Pippin’s own life was spared, but his head was shorn, and he was sent “to serve God in a monastery.” The place of his confinement was Prum in the Moselle country, and there apparently he remained till his death, which happened in 811. So ended the last and probably the most dangerous of the conspiracies against King Charles’s life and government. CHAPTER VIII. RONCESVALLES. Though the greater part of his life was passed in war, and though he was undoubtedly a man of great personal courage, Charlemagne cannot be considered a great military commander. We have the testimony of Einhard that in the whole long Saxon war he himself was personally engaged in only two pitched battles, and most of his campaigns seem to have consisted rather of military promenades, against brave but ill-armed foes, than of hard-fought battles in which the genius and courage of the king at a critical moment secured victory to his troops. But if not a great captain, he was a great and successful planner of campaigns; not so much a Hannibal or a Napoleon as an “organizer of victory” like Carnot.[47] It is remarkable that in the most famous battle which he fought, neither his strategy nor his tactics were successful. The Spanish campaign of 778 was a failure, and ended with an event of no great importance in itself, but of imperishable memory in song, the disastrous day of Roncesvalles. To understand the cause of this expedition, so remote from the usual orbit of the Frankish king, we must glance for a moment at the condition of the Mohammedan world, and must leave the marshes and forests of Saxon-land for the desert-girdled gardens of the oldest of cities, Damascus. For a hundred years the Ommayad caliphs in a long line, consisting of Moawiyah and thirteen successors, had governed the vast regions which owned the faith of Mohammed, with absolute sway. The caliph, as the successor of the Prophet, wielded a power religious as well as military; he was at once the pope and the emperor of the Saracen world. It was in the name of the Ommayad caliph and by his lieutenants that Spain was conquered; in his name that Gaul was invaded by those swarming myriads whom Charles Martel with difficulty repulsed on the great day of Poitiers. But now at last in the year 750, eighteen years before the accession of Charlemagne, there had come a change; the unity of Islamism was broken and the divisions that thus crept in, even more than the sword of Charles Martel, saved Europe from Moslem domination. The Ommayad caliphs in the luxurious delights of Damascus had forgotten some of the stern simplicity of their earlier predecessors. A new and more austere claimant to their religious throne presented himself in the person of Abul Abbas, who was descended from an uncle of the Prophet; and the old feud between the two tribes of the Koreish[48] and the Haschimites flared up into fierce civil war, the reigning Ommayads belonging to the former, and the revolting Abbasides to the latter class.