On the Day October 10 732AD

On the Day October 10 732AD

Martel Hammers the Muslims

Khen Lim



Charles Martel (Image source: stolinsky.com)

In 610AD, it is said that the 40-year-old Mohammed received his first ‘revelation’ thus marking the rise of Islam. And there began the publicity leading to the emergence of a new force to be reckoned. From 624AD to 632AD, the year of his death, he led major battles with mixed results. 

His first encounter with the Christians, which was in 630AD in Muta, ended in defeat. However within a century of its founding, Islam had become formidable, conquering Syria, Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq in 638AD, Egypt in 641AD, North Africa in 655AD and the Iberian Peninsula in 711AD. By then, swathes of the Mediterranean had become a fiery lake of Islamisation and Christendom in Western Europe was under siege.

In 720AD, Muslim forces crossed the Pyrenees under the leadership of Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi, Arab governor of al-Andalus and emir of Cordoba. Before long, he was advancing towards Gaul and on to Tours but on this day in 732AD, the Battle of Tours ended the last of the great Arab incursions into France and hailed a historically crucial Frankish victory for not just Europe but Christianity in the main. Thus began the noted military brilliance of a man called Charles Martel.

Rather than wiping out the whole of Europe, the Islamic threat halted in its tracks because of the Franks’ Mayor of the Palace, Charles Martel, and his Merovingian knights. In a land between Poitiers and Tours in northern-central France, seven days of battle secured the continent despite overwhelming odds against them. 

In the battle, the Muslims were expected to be victorious. Mounted on horses, they employed the latest innovation, the stirrup, which offered superior stability to the rider. Considered one of the most noted inventions in warfare prior to gunpowder, the stirrup meant the likelihood of falling off while fighting was lessened significantly while he could still wield his sword more devastatingly against infantry adversaries.

Battle of Tours, 732AD (Image source: commons.wikipedia.org)

While the Muslims were seemingly more advanced, the Franks were on foot. They had nothing exceptional to stave off the Muslim invasion and yet they stood their ground and deflected the enemies who then summarily withdrew in defeat. 

Meanwhile the Arab commander was killed amidst a massive rout in which the Arabs sustained humiliating losses. It was this victory that earned Charles the Latinate cognomen ‘Martellus,’ which in French, was Martel, meaning ‘the hammer,’ in a facsimile that recalled Judas Maccabaeus, ‘the Hammerer.’   

After Tours was retained with the Arabs in quick retreat, Charles went on the offensive, destroying fortresses in Agde, Béziers and Maguelonne. In Nimes, he met up with the Muslims again in 736AD and 737AD, stopping them once more from another attempt to re-expand. By 738AD, he made significant gains, establishing Frankish domination over Bavaria, Alemannia and Frisia while denying Al Ghafiqi any foothold in Europe beyond Al-Andalus (Andalusia).  

Charles Martel (Image source: jimblazsik.wordpress.com)

Through this period in time, Christianity, though in process, had not fully or successfully covered Europe. With that in mind, what Charles did to send the Muslims packing – as well as support Germanic Christian expansion – was greatly appreciated by the Church. This included the protection he offered to notable Anglo-Saxon missionary Winfrid (627-754AD) who came to be known widely as the Apostle of the Germans and then was later beatified as Saint Boniface and also Northumbrian missionary Willibrord (658-739AD) who later, as bishop of Utrecht, aided Charles in converting the people of pagan West Frisia to Christianity.

Because of his willingness to challenge the Muslim invaders, the Church was happy to loan the Carolingian leader tracts of church land in order to help him cover the costs of such acts of resistance but inevitably, this would later turned sour.

Charles, in his dealings against the Umayyads and then the crisis in the Iberian Peninsula, believed he needed a full-time and well-trained army to do justice to his military efforts, which was to stand up to the kind of heavy Muslim invasions he was expecting to face. 

This meant eliciting a core of loyal veteran Franks and supplementing them with conscripts that were placed on call at any time but to do that, he had to pay the families adequately enough to be able to buy the food that the men would otherwise had grown in their own homes. Apart from that, Charles also needed his knights to have horses, saddles and spurs and all of this had to be paid from the lands loaned to him by the Church.

Apparently, none of this sat well with the ecclesia because the Church viewed these knights who were the beneficiaries of the lands as ungodly and untrained in spiritual matters of the faith. And sure enough, church discipline declined once churches were reshaped as nothing more than branches of civil service. 

However, just as we thought Charles would be excommunicated, he wasn’t. The Church needed someone like him to protect them against the ominous Muslim threat. The problem was of course that there was no one like Charles and just as they expected, the significant invasion became a reality.

