Chapter III: The Franks to the Time of Charles Martel (3)

At the death of Pepin the storm which had long been gathering, and of which many forebodings had appeared in his lifetime, broke forth with tremendous fury. The bands of government were suddenly loosened, and the powers which Pepin had wielded with such strength and dexterity became the objects of a ferocious struggle. Plectrudis, his first wife, an ambitious and daring woman, had resolved to reign as the guardian of her grandchild, Theudwald, with whom she was at that time residing at Cologne. Theudwald had at least the advantage of being the only candidate for power installed by Pepin himself, and it was no doubt upon his quasi-hereditary claims that Plectrudis based her hopes. She manifested her foresight, discrimination, and energy, at the commencement of the contest which ensued by seizing the person of Charles, her stepson, and most formidable rival. But Charles and his party were not her only opponents. The Neustrians and Burgundians, whom their recollections of Brunehild and Fredegund by no means inclined to acquiesce in another female regency, refused obedience to her commands; and endeavoured to excite the puppet-monarch Dagobert to an independent exercise of his authority. Their zeal as Neustrians too was quickened by the desire of throwing off the Austrasian or German yoke, which they considered to have been fixed upon them by the victories and energetic rule of Pepin.

It was owing to this hostile feeling between the Romance and the German portions of the empire that many even of Pepin’s partisans took side with Theudwald and Plectrudis, although the latter held their chief incarcerated. The revolted Neustrians and the army of Plectrudis encountered each other in the forest of Guise, near Compiègne; and, as far as one can conjecture from the confused and contradictory accounts of the annalists, Plectrudis and Theudwald suffered a defeat. The Neustrians having obtained the mastery over the hated Germans in their own country, prepared to extend their authority to Austrasia itself. Having chosen Raginfrid as their major-domus, they suddenly marched into the Austrasian territory, and laid it waste with fire and sword as far as the river Maas. In spite of their Christian profession they sought further to strengthen themselves by an alliance with Ratbod, the heathen king of the Frisians, who at the death of Pepin had recovered his independence, and the greater portion of his territory.

In the meantime, the whole aspect of affairs was suddenly changed by the escape of Charles from custody. The defeated army of Plectrudis, and many of the Austrasian seigneurs, who were unwilling to support her cause even against the Neustrians, now rallied with the greatest alacrity around the youthful hero, and proclaimed him _Dux Francorum_ by the title of his glorious father. In a very short time after the recovery of his freedom, Charles found himself at the head of a very efficient, though not numerous army. He was still, however, surrounded by dangers and difficulties, under which a man of less extraordinary powers must inevitably have sunk.

Dagobert III died soon after the battle of Compiègne; and the Neustrians, who had felt the disadvantage of his imbecility, neglected the claims of his son, and raised a priest called Daniel, a reputed son of Childeric, to the throne, with the title of Chilperic II. This monarch, who appears to have had a greater degree of energy than his immediate predecessors, formed a plan with the Frisian king for a combined attack upon Cologne, by which he hoped at once to bring the war to a successful issue. Ratbod, true to his engagements, advanced with a numerous fleet of vessels up the Rhine, while Chilperic and Raginfrid were marching towards Cologne through the forest of Ardennes. To prevent this well-planned junction, Charles determined to fall upon the Frisians before they reached Cologne. His position must have been rendered still more critical by the failure of this attack. We read that after both parties had suffered considerable loss in a hard-fought battle, they retreated on equal terms.

The short time which elapsed before the arrival of the Neustrians was spent by Charles in summoning his friends from every quarter, to assist him in the desperate struggle in which he was engaged. In the meantime Chilperic came up, and, encamping in the neighbourhood of Cologne, effected a junction with the Frisians. Contrary to expectation, however, no attack was made upon Plectrudis, who is said to have bribed the Frisians to retire. A better reason for the precipitate retreat of the Neustrians and Frisians (which now took place) was the danger which the former ran of having their retreat cut off by Charles, who had taken up a strong position in their rear, with continually increasing forces; as it was, they were not permitted to retire in safety. Charles attacked them at Amblava, near Stablo, in the Ardennes, and gave them a total defeat. This victory put him in possession of Cologne, and the person of Plectrudis, who restored to him his father’s treasures.

