THE WEST: FROM CLOVIS TO CHARLEMAGNE 149 nising any authority which could override his own. He examined into the lives and characters of the bishops, and expected them to obey his orders. But he had no wish to encourage the system under which prelates for the most part hardly differed from lay- men j he held that they should be emphatically not men of the world, but men of religion. In his conception of the empire he intended them to serve as a counterpoise to the great lay mag- nates ; as a power more closely associated with the Crown than the nobles, and more to be relied on to support authority. Charles But the bishops were not only to be an order of fts Educator. nobility free from the temptation of the ordinary great noble to magnify his own family ; the Church was also under their guid- ance to discharge its great function of educating the people. Charles was not only keen in the pursuit for himself of such knowledge as was available ; he was zealous that learning should be fostered. He set up schools and universities, and gathered to them scholars whencesoever scholars might be drawn, the greatest among them being the Englishman Alcuin. Charles was emphatically one of those who stand out in history as heroic figures ; men who have been controlling forces, and have deliberately aimed at increasing the wel- His Great- fare of mankind. He was a great conqueror, but also ness - a greater organiser; he had a magnificent conception of duty himself, and he expected others to act up to his own standards. Those standards were imperfect ; in some respects they were no better than those generally prevalent. He waged war no more mercifully than other rulers and captains of his time; and since he waged war on a great scale, he was also merciless on a great scale. His private morals were those of most men of his time outside the cloister and the mission field, but the personal greatness of the man is shown first by the consistency of a career extending over a reign of forty-seven years ; secondly, by the fact that no hand but his own was strong enough to hold together the empire which he had created ; and thirdly, by the permanent effects of his achievement, which survived the disruption of the empire itself. On January 27th, 814, the mighty emperor died in the seventy- first year of his age. He was buried at his favourite seat of Aachen or Aix-la-Chapelle.
