In Our Time - The Battle of Tours

Episode Date: January 16, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Battle of Tours. In 732 a large Arab army invaded Gaul from northern Spain, and travelled as far north as Poitiers. There they were defeated by Charles Martel, whose Frankish and Burgundian forces repelled the invaders. The result confirmed the regional supremacy of Charles, who went on to establish a strong Frankish dynasty. The Battle of Tours was the last major incursion of Muslim armies into northern Europe; some historians, including Edward Gibbon, have seen it as the decisive moment that determined that the continent would remain Christian.With:Hugh Kennedy Professor of Arabic at SOAS, University of LondonRosamond McKitterick Professor of Medieval History at the University of CambridgeMatthew Innes Vice-Master and Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the first half of the 8th century, an army from Arab Spain invaded Gaul and reached as far north as Poitiers in central France.

Someone here there, they were met by forces commanded by the Frankish leader Charles Martel. The Arabs lost the ensuing battle. and retreated never to return. We don't know precisely when this battle took place, although it's generally believed that it happened sometime in 7-3-2. Even its location is a mystery, and while some historians call it the Battle of Tour,

to others it's known as the Battle of Poitiers. The 18th century historian Edward Gibbon believed this battle between Christians and Muslims as one of the turning points of European history. He suggested that if the Franks had lost, the Arab armies would have taken over the entire continent. Perhaps he wrote, 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 Bohomet. But was the Battle of Tour really such a watershed, and what effect did it have on the future of France and Europe as a whole? With me to discuss the Battle of Tour are Hugh Kennedy, Professor of Arabic at Soas, University of London, Rosamund MacKitturik, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Cambridge, and Matthew Innes, Vice-Master and Professor of,

of history at Birkbeck University of London. Hugh Kennedy, after the death of Mohammed in 632, there was a massive explosion of energy from the Arab world, including military conquests. Can you explain how the Muslim army swept through place so quickly and then entered Spain? Yes, there are two real phases with this. The first comes immediately after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632,

and there are about 50 years of very swift conquests of the central Middle East, from Iran to Egypt. And then there's a sort of pause in the late 7th century, and then the conquests regain momentum again. And we see the push into the whole of North Africa very quickly by 700 Muslim armies have reached the Atlantic coast. And then there's another short pause until they start crossing the Straits of DeBraltar

and moving into Spain from 711 onwards. And the same process happened. There's another wave of conquests in the east, which takes them into Central Asia, and the south of what is now Pakistan. And then by the year 750, certainly, the momentum of conquest has stopped, essentially, and the area that is ruled by the Arab Muslims

is approximately the area that's ruled by Arab Muslim governments today, except in Spain and Portugal. Pulling back a bit in that brisk and brief and accurate, as you may, when they swept across North Africa, they began to incorporate in their forces the Berbers, who were extremely important to them. vital to them. Can you explain that a bit to the listeners, please? Yes. The Berbers of the indigenous people of North Africa

who spoke and still do speak their own Berber language and who tended to be the people of the deserts and the mountains and the countryside. And many of them joined the Islamic armies as they came into North Africa. They weren't Muslims at that stage. They became Muslims very quickly. Lots of them joined the Arab Muslim armies and probably the vast majority of the people who actually conquered Spain in Portugal were in fact

Berba of Berber origin, not of Arab origin. But Arabic was the language they spoke, Islam was the religion they professed. Why do you think they were so effective as soldiers, warriors? They were very highly mobile. These Arab Muslim armies had no siege trains, they had no caravans of baggage, and they moved very fast, they lived off the land.

And many of their conquests were very superficial as well. They would conquer, receive the submission, in a certain area and then they'd move on quickly and find some other area to live off. By the early 8th century, which is the period we're going to come into to focus on, the regime controlling these forces were the Umayad Caliphate. Would you tell us a bit about them and their role in Spain? The Umayid Caliphs were ruling at this stage from Damascus. They ruled all the lands that the Muslims had conquered right the way from Central Asia

and borders of China right the way through to the Atlantic Ocean. and they maintained at this stage an astonishing degree of control over Spain and Portugal, given the enormous distances involved, they appointed governors and dismissed governors and people who did bad things in Spain were summoned back to Damascus and made to account for it. And Spain at this time was ruled by a whole series of governors who had very short tenures of office.

