e Franks extended, between east and west, from the
Ebro to the Elbe or Vistula; between the north and south, from the duchy
of Beneventum to the River Eyder, the perpetual boundary of Germany
and Denmark. The personal and political importance of Charlemagne
was magnified by the distress and division of the rest of Europe. The
islands of Great Britain and Ireland were disputed by a crowd of princes
of Saxon or Scottish origin: and, after the loss of Spain, the Christian
and Gothic kingdom of Alphonso the Chaste was confined to the narrow
range of the Asturian mountains. These petty sovereigns revered the
power or virtue of the Carlovingian monarch, implored the honor and
support of his alliance, and styled him their common parent, the sole
and supreme emperor of the West. [113] He maintained a more equal
intercourse with the caliph Harun al Rashid, [114] whose dominion
stretched from Africa to India, and accepted from his ambassadors a
tent, a water-clock, an elephant, and the keys of the Holy Sepulchre. It
is not easy to conceive the private friendship of a Frank and an Arab,
who were strangers to each other's person, and language, and religion:
but their public correspondence was founded on vanity, and their remote
situation left no room for a competition of interest. Two thirds of the
Western empire of Rome were subject to Charlemagne, and the deficiency
was amply supplied by his command of the inaccessible or invincible
nations of Germany. But in the choice of his enemies, [1141] we may be
reasonably surprised that he so often preferred the poverty of the north
to the riches of the south. The three-and-thirty campaigns laboriously
consumed in the woods and morasses of Germany would have sufficed to
assert the amplitude of his title by the expulsion of the Greeks from
Italy and the Saracens from Spain. The weakness of the Greeks would have
insured an easy victory; and the holy crusade against the Saracens
would have been prompted by glory and revenge, and loudly justified by
religion and policy. Perhaps, in his expeditions beyond the Rhine and
the Elbe, he aspired to save his monarchy from the fate of the Roman
empire, to disarm the enemies of civilized society, and to eradicate the
seed of future emigrations. But it has been wisely observed, that, in a
light of precaution, all conquest must be ineffectual, unless it could
be universal, since the increasing circle must be involved in a larger
sphere of hostility. [115]