In response, each Frankish soldier, with shield upraised, would lodge his spear into either the horsemen’s legs or the face and flanks of his mount, then slash and stab with his sword to cut the rider down, all the while smashing his shield—the heavy iron boss in the center was a formidable weapon in itself—against exposed flesh. Gradually advancing en masse, the Franks would then continue to trample and stab fallen riders at their feet—careful to keep close contact with each other at all times. In the dust and confusion of battle, it was not so critical for lines of foot soldiers to see their enemy as to stay in rank while slowly walking and striking out at anything ahead. In contrast, men on horses and fighting as individuals needed clear sight to search for gaps in the enemy line or to target those wounded and disoriented soldiers that might provide a rare inroad to the enemy mass.
It was exhausting for heavy-armed foot soldiers to pound their shields and stab spears against mobile mounted targets. There were also other critical factors in the battle beyond mere questions of endurance. A foot soldier presented a far less inviting target than a mounted warrior at close range: his conical helmet, armored limbs and shoulders, and upraised shield made him nearly invulnerable. Not so the mounted Arabs. Once their horses were wounded or their shins sliced, they might easily fall, and then find themselves on the ground and helpless. The chroniclers leave the impression that Abd ar-Rahman never anticipated that his fast-moving pack of raiders would find themselves opposed by a large mass of heavily armed foot soldiers in a confined valley. Under such conditions the ingredients that made his army a thing of terror in the streets of Poitiers—isolated, galloping horsemen riding down unprotected groups of twos and threes—ensured their slaughter by a waiting line of armored spearmen.
Charles’s men were the first generation of such heavy-armored foot soldiers of western Europe to face Islamic armies. Poitiers would thus inaugurate a near thousand-year struggle between the discipline, strength, and heavy armament of western Europeans and the mobility, numbers, and individual skill of their Islamic enemies. As long as the Franks stayed in rank—and miraculously they seem to have maintained order even in the aftermath of battle rather than pursue the withdrawing Arabs—it was impossible for them to be broken or ridden down. Although contemporary accounts wrongly suggest that little more than a thousand Frankish fell, while killing hundreds of thousands of Arabs, it may well be true that Charles lost only a fraction of his men in repelling an enemy unusually large for the times. Poitiers was, as all cavalry battles, a gory mess, strewn with thousands of wounded and dying horses, abandoned plunder, and dead and wounded Arabs. Few of the wounded were taken prisoner— given their previous record of murder and pillage in Poitiers.
The word Europenses, used by the continuator of Isidore, makes one of its first appearances in historical narrative as a generic noun for Westerners. While the chronicler perhaps meant that Charles’s army was an amalgam of a number of Germanic tribes and Gauls, he may have also intended “Europeans” to emphasize an emerging cultural fault line: men above the Pyrenees still fought in the Roman tradition of heavy infantry, and, for all their internecine killing, were more alike than disparate when facing Islamic armies.
After the day’s fighting, the respective armies, who had already eyed each other for a week before the battle, returned to their camps. The Franks made ready to renew battle at dawn, hoping for more reinforcements and expecting another wave of Arab horsemen to attack their positions. Instead, when they returned to the battlefield at daylight, the entire Arab army had vanished, leaving behind empty tents and booty— and their dead on the battlefield. Dead also was their emir and leader of the invasion, Abd ar-Rahman himself. Plans for the Islamic sack and occupation of nearby Tours—they had looted the Church of St. Hilary at Poitiers in the days before the battle—were abandoned.
Poitiers was only the beginning of a gradual expulsion of Muslims from southern France. Frankish lords in the decade to follow would beat back other raids from Islamic Spain, Charles himself soon defeating Saracen armies at Avignon (737) and Corbière (738). Yet Poitiers signaled the high-water mark of Islamic advance into Europe: Muslim armies never again reached so far north. With the near simultaneous repulse of the Arabs from the harbors of Constantinople in 717, the Islamic wave of the prior century was at last checked on the periphery of Europe.
