East Francia

East Francia, the kingdom of the East Franks, was the eastern of the three kingdoms carved out of the Carolingian Empire in 843. Ruled by Carolingian kings until 911 and then by elected Franconian and Saxon rulers, it covered most of the German-speaking lands east of the Rhine. Over the following century it developed into the Kingdom of Germany, and with Otto I's imperial coronation in 962 it became the core of the Holy Roman Empire.

When the emperor Louis the Pious died on 20 June 840, his sons fought a three-year civil war over his inheritance. In August 843 they settled it with the Treaty of Verdun, drawing the borders largely along the Meuse, Scheldt, Saône and Rhône. Lothair I retained the middle kingdom along with the imperial title, Charles the Bald took West Francia, and Louis, later called "the German", received the east: Saxony, Bavaria, Alamannia, the March of Carinthia and part of Austrasia, together with Speyer, Worms and Mainz on the left bank of the Rhine.

Only about a third of East Francia lay in the old Frankish heartland of Austrasia. The rest was made up of lands added to the Frankish realm between the 5th and 8th centuries, among them the duchies of Alamannia, Bavaria, Saxony and Thuringia, along with border marches facing the Danes and the Slavs. The chronicler Regino of Prüm described its peoples as differing in descent, customs, language and law. The name "eastern Francia" first meant Franconia; Louis's court stretched it to the whole kingdom, perhaps to claim the prestige of Austrasia.

By the Treaty of Meerssen, Lotharingia was shared between East and West Francia. After Louis the German died in 876 his kingdom was split among his sons, but Charles the Fat briefly reunited all the Frankish lands before the nobles deposed him in 888. In the east they chose Arnulf of Carinthia as king. As royal power weakened, the dukes of Bavaria, Swabia, Franconia, Saxony and Lotharingia went from being royal appointees to being hereditary rulers, and kings faced repeated regional revolts. Arnulf's young son Louis the Child, crowned in 900, was the last Carolingian king in the east.

On Louis's death in 911 the Saxon, Franconian, Bavarian and Swabian nobles broke with the Carolingian line and on 10 November elected one of themselves, Conrad, Duke of Franconia, the first king in the east to be anointed. Conrad struggled against the other dukes, and on his deathbed he named his rival Henry of Saxony as the most capable successor. Henry, chosen in 919, subdued the other dukes and built up the institutions of royal government. By his death in 936 he had saved the kingship from the collapse then under way in West Francia.

East Frankish kings built their rituals afresh, since Louis the German had received none of the Carolingian regalia. Around 900 an early coronation order was written in which the people answered "Fiat, fiat!" when asked to accept their prince, the earliest known form of the ceremony later called the Recognition. Councils at Mainz in 888 and Tribur in 895 drew on West Frankish ideas of sacred kingship.

Henry's son Otto I inherited a strong kingdom. In August 955 he defeated the Hungarians at the Battle of Lechfeld, ending their major raids into western Europe. His coronation as emperor in Rome in 962 opened the era of the Holy Roman Empire. By the 12th century the historian Otto of Freising explained that the eastern kingdom of the Franks had come to be known as the kingdom of the Germans.

Our 900 map shows East Francia covering most of modern Germany, Austria and Switzerland and reaching into northern Italy and Slovenia, with West Francia to the west and the Hungarians, labelled Magyars on our maps, to the east. Our 800 map shows the undivided Carolingian Empire, and by 1000 the same lands form part of the Holy Roman Empire.