Wars with the Saxons and Frisians—Missionary enterprises of St. Boniface—The Saracens in Septimania and Aquitaine—Charles wins the battle of Poictiers—Revolt and subjection of duke Hunold of Aquitaine—Charles and the Papacy.

The name of Charles Martel is generally remembered as that of the victor of Poictiers, but although the defeat of the invasion of the Saracens of Spain was destined to be the greatest of his achievements, his struggle with them was but one of a long series of wars waged against all the races of infidels who surrounded the Frankish realm. It was not till the twelfth year of his mayoralty that he himself took the field to face the invader from the south. Up to that year he had been far more concerned with the heathen neighbours of his own Austrasia, and must have spared comparatively few thoughts for the danger of distant Aquitaine, and its half-independent duke.

Charles had first to deal with the Saxons. To punish them for their interference in the Frankish civil war of 714-20 he led several expeditions into the valley of the Weser, and pushed the Frankish frontier up to the Teutoburgerwald and the head waters of the Lippe and the Ruhr. The Frisians had already submitted to him, but he had come to the conclusion that their homage was worth little until they should have adopted Christianity, and he therefore employed all his influence to make their duke Aldgisl co-operate in the conversion of his subjects. "Wars of Charles in Germany, 730." The duke, a just and peace-loving prince, was not averse to the scheme, and under his guarantee missionaries were despatched by bishop Willibrord of Utrecht over all the Frisian districts. In the course of a generation they had christianised the greater part of the country, but the East Frisians were far behind the rest in accepting the gospel, and their conversion was to be reserved till the reign of Charles’s son.

Frisia and Saxony having been dealt with, it was the next task of the great mayor to restore the Frankish suzerainty over Bavaria, which had disappeared for more than eighty years. But before he could complete this task he was summoned into the West to suppress a Neustrian rebellion. The nobles of northern Gaul, in spite of their deep humiliation at Vincy and Soissons, rose once more under Raginfred, the late mayor of Chilperich II. But the rising collapsed at the first appearance of Charles, and the enemy laid down their arms, Raginfred only stipulating that he should retain his countship of Angers on giving up his sons as hostages (724).

The next three years were occupied in the subjugation of south-eastern Germany. Marching eastward through Suabia, whose warriors he compelled to accompany him to the field, Charles advanced against the Bavarians. After severe fighting, lasting over three campaigns, he returned in triumph with much plunder, a troop of hostages, and the submission of duke Hukbert. The allegiance of the Bavarians was still very insecure, but something had been done to enforce the long-forgotten suzerainty of the Franks. Alarmed by the subjection of Bavaria, the Suabian duke Lantfrid rebelled, but Charles slew him in battle, and refused to appoint any duke in his stead, in order that Suabia might more easily amalgamate with the neighbouring districts when it had lost the prince whose title symbolised its separate unity (730).

While Charles worked with the sword against the eastern Germans, he did not neglect the other great means of binding them to the Frankish realm. "Mission of Boniface to Germany." It was during the time of his Saxon and Bavarian wars that he lent his protection to the zealous West-Saxon monk Winfrith, the indefatigable preacher and organiser who won the name of the ‘Apostle of Germany’ by his long life-work among the Bavarians, Thuringians, and Hessians. After spending some time with bishop Willibrord at Utrecht, Winfrith had started eastward to find newer and wilder fields for his activity. He fixed himself first among the Hessians where no missionary had been seen since the death of St. Suidbert.^[44] Here he met with such success that the whole land was soon reckoned Christian. Pope Gregory II., hearing of his triumphs, sent for him to Rome, and consecrated him missionary bishop of all Transrhenane Germany. After swearing implicit obedience to the Apostolic See for himself and all his converts, Winfrith—or as he is more often called in his later years Boniface—returned to the North with a papal letter of credence recommending him to the Mayor of Austrasia. Charles undertook the support of the new bishop with the greatest zeal: ‘without the aid of the prince of the Franks,’ wrote Boniface, ‘I should not be able to rule my church nor defend the lives of my priests and nuns, nor keep my converts from lapsing into pagan rites and observances.’ It was the fear of the wrath of Charles that kept the wild Hessians and Thuringians from murdering the unarmed missionary, when he came among them with his life in his hand, and hewed down the holy oak of Woden at Fritzlar in the presence of thousands of heathen spectators. For the next thirty-one years (723-54) Boniface went forth conquering and to conquer, churches and abbeys rising everywhere beneath his hand, in the regions where the Christian name had never before been known.

