repelled, once for all, the attempt of the Arab and Moorish
   followers of Mahomet, already lodged in Spain, to push their
   conquests beyond the Pyrenees.
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   The next of the family, Pippin the Short, son of Charles
   Martel, put an end to the pretence of governing in the name of
   a puppet-king. The last of the Merovingians was quietly
   deposed--lacking even importance enough to be put to death--
   and Pippin received the crown at the hands of Pope Zachary (A.
   D. 751). He died in 768, and the reign of his son, who
   succeeded him--the Great Charles--the Charlemagne of mediæval
   history--is the introduction to so new an era, and so changed
   an order of circumstances in the European world, that it will
   be best to finish with all that lies behind it in our hasty
   survey before we take it up.

The Conquests of Islam.

   Outside of Europe, a new and strange power had now risen, and
   had spread its forces with extraordinary rapidity around the
   southern and eastern circuit of the Mediterranean, until it
   troubled both extremities of the northern shore. This was the
   power of Islam--the proselyting, war-waging religion of
   Mahomet, the Arabian prophet. At the death of Mahomet, in 632,
   he was lord of Arabia, and his armies had just crossed the
   border, to attack the Syrian possessions of the Eastern Roman
   Empire. In seven years from that time, the whole of Palestine
   and Syria had been overrun, Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch, and
   all the strong cities taken, and Roman authority expelled. In
   two years more, they had dealt the last blow to the Sassanian
   monarchy in Persia and shattered it forever. At the same time
   they were besieging Alexandria and adding Egypt to their
   conquests. In 668, only thirty-six years after the death of
   the Prophet, they were at the gates of Constantinople, making
   the first of their many attempts to gain possession of the New
   Rome. In 698 they had taken Carthage, had occupied all North
   Africa to the Atlantic coast, had converted the Mauretanians,
   or Moors, and absorbed them into their body politic as well as
   into their communion. In 711 the commingled Arabs and Moors
   crossed the Straits and entered Spain, and the overthrow of
   the Christian kingdom of the Visigoths was practically
   accomplished in a single battle that same year. Within two
   years more, the Moors (as they came to be most commonly
   called) were in possession of the whole southern, central, and
   eastern parts of the Spanish peninsula, treating the
   inhabitants who had not fled with a more generous toleration
   than differing Christians were wont to offer to one another.
   The Spaniards (a mixed population of Roman, Suevic, Gothic,
   and aboriginal descent) who did, not submit, took refuge in
   the mountainous region of the Asturias and Galicia, where they
   maintained their independence, and, in due time, became
   aggressive, until, after eight centuries, they recovered their
   whole land.

The Eastern Empire.

   At the East, as we have seen, the struggle of the Empire with
   the Arabs began at the first moment of their career of foreign
   conquest. They came upon it when it was weak from many wounds,
   and exhausted by conflict with many foes. Before the death of
   Justinian (565), the transient glories of his reign had been
   waning fast. His immediate successor saw the work of
   Belisarius and Narses undone, for the most part, and the
   Italian peninsula overrun by a new horde of barbarians, more
   rapacious and more savage than the Goths. At the same time,
   the Persian war broke out again, and drained the imperial
   resources to pay for victories that had no fruit. Two better
   and stronger emperors--Tiberius and Maurice--who came after
   him, only made an honorable struggle, without leaving the
   Empire in a better state. Then a brutal creature--Phocas--held
   the throne for eight years (602-610) and sunk it very low by his
   crimes. The hero, Heraclius, who was now raised to power, came
   too late. Assailed suddenly, at the very beginning of his
   reign, by a fierce Persian onset, he was powerless to resist.
   Syria, Egypt and Asia Minor were successively ravaged and
   conquered by the Persian arms. They came even to the
   Bosphorus, and for ten years they held its eastern shore and
   maintained a camp within sight of Constantinople itself; while
   the wild Tartar nation of the Avars raged, at the same time,
   through the northern and western provinces of the Empire, and
   threatened the capital on its landward sides. The Roman Empire
   was reduced, for a time, to "the walls of Constantinople, with
   the remnant of Greece, Italy, and Africa, and some maritime
   cities, from Tyre to Trebizond, of the Asiatic coast." But in
   622 Heraclius turned the tide of disaster and rolled it back
   upon his enemies. Despite an alliance of the Persians with the
   Avars, and their combined assault upon Constantinople in 626,
   he repelled the latter, and wrested from the former, in a
   series of remarkable campaigns, all the territory they had
   seized. He had but just accomplished this great deliverance of
   his dominions, when the Arabs came upon him, as stated above.
   There was no strength left in the Empire to resist the
   terrible prowess of these warriors of the desert. They
   extinguished its authority in Syria and Egypt, as we have
   seen, in the first years of their career; but then turned
   their arms to the East and the West, and were slow in
   disputing Asia Minor with its Christian lords. "From the time
   of Heraclius the Byzantine theatre is contracted and darkened:
   the line of empire which had been defined by the laws of
   Justinian and the arms of Belisarius recedes on all sides from
   our view" (Gibbon). There was neither vigor nor virtue in the
   descendants of Heraclius; and when the last of them was
   destroyed by a popular rising against his vicious tyranny
   (711), revolution followed revolution so quickly that three
   reigns were begun and ended in six years.

