CHAPTER XVIII

THE CAROLINGIAN CONQUESTS

THE restoration of the empire in the west in the year 800 was certainly conditioned by the conquests of Charlemagne. He had then conquered the Lombards and gained Rome; he had conquered the Saxons and Avars; he had made of his conquests an opportunity to extend Christianity, to convert the barbarians, and this was an essential function of the Christian emperor. All these favourable conditions had been produced by military conquest, and the history of these conquests is the most important strand in the history of the reign. Charles was hailed as Pacifiais in 800, and contemporaries saw nothing startling in so hailing a ruler who had fought more campaigns and won more battles than any general since Belisarius, or perhaps even Caesar: for unity of rule was conceived of as the preliminary to peace, and the pacific sovereign was he who enforced law and quiet order, almost necessarily in this early and violent age, by the sword.

Charles’s army was the instrument of his conquests, and the organization which made its use possible at and beyond all the different frontiers of the regnum Francorum was simple: and yet it was surprisingly successful. The Frankish armies crossed the Rhine, the Alps, the Pyrenees; passed the Elbe to the north east, and the Bavarian plateau towards the river Enns: they passed the Danube and the Tisza (Theiss) to attack the land of the Avars: they passed the Po and the Apennines and reached the Tuscan cities and Rome herself. The Frankish army fought with men of very different races, employing different techniques of fighting: Lombards: Saxons: Avars: Arabs: Greeks: and everywhere it pressed, the frontiers of Francia were in time extended.

As to the composition of the army: the old tradition that every freeman owed military service still held, but could not be literally fulfilled, for the Frankish army was now a cavalry army, and the small freeholder could not have afforded the war horse, shod and saddled, and the equipment necessary. It was once assumed that the change in the Frankish army from a mainly infantry to a mainly cavalry force took place with some suddenness about the year 755, when Pepin ordered the assembly of the army he was going to lead into Italy for May, instead of at the traditional date, the kalends of March; presumably to allow the growth of wayside grass for the horses. It is now held, however, that the cavalry element in the Frankish army had long been growing, and that the May starting date was decided upon to allow the snow to melt in the Alpine passes, rather than for the growth of grass. In any case, the cavalry element was now of predominant importance. By custom, the landholders (whether proprietors or holders of a benefice) only owed personal service in the field if their holding amounted to four mansae (holdings of from 25 to 37 acres): landholders of smaller areas could not, in fact, serve as horse soldiers. In 808 Charlemagne, however, ordered that a holder of three mansae must serve, using the help of a stay-at-home holder of a single mansa to equip himself; one, moreover, out of every four holders of a single mansa must serve. The principle of mutual responsibility for the equipping of a horse soldier was thus laid down: in fact, nothing like this proportion of horse soldiers to landholders could ever have been raised in a single campaign as casual references to the numbers engaged in battle show. Nevertheless, the change to a cavalry army was made: with great social repercussions.

The obligation on landholders to join the army for the summer campaign, when summoned, was general and strictly enforced: the fine for non attendance was the heribannum, a composition fee of sixty solidi: but not all freemen were summoned every year; only landowners in provinces adjacent to the campaign planned. The peasants who tilled the land were not, in the main, freemen, but on these too the obligation to provide for the army pressed, for the landowners of the different regions were bound to provision the expedition and received letters enjoining them to do so from Charles, well beforehand. Clerks did not owe military service (save the few who accompanied the armies): but bishops and abbots, as landowners, were all bound to send their quota of horsemen. Since Charles’s heaviest wars lay beyond the eastern frontier, the eastern Franks usually formed the spearhead of the army; all those called up had to bring with them food for three months, arms, tools, etc. Even abbots and abbesses had to send food supplies, including live cattle, driven along behind the wagon train of the expedition. This had also to be provided.

This army of horsemen not only rode to the battlefield, but charged and fought on horseback. As was usually the case in the middle ages, campaigning occupied the summer months; but with Charles’s army the starting date was determined by the earliest time at which the horses and cattle could find pasture along the route. Behind the armed horsemen went the baggage wagons, with spare armour, clothes and food, wagons drawn by horses or oxen. The rivers that lay across the line of march were forded by bridges of boats, and where possible the river itself was used for transport by boat: small boats with sails and a cabin.