While Charles had been busied on the Austrasian frontier a new storm was rising in the South. The Saracens of Spain were once more crossing the Rhone and the Cevennes to overrun southern Gaul. Luckily for the Franks the efforts of the Moslems were most spasmodic; the governors of Spain were, as a rule, more concerned with preserving their own authority against revolted lieutenants than with extending the bounds of Islam. The centre of government at Damascus was so far away that the Caliph’s authority was only displayed at rare intervals, and as a rule the various Arab and Berber chiefs who represented the sovereign were busily engaged in deposing and murdering each other. In the first forty years of Mussulman rule in Spain there were no less than twenty viceroys, of whom seven came to violent ends.

We have already related the disastrous issue of the expedition of El-Samah against Toulouse in 721. "Conquests of the Arabs in Gaul." It was not till 725 that the Saracens stirred again; in that year the Emir Anbasa-ibn-Johim set out from Narbonne with a large army, and subdued Carcassonne, Nismes, and the rest of northern Septimania as far as the Rhone. He placed garrisons in the newly-conquered cities, and then crossed the river and executed a rapid raid through Burgundy as far as AÛtun in the heat of the summer. After sacking AÛtun he returned with such speed to Spain that the Franks were totally unable to overtake him. But Anbasa died before the year was out, and for seven years his successors were too much engaged in strife with each other to renew the attack on Christendom. Eudo, duke of Aquitaine, employed the respite in conciliating the friendship of Othman-ben-abu-Neza, the Moslem governor of Septimania, whom he won to his side by giving him his daughter in marriage. It was probably in reliance on the aid of his son-in-law that Eudo in 731 rebelled against the Franks, and once more declared himself independent duke of Aquitaine. "Wars with Eudo of Aquitaine." Charles crossed the Loire, beat Eudo in the field, and ravaged the country up to the gates of Bordeaux. The duke, however, persisted in his resistance, till he learnt that another foe was about to attack him. His son-in-law Othman had rebelled against Abderahman the viceroy of Spain, and had been defeated and slain. After subduing the rebel, Abderahman resolved to march against Othman’s ally and father-in-law. This drove Eudo into making an abject and instant submission to his Frankish suzerain.

In 732 the viceroy crossed the western Pyrenees at the head of the largest Saracen army that Spain had yet seen, strengthened by reinforcements from Africa and the East. Eudo stood on the defensive against him and endeavoured to defend the line of the Garonne, but was routed with the loss of almost the whole of his army. "Abderahman invades Gaul, 732." He fled beyond the Loire and threw himself on the mercy of Charles Martel; meanwhile the Saracens stormed Bordeaux, and moved slowly forward, ravaging the country on all sides till they drew near to Poictiers. It was for no mere raid that they had come on this occasion, but for the permanent conquest of Aquitaine, perhaps even with the design of attacking Neustria also. Headed by the strongest and most popular viceroy that Moslem Spain had yet known, and mustering not less than seventy or eighty thousand men, they set no limit to their desires.

