Perhaps most importantly, Charles Martel has become an enduring icon of fascist and far-right movements, in France and other Western states. The French romantic writer Chateaubriand made the equally dramatic claim that, “if it were not for Charles Martel’s valor, we would all be wearing turbans.”
Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet. The Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Commentators have presented the victory of Charles - later given the martial cognomen of Martel, or “the hammer” - as a civilizational as well as a military triumph, crediting the Frankish warrior with having stanched the Muslim expansion into Western Europe.Įdward Gibbon famously speculated that, had Abdul Rahman prevailed at Poitiers, Indeed, the battle of Poitiers (or Tours, as it sometimes known in the English-speaking world), has been framed as one of history’s most decisive military struggles, on par with the battles of Thermopylae or Waterloo. This confrontation between two Dark Age warlords echoed through the ages and acquired a potent symbolism, all despite the fact that medievalists know relatively little about the principal protagonists and the respective orders of battle, let alone how the fight actually unfolded.
In the ensuing battle, Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi - governor of the Muslim territories in Al-Andalus (Spain) - was slain, and his troops were routed. On a fall day in the early 8th century, somewhere between the French cities of Poitiers and Tours, a Muslim army crashed into the serried ranks of a force led by a powerful Frankish noble: Charles, Mayor of the Palace and son of Pippin of Herstal.
0 kommentar(er)
