What was history then?*

 

For our very first “from the sources” post, lets return to our old friend Gregory of Tours. He’s a real VIP of early medieval history Since the seventh century, his “History of the Franks”, which covers everything in Frankish history down to his death in 594, has been extensively used as a source for studying the early Frankish past. And since at least the sixteenth century he’s been held up as, in the words of the French renaissance humanist Claude Fauchet, “the father of French history” and “the oldest and most trustworthy author who spoke of the kings and the government of France.”

A statue of our friend Gregory wisely and kindly watches over the 9.6 million visitors who queue up to visit the Louvre every year. 

But did the venerable bishop of Tours see himself primarily as a historian of the Franks, that is to say, as a historian of them as an ethnic group or of their kings? The answer is almost certainly not. “The History of the Franks” as it’s been titled in all modern French, German and English translations of the text, is actually a misnomer. Gregory called his work the Libri Decem Historiarum – “the ten books of histories.” And his purpose was not to chronicle the deeds of one particular ethnic group (the Franks) – it was much broader than that. He wrote about contemporary events across the known world, including in places as far afield as Syria and Armenia. He gave just as much weight in his history to ecclesiastical affairs, saints and miracles as he did to the political intrigues and wars of the Merovingian kings. And he ultimately conceived of his project as a universal (or, as we’d now say, global) history, following the models given by the early Christian historians Eusebius (260 – 339), Jerome (342 – 420) and Orosius (385 – 420). He begins his history in Book One with the Creation and spends the rest of that book outlining the events from Old Testament history, the life of Jesus Christ, the spread of Christianity, the Roman imperial persecutions and early Christian martyrdoms, the conversion of Constantine the Great, the reigns of the first Christian Roman emperors and the early bishops of Clermont-Ferrand (Gregory’s home town), and finishes with the death of Saint Martin of Tours in 397. The Franks, the people who ruled supreme in Gaul in Gregory’s day but whom he did not himself identify with, only enter Gregory’s narrative in Book Two Chapter Nine. Here’s what he has to say about their origins:

Many people do not even know the name of the first King of the Franks. The “Historia” of Sulpicius Alexander gives many details about them, while Valentinus does not name their first King but says they were ruled by war-leaders. What Sulpicius Alexander says about the Franks seems to be worth quoting. He tells how Maximus gave up all hope of the imperial throne, lost his reason and went to live in Aquileia. Then he adds:

“At that time the Franks invaded the Roman province of Germania under their leaders Genobaud, Marcomer and Sunno. As the Franks crossed the frontier, many of the inhabitants were slaughtered and they ravaged the most fertile areas. The townsfolk of Cologne were terrified: and, when this news reached Trier, Nanninus and Quintinus, who commanded the Roman armies and to whom Maximus had entrusted the defence of Gaul, collected their troops together and marched to that city. The enemy, who were heavily laden with booty, for they had pillaged the richest parts of the province, crossed back over the Rhine, but left many of their men behind in Roman territory, where they were planning to continue their ravaging. The Romans found it easy to deal with these, and a great number of the Franks were cut down in the forest of Charbonniere. After this, the Roman leaders held a meeting to decide whether or not they should cross into Frankish territory. Nanninus refused to do so, for he knew that the Franks were waiting for them and that on their own soil they would undoubtedly be much the stronger. This did not meet the approval of Quintinus and the other military leaders, and so Nanninus retreated to Mainz. Quintinus crossed the Rhine somewhere near the fortress of Neuss with his army. After two days’ march away from the river, he attacked a number of dwellings abandoned by their inhabitants and a few townships of no mean size, which were, however, deserted. The Franks had pretended to retire in panic and had withdrawn into the remote woodland regions, all around which they had erected barricades of forest trees. The Roman soldiers burned down all the houses, imagining in their cowardly stupidity that by doing so they had gained a conclusive victory: then they spent an anxious night without daring to take off their heavy equipment. At first light they marched out into the woods, with Quintinus to lead them in battle. By about mid-day they had lost themselves completely in a maze of pathways and had no idea where they were. They ran up against an endless barricade solidly constructed from huge tree-trunks, and then they tried to break out over the marshy fields which bordered the forests. Here and there enemy troops showed themselves, standing on the boles of trees or climbing on the barricades as if on the ramparts of turrets. They kept shooting arrows as if from war-catapults, and these they smeared with poisons distilled from plants, so that wounds which did little more than graze the skin and touched no vital organ were followed by death against which there was no protection. Then the Roman army, now surrounded by the main force of the enemy, rushed desperately into the open meadows, which the Franks had left unoccupied. There the cavalry was bogged down in marshland and the bodies of men and animals, all mixed up together, were borne down into the ground in one common catastrophe. Such infantry as was not trodden under foot by the heavy horses was caught in thick mud from which the men had difficulty in lifting one foot after the other. With fear in their hearts they rushed back to hide in the very woodlands out of which they had marched only a short time before. As the legions were cut down the ranks were broken. Heraclius, tribune of the Jovinian legion, and almost all the other officers were wiped out. Darkness and the deepness of the forests offered safety and refuge to a few survivors.”

That is what Sulpicius Alexander had to say in Book III of his “Historia.”

In Book IV, when he is describing the murder of Victor, the son of the tyrant Maximus, he says:

“At that time Carietto and Sirus, appointed in the place of Nanninus, were stationed in the provinces of Germania with an army collected to oppose the Franks.”

A little further on, after stating that the Franks had gone home laden with booty from Germania, he goes on:

“Arbogast, who would brook no delay, urged the Emperor to inflict due punishment on the Franks unless they immediately restored all the plunder which they had seized the previous year when the legions were slaughtered, and unless they surrendered the warmongers who had been responsible for such a treacherous violation of the peace.”