[Sidenote: [717-720 A.D.]]

In the following year, 717 A.D., Charles assumed the offensive, and, marching through the Silva Carbonaria, began to lay waste the Neustrian territory. Chilperic and Raginfrid advanced to meet him, doubtless with far less confidence than before; and both armies encamped at Vincy, in the territory of Cambray. Charles, with an hereditary moderation peculiarly admirable in a man of his warlike spirit, sent envoys to the Neustrian camp to offer conditions of peace; and to induce Chilperic to acknowledge his claim to the office of major-domus in Austrasia, “that the blood of so many noble Franks might not be shed.” Charles himself can have expected no other fruit from these overtures than the convincing of his own followers of the unreasonableness of their enemies. The Neustrian king and his evil adviser rejected the proffered terms with indignation, and declared their intention of taking from Charles even that portion of his inheritance which had already fallen into his hands. Both sides then prepared for battle; Charles, as we are expressly told, having first communicated to the chief men in his camp the haughty and threatening answer of the king. Chilperic relied on his great superiority in numbers, though his army was drawn, for the most part, from the dregs of the people: Charles prepared to meet him with a small but highly disciplined force of well-armed and skilful warriors. In the battle which ensued on the 21st of March, the Neustrians were routed with tremendous loss, and pursued by the victors to the very gates of Paris. But Charles was not yet in a condition to keep possession of Neustria, and he therefore led his army back to Cologne, and ascended the “throne of his kingdom,” as the annalist[t] already calls it, the _dignissimus hæres_ of his mighty father.

The unfortunate Chilperic, unequal as he must have felt himself to cope with a warrior like Charles, was once more induced by evil counsellors to renew the war. With this view he sought the alliance of the imperfectly subjected neighbouring states, whom the death of Pepin had awakened to dreams of independence. Of these the foremost was Aquitaine, which had completely emancipated itself from Frankish rule. The Aquitania of the Roman Empire extended, as is well known, from the Pyrenees to the river Loire. This country, at the dissolution of the Western Empire, had fallen into the hands of the Visigoths, and was subsequently conquered, and to a certain extent subjugated, by the earlier Merovingians. But, though nominally part of the Frankish Empire, it continued to enjoy a semi-independence under its native dukes, and remained for many ages a stone of offence to the Frankish rulers. Its population, notwithstanding the admixture of German blood consequent on the Gothic conquest, had remained pre-eminently Roman in its character, and had attained in the seventh century to an unusual degree of wealth and civilisation. The southern part of Aquitaine had been occupied by a people called Vascones or Gascons, who extended themselves as far as the Garonne, and had also submitted to the Frankish rule during the better days of the elder dynasty.

The temporary collapse of the Frankish power consequent upon the bloody feuds of the royal house, and the struggle between the seigneurs and the crown, enabled Eudes, the duke of Aquitaine, to establish himself as a perfectly independent prince; and he and his sons ruled in full sovereignty over both Aquitaine and Gascony, and were called indifferently _Aquitaniæ_ or _Vasconiæ duces_.

Under these circumstances, it is not to be wondered at that Eudo should gladly receive the presents and overtures made to him by Chilperic; who agreed to leave him in quiet possession of the independence he had contumaciously asserted, on condition of his making cause against the Austrasian mayor. He lost no time in leading an army of Gascons to Paris, where he joined his forces to those of Chilperic, and prepared to meet the terrible foe. Charles advanced with his usual rapidity, and having laid waste a portion of Neustria, came upon the enemy in the neighbourhood of Soissons. The new allies, who had scarcely had time to consolidate their union and mature their plans, appear to have made but a feeble resistance; and Chilperic, not considering himself safe even in Paris, fled with his treasures, in company with Eudo, into Aquitaine. Raginfrid, the Neustrian major-domus, who with a division of the combined army had also made an attempt to check Charles’ progress, was likewise defeated and compelled to resign his mayoralty; as a compensation for which he received from the placable conqueror the countship of Anjou.