THE HAMMER
We do not know the precise date of the battle—probably a Saturday in October 732. Some historians continue to call the engagement the battle at Tours, since the actual battle took place somewhere on the old Roman road between there and Poitiers. Later Christian hostility against Charles Martel because of his confiscation of ecclesiastical property encouraged medieval chroniclers to ignore or downplay his achievement; and the greater glory of the subsequent Crusades naturally overshadowed this initial confrontation between Muslim and western European armies. Most of the contemporary and modern mythology that surrounds the battle can easily be dispensed with. The Muslims did not invade with hundreds of thousands of troops—300,000 of which, according to one source, were killed. Just as likely, both forces were about the same size—somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000. Given the Franks’ success in calling out thousands of rural folk to protect their farms and estates, the Europeans may well have outnumbered the invaders. Although Arab losses were much higher than the number of Frankish dead, the attackers were hardly wiped out. Somewhere around 10,000 Arabs were killed at Poitiers.
The near contemporaneous spread of early feudalism probably does not explain the Frankish victory either. Charles’s expropriation of ecclesiastical lands to be distributed to his lords and retainers occurred mostly after the battle. Nor was Charles’s achievement, as sometimes claimed, the result of newly adopted stirrups by his European cavalry. Stirrups, in fact, had appeared in the West decades earlier, but there seems to have been only haphazard appreciation of their true value in western Europe—and then not until much later, between 800 and 1000. In their emphasis on Frankish technological dynamism and sudden organizational innovations to explain the Muslim defeat, most scholars have misunderstood two universal tenets of ancient battle: that good heavy infantry, if it maintained rank and found a defensible position, usually defeated good cavalry; and that an army of horsemen far from home needed a sophisticated logistical system if it was to be anything more than a throng of raiders, in constant search of forage and booty.
Abd ar-Rahman’s invasion of 732 was not in itself a systematic attempt to conquer France and to establish Islamic rule north of the Pyrenees. Contemporary chroniclers made much of the prominent role of booty in their accounts of the battle: the Arabs plundered every church and monastery in their path to Poitiers, were burdened before the battle with spoils, and left tents full of loot in the middle of the night to ensure their escape. Both the morale and mobility of the Muslims were probably diminished by the time they arrived at Poitiers, laden as they were with baggage and captives. Had the Muslims won—Poitiers is not much more than two hundred miles from Paris—such raiding would have been continuous and perhaps have led eventually to an Islamic enclave such as had been established two decades earlier in southern Spain.
Permanent Islamic possession of the entirety of France, however, was unlikely, chiefly because the Franks under Charles possessed a well-armed and spirited army of some 30,000 infantrymen, aided by a few thousand heavy cavalrymen. Arabs and their Berber subjects also for much of the latter eighth century in Spain were fighting each other as frequently as they were Europeans, as Syrian tribes with difficulty imposed Islamic culture far to the west on native North Africans. By 915 the Muslims were expelled entirely from the southern border of France. For most of the ninth century, the Franks were more likely to raid Islamic settlements across the Pyrenees than Muslims were to invade France.
Charles won at Poitiers for a variety of reasons. His troops were fighting for their homes, not for plunder far from their bases of operations. The armies were evenly matched, and rough numerical parity is
an advantage for the defender. While both sides had chain mail and steel swords adopted from earlier standard Roman designs, the Franks probably used heavier armor and weapons. The Carolingians were careful to prohibit the export of their mail and offensive arms, suggesting a superiority in design and quantity. Charles had found a naturally strong position at Poitiers, in which his phalanx of infantrymen could not be outflanked or surrounded. He kept his ranks together and was apparently determined to fight entirely on the defensive. For his surprising resistance of the mounted charges at Poitiers, Charles became known as “the Hammer” (Martellus)—an allusion to the biblical hammerer, Judas Maccabaeus, whose Israelite armies through divine intervention had smashed the Syrians.
