Considering the difficulties of locomotion at that time this short Italian campaign against Hrodgaud seems to have been one of the most rapid and brilliant of all the military operations of King Charles. The suppression of the revolt was followed, not indeed by bloodshed, but by severe confiscations of the property of the insurgents. We have a piteous account by the great Lombard historian, Paulus Diaconus,[43] of the seven years’ captivity of his brother, who is generally believed to have been punished for his share in this insurrection. “My brother languishes a captive in your land, broken-hearted, in nakedness and want. His unhappy wife, with quivering lips, begs for bread from street to street. Four children must she support in this humiliating manner, whom she is scarce able to cover even with rags.” The next threatening of internal disaffection came from a quarter in which the sky had long looked lowering. Tassilo III., Duke of Bavaria, was the most independent and high-spirited of all the subject nobles in the Frankish kingdom. Sprung from the old Agilolfing line, which for more than two centuries had ruled the Bavarian people, he had some pretensions to a descent from Merovingian royalty, and was the undoubted grandson of Charles Martel, and therefore first cousin of King Charles, with whom he was strictly contemporary, having been born in the year 742. The dependence of Bavaria upon the Frankish crown had always been of the slightest kind, consisting of little more than a verbal recognition of the supremacy of the Frankish king, and the sending of a contingent to serve in the Frankish army, while, in all the details of ordinary administration, the will of the Agilolfing duke seems to have been practically supreme. Moreover, close ties of affinity and common interests had long united the ducal house of Bavaria and the regal house of Lombard Italy. Together they had resisted the incursions of their turbulent neighbors on the east, the Avars and the Sclaves; together they had sought, rather by diplomacy than by war, to keep at a distance from them the domineering Frank.