Yet with the picture of these fifth and sixth and seventh centuries of battle full before us, we are not tempted to glory overmuch even in such victories as Tours and Chalons.  We see war for what it has ever been—­the curse of man, the hugest hinderance to our civilization.  While men fight they have small time for thought or art or any soft or kindly sentiment.  The survivors may with good luck develop into a stronger breed; they are inevitably more brutal.

We thus begin to recognize just how necessary for human progress was the work Rome had been engaged in.  By holding the world at peace, she had given humankind at least the opportunity to grow.  The moment her restraining hand was shaken off, war sprang up everywhere.  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.”