Yale historian Paul Freedman traces the collapse of Charlemagne's empire in this lecture from HIST 210, The Early Middle Ages, 284-1000. He covers the end of Charlemagne's rule, the structural problems built into the empire, and the troubled reign of Louis the Pious, whose sons fought over the succession. The lecture explains how Viking raids compounded internal weaknesses, and how officials and nobles turned royal offices and grants into hereditary property once central authority weakened. Freedman gives extended attention to the Treaty of Verdun of 843, which split the empire into three kingdoms whose borders anticipated later France, Germany, and the lands between them. The lecture closes by assessing why an empire that seemed so dominant under Charlemagne dissolved so quickly under his successors, and what that dissolution meant for the political map of medieval Europe.