522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)

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see remixyogurt.com A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire. The repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the highlands of Scotland.
The Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Muhammad.
From such calamities was Christendom delivered by the genius and fortune of one man. Charles, the illegitimate son of the elder Pep written.
He is describing the legacy of the Battle of Tor, which was fought on the 10th of October 732, or perhaps 733, nobody is entirely sure, between the Franks and what he called an invading force of Saracens. So Tom, great passage, great book, great subject.
Just bring some of it alive for us. So who is Charles? Who are the saracens where Where are we and what's going on? Okay.
So we are still in our series on the Franks and Charles, who Gibbon in that passage is very careful to specify is not a king, but a mayor or a duke of the Franks. He is perhaps the greatest of all the Frankish warlords since the time of Clavis, the king who founds the great kingdom of the Franks as the Roman Empire is falling.

But we're now in the early 8th century and Charles will be known from the following century onwards as Charles Martel, the Hammer.

So a tremendous name for a guy who has a very mailed fist.

The Saracens are an army in the service of the Amayyad Caliphate. So that is the first great Arab empire, the first great empire of Islam.
And this is why Gibbon is casting it as a peculiarly decisive clash. He's framing it as a battle between Christianity and Islam.
and he's suggesting that had it gone the other way, had the Franks lost to the Saracens, to the Muslims, to the Arabs, then perhaps we might have seen the interpretation of the Quran taught in Oxford. And there's a bit of a joke here, because Gibbon had been a student at Oxford and had absolutely hated it.
He despised all the Dons who at the time were Anglican priests. And so I think he's slightly tweaking the noses of his old teachers and suggesting that they might have been circumcised followers of Muhammad.
But it's obviously, it's not just a joke because Gibbon has a genius for, well, Byron referred to his solemn sneer. When he makes a joke, there's often a kind of very serious purpose.
And he's making a serious point here. He's saying this is one of the great decisive battles of world history.
And this is an argument that people made particularly in the 19th and early 20th century, isn't it? that the Battle of Tor, if if it was fought in 732 was one of the genuinely pivotal moments when history might have gone differently that had the franks lost to the saracens then islam the advance of the arab armies would have continued up into france and that the entire course of european and might have been different. And in fact, all Europe might have fallen within the kind of Islamic world.
And people genuinely made that argument very vigorously, among them Adolf Hitler, right? Right. So most of the historians in the 19th and 20th century who are pushing this case, they see the possibility that Christian Europe might have become Muslim as a disaster.
So Gibbon refers to it in that passage he read as a calamity. But one person, he said, who thought it was a great shame that the Franks had won was Adolf Hitler.
And the reasons for this, he spelt it out in his table talk, and I'll read it. Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers, he said, already you see the world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing is Christianity.
Then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races have conquered the world christianity alone prevented them from doing so craggy because to hitler christianity is a kind of weedy wet religion that encourages peace but this is not what the vast majority of historical scholars now think is it most agree now that the battle of tor was massively overblown.
It was kind of a propaganda victory above all else, partly because the Arabs are not trying to launch a massive invasion of what was once Gaul. It's a raid, one among many, that they launch.
And the consequences are perhaps not as great as it's often thought. Yes.
So that's one argument that is, I would say, is pretty much the consensus now among academics on the status of the Battle of Tor, that it's not an invasion, that it's a raid. Also, that it's not a clash between Christianity and Islam, because no contemporary really seems to frame it as such.
And also that in a way, it owes more to faction fighting among various Frankish warlords, of whom Charles Martel is one, than it does to Muslim dreams of world conquest. But, you know, there are plenty of other scholars who do hold to the kind of Gibbonian view.
And it's a debate that's been rumbling away now for decades. And it is a debate that has kind of echoed beyond universities in a way that is unusual for debates about Frankish history.
Because this, I would say in general, you know, the period that we've been discussing, these centuries of Frankish history are among the most obscure in European history. It's not a period that people know a great deal amount, but the Battle of Tord does have cut through.
And there's an obvious reason for that, which is basically the kind of political context in Europe today, and specifically the fact that over recent decades, the growth of the Muslim population in Europe has been considerable.

And this, particularly in France, so the ancient Frankish heartland, it has generated quite a far-right reaction.

But, you know, not only in France.

