We hear of repeated ravages by Scandinavian pirates along the shores of the German and Atlantic oceans: by Moorish pirates along the shore of the Mediterranean: and with neither class of freebooters does Charles appear to have grappled very successfully, for the good reason that he never devoted a sufficient portion of his energies to the establishment of a navy. The well-known story that Charles saw from the windows of his palace at Narbonne the Danish sea-rovers scudding over the waters of the Gulf of Lyons, and foretold with tears the miseries which these freebooters should bring upon his posterity and their realm, comes to us on the late and doubtful authority of the Monk of St. Gall and need not be accepted as authentic history: but that was one of the thunderclouds looming up on the horizon of the ninth century whether Charles was ware of it or no. While the pirate barks of the Scandinavians were spreading terror over the islands of the west, the land forces of the King of Denmark were threatening the north-eastern boundary of Charles’s kingdom. Here the Saxons, at last subdued into loyalty, were, as we have seen, bounded on the east by the Sclavonic nations, the Abodrites, and the Wiltzi, and on the north, in Sleswik, by the Danes. The usual arrangement of parties in the perpetually recurring frontier wars was this: the Saxons (that is the Frankish kingdom) in alliance with the Abodrites on one side, and the Danes with the Wiltzi on the other. The king of the Abodrites was named Drasko; the king of the Danes was Godofrid, a proud, high-soaring king of pirates, who ventured to put himself on an equality with the mighty Frankish Emperor, declaring that Friesland and Saxonland were of right his territories, and that he would appear one day with all his warriors round him at Aachen and would try conclusions with Charles.