For much of the seventh century the Muslims, with relatively small mounted forces, had swept aside a variety of weak enemies—the Sassanid Persians and overextended Byzantines in Asia, and Visigoths in North Africa and Spain. When Abd ar-Rahman crossed the Pyrenees, however, he encountered an entirely new force in the Franks. French scholars of the battle were largely correct when they pointed out that the Arabs had been successful against similarly nomadic interlopers like the Visigoths and Vandals, who had themselves migrated into North Africa and Spain, but hit a wall against the Frankish rustics who were indigenous to Europe. In their eyes, the battle of Poitiers was a referendum of looters versus soldiers “sédentarisés,” who stayed in one place, owned property, and considered battle more than a raid.
The Franks, descendants of the Germani described by Tacitus in the first century A.D., originally lived in what is now Holland and in eastern Germany around the lower Rhine. They seemed to have migrated in large numbers into nearby Gaul by the fifth century. Scholars do not agree on the origin of the word “Franks”; most associate it with either their famed throwing ax, the francisca, or the old Germanic word freh/frec, meaning “brave” or “wild.” In any case, under Clovis (A.D. 481–511) the Frankish tribes united in the old Roman province of Gaul in what came to be known as the Merovingian monarchy, named after the legendary Frankish chieftain Merovech (Merovaeus), grandfather of Clovis, who had fought against the Huns at Châlons (A.D. 451).
After Clovis’s death a series of dynastic wars among his offspring led to independent kingdoms: Burgundy to the southeast in the valleys of the upper Seine, Rhône, and Loire Rivers; Austrasia to the east across the Meuse, Moselle, and Rhine Rivers; and Neustria in the west along the large plains bordering the Atlantic coast. By 700 Gaul was a petty kingdom of warring states until the reign of Charles Martel; nevertheless, the Franks increasingly saw themselves more as a nation than a tribe, more in the classical than in the Germanic tradition. Indeed, the Merovingians sought to trace their Frankish ancestry not back to the dark forests of Germany, but to migrations of mythical Trojans after the conquest of Troy.
Charles Martel was not in direct line of succession to the Merovingian throne, but the bastard son of King Pippin. Despite the absence of a legal claim on the Frankish kingdom—Charles was mayor of the palace, equivalent to being a duke of the Austrasian Franks—he engaged in a lifelong effort to unite these kingdoms. His eventual victories provided the foundation of the much larger, stronger Carolingian dynasty, which under his grandson Charlemagne saw the reunification of central Europe. In eighteen years of uninterrupted civil war, from 714 to 732, Charles consolidated the old tripartite realm of Clovis and then quickly expanded his rule throughout Gaul. Almost every year of the reign of Charles until his death in 741 was spent in warring to unite Gaul or to rid Europe of Islam. In 734 he fought in Burgundy; the next year he furthered his consolidation of Aquitaine. The years 736–41 saw war once more in Burgundy, in Provence, and against the Saxons. This yearly fighting eventually allowed his son Pippin (751–680) to rule over a united Francia officially as the first Carolingian king. It is often forgotten in accounts of Poitiers that when Charles brought his infantrymen to the battlefield, they were hardened veterans from nearly twenty years of constant combat against a variety of Frankish, German, and Islamic enemies.
Besides his stunning victory over Abd ar-Rahman at Poitiers, contemporaries record three great accomplishments of Charles, which reflect the continuity of classical approaches to religion and government. The first was to reestablish political control over the church, by allotting more ecclesiastical lands to private landowners, who would in turn serve in Charles’s national army. Second, he attempted to bring more secularization to the church hierarchy through appointments of his own servants and generals to Christian offices. Third, Charles extended Frankish control over most of the old province of Gaul, and was able to tie local lords and barons together into a national army, which systematically defeated Islamic incursions until Gaul was mostly free for a generation from Muslim attackers.
