These ‘capitularies’, or laws, show that Charlemagne was still half a barbarian at heart and matched pagan savagery with a severity more ruthless because it was more calculating. In the end Witikind himself, in spite of his courage, was forced to surrender and accept baptism, and gradually the whole of Saxony fell under the Frankish yoke. The Duchy of Bavaria, that had been Christian for many years, did not offer nearly so stubborn a resistance; and after he had reduced both it and Saxony to submission, Charlemagne was ruler not merely in name but in reality of an Empire that included France, the modern Holland and Belgium, Germany, and the greater part of Italy. Some of the conquests he had made were to fall away, but Germany that had suffered most at his hands emerged in the end the greatest achievement of his foreign wars. He swept away the black deceitful night And taught our race to know the only light, wrote a Saxon monk of the ninth century, showing that already some of the bitterness had vanished. ‘In a few generations’, says a modern writer, ‘the Saxons were conspicuous for their loyalty to the Faith.’ No story of Charlemagne would be true to life that omitted his harsh dealings with his Saxon foe; and yet it would be equally unfair to paint him only as a warrior, mercilessly exterminating all who opposed him in barbaric fashion. Far more than a conqueror he was an empire-builder to whom war was not an end in itself, as to his Frankish forefathers, but a means towards the safeguarding of his realm. The forts and outworks that he planted along his boundaries, the churches that he built in the midst of hostile territory, belonged indeed to his policy of inspiring terror and awe: but Charlemagne had also other designs only in part of a military nature. Roads and bridges that should make a network of communication across the Empire, acting like channels of civilization in assisting transport and encouraging trade and intercourse: royal palaces that should become centres of justice for the surrounding country: monasteries that should shed the light of knowledge and of faith: all these formed part of his dream of a Roman Empire brought back to her old stately life and power.