Had the pope and the Romans revived the primitive constitution, the
titles of emperor and Augustus were conferred on Charlemagne for
the term of his life; and his successors, on each vacancy, must have
ascended the throne by a formal or tacit election. But the association
of his son Lewis the Pious asserts the independent right of monarchy and
conquest, and the emperor seems on this occasion to have foreseen and
prevented the latent claims of the clergy. The royal youth was commanded
to take the crown from the altar, and with his own hands to place it on
his head, as a gift which he held from God, his father, and the
nation. The same ceremony was repeated, though with less energy, in
the subsequent associations of Lothaire and Lewis the Second: the
Carlovingian sceptre was transmitted from father to son in a lineal
descent of four generations; and the ambition of the popes was reduced
to the empty honor of crowning and anointing these hereditary princes,
who were already invested with their power and dominions. The
pious Lewis survived his brothers, and embraced the whole empire
of Charlemagne; but the nations and the nobles, his bishops and his
children, quickly discerned that this mighty mass was no longer inspired
by the same soul; and the foundations were undermined to the centre,
while the external surface was yet fair and entire. After a war, or
battle, which consumed one hundred thousand Franks, the empire was
divided by treaty between his three sons, who had violated every filial
and fraternal duty. The kingdoms of Germany and France were forever
separated; the provinces of Gaul, between the Rhone and the Alps, the
Meuse and the Rhine, were assigned, with Italy, to the Imperial dignity
of Lothaire. In the partition of his share, Lorraine and Arles, two
recent and transitory kingdoms, were bestowed on the younger children;
and Lewis the Second, his eldest son, was content with the realm of
Italy, the proper and sufficient patrimony of a Roman emperor. On his
death without any male issue, the vacant throne was disputed by his
uncles and cousins, and the popes most dexterously seized the occasion
of judging the claims and merits of the candidates, and of bestowing on
the most obsequious, or most liberal, the Imperial office of advocate of
the Roman church. The dregs of the Carlovingian race no longer exhibited
any symptoms of virtue or power, and the ridiculous epithets of the
_bard_, the _stammerer_, the _fat_, and the _simple_, distinguished
the tame and uniform features of a crowd of kings alike deserving
of oblivion. By the failure of the collateral branches, the whole
inheritance devolved to Charles the Fat, the last emperor of his family:
his insanity authorized the desertion of Germany, Italy, and France: he
was deposed in a diet, and solicited his daily bread from the rebels by
whose contempt his life and liberty had been spared. According to the
measure of their force, the governors, the bishops, and the lords,
usurped the fragments of the falling empire; and some preference was
shown to the female or illegitimate blood of Charlemagne. Of the greater
part, the title and possession were alike doubtful, and the merit was
adequate to the contracted scale of their dominions. Those who could
appear with an army at the gates of Rome were crowned emperors in
the Vatican; but their modesty was more frequently satisfied with the
appellation of kings of Italy: and the whole term of seventy-four years
may be deemed a vacancy, from the abdication of Charles the Fat to the
establishment of Otho the First.