LOUIS I
524
LOUIS I
time, however, the emperor fell ill, and died on an island of the Khiiie near Mentz, in June, 840, after sending to his son Lothaire the imperial crown, his sword, and his sceptre. Of what account this last act of Louis was may be inferred from the partition of the dominion. Lo- thaire, as emperor, held Italy, Provence, Burgundy, and Lorraine. Charles the Bald succeeded his father as king of France, and Lonis of Bavaria retained all Germany. Thus ends the history of this man, whose life, notwith- standing his kind disposition, was '• one continued scene of trouble and affliction, because he knew not how to govern his own house, much less his empire."
Of a prince so feeble and dependent as Louis proved himself in the affairs of state, we cannot, of course, ex- pect the same vigor and determination towards the pa- pacy that characterized the reign of Charlemagne, and it may be safely said that with the death of the latter a new sera, opens in the history of the Latin Church. Charlemagne had proved an earnest supporter of the Church and the papacy, but he had known how to op- pose their pretensions. Not so Louis. His feebleness and incapacity to govern gave rise to many abuses, or gave new life to such as had before beeii successfully repressed. The whole reign of Louis, indeed, abounded in political disorders. '■ Distraction and weakness," says Neander {C/i. Hist, iii, 351), "gave many opportunities for the Church to interfere in the political strifes," and for it the Church had been anxiously but patiently in waiting. With the coronation of Charlemagne the pope of Rome had transferred his allegiance from the East to the West, and thus, by his action, had not only confer- red a most doubtful title on Charlemagne, but secured at the same time a political ascendency of the papacy. Under Charlemagne, however, the thiuiders of the Church were controlled by the emperor; but in Louis " the Pious" was found a willing slave, and with rapid strides the Romish Church marched onward to establish its superiority over the empire. See Papacy. What Louis would do for the Church was clearly seen in his submissive acts — the master of Europe in 822 a penitent before the prelates assembled at the Council of Attigny. Here the triumphs of the spiritual power, under the au- spices of a rapid progress towards domination, were jilainly foreshadowed. The hierarchy failed not to dis- cover the hour of Louis's weakness, and day by day new laws were proposed and enacted, the ecclesiastical fabric enlarged and strengthened, the power of the secular au- tliority enfeebled and abrogated. Prominent among the ecclesiastics who influenced the king to favor the Church and her institutions was Wala, abbot of Corbie. What Wala (q. v.) advised was worthy of adoption, and he had no sooner made his proposals than they became law. Thus the granting of monasteries to laymen, and grants of Church property at pleasure to the vassals of the crown without consent of the bishops, were abrogated, virtu- ally making the bishops co-legislators ; and by 829 the ecclesiastic royal counsellor hesitated not to declare that " everything depended on keeping the line of demarca- tion clearly drawn between the ecclesiastical and the civil province, the king and the bishops concerning themselves only about the affairs which belonged to their respective callings." Unfortunately, however, the concessions which the king was daily making to the clergy gave to the bishops much of the business strictly belonging to the secular authority, and " the scope and the danger of the authority thus successively conferred upon the Church were most impressively manifested when Louis was deposed by his sons (in 833), . . , and Lothaire determined to render impossible the restoration of his father to the throne. . . . The people had been in- vited by Louis himself, eleven years before, at Attignj-, to see the bishops sit in judgment on their monarch; and the decretals (q. v.) of Siricius and Leo I, forbidding secular employment and the bearing of arms by any one wlio had undergone i)ublic |)enanco. werp not so entirely forgotten but that they might be revived. Accordingh-, when Lothaire returned to France, dragging his captive