The rank held by Charlemagne among great commanders was achieved far more by this strange and almost superhuman activity than by any pre-eminent proficiency in the art or science of war. He was seldom engaged in any general action, and never undertook any considerable siege, excepting that of Pavia, which, in fact, was little more than a protracted blockade; but, during forty-six years of almost unintermitted warfare, he swept over the whole surface of Europe, from the Ebro to the Oder, from Bretagne to Hungary, from Denmark to Capua, with such a velocity of movement and such a decision of purpose that no power, civilized or barbarous, ever provoked his resentment without rapidly sinking beneath his prompt and irresistible blows. And though it be true, as Gibbon has observed, that he seldom if ever encountered in the field a really formidable antagonist, it is not less true that, but for his military skill animated by his sleepless energy, the countless assailants by whom he was encompassed must rapidly have become too formidable for resistance; for to Charlemagne is due the introduction into modern warfare of the art by which a general compensates for the numerical inferiority of his own forces to those of his antagonists--the art of moving detached bodies of men along remote but converging lines with such mutual concert as to throw their united forces at the same moment on any meditated point of attack. Neither the Alpine marches of Hannibal nor those of Napoleon were combined with greater foresight or executed with greater precision than the simultaneous passages of Charlemagne and Count Bernard across the same mountain-ranges, and their ultimate union in the vicinity of their Lombard enemies. But though many generals have eclipsed the fame of Charlemagne as a strategist, no one ever rivaled his inflexible perseverance as a conqueror. The Carlovingian crown may indeed be said to have been worn on the tenure of continual conquests. It was on that condition alone that the family of Pepin of Heristal could vindicate the deposition of the Merovings and the pre-eminence of the Austrasian people; and each member of that family, in his turn, gave an example of obedience to that law, or tradition, of their house. But by none of them was it so well observed as by Charlemagne himself. From his first expedition to his last there intervened forty-six years, no one of which he passed in perfect peace, nor without some military triumph. In six months he reduced into obedience the great province or kingdom of Aquitaine. In less than two years he drove the Lombard king into a monastic exile, placing on his own brows the iron crown, and with it the sovereignty over nearly all the Italian peninsula. During thirty-three successive summers he invaded the great Saxon confederacy, until the deluge of barbarism with which they threaten southern Europe was effectually and forever repressed.