Reign of Odo in France—His Danish wars—His civil war with Charles the Simple—Charles succeeds to the throne—He grants Normandy to Hrolf—Lotharingia annexed to France—Robert and Rudolf rebel against Charles the Simple—Murder of Charles at Peronne—Spain and the Moors—Growth of the kingdom of the Asturias under Pelagius and the three Alfonsos—Its continued progress—Summary of the period—Feudalism, its military and political meaning—Conclusion.

We left the much-vexed Neustrian realm handed over to a king whose title to the crown lay in his strong hand and his good sword, and not in any hereditary right. Odo count of Paris was not sprung either on the father’s or the mother’s side from the house of the Karlings. His father was Robert the Strong, a count of Angers and Blois under Charles the Bald, one of the few Frankish chiefs who won a reputation in the struggle with the Vikings. When Robert fell by a Danish arrow, his son appears a few years later in power by the middle Seine and Loire, and especially in charge of Paris, where he won his great name and his crown by the gallant defence of the city in 886-7.

Odo was without doubt the best candidate that could have been chosen for the West Frankish throne. The sole legitimate heir of the Karlings—Charles the Simple, the posthumous son of Lewis the Stammerer—was only eight years of age, and to hand the kingdom over to a minor would have been a piece of madness. Nevertheless the choice of Odo was a bad alternative at the best: he was but one among a dozen personages of equal position, each of whom believed himself to be his new master’s equal. Between 850 and 887 all the greater counties of Neustria and Aquitaine were becoming hereditary. |Growth of the Great Fiefs in France.| Charles the Bald and his short-lived successors had everywhere bought a temporary freedom from trouble by appointing the son to fill the father’s place, and in the next generation the rulers of the counties and duchies looked upon their title to succeed to their ancestor’s governorship as fixed and absolute. In every one of these districts, which were afterwards to be known as the ‘Great Fiefs,’ the first commencement of hereditary rule dates from the fatal days between the battle of Fontenay and the deposition of Charles the Fat. The first sovereign in the county of Toulouse who passed on his dominions to his son dates from 852: in Flanders the date is 862: in Poitou 867: in Anjou 870: in Gascony 872: in Burgundy 877: in Auvergne 886. To all these rulers Odo was but a fortunate equal, whom they had consented to elevate to the throne because of the imminent danger which the kingdom was suffering from the Viking raids. In spite of the oaths that they had sworn him they could not in their own minds look upon him as a king of the same sort as the Karlings had been. In a time when hereditary right was beginning to count so highly, it was a fatal weakness in a king to owe his power to the old Teutonic right of election alone. In reading the chronicles of this period of French history we are reminded in a striking manner of the troubles of the kings of the Spanish Visigoths. We find once more the utter confusion that ensues from the elective system when the nobility is too strong, and the royal name has been lowered by a series of weak or incapable rulers.

In Odo’s first year he was comparatively free from troubles within; the Vikings were spread all over the face of the land, and even the turbulent counts of Neustria refrained from rebellion in face of the danger, while Wido of Spoleto, the rival of the new king, had to quit the realm for want of followers. The election of Odo received its best justification when in June 888 he smote the great army of the Danes at Montfaucon in Champagne, and drove them from the valleys of the Meuse and Marne. The whole realm concurred willingly in his second coronation at Rheims, where he was invested with a crown, which his neighbour Arnulf had sent him, in token of friendship as well as of a claim of suzerainty.

Even the distant and ever-rebellious south bowed for a time before the sceptre of Odo: when he marched into Aquitaine Ramnulf count of Poictiers, who had thought for a moment of establishing himself as an independent duke south of the Loire, struck no blow against him, but did instant homage. |Wars of Odo with the Danes.| But while Odo was in Poitou the Vikings had again gathered in great force on the lower Seine, under chiefs among whom we descry for the first time the name of Hrolf or Rollo, the future duke of Normandy. They laid siege for the third time to Paris: the brave town held out for many months, but Odo, less able to defend his old fief as king than he had been as count, followed the deplorable precedent of Charles the Fat, and gave them money to take themselves off to Brittany.

