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8 sovereignty over them. He contented himself with receiving from Prince Grimoald of Benevento in 814 a promise to pay tribute and assurances of submission, vague engagements which his successor Sico renewed more than once without causing any change in the actual situation.

On the south-western frontier of the Empire a state of war, or at least of perpetual skirmishing, went on between the Franks and either the Saracens of Spain or the half-subdued inhabitants of the Pyrenees. In 815 hostilities had broken out anew with the Emir Hakam I, whom the Frankish historians call Abulaz. The following year the recall of Séguin (Sigiwin), Duke of Gascony, led to a revolt of the Basques, but the native chief whom the rebels had placed at their head was defeated and killed by the counts in the service of Louis the Pious. Two years later (818) the Emperor felt himself strong enough to banish Lupus son of Centullus, the national Duke of the Gascons, and in 819 an expedition under Pepin of Aquitaine resulted in an apparent and temporary pacification of the province. On the other hand, at the assembly at Quierzy in 820 it was decided to renew the war with the Saracens of Spain. But the Frankish annalists mention only a plundering raid beyond the Segre river (822), and in 824 the defeat of two Frankish counts in the valley of Roncesvalles, they were returning from an expedition against Pampeluna. In 826 the revolt in the Spanish March of a chief of Gothic extraction gave Louis the Pious graver cause for disquiet. An army led by the Abbot Elisachar checked the rebels for the moment, but they appealed to the Emir 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān, and the Muslim troops sent under the command of Abu-Marwan penetrated as far as the walls of Saragossa. At the Compiègne assembly beld in the summer of 827, the Emperor decided on sending a new Frankish army beyond the Pyrenees, but its leaders, Matfrid, Count of Orleans, and Hugh, Count of Tours, shewed such an entire lack of zeal and interposed so many delays, that Abu-Marwan was able to ravage the districts of Barcelona and Gerona with impunity. The progress of the invaders was only checked by the energetic resistance of Barcelona, under Count Bernard of Septimania, but they were able, nevertheless, to withdraw unhindered with their booty. In 828, in another quarter of the Frankish Empire, Boniface, Marquess of Tuscany, was taking the offensive. After having, at the head of his little flotilla, destroyed the pirate Muslim ships in the neighbourhood of Corsica and Sardinia, he landed in Africa and ravaged the country round Carthage.

To the extreme west of the Empire, the Bretons, whom even the great Charles had never been able to subdue completely, continued from time to time to send out pillaging expeditions into Frankish territory, chieffy in the direction of Vannes. These were mere raids, up to the time when their union under the leadership of a chief named Morvan (Murmannus), to whom they gave the title of king, so far emboldened the Bretons that they refused to pay homage or the annual tribute to