swoop of an eagle. The Lombard counts were dispossessed all over north Italy, and Franks put in their place. The duchy of Benevento remained independent till 786, when Aregise, its duke, fled to Salerno before the arms of Charlemagne, and was reduced to pay an annual tribute. On the death of Aregise in 788, his successor, Grimoald, found himself in presence of a formidable Greek invasion, headed by Adalgise, the son of the last Lombard king of Italy. The Greeks were routed with severe loss, and from that time forward, Italy, the tribe of Levi among modern nations, renounced all hopes of independent national sovereignty, and remained faithful to the pope and the emperor, both alike its glory and its ruin.
The earlier years of the reign of Charlemagne are remarkable for rapid change in the scene and direction of his campaigns. Breaching the firm enceinte of barbarism which hemmed him in, now in this direction, now in that, each isolated conquest worked like a charged mine among the yet unthreatened portions of the fabric. From Aquitaine he turns on Saxony, from Saxony on the Lombards, thence to Saxony again, and then he pours through the two great rifts of the Pyrenees, at their eastern and western extremity, a stream of Franks, of Bavarians, Lombards, Gascons, and Provençals, converging on Saragossa to receive from the local governor his proffered submission. Disappointed of this, the Franks laid siege to Saragossa, received the submission of the country between the Pyrenees and the Ebro, and withdrew in triumph by the gorge of Roncevaux. Charlemagne had already gained the crest of the pass, when a host of Gascons, emerging from the dense forests which covered the mountain slopes, threw themselves on the rear-guard, rent it from the main body, and hurling it in confusion into the valley of Pampeluna, destroyed it to a man. Among the names of those who fell, Eginhard has preserved for us that of "Roland, prefect of the march of Bretagne." The winded horn and the terrible sword of the deserted hero are claimed by poetry; but the silence of the mountain valley, so suddenly broken and so rapidly restored, stands out as a poetic feature, even in the dry pages of the secretary of Charlemagne.
The Lombard and Spanish campaigns interrupt, parenthetically, the one long Saxon war which lasted nearly through the reign. Spring after spring, the Frankish armies flooded the Saxon marches, leaving each autumn as they retired a fort and garrison in the fastnesses of the country. Sometimes the Frankish foragers returning to their fort at nightfall, would be joined by pretended comrades, who avenged at midnight the plunder of the day. At other times a spirit of submission would seize the nation, and the camp of Charlemagne, fixed at the sources of the Lippe, would be crowded by myriads of Saxons, recognizing, perhaps, in the brookside the seats of their early pagan worship, and pressing to be baptized in token of subjection, or to secure the tunics of fair white linen they received after the ceremony. In 778 the nation broke out again, and from Deutz to Coblentz, the Austrasian dwellers on the left bank of the Rhine saw the blaze of villages, farms, and churches, advancing fast and far along the right. A Frankish force crossed the Rhine, defeated the Saxons at the ford of the Adern, and pushing across the Weser and Ocker to the Elbe, discovered in the darkness of the East, the Wends, the northern link in that great chain of Slavonic nations, which stretched from the Baltic to the Gulf of Venice. The episcopal organization which Saxony now received appears to have kept it in order for four years; but in 782, the heavy defeat of the Franks at Sonnethal, though cruelly revenged by the decapitation of 4500 Saxons in one day, inaugurated a struggle more severely contested than any previous. Charles sought and found the Saxons on the Teutberg, near Dethmold; they offered a sullen resistance; the carnage was terrific; and he retired, baffled, to Paderborn. Reinforced from France, he again attacked them; this time the defeat was total; the merciless army of Charlemagne burst over Saxony from the Rhine to the Elbe; the roads echoed with the tramping of captive men and cattle, setting steadily to the West; the king established his family at Ehresberg for the winter, scattered his army in flying columns, and directed in person a systematic slaughter of the Saxons in their homes. This tremendous and penetrating warfare met with complete success. Witikind, the great Saxon leader, accepted the offers of Charlemagne, and was baptized at the royal villa of Attignisur-Aisne. The happy news was sent in triumph to Offa, the Anglo-Saxon; and the pope crowned with masses the missionary prowess of the sword. Baptism had now in fact assumed a new meaning; it was not merely the outward sign of christianity; it was the shibboleth of civilization. The baptism of Witikind was more significant than his execution could have been, for it implied not merely his defeat, but his adoption of the ideas of his victor. The capitulary of 785 seconded the example of the Saxon leader. It punished with death the refusal to be baptized, the burning of the dead, and the non-observance of Lent; an inquisitorial enactment of civilized customs which betrays the terrors of a christian régime of conquest in those early days.