Of course they returned ere long, but when they once more invaded central France, Odo inflicted a crushing defeat on them at Montpensier: their chief Oskytel was captured with many of his men. Like Guthrum in England the vanquished Dane offered to become a Christian, but as he issued from the baptistery, count Ingo, the standard-bearer of Odo, cut him down. ‘Never trust a Dane, baptized or unbaptized,’ said the murderer, and his master left him unpunished, as if he felt that the cynical plea was sufficient justification (892).

|Civil Wars of Odo and Charles the Simple.| Just when he appeared to be strongest, Odo was in truth nearing his greatest danger. The Danes being for a time driven off, the unruly counts of France, free from the impending terror, began at once to conspire against their king. He was too much one of themselves for them to regard him as their absolute master, and too strong-handed for them to feel their new hereditary fiefs safely their own. In 893 some of the great nobles sent for the boy Charles the Simple, the heir of the Karlings, from his refuge in England. Richard, duke of Burgundy, William, count of Auvergne, Heribert, count of Vermandois, and Fulco, archbishop of Rheims, were the chief of the rebels. There followed six years of desperate civil war: Odo was far too strong for the fourteen-year-old boy whom his treacherous vassals had raised up against him: again and again he drove Charles from the cities where he had fortified himself, and chastised the rebels who adhered to him. But some one of the counts of Neustria or Aquitaine was always rising in favour of the Karling. Driven from one district he reappeared in another, and the land had no rest. It was to no purpose that Odo once offered to make his rival king of Aquitaine and rule himself in Neustria alone: such a compromise would not have suited his ambitious vassals, who were inspired not by any real loyalty to the ancient house, but by a wish to gain complete local independence.

At last Odo, worn out with the struggle, died on the last day of the year 898. His brother and heir Robert refused to continue the struggle against the heir of the Karlings, and did homage to Charles the Simple, receiving from him confirmation as ruler of the ‘Duchy of France’—the lands of Paris, Orleans, Tours, Chartres, Beauvais, and Le Mans. Thus the civil war ended, but at the cost of the establishment of one more great fief, and that one comprehending the whole of the heart of Neustria, a very kingdom in itself.

|Charles the Simple, King of France, 899-929.| Charles the Simple was now undisputedly king of the whole realm of the West Franks, and was recognised as its ruler for thirty-one years, till his untimely death in 929. He had by this time reached the age of twenty, and had gained much experience in the uncertainties of war and in the bearing of adverse fortune (899). He was a man of energy and resource, the worthy brother of the long-dead Lewis III., and his nickname ‘the Simple,’ given him because he was too prone to trust his treacherous vassals, and was so often deceived by them, is rather a title of honour than the reverse. From the very first his position was far weaker than that of any of his predecessors had been. The great fiefs had now become definitely hereditary: any endeavour to prevent the reversion of the father’s land to the son was regarded as a usurpation on the king’s part, and resented by the whole body of vassals of the realm. In every part of Neustria and Aquitaine the counts and dukes had now become semi-independent sovereigns, and it was only in the royal demesne, and in the lands of the great ecclesiastical fiefs, that the king retained monarchical power.

Charles was by no means destitute either of ambition or of energy. He did his best to assert his royal authority over his vassals, and to cope with the never-ending Danish invasions. He did not forget the traditional policy of the Neustrian Karlings, their desire to unite with their own realm the whole or part of Lotharingia, the plan that had led his grandfather Charles the Bald into so many unhappy wars. More fortunate than his ancestor, Charles succeeded in laying hands on a large portion of the disputed realm. The Austrasians had grown weary of their union with Germany while ruled by the turbulent and tyrannical Zwentibold, whom Arnulf had set over them. After Arnulf’s death they cast out and slew his bastard, and adhered for a time to Lewis the Child. But when the young Lewis followed his father to the grave, the Lotharingians refused to concur with the other Teutonic races in setting Conrad the Franconian on the throne. |Lotharingia joined to France, 912.| Headed by the count of Hainault, Reginald-with-the-Long-Neck, they declared that they would have none but a Karling to reign over them, and threw themselves into the arms of Charles the Simple. From 912 onwards he reigned as their king, and found his best supporters among their warriors, for Austrasia was not yet so feudalised as Neustria, and the love of the old royal house was still strong within its borders.