They were there for two, three years, then they were recalled, somebody else was sent out and so on the constant changeover. And this kept depression, it kept Damascus in control. Very much so. Rosamund MacIntyre, can we now turn to what would become their enemy? The Franks in what we now call France. Would you tell us about the emergence of the Franks?

The Franks originally within the Roman Empire, the first we hear of them is military support in the north of Gaul. But the other thing we have to remember is that the Goths were also military involved with the Roman Empire in the south of Gaul. after 4-7-6 the Franks actually take control under their leader Clovis and Clovis then advances on the Goths who are established in the south of Gaul who had also become very very Romanised and established an independent kingdom again after 476 which was the Roman Empire pulled right back

it's the deposition of the last Roman Emperor in the West and after that control in Italy is focused there and the provinces essentially left to their own devices The Frankish rulers then push the Goths into Spain as rulers, but it's likely that many Goths remained in that southern part of Gaul, south of the Loire. So there's always a sense in the whole understanding of the Frankish kingdom, Frankish Gaul as it becomes, that this southern part of Gaul has had a slightly different history.

But both regions are Christian, both have former Roman inhabitants. Franks converted to Christianity in between, 498 and 496 and 508. There's more disputes there. So that they are a Catholic people ruled by Frankish kings who are known as the Merovingians. Now all remains fairly expansionist, quite aggressive, very well organised,

but in the course of the 7th century, the Frankish Merovingian kings and their political structures begin to be slightly diluted in the sense that the Prime Minister, within the kingdom known as the Mayor of the Palace, who is an aristocrat, becomes increasingly important. The region has also been divided, more or less, into sub-kingdoms, so it remains a whole from time to time. It's quite confusing for people to register,

but Neustria, Austria, and Burgundy are the three main regions. And the southern part of Gaul, south of Luar, is bits and pieces attached to these other kingdoms in a way that's quite difficult for us to determine. But they've emerged as a power in northern what we're now called France, but moving even further north of that and east of that. It's a different configuration of land. But let's leave it at that for the moment,

because those are add-ons to the northern France idea. And can we just come now to the figure who will be very important in our story this morning, who is the Master of the Pallises, the aristocrat, Charles Martel? What do we know about him? We know quite a lot about Charles Marcell. Martel from later Carolingian sources, and they're Carolingian, which is the family he belonged to. So they're family histories, which give him big puffs at every possible opportunity. The mayors of the palace in these kingdoms, news to Australia and Burgundy were, in fact, rivals,

and Charles is based in Australia. His family is from there. His father was called Pippin II, and they're all called Pippin and Charles, which doesn't help us a lot, or Carlamen sometimes. But Piping the second had been the mayor of the palace at the end of the 7th century. Charles was his bastard son, and in fact the attempt to hand on your power to your sons under a system of partable inheritance meant initially that Charles had been left out. But Charles comes to some kind of arrangement or simply takes over from his stepmother, Plectrude, takes the treasure and takes over the mayorality after his father died in 714.

Does he have a background of being already as a young man, an effective military leader? He has only in the sense that he takes power in 714 and managed to gather sufficient support from other aristocrats to help him gain power as opposed to his step-brothers and step... Well, they're the grandchildren of Pippin II. But he had other mayors to deal with. He had the king of the Frisians to deal with, and he also had Udo of Ackyten.

So it took him four years to be secure even in the north of Gaul. But once there, then he was able to consolidate his position. And he built a strong position, did he? We're talking about a substantial man in the Frankish kingdom at that time. We're talking about somebody who's militarily, apparently very astute, who can command loyalty and is regarded as a leader. Matthew Inus, what was, can we just develop that? What was the state of the Frankish Empire in the early eight century?

Can you give our lesson us some idea of what's going on? The Rome's gone. Well, I sort of gone. Well, let's say gone. And they're rebuilding around the ruins. What are the Franks doing that are significant? I mean, there are two key developments that are happening at the last part of the 7th century and into the early 8th century.

