CHAPTER XI THE FRANKISH STATE AND CHARLEMAGNE We now turn our attention once more to the Frankish kingdoms, which under the lead of Charles M artel had Franks the brought the westward drive of the Arabs to a chief power halt, and which were to be the center of interest Christian in the West for the next century or so. Indeed, West except for the Anglo-Saxons and their adver- saries in the British Isles and the Lombards and their rivals in the Italian peninsula, the Franks included within their borders practically all that was left of Western Christendom. Christian territory in the West had shrunk to a scanty area limited on the northeast by heathen hordes and on the south by the waves of Mohammedan conquest. Moreover, this scanty area was in a rude, inland, and agricultural con- dition, with no nourishing industries, and with foreign trade either cut off or monopolized by the Scandinavians, who controlled the seas to the north, and by the Saracens and Byzantines, who held the Mediterranean and the routes to the East. It will be remembered that sometimes the Franks were all united under one ruler, but that usually they had two The worth- or three kings in Austrasia, Neustria, and Bur- McVov?n r . gundy. After the death of Dagobert, who from gian kings 629 to 639 had ruled the entire Frankish terri- tory, the kings were "good-for-nothings," mere boys who wrecked their lives by early debaucheries in the royal resi- dences, which they seldom quitted, and who died before they were half through their twenties, leaving their weak children to replicate their empty reigns. We need not be surprised that these gilded youths remained for the most part shut up in their palaces, since he who was not strenuous enough to ride a horse, and who insisted on lolling at his