The Viking raids never ceased during the reign of Charles. The civil war of 893-8 had given the Danes an opportunity of returning to Neustria, and they were not slow to take it. When the chroniclers of the time are not recounting the rebellions of Charles’s undutiful subjects, they are generally occupied in detailing Danish ravages. But it is now to be observed that the inroads of the Vikings are not nearly so dangerous to the realm as they had once been: the spell of the invincibility of the Northmen had been broken, and whenever they appeared they were fiercely withstood by the local counts and dukes. The land no longer gave them such rich prey, for the open towns had now surrounded themselves with walls, and were not as formerly the defenceless victims of every raider who could muster a few hundred men at his back. Still the invaders never ceased to come, for many of their former fields of action were now closed: in England Alfred and his son were too strong for them, and in Germany they never had their old good fortune after their great defeat at Louvain. France, therefore, had now to bear the brunt of their attacks, and all their hordes concentrated themselves on the coast between the Scheldt and the Garonne.

|Hrolf on the Seine, 910-11.| It was in 911 that Charles the Simple took a step which was to change the aspect of the great struggle with the Danes. Their main army was now lying on the lower Seine, and their chief camp was at Rouen, a great city which they had sacked and desolated and made their own. Their war-lord was now the sea-king Hrolf, or Rollo as the Franks called him, who had asserted his power by right of superior ability above all the other jarls. Hrolf’s bands ranged far and wide in the Seine valley, and had fought at Chartres a bloody but indecisive battle with the host of the Franks, headed by the king’s greatest vassals, the dukes of France and Burgundy and the count of Poitou.

Despairing, as Alfred had despaired thirty years before, of ever being able to drive away the Dane, Charles took the same step that the great king of Wessex had taken. He determined to offer the Viking leader a great tract of land as a settlement for his followers, if he would consent to draw them all together and to conclude a stable peace. The experiment had been made before by the Frankish monarchs, with no encouraging results, and the tale of Charles the Fat and king Godfred must have been fresh in the minds of the Vikings. |Treaty of Clair-sur-Epte, 911.| Nevertheless the offer was made once more: if Hrolf would settle down, he should have an ample Danelagh—as the English would have called it—for his men. Charles proffered him Rouen and the lower valley of the Seine, and with them the hand of his daughter Gisela. The Northman blustered and affected to despise the king’s offer, but presently he began to haggle and to speak of terms. The monarch of the West Franks and the veteran sea-king met at Clair-sur-Epte, and there the bargain was concluded. Hrolf asked and received all the lands from the river Epte to the sea, a grant which the Danes interpreted as giving them all the coastland from the mouth of the Somme to the borders of Brittany. Charles added to this the easy promise of the suzerainty of Brittany itself, when Hrolf should succeed in conquering the unruly princes of that land, who for many years had paid no allegiance to the Frankish crown.

The Viking therefore received the hand of the king’s daughter, promised to submit to baptism, and ‘became the man’ of Charles the Simple. A well-known story tells how Hrolf refused to bow the knee himself to the Frank, when the oath of homage had to be given, and deputed one of his chiefs to be his proxy, and how the Dane, with designed clumsiness, when he bent before the king’s feet, succeeded in upsetting king and throne together. But Charles overlooked the insult in return for the tangible benefits that the submission of Hrolf involved, and loaded the Danes with gifts on their departure.

