36. The great interest of the treaty of Verdun lies in the tolerably definite appearance of a western and an eastern Frankish kingdom, one of which was to become France and the other Germany. In the kingdom of Charles the Bald the dialects spoken by the majority of the people were derived directly from the spoken Latin, and in time developed into Provençal and French. In the kingdom of Louis the German, on the other hand, both people and language were German. The narrow strip of country between these regions, which fell to Lothaire, came to be called _Lotharii regnum_, or kingdom of Lothaire.[53] This name was perverted in time into Lotharingia and, later, into Lorraine. It is interesting to note that this territory has formed a part of the debatable middle ground over which the French and Germans have struggled so obstinately down to our own day. [Sidenote: The Strasburg oaths.] We have a curious and important evidence of the difference of language just referred to, in the so-called Strasburg oaths (842). Just before the settlement at Verdun, the younger brothers had found it advisable to pledge themselves, in an especially solemn and public manner, to support one another against the pretensions of Lothaire. First, each of the two brothers addressed his soldiers in their own language, absolving them from their allegiance to him should he desert his brother. Louis then took the oath in what the chronicle calls the _lingua romana_, so that his brother's soldiers might understand him, and Charles repeated his oath in the _lingua teudisca_ for the benefit of Louis' soldiers.[54] Fortunately the texts of both of these oaths have been preserved. They are exceedingly interesting and important as furnishing our earliest examples, except some lists of words, of the language spoken by the common people, which was only just beginning to be written. Probably German was very rarely written before this time, as all who could write at all wrote in Latin. The same is true of the old Romance tongue (from which modern French developed), which had already drifted far from the Latin. [Illustration: Map of Treaty of Mersen] [Sidenote: New divisions of the empire corresponding to France, Germany, and Italy.] 37. When Lothaire died (855) he left Italy and the middle kingdom to his three sons. By 870 two of these had died, and their uncles, Charles the Bald and Louis the German, did not hesitate to appropriate the middle kingdom and divide it between them by the treaty of Mersen. Italy was left to Lothaire's only surviving son, together with the imperial crown, which was to mean nothing, however, for a hundred years to come. The result was that, as early as 870, western Europe was divided into three great districts which corresponded with startling exactness to three important states of modern Europe, i.e., France, Germany, and Italy. [Sidenote: The empire temporarily reunited under Charles the Fat.]