From Charles the Great, by Thomas Hodgkin, D.C.L., London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1897; pp. 141-152.
CHAPTER VIII
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 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 “organiser of victory” like Carnot.
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 142 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 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 143 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 favourite heroes of Saracen literature, did not win 144 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 harmonised 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 145 moved to this enterprise by pity for the groans of the 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 “Summa Pyreneus” of the Roman road-books, looked down on the wild and narrow defile of Roncesvalles.
146It 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, 147 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 armour 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 dishonour 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 148 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 Mussulman, 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 149 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 of 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. 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 150 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 vigour 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 151 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 152 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.