LOT-ET-GARONNE, a department of south-western France, formed in 1790 of Agenais and Bazadais, two districts of the old province of Guienne, and of Condomois, Lomagne, Brullois and pays d’Albret, formerly portions of Gascony. It is bounded W. by Gironde, N. by Dordogne, E. by Lot and Tarn-et-Garonne, S. by Gers and S.W. by Landes. Area 2079 sq. m. Pop. (1906) 274,610. The Garonne, which traverses the department from S.E. to N.W., divides it into two unequal parts. That to the north is a country of hills and deep ravines, and the slope is from east to west, while in the region to the south, which is a continuation of the plateau of Lannemezan and Armagnac, the slope is directly from south to north. A small portion in the south-west belongs to the sterile region of the Landes (q.v.); the broad valleys of the Garonne and of its affluent the Lot are proverbial for their fertility. The wildest part is towards the north-east on the borders of Dordogne, where a region of causses (limestone plateaus) and forests begins; the highest point (896 ft.) is also found here. The Garonne, where it quits the department, is only some 20 ft. above the sea-level; it is navigable throughout, with the help of its lateral canal, as also are the Lot and Baise with the help of locks. The Drot, a right affluent of the Garonne in the north of the department, is also navigable in the lower part of its course. The climate is that of the Girondine region—mild and fine—the mean temperature of Agen being 56.6° Fahr., or 5° above that of Paris; the annual rainfall, which, in the plain of Agen, varies from 20 to 24 in., is nearly the least in France. Agriculturally the department is one of the richest. Of cereals wheat is the chief, maize and oats coming next. Potatoes, vines and tobacco are important sources of wealth. The best wines are those of Clairac and Buzet. Vegetable and fruit-growing are prosperous. Plum-trees (pruniers d’ente) are much cultivated in the valleys of the Garonne and Lot, and the apricots of Nicole and Tonneins are well known. The chief trees are the pine and the oak; the cork-oak flourishes in the Landes, and poplars and willows are abundant on the borders of the Garonne. Horned cattle, chiefly of the Garonne breed, are the principal live stock. Poultry and pigs are also reared profitably. There are deposits of iron in the department. The forges, blast furnaces and foundries of Fumel are important; and agricultural implements and other machines are manufactured. The making of lime and cement, of tiles, bricks and pottery, of confectionery and dried plums (pruneaux d’Agen) and other delicacies, and brewing and distilling, occupy many of the inhabitants. At Tonneins (pop. 4691 in 1906) there is a national tobacco manufactory. Cork cutting, of which the centre is Mézin, hat and candle making, wool spinning, weaving of woollen and cotton stuffs, tanning, paper-making, oil-making, dyeing and flour and saw-milling are other prominent industries. The peasants still speak the Gascon patois. The arrondissements are 4—Agen, Marmande, Nérac and Villeneuve-sur-Lot—and there are 35 cantons and 326 communes.
Agen, the capital, is the seat of a bishopric and of the court of appeal for the department of Lot-et-Garonne. The department belongs to the region of the XVII. army corps, the académie of Bordeaux, and the province of the archbishop of Bordeaux. Lot-et-Garonne is served by the lines of the Southern and the Orleans railways, its rivers afford about 160 m. of navigable waterway, and the lateral canal of the Garonne traverses it for 54 m. Agen, Marmande, Nérac and Villeneuve-sur-Lot, the principal places, are treated under separate headings. The department possesses Roman remains at Mas d’Agenais and at Aiguillon. The churches of Layrac, Monsempron, Mas d’Agenais, Moirax, Mézin and Vianne are of interest, as also are the fortifications of Vianne of the 13th century, and the châteaux of Xaintrailles, Bonaguil, Gavaudun and of the industrial town of Casteljaloux.
LOTHAIR I. (795-855), Roman emperor, was the eldest son of the emperor Louis I., and his wife Irmengarde. Little is known of his early life, which was probably passed at the court of his grandfather Charlemagne, until 815 when he became ruler of Bavaria. When Louis in 817 divided the Empire between his sons, Lothair was crowned joint emperor at Aix-la-Chapelle and given a certain superiority over his brothers. In 821 he married Irmengarde (d. 851), daughter of Hugo, count of Tours; in 822 undertook the government of Italy; and, on the 5th of April 823, was crowned emperor by Pope Paschal I. at Rome. In November 824 he promulgated a statute concerning the relations of pope and emperor which reserved the supreme power to the secular potentate, and he afterwards issued various ordinances for the good government of Italy. On his return to his father’s court his stepmother Judith won his consent to her plan for securing a kingdom for her son Charles, a scheme which was carried out in 829. Lothair, however, soon changed his attitude, and spent the succeeding decade in constant strife over the division of the Empire with his father. He was alternately master of the Empire, and banished and confined to Italy; at one time taking up arms in alliance with his brothers and at another fighting against them; whilst the bounds of his appointed kingdom were in turn extended and reduced. When Louis was dying in 840, he sent the imperial insignia to Lothair, who, disregarding the various partitions, claimed the whole of the Empire. Negotiations with his brother Louis and his half-brother Charles, both of whom armed to resist this claim, were followed by an alliance of the younger brothers against Lothair. A decisive battle was fought at Fontenoy on the 25th of June 841, when, in spite of his personal gallantry, Lothair was defeated and fled to Aix. With fresh troops he entered upon a war of plunder, but the forces of his brothers were too strong for him, and taking with him such treasure as he could collect, he abandoned to them his capital. Efforts to make peace were begun, and in June 842 the brothers met on an island in the Sâone, and agreed to an arrangement which developed, after much difficulty and delay, into the treaty of Verdun signed in August 843. By this Lothair received Italy and the imperial title, together with a stretch of land between the North and Mediterranean Seas lying along the valleys of the Rhine and the Rhone. He soon abandoned Italy to his eldest son, Louis, and remained in his new kingdom, engaged in alternate quarrels and reconciliations with his brothers, and in futile efforts to defend his lands from the attacks of the Normans and the Saracens. In 855 he became seriously ill, and despairing of recovery renounced the throne, divided his lands between his three sons, and on the 23rd of September entered the monastery of Prüm, where he died six days later. He was buried at Prüm, where his remains were found in 1860. Lothair was entirely untrustworthy and quite unable to maintain either the unity or the dignity of the empire of Charlemagne.