So in Britain, for instance,

there are now Muslim scholars preaching the Quran in Oxford. And there are people in here, in Britain, as in France, as in other countries in Europe, who regard this with extreme hostility.
And I think the implications of this for discussion of the Battle of Tor in far-right circles is, I I mean, is unbelievably toxic. So you can see this in the way that it's been used by far-right groups.
So as early as the 1970s in France, in the wake of the Algerian war, De Gaulle settlement of that, and the growth of Algerian immigration into France, in the 70s, there was an anti-Algerian terrorist group, so far-right terrorist group, and it called itself the group Charles Martel. So drawing its direct inspiration from the Frankish duke who had won the Battle of Tours.
Then in 2015, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, so the publishers of the hysterical magazine in France who were kind of shot by an Islamist gunman. Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was leader of the National Front at the time, father of Marine Le Pen.
There was this slogan, Je suis Charlie. So people saying, you know, identifying themselves with the victims of the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
But Jean-Marie Le Pen said, no, je suis Charlie Martel. and perhaps the most brutal manifestation of the way in which the far right have identified with Charles Martel is that in 2019, people may remember, there was a terrorist attack in New Zealand of all places, so the opposite end of the world from France, done by an Australian terrorist.
And he attacked a mosque and an Islamic center in Christchurch, killed 51 people. And on his gun, he had inscribed the name of Charles Martel.
So you can see that for academics, this is very difficult, I think, to kind of banish this from what they're doing, wouldn't you say? I mean, it's kind of... Yeah, of course.
I do think when you read an academic on the Battle of Tor, academics who say, oh, it's a terribly important moment, it's a pivotal moment in world civilization, a battle that changed everything, they always do tend to be of a very particular political persuasion. I think equally you could say that those who say that it's unimportant, that it's a minor border skirmish, also tend to be of a particular political persuasion, which is simply to say that it is difficult, I think, to remove discussions of this battle from current political contexts.
So just as there are people on the right who say this was the saving of Europe. So on the other hands, on the left, you occasionally you will get the sense that basically it was kind of racist of the Franks not to have surrendered to the invaders at Tor.
And I think it reflects the fact that maybe of all the battles we've discussed so far on The Rest is History, this is politically the most sensitive of the lot. So that's why I think before we get into the details of the battle itself, it's really important to explain the context for what is going on here in some detail.
All right. Well, let's start with the Arabs.
So Gibbon calls them Saracens, which is not a word that you often hear these days. But actually, they're not really Arabs, are they? Most of that army are almost certainly Berbers from North Africa, from what we'd once have called Mauritania, or probably a lot of them from Spain.
So they're not Arabs. And actually, are they even Muslims? Because of course, at this point, Islam is still in the process of kind of being formed isn't it to some degree yeah it's really difficult to know what word to use to describe these invaders for the reasons that you said i mean and certainly the berbers in the army probably the majority i mean loads of them would have had only the haziest sense of what Islam was.
And as you say, Islam itself is

still in the process of evolution at this point. Islam at this point is best thought of as a kind

of franchising system. So groups of people beyond the kind of the heartlands of the Amayyad empire

back in Syria and Iraq and Arabia are licensed by the caliph in Baghdad to form their own kind

of posses, their own groups. And essentially the license that the caliph is giving these groups

