no ruler was ever again able to do as Charles the Fat had briefly done, and rule the full empire assembled by Pippin and Charlemagne. Undone by their own family rivalries, the challenges of holding together such a vast and culturally diverse collection of territories and peoples, and the depredations of the Northmen (as well as other enemies on their eastern frontiers, including the Magyar tribal groups who had started to launch massive raids into imperial territory from what is now Hungary), the Carolingians drifted, generation by generation, from preeminence to irrelevance. Behind them they
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