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The battle—and the leader—that saved our civilization
We’ve all heard of the battle of Tours, sometimes called the battle of Poitiers, in which the Frankish army under Charles Martel consisting of unarmored infantry defeated a vast Arab and Moorish force consisting of heavily armored cavalry on the banks of the Loire and saved Christendom. Wikipedia has an excellent article describing the lead-up to the battle, the battle itself (about which far more is known than I had realized), and its mega-historical significance, reflected in quotes from many historians. An exception is Bernard Lewis who holds that the battle was not of much importance because the Moslems thought of Europe as a backwater not worth conquering. The article systematically shatters that view. (Is there any important issue on which the Illustrious Lewis has not been wrong?) Wikipedia has sometimes been accused of a leftist PC bias. You will not say that about this article.
Also see the Wikipedia biography of Charles Martel (686-741). Prior to the Moslem invasion of Gaul he was engaged in incessant wars to secure the unity and rule of the Frankish kingdoms and never lost a battle. Mindful of the Moslem threat for several years prior to Tours, he spent that time preparing his army and made certain his men knew they were fighting for Christendom. In order to have a force that would have the training and discipline to defeat the more advanced and numerous Moslem army, he created the first European standing army; prior to this, Germanic armies had been hodgepodge barbarian hordes raised for a single season between planting and harvest. To raise funds to pay the salaries of his soldiers he seized Church lands, which almost got him excommunicated, but Boniface, the great English missionary to the pagan Germans, defended Charles’s act as a necessity to defend Christianity, a fact the Church later recognized and forgave. After Tours in 732 Charles defeated the Moslems in several more campaigns in southern Gaul, which historians say were as important as Tours in delivering Europe from the Moslem threat. At the battle of Narbonne, just five years after Tours, Charles had already adopted the Moslem-style heavy cavalry for his own army and he used it in skillful combination with the infantry phalanx that he had employed so successfully at Tours. This amazed the opposing Moslem general (the son of the Moslem general who had been slain at Tours), who had assumed it would take the Franks a generation to develop proficiency in the Moslem technique of heavily armored cavalry. Charles emerges as a military and political genius of the first order, an awesome figure in European history. Email entry |