The victorious Austrasians pursued the fugitives as far as the river Loire and Orleans, from which place Charles sent an embassy to Eudes, and offered him terms of peace, on condition of his delivering up Chilperic and his treasures. It is difficult to say what answer Eudo, hemmed in as he was on all sides (for the Saracens were in his rear), might have given to this demand--whether he would have consulted his own interests, or his duty to his ally and guest. But the opportune death of Clotaire, whom Charles had made king of Austrasia after the battle of Amblava, relieved him from his dilemma. Charles, who was remarkably free from the evil spirit of revenge, declared his readiness to acknowledge Chilperic II as king, on condition of being himself appointed major-domus of the united kingdoms of Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy. These terms, offered by the victor to one whose very life was at his mercy, could not but be eagerly accepted; and thus, in 720 A.D., Charles became nominally mayor of the palace to King Chilperic II, but, in fact, undisputed master of the king himself and the whole Frankish empire.

[Sidenote: [720-727 A.D.]]

The temperate course pursued by Charles in these transactions, proceeded in a great measure from the natural moderation of his character. [Chilperic died in 720, and Charles invested Thierry IV, son of Dagobert III, with the royal title. But when Thierry died (737) the major-domus made no attempt to fill the vacant throne.]

After the death of Ratbod, the “cruel and pagan” king of the Frisians, in 719 A.D., Charles recovered the western portion of Friesland, and reduced the Frisians to their former state of uncertain subjection. About the same time he repelled the Saxons, those unwearied and implacable enemies of the Frankish name, who had broken into the Frankish _gaus_ on the right bank of the Rhine. We know little of the particulars of these campaigns, since the chroniclers[t] content themselves with recording in general terms that the “invincible Charles” was always victorious, and his enemies utterly destroyed; a statement which is rendered suspicious by the fact that their annihilation has to be repeated frequently, and at no long intervals.

(From a French cut of 1832)]

In the year after the Saxon campaign (the date of which is rather uncertain), Charles crossed the Rhine, and attacked the Alamanni (in Würtemberg) in their own country, which he devastated without any serious opposition. Subsequently, about 725 A.D., he crossed the Danube, and entered the country of the Bavarians; and after two successful campaigns obliged that nation also to acknowledge their allegiance to the Franks. From this expedition, says the chronicler,[t] “he returned by the Lord’s assistance to his own dominions with great treasures and a certain matron, by name Piltrudis, and her niece Sonihilde.” This latter, who is called by Einhard “Swanahilde, the niece of Odilo,” subsequently became one of Charles’ wives, and the mother of the unfortunate Grifo.

It seems natural to conjecture, that Charles had an important ulterior object before his mind in these extraordinary and sustained exertions. They were but the prelude to the grand spectacle soon to be presented to an admiring world, in which this mighty monarch with the humble name was to play a conspicuous and glorious part. A contest awaited him, which he must long have foreseen with mingled feelings of eagerness and apprehension, and into which he dared not go unprepared; a contest which required the highest exercise of his own active genius, and the uncontrolled disposal of all the material resources of his empire. He had hitherto contended for his hereditary honours against his personal enemies--for the supremacy of the Germans over the Gallo-Romans, of his own tribe over kindred German tribes--and finally, for order and good government against anarchy and faction. Hereafter he was to renew the old struggle between the West and East--to be the champion of Christianity and German institutions, against the false and degrading faith of Mohammed, and all the corrupting and enervating habits of the oriental world.

[Sidenote: [600-710 A.D.]]

