successor, seizing his person and trying to blind him. Leo, completely terrorized, seems to have lacked supporters in Rome to defend him, and he sought refuge with the great King at his camp near Paderborn, in Saxony, which was being used as a center for the operations against the recalcitrant Saxon tribes. The matter in dispute between the Pope and his enemies at home turned out to be a complicated one. Charles, in his capacity as Patrician, listened to the charges and countercharges brought by one side against the other. It was evident that justice could not be done at such long range, and, therefore, the King, after sending Leo home under the protection of Frankish ambassadors, moved slowly down into Italy in the year 800. Charles showed no haste to take up the obligation of settling the differences between the Pope and his discontented subjects. An expedition into Italy was always costly and troublesome. The situation, too, on the Eastern frontier needed his attention, because of the death of Count Gerold and of Erich of Friuli, on whom he depended for warding off the attacks of the Avars and the Slavs. There were matters also in the Western part of his dominions which required his personal supervision. His lieutenants had just won victories over the Bretons and in the Spanish peninsula. New schemes of expansion had to be worked out, and provision made for protecting the sea coast. Besides, he was interested in securing for Eastern Christians dwelling in the dominions of the Saracens, advantages which they were unable to attain through the intervention of the rulers at Constantinople. A way had been opened by the arrival at his court of a monk from Jerusalem, with presents from the Patriarch and relics from the Holy Places. There are hints also of his receiving representatives from the Byzantine province of Sicily, and of direct suggestions from influential quarters in the East, where the rule of a woman, the Empress Irene, was resented, that the great Frankish King should assume the imperial title. He turned his steps towards Rome only when he had made himself familiar with the special needs of the situation brought about by Leo’s policy. Many of his intimate advisers, Alcuin, Engelbert, Am of Salzburg, and Paulinus of Aquileia, had evidently discarded for some time all thought of the possibility of the Frankish ruler assuming the honors and rights which the imperial position, to the minds of that age, could alone bestow. Now everything was changed; the Empire was the one political idea which was common to the German and to the Italian, and it was kept alive by the influence of churchmen, to whom the existence of the Empire was the necessary complement to a Catholic Church. Charles was already acting with a recognized power fully equivalent to that of an emperor. His rule was not local like that of other barbarian kings; the title was needed to complete the political evolution, just as really as it was