He says that these events occurred at a time when the Franks were ruled by war-leaders. Then he continues:

“A few days later, there was a short parley with Marcomer and Sunno, the royal leaders of the Franks. Hostages were insisted upon, as was the custom, and then Arbogast retired into winter quarters in Trier.”

When he says “regales” or royal leaders, it is not clear if they were kings or if they merely exercised a kingly function. When he is recording the straits to which the Emperor Valentinian was reduced, he says:

“When these events were taking place in the East in Thrace, the government was in great difficulty in Gaul. The Emperor Valentinian was shut in the palace in Vienne and reduced almost to the status of a private citizen. The control of the army was handed over to Frankish mercenaries and the civil administration was in the control of Arbogast’s accomplices. There was not one among all of those who were bound by their military oath of obedience to him who dared obey the private orders let alone the public commands of the emperor.”

He goes on:

“That same year Arbogast, urged on by tribal hatred, went in search of Sunno and Marcomer, the kinglets of the Franks. He came to Cologne in the full blast of winter, for he knew well that all the retreats of Frankland could be penetrated and burned out now that the leaves were off the trees and that the bare and sapless forests could offer no concealment for an ambushed foe. He therefore collected an army together, crossed the River Rhine, and laid waste to the land nearest to the bank, where the Bructeri lived, and the region occupied by the Chamavi. He did this without meeting any opposition, except that a few Amsivarii and Chatti showed themselves on the far-distant ridges of the hills, with Marcomer as their war-leader.”

A few pages further on, having given up all talk of “duces” and “regales”, he states clearly that the Franks had a king, but he forgets to tell us what his name was.

“The next thing which happened was that the tyrant Eugenius led a military expedition as far as the frontier marked by the Rhine. He renewed the old tradition treaties with the kings of the Alamanni and the Franks, and he paraded his army, which was immense for that time, before their savage tribesmen.”

So much for the information which this chronicler Sulpicius Alexander has to give us about the Franks.

As for Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus, whom I mentioned above, when he comes to tell us how Rome was captured and destroyed by the Goths, he writes:

“Meanwhile Goar had gone over to the Romans, and Respendial, the king of the Alani, therefore withdrew his forces from the Rhine. The Vandals were hard-pressed in their war against the Franks, their King Godigisel was killed and about twenty-thousand of their frontline troops had been slaughtered, so that, if the army of the Alani had not come to their rescue in time, the entire nation of the Vandals would have been wiped out.”

It is an extraordinary thing that, although he tells us about the kings of these various peoples, including the Franks, when he describes how Constantine, who had become a tyrant, summoned his son Constans to come from Spain to meet him, he goes on:

“The tyrant Constantine summoned his son Constans, who was also a tyrant, from Spain, so that they might confer together about affairs of state. As a result, Constans left his wife and the administrative affairs of his court in Saragossa, entrusted all his interests in Spain to Gerontius and hurried to meet his father by forced marches. They duly met. Quite a few days passed, but no news arrived from Italy to disturb Constantine. He therefore returned to his daily round of over-drinking and over-eating, and told his son that he might as well go back to Spain. No sooner had Constans sent his troops on ahead, while he himself lingered a little longer with his father, than messengers arrived from Spain to say that Gerontius had proclaimed Maximus, one of his own dependents, as Emperor. Maximus was supported by troops from a horde of barbarian tribes and was ready for any contingency. Constans and the Prefect Decimus Rusticus, one-time Master of Offices, were very frightened by the news. They sent Erdobech to contain the people of Germania and they themselves set out for Gaul, with the Franks, the Alamanni and a whole band of soldiery, intending to return to Constantine as soon as they could.”

Later on, when he describes how Constantine was besieged, he adds:

“Constantine had been beleaguered for about four months when messengers arrived all of a sudden from northern Gaul to announce that Jovinus had assumed the rank of Emperor and was about to attack the besieging forces with the Burgundes, the Alamanni, the Franks, the Alani and a large army. Things then moved very quickly. The city gates were opened and Constantine came out. He was immediately packed off to Italy, but the emperor sent a band of assassins to meet him and he was beheaded up on the River Mincio.”

After a few more sentences, Frigeridus goes on:

“At the same time, Decimus Rusticus, the Prefect of the tyrants, Agroetius, one-time Head of Chancery of Jovinus, and many other noblemen were captured by the army commanders of Honorius and cruelly put to death. The city of Trier was sacked and burned by the Franks in a second attack.”

He notes that Asterius was made a patrician by a patent signed by the emperor and then continues:

“At this time, Castinus, Master of the Imperial Household, was sent to Gaul, as a campaign had begun against the Franks.”

That concludes what these two historians have to say about the Franks.

In Book VII of his work the chronicler Orosius adds the following information:

“Stilicho took command of the army, crushed the Franks, crossed the Rhine, made his way across Gaul and came finally to the Pyrenees.”

The historians whose work we still have give us all this information about the Franks, but they never record the names of their kings. It is commonly said that the Franks came originally from Pannonia and first colonised the banks of the Rhine. Then they crossed the river, marched through Thuringia, and set up in each country district and in each city long-haired kings chosen from the foremost and most noble family of their race. As I shall show you later, this is proved by the victories won by Clovis. We read in the consular lists that Theudemer, King of the Franks, son of Richemer, and his mother Ascyla, were executed with the sword. They also say that Clodio, a man of high birth and marked ability among his people, was King of the Franks and that he lived in the castle of Duisburg in Thuringian territory. In those parts, that is towards the south, the Romans occupied the territory as far as the River Loire. Beyond the Loire the Goths were in command. The Burgundes, who believed in the Arian heresy, lived across the Rhone, which flows through the city of Lyons. Clodio sent spies to the town of Cambrai. When he had discovered all that they needed to know, he himself followed and crushed the Romans and captured the town. He lived there only a short time and then occupied the country up to the River Somme. Some say that Merovech, the father of Childeric, was descended from Clodio.

