Franconia, the husband of his daughter Liutgard, a choice which was not completely satisfactory to the Lotharingians. In 953 Conrad, in concert with Liudulf, the son of the German king, revolted against Otto, but was abandoned by his supporters. Otto stripped Conrad of his duchy, and in 954 gave the government of it to his own brother Bruno, archbishop of Cologne. Bruno had to contend against the efforts of the last Carolingians of France to make good their claims on Lorraine, as well as against the spirit of independence exhibited by the Lotharingian nobles; and his attempts to raze certain castles built by brigand lords and to compel them to respect their oath of fidelity resulted in serious sedition. To obviate these difficulties Bruno divided the ducal authority, assigning Lower Lorraine to a certain Duke Godfrey, who was styled dux Ripuariorum, and Upper Lorraine to Frederick (d. 959), count of Bar, a member of the house of Ardenne and son-in-law of Hugh the Great, with the title of dux Mosellanorum; and it is probable that the partition of the ancient kingdom of Lorraine into two new duchies was confirmed by Otto after Bruno’s death in 965. In 977 the emperor Otto II. gave the government of Lower Lorraine to Charles I., a younger son of Louis d’Outremer, on condition that that prince should acknowledge himself his vassal and should oppose any attempt of his brother Lothair on Lorraine. The consequent expedition of the king of France in 978 against Aix-la-Chapelle had no enduring result, and Charles retained his duchy till his death about 992. He left two sons, Otto, who succeeded him and died without issue, and Henry, who is sometimes regarded as the ancestor of the landgraves of Thuringia. The duchy of Lower Lorraine, sometimes called Lothier (Lotharium), was then given to Godfrey (d. 1023), son of Count Godfrey of Verdun, and for some time the history of Lorraine is the history of the attempts made by the dukes of Lothier to seize Upper Lorraine. Gothelon (d. 1043), son of Duke Godfrey, obtained Lorraine at the death of Frederick II., duke of Upper Lorraine, in 1027, and victoriously repulsed the incursions of Odo (Eudes) of Blois, count of Champagne, who was defeated and killed in a battle near Bar (1037). At Gothelon’s death in 1043, his son Godfrey the Bearded received from the emperor only Lower Lorraine, his brother Gothelon II. obtaining Upper Lorraine. Godfrey attempted to seize the upper duchy, but was defeated and imprisoned in 1045. On the death of Gothelon in 1046, Godfrey endeavoured to take Upper Lorraine from Albert of Alsace, to whom it had been granted by the emperor Henry III. The attempt, however, also failed; and Godfrey was for some time deprived of his own duchy of Lower Lorraine in favour of Frederick of Luxemburg. Godfrey took part in the struggles of Pope Leo IX. against the Normans in Italy, and in 1053 married Beatrice, daughter of Duke Frederick of Upper Lorraine and widow of Boniface, margrave of Tuscany. On the death of Frederick of Luxemburg in 1065 the emperor Henry IV. restored the duchy of Lower Lorraine to Godfrey, who retained it till his death in 1069, when he was succeeded by his son Godfrey the Hunchback (d. 1076), after whose death Henry IV. gave the duchy to Godfrey of Bouillon, the hero of the first crusade, son of Eustace, count of Boulogne, and Ida, sister of Godfrey the Hunchback. On the death of Godfrey of Bouillon in 1100 Lower Lorraine was given to Henry, count of Limburg. The new duke supported the emperor Henry IV. in his struggles with his sons, and in consequence was deposed by the emperor Henry V., who gave the duchy in 1106 to Godfrey, count of Louvain, a descendant of the Lotharingian dukes of the beginning of the 10th century. This Godfrey was the first hereditary duke of Brabant, as the dukes of Lower Lorraine came to be called.