The strategic unit of the army was the turma or army corps, and the tactical unit the scara. The horsemen were armed with a long lance and buckler: the lance with a narrow, leaf shaped head and cross bar beneath (to prevent its being too deeply embedded), and the buckler round, painted red or blue, with a heavy, central boss. The horsemen carried also a heavy, two-edged sword (spatha), and a short sword with a single cutting edge, like the original Germanic scramaseax; they wore a cuirass sewn with metal rings or plates (broigne). By a new departure, unknown to the Merovingians and in imitation of Byzantine cavalry, the Carolingian horsemen carried also a yew-bow and quiver, shooting from the saddle. These horsemen were far the more numerous part of the army and did most of the fighting; army servants about equal in numbers were needed to drive the baggage wagons and cattle, act as smiths, cooks, etc. There was also a small proportion of infantry, transported on horseback but fighting on foot: the fantassins. They too were armed with lance and buckler, and had special uses, such as battering in the gates of defended places with axes and trying to fire the wooden towers and superstructures in siege warfare; a few such infantrymen formed part of each scara. While the cavalry wore a casque, or helmet, the fantassins were bareheaded. Fighting, after the discharge of arrows and the shock of the cavalry charge, was mainly individual, and the possession of an especially heavy, well-worked sword or other weapon counted for much; such weapons, wrought by skilled smiths in the Frankish countryside, were expensive. The standards of the Carolingian army were almost the only feature that recalled Greco-Roman warfare: they were light, that horsemen might carry them on lances, and included the old vexillum of the Roman cavalry, now a small three-pointed banner, and the draco, a hollow, light vexillum in form of a dragon. The influence of Vegetius’ Art of War still survived, and the definitions (founded on Vegetius) given in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies.

As for Charles’s share in the victories of the Frankish army, he seldom fought in the battles themselves, but he was remarkable as a strategist and a planner of campaigns. As Kleinclausz has noted, he had a genius for bringing an overpowering force to the critical spot at exactly the right time. He conceived large operations: he prepared by collecting exact information about the nature of the country, possibilities of supplies, fodder and water (individual looting for food was forbidden, but the army as such had the right to take fodrum, forage, water and pasture, in prescribed quantities while on the march); information about the climate, rivers, ways, harvest times, and the disposition and resources of the enemy. He usually rode with his army, and if some vassal led it, he remained in the near neighbourhood; he inspired great confidence. All the army officers and leaders were those of peace time, who on campaign expected, as part of their service, to fight for their king: counts palatine, constables, chamberlains, even local counts: Carolingian marshals seem to have been of lesser importance, and rode in charge of horses and transport wagons. Neither Charles nor his officers were professional soldiers; but they fought summer after summer, the annalists noting as exceptional the years when the king stayed at home, sine hoste; probably both Charles and his paladins reckoned the summer campaigns to be the most serious business of the year.

As to the general history of Charles’s campaigns and conquests: he was first occupied in holding the sum of the Frankish lands against internal rebellion, and later in extending the Frankish borders beyond the limits won for them by Charles Martel and Pepin the Short.

His first campaign, in 769, was to suppress the Aquitanian rebellion, for which Charles asked the help of Carloman and was refused. He summoned Lupus, the duke of Gascony, to give up the duke of Aquitaine, who had fled to him for refuge, crossed the Garonne into Gascony, forced Lupus to give up the rebel, and restored his own authority in Aquitaine.

In 770, through the mediation of Bertrada and abbot Sturm, Boniface’s successor at Fulda, he allowed himself to be reconciled to Carloman, and to make the Lombard marriage.

Meanwhile, the papacy was in difficulties. In June 767 Paul I had died, and the duke of Tuscany had prevailed on the electors at Rome to choose his brother Constantine, a layman, and to have him pushed hastily through the grades of the clerical militia and consecrated as pope, on 5 July. The schola of Roman notaries, themselves laymen, usually of noble Roman birth, were affronted at this exercise of external influence: and Christopher the primicery, asking for Lombard help, deposed Constantine and had his eyes put out; he next had a Roman priest consecrated as Stephen III. In 768 a council at the Lateran, with twelve Frankish bishops present, passed a canon allowing the election of none but a Roman priest or deacon as pope, and forbidding any layman to take part in the election. The situation was precarious, and when Bertrada herself came to Rome, Desiderius marched there in the Lent of 771, had Christopher and his son killed, and refused to restore the lands promised to the papacy by the Donation of Pepin. This flouting of an act of submission promised to the Franks might have been tolerated by the queen mother and Carloman; but it went too far for Charles: he repudiated his Lombard wife, an open insult to Desiderius, in the summer of 771. He had taken upon himself to enforce the terms his father had imposed on Desiderius, and to protect the papacy. In December of that year, Carloman died.

