The Carlovingian princes offered but a feeble resistance to these terrible invasions. The Normans themselves were surprised at the supineness of their victims. “The country is good,” said Ragnar Lodbrog to the Danish monarch, after returning from the sack of Paris, “but the people are tremblers. The dead there have more courage than the living, for the only resistance I met with was from an old man named Germanus, who had been dead many years, and whose house I entered.” He spoke of the Church of St. Germain d’Auxerre, where his sacrilegious marauders had been miraculously put to flight. In the reign of Charles the Bald the only opposition to the invaders was offered by Robert the Strong, who in reward of his exertions received the dukedom of France, by which name was then designated the country lying between the Seine and the Loire. As to the king himself he was content to buy off the sea-king Hasting by the payment of forty thousand livres of silver, promising either to give up as prisoners, or to ransom at a fixed sum, every Frenchman who had escaped from the Normans’ hands, and to pay a composition for every Norman who should be slain; a stipulation which probably exceeds in infamy any other ever agreed upon by a Christian prince. A few years later the cowardice exhibited by Charles the Fat, at the second siege of Paris, moved his indignant subjects to deprive him of the crown; an heroic defence was indeed offered by Eudes, son of Robert the Strong, but his chief supporters were three priests, Gauzlin, Bishop of Paris, his nephew Ebbo, and Anchesius, abbot of St. Germain-des-Pres. In 912, the devastations committed by Rollo and his followers obliged Charles the Simple to make peace with them, on terms which made over to the Norman chieftain the feudal sovereignty of Neustria. The wild sea-king received baptism, and became the first duke of Normandy but though a stop was thus put to the attacks on Paris and the northern coast, the Northmen continued their ravages in the provinces south of the Loire.