But at present the Crescent was master of the Cross; and beyond the Pyrenees all was slavery and 'miscreance.' The Arabs, invading France in 732, in countless thousands, had been driven back at the great fight of Tours, with a slaughter so great, that the excited imagination of Paulus Diaconus sees 375,000 miscreants dead upon the field, while only 1500 Franks had perished. But home troubles had prevented 'the Hammer of the Moors' from following up his victory. The Saracens had returned in force in 737, and again in 739. They still held Narbonne. The danger was imminent. There was no reason why they should not attempt a third invasion. Why should they not spread along the shores of the Mediterranean, establishing themselves there, as they were already doing in Sicily, and menacing Rome from north as well as south? To unite, therefore, the two great Catholic Teutonic powers, the Frank and the Lombard, for the defence of Christendom, should have been the policy of him who called himself the Chief Pontiff in Christendom. Yet the Pope preferred, in the face of that great danger, to set the Teutonic nations on destroying each other, rather than to unite them against the Moslem. The bribe offered to the Frank was significant--the title of Roman Consul; beside which he was to have filings of St. Peter's chains, and the key of his tomb, to preserve him body and soul from all evil. Charles would not come. Frank though he was, he was too honourable to march at a priest's bidding against Luitprand, his old brother in arms, to whom he had sent the boy Pepin, his son, that Luitprand might take him on his knee, and cut his long royal hair, and become his father-in-arms, after the good old Teuton fashion; Luitprand, who with his Lombards had helped him to save Christendom a second time from the Mussulman in 737. The Pope, one would think, should have remembered that good deed of the good Lombard's whereof his epitaph sings, 'Deinceps tremuere feroces Usque Saraceni, quos dispulit impiger, ipsos Cum premerent Gallos, Karolo poscente juvari.' So Charles Martel took the title of Patrician from the Pope, but sent him no armies; and the quarrel went on; while Charles filled up the measure of his iniquity by meddling with that church-property in Gaul which his sword had saved from the hordes of the Saracens; and is now, as St. Eucherius (or Bishop Hincmar) saw in a vision, writhing therefore in the lowest abyss of hell. So one generation more passes by; and then Pepin le Bref, grown to manhood, is less scrupulous than his father. He is bound to the Pope by gratitude. The Pope has confirmed him as king, allowing him to depose the royal house of the Merovingians, and so assumed the right of making kings.--A right which future popes will not forget.