seclusion injured the realm, and he must remember that man was not meant to live alone. When the emperor would neither go to seek a wife nor take a princess whom he had not seen on another's recommendation, his ministers brought to his court all the fairest of the daughters of the counts and nobles of his realm. The same scene was rehearsed that was a few years later to be seen at Constantinople when the widowed Theophilus took his second wife. Among the crowd of ladies presented before him, the eye of Lewis fixed upon Judith, a noble damsel from the Suabian Alps, daughter of Welf, count of Altdorf. Pressed hard by his courtiers he consented to take her to wife, and rued it all his remaining years. Judith was fair, wise, witty, and learned above all the women of her day, and soon acquired an empire over her melancholy spouse, not less than that which her predecessor had exercised. Two years later she presented him Charles the with a son, whose birth was to cause unending evils to the empire. The boy was named Charles, after his great grandsire. (A.D. 822.)

Birth of

Bald.

For a space things seemed to be going well with Lewis, but three years after his second marriage the black shadow closed in again over the unfortunate emperor. Some cause, to us unknown, suddenly plunged him once more into a fit of misery and contrition. He remembered first that he had not pardoned all his enemies as a good Christian should. Forthwith all whom he had ever injured were recalled from exile. The brothers Wala and Adalhard were drawn out of their monasteries. The partisans of Bernard of Italy who had suffered blinding and imprisonment were sent back to their homes. So anxious was the emperor to atone for his harshness that he most unwisely proceeded to place the most important of the exiles in high posts of trust. He made Adalhard master of his household, and sent Wala to his son Lothair to be his first councillor. He had forgotten that others. might not forgive as he could himself; these appointments placed in power men who at the bottom of their hearts

could never pardon their years of weariness and cloistered seclusion.

After doing what he could to recompense his victims for the indignities they had suffered, Lewis took another and a more startling step. He summoned a great council at Attigny, hard by the royal city of Soissons, and proceeded to do penance for his sins before the face of his magnates. Coming forth crownless and robed in sackcloth he recapitulated all the faults and misdeeds that had ever been committed, from the execution of Bernard of Italy down to many trifling transgressions, which most men counted as harmless failings, and all had long forgotten. He even rehearsed, with a somewhat unnecessary scrupulousness, all the crimes and short-comings of his great father the emperor Charles. Then he besought his bishops to lay on him such a meed of penance as might fit these many and grievous sins. Not unwilling to take advantage of their sovereign's humiliation, the prelates prescribed to him a course of stripes and fasting and vigils, of prayer, almsgiving, and building of churches, all of which he conscientiously carried out. The astonished counts and courtiers saw their monarch baring his back to Attigny. the lash, and discharging with exactitude all the humiliating burdens that the clergy laid upon him. It was the act of a saint, but not of an emperor.

Penance of

Nothing could have done Lewis more harm than this outburst of laboured penitence. While his subjects marvelled at his Christian humility, they drew from his conduct the conclusion that as a sovereign he was no longer to be feared or obeyed. The Frankish nobles who remembered the highhanded Charles the Great, and had loved him in spite of all his harshness, felt more scorn than admiration for an emperor who wept and grovelled in public over deeds which few in that age considered sins at all. They muttered that Lewis was no better than a brain-sick, self-torturing monk. For the future there was an under-current of contempt for the emperor passing through the minds of most of his lay vassals. It needed

but some small encouragement to turn this feeling into active disloyalty.

The year of the council of Attigny was the last year of good fortune for Lewis. It was followed by premonitory symptoms of evil all over his realm. The Moors of Spain, quiescent for more than twenty years, sent a sudden invasion into Septimania. The Danes drove out their king Harald, a protégé of Lewis and a favourer of Christianity, and began to ravage the Frisian coast. But there were worse foes than Saracen or Dane awaiting Lewis in his own household. His eldest son Lothair, under the tutelage of the unforgiving Wala, had begun to display an alarming amount of self-will and disregard for his father's wishes and the common weal of the empire. He bore himself like an independent king at his court in Pavia.

