A canal joining the Rhine and Danube and thus making a continuous waterway between East and West was planned and even begun, but had to wait till modern times for its completion. Charlemagne possessed the vision and enterprise that did not quail before big undertakings, but he lacked the money and labour necessary for carrying them out. Unlike the Roman Emperors of classic times he had no treasury on whose taxes he could draw; but depended, save for certain rents, on the revenues of his private estates that were usually paid ‘in kind’, that is to say, not in coin but at the rate of so many head of cattle, or of so much milk, corn, or barley, according to the means of the tenant. Of these supplies he kept a careful account even to the number of hens on the royal farms and the quantity of eggs that they laid. Yet at their greatest extent revenues ‘in kind’ could do little more than satisfy the daily needs of the palace. The chief debt that the Frankish nation owed to the state was not financial but military, the obligation of service in the field laid on every freeman. As the Empire increased in size this became so irksome that the system was somewhat modified. In future men who possessed less than a certain quantity of land might join together and pay one or two of their number, according to the size of their joint properties, to represent them in the army abroad, while the rest remained at home to see to the cultivation of the crops. [Sidenote: Court of Charlemagne] Charlemagne was very anxious to raise a body of labourers from each district to assist in his building schemes, but this suggestion awoke a storm of indignation. Landowners maintained that they were only required by law to repair the roads and bridges in their own neighbourhood, not to put their tenants at the disposal of the Emperor that he might send them at his whim from Aquitaine to Bavaria, or from Austria to Lombardy; and in face of this opposition many of his designs ceased abruptly from lack of labour. A royal palace and cathedral, adorned with columns and mosaics from Ravenna, were, however, completed at Aachen; and here Charlemagne established his principal residence and gathered his court round him. The life of this ‘new Rome’, as he loved to call it, was simple in the extreme; for the Emperor, like a true Frank, hated unnecessary ostentation and ceremony. When the chief nobles and officials assembled twice a year in the spring and autumn to debate on public matters, he would receive them in person, thanking them for the gifts they had brought him, and walking up and down amongst them to jest with one and ask questions of another with an informality that would have scandalized the court at Constantinople.