These dark and relentless years possibly point to the influence of the beautiful Fastrada, whom Charlemagne had married after the death of Hildegarde in 783, and whose cruelty now raised more than one conspiracy against her husband's life. The first was Thuringian. There was no difficulty in its detection. One of its leaders boldly avowed in the presence of Charlemagne—"If my advice had been followed, you would never have repassed the Rhine alive." The merciful sovereign imposed on them some edifying pilgrimages to the tombs of saints, but had them murdered on their way home. Seven years later, a natural son, named Pepin, conspired against his life at Ratisbon. The nocturnal conference of the conspirators in the church of St. Peter was overheard by a humble deacon concealed beneath an altar, who, penetrating half clad through the seven doors and seven passages which led to the king's chamber, was received with stifled merriment by the queen's waiting-women, but succeeded in communicating his news to Charlemagne, who laid his iron hand on the conspirators, and sent Pepin to the monastery of St. Gall, "considered," says the monk of St. Gall with humour, "the poorest and most outlandish spot in the vast empire."
The submission of the Lombards, completed by the homage of the duke of Benevento in 786, laid open the duchy of Bavaria to Frankish attacks on the south, as well as on the west and north. The fortunes of Lombardy and its overhanging Alpine plateau were then, as now, indissolubly connected. Three armies converged upon Bavaria. The people disavowed the intrigues of their duke with the Avars; he was degraded at the assembly of Ingelheim, and the hereditary duchy gave place to Charlemagne's favourite government of counts and margraves.
The first or Teutonic enceinte of barbarous nations was now levelled, but only to disclose a second barrier. The spear of Charlemagne had pierced the outer plate of the barbaric shield, but rang vainly on the inner. In 789 he aided the Obotrites of Mecklenburg against the Weletabians, receiving hostages for the latter; and the submission of Bavaria laid bare the singular nation of the Avars. Here opened a prospect worthy indeed of Charlemagne. To fix and settle the wild and tumultuous oscillations of those intrepid cavaliers who bathed their horses, says Gibbon, alternately in the Euxine and the Adriatic, was to dry up the well-head of barbarism from the Alps to the mouths of the Danube. The Saxons, the Frisons, the Thuringians, the Franks, and the Aquitanians, moved in two great masses down the two banks of the Danube, and penetrated to the Raab, while the Italians, under their king, Pepin, pierced the outermost circle of the mysterious ninefold ring, situated between the Danube and the Theiss, within which the brigand nation brooded like an eagle over the accumulated treasures of two centuries of plunder. The army returned on foot from this achievement, for its horses were lost in the marshes of Hungary.
The irritability of exhaustion followed this tremendous effort. Like the sailors of Columbus, or the Israelites in the desert, the world wearied of Charlemagne,—
" There is no joy but calm,
Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?"
Pepin conspired against his father's life; the count Theodoric gathering reinforcements in Saxony for the Hungarian war, was massacred with all his forces; the revolt of Benevento stripped Aquitaine of defenders; Duke William of Toulouse was defeated in attempting to protect that province; even spirits from the other world fought against Charlemagne, for the ears of corn were empty, and a council declared that demons had blighted them because the tithes were not duly paid. These dark clouds passed away with the death of Fastrada in 794. Charlemagne was not content with replacing the bishops and counts in Saxony; the missionaries had worked well as pioneers, but they were unequal to government. He drew off a vast number of
