Treaty of Verdun

The Treaty of Verdun, concluded on 10 August 843 at Verdun in the Frankish kingdom, ended a three-year civil war among the surviving grandsons of Charlemagne and divided the Carolingian Empire into three separate kingdoms. The treaty was agreed among Charlemagne's grandsons Lothair I, who kept the imperial title along with a long, unwieldy central strip of territory later called Middle Francia running from the Low Countries to Italy; Louis the German, who received the eastern lands that became East Francia; and Charles the Bald, who took the western lands of West Francia. West Francia and East Francia would go on, over the following centuries, to form the core of the kingdoms of France and Germany respectively, while Middle Francia's awkward, indefensible shape made it the object of repeated later partition and conquest, and the long-running rivalry over its territory, particularly Lotharingia and Alsace-Lorraine, shaped Franco-German conflict for more than a thousand years afterward. As the first of several partitions that steadily eroded the unity Charlemagne had achieved, the Treaty of Verdun is widely regarded by historians as a foundational moment in the political map of Western Europe, marking the point at which the single Carolingian empire began to give way to the separate national kingdoms that followed it.