The so-called Byzantine Empire.

   Then came to the throne a man of strong character, who
   redeemed it at least from contempt; who introduced a dynasty
   which endured for a century, and whose reign is the beginning
   of a new era in the history of the Eastern Empire, so marked
   that the Empire has taken from that time, in the common usage,
   a changed name, and is known thenceforth as the Byzantine,
   rather than the Eastern or the Greek. This was Leo the
   Isaurian, who saved Constantinople from a second desperate
   Moslem siege; who checked for a considerable period the
   Mahometan advance in the East; who reorganized the imperial
   administration on lasting lines; and whose suppression of
   image-worship in the Christian churches of his empire led to a
   rupture with the Roman Church in the West,--to the breaking of
   all relations of dependence in Rome and Italy upon the Empire
   in the East, and to the creating of a new imperial sovereignty
   in Western Europe which claimed succession to that of Rome.

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Lombard Conquest of Italy.

   On the conquest of Italy by Belisarius and Narses, for
   Justinian, the eunuch Narses, as related before, was made
   governor, residing at Ravenna, and bearing the title of
   Exarch. In a few years he was displaced, through the influence
   of a palace intrigue at Constantinople. To be revenged, it is
   said that he persuaded the Lombards, a German tribe lately
   become threatening on the Upper Danube, to enter Italy. They
   came, under their leader Alboin, and almost the whole northern
   and middle parts of the peninsula submitted to them with no
   resistance. Pavia stood a siege for three years before it
   surrendered to become the Lombard capital; Venice received an
   added population of fugitives, and was safe in her
   lagoons--like Ravenna, where the new Exarch watched the march
   of Lombard conquest, and scarcely opposed it. Rome was
   preserved, with part of southern Italy and with Sicily; but no
   more than a shadow of the sovereignty of the Empire now
   stretched westward beyond the Adriatic.

Temporal Power of the Popes.

   The city of Rome, and the territory surrounding it, still
   owned a nominal allegiance to the Emperor at Constantinople;
   but their immediate and real ruler was the Bishop of Rome, who
   had already acquired, in a special way, the fatherly name of
   "Papa" or Pope. Many circumstances had combined to place both
   spiritual and temporal power in the hands of these Christian
   pontiffs of Rome. They may have been originally, in the
   constitution of the Church, on an equal footing of
   ecclesiastical authority with the four other chiefs of the
   hierarchy--the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria,
   Antioch and Jerusalem; but the great name of Rome gave them
   prestige and weight of superior influence to begin with. Then,
   they stood, geographically and sympathetically, in nearest
   relations with that massive Latin side of Christendom, in
   western Europe, which was never much disturbed by the raging
   dogmatic controversies that tore and divided the Church on its
   Eastern, Greek side. It was inevitable that the Western Church
   should yield homage to one head--to one bishopric above all
   other bishoprics; and it was more inevitable that the See of
   Rome should be that one. So the spiritual supremacy to which
   the Popes arrived is easily enough explained. The temporal
   authority which they acquired is accounted for as obviously.
   Even before the interruption of the line of emperors in the
   West, the removal of the imperial residence for long periods
   from Rome, to Constantinople, to Milan, to Ravenna, left the
   Pope the most impressive and influential personage in the
   ancient capital. Political functions were forced on him,
   whether he desired to exercise them or not. It was Pope Leo
   who headed the embassy to Attila, and saved the city from the
   Huns. It was the same Pope who pleaded for it with the Vandal
   king, Genseric. And still more and more, after the imperial
   voice which uttered occasional commands to his Roman subjects
   was heard from a distant palace in Constantinople, and in
   accents that had become wholly Greek, the chair of St. Peter
   grew throne-like,--the respect paid to the Pope in civil
   matters took on the spirit of obedience, and his aspect before
   the people became that of a temporal prince.

