The Gascons fell back, dismayed by the vigorous resistance of the French; but thirty thousand Saracens came to their aid, and the odds were now overwhelming. Oliver lay dead, and, covered with wounds, Roland fell to the ground also, but first of all he broke ‘Durenda’ in half that none save he might use this peerless blade. Putting his horn to his lips, with his dying breath he sounded a blast that was heard by Charlemagne in his camp more than eight miles away. ‘Surely that is the horn of Roland?’ cried the King uneasily, but treacherous courtiers explained away the sound; and it was not till a breathless messenger came with the news of the reverse that he hastened towards the scene of battle. There in the pass, stretched on the ground amid the heaped-up bodies of their enemies, he found his Paladins--Roland with his arms spread in the form of a cross, his broken sword beside him: and seeing him the King fell on his knees weeping. ‘Oh, right arm of thy Sovereign’s body, Honour of the Franks, Sword of Justice.... Why did I leave thee here to perish? How can I behold thee dead and not die with thee?’ At last, restraining his grief, Charlemagne gathered his forces together; and the very sun, we are told, stood still to watch his terrible vengeance on Gascons and Saracens for the slaughter of Christians at Roncesvalles. The _Chanson de Roland_ is one of the masterpieces of French literature. It is not history, but in its fiction lies a substantial germ of truth. Charlemagne in the early ninth century was what poets described him more than two hundred years later--the central figure in Christendom, the recognized champion of the Cross whether against Mahometans or pagans. ‘Through your prosperity’, wrote Alcuin, an Anglo-Saxon monk and scholar who lived at his court, ‘Christendom is preserved, the Catholic Faith defended, the law of justice made known to all men.’ [Sidenote: Invasion of Lombardy] When the Popes sought help against the Lombards, it was to Charlemagne as to his father Pepin that they naturally turned. Charlemagne had hoped at the beginning of his reign to maintain a friendship with King Didier of Lombardy and had even married his daughter, an alliance that roused the Pope of that date to demand in somewhat violent language: ‘Do you not know that all the children of the Lombards are lepers, that the race is outcast from the family of nations? For these there is neither part nor lot in the Heavenly Kingdom. May they broil with the devil and his angels in everlasting fire!’ Charlemagne went his own way, in spite of papal denunciations; but he soon tired of his bride, who was plain and feeble in health, and divorced her that he might marry a beautiful German princess. This was, of course, a direct insult to King Didier, who henceforth regarded the Frankish king as his enemy; and Rome took care that the gulf once made between the sovereigns should not be bridged.