One of them is this sort of internal politics, the struggle for control of the Merovingian palace, and basically aristocrats struggling. The Marevijian, sorry, they're taken over. They've succeeded the Rome. Yeah, they've effectively succeeded to Roman authorities and they're by far the biggest kingdom in the West at this date, particularly after the Arabs take out Spain in 7-11. So Frankish aristocrats are struggling to monopolise the position of mayor of the palace.

And I think as Rosamond said, the key point is there are a series of quite bloody civil wars between different parts of the kingdom for control in the last further of the 7th century, out of which Charles Martel's father, Pippin, emerges Victoria. and establishes himself as mayor of the palace. And Charles Mattel's grandson's Charlemagne, that dynasty continues. We have a problem that the history is written with hindsight. That's very much palace-based politics, struggling for position at the centre. Neustria, which is the key area, is basically the area around palace,

and its struggle for control to access to the Merivindian King at Paris. Later Carolingian sources claim that the Merivinian kings are basically puppet. there is some contemporary evidence that might indicate they have a bit more independent power but they issue independent judgments for example but clearly the mayor of the palace is in control. Rosamund mentioned that Charles Martel was illegitimate. And I didn't take her up on that,

but how significant was that at the time? We told their Roman Catholics, did the Roman Catholicism play a part in that? Was it only just worth mentioning or was it a big factor? It's very difficult to tell because all the sources are with hindsight. Marriage law actually, and laws about illegitimacy, don't get crystallised until a couple of generations later. The canon law of marriage is basically produced by the Carolingians in the 9th century. So 800 years later, being a bastard is a big deal and you do get excluded. At this stage, the lines are blurred. And actually the whole family history and

whose, whose parent and how that works is incredibly obscure because all of our sources are written with hindsight. So my sense is that Martel is an incredibly effective military figure. His father's attempted to exclude him from the succession. As Rosamund said, he comes to a deal with his stepmother and takes control. I mean, I think the crucial thing to me that happens is, whilst there is all this quite complex infighting around the palace, the regions beyond the core of the Frankish Empire start to go their own way,

and that seems to me to be absolutely crucial to the background, to the Battle of Tour and what's going on in France south of Loire. Can you develop that? Because what we've got is we've got this great Arab surge. They sent an expeditionary force to Gibraltar in 7-11 or 7-11, and they swoop through Spain. Again, swooping and going, they had to consolidate it later. But then they cross, but they crossed, didn't have to. In those, they're different jogging. They never mind.

They get over the Pyrenees, and we've got Nabon and Carcassonne, and they're moving up and up. So that's going on there. We've got the Franks in the north. But you said that it's more complicated than just the Franks. What's happened is, in the... the 6th and 7th centuries, the areas around the Frankish heartland in the north, Paris, western Germany, the Frankish heartlands, the areas around those in the east and the south have developed as what we call peripheral principalities. They're ruled by semi-independent rulers who are normally

sent out by the Franks, marry into the local aristocracies, found their own dynasties, issue their own laws, but are clear that they're not kings, they're dukes, and they're ruling in the name of the Merivindian king. These peoples don't see themselves as Franks, They see themselves as Alimanians, Bavarians in Germany, Aquitans in Aquitaine. We have Frankish sources actually talking about France south of the Loire being inhabited by Romans and calling the Aquitanians Romans. But when they rebel, they don't call them Romans because that makes them sound legitimate. They call them Basques and use all kinds of sort of racial slurs about people living up mountains.

But before we disappear into all... Is there a sense that the Franks are seen or are seen at the time or see themselves as the great holding force, the main force, that they're going to take on if anybody is there. They don't see them. You basically have a very confusing struggle for control of the Merivindian King, who has limited power. That's the main driving force in Frankish politics.

