e duke of Aquitain;
and Eudes, from a motive of private or public interest, devoted his
beauteous daughter to the embraces of the African misbeliever. But the
strongest fortresses of Cerdagne were invested by a superior force; the
rebel was overtaken and slain in the mountains; and his widow was sent
a captive to Damascus, to gratify the desires, or more probably the
vanity, of the commander of the faithful. From the Pyrenees, Abderame
proceeded without delay to the passage of the Rhone and the siege of
Arles. An army of Christians attempted the relief of the city: the tombs
of their leaders were yet visible in the thirteenth century; and many
thousands of their dead bodies were carried down the rapid stream into
the Mediterranean Sea. The arms of Abderame were not less successful
on the side of the ocean. He passed without opposition the Garonne and
Dordogne, which unite their waters in the Gulf of Bourdeaux; but he
found, beyond those rivers, the camp of the intrepid Eudes, who had
formed a second army and sustained a second defeat, so fatal to the
Christians, that, according to their sad confession, God alone could
reckon the number of the slain. The victorious Saracen overran the
provinces of Aquitain, whose Gallic names are disguised, rather than
lost, in the modern appellations of Perigord, Saintonge, and Poitou: his
standards were planted on the walls, or at least before the gates,
of Tours and of Sens; and his detachments overspread the kingdom of
Burgundy as far as the well-known cities of Lyons and Besancon. The
memory of these devastations (for Abderame did not spare the country or
the people) was long preserved by tradition; and the invasion of France
by the Moors or Mahometans affords the groundwork of those fables,
which have been so wildly disfigured in the romances of chivalry, and
so elegantly adorned by the Italian muse. In the decline of society and
art, the deserted cities could supply a slender booty to the Saracens;
their richest spoil was found in the churches and monasteries, which
they stripped of their ornaments and delivered to the flames: and the
tutelar saints, both Hilary of Poitiers and Martin of Tours, forgot
their miraculous powers in the defence of their own sepulchres. A
victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from
the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an
equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland
and the