Posterity would celebrate Charlemagne for many things—from unifying the West to his love for scholastic learning—but it is his dealings with Islam that are germane here. As the defender of Christendom, he became the quintessential Christian warrior, a proto-crusader. Not content with keeping Muslims out of his domains, his exploits—and those of his descendants, including his son and successor Louis the Pious, who marched into Muslim Spain and established a buffer state in Catalonia—were celebrated in heroic epics and poems (the chansons de geste) and inspired generations of future crusaders.