In the hour of danger the great Mayor of the Palace was not wanting. He did not rush hastily into the field, but drew together the whole force of both the Frankish realms, though his firmest reliance was on his own Austrasians. Leading an army whose like had not been seen since the earliest days of the monarchy—for never had Neustria and Austrasia combined for an expedition of such moment—he crossed the Loire near Tours and advanced to meet Abderahman. It was close to Poictiers ‘in suburbio Pictaviensi’ that the two great hosts faced each other, though by some freak of the chronicler it is Tours that has given its name to the battle in the pages of many of our histories. Abderahman and Charles both felt that they were about to engage in no common contest. The fate of Aquitaine, possibly of all Gaul, might be largely influenced by the result of the oncoming battle between Christian and Moslem. For seven days the two hosts lay opposite each other, each waiting for the enemy to advance; at last Abderahman took the offensive, and his host poured out from their camp to assail the Frankish line. Hardly a detail of the great struggle has survived: we only know that the Saracen horsemen surged in vain around the impenetrable masses of the Frankish infantry, whose firm shield-wall ‘was frozen to the earth like a rampart of ice.’ "Battle of Poictiers, 732." The Austrasians bore the brunt of the fighting; ‘the men of the East huge in stature and iron-handed hewed on long and fiercely; it was they who sought out and slew the Saracen chief.’ The fight endured till night fell, when the invaders withdrew, leaving Abderahman and many thousands more lying dead in front of the Frankish line. In the darkness the Arabs had time to count up their losses, which were so appalling that they hastily fled rather than face another day’s fighting. Their tents, crammed with all the booty of Aquitaine, their baggage and military stores, with thousands of horses and enormous piles of arms, fell into the hands of the victorious Franks. So ended the danger of western Christendom from the Moslem invader, a danger which has not unfrequently been exaggerated, especially by French writers anxious to glorify the Austrasian mayor, whom they have chosen to make into a French national hero. It is probable that even if Abderahman had been victorious nothing more than the duchy of Aquitaine would have fallen into his hands, for this invasion after leaving Bordeaux was degenerating into an incursion for plunder, like that which in 725 had ended with the sack of AÛtun. The Moslems of Spain had proved themselves during the last forty years so factious and unruly, that we cannot believe that even under a leader of exceptional ability they would have held together long and loyally enough to ensure the conquest of central Gaul. Neustria, and still more Austrasia, were states of a very different degree of vigour from the decrepit Visigothic monarchy which fell in 711. Even if Poictiers had fared as AÛtun, there was strength and courage enough in the Franks to face many such another blow, and we may doubt the judgment of Gibbon when he draws his gloomy forecast of the probable results of a victory for Abderahman, ending in a picture of the Muezzin calling the True Believers to prayer in the Highlands of Scotland, and the Mollahs of Oxford disputing on the attributes of a Unitarian Godhead.

The remnants of the Saracen host made no attempt to hold Aquitaine, but fled hastily across the Pyrenees, so that duke Eudo was able to reoccupy Bordeaux and Toulouse, and rule once more over the whole of his former dominions as the vassal of the Frank. Meanwhile, Charles returned to Austrasia laden with booty, and was hailed by all western Christendom as the greatest conqueror since Constantine. The Frankish poets and chroniclers continued to celebrate his triumph with such fervour that ere long the world was told and believed that he had slain 375,000 Saracens, with the loss of no more than 1500 men on his own side! If only he had been more of a favourite with the Church he would have been enshrined in history as the equal of his grandson, Charles the Great. But the zeal with which he forwarded the conversion of Germany, and smote the infidel, did not atone, in the eyes of the monkish historians, for the high-handed way in which he had dealt with the Gaulish church. Because he banished bishops, and forbade synods to be held without his leave, and occasionally laid military burdens on church-land, he received a very half-hearted blessing from the annalists of his day.

Charles spent the years that followed his great victory in regulating the government of Burgundy, where he replaced most of the counts and dukes by followers of his own, and in completing the subjection of Frisia. The peaceful duke Aldgisl had been succeeded by a fierce pagan named Boddo, whom the great mayor was soon forced to attack, when he commenced to kill or drive away the missionaries of Willibrord and Boniface. After slaying Boddo in battle, and burning every heathen shrine in Friesland, Charles left the country so tamed that it did not revolt again for full twenty years.

In 735, however, new troubles began in the south. Duke Eudo died, and Charles thought the time was ripe for the complete incorporation of the great southern duchy with the Frankish realm. He rode through the land and forced its inhabitants to do him homage, but their subjection was only the result of fear, and when he had returned home the southerners proclaimed Eudo’s son Hunold as their duke. Hunold would probably have been put down had not the Saracens begun once more to stir. "Wars with Hunold of Aquitaine, 735-40." Headed by Yussuf-aben-Abderahman, the son of the chief who had fallen at Poictiers four years before, they sallied out of Narbonne, crossed the Rhone, and seized the old Roman city of Arles. The years 736-39 were mainly occupied in driving back three successive Moslem inroads into south-eastern Gaul, and Charles was so engrossed in this strife that he consented to recognise Hunold as duke of Aquitaine, so that he might have his hands entirely free for the greater struggle. Complete success at last crowned his arms: Provence was swept clear of the Arabs; Arles and Avignon, which the Infidels had seized and held for a space, were recovered; Nismes, Agde, and BÉziers, which they had possessed since the great invasion of Septimania in 725, were taken, dismantled, and burnt, and a great host was defeated in front of Narbonne. That city, however, did not yet fall into the hands of the Franks; together with the southern half of Septimania it still remained a Saracen outpost, covering the passes of the eastern Pyrenees. For twenty years more it was fated to remain unconquered; not Charles but his son was destined to move forward the Frankish boundary to the foot of the mountains. Meanwhile the Saracens of Spain, cowed by the crushing blows of Charles the Hammer, abandoned their attempt to push northward, and plunged into a weary series of civil wars.

