Meanwhile Arnulf entered Frankfurt, and was there hailed as king by all the counts and dukes of Germany. He was known as a brave and able young man, and though he was |Arnulf, king of Germany, 888-899.| but a Karling of bastard blood, the East Franks gladly intrusted themselves to the protection of his arm. But the other parts of the empire did not consider themselves bound to follow the lead of Germany. In each of the kingdoms a noble of great local note and power stepped forward to claim the crown of his native land.
WESTERN EUROPE
in 890.
In Neustria there still survived one Karling of the direct line, the boy Charles the Simple, Carloman’s youngest brother; but he had only reached the age of eight, and when Paris was but just saved, and the Danes were still on the Seine, it was no time to give the crown to children. |Odo, king of France.| Two claimants appeared for the Neustrian throne, Wido duke of Spoleto, an Italian noble whose mother had been a daughter of the emperor Lothair, and Odo count of Paris, the hero who had saved his city from the Danes in the past year. Though he could boast of no Carolingian blood in his veins, Odo easily carried the day against his rival; he was crowned king at Compiègne by Walter, archbishop of Sens, and soon forced Wido to leave France and retire to Italy.
We shall relate in another chapter how Berengar of Friuli was chosen king of Italy, and how he was obliged to fight hard for his crown with Wido, when the latter returned from his unsuccessful expedition to France.
|Rudolf, king of Upper Burgundy.| A fourth kingdom was established in the Jura and the western Alps by count Rudolf, one of the governors of Upper Burgundy. He first got himself crowned at St. Maurice by the counts and bishops of Helvetia, and then, pushing beyond the Jura, was again proclaimed king at Toul. But Rudolf never got any firm footing in Lotharingia: his realm was limited to the lands north of the Alps, west of the Aar, and east of the Saone. The chief towns of this—the smallest of the fractions of the Carolingian realm—were Lausanne, Geneva, St. Maurice, and Besançon.
Boso’s kingdom of Arles or Lower Burgundy was now in the ninth year of its existence; its founder had died in 887, but his son Lewis—a Carolingian on the female side through his mother Hermengarde, the daughter of the emperor Lewis of Italy, had succeeded without trouble to his father’s throne.
Thus the Frankish empire was cut up into five states, not ephemeral creations of a heritage-partition, like the many kingdoms which we have seen rising and falling from the days of the Merovingians onward, but more permanent divisions, three of which represented real national differences, while even the other two—the Upper and Lower Burgundy—had a certain national coherence and individuality of their own, and were destined to last for several generations. One of the five realms was ruled by a bastard Carolingian; two by two princes who boasted a Carolingian descent on the spindle side: only France and Upper Burgundy were in the hands of monarchs who could lay claim to no drop of the ancient royal blood.[[62]]
[62]. Rudolf of Upper Burgundy was connected by marriage with the Karlings. He was nephew of the empress Judith, the mother of Charles the Bald, and therefore cousin to all the Neustrian Karlings.