The most sober history of the rise and progress of Islamism, and the Arabian empire, which was founded on it, has all the characteristics of an eastern fable. In the beginning of the seventh century, an Arabian of the priestly house of Hashim retired into a cave at Mecca, to brood over the visions of a powerful but morbid imagination. The suggestions of his own distempered mind, and the impulses of his own strong will, were mistaken for the inspiration and the commands of the Almighty, concerning whom his notions were in part adopted from the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. He learned to regard himself as the chosen instrument of God, for the introduction of a new faith and the establishment of a power, before which all the nations of the earth should bow.

When his meditations had assumed consistency, he shaped them into a system of faith and practice, which he confidently proposed for the acceptance of mankind, as the most perfect and glorious expression of the divine mind and will. His belief in himself, in his own infallibility, and the perfection of his system, was so absolute, that he regarded all other men in the light of children, who, if they cannot be persuaded, must be forced, into the right path. The sword was the only logic he considered suitable to the case; and death or the _Koran_ was the sole alternative which his followers thought fit to offer.

For a time the lofty pretensions of the prophet were acknowledged only by a few, and those few belonged to his own family. But his system, springing as it did from an eminently oriental mind, was wonderfully adapted to the wants and tastes of oriental nations. But while the sublimity of certain doctrines afforded suitable objects of contemplation to the nobler faculties of the soul, the strongest passions of fallen human nature, pride, revenge, and lust, were not denied their appropriate gratification. What could be more acceptable to the natural man than a system which quiets the conscience amidst the excesses of sensual love, which takes away the necessity for self-discipline by the doctrine of fatalism, which teaches men to look down with a lofty contempt upon all who think differently from themselves, and, lastly, holds out as a reward for the coercion and destruction of opponents an eternity of voluptuous enjoyment in the society of celestial courtesans?

There is no doubt that much was done by the sword of the hardy and impetuous sons of Ishmael, but this could not alone have spread the Koran over half the world; the very faults which make it odious in Christian eyes, gave wings to its progress, and excited in its favour a deep and frenzied devotion.

In 622 A.D. Mohammed was obliged to flee to Medina, from the virulent opposition of the members of his own tribe. Within ninety years from that time his successors and disciples had conquered and converted, not Arabia alone, but Syria, Persia, Palestine, Phœnicia, Egypt, Asia Minor, Armenia, the country between the Black Sea and the Caspian, a portion of India, and the whole of the north of Africa from the Nile to the Atlantic Ocean.

[Sidenote: [710-724 A.D.]]

The year 710 A.D. found them gazing with longing eyes across the straits of Gibraltar, eager for the time when they might plant upon the rock of Calpe the meteor standard of their prophet; and thence survey the beautiful and fertile country which was soon to be their own. Nor were their hopes deferred: their entrance into Spain, which might have proved difficult if not impossible to effect in the face of a brave and united people, was rendered safe and easy by treachery, cowardice, and theological dissensions.

The first collision, indeed, of the Arabian conquerors with the warriors of the West was rather calculated to damp their hopes of European conquest. The Visigothic kings of Spain possessed the town of Ceuta on the African coast, of which Count Julian, at the time of which we speak, was military governor. The skill and courage of this great warrior and his garrison had hitherto frustrated all the attempts of Musa, the general of the caliph Walid, to make himself master of the place. The Saracens were already beginning to despair of success, when they suddenly received overtures from Count Julian himself, who now offered, not merely to open the gates of Ceuta, but to procure for the Saracens a ready admittance into Spain. The grounds of this sudden treachery on the part of one who had risked his life at the post of honour, cannot be stated with any degree of certainty. By some it was ascribed to the desire of avenging himself upon Roderic, his king, who is said to have abused his daughter; and by others to the fact that he had espoused the cause of Witiza’s sons, at that time pretenders to the Spanish throne. The Saracen general Musa, delighted to have found the Achilles-heel of Europe, immediately despatched a few hundred Moslems across the strait, under the command of Tarik; from whom the modern Gibraltar (Gebel al-Tarik) derives its name. These adventurers were well received in the town and castle of Count Julian at Algeciras, and soon returned to their expectant comrades, with rich booty and exciting tales of the fertility of the country, and the effeminacy of the degenerate Goths.