to be able of the world. But the reason that lots of people kind of buy into this isn't necessarily because they are kind of passionately committed to spreading the message of the Quran.
It's because they want to go out and grab stuff and strip and loot monasteries and towns or whatever. It's a raiding party and not, I guess, totally unlike Scandinavian raiding party in a not massively dissimilar period.
I think you're right. And again, that kind of parallels with this in the Viking period is something we might come to kind of later on in the episode.
and so what you have going over the course of the late 7th, going into the 8th centuries, is war bands who are kind of nominally Muslim, spreading westwards from Egypt along the northern coast of Africa, all the way to Mauritania. And then in 7-Eleven, there's a kind of exploratory raid across the Straits of Gibraltar.
So a war band of Berbers, of Arabs, of Muslims, whatever you want to call them. They land in Spain and they have spectacular success.
So they meet the king of the Visigoths. This is the kingdom that had given the Franks Brunhilde and wipes the king and his army out.
They go on, they capture Toledo, which is in the center of Spain, the main Visigothic city. And it's a spectacular victory.
It's a kind of Hernan Cortes type victory, the overthrow of a great and wealthy empire. And the loot that gets sent back to Syria is so overwhelming that Spain comes to seem to the eyes of the Ameids back in Syria, a kind of land of wonders.
It's a place of talking statues where cities are fashioned entirely out of brass, just full of treasure and also full of slaves. So a massive coffle of 30,000 Visigothic slaves are sent back to Damascus.
And again, this is seen as being something extraordinary. And so it's not surprising in the wake of this success that the invaders press onwards.
And by 719, so that's just eight years after they'd landed in Gibraltar, the invaders have crossed the Pyrenees. And in 720, they capture the great city of Narbonne, which there's still a kind of tiny strip of Visigothic territory on the coast of southern Gaul.
Narbonne falls to the invaders, and then they fan out to conquer the remaining Visigothic strongholds in southern Gaul, so Béziers, Agda, Nîmes. They all fall and essentially pretty much the whole of the Visigothic kingdom, with the exception of kind of the northern reaches of Spain, have fallen in the space of basically a decade to these invaders.
I mean it's a spectacular feat of conquest. So now beyond that is the land of the Franks.
And that's the kingdom we talked about last week. It's ruled by the Merovingian dynasty.
We left it with Clothar II. He's won his victory over Brunhilde.
And he's basically got a monarchy over the whole of what was once the Roman territory of Gaul. So all the different kingdoms are now acknowledging him as their, all the different bits rather, are now acknowledging him as their king.
But I read that the seeds of the Merovingians' downfall had already been sown. It's contained in this very success.
So yes, as you say, Clothar II had patched together all the various parts of what had been Roman Gaul. So Neustria, which is the kingdom kind of abutting the channel, Austrasia, which is the kind of the eastern reaches of the kingdom, stretching beyond the Rhine, deep into Germany, Burgundy, which is the kind of the southeast, and Aquitaine, which is the southwest, and Clothar II has managed to rule them all.
But the reason why this ultimately is not good for the Merovingian dynasty is that basically it's too large, it turns out, for Clothar II and his son and heir, Dagobert, to rule. So what Clothar ends up having to do is to essentially send his sons out to rule as kind of sub-kings.
So one goes off to Aquitaine, he's absolutely useless. A chronicler dismisses him as simple-minded.
Dobah, Clothar's son, he's sent off to rule Austrasia. He's slightly more efficient.
But when he arrives, he's young, he's inexperienced. And this means that he is very malleable in the hands of the two greatest men in Austrasia, who we have already met.
We met them at the end of the previous episode because these are a lord called pepin yeah and a bishop called arnulf and these are the guys who had got together to overthrow brunhild they'd betrayed her and so she'd ended up being captured by clothar and very horribly executed so arnulf serves the young dagobert as his kind of preeminent counsellor and Pepin serves him kind of off and on. Sometimes he retires, sometimes he comes back, but he is basically not just the kind of the leading magnate in Austrasia, but he is also the leading official in that kingdom.
And his status is in Latin, mayor domus, which, you know, could ang anglicize that to be major domo, his mayor, he's the leading official. And these officials are very, very ambitious.
So powerful, ambitious and resolute were the mayores who stood at the most important junctions of Merovingian polity. So that's how Yitzhak Hen, scholar of the Merovingian kingdom, describes them.
And I guess traditionally, so going back to the time of Clovis, the role of these maores, these mares, let's call them that, was to kind of mediate between the king and the local magnates, the local lords. But Pepin is so able, so powerful, Dagobert is so kind of inexperienced and young that Pepin is able to make himself into something more than that.
Effectively, the power behind the throne. And Pepin's achievement is to set up what effectively is a kind of shadow dynasty to the Merovingian dynasty.
So Pepin's daughter goes on to marry the son of Arnulf, the bishop, who's the kind of the chief advisor. And this couple, they have a son who is absolutely kind of in every sense a chip off the old block.
So he, like his grandfather, is also called Pepin. So he's called Pepin of Hairstyle by the chroniclers to distinguish him from his grandfather.
He becomes the mayor of Austrasia in 680. And I mean, he's not just the power behind the throne.
He puts the throne in his shadow. He is an absolutely domineering figure.
And he's able to do that because for the Merovingians, very unfortunate series of circumstances, there are a succession of kind of children who succeed to the throne, die, succeeded by another child you know if they grow to adulthood they're absolutely useless and so in the shadow of pepin of hairstyle this great overweening mayor the mirror of indian king is reduced effectively to a kind of cipher and by the time that pepin of hairstyle dies in 714 he's made himself the master not just Austrasia, where he's the mayor, but also of Neustria, that northern kingdom of Burgundy. And he's also been pushing eastwards.
So under his leadership, the Franks have begun conquering swathes of what today are the Netherlands and central Germany. And Pepin of Herstal is no longer content just with the title of mayor.
He wants something more. And so he has given himself an absolutely brilliant title, Dux et Princeps Francorum, the Duke and the Prince of the Franks.
And he has established this title, as though it was a kind of kingship, as hereditary. And his son, Pepin of Herstal's son, is Charles Martel.
Right. So Charles Martel, although there was a Merovingian king, we don't need to really worry too much about him.
He's called Theudoric IV. Yeah, he's useless.
But Charles Martel is the ruler of huge swathes of what was once Gaul, Austrasia, Neustria, Burgundy, and so on. But that leaves one other place in the southeast of France, which is Aquitaine.
And Aquitaine stands against Charles Martel. Is that right? And this is going to be very important for our story of the Battle of Tore.
So Aquitaine has got a duke called Odo or Oddo. Let's call him Odo.
So tell me about him. He's a very grizzled, experienced bloke.
He is battle-hardened, cunning, and absolutely does not want to submit to the rule of Charmartel. He wants to effectively maintain his kind of independence.
He's Frankish, but he's able to draw on the ancient traditions of the Roman province that had been there. So it's a kind of independence that he wants to uphold.
and this has been fine while he's only had to deal with Charmartelle and the kind of the Franks to the north, north of the Loire. The nightmare for Odo is the arrival of the Saracens, as he calls them.
He is sandwiched between these two terrifying enemies. So he's got the Frankish kingdom to the north and he's got the Saracens who are kind of riding up from the south.

And so unsurprisingly, Odo tries to kind of play these two kind of menacing enemies off against one another. So in 721, the Emead forces, they've completed their conquest of the Visigothic stretches of Gaul.
And so then they turn their attentions to Aquitaine. And the spring of 721, they lay siege

to the greater city in Aquitaine, which is Toulouse. And Odo turns to Charles Martel and he says,

look, we're all Franks together. Can you come and help me? This is a nightmare.
And Charles Martel,

far from rallying to the cause of Christendom, he says, no, I'm not interested. You're on your own.

So poor Odo has to kind of basically deal with this crisis under his own agency. And he does it very, very effectively because he gathers his forces together.
He approaches the besieging Arabs around Toulouse by stealth, and he takes them completely by surprise and he wipes them out. And this is the first great defeat suffered by the Ammaid forces in Europe.

