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 Northern Europe, Charlemagne conducted thirty-one campaigns against the Saxons, Frisons, 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; amongst which those he undertook against the Saxons, the Lombards, and the Arabs, were long and difficult wars.  It is undesirable to recount them in detail, for the relation would be monotonous and useless; but it is obligatory to make fully known their causes, their characteristic incidents, and their results.

It has already been seen that, under the last Merovingian kings, the Saxons were, on the right bank of the Rhine, in frequent collision with the Franks, especially with the Austrasian Franks, whose territory they were continually threatening and often invading.  Pepin the Short had more than once hurled them back far from the very uncertain frontiers of Germanic Austrasia; and, on becoming king, he dealt his blows still farther, and entered, in his turn, Saxony itself.  “In spite of the Saxons’ stout resistance,” says Eginhard (Annales, t. i., p. 135), “he pierced through the points they had fortified to bar entrance into their country, and, after having fought here and there battles wherein fell many Saxons, he forced them to promise that they would submit to his rule; and that, every year, to do him honor, they would send to the general assembly of the Franks a present of three hundred horses.  When these conventions were once settled, he insisted, to insure their performance, upon placing them under the guarantee of rites peculiar to the Saxons; then he returned with his army to Gaul.”