leaders. Leodegar, Bishop of Autun, who helped
Ebroin to raise Theoderic III to the throne of Neustria, was blinded,
imprisoned and at length put to death and appears in the Church's
calendar as S. Leger.

The crisis came when the long march of the successful Muhammadans was
stayed by the arms of S. Arnulf's descendant Charles Martel, mayor of
the palace to the King of Austrasia 717, to all the kingdoms from 719,
who lived till 741. In 711 the Wisigothic monarchy of Spain had fallen
before the infidels: in 720 the Moors entered Gaul. From then to 731
there was for Abder Rahman an almost unbroken triumph. The power of
the Prophet reached from Damascus to beyond the Pyrenees. Then Charles
Martel came to the relief of Southern Gaul, and on an October Sunday in
732 the hosts of Islam were utterly routed at Poictiers by the soldiers
of the Cross. [Sidenote: The defeat of the Saracens.] It was a great
deliverance; and there is no wonder that imagination has exaggerated
its importance and thought that but for the Moorish defeat there might
to-day be a muezzin in every Highland steeple and an Imam set over
every Oxford college. Charles had still to reconquer Septimania and
Provence. Arles and Nimes, the great Roman cities, had to be recovered
from the Arabs who had seized them, and Avignon, Agde, Beziers, cities
whose future was as wonderful as was the others' past, were also won
back by the arms of the Christian chief.

Charles died in 741. He had refused to help Pope {147} Gregory III. in
739 against the Lombards. It was reserved for his son Pippin to make
that alliance between the papacy and the Karling house which dictated
the future of Europe. [Sidenote: Pippin.] To Pippin came the lordship
of the West Franks, to Carloman his brother that of the East Franks,
when their father died. They conquered, they reformed the Church among
the Franks, with the aid of Boniface, and then came that dramatic
retirement of Carloman in 747 which showed him to be true heir of S.
Arnulf. Four years later the house of the Karlings became the nominal
as well as the real rulers of the Franks. In 751 the bishop of
Wuerzburg for the East Franks, and the abbat of S. Denis for those of
the West, went to Rome to ask the pope's advice. Were the wretched
Merwings "who were of royal race and were called kings but had no power
in the realm save that grants and charters were drawn up in their
names" to be still called kings, for "what wil