The Historians' History of the World 07

Great as the king was in enlarging the kingdom and in conquering foreign nations, busy as he was in affairs of this kind, he yet started a great number of works for the embellishment and convenience of the kingdom. Some of them he carried through to the finish. The chief place among these seems rightly to be assigned to the Basilica of the Holy Mother of God, which was built at Aachen, a miracle of workmanship, and to the bridge over the Rhine at Mainz, five hundred paces in length, so broad is the river at that place. This bridge, however, was ruined by fire a year before the king’s death, nor could it be restored on account of the nearness of his demise, although it was in his mind to replace the woodwork by stone. He also began some magnificent palaces—one not far from the town of Mainz near the village called Ingelheim and another at Nimeguen on the river Waal which flows past the island of the Batavians on the southern side. But above all he noted the sacred churches throughout the whole kingdom wherever they had fallen to ruin because of their age, and gave orders to the priests and fathers in whose care they were to superintend their restoration, appointing officials to see that his orders were carried out. He also constructed a fleet for the war against the Northmen, making dock yards for this purpose on the rivers of Gaul and Germany which flow into the North Sea; and because the Northmen ravaged the shores of Gaul and Germany by constant active inroads, he posted towers and outlooks in all the harbours and at the mouths of all those rivers which were navigable. By these defences he stopped the enemy from being able to pass. He did the same in the south on the coast of the provinces of Narbonne and Septimania, and all along the coast of Italy as far as Rome, in order to put a check on the Moors who had lately taken to piratical practices. By this means Italy suffered no harm from the Moors, nor Gaul and Germany from the Northmen in his days, with the exception that Civita Vecchia, a town of Etruria, was betrayed to the Moors who razed it to the ground, and certain islands in Frisia off the German coast were plundered by the Northmen.

Such was clearly the character of the king at once in the defence, in the enlargement and in the embellishment of his kingdom. We may well marvel at his gifts and at that superlative steadfastness which he showed in every circumstance whether of prosperity or adversity. Here I will begin and go on to talk of those other matters which belong to his inner life and his life in his home.

HIS FAMILY

When his father died he shared the kingdom with his brother and bore that brother’s quarrelsome envy with exemplary patience, so that all men marvelled that he could never be provoked into the slightest exhibition of angry conduct. At his mother’s instigation he married a daughter of Desiderius, king of the Lombards, but after a year, for what reason is not known, he put her aside and took Hildegard to wife, a Swabian lady of high nobility by whom he had three sons, to wit, Charles and Pepin and Louis, and the same number of daughters, Hrotrud, Bertrada, and Gisila. He also had three other daughters, Theoderada and Hiltrud by his wife Fastrada, a German lady of eastern Frankish origin, and a third, Rothaid, by a concubine whose name escapes my memory. When Fastrada died he married Liutgard of the Alamanni, but she bore him no children. After her death he had three concubines, Gerswinda, a Saxon girl, who bore him a daughter Adaltrud, Regina, the mother of Drogo and Hugh, and Adalinda from whom he begat Theoderic. His mother, Bertrada, lived with him to old age, being held in high honour. For he lavished upon her the greatest reverence, so that except on the occasion of his divorcing the daughter of Desiderius whom he had married under his mother’s persuasion, there never once rose a difference between them. Bertrada did not die until after the demise of Hildegard, having lived to see three grandsons and as many granddaughters in her son’s house. Charles had his mother buried with much honour in the church of Saint Dionysius, the same as that wherein lay his father. Her one sister, Gisila, who had devoted herself ever since her girlhood to a holy life, was treated by the king with the same pious affection that he had shown for his mother. She died a few years before him in the convent to which she had retired.