(“The History of the Franks” by Gregory of Tours, edited and translated by Lewis Thorpe, Penguin Classics, 1974, II.9, pp 120 – 125)

Now there is so much that is interesting about this chapter. Rather than talking about what it might tell us about late Roman warfare, the Germanic tribes or the imperial usurpers and civil wars of the 380s to 410s (the period covered by the sources Gregory is quoting), lets focus on what it tells us about Gregory as a historian.

One of the first things you’ll have noticed is that Gregory is quoting the Histories of Sulpicius Alexander and Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus at length and those of Orosius briefly. All of these men were Christian Roman historians writing in the first half of the fifth century AD. However, while Orosius’ work survives to us today in several manuscripts, and enjoyed widespread popularity in the Middle Ages, the more secular political-oriented Histories of Sulpicius Alexander and Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus have been lost. This is regrettable but shouldn’t be too surprising.

While the exact extent of the loss of ancient Greek and Roman literature is unknown, all reasonable estimates for the extent of literary survival between 800 BC and c.500 AD would place it somewhere in the ballpark of one percent. There are many ancient authors for whom none of their work survives at all. The reasons for this are various, but by far the most common one is simple neglect over the centuries. Ancient literary works were mostly written on papyrus. It was a fairly cheap material but not very durable, especially in the cold, damp climate of transalpine Europe. If a literary work was going to survive long term, it needed to be copied, and copying was a labour-intensive process that required professional scribes. Papyrus therefore ended up being supplanted by parchment, a process that had begun in the fourth century AD and was well underway in Gregory’s day, but very far off being complete – the papal chancery used papyrus until the eleventh century. Parchment was a much more durable medium of writing but much more expensive to produce – killing a cow as opposed to chopping down some reeds. And copying still remained labour intensive as ever. So, like with papyrus, choices had to be made about what to be preserved long term. The eighth and ninth centuries seem to have been the most critical period, in both Western Europe and Byzantium for the transition from papyrus to parchment and thereby deciding what to preserve long term – if an ancient text was written on a parchment codex by 900, then more likely than not it survives today.

Sulpicius Alexander and Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus clearly didn’t make the cut. But fortunately for us, Gregory chose to directly quote them at length, allowing us to read snippets of them. This is comparatively better than the situation for a lot of other lost classical histories. For example, the contemporary/ near-contemporary accounts of the campaigns of Alexander the Great by Callisthenes, Cleitarchus and Ptolemy can only be very speculatively reconstructed from the works of Diodorus Siculus, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Plutarch and Arrian, written several centuries later, which we know to have used them as sources. And all we know about histories of the Etruscans and Carthaginians written by the future emperor Claudius in the reign of Tiberius, is that they once existed because Suetonius briefly mentions them. But Gregory, following in the fashion of Eusebius, decided to be more transparent in his use of sources and thus preserve extracts from Roman histories which are otherwise lost.

Gregory himself also seems be very conscious of the limited and diminishing base of source material, hence why he says that Orosius, Sulpicius Alexander and Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus are “the historians whose work we still have.” This suggests that he knew of other sources which might have been relevant to his enquiry here, but which were already lost or otherwise inaccessible. And to acknowledge the limited nature of the evidence for the past is the most important sign of a mature and critical historian in any age.

The way in which Gregory handles the evidence provides further indication of how skilled he was at historical enquiry. In this chapter, he carefully analyses the language that each of this fifth century sources use to refer to the leaders of the Franks in the decades around 400, and checks them for internal consistency i.e., he notes that Sulpicius Alexander mostly speaks of Frankish “duces” (war-leaders) and “regales” (kinglets), but later on explicitly says that the Franks had a single king. He then brings together the inferences from the different sources and compares them. From there he comes to the conclusion, supported by the sources, that we cannot know who the first king of the Franks was, because while there clearly were Frankish kings c.400, their names are not provided by the Roman historians.

It is also worth noting, and this holds true throughout the Ten Books of Histories, that whenever Gregory uses oral accounts he acknowledges them, and that folk memory, rumour or commonly held opinion cannot by themselves be taken as authoritative. Thus, the last paragraph of this chapter contains phrases like “it is commonly said that”, “they also say that” and “some say that” when dealing with such sources on the earliest history of the Franks.

Stuff like this proves that, contrary to what is sometimes said, the historical method – making enquiries into the past through the critical study of the primary sources – was not a sui generis invention of Renaissance humanism or the professionalisation of history in the nineteenth century. But, to roughly paraphrase what Matthew Kempshall says at the beginning of the introduction to his Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400 – 1500 (2011), while a classicist can simply laugh at such ignorant claims from their modernist colleagues that “proper serious history writing” didn’t begin until c.1500 or c.1850 – “seriously, have those snot-nosed modernists not heard of Thucydides!” – medievalists fear that their only way to prove such claims wrong for their period is to write a book. Here a blogpost will have to do. This, I hope, shows that early medieval historians did indeed possess something we would recognise as the historical method. While undoubtedly source criticism and historical enquiry have become more advanced post the Middle Ages, especially thanks to the development of auxiliary disciplines like philology, archaeology, palaeography, diplomatic, numismatics, statistics, database management and, most recently, climate science, let’s not forget Isaac Newton’s analogy (actually first made by Bernard of Chartres in the twelfth century) about standing on the shoulders of giants.

*The title is a play on E.H Carr’s 1961 classic What is History?, which since its publication has been the entry point for many an undergraduate to the study of historiography and the historian’s craft.