What you do have is these dukes around the edges, particularly in Aquitaine, sort of seeing this infighting and factional fighting in the Frankish heartland and slowly starting to go their own way. And so the sort of, then normally ruling in the name of the Merivinging King, the Merivinian King is becoming less effective, they're effectively ruling on a separate basis. And I think, you know, the crucial figure here is the guy who is coming to control

in Aquitaine, French, south of the Loire in the early next century, is this chap Ude or Odo? We don't know a huge amount about his background, but he's clearly very effective military leader. And he links up with one of the Berber chiefs. he makes an alliance with one of the Berber chiefs. He's also crucially, one of Charles Martel's opponents. When Charles Martel kind of blags and fights his way to power in the 710s,

Odo is actually called in by Martel's opponents to supply military might. When Martel wins, Odo very quickly comes to terms with him and is left alone. And the sources that we have, which are much later and written from Charles Martel's perspective, say, you know, he cowers safe of the Loire and sends peace. embassies, he's clearly actually quite powerful in his own right. Hugh Kennedy, before the Battle of Tour, if we go back to the Arabs, they'd made

a number of excursions into France. You sketched in the nature of the excursions. Can we develop that? Did these expeditions what were the purpose of these expeditions? The purpose of these expeditions was overwhelmingly to acquire booty. In these early phases, the Islamic

empire is what we can call a jihad state, a holy war state. in the sense that people were rewarded for joining the armies by supplies of booty taken from newly conquered areas. And this meant, of course, that all the time you had to conquer new areas because you can't get the same amount of booty year after year. And so they were always looking for new districts to penetrate and so on. And we get the governors of Spain

are under enormous pressure to acquire booty for the Muslims in Spain. So they're always looking for new opportunities, new aviples, for expansion and so on. And the obvious place is the south of France. And they go around the eastern end of the Pyrenees. They go up the Mediterranean coast, through what is now in Catalonia, and then they go mostly up the Rhone Valley,

where the going is easy, the land is flat, and very rich and prosperous. But in the year 732, that's the year that it is, they decided to go further west, and were told that it was rumors of the great wealth of the palaces and monasteries at Tour that led the Arab governor to take his men in that direction, into new territory.

But is there a sense, is there an imperial purpose in this in France or even in Spain? Or is it a lute, is it always a booty purpose? Because in Spain, for instance, not quite soon, but eventually they settled, they made enormous money for being very good administrators and tax collectors, and that seems to be the source of their great wealth. But can we just talk about what's happening then

in say 730 or something. Are they only looking for booty or they're thinking we want to settle here and dominate this place? They're not wanting to settle and dominate north of the Pyrenees except possibly around the Narbon area in the extreme south of France. They don't found new towns. They don't even stay the winter most of the time. This is a summer expedition going back.

The imperative for the governor is to provide booty. If you don't, then people don't get paid and then they make trouble and mischief. So you have to have a constant supply of Booty. Rosam McHittrick, the exact year is still uncertain as I've read from reading what the three of you have written.

But in around 732, an Arab force went further than before in France and ended up around a tour. It's either tour of Poitier, the Stilda. How much is known about that force and its leader? We're told in two separate sources.

One is something called the Chronicle of Fredegar, that's the Carolingian Family Chronicle I referred to earlier, written a good 30 years later about the battle and Charles's progress and his raids. And in parenthesis, I think that the desire for booty and quick rushing raids onto very rich places, if you see Akitans as your enemy, could apply equally to Charles. We're also told about Charles's expedition in something called the Mozarabic Chronicle, the Chronicle of 754, which again, as its name, suggests is after the event. They both give accounts of this battle. We also have another battle that has referred to very much earlier in other sources, the Libre Pontific Carlos, book of the popes, refers to a battle that Odo, that Matthew was referring to earlier, had fought successfully against another Arab raid in 7-2-1, or vera-bounce. And Odo had apparently written a letter to

the Pope, boasting that he had killed 350,000 Arabs and only 50,000. 1,500 dead on his own part had been killed and wasn't he wonderful. And that gets incorporated into the source and then taken up by later sources and muddled up with 732 or 3, which is why I mention it. But the date, Fredegar says 732, Chronicle of 754 says 733. And Paul Forreaker has provided a really very good discussion of this, saying, well, Charles Martel could have been there in 733 with an implication of it doesn't really much matter because the battle actually did take place.

But the description in both sources is governed by those chroniclers' perceptions of what happens in battles. Both are Christian authors and both are very, very heavily influenced by biblical accounts. There's a lot of biblical language in there. So what do we know about the Arab force and its leader? We know the name of the leader.

We don't know how many there were. No idea. all it says is a force of Arabs and it's the same actually with the Frankish sources. We know the name of their leader. We know that there was some alliance with groups from Burgundy who are assisting and that is all.

