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OF THE KOMAN EMPIRE 289 den, Hildesheim, and Halberstadt, define, on either side of the Weser, the bounds of ancient Saxony ; these episcopal seats were the first schools and cities of that savage land ; and the religion and humanity of the children atoned, in some degree, for the massacre of the parents. Beyond the Elbe, the Slari, or Sclavonians, of similar manners and various denominations, ^i*"' overspread the modern dominions of Prussia, Poland, and Bo- hemia, and some transient marks of obedience have tempted the French historian to extend the empire to the Baltic and the Vistula. The conquest or conversion of those countries is of a more recent age ; but the first union of Bohemia with the Ger- [Bohemian manic body may be justly ascribed to the arms of Charlemagne, ad. 8o5-6]' V. He retaliated on the Avars, or Huns of Pannonia, the same Hungary calamities which they had inflicted on the nations. Their rings, the wooden fortifications which encircled their districts and villages, were broken down by the triple effort of a French army, that was poured into their country by land and water, through the Carpathian mountains and along the plain of the Danube. After a bloody conflict of eight years, the loss of some [ad. tss-tec] French generals was avenged by the slaughter of the most noble Huns ; the relics of the nation submitted ; the royal residence of the chagan was left desolate and unknown ; and the treasures, the rapine of two hundred and fifty years, enriched the vic- torious troops or decorated the churches of Italy and Gaul.^i" After the reduction of Pannonia, the empire of Charlemagne was bounded only by the conflux of the Danube with the Theiss and the Save ; the provinces of Istria, Liburnia, and Dalmatia were an easy, though unprofitable, accession ; and it was an effect of his moderation that he left the maritime cities under the real or nominal sovereignty of the Greeks. But these dis- tant possessions added more to the reputation than to the power of the Latin emperor ; nor did he risk any ecclesiastical founda- tions to reclaim the barbarians from their vagrant life and idol- "8 [It is interesting to observe on the map of Europe in the 8th and gth centuries that a strong serried array of Slavonic peoples reached from the Baltic to the Ionian and Aegean seas. At the end of the gth century the Magyars made a permanent breach in the line.] ii Quot prselia in eo gesta ! quantum sanguinis effusum sit ! Testatur vacua omni habitatione Pannonia, et locus in quo regia Cagani fuit ita desertus, ut ne vestigium quidem humanae habitationis appareat. Tota in hoc bello Hunnorum nobilitas periit, tota gloria decidit, omnis pecunia et congesti ex longo tempore thesauri direpti sunt. Eginhard, c. 13. [The .varic war strictly lasted six years, A.D. 791-6. Gibbon counts eight years (nine ?) by dating the outbreak of the war with the invasion of Friuli and Beneventum by the Avars in A.D. 788.] VOL. V. 19