to Ratisbon, which he evidently intended now to make his headquarters till the end of the Avar war, and kept his Christmas there. Next year, however (792), broke out the conspiracy of Pippin the Hunchback, and this probably occupied so much of Charles’s attention as to make it impossible to undertake an expedition into Avar-land. He remained, however, during the whole year in Bavaria, and ordered the construction of a bridge of boats which he might in the next campaign throw across the Danube, and so at any moment unite the two armies marching along the opposite banks of the river. In 793 came the terrible tidings of the destruction of Theodoric’s army by the banks of the Weser, and the rekindling of the Saxon war, deadlier and fiercer than ever. The abortive attempt to canalize the feeders of the Danube and the Rhine, and so unite those two great arteries of his kingdom, occupied Charles all the summer of that year. On its failure he recognized that the war against the Avars must be suspended for a season, at any rate as far as his personal share in it was concerned. He set his face northward and made Frankfurt, Aachen, and the towns of Saxon-land itself, his abiding places during the six years that followed. But it seems that the great campaign of 791 had been even more successful than it was thought to be at the time. There appear to have been jealousies and rivalries in the Avar kingdom which, as soon as the restraint of fear was removed, as soon as it was seen that the _chagan_ was not invincible, broke forth into open dissension and completed the wreck of the barbarous state. In the summer of 795, while Charles, keenly intent on the Saxon war, was encamped by the Elbe in a place near to the present site of Lüneburg, there came to him messengers from a _tudun_ of the Avars announcing his willingness to be baptized and to hand over his people and land to the Frankish king. And in fact next year this _tudun_ came according to his promise to Aachen, and there made his formal submission to Charles. He and his followers were baptized and returned home enriched by royal gifts.