843 - Partition of Verdun
As an integral part of the Frankish empire, the land under Charles and his immediate successors was divided into "landschafts" and "gaus," ruled over by dukes and counts, by the side of whom the church also asserted her territorial rights. Hence sprang the dukedom of Brabant, the countships of Flanders, Holland, Guelderland, and the bishopric of Utrecht; and these, under the later Carolines, were independent in all but the name. Ecclesiastically the northern portion of the Netherlands, with South Holland and part of Zealand, was under the bishop of Utrecht; while the eastern districts were under the Saxon bishops of Munster and Osnabruck, and the southern parts under the Frankish bishops of Cologne, Liege, and Doornick.
The original dukedoms were subdivided politically into countships, and geographically into gaus; each gau had a chief town, girt with a wall, wherein count and judges administered justice; such towns were also market-places. These districts were again subdivided into marks or villages, each with its headman, who acted as judge in lesser and local cases. These gaus were Frisian in the north, Saxon in the middle (about Drenthe, Ac), and Frankish in the south.
In the great partition of Verdun (843), Lothar, eldest son of Louis the Pious, became lord of North Brabant (as it is now called), Guelderland, Limburg, and all modern Belgium; Charles the Bald got Flanders and part of Zealand, while Louis the German had whatever lay on the right bank of the Rhine: this district (called Lotharingia in the days of his son Lothar II) thus became a borderland between Gaul and Germany. When Lothar II. died without heirs in 869, his uncle Charles the Bald got all the northern Netherlands, with Friesland; but the Mersen agreement (870) redistributed these lands, — to Louis the German the districts south of the present Zuyder Zee, including Utrecht and the Veluwe; to Charles the Bald, Holland, Zealand, and modern Belgium.
Eventually in 879 Louis, son of Louis the German, got these districts. In 912 they accepted Charles the Simple of France as overlord; Henry I brought them again under German lordship; afterwards Otto the Great granted thorn as a fief to his brother Bruno, archbishop of Cologne, who, dividing the land into Upper and Lower Lotharingia, set Gottfried, count of Verdun, over the latter as duke, and himself took the title of archduke. Thus, during this period, the Netherlands from 843 to 869 were a part of Lotharingia (as it came to be called); from 869 to 870 they were under French lordship, from 870 to 879 partly French partly German from 879 to 912 altogether German, from 912 to 919 French again, and finally after 924 German.
Throughout this time the country was swamp below and woodland above; and though much forest was cleared. from time to time, it was still a difficult tangle, with little communication except down the rivers and by the old Roman roads. Yet, backward as they were, the Netherlands were rich enough to attract the Northmen, who ravaged the shores and river sides, and carried with them southward many a willing Saxon and Frisian warrior.
Under Louis the Pious they got firm footing on the coast, and received the district from Walcheren up to the Weser as a group of fiefs under the emperors; they even took and sacked Utrecht. In 873 Rolf, founder of Normandy, seized Walcheren; in 880 the Northmen took Nimeguon, and spread up the left bank of the Rhine as far as Cologne; in the chapel of the Great Charles at Aix they stabled horses and held further revel, till bribed to withdraw by Charles the Fat.
Their great leader Siegfried had the emperor's daughter to wife, with lands in Friesland; he was willing to become a Christian, though this put "no stop to his demands; as the lands granted him hitherto produced no wine," he demanded also Rhine towns and districts for the sake of their vintages. His father-in-law, however, sent instead men to murder him. and, this being done, the lordship of the Northmen in the Netherlands came to an end.
