Under the powerful and administrative hand of Charlemagne, the roads being better kept up, and the rivers being made more navigable, commerce became safe and more general; the coasts were protected from piratical incursions; lighthouses were erected at dangerous points, to prevent shipwrecks; and treaties of commerce with foreign nations, including even the most distant, guaranteed the liberty and security of French traders abroad. Under the weak successors of this monarch, notwithstanding their many efforts, commerce was again subjected to all sorts of injustice and extortions, and all its safeguards were rapidly destroyed. The Moors in the south, and the Normans in the north, appeared to desire to destroy everything which came in their way, and already Marseilles, in 838, was taken and pillaged by the Greeks. The constant altercations between the sons of Louis le Débonnaire and their unfortunate father, their jealousies amongst themselves, and their fratricidal wars, increased the measure of public calamity, so that soon, overrun by foreign enemies and destroyed by her own sons, France became a vast field of disorder and desolation. The Church, which alone possessed some social influence, never ceased to use its authority in endeavouring to remedy this miserable state of things; but episcopal edicts, papal anathemas, and decrees of councils, had only a partial effect at this unhappy period. At any moment agricultural and commercial operations were liable to be interrupted, if not completely ruined, by the violence of a wild and rapacious soldiery; at every step the roads, often impassable, were intercepted by toll-bars for some due of a vexatious nature, besides being continually infested by bands of brigands, who carried off the merchandise and murdered those few merchants who were so bold as to attempt to continue their business. It was the Church, occupied as she was with the interests of civilisation, who again assisted commerce to emerge from the state of annihilation into which it had fallen; and the "Peace or Truce of God," established in 1041, endeavoured to stop at least the internal wars of feudalism, and it succeeded, at any rate for a time, in arresting these disorders. This was all that could be done at that period, and the Church accomplished it, by taking the high hand; and with as much unselfishness as energy and courage, she regulated society, which had been abandoned by the civil power from sheer impotence and want of administrative capability. [Illustration: Fig. 191.--Trade on the Seaports of the Levant.--After a Miniature in a Manuscript of the Travels of Marco Polo (Fifteenth Century), Library of the Arsenal of Paris.]