we are told by the chronicler, “with her grandsons and the king governed all things by her discreet rule.” One of the early acts of this discreet rule was to shut up her step-son Charles in prison. But deliverance for the Arnulfing house came from an unexpected quarter. The nobles of Neustria, indignant, probably, at being calmly transferred to the dominion of a beldame and a child, proclaimed one of their own class, a certain Raginfrid, major domus and supported his pretensions with an army. Neustria and Austrasia met in battle at the Cotian Forest, not far from Compiègne, and Nuestria won a decided victory, the baby mayor, who had been brought into the field at the head of the Austrasian leudes, being with difficulty carried off by his partisans. Raginfrid pressed on and formed an alliance with old Ratbod, the Frisian, and apparently with the Saxons also. Plectrudis, shut up in Cologne, saw her power slipping from her and the Austrasian state threatened with ruin. The disorganization which everywhere prevailed had at least this advantage, that in the confusion Charles escaped from his prison (715). He gathered round him some of his father’s adherents: he fought Raginfrid, his puppet king, and the Frisians: fought them at first unsuccessfully, for they pushed on to Cologne where Plectrudis was fain to purchase peace for herself and her grandsons by the surrender of a large part of the royal hoard. After this she and Theudwald disappear from history. Charles, whose powers of recovery the Neustrians appear to have under-rated, follows them westwards in 716 and wins a great victory over them at Amblève and another next year at Vincy. Raginfrid sees no prospect of defending his puppet king (to whom Charles has set up a rival) except by seeking the help of Eudo, the great Duke of Aquitaine, who as a practically independent sovereign, is ruling all the region south of the Loire. Eudo and Raginfrid join forces and advance as far as Soissons (719): then for some unexplained cause Eudo turns back and leaves Raginfrid to face the enemy alone. Charles wins a third great victory, and now Raginfrid’s resistance is practically at an end. He submits on certain conditions to Charles, who becomes (in 720) unquestioned major domus of all three kingdoms, while Raginfrid subsides eventually into some such position as Count of Angers, where he prolongs his resistance till 724.
The Arnulfing hero who out of such a chaos of opposing forces succeeded in evoking that order and stable government which the Frankish State so greatly needed, received, apparently from his contemporaries, the name of Martel or the Hammer. This epithet, which has been sometimes connected with his great victory18 over the Saracens, seems to be more truly derived from his exploits in the earlier part of his career, destroying as he did with his smashing blows, the petty tyrannies which had grown up in the anarchy that followed the death of his father.
It is worthy of note that Charles, unlike his father, did not delegate his mayoralty in Neustria and Burgundy to any one, even a son, and that he styled himself major domus for Austrasia as well as for the other kingdoms, a title which for some reason seems not to have been claimed by his father. It is also noteworthy that he finally got the needed Merovingian fainéant into his possession by a compromise with Eudo of Aquitaine who had carried him off from the unfought battlefield of Soissons. There are many indications that both Eudo and Charles felt the necessity of sparing one another’s strength and not pushing any dispute between them to extremities, in view of the far more tremendous danger which threatened them and all Christendom from the turbaned followers of the Prophet who were now beginning to swarm over the passes of the Pyrenees.
It was in 711, three years before Pippin’s death, that the Visigothic monarchy of Spain fell before the Moslem invader. In 716 the Moors seem to have first entered Gaul in detached squadrons. In 720, the year after the campaign of Soissons, they invaded Gaul in force, took Narbonne and established themselves in the old Visigothic province of Septimania, from which they were not finally dislodged for nearly forty years. They besieged Toulouse with many great engines of war, and their retreat from this place, compelled by the appearance of Duke Eudo with an army, may be noted as the first sign of ebb in the tide of Moslem conquest in Western Europe.
