4. I consider that it would be foolish for me to write about Charlemagne’s birth and childhood, or even about his boy­hood, for nothing is set down in writing about this and nobody can be found still alive who claims to have any personal knowledge of these matters. I have therefore decided to leave out what is not really known and to move on to his deeds and habits and the other aspects of his life which need explanation and elaboration. First of all I shall describe his achievements at home and abroad, then his personal habits and enthusiasms, then the way in which he administered his kingdom and last of all his death, omitting from all this nothing which ought to be known or, indeed, which is worthy of being recorded.

5. Of all the wars which Charlemagne waged, the first which he ever undertook was one against Aquitaine, which had been begun by his father but not brought to a proper conclusion. He thought that it would soon be over. He began it while his brother Carloman was still alive and even went so fir as to ask his brother for help. Carloman did not give him the promised support; nevertheless Charlemagne pressed on energetically with the expedition which he had put into the field, refusing to withdraw from a campaign already started or to abandon a task once undertaken. In the end, with no small perseverance and continued effort, he brought to complete fruition what he was striving to achieve.

6. Once matters were settled in Aquitaine and this par­ticular war was finished, and now that his partner on the throne had been withdrawn from the anxieties of this world. Charlemagne next fought a war against the Longobards. He undertook this at the request of Hadrian, Bishop of the City of Rome, who first asked and then begged him to do so. This war, too, had been started in the first instance by Charle­magne’s father, at the request of Pope Stephen, but in the most difficult circumstances, for certain of the Frankish leaders, whom Pepin the Short was accustomed to consult, were so opposed to his wishes that they openly announced their determination to desert their King and return home. Despite this Pepin declared war on King Haistulf and brought this war to a rapid completion. Although the reason for his undertaking the war was similar to that which had inspired his father, and indeed identical, it is clear that Charlemagne fought it with much more energy and brought it to a different conclusion. After besieging Pavia for a few days, Pepin forced Haistulf to give hostages, to restore the towns and fortresses which he had taken from the Romans, and to swear an oath on the holy sacrament that he would not try to regain what he had surrendered. Once Charlemagne, on the other hand, had taken over the war, he did not stop until he had worn Desiderius down by a long siege and had received his surrender. He forced Adalgis, the son of Desiderius, on whom the hopes of everyone seemed to center, to go into exile, not merely from his father’s kingdom but indeed from Italy itself; he restored to the Romans everything which had been taken from them; he crushed a revolt started by Rotgaud, the  Duke of Friuli, subjected the whole of Italy to his own domination and made his son Pepin King of the territory which he had conquered. At this point I really should explain how difficult Charlemagne found the crossing of the Alps when he came to enter Italy, and after what effort on the part of the Franks the pathless ridges of the mountains were traversed, and the rocks which reared themselves up to the sky and the abrupt abysses; but in this present work I am deter­mined to offer the modern reader a description of Charle­magne’s way of life and not the day-to-day details of his wars. The outcome of this conflict was that Italy was subdued, King Desiderius was carded off into exile for the remainder of his life, his son Adalgis was expelled from Italy and every­thing stolen by the Longobard Kings was restored to Hadrian. the ruler of the Church of Rome.

7. Now that the war in Italy was over, the one against the Saxons, which had been interrupted for the time being, was taken up once more. No war ever undertaken by the Frankish people was more prolonged, more full of atrocities or more demanding of effort. The Saxons, like almost all the peoples living in Germany, are ferocious by nature. They are much given to devil worship and they are hostile to our religion. They think it no dishonor to violate and transgress the laws of God and man. Hardly a day passed without some incident or other which was well calculated to break the peace. Our borders and theirs were contiguous and nearly everywhere in flat, open country, except, indeed, for a few places where great forests or mountain ranges interposed to separate the territories of the two people by a clear demarcation line. Murder, robbery and arson were of constant occurrence on both sides. In the end, the Franks were so irritated by these incidents that they decided that the time had come to abandon retaliatory measures and to undertake a full-scale war against these Saxons.

