The Historians' History of the World 07

And thus by a single victory Spain was added to the vast dominions of the caliph, and the cross once more retired before the crescent. Nor did it seem that the Pyrenees, any more than the Rock of Gibraltar, were to prove a barrier to the devastating flood of Islamism. About 718 A.D., Zama, the Arabian viceroy of Spain, made himself master of that portion of Gaul, on the slopes of the eastern Pyrenees, of which the Goths had hitherto retained possession. In 731 A.D. he stormed Narbonne, the capital of the province, and having put all the male inhabitants capable of bearing arms to the sword, he sent away the women and children into captivity. He then pushed forward into Aquitaine, and laid siege to Toulouse, which proved the limit of his progress; for it was there that he was defeated by Eudo, the duke of the country, who was roused to a desperate effort by the danger of his capital. The check thus given to the onward march of the Moslems was of short duration. Anbasa, the successor of Zama, about four years afterwards once more made a movement in advance. Taking a more easterly direction, he stormed and plundered Carcassonne and Nîmes (Nemausus); and having devastated the country as far as the Rhone, returned laden with booty across the Pyrenees.

Duke Eudes of Aquitaine, deprived of the fruits of his single victory, resigned all hopes of successfully resisting the invaders, and endeavoured to preserve himself from utter ruin by an alliance with his formidable foes. He is even said to have so far belied his character of Christian prince as to give his own daughter in marriage, or concubinage, to Munuza, the governor of the newly made Gallic conquests.

It appears that the expeditions of the Saracens into Gaul had been hitherto made by individual generals on a comparatively small scale, and on their own responsibility. The unusually slow progress of their arms at this period, is to be ascribed less to any fear of opposition, than to inward dissensions in the Arabian empire, and a rapid succession of caliphs singularly unlike in their characters and views. Nine short years (715-724 A.D.) had seen the cruel Suleiman succeeded by the severe, yet just and upright Omar, the luxurious epicurean Yazid, and the little-minded, calculating Hisham.

[724-728 A.D.]

It is probable, therefore, that, amid more pressing anxieties and interests, the distant conquest of Spain was forgotten or neglected by the court at Damascus; and that the generals, who commanded in that country, were apt to indulge in ideas inconsistent with their real position as satraps and slaves of an imperial master. But a change was at hand, and the new actor Abderrahman (Abd al-Rahman), who suddenly appeared upon the scene with an army of four hundred thousand men, was charged with a twofold commission,—to chastise the presumption of Munuza, whose alliance with Eudo was regarded with suspicion,—and to bring the whole of Gaul under the sceptre of the caliph and the law of Mohammed. Regarding Munuza as a rebel and a semi-apostate, Abderrahman besieged him in the town of Cerdagne, to which he fled for refuge, and, having driven him to commit suicide, sent his head, together with his wife, the daughter of Eudes, as a welcome present to the caliph Hisham.

The victorious Saracens then marched on past Pampeluna,[125] and, making their way through the narrow defiles on the western side of the Pyrenean chain, poured down upon the plains with their innumerable hosts as far as the river Garonne. The city of Bordeaux was taken and sacked, and still they pressed on impetuously and without opposition, until they reached the river Dordogne, where Eudes, burning with rage at the treatment which his daughter had received, made a fruitless attempt to stop them. Irritated rather than checked by his feeble efforts, the overwhelming tide poured on. The standard of the prophet soon floated from the towers of Poitiers, and even Tours, the city of the holy St. Martin, was in danger of being polluted by the presence of insulting infidels, when, in the hour of Europe’s greatest dread and danger, the champion of Christendom appeared at last, to do battle with the hitherto triumphant enemies of the cross.