The offer came during one of those deceptive lulls in the Saxon war, when Charles was flattered with the hope that his work was completed. It was from this very assembly that Widukind was conspicuously absent, but Charles knew not as yet how much that absence imported. The offer was a tempting one and harmonized with Charles’s general policy. Abderrahman was the enemy of the Abbaside caliph, and the Abbasides were Charles’s friends. There was, too, a prospect of continuing the work which his father had so prosperously begun when he won back Narbonne from the infidels. As he listened, the three Mussulmans enlarged on the brilliant prospect before him, and very probably held out hopes of the conquest of the whole peninsula. The question of the rival faiths, though of course it must have been present to Charles’s mind, does not seem to have been the determining motive to this expedition as it was to the Saxon war. There is no foundation for the suggestion of some later chroniclers that he was moved to this enterprise by pity for the groans of the Spanish Christians under Saracen oppression. In fact, the situation of the Christians under Abderrahman seems to have been a very tolerable one: and as we shall see, the valiant little kingdom of the Asturias, which from its mountain stronghold was so gallantly maintaining the cause of Christian freedom against the Moors, got small help at this time from its mighty co-religionist. Whatever the cause, Charles determined to accept the invitation to interfere in the affairs of the Spanish peninsula. At Easter (778) he was at Chasseneuil, in Aquitaine, about forty miles south of his grandfather’s battle-field at Poitiers. He opened his campaign early: of course the warmer climate of Spain justified much earlier operations than were possible in the late spring of undrained Saxon-land. Having spent the winter in preparations he had a large army at his disposal, and dividing it according to his usual custom, he ordered the Austrasian part of it to cross the Eastern Pyrenees. In this division of the army there were not only, as we might naturally expect, men of Septimania, of Provence and Burgundy, but some of Charles’s new Lombard subjects from Italy: and even a contingent sent by the Bavarian Tassilo. Charles himself, with the western portion of his army, marched probably by the old Roman road, passing from St. Jean de la Port over a crest of the Pyrenees 5000 feet high, into that which has since become the kingdom of Navarre. The highest point of this road, the “Summus Pyreneus” of the Roman road books, looked down on the wild and narrow defile of Roncesvalles.