During the six days he waited to begin the Battle, Abd er Rahman recalled all those columns raiding and pillaging, so that on the seventh day, when by both eastern and western accounts the Battle began, both armies were at full strength.
The Muslims in northern Spain had easily overrun Septimania, had set up a capital at Narbonne which they called Arbuna, giving its largely Arian inhabitants honorable terms, and quickly pacified the south and for some years threatened Frankish territories.
Duke Odo of Aquitaine, also known as Eudes the Great, had decisively defeated a major invasion force in at the Battle of Toulouse, but Arab raids continued, in reaching as far as the city of Autun in Burgundy. Threatened by both the Arabs in the south and by the Franks in the north, in Eudes allied himself with Uthman ibn Naissa, called "Munuza" by the Franks, the Berber emir in what would later become Catalonia.
As a gage, Uthman was given Eudes's daughter Lampade in marriage to seal the alliance, and Arab raids across the Pyrenees, Eudes' southern border, ceased [1]. However, the next year, Uthman rebelled against the governor of al-Andalus, Abd er Rahman. Abd er Rahman quickly crushed the revolt, and next directed his attention against the traitor's former ally, Eudes.
According to one unidentified Arab, "That army went through all places like a desolating storm. The slaughter of Christians at the River Garonne was evidently horrific; Isidorus Pacensis commented that "solus Deus numerum morientium vel pereuntium recognoscat", 'God alone knows the number of the slain' Chronicon. The Muslim horsemen then utterly devastated that portion of Gaul, their own histories saying the "faithful pierced through the mountains, tramples over rough and level ground, plunders far into the country of the Franks, and smites all with the sword, insomuch that when Eudo came to battle with them at the River Garonne, and fled.
In , the Arab advance force was proceeding north toward the River Loire having already outpaced their supply train and a large part of their army. Essentially, having easily destroyed all resistance in that part of Gaul, the invading army had split off into several raiding parties, simply looting and destroying, while the main body advanced more slowly.
A military explanation for why Eudes was defeated so easily at Bordeaux, after having won 11 years earlier at Battle of Toulouse, was simple. At Toulouse, Eudes managed a basic surprise attack against an overconfident and unprepared foe, all of whose defensive works were aimed inward, while he attacked from the outside.
The Arab cavalary never got a chance to mobilize and meet him in open battle. At Bordeaux, they did, and resulted in absolute devastation of Eudes army, almost all of whom were killed, with minimal losses to the Muslims. Eudes forces, like other European troops of that era, lacked stirrups, and therefore had no armoured cavalry. Virtually all of their troops were infantry. The Muslim heavy cavalry broke the Christian infantry in their first charge, and then simply slaughtered them at will as they broke and ran.
The invading force then went on to devastate southern Gaul, preparing it for complete conquest. One of the major raiding parties advanced on Tours.
A possible motive, according to the second continuator of Fredegar, was the riches of the Abbey of Saint Martin of Tours, the most prestigious and holiest shrine in western Europe at the time.
Upon hearing this, Austrasia Mayor of the Palace Charles Martel, collected his army of an estimated , veterans, and marched south avoiding the old Roman roads hoping to take the Muslims by surprise. Despite the great importance of this battle, its exact location remains unknown. Most historians assume that the two armies met each other where the rivers Clain and Vienne join between Tours and Poitiers.
Charles chose to begin the battle in a defensive, phalanx-like formation. According to the Arabian sources they drew up in a large square. Certainly, given the disparity between the armies, in that the Franks were mostly infantry, all without armour, against mounted and Arab armored or mailed horsemen, the Berbers were less heavily protected Charles Martel fought a brilliant defensive battle. In a place and time of his choosing, he met a far superior force, and defeated it.
For six days, the two armies watched each other with just minor skirmishes. The Muslims waited for their full strength to arrive, which it did, but they were still uneasy. No good general, and Abd er Rahman was one, liked to let his opponent pick the ground and conditions for battle -- and Martel had done both.
Creasy says, and his theory is probably best, that the Muslims best strategic choice would have been to simply decline battle, depart with their loot, garrisoning the captured towns in southern Gaul, and return when they could force Martel to a battleground more to their liking, one that maximized the huge advantage they had of the first true "knights" mailed and amoured horsemen -- the Franks, without stirrups in wide use, had to depend on unarmoured foot soldiers.