See “Annales Fuldenses”; Nithard, “Historiarum Libri,” both in the Monumenta Germaniae historica. Scriptores, Bände i. and ii. (Hanover and Berlin, 1826 fol.); E. Mühlbacher, Die Regesten des Kaiserreichs unter den Karolingern (Innsbruck, 1881); E. Dümmler, Geschichte des ostfränkischen Reichs (Leipzig, 1887-1888); B. Simson, Jahrbücher des deutschen Reiches unter Ludwig dem Frommen (Leipzig, 1874-1876).
LOTHAIR II. or III. (c. 1070-1137), surnamed the “Saxon,” Roman emperor, son of Gebhard, count of Supplinburg, belonged to a family possessing extensive lands around Helmstadt in Saxony, to which he succeeded on his father’s death in 1075. Gebhard had been a leading opponent of the emperor Henry IV. in Saxony, and his son, taking the same attitude, assisted Egbert II., margrave of Meissen, in the rising of 1088. The position and influence of Lothair in Saxony, already considerable, was increased when in 1100 he married Richenza, daughter of Henry, count of Nordheim, who became an heiress on her father’s death in 1101, and inherited other estates when her brother Otto died childless in 1116. Having assisted the German king, Henry V., against his father in 1104, Lothair was appointed duke of Saxony by Henry, when Duke Magnus, the last of the Billungs, died in 1106. His first care was to establish his authority over some districts east of the Elbe; and quickly making himself independent of the king, he stood forth as the representative of the Saxon race. This attitude brought him into collision with Henry V., to whom, however, he was forced to submit after an unsuccessful rising in 1112. A second rising was caused when, on the death of Ulrich II., count of Weimar and Orlamünde, without issue in 1112, Henry seized these counties as vacant fiefs of the empire, while Lothair supported the claim of Siegfried, count of Ballenstädt, whose mother was a relative of Ulrich. The rebels were defeated, and Siegfried was killed at Warnstädt in 1113, but his son secured possession of the disputed counties. After the defeat by Lothair of Henry’s forces at Welfesholz on the 11th of February 1115, events called Henry to Italy; and Lothair appears to have been undisturbed in Saxony until 1123, when the death of Henry II., margrave of Meissen and Lusatia raised a dispute as to the right of appointment to the vacant margraviates. A struggle ensued, in which victory remained with the duke. The Saxony policy of Lothair during these years had been to make himself independent, and to extend his authority; to this end he allied himself with the papal party, and easily revived the traditional hostility of the Saxons to the Franconian emperors.
When Henry V. died in 1125, Lothair, after a protracted election, was chosen German king at Mainz on the 30th of August 1125. His election was largely owing to the efforts of Adalbert, archbishop of Mainz, and the papal party, who disliked the candidature of Henry’s nephew and heir, Frederick II. of Hohenstaufen, duke of Swabia. The new king was crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle on the 13th of September 1125. Before suffering a severe reverse, brought about by his interference in the internal affairs of Bohemia, Lothair requested Frederick of Hohenstaufen to restore to the crown the estates bequeathed to him by the emperor Henry V. Frederick refused, and was placed under the ban. Lothair, unable to capture Nüremberg, gained the support of Henry the Proud, the new duke of Bavaria, by giving him his daughter, Gertrude, in marriage, and that of Conrad, count of Zähringen, by granting him the administration of the kingdom of Burgundy, or Arles. As a counterstroke, however, Conrad of Hohenstaufen, the brother of Frederick, was chosen German king in December 1127, and was quickly recognized in northern Italy. But Lothair gained the upper hand in Germany, and by the end of 1129 the Hohenstaufen strongholds, Nüremberg and Spires, were in his possession. This struggle was accompanied by disturbances in Lorraine, Saxony and Thuringia, but order was soon restored after the resistance of the Hohenstaufen had been beaten down. In 1131 the king led an expedition into Denmark, where one of his vassals had been murdered by Magnus, son of the Danish king, Niels, and where general confusion reigned; but no resistance was offered, and Niels promised to pay tribute to Lothair.