So we're moving slowly out of certainty into scholarship. Right, let's go. Matyana's what so, we've... Rosamunds told us about the main sources of information. How much do they give you and how reliant do you feel on them?

I mean, These are the two sources close to the event that we have and most of the other things we have are dependent on and embroidering on these sources for propagandist purposes much later. So we are reliant on them. I think... Is it always...

It's always necessary to test propaganda, but is propaganda always ipso facto wrong? I think actually understanding the propaganda is one of the fascinating things about this because, I mean, thinking about other debates we've heard in the news in the past two weeks, history is partly about myth-busting and about testing myths,

and there's clearly a lot of myth-making going on around this battle, and one of the things we can do as historians is check how that's working, and that tells us a lot about what's going on at the time. Yes. It also indicates why people are dressing it up like this, so that if you do not get certain strands that you might expect in the propaganda,

then that also is interesting. This is never presented as a triumph of Christian over Islam? At the time. At the time. Nevertheless, we have the indisputable fact that our great historian, Bede, thinks it's worthy of mention in his magnificent book at about the same time or just a few months after it happened. He's up in Jara, there in the middle of France. He gets the news, he puts it in as a big significant event. Does that matter? Is that important or what? That could just be a chronological conjunction. Bede needs to finish his book.

But he's going to die soon after. It's just a chronological conjunction. And he's finishing his book. So I think a chronological one junction is, well, all right then. But if you're Bede and you're writing a history of the church triumphant and Christianity coming to England, Bid famously doesn't say much that's happened in his own lifetime, but has

quite a glossy magazine photo of how great English church is at his time, the fact that there's been a defeat of the Sarasans a long way away actually really helps him with that plot as part of that story, and I wonder if that's what's going on with Bid. I mean, Bid isn't close to this, he's heard about it, and it

fits to his narrative agenda. The other thing about Bede is that he's been thinking in that particular text on universal chronical lines in which you set out the history of particular empires and regions. It's logical for him to finish off the stories with the Saracens because they've been part of the Christian perception of world history for a very long time. Okay, now I'm going to move on here. Okay, I mean you've sort of, as it were, kicked Bede out of the equation.

there he was as founder of you never mind, that's what you're the scholars Can you tell us Hugh Kennedy what they tell us chronicles or anybody else anything else later tells us about the actual battle Well there is a story about the battle And the fullest account comes in this

Christian chronicle which is written in Cordova In the south of Spain in Latin by a Christian And presumably has been talking or hearing rumours from people who are at the battle No Arabic source mentions it at all. They mention the name of the governor, Abdurahmanaghdhafi, but they don't mention the battle as such. It's only this Christian source written in Muslim Spain

that gives us details about it. And it speaks of a confrontation that goes on for some time. It speaks of the Frankish army standing firm as a northern glacier, as the wonderful phrase that is used. It speaks of days of confrontation. And then one day as the armies go to bed and then their tents and they're going to wake up the next morning and carry on the fighting and so on, the Christian army wakes up and they think it's all very quiet on the Muslim side,

and the Muslims who decamped during the night. Their leader has been killed in one of these skirmishes. They've decamped during the night and they've gone back down south. And the chronicler, writing from Godover, reproaches the Christians of the Frankish army for not being more energetic and going after them and so on. But you can't help feeling it was a very sensible strategic decision. So we have a clear image of the battle.

Whether this is what actually happened, of course, we don't know. The top of the idea of the enemy that disappears during the night is a theme that's taken up in lots of ancient chronicles and in Arab Muslim chronicles and so maybe it just fits. Well, let's keep walking into the fog, Matthew. Can you make any meaningful assessment of the type and size of the forces involved? I mean, we know generally that both the Franks and the Arabs are capable of mobilizing large armies. We know that the Arabs have, I mean, what's initially caused this campaign is there is a Berber Arab leader in Naboon who's allied with Odo in Aquitaine, which neither the Arab leaders in Cordova nor Charles Martel in the north particularly likes these two martial lords allying.