Charles’s own intervention in Italy was now possible, for he commanded the Franco-Lombard frontier. On 3 February 772 Stephen III died, and the deacon Hadrian, who had long worked as papal notary at the Lateran, was elected pope. He had had great administrative experience and was strongly anti-Lombard. When Desiderius demanded that he should crown Carloman’s two sons, seizing the towns of the old exarchate right up to Ravenna, Hadrian refused; Desiderius marched into Tuscany and prepared to besiege Rome itself. Hadrian then sent envoys, appealing to Charles for aid.

The moment was inconvenient to Charles: he received the papal envoys in his palace at Thionville (January 773) while planning an immediate campaign against the Saxons: he did not want an Italian war. He even offered Desiderius the large sum of 14,000 gold solidi if he would restore the lands taken from the pope: but Desiderius preferred to march on Rome, where Hadrian was prepared to withstand attack or siege. Moreover, the Lombards were Catholics, and when Hadrian prohibited further approach and launched an excommunication, Desiderius was unsure of their support and retired to Viterbo.

Charles, however, decided that the potential threat from Desiderius as protector of his own two nephews was too great. He collected two armies for the invasion of Italy. One, commanded by Bernard his uncle, was to go by the Great St Bernard: the other, led by himself, took the Mont Cenis. The two armies met in the plain of the Po, to find that Desiderius was holding Pavia, and his son Adalgis, with Carloman’s widow and her two children, Verona. This city was easily taken by the Franks: Adalgis fled to Byzantium and Charles took possession of his brother’s widow and the children. Pavia stood a siege from September 773 till the following spring. Before Pavia fell, however, Charles left his army and travelled to Rome to keep the Easter feast. On 2 April Hadrian received him as patrician of the Romans, according him a ceremonial greeting hardly given in the past even to the exarch: mutual oaths of loyalty were solemnly exchanged.

It was during this Easter visit of 774 that Charles, according to the Vita Hadriani in the Liber Pontificalis, made his famous Donation of territories to the pope. The document itself has not survived, and would seem to have promised territories that Charles was not then in a position to give and never, in fact, gave. Yet the reference to the making of the Donation in the form of a solemn diploma, drawn up by Charles’s chaplain and notary, Hitherius, and signed by Charles himself and those of his nobles present at Rome, is explicit and now generally accepted. The lands given are said to have included the ancient exarchate of Ravenna, the provinces of Venetia and Istria, and the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. The implementing of the grant would have involved war with the Greeks over Venetia, and with the Lombards of south Italy: it would have left the pope with the temporal rule of central Italy, from Ravenna to Benevento, not merely restored to him the landed estates of the old patrimony, of some of which the Lombards had deprived him. It has been suggested that the Vita Hadriani overstressed the comprehensiveness of the grant or the precision with which it was made; and, more recently, that Charles in 774 was swayed by the atmosphere and traditions of Rome, and regained a greater sense of practical possibilities later, when uninfluenced by the ‘Roman ambiance’.

There is much to support this view, including the history of the so-called ‘Donation of Constantine’. In the climate of opinion of the eighth century, Constantine, the apostle of Christianity for Europe, was a name to conjure with (see p. 146). When Charles made his Donation in 774, as the Vita Hadriani states, there was produced for his confirmation the Donation which his father Pepin had made at Quierzy to pope Stephen III, and which Charles himself and all the Frankish leaders had signed: it is now accepted that the Donation of Constantine had been produced by the papal notaries as a pièce justificative, at Quierzy. This strange document related a tale quite unconnected with history, of how Constantine as a pagan had been healed of leprosy by pope Sylvester, been then converted, placed upon Sylvester’s head the white tiara and given him the city of Rome and all the provinces and towns of Italy: given him an authority that antedated both Lombard and Greek rule in Italy. The language of this ‘Donation of Constantine’ accords with that of the papal scrinium in the time of Stephen III, a reason for connecting it with Stephen’s visit to Pepin.

