Charles Martel

In the autumn of 732, somewhere between Tours and Poitiers, a Frankish commander named Charles Martel planted himself in the path of an Umayyad army raiding deep into Gaul, and refused to move. He was not a king. He was a warlord who had fought his way out of prison to rule the Franks in the name of puppet kings, and the victory near Tours, magnified by later writers, made him a legend and his family a dynasty.¹

Early life

Charles was born about 688, an illegitimate son of Pippin II of Herstal, the mayor of the palace who governed the Frankish realm for its powerless Merovingian kings. The New Catholic Encyclopedia names his mother as Alpaida, Pippin's concubine or possibly his second wife, and notes that nothing is known of his first 26 years.²

When Pippin died in 714, his will passed Charles over in favor of three grandsons, with Pippin's widow Plectrude holding power for them. She had Charles imprisoned. He escaped, gathered an army and began a fight for his father's power.³

The struggle for power, 715 to 719

The Neustrians of the western Frankish kingdom, led by their mayor Ragenfrid and allied with the Frisians, invaded Austrasia, the eastern kingdom. Charles ambushed the returning Neustrians at Amblève near Liège in 716 and beat them at Vincy near Cambrai in 717. Plectrude and the Austrasians submitted.⁴

In 719 he defeated Ragenfrid at Soissons, and from then on, Britannica writes, Charles alone governed the Franks as mayor. Like his father he ruled in the name of Merovingian kings and never took the royal title.⁵

Wars on every frontier, 720s

Holding so large a realm meant constant campaigning on its edges. Through the 720s and into the 730s Charles fought the Frisians, Saxons and Bavarians, drove the Saxons back across the Rhine and restored Frankish overlordship east of it. He also backed the English missionaries Willibrord and Boniface, whose work helped bind the borderlands to the Frankish world.⁶

The southern frontier, 711 to 731

To the south lay a new danger. Muslim armies had crossed from Africa into Spain in 711 and soon took most of the Visigothic kingdom. In 719 or 720 the governor al-Samḥ captured Narbonne, and in 721 he was killed before the walls of Toulouse, where Duke Eudes of Aquitaine broke the siege. The raids went on: Carcassonne and Nîmes fell (in 724 according to William E. Watson, in 725 according to HistoryNet), and in 725 a raid up the Rhône valley reached Burgundy and sacked Autun.⁷

Eudes tried to protect himself by diplomacy. He made an alliance with Munusa, a Berber commander in Cerdagne who had rebelled against the governor of al-Andalus, and, according to the Chronicle of 754 as Watson reports it, gave him his daughter in marriage. Watson dates the alliance to 729, HistoryNet the rebellion to 731. The governor ʿAbd al-Raḥmān crushed Munusa, who died, and his head was sent to Damascus. Charles, who took the alliance as an assertion of Aquitanian independence, twice invaded Aquitaine in 731 and humbled Eudes.⁸

Tours, 732

In 732 the governor of al-Andalus, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ghāfiqī, crossed the Pyrenees, took Bordeaux and routed Duke Eudes of Aquitaine. He then pushed north across Aquitaine toward Poitiers; the Chronicle of 754 says he meant to plunder the church of St. Martin at Tours. Eudes, an old enemy of Charles, appealed to him for help.⁹

On the way, the Chronicle of 754 says, his men destroyed palaces and burned churches. Charles met him somewhere between Poitiers and Tours. The site cannot be fixed: Britannica lists several candidates, among them Moussais-la-Bataille, east of the river Clain, which is where HistoryNet places the battle. When battle came, the Franks stood "one close to another, forming as it were a bulwark of ice" and cut down the attackers with their swords. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān was killed, and in the night the Arab army slipped away, leaving its tents standing; the next morning the Franks, fearing a trap, found the camp empty. Britannica judges the Chronicle of 754 the most plausible contemporary account and thinks the Muslim attack was most likely broken by Charles's massed heavy infantry.¹⁰ › Battle of Tours, 732

The date is usually given as October 732. William E. Watson, weighing the Latin and Arabic chronicles, accepts a date in the last week of October 732 and rejects the year 733 proposed by one French historian in 1955 as a misreading of the sources.¹¹

Aquitaine, Burgundy and Provence, 733 to 739

The victory strengthened Charles's hand above all in Aquitaine, where Eudes had to swear allegiance to him; when Eudes died in 735, Charles crossed the Loire to make his power felt around Bordeaux. From 733 he also pushed into Burgundy and down the Rhône valley.¹²

In 737 Muslim forces, let into Avignon by the Provençal duke Maurontus, held the city. The Continuator of Fredegar describes how Charles's half-brother Childebrand and then Charles himself stormed it with siege machines and ropes. Charles then besieged Narbonne and, on the river Berre, destroyed an army sent from Spain to relieve it, many of the fleeing soldiers drowning as they tried to reach their ships. He could not take Narbonne, but on his way home he wrecked the walls of Nîmes, Agde and Béziers.¹³

Command style

Charles fought almost every year, and the sources show a commander who chose strong positions, kept his infantry in close order and used sieges and field battles alike. At Tours, the Chronicle of 754 credits the Austrasians drawn up around their leader with carrying all before them.¹⁴

How he paid for his army is disputed. Britannica says the growing pace of his offensive wars led him to build a strong mounted force of landed professional warriors, financed partly with church lands, though without stirrups it would not have resembled later heavy cavalry. The New Catholic Encyclopedia counters that there is no evidence he systematically seized church property, a reputation it traces to the ninth-century archbishop Hincmar of Reims. The older theory that the stirrup turned the Franks into armored horsemen and created feudalism has been largely abandoned since Bernard Bachrach's critique of 1970.¹⁵

Later life and death

When the Merovingian king Theuderic IV died in 737, Charles did not bother to set another on the throne. He retired to his palace at Quierzy-sur-Oise and died there on 22 October 741. Before his death he divided the realm between his two legitimate sons, Pippin and Carloman, still without taking the royal title.¹⁶

Legacy and memory

The name Martel, the Hammer, came later. The New Catholic Encyclopedia dates it to the ninth century. The Chronicle of Saint-Denis says he was first called Martel because he struck his enemies at Tours like a hammer of iron, and a Polish state textbook explains it by his favorite weapon.¹⁷

So did the legend of Tours. Edward Gibbon imagined that without it the Koran might be taught at Oxford; Watson, while rejecting such exaggerations, still argues that the battle had real long-term significance. Britannica takes the opposite view: Tours was a single engagement in a decades-long conflict, the invasion looked more like a great raid than a war of conquest, and it was the Berber revolt in North Africa in 739 and the Umayyads' internal troubles that really ended the Muslim advance. The New Catholic Encyclopedia notes that raids went on and Septimania stayed in Muslim hands until 759.¹⁸

His real legacy was dynastic. In 751 his son Pepin the Short set aside Childeric III, the last Merovingian king, and was crowned king of the Franks; his grandson was Charlemagne. The family that took its name from Charles is known as the Carolingians.¹⁹

See the battle among the great clashes of its age in our guide to the greatest medieval battles, see how he stands among history's captains in the greatest military commanders in history, or find your own match in the Which Commander Are You quiz.