Toulouse they never could take. Once they raided up the Rhône and Saône and burned Autun, but with Toulouse in Christian hands they could never hope to do much with the central Rhône valley. It was the successful defence of Toulouse, quite as much as the victory of Charles Martel, that checked their greatest effort in the familiar year 732. Coming over the west central Pyrenees, they turned north-east to attack Toulouse, compelled (like Wellington in 1814) to deal with such a centre of population and communications in order to secure their right flank for a move northward. So that when Toulouse held out, their stroke which took Bordeaux and failed against Charles Martel near Poitiers, was no longer a regular campaign, but merely a plundering raid on a great scale. It is worth insisting on the resistance of Toulouse to the Mohammedan invasions in order to emphasize the importance of the town. But although the infidel could not take Toulouse, he held Narbonne, eighty miles away, for forty years. He was in Saragossa for just over four hundred years until 1119, and Saragossa, the great town and road centre south of the Pyrenees (corresponding to Toulouse to the north of them), is only 250 miles from Toulouse as the crow flies. Sometimes, from either city, the crest of the mountain chain can be seen. The two faced one another, Toulouse as the untaken pivot of the Christian defence, Saragossa as the bastion of the long, but finally unsuccessful, defence of Islam. For about the same length of time as that which separates Americans of 1920 from the death of Christopher Columbus, Saragossa stood for Asia in the face of Christian Europe. Naturally, Languedoc felt the Moslem influence in every sort of way. The other two foes of the Dark Ages, the Viking and the Magyar, appear and ravage the country but leave no trace except ruins. Alone of the three the Mohammedan remained long close by, and he differed from the other two in that he knew that cities were meant to live in, as well as to burn, and in that he had ideas of a sort of his own. It was too much trouble to keep fighting him all the time, and, in the intervals of peace, his ideas sifted in through the intercourse, north and south, over the border. In his train, as it were, came also the Jew; already, in the early eighth century, an archbishop of Lyons was troubled by the “aggressive prosperity” of Jews in Southern Gaul.