Whatever the cause, Charles determined to accept the invitation to interfere in the affairs of the Spanish peninsula. At Easter (778) he was at Chasseneuil, in Aquitaine, about forty miles south of his grandfather’s battle-field at Poitiers. He opened his campaign early: of course the warmer climate of Spain justified much earlier operations than were possible in the late spring of undrained Saxon-land. Having spent the winter in preparations he had a large army at his disposal, and dividing it according to his usual custom, he ordered the Austrasian part of it to cross the Eastern Pyrenees. In this division of the army there were not only, as we might naturally expect, men of Septimania, of Provence and Burgundy, but some of Charles’s new Lombard subjects from Italy: and even a contingent sent by the Bavarian Tassilo. Charles himself, with the western portion of his army, marched probably by the old Roman road, passing from St. Jean de la Port over a crest of the Pyrenees 5000 feet high, into that which has since become the kingdom of Navarre. The highest point of this road, the “Summus Pyreneus” of the Roman road books, looked down on the wild and narrow defile of Roncesvalles.
It had been ordered that the two sections of the army should meet at Cæsar-Augusta, now Saragossa, on the Ebro. Both sections appear to have crossed the Pyrenees without difficulty, and Charles, descending into Navarre, laid siege to Pampelona and took it apparently with little difficulty. The reader learns with some surprise that Pampelona had previously belonged to the little Christian kingdom of the Asturias, against whom Charles must therefore have now been waging war.
And this was really the only warlike deed in the whole campaign: for all the rest of the operations recorded by the chroniclers (who evidently have something to conceal in this part of their story) cannot be dignified by the name of war. Charles is said to have crossed the Ebro by a ford, to have approached, perhaps entered, Saragossa, to have received the hostages whom Ibn-el-Arabi and another Saracen chief whom the chronicler calls Abuthaur (probably Abu Taker) brought to him. No doubt the hostages represented the surrender of a certain number of cities in the corner of Spain between the Ebro and the Pyrenees, but how many we have no means of deciding. In the month of August Charles set out on his return march, taking Ibn-el-Arabi with him in chains. Evidently the expedition had been a comparative failure: the large promises of Ibn-el-Arabi had not been fulfilled, and Charles, resentful, perhaps suspecting treachery, determined not to suffer the evil counsellor to be at large.
The cause of the failure was probably in part to be found in the premature rising of Abderrahman-ibn-Habib, son-in-law of Yussuf, who, before Charles entered Spain, had landed in Murcia with an army of Berbers, and had raised the standard of the Abbaside caliphs against his namesake Abderrahman-ben-Merwan. The utter failure of this expedition probably made it hopeless for Charles to proceed beyond the Ebro.
Returning to Pampelona Charles levelled the walls of that city to the ground, to prevent its rebelling against him, and then began his march across the Pyrenees. On the highest point of the pass an ambush had been planted by the Wascones whose operations were concealed by the dense forests growing there. When the baggage-train and rear-guard came in sight they dashed down upon them. The surprise and the possession of the higher ground fully compensated for the mountaineers’ inferiority in arms and discipline; in fact, in such an encounter the heavier armor of the Franks was a positive disadvantage. By the confession of the biographer of Charlemagne at least the whole of the rear-guard were cut to pieces, and with them fell many of the nobles of Charles’s court, notably Eggihard the seneschal, Anselm the count of the palace; and Hruodland the governor of the Breton March. As night soon fell and the nimble invaders dispersed rapidly to their homes and hiding-places, revenge was impossible, and Charles returned to Chasseneuil with clouded brow, all his satisfaction at his successes in Spain—such as they were—being marred by this dishonor to his arms and by the loss of so many of his friends.
The date of this disaster is fixed by the epitaph of the seneschal Eggihard to the 18th of August 778. The place, by undeviating tradition, has been identified with the wild gorge of Roncesvalles. It is indeed somewhat difficult to understand how even the main body of the Frankish army could have escaped, if the foes were on the very summit of the pass, and if the skirmish took place at Roncesvalles on the Spanish side of the mountain: but this may be accounted for by the distance at which the baggage-train and the rear-guard lagged behind the van.
It was at this same point of the Pyrenean ridge and through this same defile of Roncesvalles that Soult’s gallant soldiers forced their way in 1813, when the French marshal made his brilliant, but unsuccessful, attempt to turn Wellington’s position and raise the siege of Pampelona.
But who were these Wascones, and what was their quarrel with Charles? Certainly they were not Saracens or Mussulmans as the minstrels of later centuries supposed. A part of the mysterious Basque race, which has throughout the historic period occupied the high upland valleys on either side of the Western Pyrenees, and has given its name to Biscay in Spain and to Gascony in France, these mountaineers represent probably the oldest population of Europe of which any traces now remain. Their language, bearing no relation to any Aryan or Semitic tongue, is to this day one of the great unsolved enigmas of philology. As has been said, they were certainly not Mussulmans, and they may have professed and called themselves Christians, but it is not necessary to seek for any deep political combination, Christian or Mohammedan, to account for their attack on Charles’s baggage-train. The men whose ancestors had been driven, perhaps two thousand years before, into those mountains by the Celts, were determined, and had been determined ever since, to keep their last asylum free from the foot of the invader. Roman and Goth had vainly tried to subdue them, and now this Frankish interloper should have a lesson that should prevent his paying too frequent visits to their mountains. Theirs was a savage love, not merely of independence but of absolute isolation: that, and the attractions of the Frankish baggage-train seem quite sufficient to account for the disaster of Roncesvalles.
Among the nobles who fell was, as has been said, Hruodland, governor of the Breton March. This is none other than the far-famed Roland of mediæval romance. The minstrels and trouveurs of much later centuries have invented for him a relationship to Charlemagne, have mated him with Oliver, and have said a thousand beautiful things concerning his life and his heroic death; but, of all this, authentic history knows nothing. And yet authentic history cannot afford altogether to ignore even the Roland of romance, since it was—
De L’Allemaigne et de Rollant
Et d’Olivier et de Vassaux
Qui morurent en Rainschevaux,