War was duly declared against them. It was waged for thirty-three long years and with immense hatred on both sides, but the losses of the Saxons were greater than those of the Franks. This war could have been brought to a more rapid conclusion, had it not been for the faithlessness of the Saxons. It is hard to say just how many times they were beaten and surrendered as suppliants to Charlemagne, promising to do all that was exacted from them, giving the hostages who were demanded, and this without delay, and receiving the ambassadors who were sent to them. Sometimes they were so cowed and reduced that they even promised to abandon their devil worship and submit willingly to the Christian faith; but, however ready they might seem from time to time to do all this, they were always prepared to break the promises they had made. I cannot really judge which of these two courses can be said to have come the more easily to the Saxons, for, since the very beginning of the war against them, hardly a year passed in which they did not vacillate between surrender and defiance.

However, the King’s mettlesome spirit and his imper­turbability, which remained as constant in adversity as in prosperity, were not to be quelled by their ever-changing tactics, or, indeed, to be wearied by a task which he had once undertaken. Not once did he allow anyone who had offended in this way to go unpunished. He took vengeance on them for their perfidy and meted out suitable punishment, either by means of an army which he led himself or by dispatching a force against them under the command of his counts. In the end, when all those who had been offering resistance had been utterly defeated and subjected to his power, he trans ported some ten thousand men, taken from among those who lived both on this side of the Elbe and across the river, and dispersed them in small group; with their wives and children, in various parts of Gaul and Germany. At long last this war, which had dragged on for so many years, came to an end on conditions imposed by the King and accepted by the Saxons. These last were to give up their devil worship and the malpractices inherited from their forefathers; and then, once they had adopted the sacraments of the Christian faith and religion, they were to be united with the Franks and become one people with them.

This particular war against the Saxons began two years before the Italian campaign; and although Charlemagne pressed on with it unremittingly, no intermis­sion was permitted in the wars being fought elsewhere, nor was a truce contemplated in any other military operation of comparable importance. Charlemagne was by far the most able and noble-spirited of all those who ruled over the nations in his time. He never withdrew from an enterprise which he had once begun and was determined to see through to the end, simply because of the labor involved; and danger never deterred him. Having learnt to endure and suffer each particular ineluctable circumstance, whatever its nature might be, he was never prepared to yield to adversity; and in times of prosperity he was never to be swayed by the false blandishments of fortune.

9. At a time when this war against the Saxons was being waged constantly and with hardly an intermission at all, Charlemagne left garrisons at strategic points along the frontier and went off himself with the largest force he could muster to invade Spain. He marched over a pass across the Pyrenees, received the surrender of every single town and castle which he attacked and then came back with his army safe and sound, except for the fact that for a brief moment on the return journey, while he was in the Pyrenean mountain range itself he was given a taste of Basque treachery. Dense forests, which stretch in all directions, make this a spot most suitable for setting ambushes. At a moment when Charlemagne’s army was stretched out in a long column of march, as the nature of the local defiles forced it to be, these Basques, who had set their ambush on the very top of one of the moun­tains, came rushing down on the last part of the baggage train and the troops who were marching in support of the rearguard and so protecting the army which had gone on already The Basques forced them down into the valley be­neath joined battle with them and killed them to the last man. They then snatched up the baggage, and, protected as they were by the cover of darkness, which was just beginning to fall, scattered in all directions without losing a moment. In this feat the Basques were helped by the lightness of their arms and by the nature of the terrain in which the battle was fought. On the other hand, the heavy nature of their own equipment and the unevenness of the ground completely hampered the Franks in their resistance to the Basques. In this battle died Einhard, who was in charge of the King’s table, Anshelm, the Count of the Palace and Roland, Lord of the Breton Marches, along with a great number of others. What is more, this assault could not be avenged there and then, for, once it was over, the enemy dispersed in such a way that no one knew where or among which people they could be found.