   This process of the political elevation of the Papacy was
   completed by the Lombard conquest of Italy. The Lombard kings
   were bent upon the acquisition of Rome; the Popes were
   resolute and successful in holding it against them. At last
   the Papacy made its memorable and momentous alliance with the
   Carolingian chiefs of the Franks. It assumed the tremendous
   super-imperial right and power to dispose of crowns, by taking
   that of the kingdom of the Franks from Childeric and giving it
   to Pippin (751); and this was the first assumption of that
   right by the chief priest of Western Christendom. In return,
   Pippin led an army twice to Italy (754-755), humbled the
   Lombards, took from them the exarchate of Ravenna and the
   Pentapolis (a district east of the Appenines, between Ancona
   and Ferrara), and transferred this whole territory as a
   conqueror's "donation" to the Apostolic See. The temporal
   sovereignty of the Popes now rested on a base as political and
   as substantial as that of the most worldly and vulgar
   potentates around them.

Charlemagne's restored Roman Empire.

   Pippin's greater son, Charlemagne, renewed the alliance of his
   house with the Papacy, and strengthened it by completing the
   conquest of the Lombards, extinguishing their kingdom (774),
   and confirming his father's donation of the States of the
   Church. Charlemagne was now supreme in Italy, and the Pope
   became the representative of his sovereignty at Rome,--a
   position which lastingly enhanced the political importance of
   the Roman See in the peninsula. But while Pope and King stood
   related, in one view, as agent and principal, or subject and
   sovereign, another very different relationship slowly shaped
   itself in the thoughts of one, if not of both. The Western
   Church had broken entirely with the Eastern, on the question
   of image-worship; the titular sovereignty of the Eastern
   Emperor in the ancient Roman capital was a worn-out fiction;
   the reign of a female usurper, Irene, at Constantinople
   afforded a good occasion for renouncing and discarding it. But
   a Roman Emperor there must be, somewhere, for lesser princes
   and sovereigns to do homage to; the political habit and
   feeling of the European world, shaped and fixed by the long
   domination of Rome, still called for it. "Nor could the
   spiritual head of Christendom dispense with the temporal;
   without the Roman Empire there could not be," according to the
   feeling of the ninth century, "a Roman, nor by necessary
   consequence a Catholic and Apostolic Church." For "men could
   not separate in fact what was indissoluble in thought:
   Christianity must stand or fall along with the great Christian
   state: they were but two names for one and the same thing"
   (Bryce). Therefore the head of the Church, boldly enlarging
   the assumption of his predecessor who bestowed the crown of
   the Merovingians upon Pippin, now took it upon himself to set
   the diadem of the Cæsars on the head of Charlemagne. On the
   Christmas Day, in the year 800, in the basilica of St. Peter,
   at Rome, the solemn act of coronation was performed by Pope
   Leo III.; the Roman Empire lived again, in the estimation of
   that age, and Charles the Great reopened the interrupted line
   of successors to Augustus.

