dly looked human, that they lived like beasts, that they
ate men's flesh and drank their blood. They rode on small active horses,
so that the heavy-armed cavalry of the Franks could not overtake them;
and if they ran away before their enemies, they used to stop from time
to time, and let fly their arrows backwards. From the Elbe to the very
south of Italy these barbarians filled Europe with bloodshed and with
terror.

The Northmen at length made themselves so much feared in France, that
King Charles III., who was called the Simple, gave up to them, in 911, a
part of his kingdom, which from them got the name of Normandy. There
they settled down to a very different sort of life from their old habits
of piracy and plunder, so that before long the Normans were ahead of all
the other inhabitants of France; and from Normandy, as I need hardly
say, it was that William the Conqueror and his warriors came to gain
possession of England.

The princes of Charles the Great's family, by their quarrels, broke up
his empire altogether; and nobody had anything like the power of an
emperor until Otho I., who became king of Germany in 936, and was
crowned emperor at Rome in 962.

CHAPTER VI.

STATE OF THE PAPACY.

A.D. 891-1046.

All this time the papacy was in a very sad condition. Popes were set up
and put down continually, and some of them were put to death by their
enemies. The body of one pope named Formosus, after it had been some
years in the grave, was taken up by order of one of his successors
(Stephen VI.), was dressed out in the full robes of office, and placed
in the papal chair; and then the dead pope was tried and condemned for
some offence against the laws of the Church. It was declared that the
clergy whom he had ordained were not to be reckoned as clergy; his
corpse was stripped of the papal robes; the fingers which he had been
accustomed to raise in blessing were cut off; and the body, after having
been dragged about the city, was thrown into the Tiber (A.D. 896).

Otho the Great, who has been mentioned as emperor, turned out a young
pope, John XII., who was charged with all sorts of bad conduct (A.D.
963); and that emperor's grandson, Otho III., put in two popes, one
after another (A.D. 996, 999). The second of these popes was a very
learned and clever Frenchman, named Gerbert, who as pope took the name
of Sylvester II. He had studied under the Arabs in Spain (for in some
kinds of learning the Arabs wer