11. Next there suddenly broke out a war in Bavaria, but this was very soon over. It was occasioned by the pride and folly of Duke Tassilo. He was encouraged by his wife, who was the daughter of King Desiderius and thought that through her husband she could revenge her father’s exile, to make an alliance with the Huns, the neighbors of the Bavarians to the East. Not only did Tassilo refuse to carry out Charlemagne’s orders, but he did his utmost to provoke the King to war. Tassilo’s arrogance was too much for the spirited King of the Franks to stomach. Charlemagne sum­moned his levies from all sides and himself marched against Bavaria with a huge army, coming to the River Lech, which divides the Bavarians from the Germans. He pitched his camp on the bank of this river. Before he invaded the province he determined to discover the intentions of the Duke by sending messengers to him. Tassilo realized that nothing could be gained for himself or his people by his remaining stubborn. He went in person to beg Charlemagne’s forgiveness, handed over the hostages who had been demanded, his own son Theodo among them, and, what is more, swore an oath that he would never again listen to anyone who might try to persuade him to revolt against the King’s authority. In this way a war which had all the appearance of becoming very serious was in the event brought to a swift conclusion. Tassilo was summoned to the King’s presence and was not allowed to go back home afterwards. The government of the province over which he had ruled was entrusted from that moment onwards not to a single duke but to a group of counts.

13. The war which came next was the most important which Charlemagne ever fought, except the one against the Saxons: I mean the struggle with the Avars or Huns.

Just how many battles were fought and how much blood was shed is shown by the fact that Pannonia is now com­pletely uninhabited and that the site of the Khan’s palace is now so deserted that no evidence remains that anyone ever lived there. All the Hun nobility died in this war, all their glory departed. All their wealth and their treasures assembled over so many years were dispersed. The memory of man can­not recall any war against the Franks by which they were so enriched and their material possessions so increased. These Franks, who until then had seemed almost paupers, now dis­covered so much gold and silver in the palace and captured so much precious booty in their battles, that it could rightly be maintained that they had in all justice taken from the Huns what these last had unjustly stolen from other nations.

15. These, then, are the wars which this powerful King Charlemagne waged with such prudence and success in various parts of the world throughout a period of forty-seven years that is during his whole reign. The Frankish kingdom which he inherited from his father Pepin was already was already far-flung and powerful. By these wars of his he increased it to such an extent that he added to it almost as much again.

16. In addition to all this, Charlemagne made his reign more glorious by the friendly relations which he established with certain kings and peoples who became favorably in­clined towards him. For example, Alfonso II, the King of Galida and Asturias, became so close a friend that, when he had occasion to send letters or messengers to Charlemagne he ordered that he should always be called the King’s own man. fly the rich gifts which he gave them, Charlemagne had so influenced the Kings of the Irish that they never addressed him as anything else but their lord, and called themselves his slaves and subjects. There exist letters which they sent to him in which this subservience towards him is dearly shown.

In the same way the Emperors of Constantinople. Nicephorus I, Michael I and Leo V, sought Charlemagne’s friend­ship and alliance of their own free will, and sent many messengers to him. When he accepted the tide of Emperor, he aroused their strong suspicion, for he might well have been planning to take their own imperial power from them; but he concluded a firm treaty with them, in order to prevent any possible cause of dissension from arising between them. All the same, the power of the Franks always seemed suspect to the Greeks and Romans. Hence the Greek proverb which is still quoted today: If a Frank is your friend, then he is clearly not your neighbor.

17. However much energy Charlemagne may have ex­pended in enlarging his realm and conquering foreign nations, and despite all the time which he devoted to this preoccupa­tion, he nevertheless set in hand many projects which aimed at making his kingdom more attractive and at increasing public utility. Some of these projects he completed. Outstanding among these, one might claim, are the great church of the Holy Mother of God at Aachen, which is a really remarkable construction, and the bridge over the Rhine at Mainz which is five hundred feet long, this being the width of the river at that point The bridge was burned down just one year before Charlemagne’s death. He planned to rebuild it in stone instead of wood, but his death followed so quickly that the bridge could not be restored in time. He also began the construction of two magnificent palaces: one not far from the city of Mainz near the township called Ingelheim; and the other at Nimeguen, on the River Waal, which flows along the southern shore of the Betuwa peninsula. More important still was the fact that he commanded the bishops and church­men in whose care they were to restore sacred edifices which had fallen into ruin through their very antiquity, wherever he discovered them throughout the whole of his kingdom; and he instructed his representatives to see that these orders were carried out.

Next