Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/676

 620 THE HISTORY' OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Their personalities were almost diametrically opposed, Ch rl the anc * Louis na< ^ ma< ^ e the mistake of affronting Bold and Charles before the latter came into power. The chief manifest bone of contention between them was some towns along their frontier, the river Somme, but in general each stood in the way of the other's territorial expansion. At this time the three great provinces of Lor- raine, Savoy, and Provence were all in weak hands and only waiting for some strong monarch to come and take them. At this time, too, Charles and Louis were the two strongest princes on the Continent. Could Charles have annexed these three districts, his territories would have extended from the North Sea to the Mediterranean and have shut off France from any further eastward expansion. Louis had the ad- vantage of being the older of the two men, and before he became king had as dauphin spent ten years in Dauphine, laying the foundations of his future treaties with the Swiss and Milan and of his future acquisition of Savoy and Pro- vence. These provinces might, however, have been willed to Charles rather than to Louis had the Burgundian not died too soon, leaving his adversary to reap the harvest. The territory which it was most essential for Charles to secure, however, was Lorraine, since it intervened between Charles's re- the two Burgundies and his possessions in Lux- lations with emburg and the Low Countries. When in a.ix Lorraine and *~. . ^' ** Frederick the Duke of Lorraine died childless, Charles ar- ranged by treaty that the new incumbent should be practically his vassal, and proceeded to fill up Lorraine with his own garrisons. In the same year he conferred at Treves for eight weeks with Frederick III — since many of the Burgundian possessions were nominally fiefs of the Em- pire — over the question of Frederick's making Charles a king and marrying his son Maximilian to Charles's daughter Mary. Once before, it will be remembered, there had been a Kingdom of Burgundy which in 1032 had lost its inde- pendence and become incorporated in the Holy Roman Empire. But Frederick sneaked off down the Moselle River early one morning without having agreed to raise Bur-