Still, looking back, all of this was nothing should of an unlikely or improbably piece of miracle that couldn’t have happened were it not for the Hand of God. After all, Charles was nothing more than an illegitimate son and was not meant to amount to anything significant since his own mother, Plectrude preferred their grandson Theudoald (by their late son Grimoald) to be the heir to his father Pepin of Herstal who died in December 714AD. The nobles were opposed to this idea since Theudoald was a mere eight-year-old child but Plectrude was determined to have it her way and to achieve her ends, she had Charles incarcerated in Cologne.

With Charles in jail, some effort was made to dampen potential riots but nothing could be done to stave off unrest in Neustria where there was considerable chaos resulting in power struggles. Before the year 715AD came to an end, Charles Martel managed to escape from prison and soon thereafter, the nobles of Austrasia made him their mayor. From there, it only took him four short years to quickly rebuild his power base.

The death of Abd al-Rahman, Muslim commander in the Battle of Tours, 732AD (Image source: edu.hstry.co)

All this while, the Muslims had no clear idea how strong the military strength of the Franks were. For all they knew, Europe after the fall of Rome was predominantly run by the typical undisciplined barbarian hordes. Historians have often suggested that the Arabs only began to be wary of the Franks after the Caliph’s shock at their humiliating Battle of Tours defeat.

Charles Martel including his descendants went on to exert tremendous influence on European and Christian history. Of those who came after him, Pepin the Short (714-768AD), his son, became the first Carolingian king of the Franks and resorted to help the popes in a way that Charles didn’t. His grandson, Charlemagne (c742-814AD) carved a solid reputation of his own by becoming the famous medieval emperor who ruled much of Western Europe, extending the Frankish realms much to the western flanks.

As for Islam, the many centuries that followed were filled with persistent designs to exact the fall of Europe. We see its greatest effort of late with the Muslim infiltration of countries like Belgium, France, Holland, Germany, Sweden and so on in the last many decades topped off by the recent startling Syrian refugee crisis. Even so, history has accorded Charles with a unique place of recognition especially throughout the Christian world.

English historian Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy (1812-1878) maintained that had Charles failed to stem the Islamic tide at Poitiers-Tours, the whole of Western Europe would have been completely stampeded. He said, “the great victory won by Charles Martel… gave a decisive check to the career of Arab conquest in Western Europe, rescued Christendom from Island [and] preserved the relics of ancient and the germs of modern civilisation.” How right he turned out to be when we look at how the Islamic State today had gone on to destroy the remains of the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria, the ancient Assyrian city of Taj Ajaja as well as countless other cultural treasures.

Another English historian and also Member of Parliament, Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) said Charles’ victory prevented the Umayyad armies from vanquishing countries from Japan to the Rhine including England despite the English Channel being there for protection. Gibbon’s assertion that the fate of Christianity had hung on a balance until Charles Martel restored it in our favour is echoed by many others historians although there has evidently been Muslim apologists such as the British-American historian and nonagenarian doyen of Islamic Studies, Bernard Lewis (b1916) who believed that the Muslims had no intention of actually occupying northern France despite overwhelming evidence otherwise.

In an article on the American Thinker website questioning Lewis’ wisdom, author Andrew G Bostom said this: 

“As I demonstrate in my recent book, Sharia Versus Freedom, Lewis’ legacy of intellectual and moral confusion has greatly hindered the ability of sincere American policymakers to think clearly about Islam’s living imperial legacy, driven by unreformed and unrepentant mainstream Islamic doctrine. Ongoing highly selective and celebratory presentations of Lewis’ understandings are pathognomonic of the dangerous influence Lewis continues to wield over his uncritical acolytes and supporters.”

Note: For the complete article, click here.

Battle of Poitiers, Charles Martel (Image source: mirageswar.com)

No matter what, there is no denying that impact of Charles Martel’s role as defined by the Battle of Tours. In his book ‘Fighting Techniques of the Medieval World: Equipment Combat Skills and Tactics’ (Thomas Dunne Books, Dec 2005), renowned historian Matthew Bennett, who is also a senior lecturer at The Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, U.K. maintains that “few battles are remembered a thousand years after they are fought… but the Battle of Poitiers (Tours) is an exception… Charles Martell turned back a Muslim raid that, had it been allowed to continue, might have conquered Gaul.”

Nothing can remove the obvious; Charles Martel is a rarest of his kind in the Middle Ages. He was a brilliant military tactical strategist. With the odds stacked heavily against him, he still could alter his plans to respond to the changing dynamics of his enemy forces and still beat them not once but repeatedly. 

In Tours, he neither had the numbers nor ordnance. In Berre and Narbonne, he was clearly outnumbered. And yet he did it time and again because he had that rare quality that defined greatness in ingenuity as a true military craftsman. That rareness may also tell us something about the Hand of God that truly favoured this man.