Not only do
we find the inheritors of her territory fighting among themselves, they
are exposed to the savagery of Attila, the fury of the Arabs. New bands
of more distant Teutons come, ever pushing in amid their half-settled
brethren, overthrowing them in turn. The Lombards capture Northern
Italy, only Venice remaining safe amid her marshes.[14] The
East-Franks--that is, the semi-barbarians still remaining in the
wilderness--master the more cultured West-Franks, who hold Gaul. No
sooner does civilization start up than it is trodden on.

THE EMPIRE OF CHARLEMAGNE

At length there arose among the Franks a series of stalwart rulers,
keen-eyed, penetrating somewhat at least into the meaning of their
world, determined to have peace if they must fight for it. Charles
Martel was one of these. Then came his son Pepin,[15] who held out his
hand to the bishops of Rome, acknowledged their vast civilizing
influence, saved them from the Lombards, and joined church and state
once more in harmony. After Pepin came his son, Charlemagne, whose reign
marks an epoch of the world. The peace his fathers had striven for, he
won at last, though only, as they had done, by constant fighting. He
attacked the Arabs and reduced them to permanent feebleness in Spain. He
turned backward the Teutonic movement, marching his Franks into the
German forests, and in campaign after campaign defeating the wild tribes
that still remained there. The strongest of them, the Saxons, accepted
an enforced Christianity. Even the vague races beyond the German borders
were so harried, so weakened, that they ceased to be a serious menace.

Charlemagne[16] had thus in very truth created a new empire. He had
established at least one central spot, so hedged round by border
dependencies that no later wave of barbarians ever quite succeeded in
submerging it. The bones of the great Emperor, in their cathedral
sepulchre at Aix, have never been disturbed by an unfriendly hand, Paris
submitted to no new conquest until over a thousand years later, when the
nineteenth century had stolen the barbarity from war. It was then no
more than a just acknowledgment of Charlemagne's work when, on Christmas
Day of the year 800, as he rose from kneeling at the cathedral altar in
Rome, he was crowned by the Pope whom he had defended, and hailed by an
enthusiastic people as lord of a re-created "Holy Roman Empire."

In England, also, the centuries of warfare among the Britons and the
v