Charles Martel and the battle of Tours: a turning point in world history? A four part series (part the third)

What we've been waiting for ...

Thank you everyone for bearing with me through the previous two posts in which I established the necessary background - I hope you found it worth your while! But now we're finally on to our main man - Charles Martel. 

The battle of Tours depicted in the Grands Chroniques de France, British Library Royal MS 16 G VI.(c.1332 - 1350), commissioned by the future King John II of France. While the artist, based at the royal  abbey of Saint-Denis, doesn't exactly aim for historical accuracy, he at least tries to create a sense of the past by portraying the combatants in armour that would have looked very old-fashioned by the middle third of the fourteenth century - the transition from mail to plate was well underway at this point. Interestingly, the kind of helmets shown could have plausibly been worn in the eighth century.

Charles Martel's rise to power (715 - 724)

If you remember where we finished in part 1, in December 714 Charles' dad, Pepin of Herstal, the mayor of the palace of Austrasia and Duke and Prince of the Franks, had just died. This was not good news for his family, the Pippinids/ Arnulfings (it would be premature to call them the Carolingians just yet). Earlier that year, as we saw in the previous post, Pepin's eldest son Grimoald, the mayor of the palace of Neustria, had been assassinated by a chap called Rantgar while praying at the shrine of Saint Lambert at Liege. In the Book of the History of the Franks of 727, he's referred to as a gentilis, which literally means "pagan." Thus its often assumed that he was an agent sent by Duke Radbod of Frisia (the modern day Netherlands), whom Pepin of Herstal had fought a series of wars with from 689 to 697 and had conquered the important settlements of Dorestad and Utrecht from. The Frisians after all, still followed Germanic paganism. But lets not also forget that Radbod had not only made peace with Pepin, he had also allowed Grimoald to marry his daughter, Thiadsvind. So unless Radbod was a psychotic father-in-law from hell, why would he have done it? Rantgar was a Frankish name as well, and its possible that calling Rantgar a gentilis didn't mean he was a literal pagan. Rather, the author of the Book of the History of the Franks could have been saying that he was morally equivalent to one by committing such a sacrilegious act as murdering someone at a Christian holy site. Indeed, Adhemar of Chabannes, in his account of it written more than three hundred years later, went even further than his source material by calling Rantgar filio Belial, which basically translates to "spawn of Satan." But who Rantgar really was and what was his actual motivate are questions we'll never get the answer to. What is abundantly clear from that episode is that, around the time of Pepin of Herstal's death, the Pippinid family had made many enemies, both within and outside the Merovingian realm, who were waiting for their chance to strike. 

Charles Martel's wicked stepmother? Plectrude as she appears in an early fourteenth century genealogy chart trying to link up the French royal house, the Capetians, to the Carolingians and ultimately the Pippinids.

Pepin left as his heir his 7-year-old grandson Theudoald, the son of Grimoald and Thiadsvind. Theudoald thus became mayor of the palace of both Neustria and Austrasia, with his grandmother Plectrude exercising de facto authority on his behalf. Meanwhile, the reigning king over both Austrasia and Neustria was Dagobert III (r.711 - 715). Meanwhile, Charles Martel and his mother Alpaida were completely excluded from the corridors of power. From the charter evidence, it seems that Charles and Alpaida were not allowed to visit Pepin after he became terminally ill early in 714. And early in 715, Plectrude had Charles imprisoned. This is basically when Charles really enters into the narrative sources - the Book of the History of the Franks (727), the Continuation of Fredegar (751), the Earlier Annals of Metz (806) etc - which are completely silent about his life before then.

The regime, with Dagobert III as the monarch, the child Theudoald as prime minister (still a better one than Boris Johnson, I'm sure) and Plectrude as the effective head of government, managed to cling on for about six months. But after that, resentment towards the Pippinid family became so strong in Neustria that the aristocracy there rebelled. The author of the Earlier Annals of Metz blamed it on Plectrude being too cunning and cruel. There is definitely more than a hint of misogyny in its characterisation of Plectrude, though interestingly there is the possibility that the author of the Annals was based at the convent of Chelles (founded by Balthild who you may remember from part 1), as suggested by Janet Nelson, and therefore was a woman. Paul Fouracre and Richard Gerberding argue this can't be the case on the basis of its misogynistic characterisation of Plectrude, though that seems to me like a bit of a weak argument - internalised sexism does exist after all. Anyway, I suspect that it wasn't specifically Plectrude who was at fault. R ather, what seems to be the case is that the Pippinid/ Arnulfing family that Pepin of Herstal, Grimoald the Younger and Theudoald were from, were deeply resented by the regional elites of Neustria and Burgundy.

