The kingdom of Arles or Burgundy had fallen into evil days. During the long reigns of Conrad the Pacific (937–993) and Rudolf III. (993–1032) all power had fallen into the hands of the territorial magnates, and now the threatened extinction of the royal house seemed likely to plunge the Arelate into worse confusion. Rudolf III. was old and childless, and had long sought to make arrangements to prevent the dissolution of his kingdom with his death. In 1007 he had concluded with Henry II., his nephew, an agreement by which Burgundy was to fall on his death to the German monarch, but the Burgundian nobles had more than once forced him to renounce his treaty. An increasing sense of his powerlessness drew Rudolf, who was Gisela’s uncle, more closely to Conrad II. He hurried to Rome to be present at his coronation, and he trusted entirely to him for protection against his turbulent nobility. The contract of succession was renewed, and on Rudolf’s death, in 1032, Conrad entered into possession of the Arelate. Count Odo of Champagne set himself up as a rival and national king, but the German portions of the Arelate favoured Conrad from the beginning. In 1033 he was chosen king, and crowned at Ueberlingen, near Constance; and in 1034 Odo was forced into submission, while Conrad triumphantly wore his crown at Geneva and received the homage of the lords of Burgundy. Henceforward the kingdom of Arles was indissolubly united with the Empire. Despite the small amount of power which even the strongest Emperors could exercise in the Arelate, the acquisition was one of no small importance. The Arelate was for the most part a Romance land, and its union with the Empire made the Empire less German, and, for some generations at least, prevented the natural tendency to union between France and the Burgundian lands from being carried out. Moreover, the acquisition of the Arelate, by virtue of a contract of succession, increased the already strong tendency towards hereditary monarchy in Germany and Italy. Again, Burgundy was the chief home of the Cluniacs, and one very important consequence of its absorption by Conrad was a gradual increase of Cluniac influence all over the Empire. And most of all, the new-won kingdom was useful to the Emperors as acting as a sort of buffer-state to protect Italy from French interference. The attempt of William of Poitou had taught Conrad the necessity of thus guarding the Italian frontier. For the next few generations the acquisition of the Arelate made such projects more difficult. Supplementing the final adhesion of Lotharingia to the Eastern Kingdom, the lapse of the Arelate completed the absorption of the ‘Middle Kingdom’ in the German Empire. Of the threefold partition of Europe by the Treaty of Verdun in 843, only the ancient dominions of Charles the Bald—France, in the narrower sense—were outside the powers of the Emperor. Henceforth Conrad ruled not only all the lands that had