732: Charles the Hammer saves the West from Islam

October 11, 2008
Raymond Ibrahim

Today in History: Charles the Hammer saves the West from Islam at Tours

Precisely 100 years of Islamic conquests after Muhammad's death (632), the Muslims, starting from Arabia, found themselves in Gaul, modern day France, confronting a hitherto little known people—the Christian Franks. There, on October 11th, 732, one of the most decisive battles between Christendom and Islam took place, demarcating the extent of the latter’s conquests, and ensuring the survival of the former.

Prior to this, the Islamic conquerors, drunk with power and plunder, had, for one century been subjugating all peoples and territories standing in their western march—from Arabia to Morocco (al-Maghreb, the “furthest west”). In 711, the Muslims made their fateful crossing of the straits of Gibraltar, landing for the first time on European ground. Upon touching terra firma, the leader of the Muslims, Tariq bin Zayid, ordered all the boats used for the crossing burned, asserting “We have not come here to return. Either we conquer and establish ourselves here, or we perish.” Islam was there to stay.

This famous Tariq anecdote—often reminisced by modern day jihadists—highlights the jihadist nature of the Umayyad caliphate (661-750), the superpower of its day. As most historians have acknowledged, the Umayyad caliphate was the “Jihadi-State” par excellence. Its very existence was closely tied to its conquests; its legitimacy as “viceroy” of Allah based on its jihadi expansion.

Once on European ground, the depredations continued unabated. Writes one Arab chronicler regarding the Muslim northern advance past the Pyrenees: “Full of wrath and pride” the Muslims “went through all places like a desolating storm. Prosperity made those warriors insatiable…everything gave way to their scimitars, the robbers of lives.” Even far off English anchorite, the contemporary Bede, wrote, “A plague of Saracens wrought wretched devastation and slaughter upon Gaul.”

... unbeknownst to the Muslims, the battle-hardened Frankish king Charles, aware of their purport, had begun rallying his liegemen to his standard, in an effort to ward off the Islamic drive. Having risen to power in France in 717, Charles appreciated the significance of the Islamic threat. He therefore intercepted the invaders somewhere between Poitiers and Tours, the latter being the immediate aim of the Muslims. The chroniclers give amazing numbers concerning the Muslims, as many as 300,000. Suffice to say, the Franks were greatly outnumbered, and most historians are content with the figures of 80,000 Muslims against 20-30,000 Franks...

“The men of the north stood as motionless as a wall, they were like a belt of ice frozen together, and not to be dissolved, as they slew the Arab with the sword. The Austrasians [Franks], vast of limb, and iron of hand, hewed on bravely in the thick of the fight; it was they who found and cut down the Saracen’s king [Rahman].”

Hanson writes: “When the sources speak of “a wall,” “a mass of ice,” and “immovable lines” of infantrymen, we should imagine a literal human rampart, nearly invulnerable, with locked shields in front of armored bodies, weapons extended to catch the underbellies of any Islamic horsemen foolish enough to hit the Franks at a gallop.”

As night fell upon them, the Muslims and Christians disengaged and withdrew to their tents. With the coming of dawn, it was discovered that the Muslims, perhaps seized with panic that their emir was dead, had fled south during the night, still looting, burning, and plundering as they went. Hanson offers a realistic picture of the aftermath: “Poitiers [or Tours] was, as all cavalry battles, a gory mess, strewn with thousands of wounded or dying horses, abandoned plunder, and dead and wounded Arabs. Few of the wounded were taken prisoner—given their previous record of murder and pillage at Poitiers.”

In the coming years, Charles, henceforth known as Martel—the Hammer—would continue waging war on the Muslim remnants north of the Pyrenees till they all fled back south. Frankish sovereignty and consolidation were naturally established in Gaul, leading to the creation of the Holy Roman Empire—beginning with Charles’ own grandson, Charlemagne, often described by historians as the “Father of Europe.” As historian Henri Pirenne put it: “Without Islam the Frankish Empire would probably never have existed and Charlemagne, without Mahomet, would be inconceivable.”

Aside from the fact that this battle ushered in an end to the first massive wave of Islamic conquests, there are many indications that it also instrumentally led to the fall of the Umayyad caliphate, which, as mentioned earlier, owed its very existence to jihad, victory, plunder and slavery (ghanima). In 718, the Umayyads, after investing a considerable amount of manpower and resources trying to besiege and conquer, Constantinople, lost horribly. Less than fifteen years later, their western attempt was, as seen, also terribly repulsed at Tours. It is no coincidence that a mere 18 years after Tours, the Umayyad caliphate was overthrown by the Abbasids, and the age of Islam’s great conquests came to an end (until the rise of the Ottoman empire which, like the Umayyads, was also a jihadi state built on territorial conquests).

Thus any number of historians, such as Godefroid Kurth, would go on to say that the Battle of Tours “must ever remain one of the great events in the history of the world, as upon its issue depended whether Christian Civilization should continue or Islam prevail throughout Europe.” ...

At any rate, the facts speak for themselves: after the Battle of Tours, no other massive Muslim invasion would be attempted north of the Pyrenees—until very recently and through very different means. But that is another story.