that Norman Taillefer sang as he spurred his horse and tossed his sword aloft before the battle of Hastings.[49] Even the mythical Roland had become, three centuries after the rout of Roncesvalles, a great name to conjure with.
As for Charles’s attempt to annex territory to his kingdom south of the Pyrenees, it had to be abandoned for a time. The Saxon revolt under Widukind broke out, more stubborn and difficult to quell than ever. For the next eight years (778–785) Charles was too much occupied with the hard reality of strife in the marshes and forests of Saxon-land to have leisure for pursuing a visionary sovereignty on the banks of the Ebro. Then came the trouble with Tassilo, and, immediately following upon it, those wars with the Avars which will be described in the next chapter. But though during this period most or all of the cities in Spain which had accepted Charles as their lord were probably won back by Abderrahman, the hope of reconquering a Spanish kingdom was never abandoned, and the execution of the scheme was committed to the King of Aquitaine, or rather to his counsellors. For this King of Aquitaine was Charles’s fourth son Louis, who with a twin brother had been born in 778, while Charles himself was prosecuting the war in Spain. Born in Aquitaine, this child—one day to be the gentle and much worried Emperor, Louis the Pious—was, as we have seen, when only three years old, anointed in Rome by the pope as king of his native land; and in that land his boyhood and early manhood appear to have been spent. During those years of immaturity the government was of course in the hands of counsellors, who seem to have executed the commands of the real ruler Charles with vigor and prudence.
In 788 Abderrahman died, and was succeeded by his youngest son Hescham, a Mussulman pietist. The fierce, and for the time successful, invasion of the Narbonese province which was made by Hescham’s general Abd-el-Melec, was perhaps the cause which stirred Louis’s council to commence a war of reprisals. In 796 the country of the Saracens was ravaged by a Frankish army. In 797 Huesca was besieged, but in vain. In 801 Barcelona, which had changed hands two or three times between Christian and Mussulman, was subjected to a rigorous siege, which lasted according to one account seven months, and according to another two years. The city was at last forced to surrender, and Zaid, its governor, who had in former years played fast and loose with the Frankish alliance, was sent in chains to Charles’s court. Between 809 and 811 there were three attempts, the last a successful attempt, to capture Tortosa, the strong city which commanded the mouth of the Ebro. All these conquests seem to have been retained during the lifetime of Charles. What was perhaps more important, a firm alliance was formed with the young Alfonso the Chaste, who, during his fifty years’ reign (791–842) extended the frontiers and consolidated the strength of the Christian kingdom of the Asturias. This alliance, so obviously for the interest of both parties, cannot have existed in the year of Roncesvalles: but now we are told that “there came to the court of Charles an ambassador of Hadefonsus, King of Gallicia and the Asturias, presenting a tent of wonderful beauty,” and that “Charles so bound Hadefonsus to him as an ally that the latter whenever he sent him letters or ambassadors would never allow himself to be called anything else than ‘King Charles’s own man.’”
At first sight the result of these wars beyond the Pyrenees, and the consequent foundation of the Spanish March, which stretched from those mountains to the Ebro, may seem unimportant, as we know that the Frankish kings made no permanent acquisition of territory in Spain. But on the other hand, by the diversion which they caused, they perhaps prevented the Saracen rulers of Spain from crushing the infant kingdom of the Asturias: and the counts of Barcelona, whom they settled in the Spanish March, after having gradually relinquished the position of vassals to the French kings, became independent Christian sovereigns, and eventually acquired by marriage the rich heritage of the kingdom of Aragon.[50]
CHAPTER IX.
WARS WITH AVARS AND SCLAVES.
It is a remarkable ethnological fact, and one for which there does not seem any obvious explanation, that, almost ever since the great barbarian migrations of the fourth century, the country between the Danube and the Carpathian mountains has been occupied by a people belonging to that which, for want of a better word, we call the Turanian stock; and yet that this Turanian deposit should not have been one and the same throughout, but was the result of three distinct migrations. In the fourth century the great non-Aryan nation on the Middle Danube was the Huns; from the tenth century to the present day it has been that noble nation whom their Sclavonic neighbors have named Hungarians, but who call themselves Magyars; between 567 and 800, it was the savage and somewhat uninteresting people of the Avars.[51] The power of the Avars was at its height in the reign of the emperor Heraclius (626) when they formed the siege of Constantinople, and, joining hands with the Persians, had well-nigh accomplished the ruin of the eastern Empire. Soon after this came the revolt of the Bulgarians from the Avar sway, and from that time onward, the power of the Avars steadily declined, but though no longer formidable to Constantinople they were still securely quartered in the vast plains of Hungary, and were most unwelcome neighbors to their old allies the Lombards of Italy. Twice in the course of the seventh century had they descended upon the duchy of Friuli, and each time their invasions had been marked by that character of destruction and purposeless brutality which has ever been the especial note of the Tartar conqueror.
If the Avars were at all like their Hunnish kinsmen (which is not improbable) they were small of stature, and swarthy in color. Their long locks hanging down behind, in a kind of woven pigtails, are specially noticed by the Frankish poets. They were essentially a predatory nation, and (again arguing from the analogy of the Huns) we may presume that they were a nation of horsemen, dashing hither and thither on their nimble and hardy ponies, and vanishing ere the heavy squadrons of the Greeks or the Lombards could come up with them. They had one chief ruler, who was called the chagan of the Avars—the same title with which we are familiar as the Tartar khan—and under him, in a degree of subordination which it would be hopeless now to determine, were lieutenants or sub-kings, who bore the title of tudun. We hear also of the jugur, apparently not a proper name, but the title of a chief who contests the supremacy with the chagan. Tarchan seems to be a collective word for the Avar nobility.
The capital of the Avars consisted of a series of earthworks, which were known (probably to their German neighbors, not to themselves) by the collective name of the Hring. Of this Hring an interesting description is given by the monk of St. Gall,[52] who wrote some ninety years after its destruction, but who professes to tell the story as he heard it in his boyhood from an old soldier named Adalbert, who had served in the Avar campaigns. With a charming touch of nature, the old monk describes how the veteran used to prose on about his warlike experiences, and how he as a boy resisted, and often escaped from the tedious tale, but yet was in the end forced to listen and to learn.
He says: “The land of the Huns or [Avars] as Adalbert used to tell me was girdled with nine circles. Then said I, who had never seen any circles [circular fences] except those made of osiers, “What sort of marvel was that, sir?” and he answered, “It was fortified with nine hegin.” I, who had never seen any hedges except those with which the crops are guarded, asked him some more questions, and he said, “One circle was as wide as the distance from Zurich to Constance [thirty miles]: it was made of stems of oak, beech, or fir, twenty feet high and twenty feet broad. All the hollow part [between the walls] was filled either with very hard stones, or with most tenacious chalk, and then the top of the structure was covered with strong turfs. In between the turfs were planted shrubs which were pruned and lopped, so as to make them shoot forth boughs and leaves. Between one mound and another the villages and farms were placed, always within earshot of one another; and opposite to them the walls (in themselves impregnable) were pierced by narrow gateways, through which the inhabitants, both those who lived in the inner circle and those who were in the outer ring, used to sally forth for the sake of plunder. From the second circle, which was constructed like the first, there was a distance of twenty Teutonic or forty Italian miles to the third, and so on to the ninth, though [of course], each successive circle was smaller than the one before it. And from circle to circle the farms and dwellings were so arranged on all sides, that an alarm could be given by sound of the trumpet from each circle to its neighbor.”