{1018}

   Before this imperial coronation of Charlemagne occurred, he
   had already made his dominion imperial in extent, by the
   magnitude of his conquests. North, south, east, and west, his
   armies had been everywhere victorious. In eighteen campaigns
   against the fierce and troublesome Saxons, he subdued those
   stubborn pagans and forced them to submit to a Christian
   baptism--with how much of immediate religious effect may be
   easily surmised. But by opening a way for the more Christ-like
   missionaries of the cross, who followed him, this missionary
   of the battle-ax did, no doubt, a very real apostolic work. He
   checked the ravages of the piratical Danes. He crushed the
   Avars and took their country, which comprised parts of the
   Austria and Hungary of the present day. He occupied Bavaria,
   on the one hand, and Brittany on the other. He crossed the
   Pyrenees to measure swords with the Saracens, and drove them
   from the north of Spain, as far as the Ebro. His lordship in
   Italy has been noticed already. He was unquestionably one of
   the greatest monarchs of any age, and deserves the title
   Magnus, affixed to his name, if that title ever has been
   deserved by the kings who were flattered with it. There was
   much more in his character than the mere aggressive energy
   which subjugated so wide a realm. He was a man of
   enlightenment far beyond his time; a man who strove after
   order, in that disorderly age, and who felt oppressed by the
   ignorance into which the world had sunk. He was a seeker after
   learning, and the friend and patron of all in his day who
   groped in the darkness and felt their way towards the light.
   He organized his Empire with a sense of political system which
   was new among the Teutonic masters of Western Europe (except
   as shown by Theodoric in Italy); but there were not years
   enough in his own life for the organism to mature, and his
   sons brought back chaos again.

Appearance of the Northmen.

   Before Charlemagne died (814) he saw the western coasts and
   river valleys of his Empire harried by a fresh outpouring of
   sea-rovers from the far North, and it is said that he had sad
   forebodings of the affliction they would become to his people
   thereafter. These new pirates of the North Sea, who took up,
   after several centuries, the abandoned trade of their kinsmen,
   the Saxons (now retired from their wild courses and
   respectably settled on one side of the water, while subdued
   and kept in order on the other), were of the bold and rugged
   Scandinavian race, which inhabited the countries since known
   as Denmark, Sweden and Norway. They are more or less confused
   under the general name of Northmen, or Norsemen--men of the
   North; but that term appears to have been applied more
   especially to the freebooters from the Norwegian coast, as
   distinguished from the "Danes" of the lesser peninsula. It is
   convenient, in so general a sketch as this, to ignore the
   distinction, and to speak of the Northmen as inclusive, for
   that age, of the whole Scandinavian race.

   Their visitations began to terrify the coasts of England,
   France and Germany, and the lower valleys of the rivers which
   they found it possible to ascend, some time in the later half
   of the eighth century. It is probable that their appearance on
   the sea at this time, and not before, was due to a revolution
   which united Norway under a single king and a stronger
   government, and which, by suppressing independence and
   disorder among the petty chiefs, drove many of them to their
   ships and sent them abroad, to lead a life of lawlessness more
   agreeable to their tastes. It is also probable that the
   northern countries had become populated beyond their
   resources, as seemed to have happened before, when the Goths
   swarmed out, and that the outlet by sea was necessarily and
   deliberately opened. Whatever the cause, these Norse
   adventurers, in fleets of long boats, issued with some
   suddenness from their "vics," or fiords (whence the name
   "viking"), and began an extraordinary career. For more than
   half a century their raids had no object but plunder, and what
   they took they carried home to enjoy. First to the Frisian
   coast, then to the Rhine--the Seine--the Loire,--they came
   again and again to pillage and destroy; crossing at the same
   time to the shores of their nearest kinsmen--but heeding no
   kinship in their savage and relentless forays along the
   English coasts--and around to Ireland and the Scottish
   islands, where their earliest lodgments were made.

The Danes in England.