And Odo's absolutely triumphant. He writes a letter to the Pope saying, I'm absolutely brilliant.
I've killed 375,000 Saracens, which is possibly an exaggeration. But clearly, it is a crucial victory.
For the moment, he has saved Aquitaine from invasion. And he's won a breathing space, not just for himself, but also for Shah Martel up in the northern lands, basically to prepare for the storm that they know is going to come.
They know the storm clouds of war are gathering. And so both men prepare for the invasion that is coming.
And they know this because even though the Emeids have been defeated before the walls of Toulouse, they have not been expelled from Gaul. And they are launching raids all the time northwards as far as Burgundy, right? Right.
So Autun in Burgundy, which Brunhilde in the final years of her regency had made her capital, a kind of very beautiful ancient Roman city that gets put to the torch. Lots of other towns do, particularly monasteries.
You compared the Arab invaders to the Vikings for the same reason. They target monasteries because they're full of kind of riches that can be carted off.
And so this is looking really bad. So Odo, his strategy is to try and kind of pick Arab warlords off and enter into an alliance with them and And he succeeds in doing this with a Berber warlord called Uthman, who has been given the command of what today is Catalonia.
So for the Amayads, it's a kind of border region, a marcher region. And Odo wants to stabilise his southern frontier, and Uthman wants to carve Catalonia out as a kind of independent fiefdom.
He wants to rule it under his own steam rather than in subordination to the Emead governor in Toledo. And the alliance is signed in 730 and to seal it, Odo gives Uthman his daughter in marriage.
Can I just stop you right there? So a lot of listeners may find that really interesting because that obviously undermines the idea that this is a sort of titanic clash of civilizations and that people are consciously engaged in a clash of civilizations because here you have an alliance between Christian and, in inverted commas, Muslim and a marriage alliance along with that. So there's no sense that they've crossed some kind of tremendous ideological divide in doing that.
No, because what matters to both men, Odo and Uthman, is power politics. That's much more important than any sense of a kind of titanic clash of civilizations.
And to begin with, it seems to work. There is stability along the line of the Aquitanian border.
Uthman is able to establish himself as independent. But trouble is brewing.
The storm clouds of war continue to gather because back in Toledo, the news of this alliance goes down like a cup of cold sick. And unfortunately for both Uthman and Odo, the governor in Toledo, he's a new governor, is exceedingly able and also exceedingly devout.
And this is a man called Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi. He is from Arabia.
He's from the Red Sea. He comes from the heartlands of Islam.
He, probably far more than most people in Spain, is completely on top of what is becoming Islam. And he is not prepared to put up with this.
So his response is completely devastating. 731, he invades Catalonia.
He defeats Uthman, has him killed, captures Uthman's wife, who is the daughter of Odo, and packs her off to Damascus to live in the califal harem there. So, you know, that's bad news for Odo, and indeed, probably for Odo's daughter.
And you were saying that there's no real sense of a kind of clash of civilizations going on. While Abdelrahman is doing this in Catalonia, Charles Martel is signally not helping the Christian cause because he has crossed the Loire and is taking advantage of Odo's state of despair at the collapse of his alliance by launching an attack on Aquitaine and carting off loads of loot northwards to the Loire.
So that's not helpful at all. Then the following year in spring, Abdelrahman invades Aquitaine.
He sweeps northwards through Gastegony. He descends on Bordeaux.
He captures it. He sacks it.
Odo has been frantically marshalling men to try and resist this attack. He meets the army of Abdelrahman on the banks of the Garonne beyond Bordeaux.
And the result is a completely devastating defeat for Odo. And we have a chronicle that was written by an anonymous Christian priest back in Spain.
It's called the Chronicle of 754 by scholars. And it's essentially our main source, our most contemporary source for what's going on.
And he records of this battle that Odo's army was scattered into flight and only God could know the number of those who died or were slain. So this is terrible for Odo.
He survives the battle, but essentially he must fear that Aquitaine is lost. So he musters what troops have survived the disaster, recruits what more he can from the kind of the outer reaches of his duchy.
And then he rides with them northwards to the Loire and crosses into the lands that are ruled by Charles Martel. And he comes to the Duke of the Franks and, you know, his great rival humiliating for him, but he has no choice, you know, and he begs him for assistance.
And Charles is still driving a hard bargain. You know, it's not as though he feels, well, we're all Christians together in the face of this terrible threat.
You know, he drives a really hard bargain. He demands that Odo submit to him, that he acknowledge him as Odo's superior.
And Odo has no choice. So reluctantly, he gives his submission.
Meanwhile, back in Aquitaine, Abdelrahman's men, they've won this great victory and they are keen to profit from it all that they can. So they are spilling out across Aquitaine.
They're falling on towns. They're falling on monasteries.
They're stripping them bare. They're loading wagons high with loot and they rumble northwards.
You know, the army spilling up the Roman roads that lead towards the Loire, the wagons full of gold and treasure accompanying them. And the further north they go, the closer they come to the lands ruled by the Duke and Prince of the Franks, Charles Martel.
And I think for the Maid forces, there's a definite sense that they're venturing into unknown territory here. You know, it's a long, long way from Toledo, let alone from Africa.
They don't know much about Charles Martel. They don't know much about the people that he rules.
They don't really have a sense of what might lay ahead. But there is one thing, of course, that they are alert to, and that is the prospect of plunder.

