The image of Duke Tassilo III of Bavaria (748-788) serves as an example in history of how the victor retains the narrative while the vanquished is deemed in the wrong. Until recently, even in scholarly historiography, Tassilo was regarded as the "small-minded," "treacherous and traitorous," or "untalented politician" who willfully provoked his first cousin, Charlemagne, until disaster struck. It is all too easily forgotten that Tassilo endowed his Bavaria with such a strong and lasting structure against the expansive Frankish Empire that neither the land nor its people could be harmed by his own downfall or that of his family. Posterity should not only thank him in Bavaria for this. Herwig Wolfram vividly depicts the fate of the Bavarian duke.