While Charles was engaged in his Saracen war, the puppet-king Theuderich IV., in whose name he had been ruling for the last seventeen years, chanced to die. "Four kingless years, 737-42." So little had the royal name come to mean, that the great mayor did not seek out the next heir of the childless king and crown him, but ruled for the last four years of his life without any suzerain. He did not himself, however, take the kingly title, but continued to be styled mayor, prince, or duke of the Franks; he cared not for name or style so long as the real power was in his hands.

The reconquest of Provence and northern Septimania was the last of the great mayor’s triumphs. But the four years which he had yet to live were not without their importance. In 738 he compelled the Westphalian Saxons on the Lippe and Ems to do him homage and pay tribute. In 739 the organisation of the south German church was completed by the erection of four bishoprics in Bavaria, which looked to Boniface, now archbishop of all Transrhenane Germany, as their Metropolitan. Thus Bavaria became ecclesiastically an integral part of the Frankish Church, even as politically it had already become an integral part of the Frankish empire. "The Pope asks aid from Charles, 739." But though Charles was a firm supporter of the Church in his own dominions, he would not interfere in ecclesiastical disputes beyond his frontier. Pope Gregory III. had plunged into a struggle with the Lombard king Liutprand, and invited the pious ruler of the Franks to march against the enemy of the Church. But Charles refused; Liutprand had given him some aid against the Saracens, and he was not minded to attack an old ally merely because the Lombard had fallen out with the Pope concerning the duchy of Spoleto.

In the summer of the next year the great mayor began to feel his health failing, though he had not yet completed his fifty-fourth year. He determined to set his house in order ere yet the hand of death was upon him, and summoned the great council of all the Frankish realms to meet him. With its approval he proceeded to make over the rule of the kingdom to his sons. There was no Merovingian king whose rights needed to be taken into consideration, as Theuderich IV. had died four years back, and had left no successor. "Charles divides his realm." Accordingly Charles and the council dealt with the land as if it had already become the rightful inheritance of the house of St. Arnulf. The great mayor had three grown-up sons; two, Carloman and Pippin, were the offspring of his wife Rothrudis, the third, Grifo, was the son of Swanhildis, a Bavarian lady whom he had taken as his concubine during his Bavarian campaign of 725. Their ages appear to have been twenty-seven, twenty-six, and seventeen. Charles handed over the rule of Austrasia and Suabia to Carloman, and that of Neustria and Burgundy to Pippin. It is said that he also contemplated leaving a small appanage on the border of Neustria and Austrasia to Grifo. Bavaria and Aquitaine, the two great vassal dukedoms, were not named in the division, though the former fell under the influence of Carloman, and the latter under that of Pippin.

Shortly after he had accomplished this division of his realms, Charles died at CÉrisy-on-Oise on the 21st of October 741. He had completed the work which his father, Pippin the Younger, had taken in hand, for the ancient boundaries of the Frankish empire had now been everywhere restored, Aquitaine and Bavaria had been reduced to vassalage, Christianity was now firmly rooted all over Frisia, Thuringia, and Hesse. "Life-work of Charles." The difficulties he had faced were far greater than those which his father had to encounter. He had rescued the fortunes of the house of St. Arnulf from the lowest depths,—though Austrasia had been divided, though Neustria was hostile, and though an energetic king was for once swaying the Frankish sceptre and endeavouring to recover the lost privileges of his ancestors. Having fought his way to power, Charles had then to face the one serious danger from without which the Franks had yet encountered. He had met it without flinching, and smitten the intrusive Moslem so hard that the blow did not need to be repeated. For the future we hear of Frankish invasions of Spain, not of Saracen invasions of Gaul. Charles then had won peace without and within, he had reorganised the Frankish realm, raised it to a pitch of power and glory which it had never attained before, and made possible the triumphant career of his son and grandson. As the champion of Christianity and the protector of the evangelist of Germany, he had won a yet nobler title to honourable memory, and the complaints of the Gaulish bishops, who murmured that his hand was too hard on the Church, may be lightly disregarded when we add up the sum of his merits, and salute him as the inaugurator of a new and better era in the history of Europe.