“The battle of Tours” – Powers and Thrones (Dan Jones) https://bookshop.org/ebooks/quotes/41bcdf88-f8ed-44f0-88fd-93fdb4fd3b4f
Western writers and Charles Martel. (Does everybody want their history determined by great figures, or is that a Western thing?)
«The battle of Tours (also known as the battle of Poitiers) was well known to contemporaries and has been celebrated by western writers for more than one thousand years. Its salient details and exemplary moral lesson were fixed within no more than three years of its conclusion by writers including the Venerable Bede, who wrote in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (completed at some time before Bede’s death at Jarrow in England in May 735) that “a dreadful plague of Saracens ravaged France with miserable slaughter, but they not long after in that country received the punishment due to their wickedness.”49 Many others followed Bede’s example, both in the Middle Ages and the present day. To the chronicler of Saint Denis—writing more than six hundred years later during the apogee of French sacral kingship in the thirteenth century, Charles Martel saved “the Church of St Martin, the city, and the whole country” from “the enemies of Christian faith.” To Edward Gibbon, writing his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire between 1776 and 1789, the defeat of Abd al-Rahman saved all of Europe from Islamification and prevented an alternative history from unfolding: one in which Arab conquests reached Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; where “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 Mahomet [sic].”50 Two hundred years later, during the 1970s, the Charles Martel Group formed in France as a right-wing terrorist organization devoted to opposing Algerian migration to France through a series of bombings. In twenty-first-century America an organization called the Charles Martel Society organizes white nationalists and publishes an overtly racist journal giving a platform for pseudo-scholarly articles on subjects including eugenics and racial segregation.51 So even today Martel’s victory is regarded as a historical turning point: a battle that changed the world, the moment at which the seemingly unstoppable sweep of Arab conquests in the century following Muhammad’s death was checked.
Yet of course, as we have already seen, this is far too simple a reading of history. For one thing, it is not totally clear that Abd al-Rahman wished to conquer the kingdom of the Franks at all: the most useful Mediterranean ports between the Pyrenees and the Rhône were already in Muslim hands by the 730s, and had been pacified with a judicious use of exemplary violence (bishops were occasionally burned alive in their churches, while rumors had spread up from Visigothic Spain telling of Berber troops boiling and eating obstinate Christians) alongside the routine application of the jizyah [a head tax on non-Muslim people living in the caliphate]. Tours and the surrounding areas were interesting fields of plunder, but it is no certain thing that in the 730s they were being lined up for full Muslim conquest.
Moreover, the battle of Tours alone was nothing when placed alongside two earlier defeats that stand as much more convincing examples of historical turning points for the caliphate’s expansion. The first was the failed 717–18 siege of Constantinople, described earlier. [Greek fire! (Invented by a Syrian (family?), apparently, so why is its most popular name “Greek”?)] The second is the battle of Aksu, also in 717, in which an Arab-led army, bolstered by troops of Turkic and Tibetan origin, was wiped out by the Tang Chinese in the Xinjiang [East Turkistan] region of modern China. This defeat heralded a gradual winding down of the Muslim charge eastward; by the 750s the borders of the Islamic world and Tang China had been settled in central Asia, where the two powers shared control of the Silk Road trading routes. The middle decades of the eighth century marked the point when the Islamic conquests hit their geopolitical limits, not only in Europe but across the world. Charles Martel’s victory in 732 was only one small part of that much larger process.»
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