Theudoald's forces met with them at Compiegne and were defeated. What happened to Theudoald next is disputed. The Earlier Annals of Metz claims that Theudoald died shortly afterwards. But a Theudoald, described as a nephew of Charles Martel, witnessed a charter issued early in 723 in which Charles made a donation to the basilica in Utrecht. And the Royal Frankish Annals say that a Theudoald died in 741. The author of the Earlier Annals of Metz, written under Charles' grandson Charlemagne and possibly commissioned by his granddaughter Gisela, abbess of Chelles, was clearly trying to justify Charles' later seizure of power by having Theudoald killed off prematurely. 

We do know, however, that Dagobert III was dead no later than 716 and that the Neustrians had appointed a new mayor of the palace for their kingdom - a chap called Ragenfrid. As for who was to succeed Dagobert III as king, the Neustrian aristocracy elected a 43 year old monk called Daniel, the son the assassinated King Childeric II (d.675), as king. He took the royal name of Chilperic II. Daniel had been entrusted as an infant to a monastery for safety following the brutal murder of his father and mother by, guess who ... the Neustrian aristocracy. Ragenfrid, now prime minister of Neustria and possessing the perfect royal figurehead, also made an alliance with Duke Radbod of Frisia, thus enabling him to make a pincer movement on Austrasia and bring that realm under the control of his regime too.

The Merovingian realm at the death of Dagobert III. Map Credit: By Kairom13 - Own work based on Paul Vidal de la Blache's Atlas général d'histoire et de géographie (1912), CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=112316299

Meanwhile, Charles Martel had made a daring and successful escape from prison in Cologne. He was then declared mayor of the palace, seized control of the Austrasian treasury from Plectrude and managed to assemble an armed following. However, luck wasn't quite on his side, as he was immediately caught in the pincer movement, with Ragenfrid and his Neustrian army coming from the west and Radbod with his Frisians from the northeast. Cologne fell to them and Charles had to make yet another daring escape. He hid away in the Eifel mountains, roughly where the border between Belgium and Germany is today, and assembled an army. When Ragenfrid's army was coming through the Eifel mountains on the way back to Neustria early in 716, overladen with plunder Charles Martel successfully ambushed them at river crossing near Amel in the Liege region of Belgium and inflicted a crushing defeat on them. All our sources indicate that the Neustrian army suffered very substantial casualties indeed. Cologne may have been the first time Charles Martel ever saw battle, and he had clearly learned a lot from his mistakes in the short period of time between then Ambleve. Spoiler alert: from Ambleve on, Charles Martel was never defeated in battle. 

Whether we can call Charles Martel a military genius is debatable - unlike with, say, Julius Caesar, Richard the Lionheart, Gustavus Adolphus, Napoleon Bonaparte or George S Patton, the sources give quite terse accounts of his campaigns and don't give much insight to his tactical thinking. But we can, with great confidence, say that he would be among the top five military commanders of the period c.500 - 1000 in western Europe. Some might say that's setting the bar quite low. In conventional military history, this period is the murky interlude between the disappearance of the Roman legions and the beginning of the age of knights and castles. As Guy Halsall points out in "Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West, c.450 - 900" (2003), the best guide to early medieval military history out there, our central problem when studying this period is that western chroniclers in the sixth to ninth centuries tended to give military matters only a passing glance, and are largely silent on how battles were fought. 

Charles Martel then went on the offensive against Ragenfrid and defeated the forces of King Chilperic II and Ragenfrid at the battle of Vincy, fought somewhere near Cambrai in French Flanders, on 21 March 717. His next move, now that his position was more secure with Neustria's military capabilities being greatly reduced after two heavy defeats, was to return to Austrasia and find a credible royal figurehead for him and his supporters to rally around. That royal figurehead, of course, had to be a member of the Merovingian dynasty - Charles couldn't try and pull-off the kind of nonsense his great-uncle Grimoald had tried to do with Childebert III "the Adopted" as you may remember from part 1. Charles readily found one in Chlothar IV, who may have been a son of either Theuderic III (r.673/ 675 - 691) or Childebert IV (r.695 - 711). A royal figurehead was absolutely necessary because no one in government could issue commands that were legitimate and binding, unless they were issued in the name of a reigning king. If Charles Martel tried to rule Austrasia alone without a reigning Merovingian king on his side, he would be seen as a tyrant (tyrannus), someone who exercised political power illegitimately, and anyone who considered themselves a loyal subject of the Merovingians would be obliged to resist him. Elevating Chlothar IV would thus enable him to build-up a bigger army and be able to conquer Neustria.

