God Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire"
(A.D. 800), the authority of the pope was placed upon unassailable
heights, and France had become the centre of a world-wide dominion.

[Illustration: Coronation of Charlemagne. From the painting by Levy.]

Little did pope or emperor dream of what was to happen; that after a
brief and dazzling interlude the imperial crown would never be worn in
France; and that the popes would for centuries be insulted and treated
as contumacious vassals by German emperors. And France--France, the
centre of this dream of a magnificent unity--in less than fifty years,
with her native incohesiveness, and in the irony of fate, would have
broken into fifty-nine fragments, loosely held together by a feeble
Carlovingian king.

The plan of a dual sovereignty of pope and emperor might have been wise
had both been immortal! But it was the triple division of the empire
brought about by Charlemagne's three grandsons which overthrew the
entire scheme of its founder.

Upon the death of Charlemagne, in A.D. 814, the crown and the sceptre
of the empire passed to his son Louis (the later form of Clovis). This
feeble son of Charlemagne, known as Louis the Debonnaire, struggled
under the weight of the crumbling mass until his death in 840. Then
Charlemagne's three ambitious grandsons fought for the great
inheritance. Lothaire, who claimed the whole by right of
primogeniture, was defeated at the battle of Fontenay in Burgundy, and
by the treaty of Verdun in 843 the partition of the empire was
consummated; the title of emperor passing to Lothaire, the eldest,
along with Italy and a strip of territory extending to the North Sea,
all west of that being arbitrarily called France, and all east of it
Germany.

So the European drama was unfolding upon lines entirely unexpected.
Not only had the empire fallen apart into three grand divisions, but
France itself was disintegrating, was in fact a mass of rival states,
with counts, princes, marquises, and a score of other petty potentates
struggling for supremacy.

The rough outlines of something greater than France--the outlines of a
future Europe--were being drawn. It is easy to see now what was then
so incomprehensible: that from the chaos of barbarism left by the
Teuton flood, there were emerging in that ninth century a group of
states with definite outlines, and the larger organism of Europe was
coming into form. The treaty of Verdun (843) had roughly separat