He had still, in Germany and all around, many enemies to fight and many campaigns to reopen.  Even among the Germanic populations, which were regarded as reduced under the sway of the King of the Franks, some, the Frisians and Saxons, as well as others, were continually agitating for the recovery of their independence.  Farther off, toward the north, east, and south, people differing in origin and language—­Avars, Huns, Slavons, Bulgarians, Danes, and Northmen—­were still pressing or beginning to press upon the frontiers of the Frankish dominion, for the purpose of either penetrating within or settling at the threshold as powerful and formidable neighbors.  Charlemagne had plenty to do, with the view at one time of checking their incursions, and at another of destroying or hurling back to a distance their settlements; and he brought his usual vigor and perseverance to bear on this second struggle.  But by the conquest of Saxony he had attained his direct national object:  the great flood of population from east to west came, and broke against the Gallo-Franco-Germanic dominion as against an insurmountable rampart.

This was not, however, Charlemagne’s only great enterprise at this epoch, nor the only great struggle he had to maintain.  While he was incessantly fighting in Germany, the work of policy commenced by his father Pepin in Italy called for his care and his exertions.  The new King of the Lombards, Didier, and the new Pope, Adrian I, had entered upon a new war; and Didier was besieging Rome, which was energetically defended by the Pope and its inhabitants.  In 773, Adrian invoked the aid of the King of the Franks, whom his envoys succeeded, not without difficulty, in finding at Thionville.  Charlemagne could not abandon the grand position left him by his father as protector of the papacy and as patrician of Rome.  The possessions, moreover, wrested by Didier from the Pope were exactly those which Pepin had won by conquest from King Astolphus, and had presented to the Papacy.  Charlemagne was besides, on his own account, on bad terms with the King of the Lombards, whose daughter, Desiree, he had married, and afterward repudiated and sent home to her father, in order to marry Hildegarde, a Suabian by nation.  Didier, in dudgeon, had given an asylum to Carloman’s widow and sons, on whose intrigues Charlemagne kept a watchful eye.  Being prudent and careful of appearances, even when he was preparing to strike a heavy blow, Charlemagne tried, by means of special envoys, to obtain from the King of the Lombards what the Pope demanded.  On Didier’s refusal he at once set to work, convoked the general meeting of the Franks, at Geneva, in the autumn of 773, gained them over, not without encountering some objections, to the projected Italian expedition, and forthwith commenced the campaign with two armies.  One was to cross the Valais and descend upon Lombardy by Mount St. Bernard; Charlemagne in person led the other, by Mount Cenis.  The Lombards, at the outlet of