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 separated Italy, France, and Germany.  At the same time the Heptarchy in Britain had been consolidated into England under King Alfred; while an obscure Scandinavian adventurer named Rurik, quite unobserved, was bringing into political unity, and reigning at Kieff as Grand Duke over what was to become Russia. Spain, quite apart from all this movement, had entered upon those seven centuries of struggle with Saracen and Moor, that struggle of unmatched devotion and tenacity of purpose which is really the great epic of history.