This office from being a sort of royal stewardship had grown to be the governing power de facto. While Theodoric, the Phantom King, was having his long locks dressed and perfumed, his Maire du Palais, Charles, was moulding and welding his kingdom, and at the same time staying the Mohammedan flood which was pouring over the Pyrenees; and, by his final and decisive blow in defence of the Christianity espoused by Clovis, earning the name Charles Martel (the hammer).
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Less than one hundred years after the death of Clovis, there had come out of Asia, that birthplace of religions, a new faith, which was destined to be for centuries the scourge of Christendom, and which to-day rules one-third of the human family. Zoroaster, Buddha, Christ, had successively come with saving message to humanity, and now (600 A.D.) Mohammed believed himself divinely appointed to drive out of Arabia the idolatry of ancient Magianism (the religion of Zoroaster).
Christianity had passed through strange vicissitudes. Kings, Emperors, Popes, and Bishops had been terrible custodians of its truths, and while many still held it in its primitive purity, ecclesiastics were fiercely fighting over the nature of the Trinity, the divinity of the Virgin Mother, and the Church was shaken to its foundation by furious factions.
In this hour of weakness, the Persians (590 A.D.) had conquered Asia Minor. Bethlehem, Gethsemane, and Calvary were profaned; the Holy Sepulchre had been burned, and the cross carried off amid shouts of laughter. Magianism had insulted Christianity, and no miracle had interposed! The heavens did not roll asunder, nor did the earth open her abysses to swallow them up. There was consternation and doubt in Christendom.
Such was the state of the Church when Mohammedanism came into existence. "There is but one God, and Mohammed is his Prophet." Such was its battle-cry and its creed, and the moral precepts of the Koran its gospel. There seems nothing in this to account for the mad enthusiasm and the passion for worship in its followers. But in less than a hundred years this lion out of Arabia had subjected Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Northern Africa, and the Spanish Peninsula. Now, sword in one hand, and the Koran in the other, the Mohammedan had crossed the Pyrenees and was in Southern Gaul.
Under the strange magic of this faith, the largest religious empire the world had known had sprung into existence, stretching from the Chinese Wall to the Atlantic; from the Caspian to the Indian Ocean; and Jerusalem, the metropolis of Christianity-Jerusalem, the Mecca of the Christian, was lost! The crescent floated over the birthplace of our Lord, and notwithstanding the temporary successes of the Crusades, it does to this day.
If the Pyrenees were passed, the very existence of Christendom was threatened. Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne, averted this danger when he stayed the infidel flood at the battle of Tours, 732 A.D.
Pepin, the son of Charles Martel, who succeeded him as Maire du Palais, does not seem to have had the temper or spirit of an usurper, but simply to have been an energetic, resolute man who was bored by the circumlocution of governing through a King who did not exist. He determined to put an end to the fiction, and to cut the Gordian knot by first cutting the long curls of the last Merovingian, Childeric; and then putting the crown upon his own head, he sent the unfortunate phantom of royalty to a monastery, to reflect upon the uncertainty of human pleasures and events. By right of manhood and superiority, the Carlovingian line had succeeded to the Merovingian.
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