it fell from incompetent hands. When Clovis made gifts of large
estates to reward, or to purchase, followers, Roman or Gallic, he laid
the foundations of a system which would prove fatal to his successors.
With these estates came titles and authority, multiplying and growing
with each succeeding reign. A count, who was the chief officer of a
county, was in fact the sovereign of a small state, and so on a smaller
scale were a duke or a marquis. And it was to these smaller bodies
that the power naturally gravitated as it vanished from the throne.

This meant disintegration into helpless fragments, and this meant the
end of a Frankish kingdom, unless some power should arise great enough
to compel the crumbling state to become homogeneous.

It was a Romanized-Frankish family dwelling in the Valley of the Rhine
which saved the kingdom of Clovis from this fate. France had already
fallen apart into an eastern and a western kingdom, known respectively
as _Austrasia_ and _Neustria_. A certain Duke of Austrasia, known as
Pepin the Elder, was the forerunner of the Carlovingian line of kings.
With him the centralizing force began to work with saving power. The
one end kept in view was the restoration of the power of kingship--the
strengthening of the power at the centre. To this end, from generation
to generation, these early Pepins steadily moved. In 687 Pepin the
Younger, grandson of the Elder, by a victory at Testry over Neustria,
brought together these two sundered divisions under himself, with the
new title Duke of the Franks. The Pepins had already succeeded in
making the office of Maire du Palais hereditary in their family, and in
the year A.D. 732, Charles, son and successor of Pepin the Younger,
made himself forever the hero not of France alone, but of Christendom,
by driving the Saracen invasion back over the Pyrenees, and was in turn
succeeded by his son, Pepin the Short, who seized the Merovingian crown