History as Fantasy: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations
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There is a well-worn story that is told in one form or another in all European history textbooks. In 824, ten years after the death of Charlemagne, Agobard, Archbishop of Lyon, hailed a new Christian imperial ambition to unite all the peoples and lands of the Western Holy Roman Empire by reformulating Galatians 3:28: “There is now neither Gentile nor Jew, Scythian nor Aquitanian, nor Lombard, nor Burgundian, nor Alaman, nor bond, nor free. All are one in Christ.” But the dream did not come true. Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, followed the Frankish laws of inheritance, dividing Charlemagne’s empire among his three sons. He bequeathed the western kingdom of Aquitaine (roughly France) to Pepin. Louis the German received the Kingdom of the Eastern Franks. And ruling over them, in the middle, was the eldest son, Lothar, who retained the title of Holy Roman Emperor, but direct control only over his middle kingdom, which stretched from Utrecht and the Imperial city of Aachen through the Burgundian kingdoms and into the Mediterranean lands of Provence. When Louis the Pious died in 840, the imperial pact collapsed, the brothers went to war, and the ideal of a Christian Pax Romana vanished into the foggy forests of early feudalism.
Lothar’s middle kingdom would endure in one form or another, but mainly under the title of the Kingdom of Burgundy. Wedged in between what is today France and Germany, wealthy Burgundy was the backbone of Charlemagne’s Holy Frankish Roman Empire. With its verdant forests, its vineyards, its rich cities and fantastically rich monasteries, it was linked to Flanders and the Baltic in the north with its fairs and sea trade, and to the Alps and Savoy, and via the Rhône river to the kingdom of Provence and the Mediterranean sea. This coveted wealth would grow over time, and by the nineteenth century coal spilled from the hills of Lorraine and helped cause three wars between France and Germany. It is no accident that the European parliament now stands in Strasbourg, in Alsace-Lorraine, a point of contention between Franks, Bourbons, Hapsburgs, Bonapartes, Hohenzöllerns, free Republics, Nazis, and the U.S. Army.