Upper Lorraine.—The duchy of Upper Lorraine, or Lorraine Mosellana, to which the name of Lorraine was restricted from the 11th century, consisted of a tract of undulating country watered by the upper course of the Meuse and Moselle, and bounded N. by the Ardennes, S. by the table-land of Langres, E. by the Vosges and W. by Champagne. Its principal fiefs were the countship of Bar which Otto the Great gave in 951 to Count Frederick of Ardenne, and which passed in 1093 to the lords of Montbéliard; the countship of Chiny, formed at the end of the 10th century, of which, since the 13th, Montmédy was the capital; the lordship of Commercy, whose rulers bore the special title of damoiseau, and which passed in the 13th century to the house of Saarebrücken; and, finally the three important ecclesiastical lordships of the bishops of Metz, Toul and Verdun. Theodoric, or Thierri (d. 1026), son of Frederick, count of Bar and first duke of Upper Lorraine, was involved in a war with the emperor Henry II., a war principally remarkable for the siege of Metz (1007). After having been the object of numerous attempts on the part of the dukes of Lower Lorraine, Upper Lorraine was given by the emperor Henry III. to Albert of Alsace, and passed in 1048 to Albert’s brother Gerard, who died by poison in 1069, and who was the ancestor of the hereditary house of Lorraine. Until the 15th century the representatives of the hereditary house were Theodoric II., called the Valiant (1069–1115), Simon (1115–1139), Matthew (1139–1176), Simon II. (1176–1205), Ferri I. (1205–1206), Ferri II. (1206–1213), Theobald (Thibaut) I. (1213–1220), Matthew II. (1220–1251), Ferri III. (1251–1304), Theobald II. (1304–1312), Ferri IV., called the Struggler (1312–1328), Rudolph, or Raoul (1328–1346), John (1346–1391) and Charles II. or I., called the Bold (1391–1431). The 12th century and the first part of the 13th were occupied with wars against the counts of Bar and Champagne. Theobald I. intervened in Champagne to support Erard of Brienne against the young count Theobald IV. The regent of Champagne, Blanche of Navarre, succeeded in forming against the duke of Lorraine a coalition consisting of the count of Bar and the emperor Frederick II., who had become embroiled with Theobald over the question of Rosheim in Alsace. Attacked by the emperor, the duke of Lorraine was forced at the treaty of Amance (1218) to acknowledge himself the vassal of the count of Champagne, and to support the count in his struggles against his ancient ally the count of Bar. The long government of Ferri III. was mainly occupied with wars against the feudal lords and the bishop of Metz, which resulted in giving an impulse to the municipal movement through Ferri’s attempt to use the movement as a weapon against the nobles. The majority of the municipal charters of Lorraine were derived from the charter of Beaumont in Argonne, which was at first extended to the Barrois and was granted by Ferri, in spite of the hostility of his barons, to La Neuveville in 1257, to Frouard in 1263 and to Lunéville in 1265. In the church lands the bishops of Toul and Metz granted liberties from the end of the 12th century to the communes in their lordship, but not the Beaumont charter, which, however, obtained in the diocese of Verdun in the 14th and 15th centuries.
By the will of Duke Charles the Bold, Lorraine was to pass to his daughter Isabella, who married René of Anjou, duke of Bar, in 1420. But Anthony of Vaudemont, Charles’s nephew and heir male, disputed this succession with René, who obtained from the king of France an army commanded by Arnault Guilhem de Barbazan. René, however, was defeated and taken prisoner at the battle of Bulgnéville, where Barbazan was killed (2nd of July 1431). The negotiations between René’s wife and Anthony had no result, in spite of the intervention of the council of Basel and the emperor Sigismund, and it was not until 1436 that René obtained his liberty by paying a ransom of 200,000 crowns, and was enabled to dispute with Alfonso of Aragon the kingdom of Naples, which he had inherited in the previous year. In 1444 Charles VII. of France and the dauphin Louis went to Lorraine, accompanied by envoys from Henry VI. of England, and procured a treaty (confirmed at Chalons in 1445), by which Yolande, René’s eldest daughter, married Anthony’s son, Ferri of Vaudemont, and René’s second daughter Margaret became the wife of Henry VI. of England. After his return to Lorraine in 1442, René was seldom in the duchy. Like his successor John, duke of Calabria, who died in 1470, he was continually occupied with expeditions in Italy or in Spain. John’s son and successor, Nicholas (d. 1473), who supported the duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, against the king of France, died without children, and his heir was René, son of Frederick of Vaudemont. The duke of Burgundy,
