This commander had, by many years of faithful service in France, by strict impartiality in his decisions, and by a bravery remarkable among a people with whom the slightest sign of cowardice was an indelible disgrace, won the respect and admiration of his contemporaries. His lineage was high, his person attractive, his manners dignified and courteous. He had defended Narbonne against the power of Charles Martel, whose army, flushed with victory and animated by the presence of the great Mayor of the Palace himself, had been unable to shake his confidence or disturb his equanimity. But his eminent qualifications for the position to which he was now called did not depend upon his former services and his personal merit so much as upon the absence which had kept him from all the entanglements and intrigues of faction. Thus it was that the fiercest partisans hailed his election as a harbinger of peace and concord; a wise stroke of policy that might reconcile the antagonistic pretensions of the nobles of Damascus and Medina; curb the lawlessness of the Berbers; and restore the Emirate of the West to that tranquillity and prosperity it had at long intervals enjoyed, and of which the memory, like a half-forgotten tradition, alone remained. This illegal act of the officers was without hesitation sanctioned by the Khalif Merwan, who prudently overlooked the spirit of independence implied by its exercise on account of its evident wisdom and the imperative necessity which had dictated it.