RONCESVALLES.
Though the greater part of his life was passed in war, and though he
was undoubtedly a man of great personal courage, Charlemagne cannot be
considered a great military commander. We have the testimony of Einhard
that in the whole long Saxon war he himself was personally engaged
in only two pitched battles, and most of his campaigns seem to have
consisted rather of military promenades, against brave but ill-armed
foes, than of hard-fought battles in which the genius and courage of
the king at a critical moment secured victory to his troops. But if not
a great captain, he was a great and successful planner of campaigns;
not so much a Hannibal or a Napoleon as an “organizer of victory” like
Carnot.[47]
It is remarkable that in the most famous battle which he fought,
neither his strategy nor his tactics were successful. The Spanish
campaign of 778 was a failure, and ended with an event of no great
importance in itself, but of imperishable memory in song, the
disastrous day of Roncesvalles.
To understand the cause of this expedition, so remote from the usual
orbit of the Frankish king, we must glance for a moment at the
condition of the Mohammedan world, and must leave the marshes and
forests of Saxon-land for the desert-girdled gardens of the oldest of
cities, Damascus. For a hundred years the Ommayad caliphs in a long
line, consisting of Moawiyah and thirteen successors, had governed
the vast regions which owned the faith of Mohammed, with absolute
sway. The caliph, as the successor of the Prophet, wielded a power
religious as well as military; he was at once the pope and the emperor
of the Saracen world. It was in the name of the Ommayad caliph and by
his lieutenants that Spain was conquered; in his name that Gaul was
invaded by those swarming myriads whom Charles Martel with difficulty
repulsed on the great day of Poitiers. But now at last in the year 750,
eighteen years before the accession of Charlemagne, there had come a
change; the unity of Islamism was broken and the divisions that thus
crept in, even more than the sword of Charles Martel, saved Europe from
Moslem domination. The Ommayad caliphs in the luxurious delights of
Damascus had forgotten some of the stern simplicity of their earlier
predecessors. A new and more austere claimant to their religious throne
presented himself in the person of Abul Abbas, who was descended from
an uncle of the Prophet; and the old feud between the two tribes of the
Koreish[48] and the Haschimites flared up into fierce civil war, the
reigning Ommayads belonging to the former, and the revolting Abbasides
to the latter class. In the great battle of Mosul (750), the Abbasides
gained the upper hand; Merwan the last Ommayad caliph fled to Egypt,
where he was slain, and a bloody massacre of eighty Ommayads at a
banquet completed the ruin of the family.
From this ruin of a princely race one only escaped. The young
Abderrahman son of Merwan fled from Syria, and after many adventures
and many narrow escapes, ever journeying westward, reached the tents
of a tribe of Bedouins in Morocco with whom he claimed kinship through
his mother, and who gladly granted him the asylum which he needed.
While he was sharing their hospitality, there came an embassy from some
of the chief Mussulmans of Spain to offer him supreme power in that
country. The various _emirs_ and _walis_ who had been misgoverning that
unhappy land for forty years since the Moorish conquest, had given it
neither prosperity nor peace; probably also there was a feeling that
they had failed as champions of Islamism against Christianity. At any
rate there was a strong desire to try what unity and concentration
under a resident and independent sovereign would accomplish, and for
this purpose to take advantage of the presence of a high-spirited and
courageous youth, the descendant of a long line of sovereigns. The
invitation was gladly accepted. Abderrahman crossed over into Spain
(755), won victory after victory over the representatives of his
Abbaside foe, the chief of whom was named Yussuf-el-Fekri, and (though
he did not himself assume the title of caliph), virtually founded the
Caliphate of Cordova which, for nearly three centuries, often with
brilliant success, guided the destinies of Mohammedan Spain.
But Abderrahman, though deservedly one of the favorite heroes of
Saracen literature, did not win supreme power in Spain without a hard
struggle, and even after he had conquered there was many a fresh
outbreak of opposition to his rule. Though Yussuf-el-Fekri fell
in battle (759), his sons, continually rebelling and continually
pardoned by the magnanimous Abderrahman, filled the next twenty years
with turmoil. It was one of these sons and a son-in-law of Yussuf
who, together with a certain Ibn-el-Arabi (perhaps the governor of
Barcelona), sought out Charles while he was holding his _placitum_
at distant Paderborn, and begged his assistance against Abderrahman,
promising that they would procure the surrender of several cities in
Spain if he appeared in arms at their gates.
The offer came during one of those deceptive lulls in the Saxon war,
when Charles was flattered with the hope that his work was completed.
It was from this very assembly that Widukind was conspicuously absent,
but Charles knew not as yet how much that absence imported. The offer
was a tempting one and harmonized with Charles’s general policy.
Abderrahman was the enemy of the Abbaside caliph, and the Abbasides
were Charles’s friends. There was, too, a prospect of continuing
the work which his father had so prosperously begun when he won back
Narbonne from the infidels. As he listened, the three Mussulmans
enlarged on the brilliant prospect before him, and very probably
held out hopes of the conquest of the whole peninsula. The question
of the rival faiths, though of course it must have been present to
Charles’s mind, does not seem to have been the determining motive to
this expedition as it was to the Saxon war. There is no foundation
for the suggestion of some later chroniclers that he was moved to
this enterprise by pity for the groans of the Spanish Christians
under Saracen oppression. In fact, the situation of the Christians
under Abderrahman seems to have been a very tolerable one: and as we
shall see, the valiant little kingdom of the Asturias, which from its
mountain stronghold was so gallantly maintaining the cause of Christian
freedom against the Moors, got small help at this time from its mighty
co-religionist.
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,
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]