A source-book of ancient history - The Search For Mecca

Charles the Great 577
III.
Charlemagne: War and Diplomacy
Great and powexful as was the realm of the Franks, Conquests,
which Karl had received from his father Pippin, he never- Eginhard,
theless so splendidly enlarged it by these wars that he Greai!%.
almost doubled it.
For previously the Eastern Franks had only inhabited
The Karl
that part of Gaul which lies between the Rhine and the here^'^referred
Loire, the ocean and Balearic Sea, and that part of Ger- ^° '^ Charle-
' ^ magne.
many situated between Saxony and the Danube, the Rhine , .
and the Saal, which latter river divides the Thuringi from World, 554-9.
the Sorabi. The Alemanni and Bavarians also belonged
to the Frankish confederation. But Karl, by the wars
which have been mentioned, conquered and made tributary
first,
Aquitania and Gascony, and the whole range
of the Pyrenees mountains, as far as the river Ebro, which,
rising in Navarre and flowing through the most fertile
lands of Spain, mingles its waters with the Balearic Sea
beneath the walls of Tortosa; then the whole of Italy,
from Aosta to lower Calabria, where are the boundaries
of the Greeks and Beneventines, an extent of more than
a thousand miles in length, then Saxony, which is indeed
no small portion of Germany, and is thought to be twice
as wide as the part where the Franks dwell, and equal
to it in length; then both Pannonias, and Dacia which
lies on the other bank of the Danube; also Istria, Liburnia,
and Dalmatia, with the exception of the maritime towns,
which for friendship's sake and on account of a treaty he
allowed the Emperor at Constantinople to hold; lastly, all
the wild and barbarous nations which inhabit Germany
between the Rhine and the Vistula, the ocean and the
Danube, who speak a very similar language, but are
widely different in manners and dress.
Chief among these