So the Arabs take out this guy in Nabon and then start marauding southern France. Odo, who's, Odo apparently, is said to call for help from Martel in Aquitone. Yeah, but can we get to the numbers? Can we get to the numbers? We have no idea. We just don't know. We know that both of these people can, both of these leaders

can mobilize large forces of thousands, maybe tens of thousands if they have to. Okay, let's go to Rosmonds. You're very skeptical about all this. Very. So I want to try to say how much we don't know about this battle, which Gibbon thought and Beatt thought was worth mentioning.

You have to go back in a farther of English history, after all. And Gibbon and the second of his stepson of English. Anyway, they thought was very significant. So what sort of do you ever speculate? An expeditionary force, which is mentioned, sounds a light thing, but the expeditionary force to Gibraltar resulted in the first occupation of Spain.

So an expeditionary force needn't be a light thing. It needn't be a light thing, and it depends hugely on leadership. And I think one of the interesting thing that emerges from both sources is that the thing failed because the leader was killed. Ah, yes. Charles is described in the Fredegar sources. We simply have the battle line. We have no indication of numbers.

If one's thinking about the logistics of moving a group quickly across land and feeding off the land, then you can't be talking of thousands, but you may well be talking of high hundreds. It's just something that people make decisions about and the 350,000 that Odo claimed for an understanding, earlier battle. Just is ludicrous in terms of anything else

that we know about battles. I was wondering, do you have other battles around the place that do have numbers? Has this got to be judged in isolation? No, it doesn't, but we do have the only figures that are offered of any kind that have been extrapolated and guessed

at, and Thomas Hodgkin has a wonderful sentence about it, is the Battle of Adrianople in 378, where there is an estimate offered of the numbers involved and the numbers killed. and it runs into tens and tens of thousands, and then that is used as an extrapolation. Our chroniclers don't mention numbers very often.

For whatever reason, they don't think it's crucial. What they think is crucial is the outcome. It's very frustrating. And we can't even tell from the account we have in the Fredegar source what kind of army it was, whether it involved warriors charging in on horseback, which used to be assumed because it was much more romantic, or whether it's infantry,

or whether you've got people galloping to, a battlefield and then getting off their horses or whatever. And it's a pity that we can't extrapolate. Now, if you can put other sources together about the way soldiers work and way some descriptions or pictures in manuscripts might help a bit, then you may well be able to get some idea of how battles would be organised. But for this particular incident, we've got the chronicler from Spain and the one from Fredegar, with Christ's help Charles overturned their time.

tents, and we had the tents again, but it is in the book of numbers, and then hastening to battle to grind them small in slaughter. Well, of course, that's what you do in battles. The king, Abdurama, having been killed, he destroyed them driving forth the army he fought and he won. So again, it's this leadership. I think if you've got good leaders, then you can achieve an enormous amount. You mentioned people didn't know. There was an American. Lin, what's it? That's right, thank you. Who wrote a thesis about this battle was the beginnings of the effectiveness of mounted cavalry. And this is what won it for the Franks. And he wrote persuasively about it, persuasive enough for many years for historians to go along with him. But they no longer do that. So, or do you, Hugh, you're raising your eyebrows.

It's very interesting. The way this battle keeps on resurfacing in the historical narrative, when Edward Creasy produced his 15 decisive battles of the world in the 18th, The Battle of Tour was one of the ones he seized along, along with the Battle of Waterloo and the Battle of Thermopy and so on. He saw it as a major turning point, and interestingly, in Creece's narratives, it's very much the Seamites against the Westerners.

Gibbons' narrative is more about religion. Creasy is more about racial perspectives, and so in mid-19th century. And then typically late 20th century in 1962, I suppose that's late, Lynn White, writing in America, wants to do a material culture explanation of it, a revolution in armed warfare,

with the Mounted Knight, and all that means, appearing at the time of the Battle of Torr, and establishing mounted knights as the dominant force on the battlefields of the West, and all the social consequences that go on from that, the developments of feudalism and so on and so forth. And that was enormously influential at the time,

and people nowadays regard it as very oversimplified. And as I was saying, the only detailed account of the battle shows, portrays the Franks are standing like a northern Glacier. And one thing we know about glaciers is that they don't move very fast. They do melt them. The overpeats of evidence we have rather plays against the Lynn White hypothesis. But it was enormously influential for about 20 years.

