In 788 Abderrahman died, and was succeeded by his youngest son Hescham, a Mussulman pietist. The fierce, and for the time successful, invasion of the Narbonese province which was made by Hescham’s general Abd-el-Melec, was perhaps the cause which stirred Louis’s council to commence a war of reprisals. In 796 the country of the Saracens was ravaged by a Frankish army. In 797 Huesca was besieged, but in vain. In 801 Barcelona, which had changed hands two or three times between Christian and Mussulman, was subjected to a rigorous siege, which lasted according to one account seven months, and according to another two years. The city was at last forced to surrender, and Zaid, its governor, who had in former years played fast and loose with the Frankish alliance, was sent in chains to Charles’s court. Between 809 and 811 there were three attempts, the last a successful attempt, to capture Tortosa, the strong city which commanded the mouth of the Ebro. All these conquests seem to have been retained during the lifetime of Charles. What was perhaps more important, a firm alliance was formed with the young Alfonso the Chaste, who, during his fifty years’ reign (791–842) extended the frontiers and consolidated the strength of the Christian kingdom of the Asturias. This alliance, so obviously for the interest of both parties, cannot have existed in the year of Roncesvalles: but now we are told that “there came to the court of Charles an ambassador of Hadefonsus, King of Gallicia and the Asturias, presenting a tent of wonderful beauty,” and that “Charles so bound Hadefonsus to him as an ally that the latter whenever he sent him letters or ambassadors would never allow himself to be called anything else than ‘King Charles’s own man.’” At first sight the result of these wars beyond the Pyrenees, and the consequent foundation of the Spanish March, which stretched from those mountains to the Ebro, may seem unimportant, as we know that the Frankish kings made no permanent acquisition of territory in Spain. But on the other hand, by the diversion which they caused, they perhaps prevented the Saracen rulers of Spain from crushing the infant kingdom of the Asturias: and the counts of Barcelona, whom they settled in the Spanish March, after having gradually relinquished the position of vassals to the French kings, became independent Christian sovereigns, and eventually acquired by marriage the rich heritage of the kingdom of Aragon.[50] CHAPTER IX. WARS WITH AVARS AND SCLAVES.