Editor’s note: This is the first article in a new occasional series featuring battles that just didn’t matter, may look important, but in fact had negligible strategic or political effects or were absurd, anticlimactic, or structurally irrelevant to the wars they were part of.
Some battles never end. Their impact is debated endlessly, sometimes for centuries, as they take on new life with new generations of historians and swindlers alike. Few battles better exemplify this eternal lifespan than the Battle of Tours — also known as the Battle of Poitiers — as it was fought between the two cities in modern-day France in October 732 C.E.
The consensus among contemporary historians, such as Franco Cardini, Tomaz Mastnak, and James T. Palmer, is that Tours did not have a major impact on western European history and its significance was blown far out of proportion by subsequent generations. Nonetheless, political discourse, especially on the identitarian far right, insists on Tours’ monumental significance on the fate of Christendom and Europe.
The battle has had an enduring lifespan because of this question of its significance. This “debate” is not quite an academic one between professional historians, but between professional historians who do not think that the battle was crucial and non-specialists with a political agenda who insist that it was. Identitarian nationalists who are not trained historians often argue that the victory of Charles Martel (“the Hammer”) and his Frankish army at Tours halted Muslim incursions into Europe beyond Iberia, thereby “saving” Christian Europe from becoming incorporated into Islamic territory. They go in search of a history that suits their political narratives. The debate about the Battle of Tours, then, is not so much about its historical significance as it is a contest over the legacy and political value of a historical event.
The Battle and the Myth
In the lifetime of Muhammad and over the century after his death in 632 C.E., Islam conquered a huge swath of territory across the Middle East, northern Africa, and Iberia with amazing speed, despite the tactics and technology of Muslim armies being roughly the same as those of their adversaries. By the end of the 630s, Muslim forces had conquered Syria and Palestine and were in the process of invading Persia and Egypt. Three decades later, in the 660s, they had swept through the Mediterranean coast and conquered the whole of North Africa. In 711 C.E., a Muslim army of Arabs and Berbers began a campaign of conquest in Iberia and controlled nearly the entire peninsula within a few decades. Incursions into Gaul beginning in the 710s but primarily in the 720s and 730s were part of that campaign of rapid territorial expansion to shore up revenue.
Details about the Battle of Tours in sources at the time are scant and often inaccurate, even if broad outlines of the events are well established. In the years after 711 and the conquering of Iberia, as Berber and Arabic forces attempted to expand their military successes into Gaul, Charles Martel consolidated political and military authority over the Franks in the 720s by securing victories against nearby adversaries like the Saxons and Bavarians.
Around the same time, the Umayyads, an Arab clan that established the first great Muslim dynasty, raided into Gaul from across the Pyrenees in Spain and besieged and captured the city of Narbonne in 719, were defeated at Toulouse in 721, and then captured the city of Carcassonne in 725. After several years of intermittent raids into Gaul from their base in Narbonne, in 732 C.E., Umayyad forces led by Abd al-Rahmān al-Ghāfiqī, likely motivated by the wealth of its cities, sacked Bordeaux and Poitiers and then moved on to Tours, where they clashed outside the city with the Frankish army led by Martel. Occupying the high ground on a hill, the Frankish infantry looked down upon the Umayyad forces, led by cavalry, which unsuccessfully charged the hill and were repelled multiple times by the spears of the Frankish phalanx. The army of well-trained, armored Frankish soldiers held steady on the hill and the Umayyad force eventually retreated in defeat. It was a setback for the Umayyads, but a temporary one, and the battle did not ultimately cease Umayyad attacks in Gaul — they retreated entirely from Gaul over 20 years later.
Edward Gibbon may have been sardonic when he made his famous comment that had Martel and the Franks lost the battle on Oct. 10, 732, the Quran might now be “taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.” Yet the Battle of Tours persists as a vital historical hinge for those who seek to find in the past a justification for their anti-Islamic beliefs.
The myth of Martel and the Franks being the saviors of European Christendom is useful for those who perpetuate the false narrative of a thousand-year epic battle between “invasive” Muslims in Europe and the Christian Europeans whom they are supposedly trying to displace and whose culture they are trying to eradicate.