|The Duchy of Normandy.| The Viking chief therefore settled down to live as a Frankish duke at Rouen: he had himself baptized, according to his promise, and the majority of his warriors followed his example. Contrary to what might have been expected, the experiment of planting the Northmen on the lower Seine proved a complete success for the Frankish king. The majority of the Danish war-bands in Gaul drifted, one after the other, to join Hrolf’s followers, and to receive from him a fixed settlement in his new duchy. By sacrificing a part of his realm, Charles the Simple had saved the rest. The duke of Normandy, no longer rex piratarum, but the king’s trusted vassal, was on the whole very faithful to the oaths that he had sworn at Clair-sur-Epte. He adhered to king Charles in all his troubles, and sent him a contingent of Danes whenever he was asked for aid. It was only when Charles had been deposed by rebels that Hrolf again turned loose his plundering bands upon France, and became once more the scourge of Neustria.

The summer of 912 saw Charles both freed from his Viking war by the cession of Normandy, and hailed as king of Lotharingia by the Austrasians. The next eight years were the most fortunate period of his reign: he waged no important wars abroad, and had no very serious troubles at home. But his authority over the greater part of France was very limited: more especially in the lands south of the Loire nothing but lip-service was granted him: neither tribute nor military aid could be expected from the great counts of the South. Yet weak as he was, Charles the Simple was still stronger than his great vassals cared that he should be. |Rebellion of Robert of France.| Three of the greatest magnates of his realm resolved to compass his deposition: their chief was Robert duke of France, who in his old age began to covet the crown that he had refused to claim in 899. His confederates were Rudolf, second duke of Burgundy, and Heribert count of Vermandois. They commenced their operations by bidding the king dismiss his chief minister and favourite, count Hagano. When he refused, they sent him a formal disavowal of their allegiance, and after a space proclaimed Robert of France king of the West Franks.

Civil war at once began: supported by the Lotharingians and the Normans king Charles made head against the rebels, though they raised against him all the warriors of France and Burgundy. The armies met at Soissons for a decisive engagement: the troops of the Karling were beaten, but in the moment of victory the rebel king was pierced by a Norman lance, and by Robert’s death the rising was left without a leader (923).

The great vassals were cowed for a moment by their chief’s fall, and sorely distracted by a Danish invasion. Rollo had launched against the territories of the rebel dukes a great horde of Northmen, and the invaders were joined by a fresh army from England under Regnald, whom Edward the Elder had just deposed from the kingship of Northumbria. |Continued civil wars.| But in spite of the ravages of the Danes, who swarmed into Burgundy, and threatened to establish a second Danelagh in the valley of the Saone, the rebels resolved not to submit to their rightful lord. They now proclamed as anti-king Rudolf duke of Burgundy, for Hugh, son of Robert of France, refused to take up his father’s claims. Charles might have fought down the insurrection, for a great Norman army was coming to his aid, if he had not fallen by treachery. Heribert of Vermandois offered to submit to him, and begged him to come to a conference at Peronne. The simple king hastened to the meeting, and was seized and thrown into a dungeon (923). The only drop of bitterness in the cup of the rebels was that Edgiva, the English wife of Charles, escaped with her son Lewis to the court of her father king Edward the Elder. There was still an heir of the Karling house safe beyond the seas.

For four troubled years Rudolf of Burgundy reigned as king of France, and Charles the Simple lay in durance at Peronne. Rudolf was but a phantom king: Aquitaine refused to acknowledge him: the Danes ranged all over his realm and beset his native duchy of Burgundy with especial fury. His own confederates in the rebellion paid him scanty homage, and went each on his own way. After a space Heribert of Vermandois quarrelled with Rudolf, and to spite the new king drew Charles out of his dungeon and proclaimed him once more monarch of the West Franks. But Rudolf bought over the double traitor to rejoin him: and for a second time Heribert seized the person of his natural lord and master. |Murder of Charles the Simple, 929.| This time Charles did not escape with mere imprisonment: the cruel and treacherous count starved him to death at Peronne. At last Rudolf the Burgundian could call himself without dispute king of France (929).

