The struggle with the Saxons lasted thirty years in all, and its completion brings us almost to the end of Charles’ reign. In order to close our survey of the military operations by which the integrity of the Carolingian Empire was preserved, or its frontiers enlarged, it is necessary to take up the narrative of various warlike expeditions and operations which demanded the ruler’s attention while the Saxons were making their heroic struggle to cast off the Frankish yoke.

Hardly two years after the destruction of the Lombard monarchy, there was such unrest in the small Duchy of Friuli, which was ruled over by Hrodgaud, that a punitive expedition was needed to restore order. Apparently Hrodgaud was intriguing with other Lombard leaders to procure the restoration of the exiled son of Desiderius and so to reëstablish Lombard independence. The project failed. Hrodgaud’s allies among his own people withdrew support. Adalghis, the “pretender,” did not leave Constantinople to head the revolt, consequently the Duke of Friuli was obliged single-handed to meet the avenging Frankish army. The revolted cities were soon captured; Hrodgaud himself appears to have lost his life on the battlefield, and after this short campaign, which took place in the early months of 776, Charles crossed the Alps in June to take up again the conquest of the Saxon lands.

This Lombard revolt, although it was an incident, and involved only a small territory, was followed by stringent measures of repression. Paul the Deacon, the Lombard historian, tells of the treatment of his brother, who, it seems, took part in this insurrection. “My brother languishes a captive in your land, broken-hearted, in nakedness and want. His unhappy wife, with grieving lips, begs for bread from street to street. Four children must she support in this humiliating manner, whom she is scarce able to cover even with rags.”

Much more serious than this outbreak among the Lombards was the disaffection of Tassilo III, Duke of Bavaria, who resented Charles’ aim to turn a nominal suzerainty into an effective control. United closely to the Frankish ruler by a common descent from Charles Martel, Tassilo, whose family, the Agilolfings, had governed Bavaria for two hundred years, had no mind to sacrifice the autonomy of his people. Even under Pippin he had showed that he placed a very loose interpretation on the ties of vassalage which bound him to the Franks. After Charles’ accession he continued his policy of isolation, showing by his failure to render assistance in the campaign against the Lombards that he did not recognize any obligation to further the ambitious schemes of his overlord. During the revolt of Friuli he observed an attitude of neutrality, an act which, coming from a vassal, could signify only that the Duke of the Bavarians claimed an independent position. Such a claim Charles was in no mood to allow. In 780, during one of the intervals in the progress of the Saxon conquest, Charles, accompanied by his wife and his sons, Carloman and Louis, spent Christmas at Pavia, the Lombard capital, and in Easter, 781, visited Rome, where the royal children received baptism at Pope Hadrian’s hands, and were raised by the ecclesiastical ceremony of anointment to the royal dignity, Carloman taking the title of King of Italy, and his brother Louis, that of King of Aquitaine. During this stay at Rome, the relations of Tassilo to the King of the Franks were discussed by Charles and the Pope. The result was that a joint deputation was sent from both Charles and Hadrian to Bavaria to remind its ruler of his obligations as a vassal of the Frankish kingdom. Tassilo soon after appeared personally at Worms to renew the oath previously sworn to Pippin. Hostages were exchanged on both sides, but the tension continued. We find Tassilo, a few years later, in 787, sending representatives to Rome in order to secure the Pope as an intermediary to establish an agreement with Charles and put an end to the mutual irritation of both parties. The terms offered by the Bavarians were not regarded as acceptable by the representatives of Charles, and the Pope himself solemnly appealed to the Duke to fulfil his promises as a dependent ally and so avoid the evils of war.

After his return from Italy Charles held his court at Worms and summoned Tassilo before him as the first step in acknowledging the overlordship of the Frankish monarch. In the eyes of Charles, swift dealing with a disobedient vassal was all the more necessary, because Tassilo, by his marriage with the daughter of Desiderius, might easily make himself the center of a revival of pro-Lombard feeling in Italy. Three Frankish armies from different quarters invaded Bavaria, and Tassilo soon found himself forced by this display of superior strength to give up his dreams of independent power. He formally resigned his duchy and received it back again from Charles’ hands, at the same time taking an oath as vassal and giving hostages, among whom was his own son. But not long after this Tassilo, who complained openly that his position of dependence was insupportable, was charged by members of his people with intriguing with the Avars. He was accused of treachery, and was condemned to death by legal process. But the sentence was reduced by Charles’ intervention to imprisonment in a monastery. His wife and children met a like fate, and from this time on Bavaria was treated as Frankish territory. Like Saxony, it was divided into jurisdictions under counts and placed under the supreme military control of one superior official.

