The Rest Is History - 522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Episode Date: December 16, 2024By 711 Europe and the Frankish warlords were facing a graver threat than ever before. Bands of Northern African, nominally Muslim raiders had begun a steady incursion throughout the West, loosely unif...ied under the banner of the Umayyads. Having already taken and plundered the Christian territories of the Goths, their eyes now fell upon the Frankish kingdom in Gaul, by now the greatest power in Europe. It would be a formidable prize if taken. But fortunately for the Franks, their leader was the greatest of their warlords since the rise of Clovis I: the mighty Charles Martel. Finally, the two great hosts - Charles with his allies from Aquitaine and the Umayyads under the leadership of Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi. A world shaking, spear shattering, blood-letting battle would ensue, the outcome of which would come to determine the future of Europe. Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the build up to, climax, and aftermath of the Battle of Tours - one of the most important battles in Western history, which would prove the making of the Franks, and pave the road to the ascent of Charlemagne. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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but Amazon still has last-minute deals. Like makeup for the beauty lover, electronics for the tech pro, A 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 Quran 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 Pepin, was content with the titles of mayor or duke of the Franks, but he deserved
to become the father of a line of kings.
That was Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, one of the most famous passages of historical prose ever written.
He is describing the legacy of the Battle of Tor, which was fought on 10 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 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 Clovis, the king who founds the
great kingdom of the Franks as the Roman Empire is falling. But we're now in the early eighth 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 Ameyad 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've 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 Tours, if it was 14732, 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 world history
might have been different.
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 would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing
so. Craigie.
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.
Most agree now that the Battle of Tours 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 called. It's a raid, one among many that they launch,
and the consequence is not as great as is often thought.
Will Barron 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 Tours 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 Tours in far-right circles is, 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, a far-right terrorist group, and it called itself the group Chalmatel.
So drawing its direct inspiration from the Frankish Duke who had won the battle of Tor.
Then in 2015, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, you know, so the publishers of the Styrical
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, 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 Tours, academics who say, oh, it's a terribly important moment, it's a pivotal moment in world civilisation, 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 all.
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 Umayyad 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 of
people is to go out and proclaim the revelations of Muhammad to the limits that the caliph is giving these groups of people is to go out and
proclaim the revelations of Muhammad to the limits 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,
you know, not massively dissimilar period.
I think you're right.
And again, that's kind of parallels with this and 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 seventh, going into the eighth
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 711, there's a kind
of exploratory raid across the Straits of Gibraltar. So a war band of Berbers, of Arabs,
of Muslims, wherever 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 centre of Spain, the main Visigothic city. And it's a spectacular
victory. It's a kind of Hernán Cortés 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 Ameyads 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 Bezier, Agde, Nîmes, they all fall and essentially pretty much the whole of the Visigothic strongholds in southern Gaul, so Béziers, Agde, Nimes, 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 Merovingian's
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 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 second and his son and heir Dagoburt 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.
Dagoburt, Clothar's son, he's sent off to rule Australia.
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 Australia, who we have already met. We met them at the
end of the previous episode, because these are a lord called Pepin and a bishop called Arnulf.
And these are the guys who had got together to overthrow Brunhilde.
They'd betrayed her.
And so she'd ended up being captured by Clothar and then very horribly executed.
So Arnulf serves the young Daggerbert as his kind of preeminent counselor 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 Australia, but he is also the leading official in that kingdom.
And his status is in Latin, me or domus, which you know, you could 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 mayors,
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, Daggerbert 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 Arnof, 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 Australia 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 Mirror of Injuns, very unfortunate
series of circumstances, there is 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 Herstal, this great overweening mayor,
the Merovingian king is reduced effectively to a kind of cipher. And by the time that Pepin of
Herstal dies in 714, he's made himself the master not just of 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 is a Merovingian king, we don't need to really
worry too much about him, he's called Theodoric IV. Yeah, he's useless. But Charles Martel, although there is a Merovingian king, we don't need to really worry too much about him, he's called Theodoric IV.
Yeah, he's useless.
But Charles Martel is the ruler of huge swathes of what was once called, Austrasia, Neustadt,
Burgundy and so on.
But that leaves one other place in the south east 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 Tor. So Aquitaine has got a duke called Odo,
let's call him Odo. So tell me about him. He's a very grizzled experience bloke.
He is battle hardened, cunning and absolutely does not want to submit to the rule of Charles Martel. He wants to effectively maintain
his kind of independence. He's Frankish, but he's able to draw on the kind of 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 Charles
Martel 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. Unsurprisingly, Odo tries to kind of play these two kind of menacing enemies off against
one another.
So in 721, the Ameyad forces, they've completed their conquest of the Visigothic stretches
of Ghul.
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 Charmatel and he says, look, we're all Franks together.
Can you come and help me?
This is a nightmare.
And Charmatel, far from rallying to the cause of Christendom, he says, no, I'm 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 Ameyad forces in Europe.
And Odo is 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 Char 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 the
Yemeids 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 Otun in Burgundy, which Brunhild 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 compare the Arab Vedas 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 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 Aemaeids, 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 Aemaeid 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 sort of titanic clash of civilizations and
that people are consciously engaged in a clash of civilisations because here you have an alliance between Christian and, in a vertical way, 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
caliphate Harim 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 Abdulrahman 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, Abd al-Rahman invades Aquitaine. He sweeps northwards through Gascony, 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 Abd al-Rahman 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 was slain.