Matthew Oedis, why did the Arabs lose the Battle of Tour? I mean, according to the person who is closest to the Arab side, this chronicler in Cordova, he says, there are more Franks on their better armed, which sounds to me quite a plausible explanation. And Rosman's idea that the leader was killed, and the leader mattered enormously. The other thing is that a lot of people wanted Frankish swords.

The evidence is actually mostly from the late 8th and the 9th century, but everybody bought Frankish swords, and it was forbidden to export them because you didn't want your enemies fighting with your good weapons. So this was a technological masterstroke. They had good weapons. Yeah. Frankish swords were sold in Baghdad in the 8th and 9th centuries.

The only thing apart from slaves that the Western world exported to the Middle East. Interestingly, Frankish weaponry has designer names. It's the designer gear of this period. You have Uffbert swords with the name of the Smith on them, which are like Hugo Boss or something. They are extremely well made, lovely examples in the British Museum, if anyone wants to go and see them. Can we now move to the consequences of the battle, Rosamond.

What were the consequences of the battle? battle for the Franks? For Charles Martel, he had achieved a victory. If we can judge from the later records, he got a lot of propaganda value out of it, but he didn't consolidate that in Aki-Ten. He may well have gained a lot of extra power and influence over the Burgundians who had assisted him, but he had a lot of other fish to fry and other things to do. As far as we can tell in Aki-Ten itself, Odo and his sons,

carried on and actually became even more independent. So it was left to Charles Martel's grandsons finally to take over Akitaine finally and incorporate it within the new Frankish kingdom under the Carolingian dynasty Charles Martels was an early member of it after 7-6-8. Hugh Kennedy, was this seen as a great blow to the Arab forces, this defeat? No, it has no resonance in the wider Arab narratives at all. It happened far away and it was not good news anyway,

so it tends to be neglected. What it is is part of a pattern that we see from the whole all through the Arab Middle East. There's another battle in 751 in what is now Kazakhstan when the Arab armies confront the Chinese armies, the only time that this actually happened, and the Arabs win that battle. But they don't press home their advantage. It's as if this movement of expansion has come to a natural halt, so to speak,

there are no longer the manpower, there's no longer the volunteers coming and so on. And so in both east and west, Arab Muslim expansion stops in the West with the defeat, in the East with the victory, but the process is the same. But there's the significance of things

that things have at the time and the significance that we see they might have had when we look back much later. As you're the historic, you know, better than I do, but that is the case. Looking back,

Matthew, do people at the time, not much mention, not much effect. But the fact, as you said, they stopped moving north, they didn't come that far up in France again, they went back down, and so on. Is that part of the reason why it was built up later for the great legendary, this is the turning of the tide, this is the stopping of, parting of civilisations mode?

I think in the late 18th and 19th century, when you get people like Edward Gibbon, the people who you mentioned earlier, Leopold von Ranka, the Foundation of German Scientific History in the 19th century, all pick up on this as a great turning point. And I think that people in the late 18th, 19th century, looking back, it's very much in terms of Westerners versus the others. I think you need to understand some of it

in terms of what's going on with Ottoman Turkey and the Mediterranean in that period. And certainly in Gibbon, who's the first person who really writes, as a major turning point. He has a sort of upward curve of Arab invasions, this defeat, and then they descend into oriental, into lasciviousness, luxury, oriental despotism in a kind of classic narrative arc. So I think people in the West are using this as a turning point

to define modern Western civilization, how it's different to the Ottoman world, to North Africa, to the Middle East. I think it's part of modern Western self-definition. That, of course, becomes important because all of these, this is also the time where nation states are developing national identities, ideas about national history,

setting up universities and primary schools, setting up history curriculum. And this gets into the history curriculum as a decisive turning point because it's part of that narrative, I think. But given, we're completely wrong about the Arabs being turned about. After then, they flowed into scholarship. They had magnificent influence,

key influence, in the development of what became remissants and so on. They not only were the translators, developed ideas in medicine and philosophy and all sorts of sciences. So in other ways it was soft power accelerated. Well, the other factor is that the Carolingians continue to have political relations as well as cultural relations with people in Spain and in the Septimani region. And once the learning learnt about in the maths and the algebra filtering into Gaul in the late 9th and into the 10th century, then they're incorporating quite a lot of the learning

and the culture that comes through and also the Arabic translations of Greek material. But it's never a case where, because they are Muslim, relations cannot be conducted. There are trade relations, political relations, alliances, of lots of different kinds. It's a very complex situation, but an extraordinarily interesting one.

