly in 755, St Boniface, &quot; the apostle of the Germans,&quot; was martyred at Dokkum in Friesland while preaching among the heathen. Towards the end of the century the stern methods of Charles the Great completed the conversion of the Netherlands. Govern- As an integral part of the Frankish empire, the land mentand under Charles and his immediate successors was divided of the n8 into &quot; Iandschaf ts &quot; and &quot;gaus,&quot; ruled over by dukes and country, counts, by the side of whom the church also asserted her territorial rights. Hence sprang the dukedom of Brabant, the countships of Flanders, Holland, Guelderland, and the bishopric of Utrecht; and these, under the later Carolings, were independent in all but the name. Ecclesiastically the northern portion of the Netherlands, with South Holland and part of Zealand, was under the bishop of Utrecht; while the eastern districts were under the Saxon bishops of Miinster and Osnabriick, and the southern parts under the Frankish bishops of Cologne, Li6ge, and Doornick. The original dukedoms were subdivided politically into countships, and geographically into gaus; each gau had a chief town, girt with a wall, wherein count and judges administered justice; such towns were also market-places. These districts were again subdivided into marks or villages, each with its headman, who acted as judge in lesser aud local cases. These gaus were Frisian in the north, Saxon in the middle (about Drenthe, &c.), and Frankish in the south. In the great partition of Verdun (843), Lothar, eldest Chan son of Louis the Pious, became lord of North Brabant (a c ^. lo: it is now called), Guelderland, Limburg, and all modern n^P Belgium; Charles the Bald got Flanders and part of cento Zealand, while Louis the German had whatever lay on the right bank of the Rhine : this district (called Lotharingia in the days of his son Lothar II.) thus became a border land between Gaul and Germany. When Lothar II. died without heirs in 869, his uncle Charles the Bald got all the northern Netherlands, with Friesland; but the Mersen agreement (870) redistributed these lands, to Louis the German the districts south of the present Zuyder Zee, including Utrecht and the Veluwe; to Charles the Bald, Holland, Zealand, and modern Belgium. Eventually in 879 Louis, son of Louis the German, got these districts also. In 912 they accepted Charles the Simple of France as overlord; in 924 Henry I. brought them again under German lordship; afterwards Otto the Great granted them as a fief to his brother Bruno, archbishop of Cologne, who, dividing the land into Upper and Lower Lotharingia, set Gottfried, count of Verdun, over the latter as duke, and himself took the title of archduke. Thus, during this period, the Netherlands from 843 to 869 were a part of Lotharingia (as it came to be called); from 869 to 870 they were under French lordship, from 870 to 879 partly French partly German, from 879 to 912 altogether Ger man, from 912 to 924 French again, and finally after 924 German. Throughout this time the country was swamp below and The woodland above; and though much forest was cleared Nor1 from time to time, it was still a difficult tangle, with little ra&amp;lt; communication except down the rivers and by the old Roman roads. Yet, backward as they were, the Nether lands were rich enough to attract the Northmen, who ravaged the shores and river sides, and carried with them southward many a willing Saxon and Frisian warrior. Under Louis the Pious they got firm footing on the coast, and received the district from Walcheren up to the Weser as a group of fiefs under the emperors; they evtn took and sacked Utrecht. In 873 Rolf, founder of Normandy, seized Walcheren; in 880 the Northmen took Nimeguen, and spread up the left bank of the Rhine as far as Cologne; in the chapel of the Great Charles at Aix they stabled horses and held heathen revel, till bribed to withdraw by Charles the Fat. Their great leader Siegfried had the emperor s daughter to wife, with lands in Friesland; he was walling to become a Christian, though this put no stop to his demands; &quot; as the lands granted him hitherto produced no wine,&quot; he demanded also Rhine towns and districts for the sake of their vintages. His father-in-law, however, sent instead men to murder him, and, this being done, the lord ship of the Northmen in the Netherlands came to an end. The effect of these viking incursions on Frankish feudal ism was great. &quot; Eighty years of plunder and murder,&quot; says Gerlache (Essai sur le.s grandes Epogues, p. 94), &quot; had turned the fields into a wilderness; the towns rose like oases in the desert; the wealth of the monasteries perished; the people were either slain with the sword or had taken to the sword as robbers; all the elements of political life, kingship, nobility, clergy, were confounded together, and every tie of civil society relaxed.&quot; The im poverished natives took refuge under the nobles, whose power made great advance. Now arose, too, a new title of nobility, that of margrave, each margrave being bound to defend a piece of frontier, receiving in return an almost