One year blogoversary

 And so here we are. This blog has reached its first-year anniversary. And what a ride it has been. It has gone well beyond what I initially envisioned for this blog. Initially, I’d envisioned it as mostly somewhere for random thoughts and musings about the early middle ages I kept getting all the time (even in the shower, believe it or not), but never wrote down somewhere. But once it actually got going, it ended up becoming properly educational, and encouraged me to read more into certain topics I hadn’t really explored in much detail before. And I’m pleased to see that it has a lot more enthusiastic readership than I expected, though I do think I need to work harder to grow the community of readers – a Facebook page and, though this does make me grimace, a Twitter account may need to be set up sometime in the immediate future. Thank you so much to all of you for your support, whether you’re one of my long-time readers or this is the first post on this blog you’ve read.

I have also thought about some other necessary changes to this blog. The age of monster articles, what the Guardian would call “the long read,” are over. As a rule, going forward, no blogpost can exceed 1500 words in length. If its too long for you to read while you’re having your morning coffee, when you’re on the bus/ train to and from work or when you’re doing some internet browsing before bed, then really it’s a load of self-indulgent time-wasting on my part, lets be honest. I’ll also make it a commitment to release content more regularly. Until now there have been that there have been some periods of really intense blogging activity, followed by lengthy caesuras, much like the activity of many an early medieval chancery. But now its time to go full Angevin England mode and commit to a regular and predictable output, just like the calendars of the pipe rolls, close rolls and patent rolls but a lot less bureaucratic. I shall aim to release one every Monday morning at 7 am, though that may have to sometimes be every other Monday morning – I am starting a PGCE programme to train as a secondary school history teacher next month, after all. All subsequent posts will also be placed into one of five categories: from the sources; theory time; book review; controversies; first hand encounters with the medieval past. All of this I should have done a long time ago, but I was spurred into action after a computer glitch resulting from faulty Wi-Fi destroyed the first draft of this post, which I had spent two days working on – you can imagine how upset I was. I hope you’ll like these changes. But now let’s get on to some exciting special content.

Beowulf and the Merovingians

I’m sure you, my readers, are familiar with Beowulf. Ever since it was first translated into Modern English and published in 1815, it’s been recognised as one of the great foundational texts of English Literature. Historians now would generally see it as an invaluable source for Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian kingship, warrior masculinity and how early medieval Christians in Northern Europe approached their pre-Christian past. It’s a shame that nothing like it exists from the Frankish world, where I work on. Einhard tells us that Charlemagne “ordered that the very old German songs, in which the deeds and wars of ancient kings were celebrated, should be written down and preserved.” but posterity has handed down none of these Old Frankish epics to us in the present, with no small consequences for how differently historians view elite culture in Francia and Anglo-Saxon England.

Now, the plot of Beowulf should be familiar to many of my readers anyway but (spoiler alert) the eponymous hero, after succeeding his cousin Hygelac as king of the Geats (a people living in southwestern Sweden), dies fighting a dragon at the end. His faithful warrior companion, Wiglaf, then makes an ominous speech at Beowulf’s funeral. Here is an extract from it:

Now must our people look for time of war, as soon as afar to Frisian and to Frank the king’s fall is revealed. Bitter was the feud decreed against the Hugas (Franks), when Hygelac came sailing with his raiding fleet to Frisian land. There the Hetware in battle assailed him, and valiantly with overwhelming strength achieved that the warrior should lay him down: he fell amid the host, not one fair thing did that lord to his good men give. From us hath been ever since the favour of the Merovingian lord withheld.

(“Beowulf”, translated and with a commentary by J.R.R Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien, Harper Collins, 2014, lines 2446 – 2555, p 98)

Now in terms of being a source for the political history (in the traditional sense) of Scandinavia and the North Sea in the age of the barbarian great migrations, Beowulf is highly suspect. While most scholars would agree that it is at least partially based on authentic folk memories and oral histories of what was going on in Northern Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries, collective memory, like individual memory, can be very unreliable, with various things getting distorted, omitted or invented over time – anyone who has done family history research will likely be aware of this. But in the case of Hygelac’s disastrous proto-Viking raid on Frisia/ Frankish Gaul, we do have an independent primary source to verify it. Let’s turn to someone who is very much a friend of this blog, none other than Gregory of Tours:

The next thing which happened was that the Danes sent a fleet under their King Chlochilaich and invaded Gaul from the sea. They came ashore, laid waste to one of the regions ruled by Theuderic and captured some of the inhabitants. They loaded their ships with what they had stolen or seized, and then they set sail for home. Their king remained on the shore, waiting until the boats had gained the open sea, when he planned to go on board. When Theuderic heard that his land had been invaded by foreigners, he sent his son Theudebert to those parts with a powerful army and all the necessary equipment. The Danish king was killed, the enemy fleet was beaten in a naval battle and all the booty was brought back on shore once more.

(“The History of the Franks” by Gregory of Tours, edited and translated by Lewis Thorpe, Penguin Classics, 1974, III.3 pp 165 – 166)

Chlochilaich sounds like a very mangled rendering of Hygelac, and he’s mentioned as a king of the Danes, not the Geats. But otherwise, its exactly what is described in Wiglaf’s funeral oration for Beowulf. Since we know, from the events that come immediately before and after this passage in Gregory of Tours’ histories, that Hygelac’s raid must have taken place c.521, that means that the poem is set in the first third of the sixth century. Beowulf is therefore meant to be a contemporary of Boethius, St Benedict of Nursia, Clovis, Justinian and Theodora and, if he existed, King Arthur.

