Upon the other hand, the Franks were not inspired with zeal for the maintenance of any religious principle. Their fickle homage was paid to Zernbock and Woden, the sanguinary gods of the German forests, or to that weird priesthood which delivered its oracles from the cromlechs of Brittany. The pressing requirements of the emergency, the prospect of plunder and glory, had summoned the warriors of a hundred tribes from the banks of the Danube to the limits of Scandinavia. So little were these wild barbarians entitled to the appellation of Christians that they were, even then, under the ban of ecclesiastical displeasure, and had been loaded with anathemas for the sacrilegious use of the property of the Church to avert the danger impending over Christendom. But leaving out of consideration the motives which actuated the combatants, there can be no question as to the decisive results of the battle of Poitiers. It was one of the few great victories which, like conspicuous landmarks in the pathway of human affairs, indicate the advancement or the retardation of nations. The prospect of Mohammedan conquest had long been the terror of Europe. The Pope trembled in the Vatican. The pious devotee, as he prostrated himself before the image of his patron saint, vowed an additional penance to ward off the calamity which every day was expected to bring forth. Imagination and fear painted the Saracens as a race of incarnate fiends, whose aspect was far more frightful, whose atrocities were far more ruthless, than those of the Huns who had been routed by Ætius four hundred years before on the plains of Chalons. The lapse of twelve centuries has not sufficed to dispel this superstitious dread, and the Saracen, as a monster and a bugbear, still figures in the nursery tales and rhymes of Central France. The Spanish Emirate includes the most obscure epoch of Moslem annals. Its events have been, for the most part, preserved only by tradition. Its chronicles are chaotic, defective, and contradictory. Its dates are confused. It abounds in anachronisms; in the confusion of localities; in the multiplication of individuals under a variety of names. The credulity and prejudice of annalists, few of whom were contemporaneous with the occurrences they profess to describe, render their statements suspicious or absolutely unworthy of belief. With such drawbacks attainment to accuracy is manifestly impracticable, and a reasonable degree of probability can alone be hoped for from the baffled and perplexed historian.