As for Charles’s attempt to annex territory to his kingdom south of the Pyrenees, it had to be abandoned for a time. The Saxon revolt under Widukind broke out, more stubborn and difficult to quell than ever. For the next eight years (778–785) Charles was too much occupied with the hard reality of strife in the marshes and forests of Saxon-land to have leisure for pursuing a visionary sovereignty on the banks of the Ebro. Then came the trouble with Tassilo, and, immediately following upon it, those wars with the Avars which will be described in the next chapter. But though during this period most or all of the cities in Spain which had accepted Charles as their lord were probably won back by Abderrahman, the hope of reconquering a Spanish kingdom was never abandoned, and the execution of the scheme was committed to the King of Aquitaine, or rather to his counsellors. For this King of Aquitaine was Charles’s fourth son Louis, who with a twin brother had been born in 778, while Charles himself was prosecuting the war in Spain. Born in Aquitaine, this child--one day to be the gentle and much worried Emperor, Louis the Pious--was, as we have seen, when only three years old, anointed in Rome by the pope as king of his native land; and in that land his boyhood and early manhood appear to have been spent. During those years of immaturity the government was of course in the hands of counsellors, who seem to have executed the commands of the real ruler Charles with vigor and prudence.