This lengthy catalogue only accounts for the more
important of the wars in which Charles and his lieutenants were engaged. We
must imagine, to complete the picture, a background of minor conflicts within
and without the Empire - against the Slavs, the Danes, the Greeks, the Bretons,
the Arabs, the Lombards of Benevento. These crowded years of war leave the Frankish
Empire established as the one great power west of the Elbe and Adriatic. It did
not include the Scandinavian lands or British Isles; the Franks were never
masters of the northern seas.
It had failed to expel the Arabs and Byzantines
from the western Mediterranean; Spain, Sicily, even parts of Italy remain
unconquered. Of recovering North Africa there could be no question. Still in
magnitude the Frankish realm was a worthy successor of the Western Empire. On
Christmas Day, 800, Charles was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III,
in St. Peter's basilica at Rome; and his subjects vainly imagined that, by
this dramatic ceremony, the clock of history had been put back four hundred years.
Though the Age of the Barbarians had been ended by the greatest of them, the
era which he inaugurated was an era not of revival but of new development.
