to his authority." The West Franks elected as king Odo, the valiant defender of Paris. In Italy Berengar, Marquess of Friuli, and Guy (Guido), Duke of Spoleto, contended for the crown. Louis of Provence held the valley of the Rhone as far as Lyons. Finally, a new claimant, the Welf Rodolph, son of Conrad, Count of Auxerre, already duke of "the duchy beyond the Jura" comprising the dioceses of Geneva, Lausanne and Sion, claimed the ancient kingdom of Lorraine, without, however, succeeding in building up more than a "kingdom of Burgundy," restricted to the Helvetian pagi and the countries which formed the ancient diocese of Besançon.
The expressions used by Regino must not, however, be understood too literally. The kings whom the new nations "drew from within themselves" were all of the Austrasian race and had their origin in Francia, their families having been for hardly more than two or three generations settled in their new counties. The dismemberment, which began under Louis the Pious and was finally consummated in 888, was by no means caused by a reaction of the different nations within the Carolingian Empire against the political and administrative unity imposed by Charles the Great. The building up of new nationalities may have been largely the work of the chances of the various partitions which had taken place since the Treaty of Verdun. Nevertheless the fact that Louis the German and his heirs had as their portion the populations of Teutonic speech, and Charles the Bald and his successors those of the Romance language, no doubt accentuated such consciousness as these peoples night have of their individuality, a consciousness further strengthened by the antagonism between the sovereigns. Italy, on the other hand, had long been accustomed to live under a king of its own, a little outside the sphere of the other Frankish kingdoms. Besides these more remote causes, we must bear in mind the need which each fraction of the Empire felt of having a protector, an effective head to organise resistance against the Slavs, the Saracens or the Northmen. A single Emperor must often be at too great a distance from the point at which danger threatened. "The idea of the Empire, the idea of the Frankish kingdom recedes into the background, and gives place to an attachment to the more restricted country of one's birth, to the race to which one belongs[1]." Under the influence of geographical situation and of language, or even through the chances of political alliances, new groups had been formed, and each of these placed at its head the man best fitted to defend it against the innumerable enemies who for, half a century had been devastating all parts of the Empire.
In spite of this separatist movement, the kinglets (reguli) set up in 888 still attributed a certain supremacy to Arnulf as the last representative of the Carolingian family. Odo sought his presence at Worms in
- ↑ G. Monod. Du rôle de l'opposition des races dans la dissolution de l'Empire carolingien, p. 13.
