Charlemagne's empire did not long outlast him. His son Louis the During Charlemagne's time, fame of the great Frankish emperor spread to Arabia, from whence the powerful caliph Harun al-Rashid sent him an unusual gift in 802: an elephant called Abu al-Abbas. The king and the beast soon became inseparable, and wherever Charlemagne went on his conquests, Abu went as well. Abu died in 810, while his master was on a campaign against the Danes in northern Europe. Abu's ivory tusks were made into chess pieces.
Pious succeeded him in 814, but Louis was no Charlemagne, and his rule was marked by quarrels. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 arranged for the division of the empire into three parts, one for each of Louis's sons.
One son received an area that came to be known as the West Frankish Empire, later to become the nation of France. A second son received what was dubbed the East Frankish Empire, which would unify under the name Germany more than a thousand years later. In between was the "Middle Kingdom," the inheritance of the other son. This comprised a strip running from what is now Holland all the way down to Italy.
Through inheritance, the "Middle Kingdom" would soon be dissolved into a patchwork of tiny principalities. The western and eastern empires, by contrast, lasted a bit longer. Descendants of Charlemagne ruled France until 887, and off and on for exactly 100 more years; however, the real power rested in the hands of various feudal lords. Much the same happened in the East Frankish Empire, where in 911 the nobility chose their own king from outside the Carolin-gian line of succession.
World History
