As in the last days of the Merovingians, light came from an unexpected quarter.  The tide turned toward centralization.  Robert the Strong, a man of obscure family, who had laid down his life in a very heroic resistance to the Northmen, had won the titles “Count of Paris” and “Duke of France,” which he bequeathed, with the estates attached to them, to his successors.

Somewhat after the manner of the Pepins, this powerful and resourceful family by sheer native ability grasped one after another the sources of power in the state; and in the year 987 the dynasty established by Pepin disappeared, and Hugh Capet, Count of Paris and Abbot, was declared by the Pope of Rome to be “King of France, in virtue of his great deeds.”  It was the ecclesiastical office of this descendant of Robert the Strong which gave the name to the dynasty that had come to save France a second time from disintegration.  Because he was the wearer of the Chape, or Cope, the name Chapet, or Capet, became that of the line.

There now commenced a struggle between the antagonistic principles of royalty and aristocracy; a conflict which was going to last nearly five centuries, covering that dreary twilight known as the Dark Ages—­a time when, had it not been for the Christian Church and for the torch of the Saracen in Spain, the light of civilization would really have been extinguished, and the slender thread of connection with a great past have been broken.

In the helpless misery existing in France at this time, the Church saw its opportunity.  To that silent, humble, forgotten multitude without life or hope in the world, she offered refuge, peace, consolation, and thus forever bound to her the poor of Christendom; by this means establishing in the end an ecclesiastical dominion to which kings and peerage would be compelled to bow.

If one would know how kings submitted to the authority of the Church at this time, let him read the story of the good King Robert, second in the Capetian line, who for marrying the gentle Bertha, his cousin fourth removed, suffered the punishment of excommunication; was treated as a moral leper in his own palace; cut off from contact with human kind and from sound of human voice; the dishes from which he ate, the clothes he wore, destroyed, until repentant and heart-broken they consented to part and to break the bond of their union forever.

It was the despair in the heart of the nation which gave intensity to the religious instinct at this time.  And when pestilence came, and neither rich nor poor could escape, conscience-stricken barons also trembled.  A belief began to prevail that the end of the world was at hand.  Did not the Book of Revelation say that one thousand years from the birth of Christ the great dragon was to be let loose and the earth was to be destroyed?