Here we must leave the history of the western realm, at a moment when it had reached much the same wretched condition that Germany attained at the time of the death of Conrad I. More unhappy than their eastern neighbours, the Franks of Neustria and Aquitaine were not yet to see any such great rulers as Henry the First and Otto the Great set over them. They were destined to drink the cup of feudal anarchy to the dregs, ere a strong monarchy was once more to arise among them. The fight between the Karlings and the dukes of France was to drag on for two generations more, ere Hugh Capet finally gained the crown that his grandfather Robert and his great-uncle Odo had worn. And when the house of the dukes of France had seized the throne, they were to be for long ages as powerless as the Karlings whom they had supplanted.

As yet the only favourable symptom in the condition of France was the comparative immunity from Viking raids that it was beginning to enjoy. Thanks to the feudal horseman and the feudal castle, thanks still more to the narrowing of Danish ambition to the Norman duchy and its neighbouring lands of Maine and Brittany, the kingdom was beginning to enjoy a certain measure of peace from the outer enemy. Unfortunately the great vassals of the crown only used their opportunity to redouble their wicked feuds, and the nation’s worst foes were to be those of its own household for many a long day.

|History of Spain, 700-918.| There is still one region of Europe at which we have cast no glance for a hundred years. But the fortunes of Spain lie far apart from those of the Frankish empire, and during the ninth and tenth centuries form no part of the general history of Christendom. We have had occasion to mention, however, that the Moslem conquerors of the peninsula paid for forty years a wavering allegiance to the Ommeyad caliphs, and were ruled for a time by a series of ephemeral viceroys, most of whom came to violent ends. Of the fate of those of them who ventured to attack the Frankish empire, we have spoken while dealing with the annals of Charles Martel and Pippin the Short.

In 756 Spain became separated from the caliphate of Bagdad. After the massacre of the Ommeyad house by their Abbasside successor, one member of the older family escaped to Spain. The young Abderahman, after long struggles, put down all those who opposed him, and became an independent sovereign. He ruled at Cordova for more than thirty years, and not unprosperously, though he was vexed all through his life by incessant rebellions, such as that of the chiefs who in 778 called in Charles the Great against him, and led the Franks to the gates of Saragossa.

But while Abderahman was ruling in great state at Toledo and Cordova, and winning the admiration of all the Moslem world by his courage, his wisdom, and his magnificence, a little cloud was arising in the west, which was in later days to overshadow all Mohammedan Spain.

After the destruction of the Visigothic kingdom in 711-12, the viceroys of Spain had overrun well-nigh the whole land, and planted it thickly with colonists from Arabia, Syria, and Africa. But they had never completely subdued the extreme north-west of the peninsula. The Cantabrian and Asturian highlands had always been the last refuge of broken tribes from the first dawn of Spanish history. There the Galaeci and Astures had long withstood the Roman legions: there, in a later age, the Suevi had resisted the Visigoths for more than a century. And now, in the same rugged hills, the last of the Visigoths took refuge from the advancing Saracen. |Pelagius in Asturia.| The annals of this rugged region are very scanty, but we learn that a certain count Pelagius, a chief with a Roman name, and perhaps, therefore, of native Spanish rather than Gothic blood, maintained himself with success against the Moslems. The narrow rocky tract between the Bay of the Biscay and the Cantabrian mountains presented few attractions to the Saracens, who preferred to settle in the fertile plains of Andalusia and Valencia, and they paid no heed to Pelagius when he drove their scattered garrisons out of the Asturias, and built up for himself a little kingdom in the hills. He is said to have reigned for eighteen years (718-36) over the Asturians. On his death his son Favila and his son-in-law Hildefuns (Aldefonsus, Alfonso) followed him on the throne. The last-named, whose pure Visigothic name recalls that of the sainted archbishop of Toledo, was the founder of the greatness of the new kingdom. Taking advantage of the civil wars of the Saracens, he issued from his hills, and threw himself upon the neighbouring province of Galicia, where a few Berber chiefs held down a discontented population of Christians. The natives rose to aid him, and the Mohammedan settlers were driven out of the land, and chased down into the plains of northern Spain (751).

|Conquests of Alfonso I.| Alfonso followed the flying foe, and made himself a lodgement on the southern slope of the Cantabrian hills, occupying the towns of Astorga and Leon, and pushing his incursions as far as the north bank of the Douro. He is said to have driven the Saracens completely out of the broad Tierra de Campos, the plain of Leon, and to have left it behind him an uninhabited desert, when he drew back to his fastnesses in the mountains. He laid Oporto, Zamora, and Salamanca in ruins, but was not strong enough to occupy them and add them to his kingdom.