In the April of the following year, 711 A.D., a body of five thousand Saracens effected a landing on the coast of Spain, and entrenched themselves strongly near the Rock of Gibraltar. These were soon followed by other troops, until a considerable Moslem army was collected on the Spanish shores. The feeble resistance made to this descent was a fatal omen for the empire of the Visigoths. This once brave and hardy tribe of Germans had lost, during a long peace, the valour and endurance to which they owed the rich provinces of Spain; and, amidst the pleasures of that luxurious country, had grown so unaccustomed to the use of arms, that it was long before they could be roused to meet the foe. At length, however, the unwarlike Roderic, having collected an army four times as great as that of the enemy, but without confidence either in their leader or themselves, encamped at Xeres de la Frontera, in the neighbourhood of Cadiz. While awaiting at this place the approach of the enemy, the Gothic king is represented as sitting in an ivory chariot, arrayed in silken garments unworthy of a man even in time of peace, and wearing a golden crown upon his head. The battle which quickly followed was fought on the 26th of July, 711 A.D. It was of short duration and of no doubtful issue. The timid herd of Goths, scarcely awaiting the wild charge of the Saracens, turned and fled in irretrievable confusion. Roderic himself, fit leader of such an army, was among the first to leave the field on the back of a fleet racer, which had been placed, at his desire, in the neighbourhood of his tent, as if his trembling heart had foreseen the issue.

The Visigothic empire in Spain fell by a single blow. Tarik advanced with his victorious army as far as Cordova (Corduba), which immediately yielded at his summons; and he would, without doubt, have overrun the whole of Spain, had he not been recalled by the jealousy of Musa, who reserved for himself the glory of completing the splendid conquest.

Of all the Spanish towns which were captured on this occasion, Seville and Merida alone appear to have upheld the ancient glories of the Gothic name; but even these were finally reduced, and the last remnants of the Visigoths were driven from the rich plains they had so long possessed into the mountains of Asturias. It was in these rugged solitudes, and amidst the hardships and privations which they there endured, that they regained their ancient vigour, and preserved their Christian faith. It was thence that at a later period they descended upon their Moorish foes, and in many a hard-fought battle, the frequent theme of ballad and romaunt, recovered, step by step, the fair possessions which their ancestors had won and lost.

And thus by a single victory Spain was added to the vast dominions of the caliph, and the cross once more retired before the crescent. Nor did it seem that the Pyrenees, any more than the Rock of Gibraltar, were to prove a barrier to the devastating flood of Islamism. About 718 A.D., Zama, the Arabian viceroy of Spain, made himself master of that portion of Gaul, on the slopes of the eastern Pyrenees, of which the Goths had hitherto retained possession. In 731 A.D. he stormed Narbonne, the capital of the province, and having put all the male inhabitants capable of bearing arms to the sword, he sent away the women and children into captivity. He then pushed forward into Aquitaine, and laid siege to Toulouse, which proved the limit of his progress; for it was there that he was defeated by Eudo, the duke of the country, who was roused to a desperate effort by the danger of his capital. The check thus given to the onward march of the Moslems was of short duration. Anbasa, the successor of Zama, about four years afterwards once more made a movement in advance. Taking a more easterly direction, he stormed and plundered Carcassonne and Nîmes (Nemausus); and having devastated the country as far as the Rhone, returned laden with booty across the Pyrenees.

Duke Eudes of Aquitaine, deprived of the fruits of his single victory, resigned all hopes of successfully resisting the invaders, and endeavoured to preserve himself from utter ruin by an alliance with his formidable foes. He is even said to have so far belied his character of Christian prince as to give his own daughter in marriage, or concubinage, to Munuza, the governor of the newly made Gallic conquests.