The overthrow of Bavaria as a separate power laid the foundation of a consolidated Germany, North and South, and, as in Middle Germany, there was the same system of counties and bishoprics. Unity was still far from being thoroughly realized, but that the germ of national consciousness was already present is proved by the readiness of the Bavarians, after the loss of their ruling duke and their autonomy, to coöperate with the Franks in resisting the attacks of the Avars.

Just at the time that the tension in Bavaria was reaching its acute stage, the situation in the Lombard Duchy of Benevento, whose Duke Arichis seemed to be taking his cue from Tassilo, demanded attention. There were no actual hostilities, for the presence of Charles in the duchy was enough to bring the turbulent Duke to reason. His position of vassalage was marked by a payment of an annual tribute of 7000 solidi. The duchy was mildly treated by Charles because it was useful as a buffer against the provinces of the Eastern Empire, with which his relations were far from being always friendly. The result was that the Beneventines played a double rôle, sometimes befriending the Greeks and rejecting the Frank overlordship, and on other occasions engaging in hostilities with their Southern neighbors, as allies of the Franks. There were a number of Frankish expeditions necessary to keep the Lombards of Benevento and their dukes in mind of their duty as a vassal state, and once there was a noteworthy failure of Frankish arms in 792, when the campaign they had begun in the territory of the duchy was abandoned.

Apart from the campaigns in Saxony, in Italy, and in Bavaria, necessary to the integrity of the Frankish empire, there were various frontier wars undertaken, not for the purpose of incorporating fresh territory, but rather to impress upon contiguous peoples the power and prestige of Frankish arms. The occupation of Bavaria brought Charles in contact with the Avars, and his control of Aquitaine gave him as near neighbors the Moslems of Spain, those enemies with whom his grandfather, Charles Martel, had tried conclusions on the historic field of Poictiers.

This defeat had been inflicted on the conquerors of Spain at a time when the Ommayad Caliphate ruled over a united Moslem world. But the great internal revolution had broken this unity in 750, eighteen years before the accession of Charles. The last Ommayad Caliph, Merwan, after the great battle of Mosul, had been obliged to flee from Damascus to Egypt and had there met his death. Shortly afterward eighty members of his house were massacred by treachery at a banquet. Only one of the family escaped, Abderahman, the son of Merwan, who, after many adventures, reached Morocco, and was there invited to assume the rule of Moslem Spain, where the jealousies of the Emirs, the lieutenants of the far-distant Caliph in the East, had produced an era of misgovernment and faction.

So began in 755 the Caliphate of Cordova, and with it the most brilliant period of Mohammedan rule in Spain. But Abderahman was not accepted as supreme head of the Spanish Moslems without active protest; the Eastern Caliphate of the Abbasides had many supporters in the peninsula, and it was to Charles that they appealed for aid in resisting the Ommayad house. Naturally, the internal disputes of the Spanish Moslems constituted by themselves no ground for Frankish intervention. But the appeal was reinforced by promises that various Spanish cities would open their gates if Charles would undertake to cross the Pyrenees with an adequate army. This offer was made to Charles by Moslem envoys, who appeared before him at Paderborn, where he was holding a formal assembly (placitum) of the Frankish host during the early course of the Saxon war. The prospects of valuable territorial acquisition prompted the ruler of the Franks to embark on this hazardous expedition. There is no proof whatsoever it was undertaken to aid, as a kind of crusade, the feeble kingdom of the Asturias, where the heirs of the Visigoths were still maintaining the Christian cause against the Moslems.

In the spring of 778 the Christian army in force, containing contingents of Lombards and Bavarians, as well as Franks, crossed the Pyrenees, part of it passing into what afterwards became the Kingdom of Navarre, while the second division moved along the Mediterranean coast. Both were to meet at Saragossa, but before the junction was made Charles laid siege to Pampeluna, which had previously belonged to the small Christian kingdom of the Asturias. The city was taken, and at Saragossa hostages were received to guarantee to the Franks the possession of certain towns between the Ebro and the Pyrenees. With this inconclusive result the aggressive part of the campaign ended. Probably Charles hesitated to penetrate further into the country after hearing that Abderahman had lately defeated an army of Berbers who had come over to Spain to help the cause of the Abbaside Caliph. It was now evident that the prospects of the opponents of the Ommayad house were anything but brilliant, and it must have seemed advisable for the Frankish army to withdraw from Spanish territory. Summer had already begun before Charles turned his face homeward, after leveling the walls of the city of Pampeluna to the ground to prevent its inhabitants from revolting against him.