In 829 the fatal civil wars of the ninth century began. Charles, the young son of Lewis and Judith, had now attained his seventh year, and his future had become the greatest concern of his father and mother. The emperor, always brooding over his own latter end, was convinced that he had not long to live: he was filled with fears as to the fate of the Joseph of his old age when he should fall into the hands of his brethren. Urged on by his wife he determined to make some provision for the boy in the event of his own early death. He set aside the duchy of Alamannia and the Swiss and Burgundian Alpine lands to the south of it, as a kingdom for his youngest

son.

Lewis declared his purpose of erecting the kingdom of Alamannia at a great council held at Worms, to which no one of his three elder sons vouchsafed his presence. The moment that the edict was published murmuring and conspiracy began. The new kingdom was carved out of territory which would have ultimately fallen to Lothair, but his two brothers showed themselves quite as resentful at the partition as was the heir of the empire. Their wrath found vent in slanderous rumours: they did not shrink from asserting that Charles was no brother of theirs. Bernard of Septimania,

they said, had betrayed their father and seduced the old man's wife. The accusation was absolutely without foundation, but it met with wide belief. The chiefs of the higher clergy joined themselves to the royal princes; Wala found an opportunity of revenging himself by aiding the conspiracy; the ministers Ebbo and Hildwin, who had found themselves superseded in favour by count Bernard, had the ingratitude to join in the plot against the man who had raised them from the dust. The two chief prelates of Gaul, Agobard of Lyons and Jesse of Amiens, were also of the conspirators. A general revolt was planned before the unsuspecting Lewis had any notion that aught was amiss.

First Civil
War, 829.

It burst out in the next spring. A new rising of the Bretons had called the emperor off into a remote corner of his realm. He summoned a small force to follow him, and was soon lost to sight on the distant western moors. But the very moment that the emperor was gone his enemies set to work to stir up rebellion. The implacable Wala harangued the west Frankish nobles, and sent letters to the chief ecclesiastics of Gaul in which he accused the emperor of ruining the unity of the Church and the empire, the one by his interference with things sacred, the other by his neglect of things secular.. Lewis had become a mere tool in the hands of an adulterous wife and an unfaithful servant, and it was the duty of good Christians and patriotic Franks to rescue the empire from its shame. Pippin of Aquitaine soon gave point to the harangues of Wala by leading a Gascon army to Paris, where all the counts of Neustria joined him in arms, Lothair sent word from Italy that he. was approaching at the head of a great host of Lombards. Presently Lewis came back from Brittany to find the land in arms behind him he penetrated as far as Compiègne before he was surrounded by the forces of Pippin. Beset by an overwhelming host of enemies, the army of the emperor dispersed, and he himself fell into the hands of the rebels. His sons put him in confinement, pending the meeting of a grand council. The empress Judith they dragged from sanctuary

:

and forced under the terror of death to take the veil at Poictiers. But when the great council of the empire assembled at Nimuegen in the next spring a reaction had followed the first success of the rebellion. The meeting was in the heart of the old Frankish land, where the rebels had few sympathisers, and the counts of the Rhineland and northern Germany came up to it with such a following of armed men and such a truculent aspect that the Neustrians and Lombards who accompanied Pippin and Lothair were quite overawed. Without a sword being drawn or a blow struck the tables were completely turned, and the old emperor found his rebel sons at his feet. He showed himself merciful-all too merciful-in the moment of his triumph. Lothair was despoiled of his imperial title, but permitted to keep his kingdom of Italy, and sent back unharmed to Pavia. Pippin returned to Aquitaine pardoned also. The rancorous Wala, the soul of the conspiracy, was sent back to his cloister at Corbey and bidden to live according to his rule, till his disloyal murmurings provoked the emperor into banishing him into a less comfortable seclusion on the shores of the Lake of Geneva. Lewis deThe discomfiture of the rebels released the throned and empress Judith from her nunnery; but Lewis thought it necessary to make her clear herself by compurgation from the cruel charges that had been brought against her, before she was released from her monastic vows.

restored.

Lewis was once more emperor, but the mercy with which he had treated his conquered enemies was destined to breed him unending troubles. His undutiful sons had been left as powerful as before, and instead of feeling grateful for their pardon, were only vexed at the mismanagement which had ruined their well-planned conspiracy. When they had returned to their kingdoms they merely took breath for a space, and then recommenced their intrigues. This time Lothair and Pippin took pains to enlist their younger brother, Lewis of Bavaria, in the plot. By his means they hoped to divide Germany, for the young king was very popular in his own