f
the Franks to the Ebro, had given the Christian Goths a powerful alliance
against the Spanish Mussulmans. For all these reasons, the invasions of
the Saracens in the south of France did not threaten, as those of the
Northmen did in the north, the security of the Gallo-Frankish monarchy,
and the Gallo-Roman populations of the south were able to defend their
national independence at the same time against the Saracens and the
Franks. They did so successfully in the ninth and tenth centuries; and
the French monarchy, which was being founded between the Loire and the
Rhine, had thus for some time a breach in it, without ever suffering
serious displacement.

A new people, the Hungarians, which was the only name then given to the
Magyars, appeared at this epoch, for the first time, amongst the
devastators of Western Europe. From 910 to 954, as a consequence of
movements and wars on the Danube, Hungarian hordes, after scouring
Central Germany, penetrated into Alsace, Lorraine, Champagne, Burgundy,
Berry, Dauphine, Provence, and even Aquitaine; but this inundation was
transitory, and if the populations of those countries had much to suffer
from it, the Gallo-Frankish dominion, in spite of inward disorder and the
feebleness of the latter Carlovingians, was not seriously endangered
thereby.

And so the first of Charlemagne's grand designs, the territorial security
of the Gallo-Frankish and Christian dominion, was accomplished. In the
east and the north, the Germanic and Asiatic populations, which had so
long upset it, were partly arrested at its frontiers, partly incorporated
regularly in its midst. In the south, the Mussulman populations which,
in the eighth century, had appeared so near overwhelming it, were
powerless to deal it any heavy blow. Substantially France was founded.
But what had become of Charlemagne's second grand design, the
resuscitation of the Roman empire at the hands of the barbarians
that had conquered it and become Christians?

Let us leave Louis the Debonnair his traditional name, although it is not
an exact rendering of that which was given him by his contemporaries.
They called him Louis the Pious. And so indeed he was, sincerely and
even scrupulously pious; but he was still more weak than pious, as weak
in heart and character as in mind, as destitute of ruling ideas as of
strength of will; fluctuating at the mercy of transitory impressions, or
surrounding influences, or positional embarrassmen