That chroniclers around the time of the Battle of Tours did not see the battle as a critical showdown between Christianity and Islam has not weakened the pervasiveness of the myth of Tours.
Tomaz Mastnak argues:
Muslims played a relatively unimportant role in portrayals of the cosmic struggle between good and evil. For Charlemagne and his contemporaries, as for their predecessors, the Saracens were no more than one group among many, and not the one that worried them the most.
Contemporary chronicles were primarily interested in the narrative of Frankish rule, casting Islamic forces as enemies opposed to the Franks in the same light as other enemies like the Lombards, a Christianized people who ruled most of the Italian peninsula until being conquered by Charlemagne in 774. The Saracens are just one of many foes, and Tours is just one of many battles. As Franco Cardini succinctly puts it, the battle itself was of less importance than the myth it spawned. The battle may have been a victory for the Franks, but it was not a decisive victory for Christendom.
Yet some voices insist that the Battle of Tours played a pivotal role in halting the complete conquest of Europe by Islam, when in reality, Tours did not stop Muslim forces from continuing to raid in Gaul, from Burgundy to Provence. Crucially, chronicles from around the time of the battle do not support the argument that Tours was a critical turning point that “saved” Christian Europe from Islamic forces. Although contemporary sources provide few details about the battle itself, some do describe the broader events unfolding in Gaul. Such chronicles deflate the narrative of a pivotal civilizational struggle between Christendom and Islam, whose decisive battle was Tours in 732.
In the Continuations of the Chronicle of Fredegar, which narrates events in the Frankish Empire through 768 C.E., Tours is an inconsequential clash in the larger arc of near-constant battles between Frankish princes and amongst Christians and pagans. It is not even clear if Martel or his Frankish soldiers thought of this battle against Saracens as primarily a religious war at all, so much as a series of defensive battles protecting land and wealth.
Moreover, the chronicle recounts that Odo, a duke of Aquitaine, made an alliance with the Muslim Berber governor of Catalonia known as Munuza to strengthen his defenses against the Umayyads, whom the Berber general had rebelled against, and that this combined force of Christians and Muslims helped Odo in his struggle against Martel: “When Duke Eudo saw that he was beaten and an object of scorn, he summoned to his assistance against Prince Charles and his Franks the unbelieving Saracen people.” The real story in the Continuations of the Chronicle of Fredegar is not Christianity against Islam, but internecine conflicts between Frankish princes and warlords. Tours is not framed as part of a larger religious war.
Turning Tours into a Turning Point
In the centuries following Tours, especially after Pope Urban II’s call in 1095 for what would become known as the First Crusade, Christians’ hostility towards Muslims intensified and became widespread. After that point, it became commonplace for medieval European texts to frame the Islamic religion as evil and Muslims as diabolical, and the significance and scope of earlier raids and battles in Spain and Gaul were exaggerated to answer that call.
Composed around 1100, the fictional chanson de geste, The Song of Roland, for example, turns the Frankish king Charlemagne’s incursions into Spain in 778 into a civilizational struggle between Saracens and Christians, when in reality, Charlemagne had been invited by the Islamic governor of Barcelona to aid him against the emir of Cordoba. There is little nuance in the poem’s depiction of a civilizational struggle: “The pagans are wrong and the Christians are right,” the bishop Turpin declares to justify the Frankish cause. That process of orientalization and demonizing was standard by the time of Gibbon in the 18th century.
The legacy of battles like Tours turned Islam into the enemy of Europe sine qua non and turned the “East” from a potential trade market into a civilization that was, in Edward Said’s words, “culturally, intellectually, spiritually, outside Europe and European civilization.” These discourses of perpetual conflict influenced some to look back and find in Tours what they want to find.
While most current historians would agree that Tours did not have a major impact on larger religious or political trends, an earlier generation of modern historians such as Gibbon in the 18th century and Sir Edward Creasy in the 19th — as well as more recent non-specialist, anti-immigrant political voices — insist on Tours’ crucial importance to stopping Muslim incursions into Europe at a time of rapid and significant Islamic expansion. This line of thinking emanates from earlier centuries of “historical” narratives like The Song of Roland that frame Frankish and Islamic interactions as a binary between Christian and Islamic forces, as well as from later medieval and early modern chroniclers and antiquarians who were eager to tell a story of the early Middle Ages that justified what they saw as the inevitable destiny of eventual Christian dominance in Europe.