By 718, Charles Martel was clearly becoming a very serious threat to Chilperic II and Ragenfrid, so they entered into an alliance with Duke Odo of Aquitaine. Aquitaine had basically become a semi-independent principality during the crisis the Merovingian realm went through from 656 to 687. Its elites and the general population still identified as Romans, used Roman law (in the form of the Theodosian Code of 438) as their legal system and Poitiers seems to have been the last city in the Merovingian realm to keep the old Roman civic archive, the gesta muncipalia, going. There was a strong sense of ethnic difference between them and the "Franks" living north of the Loire. The Franks often called these Romans living in the south "Aquitanians" (after the pre-Roman inhabitants of the region) or "Gascons" (after the Basques living in the Pyrenees whom the Dukes of Aquitaine often recruited to bolster their armies), much to the offence of those concerned. In a similar way, westerners from the ninth century would start to refer to the Romans of the still surviving Roman Empire in the East as "Greeks."

Odo of Aquitaine provided them with a large army of Romans and Basques. Yet that didn't stop Chilperic II, Ragenfrid and Odo losing to Charles Martel at Soissons, another place on the eastern edge of Neustria, in the spring of 718, and unlike at Vincy, Charles didn't go home but instead pursued them all the way to Paris. Chilperic, Ragenfrid and Odo then fled down the Seine to Orleans, and from there they escaped over the Loire into Aquitaine, taking the Neustrian royal treasury with them. Charles seems to have secured control of Neustria down to the Seine and the Paris basin pretty quickly. He then went on campaign against the pagan Saxons living east of the Rhine, leading an army 200 km into Saxony, a land where there were no Roman roads. Given that his army had already been down to Orleans earlier that year , they must have marched at least1,300 km in total during the campaigning season of 718. The logistics, knowledge of local conditions and morale necessary for that are a pretty clear sign, in my view, that Charles Martel was a military genius.  Later that year, Chlothar IV died - he had reigned only a year and a half. There was now only one adult male Merovingian left, that being Chilperic II. Charles Martel needed a Merovingian royal backer to remain prime minister of Austrasia, let alone reunite Neustria, Burgundy and Austrasia under his leadership. So he sent envoys to Duke Odo of Aquitaine in 720, made a pact of friendship with him and had Chilperic II handed over to him. Chilperic II was then returned to Neustria and proclaimed king of all the Franks. In the meantime, following the death of Duke Radbod in 719, Charles managed to take back what is now Holland from the Frisians, and fought another campaign against the Saxons in 720. By this point, Charles Martel, now prime minister of a reunified Merovingian realm had really won the civil war - he now had control over the king, the Neustrian royal palaces, the Neustrian treasury and all the key bishoprics and monasteries in Neustria with their extensive landowning and patronage networks, under his control.

