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 OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 13 vingian race.^'' They ascended the throne without power, and sunk into the grave without a name. A country palace, in the neighbourhood of Coinpiegne,-'^ was allotted for their residence or prison ; but each year, in the month of March or May, they were conducted in a waggon drawn by oxen to the assembly of the Franks, to give audience to foreign ambassadors, and to ratify the acts of the mayor of the palace. That domestic officer was become the minister of the nation, and the master of the prince. A public employment was converted into the patrimony of a private family ; the elder Pepin left a king of mature years under the guardianship of his own widow and her child ; and these feeble regents were forcibly dispossessed by the most active of his bastards. A government, half savage and half corrupt, was almost dissolved ; and the tributary dukes, the provincial counts, and the territorial lords were tempted to despise the weakness of the monarch and to imitate the ambi- tion of the mayor. Among these independent chiefs, one of the boldest and most successful was Eudes, duke of Aquitain, who, in the southern provinces of Gaul, usurped the authority and even the title of king. The Goths, the Gascons, and the Franks assembled under the standard of this Christian hero ; he repelled the first invasion of the Saracens ; and Zama, lieutenant [ad. 721, of the caliph, lost his army and his life under the walls of Toulouse."" The ambition of his successors was stimulated by revenge; they repassed the Pyrenees with the means and the resolution of conquest. The advantageous situation Avhich had recommended Narbonne '^ as the first Roman colony was again 2-Eginhart. de Vita Caroli Magni, c. ii. p. 13-18, edit. Schmink, Utrecht, 1711. Some modern critics accuse the minister of Charlemagne of exaggerating the weakness of the Merovingians ; but the general outline is just, and the French reader will for ever repeat the beautiful lines of Boileau's Lutrin. ^ .famaccae on the Oise, between Ccmpiegne and Xoyon, which Eginhart calls perparvi reditus villam (see the notes, and the map of ancient France for Dom. Bouquet's Collection). Compendium, or Compiegne, was a palace of more dignity (Hadrian. Valesii Xotitia Galliarum, p. 152), and that laughing philosopher, the Abb6 Galliani (Dialogues sur le Commerce des Bleds), may truly affirm that it was the residence of the rois tres Chretiens et tres chevelus. not quite clear whether the invasion had any abiding results. It is a question whether the capture of Narbonne was the work of Al-Hurr (as Arabic authors state), or of Al-Sama (as Weil inclines to think: Gesch. der Chal. i. p. 610, note). The governor Anbasa crossed the Pyrenees in 725 to avenge the defeat of Toulouse, and captiu-ed Carcassonne and reduced Nemausus. Gibbon's "successors" refers to him and Abd ar- Rahman.] ^lEven before that colony, A.u.C. 630 (Velleius Patercul. i. 15), in the time of Polybius (Hist. 1. iii. p. 265, edit. Gronov. [B. 34, c. 6, § 3]), Narbonne was a Celtic town of the first eminence, and one of the most northern places of the known world (d'Anville, Notice de I'Ancienne Gaule, p. 473).
 * [The first invasion of Gaul was probably that of Al-Hurr in A.D. 718, but it is