So this is terrible for Odo. 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 his great rival
humiliating for him but he has no choice and he begs him for assistance.
And Charles is still driving a hard bargain.
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 Superior and Odo has no choice. So reluctantly, he gives his submission.
Meanwhile, back in Aquitaine, Abdulrahman'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. It's a long, long way from Toledo, let alone from Africa. They don't know much about
Charmantel. 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 rumors 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 Saint Martin of Tours, 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 Bear.
Okay, so what will happen? Will they strip it bare? Will there be a great battle? Who
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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 729, but there wasn't
any Saracen invasion of Gorn in 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 witnessed 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 tuned 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, Abd al-Rahman, the Umayyad 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 Tours, and the Franks in that were kind of knights on armour and the Arabs all
had you know they were kind of loosely you know wearing their kind of flowing robes.
They were a Saladin in the Ladybird books.
Yes, exactly.
But actually it's the other way round.
It's the Omeid 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 eighth century
throughout the empire's Romano-German successor states in the west.
So basically, their kit is loads, loads better.
And also the Ameids, they're just much richer.
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 Bachrach,
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 I 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. So they kind of curl back on themselves like a horn almost.
It's the kind you get in the Arabian Nights.
Yeah, Arabian Nights 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 it 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 armored loricati they're called, the kind of the armored 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 packed in a bit like the images of fighting that you get in Bernard Cornwell's books,
which are again not massively dissimilar period.
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 Romans
called 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, the Odo's defeat of the Arabs before
the Wars 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 Ameyad 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 Abdulrahman 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 recognises the kind of significance to Frankish prestige
of the Shrine of St. Martin. If he can sack it, it'll be a real body blow to the prestige
of Shah Martel and his regime. And I think we've said Abdulrahman, 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 worshipers 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 Tor 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, you know,
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. Abdulrahman 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 incredibly memorable 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 Abd al-Rahman himself. So again, the chronicle of
754. The Austracians, 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, woo, 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 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 plan do they have?
I think they leave some of it behind and this is what the Franks pick up. 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.
St. Martin is safe.
St.
Martin is safe and his shrine will never be threatened again.
But this leaves open 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?
Is it world historical in its moment? And I guess the first question is, what do we make of this attack that the Ameyad 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 Abdulrahman 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.
Yeah.
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, you know, there are so many kind of intangibles, but the balance
of probability would be that Aquitaine would definitely fall to the Ameid forces. I mean, if Odo is dead, if his men have been wiped out, there's no real prospect
of the Ameid 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. that would have then have provided a kind of reserve of manpower that the Aemaeid 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 Aemaeid 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 aquatain
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 Tours 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 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, you know, 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 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 shock waves not just across
Britain, but across the whole of Europe.
And I think it gives a pretty devastating blow to Northumbria
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 eighth century, it's
become much more than that. So St. Martin,
he's the first, he's the most celebrated of all 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 St. 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 Umayyad campaign.
It's not particularly what they are proclaiming.
And therefore very few people at the point where the Battle of Tours 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 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 vaguer sense of who the Saracens,
as he calls them, you know, vaguer sense of who they are. He thinks that they're pagans, that they're worshippers 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
are, you know, it's basically kind of grab it and settle and that's at 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 Tours,
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.
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 Tours 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, Umayyad Chronicles often mentioned big defeats.
So they mentioned defeats in the early stages of the Reconquista,
for example, but they never mentioned 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, but 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. But 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 Emirates can't keep raising all these Berber troops. So that would seem
to undermine the idea that, oh, they get aquatane, 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 Ameids are overthrown by the Abbasids.
But one of the Ameids 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 Ameid 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 Ameyads take over
in the wake of the Abbasid Revolution. Had that extended to Southern Gaul,
had it extended to Northern Italy,
then 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 gonna 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 Charles 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 remember 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 therestishistory.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 bye. Bye bye. Hello everybody, Dominic Sandbrook here.
And I'm Tom Holland.
And we have some incredibly exciting news to tell you, don't we Dominic?
We do.
So we often say we've got exciting news, but this is genuinely very, very exciting news.
We are thrilled to announce that after the sellout show that we did earlier this year, The Rest is History will be returning to the Royal
Albert Hall on Sunday, the 4th of May to perform live once again with an orchestra.
And we will be bringing you a brand new show and this time discussing two more of history's most
extraordinary, fascinating and iconic classical composers,
in this case Tchaikovsky and Wagner. And these extraordinary lives will be brought to life
thanks to the accompaniment of the renowned Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by the celebrated
Oliver Zefferman.
So that first show that we did this year was a truly glorious experience and we are hoping
that this too will be an unforgettable night. There'll be great music, we'll be telling great stories, we'll be delving into the history. So you
had better get your hands on tickets for the show as soon as you can.
And these tickets will be available from www.royalalberthall.com on Thursday, the 19th of December with a
presale for the Rest is History Club members and Royal Albert Hall friends
and patrons 24 hours earlier on Wednesday the 18th of December at 10am. That is the Rest is History
live with the Philharmonia Orchestra, Tchaikovsky and Wagner. It's at the Royal Albert Hall on Sunday
the 4th of May. Now the tickets are available for members on Wednesday the 18th of December and for
the general public on Thursday the 19th of December and please make sure that you don't
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If the history buff in your life is always regaling you with the same old facts about
Churchill or Napoleon, why not get him or her, and let's face it you, a present?
After all, Christmas is just around the corner and a very happy coincidence, our first official
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It is packed to the brim with the most bizarre historical questions you never thought to
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