provoked Bernard to revolt in 817. The rebellion was crushed and its instigator blinded, a
punishment from which he died.
Difficulties for Louis the Pious increased with the birth in 823 of Charles (later known
as “the Bald”) to his second wife, Judith. (The three older sons were by his first spouse,
Irmengarde.) A revised scheme of inheritance gave to Charles lands previously intended
for his older brothers. Coming on top of existing tensions between Louis and Lothair I,
this drove Lothair and his supporters to revolt in 830. Over the next several years,
conflicts between the aging emperor and one or more of his sons plagued the empire.
Although Louis managed to regain political control in 834 and confined Lothair to Italy,
strife among Lothair, Louis the German, and Charles the Bald flared after their father’s
death in 840. The written records that were made of one attempted accord between Louis
the German and Charles, the Oaths of Strasbourg of 842, provide unique evidence of the
French and German vernaculars of the day; but the agreement failed to achieve a lasting
peace. In 843, the Treaty of Verdun ended the ideal of a united empire by dividing it into
separate kingdoms for Louis the Pious’s surviving sons: to Charles went the western
regions, to Louis the German the eastern territories, and to Lothair the middle section.
Yet this only temporarily ended the conflict. The tensions among the brothers, along with
such external threats as Viking raids, undermined the authority of the Carolingian
monarchs and encouraged the rise of aristocratic factions. The church’s authority in
secular affairs also grew, as it increasingly claimed a right to intervene in political issues.
After Lothair I’s death in 855, his kingdom was shared among his three sons. Italy was
given to the eldest, Louis II (d. 875), who had received the imperial crown in 850, while
Lothair II (d. 869) obtained the kingdom of Lorraine and Charles (d. 863) the kingdom of
Provence. Charles of Provence’s realm was partitioned after his death between his two
brothers. When Lothair II died, however, Louis II was too busy battling the Muslims in
southern Italy to be a serious contender for his lands, and the Treaty of Meerssen (870)
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