It was, however, twelve years before the Mussulman’s hope of adding Gaul to the Empire of the Caliph received its death-stroke. In 725 they penetrated as far as Autun, in the very heart of Burgundy, demolished the city and carried off the treasures of the Church to Spain. The vigilance of Eudo of Aquitaine seems to have relaxed, and he was now no longer, as in 720, the great champion of Gaulish Christendom against the invader. On the contrary he entered into friendly relations with at least one Mussulman warrior, bestowing his daughter Lampegia on Munuza, a Berber chieftain, who seems to have been striving to establish a Moorish kingdom in Spain independent of the Caliphs. It was perhaps owing to this new combination that Eudo broke through the treaty which he had made with Charles in 720. There were thus two princes, a Christian and a Moor, Eudo and Munuza, each rebelling against the state to which they nominally owed allegiance. However, neither attempt at independence was destined to succeed: Charles twice crossed the Loire in the year 731, defeated Eudo in battle, apparently near the city of Bourges, and returned home with great booty, having effectually checked the separatist designs of the Aquitanian chief. About the same time apparently, Abderrahman, the legitimate representative of the Caliph of Damascus, overthrew the Berber chief Munuza and hunted him into the Pyrenees, where he was overtaken while resting by a fountain. Munuza fell pierced with many wounds, and his bride, Eudo’s daughter, was sent to end her days in the Caliph’s harem.
Thus then were all the side issues disposed of, and the ground was cleared for the great, the real issue between the Mohammedan power reaching from Damascus to the Pyrenees, and the Christian power which was embodied in the Frankish monarchy, but whose central point was now to be found in the home of the great major domus by the Rhine. Abderrahman, a brave and capable warrior, the chief who alone had gotten glory out of the great expedition of 720, when he led the beaten host back from Toulouse, prepared a great armament for the conquest of Gaul, and in the spring of 732 started from Pampelona on an expedition, as full of meaning for the future history of the human race as was that armament of Xerxes which found its doom at Salamis. The overflowing flood of the Islamites soon spread beyond the limits of Gascony. In Perigord Eudo met them, Eudo now cured of all desire to coalesce with the Mussulman and probably longing to revenge Lampegia’s wrongs on her captor, Abderrahman. He was, however, utterly defeated by the banks of the river Vienne and lost the greater part of his army. The Moorish host pushed on towards the Loire; and now, had the Frankish monarchy been in the same condition as seventeen years before, with Neustria and Austrasia divided against one another, and the Austrasian major-domat put in commission between an old woman and a child, the Moorish invasion must to all appearance have carried everything before it. But when Abderrahman had reached Poitiers, and burnt the Church of St. Hilary, the tide of his success was stayed. Eudo, a fugitive and despairing, had sought the help of his late adversary Charles, and the great major domus with a host of stout-hearted Austrasians was posted between the rivers Clain and Vienne, blocking the old Roman road from Poitiers to Tours. For seven days the armies stood watching one another, while Abderrahman was probably trying to turn the Frankish position. Then at last, on a certain Saturday in October, finding that only the sword could open up the road, he sent the masses of his turbaned followers against the Frankish position. In vain they dashed against that moveless barrier. “The Northern nations,” says the Spanish Chronicler Isidore,19 “stood immovable as a wall, or as if frozen to their places by the rigorous breath of winter, but hewing down the Arabs with their swords. But when the Austrasian people by the might of their massive limbs, and with iron hands striking straight from the chest their strenuous blows, had laid multitudes of the enemy low, at last they found the king [Abderrahman], and robbed him of life. Then night disparted the combatants, the Franks brandishing their swords on high in scorn of the enemy. Next day, rising at earliest dawn and seeing the innumerable tents of the Arabs all ranged in order before them, the Europeans prepared for fight, deeming that within those tents were the phalanxes of the enemy; but sending forth their scouts they found that the hosts of the Ishmaelites had fled away silently under cover of the night, seeking their own country. Fearing, however, a feigned flight, and a sudden return by hidden ways, they circled round and round with amazed caution and thus the invaders escaped, but the Europeans after dividing the spoils and the captives in orderly manner among themselves returned with gladness to their homes.”
So,
