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Ah! it is the wisest prince that ever put purple on his back and yet he weareth not much of that neither I see him often go plainer than I would think befitted me to do." His kingdom included Germany and France, the greater part of Italy, and Spain as far as the Ebro. As Emperor of the West he bore the title Caesar Augustus.
During the progress of the Saxon war, at the call of the Arab governor of Saragossa for aid against the caliph Abderrahman, Charles marched into Spain, and conquered Saragossa and the whole land as far as the Ebro. On his return, in the valley of Ronceveaux, the Frank rear guard was surprised and destroyed by the Basques.
So Don Quixote forgave his squire, and by that time they had reached the grove, and they spent the night there under the trees: Don Quixote in soliloquies and meditation, Sancho in pain and restlessness. In the morning they continued on their way to find the river Ebro. It took them two days to reach the river.
LXVIII. Caesar, having taken a view of the country, the moment the sky began to grow white, led his forces from the camp and marched at the head of his army by a long circuit, keeping to no regular road; for the road which led to the Ebro and Octogesa was occupied by the enemy's camp, which lay in Caesar's way. His soldiers were obliged to cross extensive and difficult valleys.
The heathen still fled, but the Franks surrounded them, closing every path, and in front flowed the river Ebro wide and deep. Across it there was no bridge, upon it no boat, no barge. Calling upon their gods Tervagan and Apollin and upon Mahomet to save them, the heathen threw themselves into the water. But there no safety they found. Many, weighted with their heavy armor, sank beneath the waves.
So efficiently did Saladin administer the country that in a few months it had regained its prosperity, despite the five years' devastating war which had preceded. At this juncture the traveller Rabbi Benjamin came to Egypt. Some three years earlier he had left his native place Tudela, on the Ebro in the north of Spain.
How did this German warrior govern that vast dominion which, thanks to his conquests, extended from the Elbe to the Ebro, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean; which comprised nearly all Germany, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and the north of Italy and of Spain, and which, sooth to say, was still, when Charlemagne caused himself to be made emperor, scarce more than the hunting-ground and the battle-field of all the swarms of barbarians who tried to settle on the ruins of the Roman world they had invaded and broken to pieces?
But he was again at Tarraco, before Hasdrubal made his appearance on the Ebro. The hazard of the game which the young general played, when he abandoned his primary task in order to execute a dashing stroke, was concealed by the fabulous success which Neptune and Scipio had gained in concert.
If the empire itself lost its unity, and divided into sections, even thus it did not lose the splendor and prosperity of its separate parts; and the praise remains entire let succeeding princes, as conservators, have failed as much and as excusably as they might that he erected the following splendid empire: The whole of France and Belgium, with their natural boundaries of the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Ocean, the Mediterranean; to the south, Spain, between the Ebro and the Pyrenees; and to the north, the whole of Germany, up to the banks of the Elbe.
In his absence he instituted the Spanish march, which extended from the Pyrenees to the River Ebro: Barcelona was the residence of the French governor: he possessed the counties of Rousillon and Catalonia; and the infant kingdoms of Navarre and Arragon were subject to his jurisdiction.
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