As Alfred, we are told, was at Rome in his sixth year, and had subsequently been with his father at the Court of Charles the Bald, whose daughter Judith became the boy’s step-mother, the young king must have been impressed by his memories of foreign lands. His yearly embassies with offerings to the Pope, and the restoration of the Saxon College at Rome, bear witness to his close relations with the See. He married his own daughter, Elfrida, to Baldwin II., Count of Flanders, son of the same Judith, and ancestor of Matilda, wife of the Conqueror. This brought about a connection between England and Flanders, both so much threatened by Northmen invaders. With the Britons of Cornwall and Wales Alfred’s policy showed the same moderation, sagacity, and practical skill. They were not dangerous unless united and in active combination with Danes. By the creation of English Mercia, he effectively cut them off from East Anglia; and his whole policy was directed to detach them by separate tribes and to win them into peaceful union with his own people. He had to fight them in groups from time to time, but he never attempted to conquer or annex them in the mass. And after the failure of the house of Roderick, of North Wales, Alfred secured a recognised supremacy over both North and South Welsh. His wise, firm, and victorious government impressed the smaller and more backward tribes on all sides; so that, without demanding any formal subjection, his paramount authority was recognised over the island, whilst his sphere of influence was extended to Northumbrians and Scots. The defence and reorganisation of Wessex had founded a sentiment of national unity, which was ultimately to be consolidated in a formal kingdom of all England. He made Wessex an organic, civilised, and progressive kingdom, and created it as the type which England was to follow. It was the same idea of bringing England into the European world which suggested Alfred’s very remarkable series of distant voyages and missions. The characteristic account of the discoveries of Ohthere and Wulfstan round the North Cape and in the Baltic, which Alfred inserts into his translation of _Orosius_, testifies to the king’s strong interest in the geography and ethnography of Europe. The expedition which he despatched to India, it is said, in 883, to the shrines of St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew, in accordance with his vow when he recovered London from the Danes, was a really extraordinary feat for that age; and, though some of the MSS. read _Judea_ for _India_, it is thought that the mission was really sent to Christian churches then known to exist in India. Asser relates that the king received letters and presents from the patriarch of Jerusalem; a tale which the later writers considerably embellish. A deep impression was left by Alfred’s zeal to extend his foreign relations with distant lands.