Yes. And to take that point, Hugh, what we read is that the resistance, the religious resistance was not there at that time. the fact that that wasn't there and the racism wasn't there. It was just battles between these people wanted the treasure. There's people coming wanting the treasure and then they... So it was...

It's seen. Everybody's got the hand of it. I'm asking Hugh the first. Can you just unravel that a bit? Because it's fascinating. Yes. I mean, the booty was essentially the lifeblood of the state at this stage. And then it changes in the second half of the 8th century

into the 9th century. Muslim Spain develops a system of taxation. It develops a system of administration. It's not dependent on raiding in the same way as it had been before. And that's when you start to get the development of this Andalusie civilisation and so on that you're talking about. But we have the great hanging gardens of Cordoba, don't we? With the three Arabic-Arabic, sorry,

and religion side-by-side, a few yards away from each other and in Seville, which suggests a sort of passivity, which is quite rare. Yes, it becomes a largely civilian state, so to speak, with a bureaucratic system and so on, which permits people to live side by side, at least for a while. You mentioned the Abrahamic religions, and in fact the Islamic groups are considered in a very similar way to Jewish ones.

In ethnic terms, they are both descendants from Abraham, and they are a background to the history of the Christians, so that all the earlier sources talk about them He says it's not racist. It is in a way it is a very ethnic understanding of these groups. So they're seen as they're not Franks, but equally they're not out of their world because they are a biblical people.

And I think in terms of the conflict, there's the battle in 732, Odo defeats the Arabs in 720, Charles Martel defeats the Arabs are having none in 737. 737 and 720 are written up as Christian versus Muslim propaganda to some extent there's the letter to Pope that Rosamond mentions. But what's really going on is you have independent warlords in southern France, you have the Berber leaders at Naboen, you have the Dukes of Aquitaine, and then you have the people at Cordoba in Paris,

basically trying to clamp down on the independence of these southern leaders. Can we go back for the last couple of minutes to Gibbon, in full flow. He saw this as a clash of civilisations. He obviously saw this as a triumph of Christianity. He saw this the disaster. of people teaching in Oxford today to circumcised persons about Muhammad had been avoided.

Is that a period piece or has got any historical resonance whatsoever? It's a wonderful period piece and it's not quite as simple as that given his very ambiguous attitude to Christianity and he doesn't see it as necessarily the triumph of a good Christian force over a Muslim force. He's got his elegant scepticism which is so typical of him and I think that's what he's doing. It's a very funny passage in lots of ways, humorous, funny.

And I think that's one of the reasons why it lingers in the memory. He also uses the point about Oxford is partly he has a difficult relationship with Oxford. And he has a wonderfully sort of pitched aside to saying, where he basically says, of course, the disputes of these Islamic phyologians might make more sense than the disputes of the Christians in Oxford do in my time. Say it's kind of partly him settling scores. And I think you can see, given really taking up his pen and his imagination then doing the rest.

He's scrupulous about reading his sources, but he's also wonderfully imaginative in the gloss that he adds to them. And in that passage in particular, you can see him doing it because you know the sources he's read and what he is then making of them. How has he given you a wonderful, as it were, a wonderful pitch to bat on by putting it so sternly and romantically here? Well, I think it's a few. feature of, we were talking about it earlier, of the way in which a sensationalist, very strong

interpretation of the particular significance for an 18th century writer of a particular event. How significant finally, was this battle? Not very, except that it represents a process. It represents a turning point, as Matt was suggesting, that goes on for maybe 20 years of conflict and interaction. Historians, for these reasons, has seized on this one battle to, as it were, encapsulate, almost personify this sea change when Arab Muslim expansion stops. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks Rosamund McIthrich, Hugh Kennedy and Matthew Innes.

Next week we will be talking about early Chinese history writing. Thanks for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.com.com.