then after Robert's death the following year of his son-in-law Raoul of Burgundy. At this stage France was in a condition not greatly dissimilar from that in which Germany was so often to find itself after the reign of Henry III. Great lordships, some very temporary, were in the process of creation and consolidation; emerging as they did from a fusion of royal grant, usurpation, and coercion, each stimulated by fear of the equivalent process on the lands of a neighbouring lord, it was natural for their lords to exploit the struggles between Capetian and Robertian and even to foment them, for a prospective monarch was likely to be more generous than an incumbent one. Once such polarization of interests was created only two things were likely to bring it to an end; the extinction of one or other of the contestant families, or the development of the great lordships to a point at which they need no longer fear or encourage royal action.

Although Count Odo's descendants and relatives did not again occupy the throne between 936 and 987, there was always the possibility that they would. The reigns of the Carolingian Louis IV ( 936-54), Lothar ( 954-86), and Louis V ( 986-7) were dominated by the threat which Robert's son, Hugh the Great, and then his grandson, Hugh Capet, could offer only too readily. In this climate the kings could do little but look on as the great magnates usurped offices, rights, and lands, attempted to gain control of the great churches as Herbert of Vermandois did at Rheims on behalf of his son, and murdered their rivals without fear of retribution. External circumstances provided little cheer; Magyar and Saracen attacks came and went too rapidly for the kings to present themselves as great war-leaders in the way that the Ottonian kings did. At the same time the very strength of the German monarchy made uninviting the prospect of binding men to the crown through the attempted recovery of Lotharingia which had been drawn into the German ambit. When this was tried during one of the few periods of German weakness it provoked the interests of great families to such a degree as to move them to the direct support of the Robertian alternative; the interests of Archbishop Adalbero of Rheims' relatives in

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