Alfonso died in 757, just at the moment when the peninsula was falling into the hands of Abderahman the Ommeyad. The kings of Cordova proved more formidable foes to the new Christian state than the old viceroys of Spain had been, and for some generations its growth was comparatively slow. For fifty years the kings of Asturias and Galicia are mere names to us: it would appear that they were often constrained to pay tribute to the Ommeyad princes, and that they found their chief safety in the civil wars with which the Moslems were so continually vexed.

Alfonso II. (791-842) successfully repelled the last Moslem attempt to reconquer Galicia. He appears once in Frankish history as sending ambassadors to Charles the Great, to say that he considered himself the ‘man’ of the great king, and to offer his homage. But the Franks did not acquire any real suzerainty over Asturias, or come into any contact with its borders. |The County of Barcelona.| The reign of Charles, however, left its mark on Peninsular history in another quarter: it was he who conquered from the Saracen the ‘march of Spain,’ which, under its later name of the county of Barcelona, became the second great Christian state beyond the Pyrenees. At first the ‘Spanish March’ was a dependency of the duchy of Septimania, but ere long they were separated, and the count of Barcelona became as free from any active interference on the part of the Frankish kings as were his neighbours, the counts of Aquitaine.

The long reign of Alfonso II. was a period of rapid growth and extension for the kingdom of Asturias. He pushed his arms forward as far as the Tagus, and in one expedition he took and sacked Lisbon. But he drew the line of his garrisons at the Douro, which remained for some time the limit of the occupation of the Asturians. They were engaged for a whole generation in repeopling the deserted plains of Leon, which had long been a waste march between the Christian and the Moslem.

|Successes of Alfonso III.| Another Alfonso, third of the name, who ascended the throne in 866, was the next prince who pushed forward the Asturian border. To the kingdom that he inherited he added Old Castille, northern Portugal, and the land beyond the Douro, the extrema Durii, which keeps its name of Estremadura till this day. Mohammed king of Cordova could make no head against him, for a rising under a chief named Omar-ben-Hafs had torn his northern dominions from his grasp, and while endeavouring to subdue the rebel, he had to leave the king of Asturias to press forward unopposed.

In Alfonso’s time the county of Castille and the kingdom of Navarre took their rise. The former was a border march against the Moor, intrusted by the king to the bravest of his vassals. The latter was founded by a Gascon count Sancho, who though a vassal of the Frankish crown made conquests on his own account beyond the Pyrenees, and obtained the aid of the king of Asturias by doing him homage.

Alfonso strengthened his realm by building the great frontier fortresses of Zamora, Simancas, and Osma, to protect his new acquisitions from the raids of the Moslems. In 910 his son Garcia removed his residence from the Asturian town of Oviedo to Leon, south of the hills, as if to mark the advance of his borders into the plains of northern Spain.

