THE FRANKISH STATE AND CHARLEMAGNE 213 but his brothers defeated him at Fontenay and he had to sign the Treaty of Verdun in 843. This left him in posses- I sion of only a long central strip of territory, extending from
- Rom e to the N orth Sea and including both the papal city
and the Frankish capital, Aachen. It also embraced Lom- bardy, Provence, most of Burgundy, the original territories of the Salians and Ripuarians before Clovis's conquests, and Frisia, north of these. Roughly speaking, he controlled central and northern Italy and the Rhone and Rhine val-
- leys. From Lotharingia, as Lothair's territory north of the
Alps came later to be called, has come the modern name I Lorraine, now applied to a much more restricted area. j Louis, King of the East Franks, ruled Germans exclusively J — the Saxons, Thuringians, Alamanni, and Bavarians. ! Charles, King of the West Franks, had most of Neustria and Aquitaine with their predominantly Latin population. j He had only nominal control over Aquitaine, where his ! nephew Pepin was king, and the Spanish March, Septima- ! nia, and Brittany were quite independent of him. Passing
- over various treaties and territorial readjustments of minor
importance, we find that in 870 the one surviving son of ' Lothair had only Provence and Italy left as his "empire." j By the Treaty of Mersen his uncles had divided Lotharin- gia, Louis the German taking the lion's share including ! Aachen. When Lothair's son died in 875, the empire was practically at an end. For a few years from 881 to 887, Charles, who had ruled the East Franks since the death of his father, Louis the German, became emperor; and in 884 the West Franks accepted his rule because the other avail- able Carolingian was but five years old. Charles proved quite unequal to his imperial task ; he did not govern at all ; and at last was deposed. Thereafter the different sections which had once been combined under Charlemagne sub- divided into even smaller parts than before.