The Vita Hadriani, in any case, states that Charles in 774 had three copies of his Donation made ‘in the same pattern’ as Pepin’s Donation at Quierzy; some knowledge of the ‘Donation of Constantine’ may have spread from Saint-Denis among the Franks, for Fulrad of Saint-Denis had been Stephen III’s host on this same visit, and also preserved a copy of the ‘Donation’; the scrinium at Rome must have had knowledge of it. Charles’s confirmation of the grant is one expression of reverence for the ‘Romulean city’, the city of Peter; and the atmosphere of reverence for Rome is expressed also in the noble Latin hymns of the Frankish court poets of this generation. Charles was a pilgrim at Rome at Easter, 774, and Paulinus of Aquileia or some courtier expressed his own and perhaps Charles’s wonder in the hymn:

O felix Roma, quae tantorum principum

Es purpurata preciosa sanguine:

Non laude tua, sed ipsorum meritis

Excellis omnem mundi pulchritudinem.

The Carolingian poets had too much learning and too much historical conscience to have produced the Donation of Constantine: but the same impulse of enthusiastic, if unhistorical and unscrupulous, piety for Rome produced their hymns, the Donation of Constantine, and the Donations of the two Frankish rulers.

After his Roman Easter, Charles went north again, and in June 774 took Pavia, sending Desiderius and his family captive to Liége. From July 774 he used the title: Carolus, gratia dei rex Francorum et Langobardorum atque patricius Romanorum: he claimed and meant to keep control of Lombardy, while leaving the Lombards, in the main, local self-government. He put a Frankish garrison in Pavia and appointed a few Frankish counts. He took over some royal Lombard lands and bestowed certain estates on great Frankish churches. A larger measure was to restore to the pope the lands recently usurped by Desiderius, and with them Bologna and Imola, promised by Pepin in 756 but never actually given up. When archbishop Leo of Ravenna claimed to exercise all ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the lands now transferred to the pope, Charles allowed him to retain them till his death; with the pope’s very old claim to appoint the archbishop of Ravenna, the matter should solve itself.

The Lombard dukes and the Greeks in Italy were not willing, however, to acquiesce in Charles’s annexation of the Lombard crown. Hadrian reported to Charles that Adalgis, with the dukes of Friuli, Spoleto, Benevento and others, were planning revolt, with possible help from the Greeks. Charles in 775 suppressed the revolt, killing the duke of Friuli in battle: this duchy, at the head of the Adriatic, would be dangerous if open to the Greeks. The duchy of Friuli was suppressed, and the number of Frankish counts in Lombardy increased.

The papal struggle with Lombards and Greeks in south Italy was less easily dealt with: Greek colonization and influence had increased there in the seventh century. The duke of Benevento had encroached on the southern patrimony, and the patrician of Sicily, arrogating to himself the title of basileus and viceroy to the emperor, and using the royal title not only in Sicily, but in south Italy, seized Terracina from the pope. Hadrian’s forces recaptured it in 778, but could not hold it. Hadrian then wrote to Charles for help, urging that without it the Greeks and Lombards would seize the whole plain of the Campagna, from Rome to Naples. Duke Arichis of Benevento, a son-in-law of Desiderius, was now calling himself princeps, minting his own coins, dating his acta by the years of his principate, and seeking the lordship of all south Italy.

Charles made his second journey to Rome in 780 to deal with this situation. He made further arrangements for the Lombard kingdom on his way, kept Easter at Rome, and dealt with Hadrian’s large claims arising out of his own Donation of 774. Hadrian claimed in virtue of this grant Spoleto and Benevento themselves, as well as the Spoletan and Beneventan patrimonies: and also the duchy of Tuscany. Charles could only have allowed his claims, justified or not, by a costly campaign in south Italy. He therefore restored to Hadrian the Neapolitan patrimony, but not Terracina, nor would he give him Spoleto or Tuscany.