And again, in this, they are like the Vikings. And of course, the nearer they head to the Loire, the more they are picking up the rumours of, I mean, not just a wealthy shrine, but a fabulously wealthy shrine, the wealthiest shrine in the whole of Gaul, rich in every kind of treasure.
And this shrine, of course, is the shrine of St. Martin of Tor, the great patron saint of the Merovingian monarchy, but also more generally of the Franks themselves.
And there is no way that the Duke of the Franks can possibly allow the invaders, if he can in any way help it, to strip the Shrine of St. Martin bare.
Okay, so what will happen? Will they strip it bare? Will there be a great battle? Who knows? Come back after the break and find out. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.
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In this year, two comets appeared around the sun, striking great terror into those that saw them. One went before the sun, rising in the morning.
The other followed it, sinking in the evening, as if foreboding dire calamity, for east as well as west. Certainly, one anticipated the day's beginning, and the other the night's, so that they might act as a sign that evils threatened mortals at both times.
They bore a fiery torch to the north as if to start a fire. They appeared in the month of January and remained for nearly two weeks.
At that time, a very serious plague of Saracens plundered the Gauls with miserable slaughter. So that was the Venerable Bede, writing in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
Now, Bede, not brilliant at dates, to be fair to him. He said this happened in 729.
He's pretty good. He's the guy who comes up with our dating system.
He's at least three years out here. Probably.
So he dated the Comets to to 729 but there wasn't any saracen invasion of corner 729 most scholars think he's got in a muddle and he's actually talking about 732 yeah which is a bit odd because he actually claimed that he finished his book a year earlier so maybe he put this in afterwards i think that's probably the generally held theory and if he did that then it's witness to the fact that his sense that this is an amazing episode, it's something that's worth recording. And also it bears witness to the fact that the news of this great battle that's been fought, this great Saracen invasion, has kind of crossed the channel.
It's spread up all the way through England up to Northumbria. So this is something that really resonates.
And if Bede is writing about this invasion of 732, then this is the earliest witness that we have to it. And it is indeed very dramatic.
It's not surprising that Bede, who's kind of obviously very attuned to the flow of great events, would have heard of it and been interested in it. Because we have two great and formidable generals coming up against one another.
So, Abdelrahman, the Omeyed general, the governor of Spain, I mean, he's already proved himself very, very formidable in battle. He's overthrown Uthman.
He's defeated Odo. He's now heading northwards towards the line of the Loire.
We don't know how large his invasion force is, but it's evidently, you know, I mean, it's large enough to have defeated Uthman, to have swatted aside Odo. And it is also much, much better equipped than the Frankish army.
I mean, I always remember I had a children's book of history that had an illustration of the Battle of Tor. And the Franks in that were kind of knights on armor.
And the Arabs all had, you know, they were kind of loosely, you know, wearing their kind of flowing robes. They were like Saladin in the ladybirds.
Yes, exactly. But actually, it's the other way around.
It's the Umayyad forces that are very much heavier in cavalry than the Franks. And they're also much, much better equipped.
So a quote, Bernard S. Bachrach, whose book on early Carolingian warfare is brilliant on this whole campaign.
And he writes that the Arabs had acquired by conquest the arms manufacturing infrastructure of what had been a large part of the eastern half of the Roman Empire. These production resources were far better developed than those found during the early 8th century throughout the empire's Romano-German successor states in the West.
So basically, you know, their kit is loads, loads better. And also the Amayids, they're just much richer.
You know, they've had a century and more of plunder behind them. They can afford better armor, better helmets, better swords than the Franks have.
And on top of that, they're also much more technologically advanced. So there's one key technological development that the Franks can't rival.
And again, to quote Bacharach, finally, the Muslims had the technology to construct the composite recurve bow, which was made from various layers of bone, horn and wood. These weapons were far superior to the wood and self bows available to the northerners.
In addition, the shorter and more powerful recurve bow could be used effectively by mounted troops. And read that because i don't really know what a recurve bow is i was about to say it's one where the limbs of the bow kind of curve away so it's a sort of more elaborate curve yeah so they kind of curl back on themselves like a horn almost it's the kind you get in the arabian nights yeah arabian night kind of bow and even because of that because of the extra sort of tension or whatever you can have a shorter bow so in other words it's easier to fire when you're on horseback and also apparently you can go further than the frankish bows can so it's basically a brilliant bow it's a great bow it's a top bow so basically you know this is not a kind of rag tag desert army this is a very very formidable force and one that effectively is a kind of worthy successor to the roman armies because it's drawing on those traditions.
Now, people who've listened to the first two episodes will remember that the Franks too are drawing on a Roman inheritance. So they were trained to fight in a Roman way.
And that's a tradition that's endured for the two centuries since the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. And on top of that, they have Roman military manuals, which we know that they read.
So like the Romans, they have an emphasis on infantry. At this point, the Franks do not have the kind of the heavily armoured loricati, they're called, the kind of the armoured horsemen that are the precursors of the Western knight.
They are very, very much focused on fighting on foot. I think in part, although I gather that this is hugely debated by military historians because they haven't yet adopted the stirrup.
The stirrup is just kind of being introduced to the land of the Franks at this point. So Charles would have had horsemen with him and these were called palatini.
So people who are, you know, his elites who surround him in the palace. And this is where the word paladins comes from, which is kind of very King Arthur.
Lancelot and Gawain are the paladins of King Arthur. So he does have some of them, but the main focus is on, as I say, on infantry and specifically the Franks fight in a phalanx.
So like the Romans had done, very close order, shields locked together. If they are faced by archers, as the Romans had done, they're able to kind of form a testudo, a tortoise.
So you put the shields up and over your heads and the arrows just kind of bounce off your shields. And they fight so closely together that there's a Frankish report of a battle that was fought a century before the Battle of Tor that describes how the slain had nowhere to fall but stood in their battle lines, corpse supporting corpse, as though they were still alive.
So very, very close formation. So it's a bit like the images of fighting that you get in Bernard Cornwell's books, which are, again, not a massively dissimilar period.
People people packed in a kind of shield wall stabbing with their swords relentlessly through the gaps in the enemy line yeah the use of the stabbing sword rather than the slashing sword and I guess people would associate kind of Frankish knights as using a massive great heavy slashing sword but at this point again they are using the gladius as the it, the kind of the stabbing sword. So they approximate to a Roman legion more than to anything else.
And of course, Roman legions were dependent on relentless training. And this seems to have been what Charles had given his troops.
So, you know, that breathing space that Odo's defeat of the Arabs before the walls of Toulouse had brought Charles, he doesn't seem to have wasted it. He seems to have essentially put his troops through their paces, drilling them and drilling them and drilling them.
And even if his men are not as well equipped as the Amayad forces, they are as well trained. And I think that this is what Charles is relying on to defeat them.
So those are the

