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The Carolingian Empire

Conquests: Spain

The final area of conquest (that I will discuss here) was Spain, and here again the issues and outcome were different. Here, Charles was not so successful.

The great threat from this quarter was Islam. Charles' grandfather had defeated a couple of raiding armies, but he had not met the full brunt of Moslem invasion. Spain had, and most of the peninsula had fallen. The few Christians who remained were in the north and they appealed to Charles for help.

In 778, Charles led a great army over the audio gifPyrenees. He did manage to win back a couple of cities, and he established an outlier of his realm known as the Spanish March. But he was unable to win any great victory, was unable to negotiate anything substantial, and finally had to return to Gaul with not much accomplished.

The whole affair is not of great significance except for Iberian history, except for one rather trivial incident during the retreat that came to have an importance all out of proportion to the event itself.

During his retreat over the mountains, Charles had in his train a good deal of booty. The Pyrenees were a perfect place for an ambush, not least because they were infested with both Moslems and Basques, neither of whom cared much for the Franish invaders.

So Charles set a rear guard, to cover his retreat. Their job was to ensure no Moslem army should advance suddenly and catch Charles on the march. Once the Franks were safely over the mountains, then the rear guard could catch up and join the main force.

The captain of these defenders was a young Breton prince named Roland. Charles had assessed the risk correctly, of course. The covering force was indeed ambushed and Roland and his men died while the rest of the Franks won free.

Such incidents surely happened more than once--some hero sacrificing himself and his men for his king. But this incident somehow found a poet. The original author of the tale is unknown, and the Song of Roland was not actually written down for another two centuries, but it survives to this day. The Song of Roland is a major work of medieval literature, but it is the story of an insignificant action during a retreat after an expedition whose success was mixed at best. Hardly the stuff of legend, you might think, but Roland became the center of not one but countless legends. He is to the Franks what Arthur is to the Britons.