Ludwig the Younger promptly set to work to rid his territory of the Northern pirates. The latter had established themselves at the mouth of the Schelde, where they had constructed strong bulwarks, behind which they were wont to place their ships in shelter while they perpetrated their ravages upon the country. Godefrid, king of the Danes, was even then making his way back to his ships, laden with rich spoils from a raid inland. Ludwig overtook the robber horde on the march, and inflicted such a severe defeat upon them that five thousand of the enemy were left on the field and the remainder took to flight.
As the king was returning from the scene of his victory he was met by tidings of disaster which plunged him into profound grief. A Saxon levy (Heerbann) had succumbed to a surprise of the Northmen. The latter had made an attack on the Elbe district, not far from Hamburg. A Saxon detachment had hastened thither, but had been dispersed by an unexpectedly high tide and so hemmed in between the arms of the river that it fell a helpless victim to the Northmen, who assailed it on all sides from their ships. Bruno, the commander and the king’s brother-in-law, was slain, together with many bishops and counts, and many nobles were carried into captivity.
From this time forward the king, once so energetic, gradually succumbed to the malady to which his brother Carloman had fallen a victim. For two years he was obliged to watch idly the miseries of his country from his palace, confined to his couch by paralysis and incapable of leading an army. He lived on till the year 882. He had married Liutgard, a daughter of Liudolf, count of Saxony, from whom the royal house of Saxony claims descent. His son, whom he had destined to succeed him, fell from a window in Ratisbon in the year 879 and broke his neck. An illegitimate son, Hugo by name, had already fallen in the battle against the Northmen on the Schelde.
RAVAGES OF THE NORTHMEN
Ludwig the Younger
[880-882 A.D.]
During the two years in which Ludwig the Younger was slowly pining away the kingdom became a scene of woe indeed. Charles the Fat, the third son of Ludwig the German, might have been expected to assume the government of the kingdom; but, unlike his energetic brothers, he was of feeble intellect, and had suffered from epilepsy from his youth up. As long as his brother was alive he concerned himself solely with the affairs of Swabia and Italy, so that for two years Germany was practically without a ruler. The state of the kingdom answered to this defect. The Northmen came back to the Schelde and the mouth of the Rhine, and thence made predatory excursions, directed indeed for the most part against the Austrasian kingdom, but occasionally touching upon German territory. They soon afterwards sailed up the Waal with a large fleet, got as far as Xanten, and proceeded to establish themselves at Nimeguen, the imperial seat of Charlemagne. This roused the sick king Ludwig to hasten with an army to the Rhine; but, unable to expel the invaders by force of arms, he was obliged to grant them permission to withdraw unmolested; and in their retreat they set fire to the castle of Charlemagne. Only a portion of the Norse host left for the winter, another portion overran the coasts of the kingdom of the West Franks and spread hideous devastation through the country. With the spring of 881 the swarms of Northmen again made their appearance. This time their depredations were confined in the main to the districts about the Schelde and Somme. And now once again the sick king of Germany appeared on the scene with a detachment of his army, and arranged a meeting with Louis, the king of the West Franks, to take counsel with him for combined defence against the Northmen, for the unhappy man was incapable of taking the command of his army in the field. The sight of the horrors perpetrated by the Northmen so inflamed the West Frank warriors and their youthful king that they flung themselves upon the robber hordes and gained a brilliant victory at Saucourt on the Somme in 881. Joy at this fortunate event inspired a contemporary writer, a cleric without doubt, with the famous Ludwigslied, a noble monument of old German poetry. The Northmen then left the territory of the West Franks, but only to sail up the Meuse immediately and continue their ravages on East Frankish soil, where the king’s illness gave them little cause for fear. At Elsloo, not far from Maestricht, in the vicinity of a royal palace, they constructed a great camp to protect their ships, and thence undertook raids on the cities of the Rhine, as yet untrodden ground to them, under the leadership of their chieftain kings (heerkönige) Godefrid and Siegfrid. Cologne and Bonn were burned, Aachen laid waste, the palace of Charlemagne there set on fire, and the famous Marienkirche turned into a stable; the abbeys of Malmedy, Stablo, and Prüm then fell into their hands and were stripped of all their treasures. Wherever the Northmen came they set the houses alight and slaughtered the inhabitants. The country-folk often gathered together in troops for self-defence, but they were generally surrounded by the practised Northmen warriors, who regaled themselves with the torments in which their victims perished. Smitten with the sight of so much misery, the sick king sent an army to the Maas, but the news of his death overtook it and it soon turned homewards.
[882-884 A.D.]
In the following year, 882, the Northmen laid waste the district along the Moselle. The German king whom they had dreaded was no longer alive, and they therefore gave themselves up without concern to the work of plunder. In a little while the whole region between the Maas, Moselle, and Rhine was a scene of wreck and blackened ruins; the cities of Trèves and Metz were destroyed by fire. The archbishop of Trèves and the bishop of Metz, together with a few of the neighbouring nobles, collected a small army; but they were defeated, and the bishop of Metz himself fell in the battle. The unhappy inhabitants of the country turned in despair to Louis, the young king of the West Franks and the victor of Saucourt, and declared themselves willing to elect him their king. This offer he declined by a reference to existing treaties, but moved with compassion he sent an army to expel the Normans. Never before had Germany fallen upon such evil days.
At the time of Ludwig’s death Charles the Fat, the heir to his kingdom, was in Italy, where he had spent most of his time during the period of measureless misery which had laid his country waste. Pope John VIII, under other circumstances no friend to the German branch of the Carlovingians, had summoned him thither because he was the only prince who, as wearer of the imperial crown, could guarantee at least the possibility of protection to the church. After protracted negotiations over the conditions upon which he was to receive the crown—dealing in the main with the long-claimed papal territory and definite sovereign rights therein—Charles the Fat had been crowned emperor at Rome in February, 881. But the pope, who was so harassed by his quarrelsome nobles and by the close neighbourhood of the Saracens that his life was hardly safe, found himself in no better plight than before; for in spite of all his urgent appeals Charles the Fat stayed in upper Italy and made no preparations for coming to Rome. Pope John VIII met his end soon afterwards, being assassinated at Rome in the year 882.d