Page:Western Europe in the Middle Ages.djvu/74

 The rule of primogeniture was not yet established in Europe; the Empire, like any other inheritance, was divided among the sons of the Carolingian house. Charlemagne himself had planned to share his lands among his children, but premature deaths left him only one heir. Charles's only surviving son, Louis the Pious, spent the last half of his life trying to work out a division of the Empire which would be accepted by his sons, but he never succeeded in pleasing all three of them. A long series of civil wars, both in his lifetime and after his death, settled the problem only partially. One son took the west and one the east, thus creating the nuclei of the future kingdoms of France and Germany, but the eldest received a long strip of territory stretching from the North Sea to Rome. This middle kingdom included the Low Countries and the Rhineland, Alsace and Lorraine, Switzerland, Savoy, Dauphine, and Provence, the Po valley, and central Italy. Perhaps it was hoped that the eldest brother, ruling a central territory which included both "capitals" (Rome and Aachen), could preserve some degree of unity in the Empire, but his kingdom never achieved political stability. It soon broke up into smaller states, which in peaceful times had little influence and which in war furnished the battlefields and the spoils for powerful neighbors. The history of Western Europe, from the ninth to the twentieth centuries, has been dominated by the struggle between France and Germany for control of the middle kingdom.

The division of Charlemagne's unwieldy Empire into smaller states might have solved many problems if it could have been accomplished peacefully and irrevocably. But it was done in the heat of conflict and none of the later Carolingians were satisfied with the results. The stronger kings dreamed of reuniting the Empire under their own rule; the weaker ones at least hoped to increase their share. In the frequent wars of the ninth century the great landowners were the only gainers. They furnished the armies with which the Carolingians fought, but they demanded a high price for their aid. By playing one ruler against another and