[CHAPTER VI.]
THE BEGINNING OF THE MODERN EUROPEAN STATES.
§ 1. The Division of the Frankish Empire.
♦Dissolution of the Frankish dominion.♦
The great dominion of the Franks, the German kingdom which had so strangely grown into a new Western Roman Empire, did not last long. In the course of the ninth century it altogether fell to pieces. ♦The chief states of modern Europe spring out of it.♦ But the process by which it fell to pieces must be carefully traced, because it was out of its dismemberment that the chief states of Western Europe arose. Speaking roughly, the Carolingian Empire took in Germany, so far as Germany had yet spread to the East, all Gaul, a great part of Italy, and a small part of Spain. ♦National kingdoms not yet formed.♦ Of these, it was only Italy, and sometimes Aquitaine, which showed any approach to the character of a separate or national kingdom. ♦Extent of Francia.♦ Northern Gaul and central Germany were still alike Francia; and, though the Romance speech prevailed in one, and the Teutonic speech in the other, no national distinction was drawn between them during the time of Charles the Great. Among the proposed divisions of his Empire, none proposed to separate Neustria and Austria, the Western and the Eastern Francia. ♦Separate being of Italy and Aquitaine.♦ But Italy did form a separate kingdom under the superiority of the Emperor; and so for a while there was an under-kingdom of Aquitaine, answering roughly to Gaul south of the Loire. This is the land of the Provençal tongue, the tongue of Oc, a tongue which, it must be remembered, reached to the Ebro. ♦Division under Lewis the Pious.
First glimpses of Modern France.♦ It is in the various divisions, contemplated and actual, among the sons of Lewis the Pious, the successor of Charles the Great, that we see the first approaches to a national division between Germany and Gaul, and the first glimmerings of a state answering in any way to France in the modern sense.
♦Division of 817.♦
The earliest among those endless divisions that we need mention is the division of 817, by which two new subordinate kingdoms were founded within the Empire. Lewis and his immediate colleague Lothar kept in their own hands Francia, German and Gaulish, and the more part of Burgundy. South-western Gaul, Aquitaine in the wide sense, with some small parts of Septimania and Burgundy, formed the portion of one under-king; South-eastern Germany, Bavaria and the march-lands beyond it, formed the portion of another. Italy still remained the portion of a third. Here we have nothing in the least answering to modern France. The tendency is rather to leave the immediate Frankish kingdom, both in Gaul and Germany, as an undivided whole, and to part off its dependent lands, German, Gaulish, and Italian. ♦Union of Neustria and Aquitaine the first step to the creation of France. 838.♦ But, in a much later division, Lewis granted Neustria to his son Charles, and in the next year, on the death of Pippin of Aquitaine, he added his kingdom to that of Charles. A state was thus formed which answers roughly to the later kingdom of France, as it stood before the long series of French encroachments on the German and Burgundian lands. ♦Character of the Western Kingdom.♦ The kingdom thus formed had no definite name, and it answered to no national division. It was indeed mainly a kingdom of the Romance speech, but it did not answer to any one of the great divisions of that speech. It was a kingdom formed by accident, because Lewis wished to increase the portion of his youngest son. Still there can be no doubt that we have here the first beginning of the kingdom of France, though it was not till after several other stages that the kingdom thus formed took that name. ♦Division of Verdun. 843.♦ The final division of Verdun went a step further in the direction of the modern map. It left Charles in possession of a kingdom which still more nearly answered to France, as France stood before its Burgundian and German annexations. It also founded a kingdom which roughly answered to the later Germany before its great extension to the East at the expense of the Slavonic nations. And, as the Western kingdom was formed by the addition of Aquitaine to the Western Francia, so the Eastern kingdom was formed by the addition of the Eastern Francia to Bavaria. Lewis of Bavaria became king of a kingdom which we are tempted to call the kingdom of Germany. Still it would as yet be premature to speak of France at all, or even to speak of Germany, except in the geographical sense. ♦Kingdoms of the Eastern and Western Franks.♦ The two kingdoms are severally the kingdoms of the Eastern and of the Western Franks. But between these two states the policy of the ninth century instinctively put a barrier. The Emperor Lothar, besides Italy, kept a long narrow strip of territory between the dominions of his Eastern and Western brothers. After him, Italy remained to his son the Emperor Lewis, while the border lands of Germany and Gaul passed to the younger Lothar. ♦Kingdom of Lotharingia, Lothringen, Lorraine.♦ This land, having thus been the dominion of two Lothars, took the name of Lotharingia, Lothringen, or Lorraine, a name which part of it has kept to this day. This land, sometimes attached to the Eastern kingdom, sometimes to the Western, sometimes divided between the two, sometimes separated from both, always kept its character of a border-land. ♦The Western Kingdom called Karolingia.♦ The kingdom to the west of it, in like manner took the name of Karolingia, which, according to the same analogy, should be Charlaine. It is only by a caprice of language that the name of Lotharingia has survived, while that of Karolingia has died out.
♦Burgundy, or the Middle Kingdom.♦