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Updated: May 16, 2025
The papacy, lately a hereditary fief of the counts of Tusculum, was utterly ruined; the dominium temporale, the ominous gift of the Carlovingians, the box of Pandora in the hands of the Pope from which a thousand evils had arisen, had disappeared, since the Church could scarcely command the fortresses in the immediate neighborhood of the city.
During a short time there was reason to expect a general spoliation, a national bankruptcy, a new partition of the soil, a maximum of prices, a ruinous load of taxation laid on the rich for the purpose of supporting the poor in idleness. Such a system would, in twenty years, have made France as poor and barbarous as the France of the Carlovingians.
Their duchy Western or Latin Francia was the strongest state north of the Loire. The feudal lords were growing mightier, and the imperial or royal power was becoming weaker. After Odo of Paris was elected to the Western kingdom, there followed a period of about a hundred years during which there was a king sometimes from his house and sometimes from the family of the Carlovingians.
Three years later, in 754, it was Pope Stephen II. who came over to France to anoint King Pepin, and, forty-six years afterwards, in 800, it was Pope Leo III. who proclaimed Charlemagne emperor of the West. From the Papacy, then, on the accession of the Carlovingians, came the principal decisions and steps.
From the king down to the lowest landholder all were bound together by obligation of service and defence; the lord to protect his vassal, the vassal to do service to his lord. These are the essential features of the social system which, from its early growth under the later Carlovingians in the ninth century, spread over Europe and reached its highest development in the twelfth century.
Such a position would not be reached except by means of great struggles and by passing through a period of great disintegration and of fierce internal strife between opposing factions, such as in the history of the Italian communes is represented by the dark period between the fall of the last of the Carlovingians and the election of the first German emperor as king of Italy; but once attained, the character of the people who accomplished it would ensure its permanence, as long as they retained those principles of independence which had made them victorious in the struggle.
In spite of this apparent equality, however, it seems to me nearer the truth to consider the position of the gastald as an inferior one to that of the dux, especially in Lombard times, before that official was replaced by the comes of the Carlovingians.
According to Genoude, royalty, religion, and the national assemblies here are "the principles" of the French nation, which go back to the Merovingians. The Carlovingians fell away from them. The Capetians, being in accord with the people, made an effort to maintain them.
The saints then vanished from before him and sped against the devils and reft the soul from them, which they were tormenting with threats and buffetings, and bare it to the joys perdurable of Paradise, chanting the words of the Psalmist Beatus quem eligisti. The Carlovingians The Great Siege of Paris by the Normans The Germs of Feudalism Chaos and misery followed the brilliant reign of Dagobert.
Disintegration was making rapid progress, and the epoch of the last Valois seemed mare dark and barbarous than the times of the degenerate Carlovingians had been.
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