The progress of the Christians southward and eastward was never to be checked, though it was often delayed for a space when strong rulers sat on the throne of Cordova. Three centuries before, it was the Goths who had been a turbulent unruly aristocracy, ruling a nation of serfs, and the Saracen had swept their monarchy off the face of the earth in two years. |The Spanish Moors.| Now the Moslem had become even as his Gothic predecessor, luxurious, proud, untrue to his king, a hard master to the peasantry who paid him toll and tribute. Religious persecution was not rare, and Andalusia could count many martyrs; the accusation of having blasphemed the name of Mohammed always stirred the Moslem crowd to sudden cruelty, and victims of all ages and conditions, from an archbishop of Toledo down to obscure monks and trades folk, suffered on that charge. While the conquerors were losing their ancient strength, the new Christian kingdom in the north-west was breeding an iron-handed race of men in its rugged mountains, a race whose life was one constant crusade against the Infidel. They had lost in their common danger all memory of the ancient grudges that separated Visigoth and Roman,^[70] and had become a perfectly homogeneous people, welded completely together by the day of adversity. The stubborn Spanish nation, poor, proud, warlike, and fanatically orthodox, was the natural product of the time when Christianity and freedom could only be preserved by accepting exile in the Cantabrian hills, and a life of constant struggle against the Saracen. The Mohammedan aristocracy, cultured, wealthy, luxurious, turbulent, and selfish, could not in the end resist such enemies. Though brave and numerous, they were divided by countless local, family and national feuds—the Arab hated the Syrian and the Berber, while all three despised the Spanish-born Moslem. Their monarch at Cordova only existed by playing off one faction against another, and was often deprived for whole years of his control over an important town or province.

It is small wonder then that the Asturian kingdom waxed, while the caliphate of Cordova waned. Perhaps we ought rather to marvel that the Moslems ruled in Spain so long and with so much splendour, in spite of all their feuds and civil wars. It is strange that in the midst of so much turbulent disorder they should have been able to found a very nourishing literature, and to leave their mark on the face of the land in the shape of such triumphs of architecture as the great Mosque of Cordova, or the Alcazar of Seville. Certainly the Saracen was seen at his best in Spain; in the other lands that he conquered, decay and decline came on him much more rapidly. The Abbassides of Bagdad had sunk into decrepitude some time before the Ommeyads of Cordova met with their fall. Syria, Egypt, and Persia became the prey of Turk and Mameluke and Tartar long ere Andalusia yielded to the Christian. Arabia itself sunk back into torpor with astonishing rapidity and ease. It was certainly in Spain that the conquering Moslems retained longest all the best and worthiest characteristics of the days of their early greatness.

|Summary.| We leave Europe at the end of our period in a day of gloom and depression. The picture indeed has its bright points: in Spain the balance had definitely turned in favour of Christendom, and the crescent was already beginning to wane. At Constantinople the rule of the Basilian dynasty promised a period of stationary prosperity, even if no strong emperor should arise to lead the Byzantine armies once more to victory. But in those great lands of Central Europe which then, and always, have formed the heart of Christendom, the outlook was very black—blacker than it had been at any time since the evil days of the seventh century. If the attacks of the Vikings were visibly slackening, and if the Saracens had last been driven out of southern Italy, so that the invaders from without were for a time checked, yet the state of affairs within showed no signs of mending. The empire was dead: the papacy was falling into premature decay and corruption.

In the midst of all the treason and selfishness, the wars, murders, and rebellions of the dismal age that lies between the battle of Fontenay and the end of the tenth century, there is one thought only that can afford the student any consolation. After the break-up of the empire of Charles the Great, while Dane, Saracen, Hungarian, and Slav were simultaneously besetting the gates of Christendom, there was a very serious danger that the fabric of civilised Europe might crumble to pieces beneath their blows. That it did not do so must be attributed to the unexpected powers of resistance developed by the disintegrated fractions of the Frankish empire under the feudal system. Disastrous as were most of the effects of that system, it at least justified its existence by saving Christendom from the foe without. What the successors of Charles the Great had failed to do when all the military force of the empire was at their backs, was accomplished by the petty counts and margraves whose power was developed on the ruins of the central authority. It was the mailed feudal horseman, and the impregnable walls of the feudal castle, that foiled the attacks of the Dane, the Saracen, and the Hungarian.