armies. What about the strategy of the two commanders? So Abdul Rahman's strategy is very

plain. He wants to sack the shrine of St.
Martin. And there are various reasons why he would be

particularly keen to do that. The obvious one is loads of his troops are following him in the

expectation of loot. Most of them, I suspect, are not motivated by a passionate commitment

to the teachings of the Quran. They want to get as rich as they possibly can.
And St. Martin's Shrine promises them all kinds of goodies.
I think Abdul Rahman recognizes the kind of significance to Frankish prestige of the Shrine of St. Martin.
If he can sack it, you know, it'll be a real body blow to the prestige of Shah Martel and his regime. And I think, you know, we've said Abdul Rahman, you know, he comes from the heartlands of Islam.
He definitely has a kind of a doctrinal motivation. He wants to strip the Shrine of St.
Martin bear, not just because it's full of treasure, but because as he sees it, it's full of kind of idols. He wants to humble the pride of the cross worshippers into the dust.
But to do that, to reach the shrine of St. Martin, you know, he's going to have to wipe out the army of the Franks, Charles's army.
And the reason for that is that Charles's strategy essentially is to block his access to Taur and force him to attempt a decisive battle. And this for Abdurrahman is going to be a real challenge because even though his men are superior in kit and in military technology, the Franks, as we've said, are at least as well trained, and they're also probably numerically superior.
And that's because Charles's forces have been swelled by the troops that Odo has brought with him from Aquitaine. And of course, they are absolutely resolute in their determination to defend St.
Martin's Shrine, just as Abdul Rahman wants to strip it because it's so precious to the Franks. Obviously, for that reason, the Franks are determined to defend and protect it.
Charles is confident that this is a potentially winning strategy because he can rely on his men to hold their ground, not to break, not to flee, but also should the Arabs be defeated, not to run after them, which would potentially then open them up to attack by the Arab cavalry. So this strategy effectively means the late autumn of 732, that a battle is going to be inevitable.
Charles is going to block the road to Tor. Abdul Rahman is going to have to engage him if he wants to break through.
And the reason for that, he can't really retreat because that would be very damaging to his prestige. And also if he retreats, there's a risk to his baggage train with all that kind of gold and stuff.
So effectively, there is no choice but to engage. So there's essentially a kind of week of shadow boxing.
And then finally, the moment comes. The Arabs are on the Roman road.
They see the Franks lined up ahead of them. There is no choice now but to engage in battle.
And again, the best account of what happens is this Chronicle of 754. And the Christian priest writing that, he describes the Frankish battle line in an incredibly memorable way way the northern has held their position like a glacier from the frozen north i mean amazing description kind of impassable immovable indomitable but also icy cold and dangerous he describes how the stabbing swords of the franks the gladi inflict terrible damage on the invaders And among the dead is Abdelrahman himself.
So again, the Chronicle of 754, the Austrasian, so that's the Franks, with a terrible strength in their limbs and an iron hand throughout the hard fight, killed him when they found him. And as evening comes, it's clear that the victory is the Franks.
But what is perhaps the most impressive witness to their discipline is that they hold their line. I mean, as I said, it's the only way that they could have lost at this point would be if they'd kind of go, whoa, we've won, brilliant, and piled off.
They don't. They hold their positions and then they retreat to their camp pretty confident that the next day they're going to have to fight again, that the battle will continue.
And I'll describe what then happens and what they find when they wake up the day after this first engagement by quoting the Chronicle of 754. So this priest writes, rising from their sleeping bags at dawn, the Europeans, and it's such an interesting use of that.
I mean, I think it's the first use of that phrase in any medieval chronicle. The Europeans beheld the tents and camps of the Arabs' canopies located and ordered as they had been, not knowing that they were all empty and supposing that the Saracens' phalanxes were prepared for battle within.
They sent scouts and found that all the Ishmaelites' columns had escaped, so that's the Arab columns, and that all of them were secretly secretly fleeing home passing the night in tight formation the europeans were anxious lest they might have concealed themselves on a hidden path as a stratagem stunned in every way they hunted the surrounding area in vain making no further effort to find the aforesaid people they returned to their own countries rejoicing with their booty and the evenly divided spoils so that's it the invaders the raiders have been beaten off and they've vanished with their stuff because they don't want to lose their what plunder they've i think they leave some of it behind and this is what the franks pick up yeah but the franks don't pursue them i mean that's what's striking they let them go right and it's indisputably for them a great victory saint mart. Martin is safe.
St. Martin is safe and his shrine will never be threatened again.
But this leads open to the question that we began this episode with. Yeah.
What is the significance of this battle? Yeah. You know, is it world historical in its moment? And I guess the first question is, what do we make of this attack that the Améad forces have launched on the Loire? Is it a raid? Is it a maneuver in a kind of factional battle between assorted Christian and Muslim warlords? Is it a Muslim attempt to humble a Christian shrine? I reckon the answer to that is that it's all of those.
I mean, they're not mutually exclusive. You know, the desire for loot, the ambition that Abdul Rahman had to punish the treachery of Uthman and to kind of humble Odo into the dust, his zeal for Islam.
I mean, all of these are clearly part of the mix of motivations, I think, that are encouraging him. But what it isn't is a long-planned, cold-blooded, coordinated, massive invasion.
No. It's not that.
It isn't. But I think that doesn't mean that it's not significant.
Let's do a counterfactual. Abdurrahman wins.
Charles Martel is killed. Odo is killed.
They march on the Shrine of St. Martin.
They strip it bare and then they cart all the treasure back.