In the 18th century, Gibbon perpetuated medieval Frankish propaganda and claimed that “Christendom [was] delivered by the genius and fortune of” Martel. And in the next century, historians such as Sir Edward Creasy amplified the myth of the Battle of Tours as having “rescued Christendom from Islam, preserved the relics of ancient and the germs of modern civilization, and re-established the old superiority of the Indo-European over the Semitic family of mankind.”
By overcoming the Saracens at Tours, Creasy argues that the progress of civilization was preserved and defended and that nations and peoples could continue their march towards modernity, united under the banner of Christendom. By overcoming Muslim forces — characterized by Creasy as murderous hordes driven by a lust for slaughter — Christian Europe was able to flourish, progress, and develop its modern institutions and values. “Civilization” was thus saved. If the “East” had won at Tours, they would have brought Europe under their yoke and subjugated Europeans to their harsh, despotic rule.
This specious reasoning ignores the reality of conflicts between the Franks and Umayyad forces in the eighth century, which involved factional discord between Frankish Christian warlords and provisional alliances at times between Christian and Muslim rulers. Yet it is this myth that proliferates in some political corners today. It is revealing how similar the anti-Islamic rhetoric of someone like Creasy is to that of contemporary voices. For Martel, Tours was an important battle because it solidified the Franks’ hold on their territory and protected their wealth from an invading army. It was not a civilizational duel at high noon between East and West or Christianity and Islam. Only in later centuries — when the Battle of Tours took on its legendary status — did narratives of civilizational warfare between “us” and “them” mold into a firmer shape.
Historiography from the 18th and 19th centuries on the Battle of Tours reverberates today as a linchpin of the political rhetoric of nationalists and identitarians who perpetuate a narrative of a civilizational war between Christianity and Islam for the last 1,300 years, and who use some of the same rhetoric of defending a Christian West from that nemesis as was used by earlier historians like Gibbon and Creasy.
Guillaume Faye, a prominent anti-Islam French nationalist and founding figure of the French New Right, said at a talk in Moscow that as in the eighth century, Islam is again trying to invade Europe, claiming that Islam:
seeks the conquest of Europe. We’ve already suffered three great assaults by Islam … The first of these offensives was halted at Poitiers in 732 by Charles Martel; the second in 1683, during the Ottoman siege of Vienna; the third … is now underway … Islam has a long memory, and its objective is to establish on our Continent [a caliphate].
That third “invasion” is not an armed offensive but immigration, according to that figure. A National Review editorial explicitly compares actions that the writer claims were taken during the Battle of Tours to actions supposedly taken by fundamentalist Islamic terrorists today and casts the two moments — 732 and today — as being similar: “After the Battle of Tours, no other Muslim invasion would be attempted north of the Pyrenees — until very recently and through very different means,” the implication again being the means of immigration. Steve Bannon has praised the Franks — “our forefathers” — for keeping Islam out of Europe at Tours. That National Review writer fancifully envisions the Franks seeing Arabic and Berber fighters as “wild and insatiable madmen, possibly cannibals” bent on the destruction of the civilized world.
Such heated rhetoric has been echoed by those who have carried out violent, destructive attacks, like the Charles Martel Group, a far-right, anti-Arab French terrorist organization that was responsible for multiple bombings primarily of Algerian consulates throughout France in the 1970s and 80s. Organized violence decades later escalated to mass murder. The white supremacist terrorist who murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 had “Tours 732” etched into one of his rifles.
The Battle of Tours is sometimes cast as a crucial turning point, but it is done with a political aim as it is molded into an identitarian teleology that fits historical pieces together to justify contemporary political ends. We often hear the aphorism that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, but sometimes it is precisely those who callously and maliciously “remember” the past in bad faith who try to ensure that it is repeated.
Daniel Wollenberg is associate dean of the College of Arts and Letters and an associate professor of English and writing at the University of Tampa. He specializes in medieval studies and medievalism studies, which focus on the reception of the Middle Ages in the modern world.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
