Library › Latin: Law › Acta Conventus apud Marsnam II
This text is a second record of a meeting of the Carolingian brothers Lothar I, Louis the German and Charles the Bald at Meerssen (Marsna), again in the form of three announcements to their followers, one by each ruler. Lothar’s speech, given here, explains that they had come together to consider with their followers the will of God, the state of the Church and kingdom and the common good, and that they are now united with one another and with their men. He admits frankly that since God had put the kingdom into their hands after their father’s death they had not always been in concord as true brotherhood required, and that great harm had followed.
The text is short, but it preserves the spoken style of the public declarations by which the Carolingian kings announced their agreements to the assembled nobility. Its admission of past discord after the death of Louis the Pious and its insistence on unity within and beyond the borders, ‘per marcas nostras’, reflect the anxieties of the period after the Treaty of Verdun. Read with the companion Meerssen text, it documents the brothers’ attempts at joint rule.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Corpus Corporum, the Latin text repository of the University of Zurich (edition: Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 138, Parisiis 1853), reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-SA). Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.