in October,20 is it due that the muezzin is not at noon to-day calling the faithful to prayer from some high minaret by the Seine. It was said that the Franks on this day slew 375,000 Saracens, losing only 1500 of their own men. The numbers are evidently but a wild and baseless guess, but the strange thing is that they could be thus reported by a sober and cautious historian, and one not of the Frankish nation (Paulus Diaconus),21 writing barely sixty years after the date of the famous victory.
The Moslem invaders were weakened, but not absolutely crushed by this great encounter. They still kept their hold on the sea-coast of Languedoc, the region which having been for three centuries in the possession of the Visigoths was still known as Gothia. In 737 they crossed the Rhone, and forming a league with a certain Maurontus (who was perhaps Duke of Provence), they obtained possession of the strongly fortified city of Avignon. Charles, whose normal occupation was warfare with the Frisians and Saxons, was recalled from the Rhine-lands in order to do battle with the Islamite in the valley of the Rhone. Avignon was recaptured and Charles marched on to Narbonne, the citadel of the Saracen power in Gaul. But though he defeated the Mussulmans in a great battle by the sea-coast, he failed to take Narbonne. Nismes and several other towns in Languedoc were recovered from the misbelievers; their walls were demolished, and the great amphitheatre of Nismes was somehow dismantled so as to prevent its again affording cover to the enemy, but Narbonne was still Islamite at the death of Charles.
In the same year in which this encounter took place, died Theodoric IV., the fainéant Merovingian who for seventeen years had been the figure-head at the prow of the vessel of the State. Charles did not covet the mere name of royalty, nor was he disposed to imitate the disastrous example of his great-uncle Grimwald; but, as the needful Childeric or Chilperic was not at the time forthcoming, he dispensed with the luxury of a roi fainéant, and for the remaining four years of his life reigned alone, mayor of a palace in which no king was to be found.
The career of Charles Martel was now drawing to a close. He was again, in 738, recalled from his operations against the Saxons, by tidings of the invasion of Provence by the Saracens in league with the turbulent Maurontus. For that year the danger was averted by the help of the Lombard king Liutprand, the friend and brother-in-law of Charles. Next year Charles himself invaded Provence with a large army, brought the whole of that beautiful land into real instead of nominal subjection to the Frankish State, and broke the power of Maurontus, who, a hunted fugitive, escaped with difficulty over the craggy cliffs of the Riviera, which are now linked together by the great highway of the Cornice.
But, this exploit performed, Charles began to sicken. He was still little more than fifty years of age, but his incessant wars his rapid marches and counter-marches between the German Ocean and the Pyrenees had worn out his strenuous frame. The hammer would strike no more blows for the welding together of the Frankish State. The piteous appeals of Pope Gregory III., who implored his assistance against the Lombard assailants of Rome, fell on unwilling ears. Charles had something else now to do than to cross the Alps and wage war on his friend and kinsman Liutprand, who had been his helper against the Islamites, and to whom he had sent his son Pippin to be adopted as his filius per arma, a ceremony similar to the bestowal of knighthood in a later day. In 740 the extraordinary fact is recorded, that no warlike expedition was undertaken by the Franks. The great major domus seems to have been chiefly occupied in arranging for the partition of his territories—they were now without hesitation called his—among his three sons. On the 22d of October, 741, he died at his villa of Quierzy on the Oise, and was buried in that great abbey of St. Denis, which was to receive the corpses of so many sovereigns of his own and other races.
Though the descendant of the sainted Arnulf though the champion of Christendom against the Saracens, and the strong protector of the “apostles” who, relying on the sharpness of the Frankish battle-axe, went forth to convert the heathen Frisians and Saxons, Charles Martel was looked upon with no favor by the ecclesiastics of his time. By the grants of fainéant kings and honorable women, the possessions of the Church in Gaul had grown so enormously as to weaken the resources of the kingdom, and Charles found himself, or believed himself, compelled to lay his hand upon some of all this accumulated wealth for the defence of Gaul and Christendom. He did it in the most dangerous way for the Church, not by revoking grants or imposing taxes on ecclesiastical property, but by conferring prelacies and abbacies on trusty friends and followers of his own, men who were without any pretensions to the spiritual character, but upon whom he might rely to use the Church’s wealth on the right side. Thus, we find already emerging the question which three or four centuries later in the days of Hildebrand and the Franconian Emperors, took peace from the earth. It is easy to see how such a manner of disposing of ecclesiastical property would rouse the opposition of all that was highest as well as of all that was lowest in the Gaulish Church, of genuine zeal for holiness as well as of mere greed and worldly ambition. Thus it came to pass, that while the rest of the Arnulfing line were venerated as friends and patrons of the Church, Charles Martel fared more hardly at her hands, and the superstition of the times—
“Doomed him to the Zealot’s ready hell,
Which” pleads the Church’s claims “so eloquently well.”
In the next century a libellous vision was forged by a famous archbishop,22 according to which a prelate saw Charles Martel suffering the torments of hell, and, on asking the cause, was told that it was his allotted penalty for seizing on the domains of the Church. The dreaming prelate, on awaking, went, so it was said, to the abbey of St. Denis and opened Charles’s tomb, but found no corpse therein, only a blackened shell, out of which a winged dragon rushed and flew rapidly away.
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