   About the middle of the ninth century they began to seize
   tracts of land in England and to settle themselves there in
   permanent homes. The Angles in the northern and eastern parts
   and the Saxons in the southern part of England had weakened
   themselves and one another by rivalry and war between their
   divided kingdoms. There had been for three centuries an
   unceasing struggle among them for supremacy. At the time of
   the coming of the Danes (who were prominent in the English
   invasion and gave their name to it), the West Saxon kings had
   won a decided ascendancy. The Danes, by degrees, stripped them
   of what they had gained. Northumberland, Mercia and East
   Anglia were occupied in succession, and Wessex itself was
   attacked. King Alfred, the great and admirable hero of early
   English history, who came to the throne in 871, spent the
   first eight years of his reign in a deadly struggle with the
   invaders. He was obliged in the end to concede to them the
   whole northeastern part of England, from the Thames to the
   Tyne, which was known thereafter as "the Danelaw"; but they
   became his vassals, and submitted to Christian baptism. A
   century later, the Norse rovers resumed their attacks upon
   England, and a cowardly English king, distrusting the now
   settled and peaceful Danes, ordered an extensive massacre of
   them (1002). The rage which this provoked in Denmark led to a
   great invasion of the country. England was completely
   conquered, and remained subject to the Danish kings until
   1042, when its throne was recovered for a brief space of time
   by the English line.

{1019}

The Normans in Normandy.

   Meanwhile the Northmen had gained a much firmer and more
   important footing in the territory of the Western
   Franks--which had not yet acquired the name of France. The
   Seine and its valley attracted them again and again, and after
   repeated expeditions up the river, even to the city of Paris,
   which they besieged several times, one of their chiefs, Rolf
   or Rollo, got possession of Rouen and began a permanent
   settlement in the country. The Frank King, Charles the Simple,
   now made terms with Rollo and granted him a district at the
   mouth of the Seine, (912), the latter acknowledging the
   suzerainty or feudal superiority of Charles, and accepting at
   the same time the doubly new character of a baptised Christian
   and a Frankish Duke. The Northmen on the Seine were known
   thenceforth as Normans, their dukedom as Normandy, and they
   played a great part in European history during the next two
   centuries.

The Northmen in the West.

   The northern sea-rovers who had settled neither in Ireland,
   England, nor Frankland, went farther afield into the West and
   North and had wonderful adventures there. They took possession
   of the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Hebrides, and other islands
   in those seas, including Man, and founded a powerful
   island-kingdom, which they held for a long period. Thence they
   passed on to Faroë and Iceland, and in Iceland, where they
   lived peaceful and quiet lives of necessity, they founded an
   interesting republic, and developed a very remarkable
   civilization, adorned by a literature which the world is
   learning more and more to admire. From Iceland, it was a
   natural step to the discovery of Greenland, and from
   Greenland, there is now little doubt that they sailed
   southwards and saw and touched the continent of America, five
   centuries before Columbus made his voyage.

The Northmen in the East.

   While the Northmen of the ninth and tenth centuries were
   exciting and disturbing all Western Europe by their naval
   exploits, other adventurers from the Swedish side of the
   Scandinavian country were sallying eastwards under different
   names. Both as warriors and as merchants, they made their way
   from the Baltic to the Black Sea and the Bosphorus, and bands
   of them entered the service of the Eastern Emperor, at
   Constantinople, where they received the name of Varangians,
   from the oath by which they bound themselves. One of the
   Swedish chiefs, Rurik by name, was chosen by certain tribes of
   the country now called Russia, to be their prince. Rurik's
   capital was Novgorod, where he formed the nucleus of a kingdom
   which grew, through many vicissitudes, into the modern empire
   of Russia. His successors transferred their capital to Kief,
   and ultimately it was shifted again to Moscow, where the
   Muscovite princes acquired the title, the power, and the great
   dominion of the Czars of all the Russias.

The Slavonic Race.

   The Russian sovereigns were thus of Swedish origin; but their
   subjects were of another race. They belonged to a branch of
   the great Aryan stock, called the Slavic or Slavonic, which
   was the last to become historically known. The Slavonians bore
   no important part in events that we have knowledge of until
   several centuries of the Christian era had passed. They were
   the obscure inhabitants in that period of a wide region in
   Eastern Europe, between the Vistula and the Caspian. In the
   sixth century, pressed by the Avars, they crossed the Vistula,
   moving westwards, along the Baltic; and, about the same time
   they moved southwards, across the Danube, and established the
   settlements which formed the existing Slavonic states in
   South-eastern Europe--Servia, Croatia and their lesser
   neighbors. But the principal seat of the Slavonic race within
   historic times has always been in the region still occupied by
   its principal representatives, the Russians and the Poles.

