Enough has been said in a former chapter of the restoration of letters which took place under Charlemagne. If any work ever had fair promise of success, it was surely this, and yet in a certain sense it was a failure. The century that followed his decease was precisely the iron century which all historians have agreed to vilify, and it is undoubtedly true that in some respects the state of Europe under the Carlovingian monarchs was even worse than under their Merovingian predecessors. The dream of a restoration of the Roman Empire, which had been realised only so long as the European sceptre was grasped in the mighty hand of Charlemagne, fell to pieces after his death like a child’s house of cards. The fatal step taken by Louis the Debonnaire, of dividing his dominions among his sons during his lifetime, plunged the whole empire into a civil war, which resulted in his own deposition, and which did not cease on his death. The various subdivisions into which the empire then split were indeed reunited under Charles the Fat, but his cowardice and incapacity having rendered him contemptible to those great feudal vassals who were gradually assuming all the real power in the realm, he also was deposed, and the imperial dignity ceased to find a representative till it was revived under Otho the Great. For a century after the death of Charles, France was nominally governed by princes of the Carlovingian race, appointed or removed at the will of the dukes of France. On the death of Duke Hugh the Great, his son, Hugh Capet, contented himself for a time with the system adopted by his predecessors, but in 987 he assumed the royal title, the powers of which he had long exercised, and became the founder of the Capetian dynasty. During the progress of these events, the firmly-knit and centralised government of Charlemagne totally disappeared; the territories of his empire were divided first into three, then into seven kingdoms; and were finally dismembered into more than fifty feudal sovereignties. Florus, the deacon of Lyons, mentioned in a former chapter, in a poem entitled _Querela de divisione Imperii_, describes the disorders consequent on these changes with an eloquent pen. “A beautiful empire,” he says, “once flourished under a glorious crown. Then there was one prince and one people, and every town had judges and laws. The word of salvation was preached to nobles and peasants, and youth everywhere studied the Sacred Scriptures and the liberal arts.... Now, instead of a king, we see everywhere a kinglet, instead of an empire, its fragments. The bishops can no longer hold their synods, there are no assemblies, no laws; and if an embassy arrive, there is no court to receive it.”[123]