In 721, Chilperic II died and Charles Martel was able to install his own Merovingian of choice as king - Theuderic IV, the young son of Dagobert III who had been hidden away in a monastery after his father's death. By the 720s, even the most revisionist historians who fervently oppose the idea of Merovingian royal decline, are willing to concede that the Merovingian kings were now constitutional figureheads, or as the French call them, rather unkindly, "rois faineants (do nothing kings)." Unlike with his grandfather, Childebert IV the Just (r.694 - 711), there are no judgements or political decisions that can be attributed to Theuderic IV. And we have no evidence that Theuderic IV advised Charles Martel on anything, unlike what Queen Elizabeth II is supposed to do when she has her weekly audiences with Boris Johnson. Theuderic IV's activities were relegated to greeting foreign dignitaries and the eighth century equivalents of the Trooping of the Colour, the State Opening of Parliament and cutting a ribbon outside a new leisure centre in Milton Keynes. Southwestern Neustria still held out against Charles. That took some time to subdue, but after the fall of Angers in 724, Ragenfrid finally submitted to Charles. After nine years the civil war was finally over, and no one between the Loire and the Rhine stood in opposition to Charles' authority. No one in 715 could have predicted this. At that time, Charles Martel was languishing in a dungeon in Cologne and possessed no powerbase. How, then, did he do it? Quite simply, it came down Charles' skill as a politician and military leader. Charles Martel fought eight battles in the civil war of 715 - 724 and lost only one, the very first. As Paul Fouracre has shown quite clearly from studying the charter evidence, the more victories Charles Martel won, the more followers he attracted to his side as previously neutral nobles and ecclesiastics realised he was the runner they should be hedging their bets on. With each victory, he also won more treasure to give out as gifts, either to win new followers or keep pre-existing ones close to him. And after 718, he was able to establish his followers in bishoprics, abbacies and counties in Neustria. By this point he would have reached a critical mass in terms of his patronage base, so that any Frankish noble who wanted to be anything more than a local bigwig and obtain wealth from any source other than his landed estates had to declare his support for Charles. He was also, as we have seen, diplomatic and very careful to avoid accusations of being a tyrant and trying to exercise power independently of the Merovingian monarchy. And above all, contemporaries recognised how able and charismatic he was. As the author of the Book of the History of the Franks wrote, no later than 727, Charles was "a warrior was uncommonly well educated and effective in battle", managed to escape from prison with difficulty and "with the help of the Lord", and was "steadfastly unafraid" when faced with formidable opposition from Chilperic II, Ragenfrid and Odo in the spring of 718. Given that its anonymous Neustrian author can't have been a supporter of Charles from the start, and can't have been influenced by the heaps of praise Charles Martel was going to win after 732, these comments from a contemporary strike me as pretty indicative of what lay behind Charles' success up to 724.

Prime Minister Charles on the warpath  

Now Charles Martel was head of government of a reunified Merovingian realm, what was he going to do? One of his policies was to revive the practice of holding an assembly of the Frankish army in the spring followed by a military campaign outside the Merovingian realm in the summer every year. The early Merovingians had done this annually, but since the death of Dagobert I in 639, it had only been practised very irregularly, More than half the time in the subsequent eighty years, either the kings were children or their mayors of the palace were busying themselves in squabbles with rival noble factions. It would have seemed like an obviously good idea for Charles to revive it. The experience of campaigning, and the rewards that came with it, would serve to bind the Frankish political community closer to Charles and to each other. He also needed to make sure that neighbouring realms, which many members of the Frankish nobility had family ties to the elites of, would not harbour fugitives or give support to opponents of his regime, should they arise.

Charles spent 725 - 730 campaigning east of the Rhine against the Saxons. He also campaigned in southern Germany against the Alamans and Bavarians, who nominally accepted Merovingian overlordship but were de facto independent, and managed to get the their dukes to recognise his authority as prime minister of the Merovingian realm.

After 730, Charles began to turn his attentions southwards. Duke Odo of Aquitaine had broken the pact of friendship established ten years earlier. The Continuation of Fredegar gives the impression that Odo was a weak, erratic and cowardly leader, though non-Frankish sources tell a different story. They instead suggest that Odo was a strong leader and a proven commander, who had won some crushing victories over Muslims when they attempted to invade Aquitaine in the 720s, earning him the recognition of Pope Gregory II (r.715 - 731). Indeed, in Pope Gregory's biography, contained in the eighth century Book of the Popes, the extravagant claim was made that at the battle of Toulouse in 725, Odo had killed 375,000 Saracens while losing only 1,500 of his own men. Clearly Odo had quite some skill as a self-publicist. And Odo's principality was also very rich - viticulture had been thriving there since Roman times, and Poitou had very active iron and lead industries in this period. Charles either needed to get Odo firmly on his side or try plunder the wealth of Aquitaine to bolster his resources. He thus led a campaign into Aquitaine in 731, won a battle with Odo and returned with some booty. 

The road to Tours

But an unexpected turn of events was going to change Charles' approach towards Odo, and Odo's approach towards Charles. The Continuation of Fredegar claims that the humiliated Odo called on the Muslims to provide him with military assistance against Charles Martel, only to have them betray him. However, we do have another source at hand, the Chronicle of 754, written in Latin by a Visigoth living under Umayyad rule in Cordoba. Again, this shows Odo in a very different light. It tells us that no later than 731, Odo had his daughter married off to Munnuza, a Berber chieftain in control of Cerdanya in what is now Catalonia, in hope that it would secure his southern border against future Muslim attacks. Odo was no doubt also aware of how the Berber military leaders in Spain were coming to resent the Arab governors in Cordoba and the increasing attempts at centralised control of the Iberian Peninsula from the Umayyad caliphs in distant Damascus. Munnuza rebelled against the Umayyad governor but was defeated and committed suicide. Odo's daughter was then sent to Caliph Hisham (r.724 - 743) in Damascus as gift for his harem. 