Martel gambled everything that Abd er Rahman would in the end feel compelled to battle, and to go on and loot Tours. Neither of them wanted to attack. The Franks were well dressed for the cold, and had the terrain advantage. The Arabs were not as prepared for the intense cold, but did not want to attack what they thought might be a numerically superior Frankish army. It became a waiting game, which Martel won. The fight commenced on the seventh day, as Abd er Rahman did not want to postpone the battle indefinitely.
Abd er Rahman trusted the tactical superiority of his cavalry, and had them charge repeatedly. This time the faith the Muslims had in their cavalry, armed with their long lances and swords which had brought them victory in previous battles, was not justified. In one of the rare instances where medieval infantry stood up against cavalry charges, the disciplined Frankish soldiers withstood the assaults, though according to Arab sources, the Arab cavalry several times broke into the interior of the Frankish square.
But despite this, Franks did not break, and it is probably best expressed by a translation of an Arab account of the battle from the Medieval Source Book: "And in the shock of the battle the men of the North seemed like North a sea that cannot be moved. Firmly they stood, one close to another, forming as it were a bulwark of ice; and with great blows of their swords they hewed down the Arabs.
Drawn up in a band around their chief, the people of the Austrasians carried all before them. Abd-ar-Rahman, the Muslim governor of Cordoba, was killed in the fighting, and the Moors retreated from Gaul, never to return in such force. Charles was the illegitimate son of Pepin, the powerful mayor of the palace of Austrasia and effective ruler of the Frankish kingdom. He expanded the Frankish territory under his control and in repulsed an onslaught by the Muslims. His son Pepin became the first Carolingian king of the Franks, and his grandson Charlemagne carved out a vast empire that stretched across Europe.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! On October 10, , Romani children, including more than a hundred boys between 9 and 14 years old, are systematically murdered. It was at Auschwitz II, at In the conclusion to an extremely embarrassing situation, President Dwight D. It was one of the first of many such incidents in Less than a year before Richard M. The number of troops in each army is not known. Drawing on non-contemporary Arab sources Creasy describes the Muslim forces as 80, strong or more.
Writing in , Paul K. Davis estimates the Muslim forces at 80, and the Franks at about 30,, while noting that modern historians have estimated the strength of the Muslim army at Tours at between 20—80, Edward J.
Schoenfeld rejecting the older figures of 60—, Muslim and 75, Franks contends that "estimates that the Muslims had over fifty thousand troops and the Franks even more are logistically impossible. Both Davis and Hanson point out that both armies had to live off the countryside, neither having a commissary system sufficient to provide supplies for a campaign. Losses during the battle are unknown but chroniclers later claimed that Martel's force lost about 1, while the Muslim force was said to have suffered massive casualties of up to , men.
However, these same casualty figures were recorded in the Liber pontificalis for Duke Odo of Aquitaine's victory at the Battle of Toulouse Paul the Deacon, correctly reported in his Historia Langobardorum written around the year that the Liber pontificalis mentioned these casualty figures in relation to Odo's victory at Toulouse though he claimed that Charles Martel fought in the battle alongside Odo , but later writers, probably "influenced by the Continuations of Fredegar , attributed the Saracen casualties solely to Charles Martel, and the battle in which they fell became unequivocally that of Poitiers.
Great expansion of the Caliphate occurred under the reign of the Umayyads. Muslim armies pushed across North Africa and Persia, through the late s, expanding the borders of the empire from the Iberian Peninsula, in the west, to what is today Pakistan , in the east.
Forces led by Tariq ibn-Ziyad crossed Gibraltar and established Muslim power in the Iberian peninsula, while other armies established power far away in Sind, in what is now the modern state of Pakistan. The Muslim empire under the Umayyads was now a vast domain that ruled a diverse array of peoples.
It had destroyed what were the two former foremost military powers, the Sassanid Empire , which it absorbed completely, and the Byzantine Empire , most of which it had absorbed, including Syria, Armenia and North Africa, although Leo the Isaurian successfully defended Anatolia at the Battle of Akroinon in the final campaign of the Umayyad dynasty. It consisted of what is today most of Germany, the low countries, and part of France Austrasia, Neustria and Burgundy.
The Frankish realm had begun to progress towards becoming the first real imperial power in Europe since the fall of Rome, as it struggled against the hordes of barbarians on its borders, such as the fierce Saxons, and internal opponents such as Eudes, the Duke of Aquitaine. Muslim conquests from Hispania. This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia with only minor checks and changes see www.
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