And just as this incident didn’t go forgotten in Anglo-Saxon England, the Franks remembered it as well. The Book of the History of the Franks of 727 describes it almost identically to Gregory of Tours, who was the source its anonymous author used, but unlike in Gregory’s account, Hygelac is rendered Cothelac and he’s referred to as a rex Gotorum – literally, king of the Goths. And of course, we can rely on Adhemar of Chabannes, writing in the early eleventh century, to remember it – he remembered almost every significant episode in Frankish history:

(Original Latin) In illo tempore Dani cum rege suo, nomine Cothelaico, cum navali hoste per altum mare Gallias petunt, devastantes et captivantes omnia, et, plenis navibus de captivis, altum mare intrant, rege eorum ad litus maris residante. Quod cum Theodorico nunciatum fuisset, Theodebertum filium suum cum magnum exercitu in illis partibus direxit. Qui, consecutus eos, pugnavit cum eis cede magna atque prostravit, regem eorum interfecit, predam tulit et in terram suam restituit.

(“Chronique” by Adhemar of Chabannes, edited by Jules Chavanon, 1897, p 23)

(My translation): At that time, the Danes with their king, called Hygelac, with a host of ships made for Gaul through the North Sea, devastating everything and taking everyone captive, and, with ships full of captives, entered the North Sea, with their king residing by the shore. When that was announced to Theuderic, he ordered his son Theudebert to go to those parts with a large army. Theudebert, having pursued the Danes, fought with them and after great losses brought them to heel, killed their king, carried away the plunder and restored it to his land.

Notably, Adhemar, like Gregory before him, refers to Hygelac as a king of the Danes, rather than a king of the Goths like the “Book of the History of the Franks”, thus indicating he consulted Gregory’s work. This goes against Jules Chavanon’s claim that, in the first fifty-one chapters of his Chronicle, Adhemar just copied the “Book of the History of the Franks” almost verbatim and inserted a few additions. He was much too good a historian for that!

Even in the late middle ages, the defeat of Hygelac's raid was still remembered. Here it is depicted in the Tours manuscript of the Grand Chroniques de France, illustrated between 1455 and 1460 by the great French Renaissance painter Jean Fouquet. 

Now the account of Hygelac’s raid, specifically the mentioning of the Merovingians, has a bearing on an important scholarly debate. When was Beowulf composed? Since its author, if its ever appropriate to attribute a traditional epic to the work of a single author (Classicists will recognise this problem for the Iliad and the Odyssey), is anonymous, we can’t date it according to when they lived. Old English vernacular literature begins to appear in the final third of the seventh century, when the poet Caedmon wrote down his Hymn of Creation under the patronage Abbess Hilda of Whitby (d.684). But Beowulf survives in only one manuscript dating from either the last quarter of the tenth century or the first quarter of the eleventh century. Thus, as a notorious conference of academic Anglo-Saxonists in 1981 known as the “Scandal in Toronto” hammered home, scholars have a whole range of different estimates for the date of the composition of Beowulf, with c.685 at one end and c.1000 at the other.

The first folio of Beowulf in the Southwick Codex (c.1000), the one manuscript in which the poem survives.

Tom Shippey, a respected scholar of Old English literature and the leading academic expert on J.R.R Tolkien, is in the very early date (c.685 – 750) for Beowulf camp. In 2007, reviving an argument made all the way back in 1849, he suggested that that the mentioning of the Merovingians in Wiglaf’s speech indicates that Beowulf couldn’t have been written any later than 750. His reasoning for this is that, after Pippin the Short deposed the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, in 751, the new dynasty, the Carolingians, gave their predecessors damnatio memoriae treatment – like the ancient Roman emperors for whom that term was originally applied, they were vanished from the official histories.

Now Shippey’s argument was thoroughly criticised in a follow-up article that year by Walter Goffart. Goffart argued that the Carolingians did not give the previous dynasty damnatio memoriae treatment, and copies of the “Book of the History of the Franks” were present in Anglo-Saxon England. Goffart himself believes, for his own reasons, that Beowulf could not have been written any earlier than 923. Now, with regard to the whole damnatio memoriae thing I’m on Goffart’s side. While Carolingian historians, like the anonymous author of the Early Annals of Metz or Einhard in The Life of Charlemagne, did their best to portray the last Merovingian kings as lazy, degenerate and foolish, whose loss of real power to their mayors of the palace followed their eventual deposition was inevitable, they didn’t try to erase them from history at all. And in the 860s, Archbishop Wulfaldus of Bourges used Merovingian charters issued in the names of kings Childebert and Chilperic in a court case against Count Eccehard of Macon over ownership of the manor of Perrecy. Would King Charles the Bald’s judges have led that fly if it was no longer politically correct to speak of the Merovingians anymore? And, to state the obvious, England, while undoubtedly part of the wider Carolingian world, was never ruled by the Carolingians. So Shippey’s argument fails. But that doesn’t mean I agree with Goffart’s proposals for the dating of Beowulf either. And as someone with next to no knowledge of Old English philology, I can’t really take a position on the debate. But scholarly opinion, following the publication of Leonard Niedorf’s seminal The Dating of Beowulf: A Reconsideration (2014), is starting to gravitate towards the earliest date range.

 

Tolkien and the Carolingians

Since with the discussion of Beowulf we’ve ventured in the scholarly territory where J.R.R Tolkien was undisputed master (at least within the confines of Oxford) back in the day, where are the Carolingians to be found in Middle Earth? The northern early Middle Ages are there in abundance – the languages and place names of Middle Earth are modelled on Old English, Old Norse and Old Welsh, and many of the races that populate it are taken straight from Norse mythology (even the orcs, Tolkien’s trademark creation, get their name from an Old English word meaning hobgoblin or demon). Indeed, the Lord of the Rings is very consciously written to be like an Anglo-Saxon epic, and in many ways deviates from the literary conventions of the modern novel – fans like myself appreciate this, but other readers find it frustrating that more weight is given to lengthy descriptions of the exterior world over interior drama. But there doesn’t seem to be any place for the Carolingians in Tolkien’s majestic creation.