In 732, the Umayyad Arab governor of Spain, Abd al-Rahman, led an army north through the Pyrenees to invade Aquitaine. He had two obvious grudges with Odo. The first being that he'd killed his predecessor, Al Sham, at Toulouse in 725, and the second being that he'd given tacit support to Munnuza's rebellion. The campaign seems to have been something between a punitive expedition and plunder raid. Abd al-Rahman defeated Odo in battle at the river Garonne and then marched up to Bordeaux, destroyed the city and exterminated its population. He then came to Poitiers and destroyed the old late Roman basilica of Saint Hillary of Poitiers, one of the greatest Gallo-Roman saints. He then marched along the Roman road northwards to Tours and it was feared that the same fate would befall the basilica and monastery of that other great Gallo-Roman saint, Martin of Tours. This could not be allowed to happen. Odo was left with no choice but to call on the help of Charles Martel. Indeed, Charles must have already been campaigning against Odo in northern Aquitaine that year, given how quickly he answered his call. The Muslim army was intercepted on the road from Poitiers to Tours, hence why it is known as both the battle of Tours and the battle of Poitiers (Anglophones prefer the former, Francophones the latter), and the rest is history.

The battle of Tours

The battle took place on 10 October 732. We do not know the exact location of the battlefield and so we do not know its layout and what sort of terrain they were fighting on. On one side were Charles Martel and Duke Odo with their Frankish and Roman troops (there may have also been a Burgundian contingent). On the other, there was Abd al Rahman, with his army primarily consisting of professional Arab troops he'd brought with him from Yemen and Hijaz back when he was appointed governor of Al-Andalus by Caliph Hisham in 730.

We have two near-contemporary accounts of the battle, both written less than 25 years after it happened - not bad by early medieval standards. Those are the Continuation of Fredegar and the Chronicle of 754. Both are written by people who were in a good position to know what happened. The author of the Continuation of Fredegar was commissioned to write it by Count Childebrand (676 - 751), the brother of Charles Martel. Meanwhile, the Visigoth author of the Chronicle of 754 seems to have been a high-ranking churchman and administrator with ties to the Umayyad court in Cordoba, so he may have personally known some of the Arabs who fought in the battle and heard their accounts of it. 

The Continuation's account is pretty brief:

Prince Charles boldly drew up his battle line against them [the Arabs] and the warrior (belligerator) rushed in (inruit) against them. With Christ's help he overturned their tents, and hastened to battle to grind them small in slaughter. The king Abdirama having been killed, he destroyed [them], driving forth the army he fought and won. Thus did the victor triumph over his enemies. 

Source of translation: Paul Fouracre, The Age of Charles Martel, Longman (2000). John Michael Wallace Hadrill did a translation of it in his The Fourth Book of Fredegar and its Continuations (1960), but I chose Fouracre's over that one because Hadrill's is verbose and less true to the original Latin text, in some places being misleading.

Basically, what it says is that Charles and his army made a successful headlong charge at the Muslim camp, overwhelmed the enemy, killed Abd al-Rahman and decimated his army. The account appeals to divine favour as one of the reasons for Charles' victory, and as Paul Fouracre has pointed out it does allude a lot to the Old Testament in its choice of Latin words i.e. inruit is found in Chapter 24 of the Book of Numbers, when the Holy Spirit "rushed in" through the tents of the Israelites, and belligerator is used when describing the huge battles in chapters 15 and 16 of the Book of Maccabees. Some have used this account to suggest that mounted shock cavalry were the decisive element in Charles Martel winning the battle of Tours, but that really is reading too much into it - nowhere does the Continuation's account give any indication that Charles' charging troops were mounted rather than on foot.

