Who won the Battle of Tours?
The Franks under Charles Martel won. In October 732, somewhere between Tours and Poitiers, they defeated the army of Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi, the Umayyad governor of al-Andalus, who was killed in the fighting; his army slipped away by night. For centuries the battle was hailed as the day Europe was saved from Islam, a verdict most modern historians reject.1
Few battles are so famous and so poorly recorded. No one can point to the field, the date is argued over, and the size of the armies is unknown. Yet the clash between the Franks and the Umayyad army in the autumn of 732 has been told and retold for nearly thirteen centuries, first as a miracle, then as the moment that decided the fate of a continent, and lately as a case study in how a legend is made.2
Background: from Gibraltar to the Loire
In 711 an Umayyad army of Arabs and Berbers under Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed from North Africa into Spain and destroyed the army of the Visigothic king Roderick. Within a few years almost the whole Iberian Peninsula was under Muslim rule as the province of al-Andalus, governed for the caliphs in faraway Damascus. In 719 or 720 Muslim forces crossed the Pyrenees and took Narbonne, and by 725 raiders had reached Burgundy and sacked Autun.3
North of the mountains lay the Frankish kingdom of the Merovingians, whose kings had long since become figureheads. Real power was held by the mayor of the palace, and from about 719 that was Charles, the illegitimate son of Pippin II of Herstal, who had fought his way to power against his father's widow Plectrude and the Neustrian Franks, winning at Amblève in 716 and Vincy in 717.4
Between the two powers lay Aquitaine, ruled by Duke Eudes, or Odo, who had beaten the Muslims at Toulouse in 721 but answered to neither side. When he allied himself with Munusa, a Berber chieftain in revolt against the governor of al-Andalus, and gave him his daughter in marriage, Charles took it as a bid for independence and invaded Aquitaine twice in 731. The governor, Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi, meanwhile crushed Munusa, who died in the campaign.5› Charles Martel
The historian William E. Watson argues that Abd al-Rahman's expedition of 732 was neither a mere plunder raid nor a plan to conquer Christendom, but an attempt to remove the strategic threat that Eudes posed on the northern border of al-Andalus. Britannica's account, by contrast, likens it to a large raid, a razzia, rather than a true attempt to conquer and hold Aquitaine.6
Armies and commanders
Charles was in his forties and a veteran of almost twenty years of war against Neustrians, Frisians, Saxons, Bavarians and Alemanni. The Franks had no standing army, and his force was a gathering of armed freemen around a core of seasoned warriors who fought on foot when it mattered.7
Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi was governor of al-Andalus. Arab writers, as Watson notes, remember him as a just and devout man who went out as a ghazi, a fighter on the frontier of Islam. His army was strong in horsemen and, by the time it reached Poitou, heavy with plunder.8
How many men they led is unknown. Medieval writers gave absurd figures, as the losses they claimed show, and the sources allow no firm count of either army.9
The battle in phases
Bordeaux. In 732 Abd al-Rahman crossed the Pyrenees, sacked Bordeaux and routed Eudes on the Garonne and the Dordogne. The Chronicle of 754, written by a Christian in Muslim Spain, said that God alone knew the number of the slain. Eudes fled north and appealed to Charles, the rival who had invaded his lands the year before.10
The road to Tours. The Muslim army moved north along the old Roman road toward the Loire, burning the church of Saint-Hilaire outside Poitiers. Its goal was the abbey of Saint-Martin at Tours, one of the richest shrines in Gaul. Charles marched south to cover it.11
Seven days. The Chronicle of 754 says the armies watched each other for almost seven days, and Britannica suggests the main battle was probably preceded by skirmishes between scouts and outriders. Where it was fought cannot be established. Britannica lists the village of Cenon near Naintré, hamlets near Loudun, and Moussais-la-Bataille, east of the Clain roughly halfway between Poitiers and Tours, the site Watson favors on the Roman road.12
The wall. When battle came, the Franks stood in a dense mass and let the attackers come to them. The chronicler's image has never been forgotten: the men of the North stood like a wall, firm and close, "forming as it were a bulwark of ice," and cut the Arabs down with their swords. The Muslim horsemen charged again and again until nightfall without breaking the formation.13› Battle of Yarmouk, 636
Turning point: the camp and the commander
Abd al-Rahman was killed in the fighting. How it happened depends on the source. Britannica cites accounts in which a cavalry attack, possibly led by Eudes, struck the Muslim camp, and whole units left the line to defend their families and their plunder; Abd al-Rahman fell at about that time. The Arab narrative Creasy took from the Spanish historian José Antonio Conde has a false cry that the camp was being looted, horsemen riding back to save it, and the emir speared while trying to rally them.14