Charles’s agreement with Byzantium was rendered the easier because the emperor Leo IV had died in 780, and the empress Irene was now in power, ruling as regent for his son, Constantine VI: Irene, moreover, was no iconoclast (see p. 412). Good relations seemed possible, and in 781 Charles’s daughter Rohtrud was even betrothed to the young emperor Constantine. Peace with the Greeks in Italy seemed reasonably secure, and Hadrian’s old patrimonies had been restored to him, though he had been disappointed at the meagre fulfilment of Charles’s and Pepin’s large Donations. He had baptized Charles’s three-year-old son, Pepin, and had anointed him and his elder brother Louis as kings. Charles left little Pepin as nominal king of Lombardy, with Frankish deputies to rule for him and guide the external and military policy of the kingdom; in home affairs the Lombards were left to rule themselves.

A third visit by Charles to Rome was however necessitated in 786 by the ambitions of Arichis, duke of Benevento: he had seized Amalfi from the Byzantine duke of Naples. Charles arrived in Rome at Hadrian’s invitation at the end of 786, and in 787 he invaded Arichis’ duchy and brought him to submission. He demanded an oath of fidelity, the giving of hostages and future tribute, while he restored to Hadrian the Beneventan patrimony. While Charles was at Capua, an embassy arrived from Irene to express indignation at the Frankish intervention in south Italy, and break off the betrothal of Rohtrud and Constantine. Irene’s stern measures to the iconoclasts at the council of Nicaea, 787, had improved her relations with Hadrian, and Charles too felt it necessary to conciliate Hadrian; he therefore promised him Orvieto in Tuscany and certain towns in Benevento. When in 787 duke Arichis died, Charles allowed Grimoald his son to succeed him, and, to prevent a possible Beneventan-Byzantine alliance, did not force him to give up the towns promised to Hadrian. In spite of these efforts to avoid war in Italy, war actually broke out between Franks and Byzantines in 788: but in the north.

Charles was always loath to intervene in south Italy, when intervention meant war so far from his base; but frontier disputes between Franks and Greeks at the head of the Adriatic were bound to occur when their mutual relations were bad. Here, moreover, it was easier for the Franks to fight, and the more expedient in that Byzantium might try to stir up trouble in the adjacent Frankish duchy of Bavaria.

In 788 Adalgis, the Lombard heir, fought with the Byzantines against an army led by the Frankish missus, Winigis. He was defeated, and the Franks conquered the Byzantine province of Istria, expelling the pro-Byzantine Venetian merchants from the exarchate. One cause of this minor war may have been the non-invitation of Charles or Frankish bishops to the council of Nicaea in 787 (see p. 412).

For seven years more pope Hadrian continued to rule Rome and the patrimonies and retain good relations with Charles. His pontificate was perhaps the most notable since that of Gregory the Great for the Roman see. He had been swept to power, like Stephen III, by the Roman, anti-Lombard party, headed by the scrinium, and he was by training very closely tied to them. His uncle, Theodotus, had been primicery of the notaries and ‘once consul and duke’; Hadrian himself, though not a member of the scrinium, had been regional notary. He had been made sub-deacon and deacon, serving the poor by whom he was beloved and esteemed pious; he had conducted papal business from the Lateran palace. He had both a high notion of the position of the apostolic see, and the toughness of the well-trained lawyer. He would not tolerate being bullied by Desiderius, nor would he acquiesce in the iconoclasm of the eastern empire. The shadow of the great name of Constantine, it is true, fell over the word emperor, but Hadrian found the Greek emperors of very little use to him.

His most notable work was the severance he accomplished in the old relations between the apostolic see and Constantinople. It was he who stopped using the regnal year of the eastern emperor for the dating of his letters, using instead the phrase: Regnante domino nostro Jesu Christo (see p. 384); from 781 he dated his letters by the years of his own pontificate. Without renouncing East Roman sovereignty, he ignored it: he wrote with deference to the ruler at Constantinople, but without the old formal acknowledgment of sovereignty. He minted coins with his own name, and issued orders to the old imperial agents in Italy. It was not to be he who should crown a new emperor at Rome: but, more than any man, he made that coronation possible.

As regards the patrimony, he showed himself a good administrator; and he was, moreover, able to rebuild the walls and water-conduits of Rome. As regards his new protector, the patrician, however, he found himself increasingly powerless in large issues, though both he and Charles continued to treat each other with courtesy and deference. Hadrian certainly contended for a much wider fulfilment of the Donations of Pepin and Charles than the latter was willing to undertake: Charles never in fact gave up, that is, what he had solemnly offered at the confession of St Peter. He seems to have held that since his intervention in Italy was undertaken to secure the papacy from Lombard aggression, and since he had now himself become king of the Lombards and averted the original danger, there was no need to implement the Donation.