While the emperor or king was expected to protect every corner of the realm, and as a matter of fact protected none of it, the governors of the gaus and marks proved, on the whole, to be equal to the task, when once they had got their hands free and were not fettered by the close supervision of their master. Europe lapsed, indeed, into utter decentralisation, and lost for centuries the administrative unity which the reign of Charles the Great had promised. A heavy blow was dealt at the slowly developing culture and civilisation which the eighth century had produced. It was not without justice that the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries have been called ‘the Dark Ages.’ Literature and art sank back to the level from which Charles the Great had for a time raised them; history has once more to be reconstructed from the scantiest materials. Architecture was stagnant, save in the single department of castle-building—the one development that these centuries produced. The internal history of continental Europe, when it ceases to be a series of Danish, Saracen, and Magyar raids, becomes a dismal record of tiresome local feuds and private wars. The remains of the old Teutonic liberty, which had survived in slowly dwindling measure, finally disappear as feudalism is perfected, and the freeman becomes everywhere the vassal of some greater or smaller lord.

But all the details of this unhappy change must not blind us to the fact that Christendom was saved from destruction by the men of the feudal age. In spite of all the faults of their system, its selfishness, its particularism, its feuds, its degradation of the lower classes, it served the required end in producing the condition of military efficiency which was needed to beat off the invading hordes from without. |The feudal horsemen.| The problem with which Europe had to deal was that of facing quickly-moving assailants, whose object was primarily plunder rather than fighting, and who therefore had to be caught and brought to bay if they were to be checked. The slowly-moving masses of foot-soldiery which the Frankish empire put into the field were quite unable to deal with this problem. The light cavalry of the Magyars and Saracens could ride around or away from them: the Dane took to his ships and disappeared when they tardily crept up to drive him from his prey. The local count or duke who could put a few hundred mailed horsemen of approved valour into the field, men bound to him by every tie of discipline and obedience, and trained to war from their youth up, was really a far more formidable foe to the plundering invader. Even if he could not check the raiders for want of numbers, his troop of riders hung round the intruders, cut off their stragglers, intercepted them at every defensible pass or ford where the few can withstand the many, circumvented them by cross-roads which the native must know better than the stranger.

|The feudal castle.| No less important than the rise of the mailed horseman was the rise of the feudal castle. In the Frankish empire fortified places had hitherto been rare: save the towns that possessed ancient Roman walls there seem to have been none that could defend themselves: Frankish ideas of fortification went no further than heaping up a mound, surrounding it with a ditch, and crowning it with a palisade. Such temporary strongholds were inadequate, and safety from the Dane was only found by the use of permanent fortifications of firm masonry. Every town that had not perished surrounded itself with a ring-wall: fortified bridge-heads were built to shut up the rivers to the Viking ships. But most important of all were the castles, which rose up on every hand, to form safe residences for the chiefs who had once dwelt in open villas, and to serve as bases for the defence of the country-side. Few in number at first, they gradually spread over the breadth of the land, as each lord who was able reared himself a stronghold. The existence of these castles changed the whole face of war: when an enemy appeared there were now countless places of refuge to seek, and the invader, instead of sweeping easily over the district in search of plunder, found that it could for the future only be procured at the cost of a series of lengthy sieges. There was hardly any sure method known of reducing a strong place, save the expedient of starving it out: but to sit three months before a castle till famine should reduce it, was not what Dane or Magyar desired. Their booty would be limited, while the delay would allow the whole military strength of the country to be mustered against them. Hence it may be truly said that the rise of the feudal castle was the best remedy that could have been found against the pressing evils that threatened Christendom in the ninth century.

|Conclusion.| The military triumph was a political disaster. At a moment when the kingly power was shaken by the unhappy civil wars of the descendants of Charles the Great, when almost every province was disputed by two lords, it was absolutely fatal that the control of the warlike strength of Europe should pass into the hands of a crowd of petty magnates, each intent on his own aggrandisement, and caring nought for the general welfare of the kingdom so long as his own county was well guarded. The price at which Christendom bought its safety was enormous: nevertheless no price was too high when the future of Europe was at stake. Any ransom was worth paying, if thereby Rome was saved from the Saracen, Mainz from the Magyar, Paris from the heathen of the North.