After the first eighty years of its existence, the Frankish kingdom, which under three generations of warlike monarchs had continued to extend its borders so fast and so far, ceased suddenly to grow, and was given up for a century and a half to ruinous civil wars, as objectless as they were tedious and confused. In surrendering their primitive Teutonic freedom to their royal house, in return for the glory and aggrandisement which union under a single despotic hand gave to their hitherto weak and scattered tribes, the Franks had bartered away their future. As long as the house of Chlodovech were able and active, their subjects could console themselves for submitting to an autocrat by sharing in the power and plunder which a century of successful war brought in to them. But when the Merovings, though still retaining their despotic authority, grew weak and incapable, showing no trace of their ancestor’s qualities, save an inveterate tendency to treachery and fratricide, an evil time came upon the Frankish race. They paid for their early aggrandisement by being condemned to five generations of useless civil wars at home, and powerlessness abroad, while their hereditary monarchs sacrificed everything to their unending family feuds. Nothing more could be hoped for the Franks till they had rid themselves of the nightmare-incubus of this wicked house, whose repulsive annals are, on the whole, the most hopeless and depressing page in the history of Europe.[22] From generation to generation their story reeks with blood; there is nothing that can be compared to it for horror in the records of any nation on this side of the Mediterranean. We have to search the histories of the courts of Mohammedan Asia to discover a parallel. The Franks only found salvation in the growth of checks on the royal power by the development of the great provincial governors, and by the final deposition of the Merovings in favour of the great house of the descendants of St. Arnulf, the Mayors of the Palace, whose strong hand at last stayed the fratricidal wars of the seventh century. And even when the new dynasty had mounted the throne, the Frankish realm showed fatal signs of the demoralisation it had suffered under the old royal house. The tendency of the race to acquiesce in the unwise habit of heritage-partition, and the unhappy grudge between the eastern and the western Franks, were direct legacies of the Merovings. Footnote 22: In spite of the wickedness of the house of the Merovings, the Franks were very loyal, even in the days of the decay of the royal race. We find their chroniclers repeatedly contrasting the fidelity of the Franks with the fickleness of their Visigothic neighbours, who, having lost their ancient royal house, were continually making and unmaking sovereigns from among the ranks of their counts and dukes.