But to follow Charles into every department of his activity during his long life and reign would require many volumes. [Sidenote: Death of Charles, 814.] Here it must suffice to say that after all these achievements he died at his chosen abode at Aachen, on the 28th of January 814, carried off at a ripe old age by a pleurisy caught in the winter cold. He was buried in the cathedral that he himself had built, and over his tomb was placed a golden shrine, with his image and the inscription:—‘SUB HOC CONDITORIO SITUM EST CORPUS KAROLI MAGNI ET ORTHODOXI IMPERATORIS, QUI REGNUM FRANCORUM NOBILITER AMPLIAVIT, ET PER ANNOS XLVII FELICITER REXIT.’ It was but a short epitaph considering the mighty deeds of him who lay beneath, but no length of words could have done justice to his greatness. A far better memorial was left to him in the hearts of his subjects; his name survived in the mouths of all the races that had served him, as the type of power, wisdom, and righteousness. All Western Europe looked back to him for seven hundred years as the common pride of Christendom, the founder of that ‘Holy Roman Empire’ which satisfied their ideal of governance. His figure looms out, though often with outlines blurred and distorted, from dozens of the legends and romances which shadowed forth the aspirations of the Middle Ages. Within a hundred years of his death it was currently believed that he had conquered Spain and Byzantium, and carried his arms as far as Palestine. So great was the impression he had left behind him, that the world thought nothing too impossible for him to have achieved. Perhaps the notion that his reign had been a kind of Golden Age was partly produced by the contrasting years of trouble and civil strife that followed his death. But the tendency to look back to his time as a period of unexampled splendour and righteousness was no delusion, but a just recognition of the fact that he had given the Western world a glimpse of new and high ideals, such as it had never known under the brutal rule of twelve generations of barbarian kings, nor in those earlier days when it was still held together in the iron grasp of the Caesars of ancient Rome. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXIII LEWIS THE PIOUS 814-840 Character of Lewis the Pious—He reforms the Frankish court—His ecclesiastical legislation—After a narrow escape from death he divides his kingdom among his sons—The partition of Aachen—Rebellion and death of Bernard of Italy—The second marriage of Lewis and its consequences—Second partition of the empire followed by rebellion of Lewis’ elder sons—Their repeated risings—The ‘Lügenfeld’—Lewis twice deposed and restored—Continued troubles of his later years—He dies while leading an army against his son Lewis—Disastrous consequences of his reign.