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his son Louis le Debonnair, and as it was apportioned and divided, during the second half, among their successors. The empire reunited nearly all the countries which had been subject to the rule of the Western Cæsars and had partaken of the Roman civilization. Viewed in its widest extent, as including the tributary nations beyond the proper frontier,-the Elbe and the Baltic may be considered its extreme limits on the north; the Mediterranean, the Adriatic, or perhaps the Save, on the south; the Oder, the Carpathian mountains, the Danube or the Theiss on the east; and the ocean and narrow seas, from the gulf of Gascony to the mouth of the Elbe, on the west.

The first kingdoms founded by the Franks, after they crossed the Rhine, were those of Austrasia and Neustria, in Gaul, on the north of the Loire. Round these respective centres were grouped the kingdoms aud territories which were the fruits of their subsequent conquests. To Austrasia, having the Rhine and the Meuse for its northern and eastern boundaries, the Scheld on the west and the Vosges on the south, the victories of Pepin annexed the country between the Rhine, the Danube, and the Rhætian Alps, the antient Vindelicia; from which was formed the kingdom of Almaine or Bavaria. Those of Charlemagne northward on the Elbe added Saxony and Thuringia to the German branch of the empire.

In Gaul, the victorious arms of the Franks had gradually consolidated all the surrounding states with their original kingdom of Neustria. They became masters of the ancient Burgundian kingdom of the Goths between the Rhone and the Grecian Alps, from Provence on the shores of the Mediterranean to the Vosges where it met the Austrasian fontier, and to the sources of the Rhone; including, therefore, great part of modern Switzerland. The great province of Gothia or Septimania, afterwards called the Narbonnese, situated between the Rhone and the Garonne, with the dutchy of Gascony, extending from the Garonne to the Pyrenees, and bounded by the Atlantic on the west, completed the circuit of the south of Gaul. The central region, occupied by the Aquitani and lying between the two last named provinces and the circuitous course of the Loire, opposed the greatest resistance to the arms of the Franks. Their final subjugation was the first enterprise of Charlemagne's reign; and the kingdom of Aquitain,

subsequently founded, took its place among the satellite sovereignties of the Neustrian Franks. Brittany on the north-west, strong in its peninsular position, its rugged surface, and the brave and independent character of its ancient people, yielded a reluctant submission to the power of the great emperor; to whom its dukes, as well as those of Gascony in the south-west, rendered a doubtful allegiance. Thus the whole of Gaul was included in the dominions of the restored empire.

In Spain, the narrow angle of territory between the Pyrenees and the Ebro, the modern Catalonia, formed a province, with Barcelona for its capital, which was debateable ground between the Franks and the Saracens; and the counts of the Spanish marches guarded with difficulty that advanced frontier of the empire. In the valleys of the Asturias the descendants of the Christian exiles who escaped from the conquest of the Moors, joined to the hardy Basques, maintained their freedom and nourished their strength till the waning crescent should give the signal for rushing from their mountain fastnesses to restore the ancient kingdom of the Visigoths and re-establish the cross in the cities of Spain. With these small exceptions, the whole of the peninsula was included in the Saracen caliphate of Cordova; a section of Europe sufficiently important and interesting to demand hereafter a separate notice.

In Italy, the arms of Pepin had wrested from the Greek emperor the exarchate of Ravenna and the Pentapolis, as Romagna was then called, on the shores of the Adriatic. His piety or his prudence had induced him to cede those territories to the Pope; but whatever rights beneficiary and administrative were conferred by that memorable dotation, it seems clear that those of suzerainty, at least, were reserved to himself and his successors, patricians of Rome and kings or emperors of the Franks. The Gothic kingdom of Lombardy, subjugated by Charlemagne, may be considered the central seat of the Frankish dominion in Italy, as the kingdoms of Austrasia and Neustria were in Germany and Gaul. With the iron crown of the Lombard kings Charlemagne assumed the style of king of Italy; and with their rich territories in the north-he succeeded to their rights over the great Lombard dukedom of Beneventum, in the south of the peninsula, composing more than half of the present kingdom of Naples; rights, however, fiercely

resisted by the powerful dukes who claimed independence in the government of that fine territory. Finally, when Charlemagne, king of the Franks and Lombards, was invested with the imperial crown, and hailed Cæsar and Augustus by the acclamations of the Roman people, he succeeded to the prerogatives of the western emperors over the city and state of Rome, and whatever rights those lofty titles gave him pretensions to assert; not the least of which was, that the election of the Popes was subject to his control and required the confirmation of the emperor. These prerogatives and the rights of suzerainty, as yet undefined, vested in such hands as Charlemagne's, conferred a real power over the most powerful vassals who struggled for independence in the government of their great fiefs.