Night ended the fight. At dawn the Franks saw the enemy tents still standing and feared an ambush, but their scouts found the camp empty: the Muslims had gone in the night, leaving much of their booty behind. Charles did not pursue. Gibbon read that caution as proof that the Franks too had bled heavily.15
The losses were magnified at once. A letter from Eudes reported in the papal biography of Gregory II claimed 375,000 Arabs killed for only 1,500 Christians, and a later French chronicle gave 300,000. Gibbon called such tallies an incredible tale; James Palmer points out that 375,000 is far more than the population of Rome or Constantinople at the time.16
Aftermath
The immediate winner was Charles. He forced Eudes to swear allegiance to him and left him as duke, and when Eudes died in 735 he crossed the Loire to make his power felt around Bordeaux.17
Tours did not end the raids. In 734 or 735 the governor of al-Andalus and the governor of Narbonne struck into Aquitaine and the Rhône valley, taking Avignon with the help of Maurontus, duke of Provence. Charles drove them back in 737, but could not take Narbonne. Another invasion in 739 led him to call on Liutprand, king of the Lombards, for help. The real brake on Muslim expansion, Britannica argues, came from the Berber revolt in North Africa in 739 and the civil wars that ended in the Abbasid revolution of 750.18
To pay his warriors Charles gave them the use of church lands, and the clergy never forgave him. Gibbon and the Catholic Encyclopedia both tell how, a century later, a vision attributed to Saint Eucher showed the savior of Christendom burning in hell for robbing the Church.19
When the Merovingian king Theuderic IV died in 737, Charles left the throne empty. He died at Quierzy in October 741, having divided the realm between his sons Carloman and Pepin. In 751 Pepin the Short deposed the last Merovingian, Childeric III, and was made king; his son Charlemagne was crowned emperor in 800.20
The debate: did Tours save Europe?
The earliest sources are oddly modest. The Frankish continuator of Fredegar ranks the battle with Charles's other victories of that decade, and the Annals of Lorsch give it one line. In Palmer's reading, the Arab historian Ibn Abd al-Hakam treats it as little more than a raid gone wrong, while the Spanish chronicler of 754 makes the most of it.21
Edward Gibbon made it a world event. In the Decline and Fall he wrote that a victorious march of a thousand miles from Gibraltar to the Loire could have been repeated as far as Poland and the Scottish Highlands, and that "perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford." Creasy thought the remark had "almost an air of regret," and the medievalist Daniel Wollenberg suspects it was sardonic, but either way it set the tone for a century.22
In 1851 Sir Edward Creasy put Tours among his Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, claiming it had "rescued Christendom from Islam" and quoting Ranke, Schlegel, Thomas Arnold and Henry Hallam in support. In France, the Guizots wrote in 1869 that the civilization of the world had depended on it. Yet Jules Michelet thought the Franks a greater danger to Gaul than the Saracens, and the Oxford historian Charles Oman wrote in 1893 that the danger to Christendom had often been exaggerated, especially by French writers. In the 1930s Henri Pirenne held that the battle did not have the importance attributed to it.23
Modern scholarship has moved further. Watson rejects both the raid and the crusade readings, but concludes that history would have run differently had Charles fallen as Roderick did in 711. Britannica's article judges that the Berber revolt and Umayyad civil wars, not Tours, ended the Muslim advance. Palmer calls it a turning point that failed to turn, whose fame grew from nineteenth-century arguments about nations and faith rather than from the sources.24
Legacy and memory
The battle's best-known legacy is a name. The French chronicle tradition says Charles was first called Martel, the Hammer, at Tours, because he smote his enemies as a hammer strikes metal, and the Catholic Encyclopedia repeats it as "it is said." Britannica ties the byname to his many conquests, and a Polish ministry of education textbook to his favorite weapon.25
In Europe the legend outgrew the battle: a French terrorist group of the 1970s and 1980s took the name of Charles Martel, and in 2014 Steve Bannon invoked the battle in a speech to a Vatican-linked institute. Wollenberg and Palmer both see in this a medieval battle recast as a war of civilizations.26› Battle of Vienna, 1683
When and where
Several Latin annals record the battle in October 732, and Watson reads them as placing it on a Saturday. Popular accounts give 10 October, while Lévi-Provençal argued for a day between 25 and 31 October and Michel Rouche for 25 October. Michel Baudot's dating to 733, Watson notes, rests on a misreading of Ibn Idhari, though Palmer still writes 732/3. The battlefield itself has never been found, and the battle is known by both cities, as Tours or as Poitiers.27
