outpost of Bavaria, to keep watch upon the Slavs.

(5) To Spain the Emperor first turned his attention in 777, when he was
invited by the discontented emirs on the north of the Ebro to free them
from the Caliph of Cordova. The next year saw his abortive march through
the pass of Roncesvalles to the walls of Saragossa--an expedition
immortalised in the _Chanson de Roland_, the earliest and most famous
epic of the Charlemagne cycle, but fabulous from first to last, except
in recording the fact that there was a certain Roland (warden of the
Breton Mark) who fell in the course of the Frankish retreat. More
substantial work was done in Spain during the last years of the reign.
Navarre declared for the Franks and Christianity; the eldest son of
Charles captured Tortosa at the mouth of the Ebro (811), and founded the
Spanish Mark.

This lengthy catalogue only accounts for the more important of the wars
in which Charles and his lieutenants were engaged. We must imagine, to
complete the picture, a background of minor conflicts within and without
the Empire--against the Slavs, the Danes, the Greeks, the Bretons, the
Arabs, the Lombards of Benevento. These crowded years of war leave the
Frankish Empire established as the one great power west of the Elbe and
Adriatic. It did not include the Scandinavian lands or British Isles;
the Franks were never masters of the northern seas. It had failed to
expel the Arabs and Byzantines from the western Mediterranean; Spain,
Sicily, even parts of Italy remain unconquered. Of recovering North
Africa there could be no question. Still in magnitude the Frankish realm
was a worthy successor of the Western Empire. On Christmas Day, 800,
Charles was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III, in St.
Peter's basilica at Rome; and his subjects vainly imagined that, by this
dramatic ceremony, the clock of history had been put back four hundred