Every free household in Charles’s realm was to provide an adult warrior for a national army, most commonly a heavily armed infantryman who was to fight with similarly armed foot soldiers, with large wooden shields, reinforced leather or chain-mail jerkins, conical metal helmets, broadswords, and either spears, javelins, axes, or combinations of such arms. Strong classical antecedents explain the preponderance of heavily armed foot soldiers in Merovingian armies:
The Merovingian military was greatly influenced by the Roman empire and its institutions, and it owed comparatively little to the Franks, who were only a minority of the population and a small part of the fighting forces. As with many aspects of Merovingian life, the military organization recalls Romania and not Germania. (B. Bachrach, Merovingian Military Organization,128)
Charles Martel’s most important legacy, besides creating a unified Western state strong enough to withstand the onset of Islam’s advance into southern Europe, was the continuance of the classical tradition of mustering free men into a large infantry force, in which citizens, not slaves or impressed serfs, formed the corps of the army. Charles reestablished the principle that the Frankish monarchy and the church were separate entities, and that ultimately church property and offices were dependent on a central monarch. All this was in antithesis to his adversaries at Poitiers. In theory, for the next thousand years of warring, all Muslim political states were theocracies subservient to the laws of the Koran, while their mostly mounted armies would be built around a corps of servile soldiers. The thousand-year-old cultural fault lines characteristic of the past Greco-Roman wars against the Achaemenids and Sassanids reappeared in the Christian struggle against Islam.
ISLAM ASCENDANT
The prophet Muhammad died exactly one hundred years before the battle of Poitiers. In that century between 632 and 732, a small and rather impotent Arab people arose to conquer the Sassanid Persian Empire, wrest the entire Middle East and much of Asia Minor from the Byzantines, and establish a theocratic rule across North Africa. In the past the Romans had built a wall to protect their province of Syria from the warring tribes of Arabia, thinking that there was little danger from an impoverished and nomadic people of the desert, who had no real settlements, a tiny population, and no systematic logistical capability. Yet by the mid-eighth century, the suddenly ascendant kingdom of the Arabs controlled three continents and an area larger than the old Roman Empire itself.
The Arab conquests were a result of two phenomena: prior contact with Byzantines, from whom they borrowed, looted, and then adapted arms, armor, and some of their military organization; and the weakness of the Persian Sassanids and the barbarian Visigoth successors in the old Roman provinces of Asia and North Africa. It is often forgotten that Islamic dynamism between the eighth and tenth centuries represented a reconquista of territory that had been ruled largely by others from Persia or Europe. Despite nearly seven hundred years of Greek and Roman power in northern Africa, local populations still maintained indigenous religious, linguistic, and cultural practices, and vastly outnumbered Europeans and their own educated Westernized elites. All these Islam swept away. Once the old Asian and African provinces returned to a religion and government of the East, only Europe proper of the old Rom
an Empire remained uninvaded from the Islamic south and east. Yet conquest of central Europe—“the Great Land” to the Arab chroniclers—was a different matter altogether. It was understandable that Islam—without a tradition of heavy infantry, shock battle, and civic militarism, or the ability to create sophisticated lines of supply and transport—stalled in its attack against the West until the rise of the Ottomans in the fifteenth century.
The weakness of other empires, the borrowing of arms and organization from the Byzantines, and the natural role of an Asiatic kingdom in Asia proper still do not entirely explain the miraculous Islamic conquests. Arab armies also won because of the peculiar nature of their newfound religion, which offered the nomad singular incentives to fight. There was to be a novel connection between war and faith, creating a divine culture that might reward with paradise the slaying of the infidel and the looting of Christian cities. Killing and pillaging were now in the proper context, acts of piety.
Second, the onslaught of the Muslims into the Persian, Byzantine, and European realms was considered a natural—or fated—act. The world was no longer bound by national borders or ethnic spheres, but was properly the sole domain of Muhammad—if only his followers were courageous enough to fulfill the Prophet’s visions. Islam was not a static or reflective religion, but a dynamic creed that saw conquest and conversion as prerequisites to world harmony. Islam came at an opportune time for conquest, as the eroding urban centers of the seventh-century Persian and Byzantine Empires were especially vulnerable to large mounted attacks of spirited warriors.
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Page 19
