in terms of territorial expansion and consolidation, church reform, and entanglement with Rome, Charlemagne's reign was merely bringing the policies of his father Pippin to their logical conclusions.

Charlemagne became the subject of the first medieval biography of a layman, written by Einhard, one of his learned courtiers. Following his literary model, Suetonius' word portrait of the Emperor Augustus, Einhard described Charlemagne's appearance, his dress, his eating and drinking habits, his religious practices, and intellectual interests, giving us a vivid, if not perhaps entirely reliable, picture of this Frankish monarch. He was strong, tall, and healthy, and ate moderately. He loved exercise: riding and hunting and, perhaps more surprising, swimming. Einhard tells us that he chose Aachen as the site for his palace because of its hot springs, and that he used to bathe there with his family, friends, and courtiers. He spoke and read Latin as well as his native Frankish, and could understand Greek, and even speak it a little. He learnt grammar, rhetoric, and mathematics from the learned clerics he gathered around him, but although he kept writing-tablets under his pillows for practice (he used to wake up four or five times in the night) he never mastered the art of writing.

Einhard's biography starts, very appropriately, with Charlemagne's wars. It was because he was a tireless and remarkably successful general that he was able to make such a mark upon European history. As we have seen, he concluded Pippin's wars with Aquitaine, and proclaimed his son Louis as king in 781; the one serious defeat he suffered was in these wars, at Roncevaux in the Pyrenees, a defeat one day immortalized in The Song of Roland and later chansons de geste. He added Saxony to his realm, after years of vicious campaigning, and towards the end of his reign moved against the Danes; he destroyed the kingdom of the Avars in Hungary; he subdued the Bretons, the Bavarians, and various Slav peoples. In the south he began the reconquest of Spain from the Arabs, and established the Spanish March in the north-east of the peninsula. But perhaps his most significant campaigns were south of the Alps, in Italy. Pope Hadrian appealed to

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