The broad empire of Germanic peoples built up by Charlemagne was extremely difficult to hold together. Even before the death of its masterful creator, in 814, it was already showing signs of breaking up, and after that event the process of dissolution set in rapidly. It will not do to look upon this falling to pieces as caused entirely by the weakness of Charlemagne's successors. The trouble lay deeper, in the natural love of independence common to all the Germans, in the wide differences that had come to exist among Saxons, Lombards, Bavarians, Franks, and other peoples in the empire, and finally in the prevailing ill-advised principle of royal succession by which the territories making up the empire, like those composing the old Frankish kingdom, were regarded as personal property to be divided among the sovereign's sons, just as was the practice respecting private possessions. As a consequence of these things the generation following the death of Charlemagne was a period of much confusion in western Europe. The trouble first reached an acute stage in 817 when Emperor Louis the Pious, Charlemagne's son and successor, was constrained to make a division of the empire among his three sons, Lothair, Pepin, and Louis. The Emperor expressly stipulated that despite this arrangement there was to be still "one sole empire, and not three"; but it is obvious that the imperial unity was at least pretty seriously threatened, and when, in 823, Louis's second wife, Judith of Bavaria, gave birth to a son and immediately set up in his behalf an urgent demand for a share of the empire, civil war among the rival claimants could not be averted. In the struggle that followed the distracted Emperor completely lost his throne for a time (833). Thereafter he was ready to accept almost any arrangement that would enable him to live out his remaining days in peace. When he died, in 840, two of the sons, Louis the German and Judith's child, who came to be known as Charles the Bald, combined against their brother Lothair (Pepin had died in 838) with the purpose of wresting from him the imperial crown, which the father, shortly before his death, had bestowed upon him. At least they were determined that this mark of favor from the father should not give the older brother any superiority over them. In the summer of 841 the issue was put to the test in a great battle at Fontenay, a little distance east of Orleans, with the result that Lothair was badly defeated. In February of the following year Louis and Charles, knowing that Lothair was still far from regarding himself as conquered, bound themselves by oath at Strassburg, in the valley of the Rhine, to keep up their joint opposition until they should be entirely successful.