The dominion of the Eastern emperors in Italy was now reduced to a fragment of territory and an empty title. Venice founded in the lagunes of the Adriatic by refugees from the Lombard invasion, together with the Greek cities of Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi on the shores of the Mediterranean, which retained the institutions of municipalities and were enriched by the wealth their maritime position and active industry created, were gradually establishing their independence and becoming the types of the great Italian republics of the middle ages. These free cities, however, either from the force of old associations or the policy of attaching themselves to a weak and a distant power instead of submitting to a powerful and neighbouring master, still paid a nominal allegiance to the Greek emperor. In the case of Venice, indeed, the Latin writers vaunt of its complete subjugation by Pepin son of Charlemagne and titular king of Italy. But the Italians give a more correct account of the issue of his enterprise. They admit that Pepin gradually reduced all the islands, till the Venetians, driven to extremity, retired on the Rialto, which thenceforth became their citadel and seat of government. Having there concentrated their forces, they sallied forth and burnt the fleet of Pepin, which had grounded in the shallows of the Lagunes. This signal success and their unapproachable position left them afterwards nothing to fear for the maintenance of their independence. The Doges of Venice formed alliances with the Greek cities on the northern shore of the Adriatic, and laid the foundations of the dominion which they afterwards extended on that

coast. But here their position was more accessible, and Istria and Dalmatia were reckoned among the provinces of the empire connected with its Italian states.

The actual sovereignty of the Greek emperors in Italy in the ninth century was confined to an unimportant territory at its eastern extremity, where part of Apulia and Calabria with Bari for the capital, dignified after the extinction of the exarchate of Ravenna, with the empty title of the Theme of Lombardy, was all that remained of their dominions in the west. Indeed, though their Byzantine capital was seated on the hither side of the Bosphorus, and the barbarized provinces of Greece and Macedonia were subject to their rule, the emperors of Constantinople can scarcely be considered at this period as an European power. With so wide a field before us it is therefore happily needless that we should more than incidentally notice the political relations of the series of emperors who, with savage despotism or oriental apathy, filled the Byzantine throne between the Isaurian and the Macedonian dynasties. A frontier treaty with Charlemagne, another with the Caliphs of Spain for mutual cooperation against those of Bagdad, some pompous embassies to the Frankish kings, and the tardy and infrequent appearance of their fleets on the southern shores of Italy, were the slender tokens of the intervention of the Greek emperors in the affairs of western Europe.

Exterior to the great aggregation of kingdoms which composed the body of the Carlovingian empire, a vast zone almost equal in extent to the immediate territories af the Franks, peopled by nations mostly of Sclavonic origin, embraced its northern and eastern flanks. It extended from the Baltic to the gulf of Venice, and was backed again by still more savage and unknown tribes who wandered over the deserts of northern and eastern Europe ready in turn to pour their swarms on any frontier where the progress of civilization might advance-not to speak of the Scandinavian tribes, whose piratical descents on every coast will form a melancholy feature in the course of this enquiry, but whose history belongs to another division of the present work.

The victories of Charlemagne over the nations more immediately in contact with his hereditary dominions, the Saxons, the Moravians and the Bohemians, enabled him to extend the bounds

of his empire to the Oder, the Carpathian mountains, the Danube and the Theiss. But these warlike nations submitted impatiently to a foreign master. They became tributaries rather than subjects, and were waiting the opportunity which the decline of the empire speedily afforded them, of throwing off the yoke and asserting their national independence.

Such being a geographical sketch and a view of the relative positions of the dominions of the Franks in the last years of Charlemagne, it may easily be conceived that no arm less powerful, no mind less vigorous than his, could enforce the allegiance of so many peoples, differing in race, in customs, and in language, held together by no common interests, and over which the rights of sovereignty materially varied.

But viewing the empire in its integrity, it must not be supposed that under Charlemagne himself, with all the power of his arms and all the vigour of his administration, it presented the aspect of order and tranquillity which its traditions seem to convey.' Scarcely a year passed but Charlemagne was at the head of his armies, at one time to curb the barbarians on the Elbe, at another to chastise the insubordinate vassals of Brittany or Beneventum; now, to repel the incursions of the Sclaves on the Oder or the Danube, and again to secure or enlarge his Spanish frontier on the Ebro.

It is foreign to our purpose to consider the character of Charlemagne's legislative and administrative policy, except as it may be hereafter necessary to glance at its connection with the revolutions, the elements of which are to be discovered in the very foundation of the empire. The leading principles of his government were unity, the conservation and extension of the remains of Roman civilization, incessant conflict with barbarism within and without. He reformed, protected, and endowed the church; he made it his instrument and auxiliary; but he ruled it with a stern hand. The ascendancy of the bishops over the temporal power was deferred till the period from which we propose to take our next point of view ;-that of the popes to a still later age. Charlemagne founded schools and encouraged learning—surrounding

(1) The chronicles of the times record Charlemagne's annual expeditions as part of his regular routine of action, with as much uniformity as they register his solemnization of the great feasts of the church and his hunting in the forests of the Vosges or the Ardennes.

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