And what happens next? You know, we can never be sure in any of these situations. So, you know, there's so many kind of intangibles, but the balance of probability would be that Aquitaine would definitely fall to the Améad forces.
I mean, if Odo is dead, if his men have been wiped out, there's no real prospect of the Emeid forces not occupying it and kind of making it a forward base beyond the Pyrenees. The one thing I would say is if they have that, they have to keep supplying it with men and whatnot from beyond the Pyrenees, which does look like a pretty significant natural barrier through most of history between France and Spain.
They do, but then the Straits of Gibraltar are also a pretty significant barrier, and they've managed to take Spain. And I think part of the reason for that is that success attracts followers, and there would undoubtedly have been people in Aquitaine who would have wanted to side with the winners, and that would then have provided a kind of reserve of manpower that the Améad occupiers could have drawn on.
And if they do that, then the consequences of that for southern Gaul are pretty clear. I mean, southern Gaul will become part of the Emmaid caliphate.
And that in turn, I think, would have put Italy in peril. And Italy, of course, is the home of the papacy in Rome.
And the Byzantine forces there are, you know, under attack. You've made a massive leap in the course of a sentence from they'd probably got Aquitaine to suddenly Italy has fallen as well.
Like your dominoes are falling very quickly. Well, if Southern Gaul falls, then the Franks can't come to the rescue of the papacy.
And as we will see in our next episode, essentially, in this century, the papacy is dependent for its political survival on Frankish support. So I think it's improbable that the papacy that Rome would have held out against Muslim domination had Tor gone the other way.
And the implications of that would have been pretty significant. I mean, what about the implications for the independent Frankish kingdom? I mean, it's got huge reserves of manpower.
It could easily have rallied. It could have held out.
It could have launched a reconquest of the South. That, after all, is what, you know, in the long run, the Spanish Christians do over the course of the Middle Ages.
But I think that there are two episodes from early medieval history that suggests that it would have been a challenge. It would have been difficult for the Franks to do that.
And the first, of course, is what we've just been talking about, the defeat of the Visigoths. Because if you say, you know, the attack on Tor was just a raid, well, essentially, the invasion across the Straits of Gibraltar into Spain was just a raid.
But because the invaders won this massive battle and killed the Visigothic king, within a decade, pretty much the whole of Spain had fallen into their lap. And with Aquitaine as a base, I think the potential for a kind of campaigns of jihad against the Franks in the north would have been considerable, which isn't to say that the same thing would have happened, but it might have done.
We don't know. But the other event that I think, you know, had the Shrine of St.
Martin been sacked, there is then an obvious parallel later in the century,

which you alluded to right at the beginning of this episode. And that's what the Vikings do

when they launch their campaigns against particularly England. And that begins with

the sack of a famous shrine, the Shrine of St. Cuthbert on Holy Island, the island of Lindisfarne.
And what that demonstrates is that to loot a shrine that has a kind of a special holiness is never just to loot it. Because as well as the financial loss, there is also the shock that it delivers to people for whom this shrine is a kind of central part of their spiritual identity.
So the sack of the Shrine of St. Cuthbert on Lindisfarne sends shockwaves not just across Britain, but across the whole of Europe.
And I think it gives a pretty devastating blow to Northumbrian morale. And the Kingdom of Northumbria falls to pieces fairly soon afterwards.
And I think that the sack of the Shrine of St. Martin would have had probably an even greater impact.
St. Martin is the great patron of Frankish royalty, but by the 8th century, it's become much more than that.
So St. Martin, he's the first, he's the most celebrated of all Gauls gauls monks of all gauls holy men and he has become the emblem of a kind of common identity that has joined franks and romans they all share a kind of common devotion to this saint and so you could say that the sack of saint martin's shrine would have been a blow, not just to Frankish prestige,

but to the very spiritual identity of this emergent Frankish nation. And of course, at the same time, it would have offered evidence for those with eyes to see of the truth of the message that is being proclaimed by the invaders.
And it's absolutely true that this is not kind of at the forefront of the Emmaid campaign. It's not particularly what they are proclaiming.
And therefore, very few people at the point where the Battle of Taur is being fought really have a sense of anything approximating to Islam. So this is why it's not couched by contemporary chroniclers as a, you know, a great clash of civilizations or anything like that.
So Bede, who we've referenced this, you know, the great scholar and historian writing in his monastery up in Northumbria, he has only the vaguest sense of who the Saracens, as he calls them, you know, vaguest sense of who they are. He thinks that they're pagans, that they're worshipers of the morning star.
There are others who are closer to them who think of them essentially as Christian heretics. Which is so common.
That's what Christians think of them in the early years of Islam, isn't it? Right. And I think right the way through to the Middle Ages, I mean, Dante is still kind of, you know, that's still how he's framing them.
I mean, they don't really have a sense of Islam as a religion. I mean, that's a much later kind of conceptualization.
And maybe because of that, maybe because Islam in some ways is very close to Christianity, you know, Jesus is in the Quran, Virgin Mary's in Quran, both Christianity and Islam have a respect for the Hebrew prophets. That is a big difference, I think, between the Muslim invaders of Spain and Gaul and the Vikings, because there are doubtless people in England who do end up abandoning their Christianity and turning to the worship of the Viking gods.
But it's not a sophisticated framework of belief. And the kind of structures of imperialism that the Vikings bring, it's basically kind of grab it and settle.
And that's the limit of it. But the evidence of Muslim Spain shows that Islam is very, very different, that it has a very sophisticated relationship to Christianity.
It has a framework for subordinating Christians and Jews and kind of, you know, putting them within an empire. The Quran mandates how they should be taxed, how they should be subordinated, all these kinds of things.
It's a program for imperial rule. And that is an obvious point of differentiation between the Vikings and the Arabs.
And that's why Spain, it's not just that it is ruled by Muslims, it becomes Muslim over the course of the centuries that follow its conquest. And I think you could suppose the Muslims hold on to southern Gaul.
You could see the same process happening there. You know, that would have pretty seismic implications for the future course of medieval history.
And I think ultimately to think that the annihilation of Charles Martel's army has no real significance, that it's just a raid, that it's nothing very important.

