ry in the island of Rhe to try
and recover power and independence. Charles and Carloman marched against
him; but, on the march, Carloman, who was jealous and thoughtless, fell
out with his brother, and suddenly quitted the expedition, taking away
his troops. Charles was obliged to continue it alone, which he did with
complete success. At the end of this first campaign, Pepin's widow, the
Queen-mother Bertha, reconciled her two sons; but an unexpected incident,
the death of Carloman two years afterwards in 771, re-established unity
more surely than the reconciliation had re-established harmony. For,
although Carloman left sons, the grandees of his dominions, whether laic
or ecclesiastical, assembled at Corbeny, between Laon and Rheims, and
proclaimed in his stead his brother Charles, who thus became sole king of
the Gallo-Franco-Germanic monarchy. And as ambition and manners had
become less tinged with ferocity than they had been under the
Merovingians, the sons of Carloman were not killed or shorn or even shut
up in a monastery: they retired with their mother, Gerberge, to the court
of Didier, king of the Lombards. "King Charles," says Eginhard, "took
their departure patiently, regarding it as of no importance." Thus
commenced the reign of Charlemagne.

The original and dominant characteristic of the hero of this reign, that
which won for him, and keeps for him after more than ten centuries, the
name of Great, is the striking variety of his ambition, his faculties,
and his deeds. Charlemagne aspired to and attained to every sort of
greatness, military greatness, political greatness, and intellectual
greatness; he was an able warrior, an energetic legislator, a hero of
poetry. And he united, he displayed all these merits in a time of
general and monotonous barbarism, when, save in the Church, the minds of
men were dull and barren. Those men, few in number, who made themselves
a name at that epoch, rallied round Charlemagne and were developed under
his patronage. To know him well and appreciate him justly, he must be
examined under those various grand aspects, abroad and at home, in his
wars and in his government.

In Guizot's _History of Civilization in France_ is to be found a complete
table of the wars of Charlemagne, of his many different expeditions in
Germany, Italy, Spain, all the countries, in fact, that became his
dominion. A summary will here suffice. From 769 to 813, in Germany and
Western and Nor