From the actuality of such an invasion the great Charles was spared, but in the British Isles it had already begun. In 787 the Anglo-Saxon _Chronicle_ tells us there “first came three ships of Northmen out of Haeretha-land” [Denmark?], whereupon the reeve of the Dorset port “rode down to the place and would have driven them to the king’s town, because he knew not who they were; and they there slew him. These were the first ships of Danishmen which sought the land of the English nation.” Six years later they fell upon the holy isle of Lindisfarne, pillaged the church sacred with the memories of Northumbrian Christianity, and slew the monks or drove them into the sea. In 807 they first landed in Ireland, and “after this there came great sea-cast floods of foreigners into Erin, so that there was not a point thereof without a fleet.” Then came the turn of the Continent, first along the coast of Frisia and Flanders, and then in what is now France. In 841, when the grandsons of Charlemagne were quarrelling over the fragments of his empire at Fontenay, the first fleet of Northmen entered the Seine; in 843 when they were making their treaty of partition at Verdun, the Vikings entered Nantes on St. John’s Day and slew the bishop before the high altar as he intoned the _Sursum corda_ of the mass. Within two years they sacked Hamburg and Paris. Wherever possible they established themselves at the mouths of the great rivers, often on an island like Walcheren, Noirmoutier, or the Ile de Rhé, whence the rivers opened the whole country to them--Elbe and Weser, Rhine and Meuse, Scheldt, Seine, Loire, and Garonne, even to the Guadalquivir, by which the Arabic chronicler tells us the “dark red sea-birds” penetrated to Seville. One band more venturesome than the rest, entered the Mediterranean and reached Marseilles, whence under their leader Hastings they sacked the Italian town of Luna, apparently in the belief that it was Rome.