It appears that the expeditions of the Saracens into Gaul had been hitherto made by individual generals on a comparatively small scale, and on their own responsibility. The unusually slow progress of their arms at this period, is to be ascribed less to any fear of opposition, than to inward dissensions in the Arabian empire, and a rapid succession of caliphs singularly unlike in their characters and views. Nine short years (715-724 A.D.) had seen the cruel Suleiman succeeded by the severe, yet just and upright Omar, the luxurious epicurean Yazid, and the little-minded, calculating Hisham.

[Sidenote: [724-728 A.D.]]

It is probable, therefore, that, amid more pressing anxieties and interests, the distant conquest of Spain was forgotten or neglected by the court at Damascus; and that the generals, who commanded in that country, were apt to indulge in ideas inconsistent with their real position as satraps and slaves of an imperial master. But a change was at hand, and the new actor Abderrahman (Abd al-Rahman), who suddenly appeared upon the scene with an army of four hundred thousand men, was charged with a twofold commission,--to chastise the presumption of Munuza, whose alliance with Eudo was regarded with suspicion,--and to bring the whole of Gaul under the sceptre of the caliph and the law of Mohammed. Regarding Munuza as a rebel and a semi-apostate, Abderrahman besieged him in the town of Cerdagne, to which he fled for refuge, and, having driven him to commit suicide, sent his head, together with his wife, the daughter of Eudes, as a welcome present to the caliph Hisham.

The victorious Saracens then marched on past Pampeluna,[125] and, making their way through the narrow defiles on the western side of the Pyrenean chain, poured down upon the plains with their innumerable hosts as far as the river Garonne. The city of Bordeaux was taken and sacked, and still they pressed on impetuously and without opposition, until they reached the river Dordogne, where Eudes, burning with rage at the treatment which his daughter had received, made a fruitless attempt to stop them. Irritated rather than checked by his feeble efforts, the overwhelming tide poured on. The standard of the prophet soon floated from the towers of Poitiers, and even Tours, the city of the holy St. Martin, was in danger of being polluted by the presence of insulting infidels, when, in the hour of Europe’s greatest dread and danger, the champion of Christendom appeared at last, to do battle with the hitherto triumphant enemies of the cross.

It seems strange at first sight that the danger, which had so long been threatening Europe from the side of Spain, should not have called forth an earlier and more effectual resistance from those whose national and religious existence was at stake. Abderrahman had now made his way into the very centre of modern France; had taken and plundered some of the wealthiest towns in the Frankish Empire; and, after burning or desecrating every Christian church he met with, was marching on the hallowed sanctuary of the patron saint, enriched by the offerings of ages; without encountering a single foe who could even hope to stay his progress. Where was the “invincible” and ubiquitous Charles, who was wont to fall like a thunderbolt upon his enemies? We might indeed be surprised at his seeming tardiness, did we not know the extraordinary difficulties with which he had to struggle, and the seemingly impossible task he had to perform. It was not with the modern superstition of Mohammed alone that he had to contend, but with the hoary heathenism of the north; not with the Saracens alone, but with his barbarous kinsmen--with nations as hardy and warlike as his own Austrasian warriors, and animated no less than the followers of Mohammed with an indomitable hatred of the Christian name. Enemies were ready to pour upon him from every side, from the green slopes of the Pyrenees and over the broad waters of the Rhine; nor could he reckon upon the fidelity of all who lay within these boundaries.

[Sidenote: [728-732 A.D.]]

During the whole of the ten years in which the Saracens were crossing the Pyrenees and establishing themselves in Gaul, Charles was constantly engaged in wars with his German neighbours. In that short period he made campaigns against the Frisians, the Swabians, and the Bavarians, the last of whom (as we have seen) he even crossed the Danube to attack in their own country. As late as 728 A.D., when Abderrahman must have been already meditating his desolating march, Charles had to turn his arms once more against the Saxons; and in 731 A.D., the very year before he met the Saracens at Poitiers, he marched an army into Aquitaine to quell the rebellion of Duke Eudes.

