marked it out for the rank of a local capital, and, through the way in which it used its position, it grew into the capital of a kingdom. But it did not, like London, simply grow into the capital of a kingdom already existing. The city created first the county, and then the kingdom, of which it was successively the head. Modern France, as distinguished both from Roman Gaul and from the Western Kingdom of the Karlings, grew out of this County of Paris; and of the County of Paris the city was not merely the centre, but the life and soul. The position of Paris in the earliest times is best marked, as in the case of all Gaulish cities, by its place in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. It was a city, not of the first, but of the second rank; the seat of a Bishop, but not the seat of a Metropolitan.[43] Lutetia Parisiorum held the usual rank of one of those head towns of Gaulish tribes which grew into Roman cities. But it never became the centre of one of the great ecclesiastical and civil divisions; it never reached the rank of Lyons, Narbonne, Vienne, or Trier. Twice before the ninth century, the discerning eye, first of a Roman and then of a Frankish master, seemed to mark out the city of the Seine for greater things. It was the beloved home of Julian; it was the city which Hlodwig at once fixed upon for the seat of his new dominion. But the greatness of Paris, as the earliest settled seat of the Frankish power, was not doomed to be lasting. Under the descendants of Hlodwig Paris remained a seat of royalty; but, among the fluctuations of the Merovingian kingdoms, it was only one seat of royalty among several. It was the peer of Soissons, Orleans, and Metz--all of them places which thus, in the new state of things, assumed a higher importance than had belonged to them in Roman times. But, as the Austrasian House of the Karlings grew, first as Mayors, and then as Kings, to the lordship of the whole Frankish realm, the importance of the cities of Western Gaul necessarily lessened. Paris reached its utmost point of insignificance in the days of Charles the Great, whom French legends have pictured as a French King, reigning in Paris as his royal city. Whatever importance it had, it seems to have derived from its neighbourhood to the revered sanctuary of St. Denis. By a strange accident, the first King of the new house--the house with which Paris was to wage a war of races and languages--died either in the city itself, or in the precinct of the great monastery beyond its walls. Pippin, returning from a successful campaign in Aquitaine, fell sick at Saintes; from thence he was carried to Tours to implore the help of Saint Martin, and thence to Paris to implore the help of Saint Denis. He died at Paris, and was buried in the great minster which became the burial-place of the next and rival line of kings.[44] But Paris was neither the crowning-place nor the dwelling-place of his son, nor was it the object of any special attention during his long reign.