Category: Biographies
In the gradual transformation of the old world of classical antiquity into the world with which the statesmen of to-day must deal, no man played a greater part than Charles the Great,[1] King of the Franks and Emperor of Rome. The sharp lines of demarcation which we often draw...
No ruler for many centuries so powerfully impressed the imagination of western Europe as the first Frankish Emperor of Rome. The vast cycle of romantic epic poetry which gathere...
5. CHAPTER IV.The unity of the Frankish State, so dearly purchased by the heroic labors of Charles Martel, was as usual placed in jeopardy by the dying ruler’s arrangements for the succession...
12. CHAPTER XI.The events described at the end of the last chapter happened in August 797. In the autumn of the following year, when Charles was resting at Aachen from the fatigues of a Saxon...
13. CHAPTER XII.We hear of repeated ravages by Scandinavian pirates along the shores of the German and Atlantic oceans: by Moorish pirates along the shore of the Mediterranean: and with neither...
3. CHAPTER II.The historical student who visits in thought the nursery of modern European states--the period from 500 to 800 of the Christian era--finds with amused surprise how many of the f...
6. CHAPTER V.The situation of affairs after the death of Pippin seems at first sight almost the exact counterpart of that which existed at the death of Charles Martel. We have again two brot...
7. CHAPTER VI.The year 772, which opened upon a reunited Frankish kingdom (Carloman having died at the close of the year preceding), and which was a blank as far as Frankish operations in Ita...
11. CHAPTER X.Now that we are approaching the most important event in the life of Charlemagne, his assumption of the imperial title, it will be necessary to glance at his relations with the l...
8. CHAPTER VII.In tracing the history of Charles’s long struggle with the Saxons we have come down to a very late point in the story of his reign. We must now retrace our steps and notice some...
4. CHAPTER III.Thus at last was supreme power in the Frankish kingdom concentrated in the hands of that family of statesmen who were to hold it for two centuries. I have been somewhat minute i...
10. CHAPTER IX.It is a remarkable ethnological fact, and one for which there does not seem any obvious explanation, that, almost ever since the great barbarian migrations of the fourth century...
9. CHAPTER VIII.Though the greater part of his life was passed in war, and though he was undoubtedly a man of great personal courage, Charlemagne cannot be considered a great military commander...
2. CHAPTER I.In the gradual transformation of the old world of classical antiquity into the world with which the statesmen of to-day must deal, no man played a greater part than Charles the...
1. CHAPTER XIII.