And I think ultimately that to suppose that had Charles Martel lost the battle, had he died, had his troops been wiped out, had the shrine of St. Martin been attacked, that it was just a raid.
I think that to kind of believe that it's effectively to argue that Islam and Christianity and specifically the distinctive form of Christianity that emerges in Western Europe in the centuries after the Battle of Tore, that they're essentially the same. There's no real difference between them.
It doesn't really matter if you're ruled by Christians or by Muslims. And I just don't think that's true.
I think that there is a very, very profound difference between the two ways of seeing the world. And so therefore, I think that the Battle of Tor is significant.
I mean, I don't think it's a kind of peripheral clash. I think it is momentous, perhaps not quite as momentous as Gibbon suggested, but pretty important.
And Charles Martel's victory in that sense is pretty seismic in the long run. But it's seismic also in the short term because it has very important implications for the future of the Frankish kingdom and for his own dynasty.
Are there not some other reasons why you could question the idea about the momentousness of this battle? So, for example, the Maia Chronicles often mention big defeats. So they mention defeats in the early stages of the Reconquista, for example.
But they never mention this at all. Like it doesn't even feature.
They treat it as a raid that just, you know, just one raid among many and beaten back. I looked this up.
There were more raids in 734. There was a raid in 736.
And there was actually, some people think, an even bigger raid, even bigger invasion in 739 when the Umayyads got to Burgundy, only to be beaten back by the Franks. So in other words, this was not the end of their incursions.
So in that sense, it's not really a turning point. It doesn't change anything because they just keep coming.
I think it is for reasons that we'll look at in the next episode, because it means it's not just the Franks have won. Charles Martel has won.
The kind of the glory of his victory kind of resonates to his prestige. And as we will see, he is now in a position not just to defend his kingdom against the invaders, but to go on the offensive.
And his son in turn will be able to do that. And his grandson, who is Charlemagne, will definitely be able to do that.
There's one other thing which is even more important, which I think is arguably much more important than the Battle of Tours. And that's in 740.
A huge revolt breaks out in what's now Morocco, Great Berber Revolt. And that basically cuts off Umayyad Spain from the sort of Arab heartland.
It means that the age of raiding kind of comes to an end because they can't keep raising all the, you know, there's so much internal dissension, and the Umayyads can't keep raising all these Berber troops. So that would seem to undermine the idea that, oh, they get Akkutane, then they get this, then they get this, then they get this, because actually they've got so many problems in their own kind of backyard, as it were, that they were actually never going to be able to do all that because of the massive ructions going on in North Africa.
No, I don't think so, because what also then happens after that is that, and we've did this in our history of baghdad is that the amayas are overthrown by the abbasids but one of the amayas is able to get to spain where he establishes himself as its ruler and in the long term as its caliph and this is the great golden age of amayad spain and it's ferociously and impressively formidable it's a very potent military power and it's a very great kind of civilizational power. And this is the period when you see large numbers of Christian Spaniards converting to Islam because it has this kind of great force of appeal.
It's culturally, militarily, politically more appealing than Christianity, which seems a kind of defeated and superseded way of seeing the world, way of explaining man's relationship to God. And had that realm that the Omeyads take over in the wake of the Abbasid Revolution, had that extended to southern Gaul, had it extended to northern Italy, then, you know, that would have been an even larger power base for the Umayyad Caliphate.
All right. Well, if people want to listen to that, they've got an episode on Umayyad Spain, which I greatly recommend.
But for the time being, we're going to be going on with the story of the Franks, right, Tom? So what's coming up next? So coming up next, it's the son of Shah Martel and his relationship with the papacy, which is, again, a development of seismic impact for the future history of Europe and therefore, in the long run, the world. And this man, Pippin, who overthrows the Merovingians, makes himself king.
He is the father of a much greater and more famous king, Charlemagne. And so at the end of our next episode, Charlemagne will be entering the story.
Brilliant. So next up is our Charlemagne trilogy, one of the most epic stories we've ever done on The Rest is History.
Now, the good news, if you're a member of The Rest is History Club, is that you should have all three parts of that trilogy right

now now if you're not a member of the club and you'd like to get your hands on them all you need

to do is head to the rest is history.com and sign up and you can have that charlemagne trilogy

straight away if not i'm afraid you'll just have to wait see you then bye bye bye