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Now the Emperor is putting on his domestic robes, we said a new dress, and after the old Carolingian pattern. The hereditary officers receive the insignia, and with them get on horseback. The Emperor in his robes, the Roman King in the Spanish habit, immediately mount their steeds; and while this is done, the endless procession which precedes them has already announced them.
Twice the Carolingian lands were divided, by the treaties of Verdun in the year 843 and by the treaty of Mersen-on-the-Meuse in the year 870. The latter treaty divided the entire Frankish Kingdom into two parts. Charles the Bold received the western half. It contained the old Roman province called Gaul where the language of the people had become thoroughly romanized.
Twice during Louis reign his own sons dethroned him, but on his death in 840 the Empire became more firmly established. Charles the Bald ruled over France. Lothairs portion was limited to Lorraine, Burgundy, Switzerland, and Italy. Civil strife broke out, but Louis retained the whole of Germany with the provinces on the left bank of the Rhine. With Charles ended the Carolingian dynasty.
The long sun-lit fields; the infinite past Carolingian, enormous; the delicate fronds of young trees; the distant sight of the mountains, which is the note of all that land; the invasions it had suffered, the conquests it might yet achieve; its soul and its material self, were all summed up in the solicitor, not in the farmer, and he was to vote on peace or war, on wine or water, on God or no God in the schools.
The owners were obliged to surrender any person accused of a grave crime, but otherwise did justice at their pleasure. This system of immunity was greatly extended by the Carolingian sovereigns, but with two important changes. Henceforward the privilege was seldom granted to laymen, but was bestowed as a matter of course on the estates of bishops and of religious houses.
Both owed their initial power to their alliance with the Carolingian dynasty. After extending his domains as far as the Somme and annexing Walloon Flanders and Artois, this prince consolidated his power by marrying a daughter of Alfred the Great. Flanders was definitely established as one of the richest fiefs of the French crown, in close contact with England.
The charm for me a charm sometimes pleasurable, but sometimes also painful, like the imperious necessity which we sometimes feel to see again and examine, seemingly uselessly, some horrible evil the charm, I mean the involuntary compulsion of attention, has often been as great in following the vicissitudes of a mere artistic item, like the Carolingian stories or the bucolic element, as it has been in looking on at the dissolution of moral and social elements.
In each re-distribution of territories among Carolingian princes the lines of partition approximate more closely to the boundaries of modern nations. Burgundy and Provence alone remain, after the year 888, as memorials of the Middle Kingdom.
Also the cultivated, spoon-fed art of the renaissance court of Charlemagne is too often allowed to misrepresent one age and disgust another. Of course the bulk of those opulent knick-knacks manufactured for the Carolingian and Ottonian Emperors, and now to be seen at Aachen, are as beastly as anything else that is made simply to be precious.
The stuff of Boiardo and Ariosto is the same: that old mediæval stuff of the Carolingian poems, coloured, scented with Arthurian chivalry and wonder. The knight-errantry of the Keltic tales is cleverly blended with the pseudo-historical military organization of the Carolingian cycle.
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