The crisis came when the long march of the successful Muhammadans was stayed by the arms of S. Arnulf's descendant Charles Martel, mayor of the palace to the King of Austrasia 717, to all the kingdoms from 719, who lived till 741. In 711 the Wisigothic monarchy of Spain had fallen before the infidels: in 720 the Moors entered Gaul. From then to 731 there was for Abder Rahman an almost unbroken triumph. The power of the Prophet reached from Damascus to beyond the Pyrenees. Then Charles Martel came to the relief of Southern Gaul, and on an October Sunday in 732 the hosts of Islam were utterly routed at Poictiers by the soldiers of the Cross. [Sidenote: The defeat of the Saracens.] It was a great deliverance; and there is no wonder that imagination has exaggerated its importance and thought that but for the Moorish defeat there might to-day be a muezzin in every Highland steeple and an Imam set over every Oxford college. Charles had still to reconquer Septimania and Provence. Arles and Nimes, the great Roman cities, had to be recovered from the Arabs who had seized them, and Avignon, Agde, Beziers, cities whose future was as wonderful as was the others' past, were also won back by the arms of the Christian chief. Charles died in 741. He had refused to help Pope {147} Gregory III. in 739 against the Lombards. It was reserved for his son Pippin to make that alliance between the papacy and the Karling house which dictated the future of Europe. [Sidenote: Pippin.] To Pippin came the lordship of the West Franks, to Carloman his brother that of the East Franks, when their father died. They conquered, they reformed the Church among the Franks, with the aid of Boniface, and then came that dramatic retirement of Carloman in 747 which showed him to be true heir of S. Arnulf. Four years later the house of the Karlings became the nominal as well as the real rulers of the Franks. In 751 the bishop of Wuerzburg for the East Franks, and the abbat of S. Denis for those of the West, went to Rome to ask the pope's advice. Were the wretched Merwings "who were of royal race and were called kings but had no power in the realm save that grants and charters were drawn up in their names" to be still called kings, for "what willed the _major domus_ of the Franks, that they did?" Zacharias answered as a wise man would, that he who had the power should bear the name. And so, blessed by the great missionary S. Boniface, Pippin was "heaved" on the shield, and became king of the Franks, and Childerich, the last of the Merwings, went to a distant monastery to end his days. [Sidenote: The end of the Imperial power in Italy.]