The Chronicle of 754's account is a great deal more detailed and poetic. It reads:

While Abd ar-Rahman was pursuing Eudes, he decided to despoil Tours by destroying its palaces and burning its churches. There he confronted the consul of Austrasia by the name of Charles, a man who, having proved himself to be warrior from his youth and an expert in things military, had been summoned by Eudes. After each side tormented each other with raids for almost seven days, they finally prepared their battle lines and fought fiercely. The northern peoples remained as immobile as a wall, holding together like a glacier in the cold regions. In the blink of an eye, they annihilated the Arabs with the sword. The people of Austrasia, greater in number of soldiers and formidably armed, killed the king, Abd ar-Rahman, where they found him, striking him on the chest. But suddenly, within the sight of the countless tents of the Arabs, the Franks despicably sheathed their swords, postponing the fight until the next day since night had fallen during the battle. Rising from their own camp at dawn, the Europeans saw the tents and canopies of the Arabs all arranged just as they had the day before. Not knowing that they were empty and thinking that inside them were Saracen forces ready for battle, they sent officers to reconnoitre and discovered that all of the Ishmaelite troops had left. They had indeed fled silently by night in tight formation, returning to their own country. Worried that they would attempt to ambush them, the Europeans were slow to react and thus searched in vain all around. Deciding against pursuing the Saracens, they took the spoils - which they divided fairly amongst themselves - back to their country, and were overjoyed. 

Source of translation: Kenneth Baxter Wolf (ed and trans), Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain, Liverpool University Press (1999)

"The Northern Peoples remained as immobile as a wall, holding together like a glacier in the cold regions": The Chronicle of 754 seems to describe Charles Martel using the shield wall at the battle of Tours like the one at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 depicted here in the Bayeux Tapestry. Unlike at Hastings, however, it worked because Charles Martel, unlike Harold Godwinson, was cautious and did not break the formation until he knew the time was right.

We can immediately huge differences between the two accounts. Not only is the Chronicle of 754's obviously longer and more detailed than the Continuation of Fredegar's, it attributes a fundamentally different battle-plan. Rather than suggesting that Charles was on the offensive, it says that Charles's army fought defensively in the shield-wall formation, managing to cut down wave upon wave of Arab troops and kill their commander in chief while not leaving their positions. Rather than coming across as a bold heroic figure confident that God would grant him victory, Charles Martel comes across as a much more cautious and thoughtful commander. As an interesting detail, the Chronicle of 754 describes skirmishing taking place between the two armies before the battle. It is also the very first source to use the term "Europeans", and there is a case to be had that its in the eighth and ninth centuries, especially under Charles Martel's descendants, the Carolingians, that "Europe" stops being simply a geographical expression like it had been to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and starts to be thought of as a cultural entity.

In my view, its the Chronicle of 754's account that gives us the best, most accurate view of what happened. Its perspective is unique and remarkably even-handed, coming from a Christian Visigoth living under Muslim rule. By contrast, the Continuation of Fredegar is simply too triumphalist, being written to demonstrate that the hand of God was behind the rise of the Carolingians, and so neglects most of the actual military aspects of the battle and produces a very distorted account.

Aftermath

After Charles Martel's victory at Tours, the Aquitanians acknowledged his overlordship. Muslim incursions into Gaul did not end. In 735, the new Umayyad governor of Spain, Uqba ibn al-Hajjaj, led an army through Muslim-controlled Septimania, conquered Provence and raided Burgundy. Charles Martel managed to wrestle Provence back off him, winning crushing victories at the sieges of Avignon and Nimes. But his attempt at conquering Septimania was ultimately unsuccessful. While he defeated the Arabs in open battle at the river Berre, the siege of Narbonne came in 737 to nothing after Charles Martel realised that the resistance from both the Muslim Arab garrison and the Christian Visigothic citizenry was simply too great for it to be worth the trouble.

Meanwhile, in the wake of his great victory over the Muslims, Charles hold over Francia had grown yet stronger. In 737, King Theuderic IV died, yet Charles didn't hastily find another Merovingian to succeed him. Instead, in his capacity as Prime Minister, he ruled as de facto sovereign head of state of the Frankish kingdom for four years until his death in 741. It is a real testament to Charles' personal authority and reputation as a statesman and military commander that he could pull it off. This is because as soon as his sons, Pepin the Short and Carloman, succeeded him as joint mayors of the palace/ co-prime ministers, they installed the last surviving male Merovingian, Childeric III, whose father was either Chilperic II or Theuderic IV, as king. Little did Childeric know that he was going to be the last - ten years down the line he was going to be deposed, in order to make way to a new dynasty, the Carolingians.

Here Charles Martel is depicted holding audience with a petitioner in the Grand Chroniques de France (c.1375). Its both ironic and revealing, in terms of how he was remembered centuries later, that Charles Martel is shown wearing a crown and holding a sceptre - he was never a king (though his son Pepin would become one) but the artist, with hindsight, thought he might as well have been one.