Your name will divide opinion for as long as Europe lasts, and many think only of your overweening ambition. Yet you saved your country from chaos, and even as your armies marched across the continent they were engaged in an act of creation as much as destruction, resulting in the making of modern Europe. And in their wake you imposed a unified legal code that has never been replaced. Even in England where you were both feared and reviled, the consequence of those long years of conflict was the beginning of political reform that eventually led to universal suffrage.