The problem of reducing the Saxons was, however, a very different one. The Saxons of Charlemagne's day were a people of purest Germanic stock dwelling in the land along the Rhine, Ems, Weser, and Elbe, and inland as far as the low mountains of Hesse and Thuringia--the regions which now bear the names of Hanover, Brunswick, Oldenburg, and Westphalia. The Saxons, influenced as yet scarcely at all by contact with the Romans, retained substantially the manner of life described seven centuries earlier by Tacitus in the _Germania_. They lived in small villages, had only the loosest sort of government, and clung tenaciously to the warlike mythology of their ancestors. Before Charlemagne's time they had engaged in frequent border wars with the Franks and had shown capacity for making very obstinate resistance. And when Charlemagne himself undertook to subdue them he entered upon a task which kept him busy much of the time for over thirty years, that is, from 772 to 803. In all not fewer than eighteen distinct campaigns were made into the enemy's territory. The ordinary course of events was that Charlemagne would lead his army across the Rhine in the spring, the Saxons would make some little resistance and then disperse or withdraw toward the Baltic, and the Franks would leave a garrison and return home for the winter. As soon as the enemy's back was turned the Saxons would rally, expel or massacre the garrison, and assert their complete independence of Frankish authority. The next year the whole thing would have to be done over again. There were not more than two great battles in the entire contest; the war consisted rather of a monotonous series of "military parades," apparent submissions, revolts, and re-submissions. As Professor Emerton puts it, "From the year 772 to 803, a period of over thirty years, this war was always on the programme of the Frankish policy, now resting for a few years, and now breaking out with increased fury, until finally the Saxon people, worn out with the long struggle against a superior foe, gave it up and became a part of the Frankish Empire."[132] It is to be regretted that we have no Saxon account of the great contest except the well-meant, but very inadequate, history by Widukind, a monk of Corbie, written about the middle of the tenth century. However, the following passage from Einhard, the secretary and biographer of Charlemagne, doubtless describes with fair accuracy the conditions and character of the struggle. A few of the writer's strongest statements regarding Saxon perfidy should be accepted only with some allowance for Frankish prejudice. Source--Einhard, _Vita Caroli Magni_, Chap. 7. Text in _Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores_ (Pertz ed.), Vol. II., pp. 446-447. Adapted from translation by Samuel Epes Turner in "Harper's School Classics" (New York, 1880), pp. 26-28. [Sidenote: Lack of a natural frontier]