Or is there indeed? Concerning the hobbits (Tolkien’s other trademark creation and the only race that doesn’t have their provenance in Germanic folklore), some of them do have Frankish names – Pippin, Meriadoc, Fredegar, Adelard, Drogo, Dudo, Odo, Wilibald etc. But this is most likely intended for purely ironic effect. The Hobbits are famously idle, peaceable folks who just want eat and be left alone, while the Franks are famously vigorous, warlike and expansionist – can you imagine someone saying, to paraphrase a Byzantine proverb given by Einhard in The Life of Charlemagne, “have a hobbit as your friend, not as your neighbour”?

But there’s more. At the time Frodo, Sam, Pippin and Merry leave the Shire, the kingdom of Gondor is ruled by stewards, as it has been for 969 years since their branch of the royal house of Elendil died out – Aragorn is from the northern (Arnor) branch. The evolution of the office of the steward sounds remarkably identical to that of the mayors of the palace in the Merovingian realm. They started off as simple palace officials, responsible for managing the king’s household and doing the business of government during the king’s absence/ a royal minority. But gradually they assumed more and more de facto control of the executive, were able to make their office hereditary (in the Merovingian realm by the Pippinids/ Carolingians, in Gondor by the House of Hurin) and then after the royal line apparently terminated, ruled without a king – compare the Carolingians’ puny four years to the House of Hurin’s 969. But its here the comparison ends. After Charles Martel’s death in 741, the Carolingians found the last surviving Merovingian, Childeric III (what relation he was to his predecessor, Theuderic IV, we’ll never actually know) and made him king before deposing him in 751 due to his apparent uselessness. Meanwhile, the Stewards of Gondor soldier on until the one true king, Aragorn finally turns up. And in The Return of the King, Gandalf tells Pippin that Boromir once asked his father, Denethor, how long it would be until the stewards could make themselves kings. The penultimate steward of Gondor then replied “a few years, maybe, in other places of less royalty … in Gondor, ten thousand years would not suffice.” Perhaps Tolkien, who famously had a profound dislike of anything French, intended that as a bitchslap to the Carolingians and the Franks/ French for being less patient with their kings than the Gondorians.

 

"Francia has no king. Francia needs no king." So might Charles Martel have said in 740. But his son, Pippin the Short, evidently disagreed.

Did Charlemagne have a beard?

Certainly, its been artistic convention since the late middle ages to portray him with one. Albrecht Durer’s very famous 1512 portrait of the king of the Franks/ emperor in the west portrays him with a beard that wouldn’t look out of place on one of Tolkien’s wizards, and that’s kind of set the gold standard for artistic portrayals of Charlemagne since. But is it actually true to the historical record?

Definitely bearded here. The coronation of Charlemagne in 800 from the Saint Denis Manuscript of the Grand Chroniques de France (c.1325 - 1350)

The very famous Charlemagne reliquary bust (1349) at Aachen, photographed by me. Will do a post about this. There's more than first meets the eye.

The Frankish emperor depicted here in an French book of hours from the early fifteenth century, British Library MS Harley 2952 folio 62v

Panel painting of Charlemagne from the Aachen cathedral treasury dating to 1470, photographed by me. In the late middle ages, they had to invent coats of arms for all the historical figures who lived before heraldry came into being in the twelfth century. So they gave Charlemagne a coat of arms that was half the German eagle, half the French fleur de lys to reflect his status as a forefather to both the French and the Germans.

Durer's portrait of Charlemagne - absolutely majestic, but anachronistic on so many levels.

We have a famous physical description of Charlemagne from Einhard:

His body was large and strong. He was tall, but not unduly so, since his height was six times the length of his own foot. The top of his head was round, his eyes were large and lively, his nose was a little larger than average, he had fine white hair and a cheerful and attractive face. So, standing or sitting his presence was greatly increased in authority and dignity. His neck seemed short and thick and his stomach seemed to project, but the symmetry of the other parts hid those flaws. His pace was firm and the whole bearing of his body powerful. Indeed, his voice was clear but, given his size, not as strong as might have been expected. His health was good until four years before he died, when he suffered from constant fevers. Towards the end he would limp on one foot. Even then, he trusted his own judgement more than the advice of his doctors, whom he almost hated, since they urged him to stop eating roast meat, which he liked, and to start eating boiled meats.

(“Two Lives of Charlemagne” by Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, translated with an introduction and notes by David Ganz, Penguin Classics, 2008, p 34)

Now, as I remember well from doing “The Transformation of the Ancient World, 370 – 900” with Conrad Leyser in my first year at Oxford, this is a classic extract that tutors in early medieval history give their students to teach them source criticism. You see, while Einhard is obviously a close friend of Charlemagne who knew him well, he has very consciously modelled his biography of Charlemagne on Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars, and at various points in this passage he directly quotes the ancient Roman author. Thus, you do have to ask: how much of this is the real Charlemagne, and how much of this is Einhard trying to present him as a deified Roman emperor? However, on closer examination you realise that he’s quoting Suetonius’ biographies of half a dozen different emperors, which suggests that Einhard is not attempting a comparison between Charlemagne and, say, Augustus, and that actually he is talking about the real Charlemagne and has simply lifted the quotes from Suetonius that fit Charlemagne’s description, so he can be true to fact whilst also showing off his Classical learning. But, more to the point, there is no mention of a beard here!

For contemporary written descriptions of the emperor’s physical appearance, that is all we have got. But we do have three artistic depictions from the time. The first are coins minted with Charlemagne’s image after his coronation as emperor in 800. The second is a tenth century copy of a ninth century manuscript illumination that depicts Charlemagne with one of his sons, Pippin of Italy, and a scribe. The third is an equestrian statue, which I saw in the Louvre when I visited it in May this year, dating between 800 and 875 that may be of Charlemagne or his grandson, Charles the Bald. There is a common pattern between all of them – Charlemagne is clean-shaven with short hair and a moustache. If we combine these with Einhard’s account, the overwhelming likelihood is that Charlemagne did not have a beard.

