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 afterward in 771,
reestablished unity more surely than the reconciliation had
reestablished 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.

From 769 to 813, in Germany and Western and Northern Europe, Charlemagne
conducted thirty-one campaigns against the Saxons, Frisians, Bavarians,
Avars, Slavons, and Danes; in Italy, five against the Lombards; in
Spain, Corsica, and Sardinia, twelve against the Arabs; two against the
Greeks; and three in Gaul itself, against the Aquitanians and the
Britons; in all, fifty-three expeditions; among which those he undertook
against the Saxons, the Lombards, and the Arabs were long and