enees, the provinces of Gaul were threatened and invaded by the
conquerors of Spain. [25] The decline of the French monarchy invited the
attack of these insatiate fanatics. The descendants of Clovis had
lost the inheritance of his martial and ferocious spirit; and their
misfortune or demerit has affixed the epithet of lazy to the last kings
of the Merovingian race. [26] They ascended the throne without power,
and sunk into the grave without a name. A country palace, in the
neighborhood of Compiegne [27] was allotted for their residence or
prison: but each year, in the month of March or May, they were conducted
in a wagon drawn by oxen to the assembly of the Franks, to give audience
to foreign ambassadors, and to ratify the acts of the mayor of the
palace. That domestic officer was become the minister of the nation and
the master of the prince. A public employment was converted into the
patrimony of a private family: the elder Pepin left a king of mature
years under the guardianship of his own widow and her child; and these
feeble regents were forcibly dispossessed by the most active of his
bastards. A government, half savage and half corrupt, was almost
dissolved; and the tributary dukes, and provincial counts, and the
territorial lords, were tempted to despise the weakness of the monarch,
and to imitate the ambition of the mayor. Among these independent
chiefs, one of the boldest and most successful was Eudes, duke of
Aquitain, who in the southern provinces of Gaul usurped the authority,
and even the title of king. The Goths, the Gascons, and the Franks,
assembled under the standard of this Christian hero: he repelled the
first invasion of the Saracens; and Zama, lieutenant of the caliph, lost
his army and his life under the walls of Thoulouse. The ambition of his
successors was stimulated by revenge; they repassed the Pyrenees with
the means and the resolution of conquest. The advantageous situation
which had recommended Narbonne [28] as the first Roman colony, was
again chosen by the Moslems: they claimed the province of Septimania or
Languedoc as a just dependence of the Spanish monarchy: the vineyards
of Gascony and the city of Bourdeaux were possessed by the sovereign of
Damascus and Samarcand; and the south of France, from the mouth of
the Garonne to that of the Rhone, assumed the manners and religion of
Arabia.

[Footnote 25: For the invasion of France and the defeat of the Arabs by
Charles Martel, see the Histo