And indeed, if we look at other surviving artistic depictions of Carolingian rulers from the ninth century, we’ll see the same pattern yet again – they’re all clean-shaven with short hair and moustaches. What is the reason for this?

Paul Edward Dutton, a North America-based Carolingianist scholar, has an interesting theory for this. He argues that the Carolingians groomed themselves in such a matter in order to present themselves as a clean break from the previous dynasty, the Merovingians, who famously sported luxurious long hair and beards. Indeed, the Merovingians would be known to posterity as “the long-haired kings.” The whole long hair and beards vs short hair and moustaches may well therefore have been part of the Carolingians’ propaganda drive to present themselves as vigorous and morally upstanding in contrast to their lazy and degenerate predecessors. But that leaves another question unanswered – why did artists from the later Middle Ages onwards feel the need to depict Charlemagne with a beard? I cannot even begin to speculate about that.

At least by the late nineteenth century they got it right! The mosaics from the upper camera of Aachen cathedral depict Charlemagne with short hair and a moustache - clearly the prosperous bourgeoisie of Wilhelmine Germany who funded this had read their Einhard. Photograph by yours truly.

Charles Martel and the battle of Tours: a turning point in world history (part 4)? Legacy and conclusions

So what really was the significance of the battle of Tours in 732? Did it really make a difference to European and world history? Such is a question for the final part of our series to tackle. Firstly, lets start with what medieval people themselves thought of it.

Medieval views on the battle of Tours

Contemporaries far and wide immediately picked up on what was going on. The Venerable Bede (672 - 735), the most internationally renowned theologian medieval England ever produced and, some would argue, its greatest historian, certainly did. In Chapter 23 of Book IV of his Ecclesiastical History, when he was describing the the state of the Anglo-Saxon Church at the time he was writing, he gave a short, journalistic notice:

(Original Latin) Quo tempore gravissima Sarracenorum lues Gallias misera clade vastabat, et ipsi non multo post in eadem provincia dignas suae perfidiae poenas luebant.

(English translation) At what time the Saracens, like a very sore plague, wasted Gaul with pitiful destruction, and themselves not long after were justly punished in the same country for their unbelief. 

Source: Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, edited and translated by J.E King, Harvard University Press (1930)

A portrait of the Venerable Bede at work, from a twelfth century copy of his Life of Saint Cuthbert (British Library, Yates Thompson MS 26, f. 2r)

Of course, in the Carolingian Empire (751 - 888), ruled over by Charles' descendants, the deeds of the founder of the ruling dynasty did not go forgotten and Tours was no exception. At the same time, it wasn't given the importance which, as we'll see, it acquired later. The Continuation of Fredegar (751) sees it as a great victory, won with divine backing. But at the same time it treats it merely as one of many such victories Charles won in that decade such as the sieges of Avignon and Nimes, also fought against the Muslims, in 737. The Annals of Lorsch (835) simply say that in 732  "Charles [Martel] fought against Saracens on a Sunday at Poitiers." Einhard, writing in the Life of Charlemagne (817), is much more celebratory. Following the model of biography given by the Roman historian, Suetonius, Einhard gives an account of Charlemagne's ancestors in the second chapter, but unlike the anonymous nun who wrote The Earlier Annals of Metz (806), Einhard doesn't say anything about Charlemagne's Pippinid/ Arnulfing ancestors, save for a passing acknowledgement that Pippin of Herstal was Charlemagne's great-grandfather and had held the office of mayor of the palace. Instead, he only really goes back as far as Charlemagne's grandfather, our friend Charles Martel, and says of him:

Charles overthrew the tyrants who claimed rule over all of Francia and so completely defeated the Saracens, who were attempting to occupy Gaul, in two great battles, one at Aquitaine at the city of Poitiers and the second at Narbonne on the River Berre, that he forced them to return to Spain.

Source: Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two Lives of Charlemagne, edited and translated by David Ganz, Penguin Classics (2008)

Einhard is alone among Carolingian authors in giving the battle of Tours special significance, and is probably the first historian to have claimed that the Muslims were trying to conquer Gaul rather than just raid it. At the same time, he mentions it alongside the battle of the River Berre, which happened five years later, and so doesn't make it completely decisive either.

After the Carolingian Empire had broken up and the Carolingian royal line had ended in 987, Charles Martel's achievements were still well-remembered. Of course, Adhemar of Chabannes, a native of Aquitaine no less, had something to say about the battle of Tours:

(Original Latin): Tunc Eudo dux cernens se superatum atque derisum, gentem perfidam Saracenorum ad auxilium convocat contra gentem Francorum. Qui egressus de Hispania cum rege suo, nomine Abderrama, Garonnam transeunt, Burdegalam urbem perveniunt, ecclesias concremant, populos consumunt gladio, et usque Pictavis profecti, basilicam Sancti Hilarii igne concremant et ad domum Sancti Martini Turonis evertendam properant. Contra quos Karolus princeps audaciter aciem ministravit et, super eos irruens no longe a Pictavis tentoria eorum subvertit, et cunctum exercitum eorum sternens in ore gladii, regem eorum Abderrama peremit et victor Franciam rediit et ex tunc omnes ceperunt eum cognominare Martellum, quia sicut martellus cunctum ferrum subigit, sic ipse Deo adjuvante, cuncta prelia frangebat. 

