When Louis died in 840, the seeds of dissension were widely scattered; and those of his House who came after him openly showed that they cared for nothing save personal ambition. Lothar, the eldest, was proclaimed Emperor, and obtained as his share of the dominions a large middle kingdom stretching from the mouth of the Rhine to Italy, and including the two capitals of Aachen and Rome. To the East, in what is now Germany, reigned his brother Louis, to the West, in France, Charles ‘the Bald’, the hated younger brother who had succeeded at the last in obtaining a substantial inheritance. [Sidenote: Oath of Strasbourg] This division is interesting because it shows two of the nationalities of Europe already emerging from the imperial melting-pot. When the brothers Louis and Charles met at Strasbourg in 842 to confirm an alliance they had formed against Lothar, Charles and his followers took the oath in German, Louis and his nobles in the Romance tongue of which modern French is the descendant. This they did that the armies on both sides might clearly understand how their leaders had bound themselves, and the Oath of Strasbourg remains to-day as evidence of this new growth of nationality that had already acquired distinct national tongues. The Partition of Verdun, signed shortly afterwards by all three brothers, acknowledged the division of the Empire into three parts, France on the West, Germany in the East, and between them the debatable kingdom of Lotharingia, that, dwindled during the Middle Ages and modern times into the province of Lorraine, has remained always a source of war and trouble. It would be wearisome to trace in detail the history of the years that followed the Partition of Verdun. One historian has described it as ‘a dizzy and unintelligible spectacle of monotonous confusion, a scene of unrestrained treachery, of insatiable and blind rapacity. No son is obedient or loyal to his father, no brother can trust his brother, no uncle spares his nephew.... There were rapid alterations in fortune, rapid changing of sides, there was universal distrust and universal reliance on falsehood or crime.’