Beyond this disappointment, Hadrian could not prevent Charles’s exercising a practical suzerainty in the duchy of Rome and in the patrimony. Charles demanded that the inhabitants should swear loyalty to himself as well as the pope: he coined money at Rome: he received complaints against the papal government. Hadrian had to acquiesce in the direction of papal foreign relations by Charles, and, if he had avoided submission to the Lombard king, he found himself, in secular matters, powerless before his own protector. Yet Charles had the greatest respect for Hadrian and frequently wrote him news of himself, his queen and his children. He knew Hadrian’s needs, and sent him presents of horses and church ornaments, and wood and tin much needed for the repair of the roofs of St Peter’s and other churches. Hadrian for his part sent Charles marbles and mosaics for his new villas and basilicas, and saw that all Italian bishops and abbots recognized his authority; his letters were most useful to Charles as a source of information. He died on Christmas Day, 795, and when the news of his death arrived, Charles wept for him as for a father.

Hadrian had not been the only Roman to find the Frankish protectorate overpowering. When a priest of his familia, of low birth and no experience outside the papal household, was elected on his death as Leo III, the choice was unacceptable to the Roman knights, and particularly to the scrinium. As so often later, there was jealousy between the clerks and priests of the papal familia and the lay notaries of the scrinium, who were married and associated by birth with the class of Roman nobles. Hadrian had united notarial and clerical experience and been a candidate acceptable to the nobles; Leo was not. Leo at once showed himself pro-Frankish by sending Charles, in open acknowledgment of the protectorate, the standard of Rome and the keys of the sepulchre of St Peter’s: Charles was acknowledged defensor and advocatus of city and see, with all that that implied in canon law of the lay patronage of a church, even a great church. Charles, in acknowledgment of the tidings, sent Angilbert to Rome to receive the oath of loyalty from the Roman people. Angilbert was an honourable and acceptable Frankish envoy, and the oath-taking at Rome passed off without disturbance. Leo’s enemies at Rome held their hand for a time.

Charles’s conquests were in no case completed in a year, or in groups of consecutive summer campaigns. He fought beyond the frontiers of his kingdom, and often before he could complete the summer’s conquest or organize the conquered territory, news would come of danger on some other frontier. Thus, an early campaign meant to safeguard Aquitaine from Moorish attack ended in disaster in 778, and danger from the Saxons was so urgent that no revenge could be taken by Charles in the summer following: but in the end the Franks established a March beyond the Pyrenees.

Danger from the Saracens in Spain had much decreased with Pepin’s vigorous measures against them in Aquitaine, and with the divisions in Spain between the Abbasids and the Umayyads; but the Umayyads had now united the Saracens by the creation of their amirate of Cordoba. Moreover, the southern road from Spain to Aquitaine lay open to advance from the fortress of Saragossa on the Ebro, and the Saracen outposts of Barcelona and Huesca. The small Christian kingdom of the Asturias, in the corner of the Bay of Biscay, was well disposed towards the Franks, but much too weak to engage the whole military attention of the Saracens. Charles moreover was attracted to some intervention in Spain for the sake of aiding the submerged Christian population. When the chance came, he was inclined to take it.

In 768 envoys from the caliph of Baghdad had been sent with presents to Pepin, and it was possible for Charles to regard the Abbasids as the lawful rulers of Spain, and the Umayyads as usurpers. Between 770 and 777 ‛Abd ar-Rahman, the Umayyad caliph, had had to subdue internal risings fomented by the Abbasid caliph, and in 777 a group of conspirators, led by the Yemenite Sulaiman ben Alarabi, governor of Barcelona, made overtures to Charles for help, promising to deliver to him certain towns in the north of Spain. Sulaiman actually made the journey to Charles himself, reaching him at Paderborn in Saxony, where Charles had been leading an expedition. He promised him the loyalty and eventual submission of all his followers. Charles appeared to have brought Saxony to submission, and he could raise a large army next spring; he hoped that a Spanish war would at least bring better terms to the Spanish Christians.

