Charlemagne (742-814), a descendant of a mayor of the palace who had become king by virtue of ability, swept all Europe under his sway by reason of his transcendent powers as a warrior and administrator. He did for the first time for Europe what Akbar did in his day for India. In forty-five years he headed fifty-three campaigns against all sorts of enemies. He fought the Saxons, the Danes, the Slays, the Arabs, the Greeks, and the Bretons. What is now France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Spain, and most of Italy were under his kingship. He was a student, an architect, a bridge-builder, though he could neither read nor write, and even began a canal which was to connect the Danube and the Rhine, and thus the German Ocean, with the Black Sea. He is one of many monuments to the futility of technical education and mere book-learning. The Pope, roughly handled, because negligently protected, by the Roman emperors, turns to Charlemagne, and on Christmas Day (800) places a crown upon his head, and proclaims him "Caesar Augustus" and "Christianissimus Rex." The empire of Rome is to be born again with this virile German warrior at its head. Just a thousand years later, another insists that he has succeeded to the title by right of conquest, and gives his baby son the title of "King of Rome," and just a thousand years after the death of Charlemagne, in 814, Napoleon retires to Elba. There is a witchery about Rome even to-day, and an emperor still sits imprisoned there, claiming for himself the right to rule the spiritual and intellectual world: "sedet, eternumque sedebit Infelix Theseus."