It was during this retreat that the famous disaster befell the arms of Charles, to which literary history has given an importance beyond its real deserts. On the 15th of August, at Roncesvalles, while the main army was slowly winding its way among the defiles of the mountains, the Basques applied to the Franks the guerrilla tactics they had successfully used against all the invaders of Spain, Roman, Gothic, and Moslem in turn. They made a sudden attack on the rear guard, and this division of the Frankish army was utterly cut to pieces. Many of the closest followers of Charles here met their death, among them Roland, prefect of the march of Brittany, of whom we know nothing apart from this brief notice in the contemporary histories, but whose exploits were celebrated in popular legend, where, under the glamour of poetical description, he has come to occupy a place as a warrior and hero almost the equal of Hector.

The defeat remained unavenged, for it was realized that the pursuit of the Basques in their mountain fastnesses was impossible. This expedition into Spain not only accomplished little in the way of permanent conquest, but served to provoke the Moslems to successful reprisals extending over a series of years in the Southern part of Gaul. The country was harried by the invaders, and towns as important as Carcassonne and Narbonne were attacked and the country about them ravaged. Dissensions among the Moslems themselves brought a respite, and, aided by insurgents against the authority of the Cordovan Caliphate, the Frankish officers in Aquitaine later on extended the sphere of Frankish influence far into the Iberian peninsula. Before the end of Charles’ reign Navarre and Pampeluna were again occupied, and he could number Barcelona among the cities of his empire.

After the conquest of Bavaria, the campaign against the Avars, a people closely allied to the Huns, was brought about by their threatening attitude on the Eastern frontier, where they showed such constant hostility to the peoples of German stock that in his military handling of the problem Charles had the ready coöperation of the Saxons themselves. After a preliminary campaign in 791, in which the Franks advanced as far as the confluence of the Danube and the Raab, the decisive struggle took place in 795, when the Frankish army, under Pippin, the son of Charles, taking advantage of dissensions among the Avars, succeeded in forcing the famous armed camp of the Khan called the Ring, and returned with an immense amount of booty stored there, the fruits of many successful raids on Christian towns and monasteries. In 809 the Avars, hard-pressed by the Slavs, were glad to place themselves under the Emperor, but their number had been so reduced by warfare that a contemporary historian speaks of their lands as being deserted, their treasures confiscated, and their nobility wiped out.

Operations against the Slavic tribes were taken up in earnest after the reduction of the Saxons, though we hear of one marauding expedition against them as early as 789. In 805 and 806 Slavic territory was overrun by Frankish armies under the command of the Emperor’s lieutenants, and two strong outposts were established for purposes of military observation of their movements. These posts, on the Saale and on the Elbe, became the nucleus for the development of the German cities of Halle and Magdeburg.

After describing the wars of Charles, Einhard, his contemporary, gives a summary of the conqueror’s achievements that deserves to be repeated: “Such are the wars,” he says, “which this most powerful king waged during forty-seven years. For as many years as these he reigned in the different parts of the earth with the greatest wisdom and the greatest success. So the kingdom of the Franks, which he had received from Pippin, his father, already vast and powerful, nobly developed as it was by him, was increased nearly twofold in extent. Before his day this kingdom included only that part of Gaul which lies between the Loire and the Rhine, the ocean and the sea of the Balearic Isles, and that portion of Germany occupied by the Franks (who are called Eastern) whose country lies between Saxony and the Danube, the Rhine and the Saale, the river which divides the Thuringians from the Swabians. Besides this, the Alemanni and the Bavarians acknowledged the overlordship of the Franks. To these possessions Charles added by his conquests first Aquitaine and Gascony, all the chain of the Pyrenees, and all the territories as far as the Elbe. Then all that part of Italy which extends from the valley of Aosta to lower Calabria, where is the frontier between the Beneventines and the Greeks, in length more than a million paces; then Saxony, which is a considerable part of Germany, as long and twice as broad, it seems, as the portion of this country inhabited by the Franks; then the two Pannonias; Dacia, situated on the other bank of the Danube; then Istria, Liburnia, and Dalmatia, with the exception of the coast cities which it pleased him to leave to the Emperor, because of the friendship and the alliance by which they were united. Finally, all the barbarous and savage nations situated between the Rhine and the Vistula, the ocean and the Danube, much alike in language, different in manners, and in their method of existence, all of whom he overcame and rendered tributary.”