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Two features characterize the policy of the native aristocracy: their attachment to the Carolingian dynasty and the way in which they endeavoured to preserve their freedom of action by concluding a series of alliances either with France against Germany or with Germany against France.

Between unmarried young men and young women, kept carefully apart by the system which gives away a girl without her consent and only to a rich suitor, there is no possibility of love in these early feudal courts; the amours, however licentious, between kings' daughters and brave knights, of the Carolingian tales, belong to a different rank of society, to the prose romances made up in the fourteenth century for the burgesses of cities; the intrigues, ending in marriage, of the princes and princesses of the cycle of Amadis, belong to a different period, to the fifteenth century, and to courts where feudal society scarcely exists; the squires, the young knights who hang about a great baronial establishment of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, have still to make their fortune, and do not dream of marriage.

Moreover, those who listened to the tales of chivalry were different from those who had listened to the Carolingian stories; and, therefore, required something different. They were courtiers, and one half of them were women.

French jongleurs singing in impossible French-Italian; Italian jongleurs singing in impossible French; Paduan penny-a-liners writing Carolingian cyclical novels in French, not of Paris, assuredly, but of Padua a comical and most hideous jabber of hybrid languages this was how the Carolingian stories became popular in Italy.

His heroic size, his practical religious pretensions and assumptions, his campaigns to seize control of foreign lands all such Carolingian features and manifestations were imitated and adopted as German motifs, but the corresponding gallant exaltation of the gentler sex was not included.

The free towns of the Netherlands and of Germany appear to have been full of this unfashionable literature: the Carolingian cycle had become democratic. And, inasmuch as it was literature no longer for knights and courtiers, but for artizans and shopkeepers, it went, of course, to the pre-eminently democratic country of the Middle Ages Italy.

He sanctioned a usurpation which was practically inevitable and which was carried out with the approbation of the Frankish nation. Raised on the shields of the counts and dukes, anointed by St. Boniface, and blessed by the pope, Pippin became in 752 the first king of the Carolingian family, which had already for several generations ruled the Franks in all but name.

Nor did the king always escape these abuses, for the office, like that of the Carolingian count, to which it was in many ways similar, contained a possibility of use for private and personal advantage which could be corrected, even by so strong a sovereign as the Anglo-Norman, only by violent intervention at intervals.

The Eloi, like the Carolingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They still possessed the earth on sufferance: since the Morlocks, subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to find the daylit surface intolerable. And the Morlocks made their garments, I inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs, perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service.

Till Carolingian times the patriarchs were Italians, Greeks, or Friulians; but, with the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire, the patriarchs of Aquileia politically were attached to it, and were friends of the emperors, who often stayed in the city on their journeys to and from Italy. All the names are German from the end of the tenth century to the middle of the thirteenth.