Mediæval Society.--The Feudal System.

   We have now come to a period in European history--the middle
   period of the Middle Ages--when it is appropriate to consider
   the peculiar state of society which had resulted from the
   transplanting of the Germanic nations of the North to the
   provinces of the Roman Empire, and from placing the well
   civilized surviving inhabitants of the latter in subjection to
   and in association with masters so vigorous, so capable and so
   barbarous. In Gaul, the conquerors, unused to town-life, not
   attracted to town pursuits, and eager for the possession of
   land, had generally spread themselves over the country and
   left the cities more undisturbed, except as they pillaged them
   or extorted ransom from them. The Roman-Gallic population of
   the country had sought refuge, no doubt, to a large extent, in
   the cities; the agricultural laborers were already, for the
   most part, slaves or half-slaves--the coloni of the Roman
   system--and remained in their servitude; while some of the
   poorer class of freemen may have sunk to the same condition.

   How far the new masters of the country had taken possession of
   its land by actual seizure, ousting the former owners, and
   under what rules, if any, it was divided among them, are
   questions involved in great obscurity. In the time of
   Charlemagne, there seems to have been a large number of small
   landowners who cultivated their own holdings, which they
   owned, not conditionally, but absolutely, by the tenure called
   allodial. But alongside of these peasant proprietors there was
   another landed class whose estates were held on very different
   terms, and this latter class, at the time now spoken of, was
   rapidly absorbing the former. It was a class which had not
   existed before, neither among the Germans nor among the
   Romans, and the system of land tenure on which it rested was
   equally new to both, although both seem to have contributed
   something to the origin of it. This was the Feudal System,
   which may be described, in the words of Bishop Stubbs, as
   being "a complete organization of society through the medium
   of land tenure, in which, from the king down to the landowner,
   all are bound together by obligation of service and defence:
   the lord to protect his vassal, the vassal to do service to
   his lord; the defence and service being based on, and
   regulated by, the nature and extent of the land held by the
   one of the other." Of course, the service exacted was, in the
   main, military, and the system grew up as a military system,
   expanding into a general governing system, during a time of
   loose and ineffective administration. That it was a thing of
   gradual growth is now fairly well settled, although little is
   clearly known of the process of growth. It came to its
   perfection in the tenth century, by which time most other
   tenures of land had disappeared. The allodial tenure gave way
   before it, because, in those disorderly times, men of small or
   moderate property in land were in need of the protection which
   a powerful lord, who had many retainers at his back, or a strong
   monastery, could give, and were induced to surrender, to one
   or the other, their free ownership of the land they held,
   receiving it back as tenants, in order to establish the
   relation which secured a protector.

{1020}

   In its final organization, the feudal system, as stated
   before, embraced the whole society of the kingdom.
   Theoretically, the king was the pinnacle of the system. In the
   political view of the time--so far as a political view
   existed--he was the over-lord of the realm rather by reason of
   being its ultimate land-lord, than by being the center of
   authority and the guardian of law. The greater subordinate
   lordships of the kingdom--the dukedoms and counties--were
   held as huge estates, called fiefs, derived originally by
   grant from the king, subject to the obligation of military
   service, and to certain acts of homage, acknowledging the
   dependent relationship. The greater feudatories, or vassals,
   holding immediately from the king, were lords in their turn of
   a second order of feudatories, who held lands under them; and
   they again might divide their territories among vassals of a
   third degree; for the process of sub-infeudation went on until
   it reached the cultivator of the soil, who bore the whole
   social structure of society on his bent back.