Charles therefore kept the Easter feast at his villa of Chasseneuil, and, leaving his wife Hildegard there, collected an army of Austrasians, Burgundians, Bavarians, Septimanians and Lombards, and ordered the advance by both northern and southern roads into Spain. The southern division of his army marched through Septimania towards Barcelona: the northern, commanded by Charles himself, through the difficult Pyrenean gorges, and possibly through the pass of Roncesvalles, into Navarre: Pampeluna, its chief city, was the appointed meeting place for the Frankish armies. Navarre was difficult country, for its inhabitants were mainly Basques (Gascons), and they were used to fighting the Moors, the Asturians and the Franks, indiscriminately. The local Saracen chiefs offered their submission to Charles in Pampeluna: and he heard there that his ally Sulaiman had taken Saragossa. But when he arrived before Saragossa, meeting the other Frankish army before the walls, he found that another Saracen chief was holding it against him. He was, on the whole, disappointed of the Abbasid help promised to him. He left Saragossa, marched south and was, however, able to take Huesca, Barcelona and Gerona. He then led his forces back up the Ebro to Pampeluna, and since he could not hold it as an isolated outpost beyond the Pyrenees, he razed its walls to the ground. The Basques of Navarre were enraged, and though they could not fight a pitched battle with Charles’s well-armed cavalry, they lay in wait for him in the mountains when he returned by the northern route to Aquitania. Even now, they acted rather as pillagers than patriots, hoping to loot the baggage train that followed the Frankish cavalry. They lay in ambush on the heavily wooded cliffs that lay above the pass of Roncesvalles, and let the advance guard and Charles himself pass. The rearguard was led by Eggihard the seneschal, the count palatine Anselm, and Roland, prefect of the march of Brittany; the whole rearguard fought and was cut down, to the last man, on 15 August 778. The Royal Annals pass over the matter in silence, but all men knew, as a ninth-century historian states casually, the names of Charles’s paladins who died fighting: the memory lies behind the eleventh-century poem, the Chanson de Roland. As another annalist wrote briefly of the year 778: This year the lord king Charles went to Spain, and there he suffered a great disaster.

There was no immediate sequel to the expedition. Sulaiman fought a rival for the leadership of the Abbasid party and his conspiracy came to nothing: ‛Abd ar-Rahman retook Saragossa and asserted his authority over the Basques; and Charles had news of urgent dangers in Saxony. He left his account with the Saracens for the time unsettled, and went off to Saxony. Christian refugees from Spain passed the Pyrenees and founded little colonies in Septimania.

Frankish authority in Aquitania now needed strengthening in view of a renewal of Saracen attack, and in spite of his preoccupation with Saxony, Charles found energy to deal with the matter. Nine new Frankish counts were established in the principal Aquitanian cities, with some lesser officers; many Frankish vassals were planted out in the countryside, and Franks or specially trusted clerics were established as bishops and abbots. Aquitanian patriots still regarded themselves as having more Romanitas and civilitas than the semi-barbarous northerners, and some show of respect and autonomy had to be granted them; Charles therefore in 781 made his year-old son Louis, born in Aquitania while Charles was away fighting the Moors, king of Aquitania. The new kingdom included Aquitania proper, within the great sweep of the Loire to the north (but not including Tours, still the holiest shrine and church in Francia), Septimania and Gascony (north of the Pyrenees). Louis’ two regents, Arnold and Meginarius, ruled Aquitania in his minority, exercising only a limited supervision of Gascony. Charles continued to direct all the external relations of Aquitania himself, appointing his officers, and enjoining the acceptance of his capitularies; the young king’s powers were limited to enforcing their acceptance, and supporting Charles’s missi.

Enforcement of order among the Basques of Gascony was still difficult: Basque tribes continued to fight each other, and to intrigue with the northern Saracens. Wasconia (Gascony) now had its duke and counts, appointed by Charles, but, though these had taken oaths of vassalage, they frequently rebelled. In 785 attack from the Saracens seemed so imminent that harsh security measures were enjoined. In 790 the Basque chieftain Adelric nevertheless attacked and captured the greatest Frankish leader in southern Aquitania, Chorso, duke of Toulouse, and at this insult Charles himself was driven to intervene. He summoned Adelric to the assembly at Worms in 790, which was so much resented by the Basques that William, count of Toulouse, and successor to his father Chorso, had to intervene in Gascony. The Basques had entered into negotiations with the Saracens, and from 785 to 790 Frankish troops had gradually occupied Gerona and other posts beyond the Pyrenees, till they held some three hundred miles of the Mediterranean coastline of Spain.