Such were some of the adverse circumstances under which Charles had to make his preparations, and under which he encamped with his veterans in the neighbourhood of Poitiers, where, for the first time in his life, he beheld the white tents of the Moslem invaders, covering the land as far as the eye could reach.

We cannot doubt that he had long been looking forward to this hour with an anxious though intrepid heart, for all depended upon him; and that the wars in which he had lately been engaged, were the more important in his eyes, because their successful termination was necessary to secure his rear, and increase the limits of his war-ban when the time for action should arrive.

The hitherto unconquered Saracens, who had carried the banner of their prophet in almost uninterrupted triumph from the deserts of Arabia to the banks of the Loire, were destined to find at last an insuperable barrier in the brave hearts of Charles and his Austrasian followers.

On a Sunday, in the month of October, 732, after trying each other’s strength in skirmishes of small importance during the whole of the previous week, the two armies, invoking respectively the aid of Christ and Mohammed, came to a general engagement on the plains between Poitiers and Tours. The rapid onslaught of the Ishmaelites, by which they were accustomed to bear everything before them, recoiled from the steady valour and iron front of the Franks, whose heavy swords made dreadful havoc among their lightly clad opponents. Repulsed, but unbroken in courage and determination, resolved to force their way through that wall of steel or to dash themselves to death against it, the gallant Moslems repeated their wild charges until sunset. At every repulse their blood flowed in torrents, and at the end of the day they found themselves farther than ever from the goal, and gazed upon far more dead upon the slippery field than remained alive in their ranks. Hopeless of being able to renew the contest, they retreated in the night, and, for the first time, fled before an enemy. On the following morning, when the Franks again drew up in battle-array, the camp of the foe was discovered to be empty, so that, instead of awaiting the attack, they had the more agreeable task of plundering the tents and pursuing the fugitives. Abderrahman himself was found among the dead, and around him, according to the not very credible account of the chroniclers,[v] lay three hundred thousand of his soldiers; while the Franks lost only fifteen hundred men.

Eudo, who after his defeat on the Dordogne had taken refuge with his more merciful enemy Charles, was present in the battle and took part in the pursuit and plunder. It was after this glorious triumph over the most formidable enemies of his country and religion that Charles received the surname of Martel (the hammer), by which he has since been known in history.

The importance of this victory to all succeeding ages has often been enlarged upon, and can hardly be exaggerated. The fate of Europe, humanly speaking, hung upon the sword of the Frankish mayor; and but for Charles, and the bold German warriors who had learned the art and practice of war under him and his glorious father, the heart of Europe might even now be in the possession of the Moslem; and the mosque and the harem might stand where now we see the spire of the Christian church, and the home of the Christian family.[q]

FOOTNOTES

[119] [His soldiers sang a song which Vopiscus[c] quotes:

“_Mille Sarmatas, mille Francos, semel et semel occidimus_
_Mille mille mille mille mille Persas quærimus._”

This song which became a street song in Rome is perhaps the first appearance of the name in Roman history.]

[120] [He is also called Hlodowig and Chlodwig, and succeeded his father in 481.]

[121] [Also spelled Hlothehild and Clothildis.]

[122] [Clovis defeated the Alamanni in 496, but not, as is wrongly stated, at Tolbiacum or Zülpich.]

[123] [The absorption of the Burgundian kingdom by the Franks is vaguely reflected in the great German epic, the _Nibelungenlied_.]

[124] [Henri Martin[w] says that _Luco-Fago_ appears to be the same as _Latofao_, where a great battle had already been fought in 596, and which is identified with the village of _Lafaux_ between Laon and Soissons.]

[125] [According to Strabo[x] this town, called in Roman times Pompelo, derived its name from Pompey the Great, who rebuilt it in 68 B.C.]