   But the feudal system would have wrought few of the effects
   which it did if it had involved nothing but land tenure and
   military service. It became, however, as before intimated, a
   system of government, and one which inevitably produced a
   disintegration of society and a destruction of national bonds.
   A grant of territory generally carried with it almost a grant
   of sovereignty over the inhabitants of the territory, limited
   only by certain rights and powers reserved to the king, which
   he found extreme difficulty in exercising. The system was one
   "in which every lord judged, taxed, and commanded the class
   next below him, in which abject slavery formed the lowest and
   irresponsible tyranny the highest grade, in which private war,
   private coinage, private prisons, took the place of the
   imperial institutions of government" (Stubbs). This was the
   singular system which had its original and special growth
   among the Franks, in the Middle Ages, and which spread from
   them, under the generally similar conditions of the age, to
   other countries, with various degrees of modification and
   limitation. Its influence was obviously opposed to political
   unity and social order, and to the development of institutions
   favorable to the people.

   But an opposing influence had kept life in one part of society
   which feudalism was not able to envelope. That was in cities.
   The cities, as before stated, had been the refuge of a large
   and perhaps a better part of the Roman-Gallic free population
   which survived the barbarian conquest. They, in conjunction
   with the Church, preserved, without doubt, so much of the
   plant of Roman civilization as escaped destruction. They
   certainly suffered heavily, and languished for several
   centuries; but a slow revival of industries and arts went on
   in them,--trade crept again into its old channels, or found
   new ones,--and wealth began to be accumulated anew. With the
   consciousness of wealth came feelings of independence; and
   such towns were now beginning to acquire the spirit which made
   them, a little later, important instruments in the weakening
   and breaking of the feudal system.

Rise of the Kingdom of France.

   During the period between the death of Charlemagne and the
   settlement of the Normans in the Carlovingian Empire, that
   Empire had become permanently divided. The final separation
   had taken place (887) between the kingdom of the East Franks,
   or Germany, and the kingdom of the West Franks, which
   presently became France. Between them stretched a region in
   dispute called Lotharingia, out of which came the duchy of
   Lorraine. The kingdom of Burgundy (sometimes cut into two) and
   the kingdom of Italy, had regained a separate existence; and
   the Empire which Charlemagne had revived was nothing but a
   name. The last of the Carlovingian emperors was Arnulf, who
   died in 899. The imperial title was borne afterwards by a
   number of petty Italian potentates, but lost all imperial
   significance for two-thirds of a century, until it was
   restored to some grandeur again and to a lasting influence in
   history, by another German king.

   Before this occurred, the Carlovingian race of kings had
   disappeared from both the Frank kingdoms. During the last
   hundred years of their reign in the West kingdom, the throne
   had been disputed with them two or three times by members of a
   rising family, the Counts of Paris and Orleans, who were also
   called Dukes of the French, and whose duchy gave its name to
   the kingdom which they finally made their own. The kings of
   the old race held their capital at Laon, with little power and
   a small dominion, until 987, when the last one died. The then
   Count of Paris and Duke of the French, Hugh, called Capet,
   became king of the French, by election; Paris became the
   capital of the kingdom, and the France of modern times had its
   birth, though very far from its full growth.

   The royal power had now declined to extreme weakness. The
   development of feudalism had undermined all central authority,
   and Hugh Capet as king had scarcely more power than he drew
   from his own large fief. "At first he was by no means
   acknowledged in the kingdom; but ... the chief vassals
   ultimately gave at least a tacit consent to the usurpation,
   and permitted the royal name to descend undisputed upon his
   posterity. But this was almost the sole attribute of
   sovereignty which the first kings of the third dynasty
   enjoyed. For a long period before and after the accession of
   that family France has, properly speaking, no national
   history" (Hallam).

The Communes.

   When the royal power began to gain ascendancy, it seems to
   have been largely in consequence of a tacitly formed alliance
   between the kings and the commons or burghers of the towns.
   The latter, as noted before, were acquiring a spirit of
   independence, born of increased prosperity, and were
   converting their guilds or trades unions into crude forms of
   municipal organization, as "communes" or commons. Sometimes by
   purchase and sometimes by force, they were ridding themselves
   of the feudal pretensions which neighboring lords held over
   them, and were obtaining charters which defined and guaranteed
   municipal freedom to them. One or two kings of the time
   happened to be wise enough to give encouragement to this
   movement towards the enfranchisement of the communes, and it
   proved to have an important influence in weakening feudalism
   and strengthening royalty.