A Silver Denier of Charles the Bald, Struck at Reims
A denier of Charles the Bald from the mint at Reims, struck between 840 and 864: a temple on one face, a cross and the legend CAROLVS REX FR on the other. Coin like this is how the partition of 843 was announced to people who would never see a treaty.
At Verdun in August 843 the three surviving grandsons of Charlemagne divided the empire: Lothair took the imperial title and a long central strip from the North Sea to Italy, Louis the German the lands east of the Rhine, Charles the Bald the west. The middle kingdom broke up within a generation; the eastern and western portions did not, and the line between them is roughly where France and Germany would spend the next eleven centuries arguing. See the Treaty of Verdun and the Frankish partition of 843.
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