‛Abd ar-Rahman, the founder of the Cordoban amirate, had died in October 788, in old age. He was succeeded by his son Hisham, young, able, and a devout Muslim; he desired to incite his subjects to a holy war and extend the bounds of Islam. He exhorted his followers in 791 to exalt the glories of Islam by the sword, and by 793 he had collected a strong army to invade and ravage Gaul. They advanced to Narbonne, burned the suburbs without the walls, took numerous captives and much plunder, and marched on Carcassonne. William, count of Toulouse, intervened to stop them but was defeated: the Saracens bore off their plunder and hung spoils on the walls of the great mosque of Cordoba. It was a great humiliation to the Franks, the less avoidable because Charles at the time was preparing his expedition against the Avars.

In 796 the tide turned. A small Frankish raiding force sent to Spain by Charles reached their objectives and returned safely; Hisham died in 801; the new amir, al Hakam, quarrelled with his uncle and the Saracen governors of the northern towns. Discontented Saracen chieftains sent to Charles at Aix-la-Chapelle, inviting his help; young Louis arrived at Aix; the discontented Saracens had conversations with Charles and his son both at Aix and Heristal. In 799 Huesca was placed by its chieftain in Charles’s hand, but the other vague promises of submission in return for help Charles distrusted. Meanwhile the Aquitanian chiefs had of necessity undertaken the defence of their frontier district, their March, and contemporaries began to speak of them as marchiones (marquises).

The Spanish March was formally constituted in 795, when king Louis garrisoned certain fortresses beyond the Pyrenees, committing them to the charge of count Borrel and count Rostaing. He used also, in defence of the March, a roving band of mixed Christian and refugee Saracens and with these helpers conquered a narrow strip of territory stretching from the coast beneath the crest of the Pyrenees northwards to Navarre. This brought the Frankish power reasonably near to the Christian kingdom of the Asturias, and king Alfonso II twice sent embassies to Charles, bearing presents and pressing for an alliance; in 798 Alfonso sent to Heristal a third embassy, with Moorish prisoners, arms, mules, and spoils taken from the city of Lisbon. At the southern end of the Spanish March, the Balearics too were captured and brought under Frankish rule: hard fighting advanced Frankish conquests along the coast. A revolt against the Franks in 800 was followed by the death of Hisham, and during the Saracen divisions at his death, count William led the Franks on to the capture of Barcelona: the March had been doubled in extent. Fresh campaigns followed every year from 809 to 812, and in 813 king Louis himself appears to have led the Franks on to the capture of Navarre. He left a skeleton government in Pampeluna, and had to return without taking the fortress of Huesca.

By the end of Charles’s reign the Spanish March had been attached to the kingdom of Aquitania, as part of the duchy and ‘March of Toulouse’, whose count William had been so largely responsible for its conquest. The land, as elsewhere among the Franks, was divided into counties, under the general authority of the count of Toulouse. Colonies of refugee Christians from Spain were allowed to settle in the war-wasted territories. Count William himself, long the friend and patron of monks, in 806 retired to the abbey of Gellona which he had himself founded, and which became known from its founder as ‘Count William of the Desert’. He died in 812, and his great deeds were sung in the ‘Cycle of William of Orange’. The Spanish March, which later became the province of Catalonia, proved a Christian bastion for north-east Spain, and a basis for a Christian reconquista.

For comparison with the Spanish March, the smaller March of Brittany may be noted. The Celts of Brittany, always hostile to the Franks, had been pressed gradually westward, and in 753 Pepin had made his way as far as Vannes, claiming tribute. By 778 there was a March of Brittany, with count Roland as its prefect, comprising the adjacent counties of Nantes and Rennes. The Bretons were never, however, willingly submissive: in 786 the seneschal Audulf had to be sent to compel the payment of tribute, and in 799 Guy, prefect of the March, invaded their lands and made the greater part of independent Brittany submit. Frankish authority, however, was never well or easily maintained; there was another rebellion in 811.