Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/453

 1920 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 445 remained the capital city of the Lorraine region it would have been the centre of a civilization that would have imposed some unity on the cities and principalities. But the archbishop of Treves, the greatest personage in Lorraine, was chiefly concerned with his occupations as an elector of the empire. German Treves was too influential to allow Lorraine to be Gallicized, and not influential enough to Germanize Metz and Verdun and Toul. There was a period when Metz might have become a metropolitical see, as Chrodegang (who died in 766) received the palUum, and about a century later John VIII gave it to Wala ' ob reverentiam dignitatis regni Lotharingiae, cuius Metis civitas caput fuit '. Bertulf of Treves objected, and although Wala asserted, somewhat rashly, that he was the fifth bishop of Metz to receive the pallium, he gave it up on the advice of Hincmar of Reims (Bouquet, ix. 113 n.). There were periods also when it seemed possible that the dukes of Lorraine would create a kingdom, especially towards the close of the fifteenth century, when Rene II held Bar and Vaudemont as well as the duchy, and was able to place his own nominees in the bishoprics. His son John, known as the first cardinal of Lorraine, was bishop of Metz, Toul, and Verdun before he was twenty-six. But unity, even of French-speaking Lorraine, was very difficult to achieve as the lands of the three bishoprics were outside the feudal duchy, and the bishops were not vassals of the dukes. Independence was even harder to secure, as the basin of the Moselle was so important for military reasons to the empire and France, and during some years to Burgundy. It is remarkable, however, that the house of Alsace, which held the duchy for nearly seven centuries after Gerard acquired it in 1047, and threw off as a younger branch the powerful and ambitious Guises, did not accom- plish more. Lacking the patience and concentration of the dukes of Savoy, the dukes of Lorraine looked too far afield, and were adventurous rather than persistent. M. Parisot has written almost as much from the standpoint of general as of purely local history. Thus his history of Roman and Frankish Lorraine contains short but clear accounts of the institutions that prevailed in most parts of the western empire. On the other hand, he might well have given more space to the 'loi de Beaumont', which was the type of the charters of so many towns and villages, and must have been one of the most power- ful instruments in spreading French civilization in Lorraine. The main interest of his theme is the comparison of French and German institutions, ecclesiastical, political, and social. When Lorraine was acquired by Henry the Fowler in 925, its civilization was higher than that of Germany, and it was the channel through which the monastic reforms of the tenth and eleventh centuries reached Germany. Leaders of this movement in Lorraine were St. John of Gorze and Richard, abbot of St. Vannes, Verdun. Ger- many, says M. Parisot, may have borrowed a more advanced feudalism from Lorraine, but if so she returned the loan with interest by the feudalization of the church. The investiture quarrel had disastrous results. Bishops and counts came to be independent of the dukes, and bishops became counts of their cities, temporal princes who were largely freed from the authority of the emperors but had to defend them- selves against the burgesses within their cities and the unruly vassals