Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/28

Rh 16 LOUIS been declared co-regent. At the beginning of his reign be excited higb anticipations by the earnestness with which lie attacked the abuses that had accumulated during the later years of Charlemagne s sovereignty. The licentious ness which prevailed at court he sternly suppressed ; he punished counts who were proved to have misused their authority ; and he sought to reform the manners both of the secular and of the regular clergy. The Saxons and the Frisians, who, although conquered, had never cordially accepted Frankish rule, were conciliated by mild and generous treatment. A period of trouble and confusion, however, was opened in 817, when Louis, anxious to establish the order of succession, declared his eldest son Lothair his successor, and made him co-regent, granting him Austrasia with the greater part of Germany. The younger sons of Louis, Pippin and Louis, received, the former Aquitania, the latter Bavaria, Bohemia, Carinthia, and the subject Slavonic and Avar territories. This arrangement was resented by Bernard, king of Italy, the emperor s nephew, who forthwith rebelled. He was soon captured, and condemned to the loss of his sight, while his kingdom was transferred to Lothair. After the death of Bernard, the emperor, who was a man of a gentle and sensitive temper, bitterly repented the harsh punishment which he had sanctioned, and, being further depressed by the death of his first wife, he proposed to resign the crown and retire to a monastery. He was induced to abandon this intention, and (in 819) to marry Judith, the beautiful daughter of Count Welf of Bavaria. In 829 he made a new division of the empire in favour of Charles (afterwards Charles the Bald), his son by his second wife. The three brothers, deeply dissatisfied, combined to declare war against him, and at Compiegne he was taken prisoner. The empress Judith was condemned to the cloister for alleged infidelity to her husband, and Louis was virtually deposed. Pippin and the younger Louis, suspecting that Lothair meant to usurp exclusive authority, changed their policy, and at a diet in Nimeguen the emperor was restored. Soon afterwards he provoked fresh disturbance by granting Aquitania, the territory of Pippin, to Charles, and in 833 the army of the three brothers confronted that of their father near Colmar. When Louis was negotiating with Pope Gregory IV., who had crossed the Alps in the hope of restoring peace, his troops were persuaded to desert him, and on the Liigenfeld (&quot; the field of lies &quot;) he was obliged to surrender to his sons. The empress was sent to Italy, her son to the monastery of Priim, and at Soissons Louis not only abdicated, but made public confession of his sins, a long list of which he read aloud. Again the arrogance of Lothair awoke the distrust of his brothers, and they succeeded in reasserting the rights of the emperor, whose sufferings had excited general sympathy. He went through the ceremony of coronation a second time, and Lothair found it necessary to confine himself to Italy. After the death of Pippin in 838 Louis proposed a scheme by which the whole empire, with the exception of Bavaria, would have been divided between Charles and Lothair, to whom the empress had been reconciled. The younger Louis prepared to oppose this injustice, and he was supported by the people of Aquitania in the interest of Pippin s sons. A diet was summoned at Worms to settle the dispute, but before it met the emperor died on an island in the Rhino near Mainz, on the 20th of June 840. He had capacities which might have made him a great churchman, but as a secular ruler he lacked prudence and vigour, and his mis management prepared the way for the destruction of the empire established by his father. His son Lothair I. suc ceeded to the imperial title. See Funck, Ludvig clcr Frommc, 1832 ; and Simson, J/Jirliichcr ifcs Frdnkischcn Rcichcs miter Ludwig dcm Frommcn, 1874-76. LOUIS II., Roman emperor, grandson of the preceding, was born about 822 and crowned king, of Lombardy in 844. From 849 he shared the imperial title with bis father, Lothair I., being crowned at Rome by Leo IV. in 850. He succeeded to the undivided but almost entirely nominal dignity in 855. On the death of his childless brother, Lothair of Lorraine, in 869, the inheritance was seized and shared by his uncles Charles the Bald and Louis the German ; the pope, however, espoused the cause of the emperor, crowning him king of Lorraine in 872. Louis II. died in 875, and the imperial crown was forth with bestowed on Charles the Bald. LOUIS III., Roman emperor, surnamed &quot;The Blind,&quot; was the son of Boso, king of Provence, and, through his mother, grandson of the emperor Louis II. He was born about 880, called to the throne of Provence in 890, and crowned emperor in succession to Berengar I. at Rome in 901. In 905, while residing at Verona, he was surprised by his discrowned rival, blinded, and ultimately sent back to Provence, where he lived in inactivity and comparative obscurity until 929. LOUIS THE CHILD, though he never actually received the imperial crown, is usually reckoned as the emperor Louis III. or Louis IV. He was the son of the emperor Arnulf, was born in 893, and succeeded to the throne of East Francia or Germany in 900, when he was six years of age. During his brief reign Germany was desolated by the Hungarians, who invaded the country year after year, defeating every force that ventured to oppose them. At the same time the kingdom was weakened by internal strife. The result of the prevailing anarchy was that the imperial constitution established by Charlemagne broke down, and Germany was gradually divided into several great duchies, the rulers of which, while acknowledging the supremacy of the king, sought to become virtually independent. Louis, the last of the Carolingian face in Germany, died in 911. LOUIS IV. (or V.), &quot;the Bavarian,&quot; German king and Roman emperor, was born in 1286. He was the son of the duke of Bavaria, and in 1314, after the death of the emperor Henry VII., was elected to the throne by five of the electors, the others giving their votes for Frederick, duke of Austria. This double election led to a civil war, in which Frederick was supported by the church and by many nobles, while the inhabitants of the great cities rallied round Louis. In 1322 Louis gained the battle of Miihhlorf, taking Frederick prisoner; but the war still went on. Pope John XXII. excommunicated Louis in 1324 ; whereupon, wishing to bring the conflict to an end, Louis offered to liberate Frederick on condition that he would withdraw his claim to the throne, and restore the cities and imperial lands seized by his party in Swabia. Frederick, finding that the obstinacy of his brother, Duke Leopold, would render it impossible to fulfil these terms, returned to cap tivity ; and Louis was so touched by his magnanimity that he proposed that they should share the responsibilities of government. The plan was tried but did not succeed, and was virtually abandoned before Frederick s death in 1330. In 1327 Louis had gone to defend his rights in Italy, where he was crowned emperor by Pope Nicholas V., whom he supported in opposition to Pope John XXII. Returning to Germany in the year of Frederick s death, he made peace with the house of Austria, but John XXII. refused to be conciliated, and his successor Benedict XII., acting in part under the influence of France, continued the struggle. Irritated by the revival of papal pretensions which no longer commanded respect in Germany, the elec tors met at Rherise, and on the 15th of July 1338, issued an important declaration to the effect that the emperor derived his right to the German and imperial crowns, not from the pope, but from the electors by whom he was