The Rhine, its valley and history . rg and Mainz,the other Cologne and Aachen. Somewhat later thefrontier was advanced, as we have already seen,eastward of the Rhine, so as to include the fertilevalleys of the Neckar and of the Lower Main, and tothis day the trenched Pfahlgraben remains to attestthe faci that, except for a short preliminary period,the Rhine was the Roman frontier only from Colognedownward. In the Netherlands, moreover, the boun-dary was marked, not by the existing Waal or Lekestuaries, but by the Old Rhine, the sorry ditch whichto-day traverses Utrecht and Leyden. When the Rom
The Rhine, its valley and history . rg and Mainz,the other Cologne and Aachen. Somewhat later thefrontier was advanced, as we have already seen,eastward of the Rhine, so as to include the fertilevalleys of the Neckar and of the Lower Main, and tothis day the trenched Pfahlgraben remains to attestthe faci that, except for a short preliminary period,the Rhine was the Roman frontier only from Colognedownward. In the Netherlands, moreover, the boun-dary was marked, not by the existing Waal or Lekestuaries, but by the Old Rhine, the sorry ditch whichto-day traverses Utrecht and Leyden. When the Roman organization broke down, andthe Frankish or German dominion spread duringseveral centuries from the border of Bohemia to theborder of Brittany, it must have appeared that so farfrom being a national frontier, the Rhine and theRhine basin were destined to be the metropolitan fea-tures of a united Northern Europe, comprising thewhole of the unbroken plain which extends from thePyrenees by the oceanic shores to the Baltic. Carl der. The RhineGrosse or Charlemagne, for he is the heroic founderalike of Germany and France, made his palaces atAachen and Ingelheim, neither of them far removedfrom the left bank of the Rhine. His wars, however,were on distant rivers, on the Weser, the Danube andthe Ebro. After the death of Charlemagne there was no oneleft who could bend the bow of Ulysses. By a seriesof family arrangements and rearrangements extendingover the greater part of a century, the Frankish realmwas subdivided for purposes of rule among the mem-bers of the Carling family. But the ownership of theRhine land appears in each division to have markeda certain primacy. By the Treaty of Verdun in theyear 843 Francia in the wide sense was severed intothree belts. The west was called Carolingia, for it wasruled by a King Charles. It spread from the Spanishslope of the Pyrenees to the Flemish Scheldt withinthe modern Belgium, but did not include the basinof the Rhone. The east was the G
Size: 1401px × 1783px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookpublisherlondo, bookyear1908