(My own translation): Afterwards, Duke Odo, noticing that he had been overcome and humiliated, enlisted the help of the perfidious race of Saracens against the Frankish people. They left Spain with their king, by the name of Abd ar-Rahman, crossed the Garonne, came through the city of Bordeaux, burned the churches to the ground, exterminated the populace, and proceeded to Poitiers, burned the basilica of Saint Hillary to the ground, and hastened to the home of Saint Martin of Tours, intent on destroying it. Against them, Prince Charles boldly commanded his battle-lines, and he rushed over them not far from Poitiers, overturned their camp, slaughtered their entire army, killed their king, Abd ar-Rahman, and returned victorious to Francia. And from that time on, everyone knew him by the nickname of Martel, because like how the hammer drives under all iron, this man, with God’s help, broke the spirits of all his adversaries.

Adhemar, unlike Einhard, makes no claim that this victory saved Gaul from Muslim conquest. As he saw it, the Muslims were simply on a massive plundering raid up to the Loire. Yet he sees that Battle of Tours as a key moment in cementing Charles' reputation and political image, claiming that this was when his nickname of Martel (literally "the hammer", from the Latin martellus) originated.

As we have seen, the battle of Tours and Charles Martel found their place in the Great Chronicles of France, official histories commissioned by King Louis IX of France (r.1227 - 1270), who wanted to preserve the glorious history of the Franks from their ancient Trojan origins down to the present day - the same impulse that had guided Adhemar of Chabannes more than 200 years earlier. These were very widely disseminated indeed, and richly illustrated. 

I must confess that I completely lack expertise on the Muslim point of view. According to Gustave von Grunebaum in Classical Islam: A History, 600 - 1258 AD, "This setback may have been important from the European point of view, but for Muslims at the time, who saw no master plan imperiled thereby, it had no further significance." Some Arab historians writing later in the Middle Ages, like the Moroccan chronicler Ibn Idhari al-Marrakushi in his The Amazing Story of the Maghreb (1312), referred to the battle of Tours as "the path of the martyrs." But he also applied that epithet to Duke Odo's victory over the Muslims at Toulouse on 9 June 721. And broadly speaking, it seems like any defeat at the hands of an army of Christian infidels was seen as constituting a form of martyrdom for those Muslim soldiers who went down fighting. Basically, it seems to me, from a cursory glance, that medieval Muslims remembered Tours but didn't see anything special about it.

Modern views of the battle of Tours 

Just like the medieval historiography of the battle of Tours begins with Bede, the modern historiography of it begins with that other colossal figure that is sometimes called England's greatest historian - Edward Gibbon (1737 - 1794). In Volume 9, Chapter 52 of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788), he wrote in his trademark verbal wit and bespoke, inimitable prose:

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 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. 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 ... 

he nations of Asia, Africa, and Europe advanced with equal ardour to an encounter which would change the history of the whole world. In the six first days of desultory combat, the horsemen and archers of the East maintained their advantage; but in the closer onset of the seventh day the Orientals were oppressed by the strength and stature of the Germans, who, with stout hearts and iron hands, asserted the civil and religious freedom of their posterity. The epithet of Martel, the Hammer, which has been added to the name of Charles, is expressive of his weighty and irresistible strokes: the valour of Eudes was excited by resentment and emulation; and their companions, in the eye of history, are the true Peers and Paladins of French chivalry. After a bloody field, in which Abderame was slain, the Saracens, in the close of the evening, retired to their camp. In the disorder and despair of the night, the various tribes of Yemen and Damascus, of Africa and Spain, were provoked to turn their arms against each other: the remains of their host was suddenly dissolved, and each emir consulted his safety by an hasty and separate retreat. At the dawn of day, the stillness of an hostile camp was suspected by the victorious Christians: on the report of their spies, they ventured to explore the riches of the vacant tents; but, if we except some celebrated relics, a small portion of the spoil was restored to the innocent and lawful owners. The joyful tidings were soon diffused over the Catholic world, and the monks of Italy could affirm and believe that three hundred and fifty, or three hundred and seventy-five, thousand of the Mahometans had been crushed by the hammer of Charles; while no more than fifteen hundred Christians were slain in the field of Tours. But this incredible tale is sufficiently disproved by the caution of the French general, who apprehended the snares and accidents of a pursuit, and dismissed his German allies to their native forests. The inactivity of a conqueror betrays the loss of strength and blood, and the most cruel execution is inflicted, not in the ranks of battle, but on the backs of a flying enemy. Yet the victory of the Franks was complete and final; Aquitain was recovered by the arms of Eudes; the Arabs never resumed the conquest of Gaul, and they were soon driven beyond the Pyrenees by Charles Martel and his valiant race. It might have been expected that the saviour of Christendom would have been canonised, or at least applauded, by the gratitude of the clergy, who are indebted to his sword for their present existence. But in the public distress the mayor of the palace had been compelled to apply the riches, or at least the revenues, of the bishops and abbots to the relief of the state and the reward of the soldiers. His merits were forgotten, his sacrilege alone was remembered, and, in an epistle to a Carlovingian prince, a Gallic synod presumes to declare that his ancestor was damned; that on the opening of his tomb the spectators were affrighted by a smell of fire and the aspect of a horrid dragon; and that a saint of the times was indulged with a pleasant vision of the soul and body of Charles Martel burning, to all eternity, in the abyss of hell.

Gibbon thus elevates Charles Martel and the battle of Tours to a place of pivotal importance in European and World history. As he saw it, this was the epic last stand of "the Christian republic of nations" against the otherwise unstoppable tidal wave of Islamic armies. Had Charles Martel lost, all of Europe would have become Muslim. Gibbon also touches on another, darker side of Charles Martel's reputation, as a despoiler of church property. All throughout the Decline and Fall, Gibbon loves to indulge in nothing more than a good bit of verbal wit and irony. The University of Oxford is one his targets here, with that throwaway line imagining the Quran being taught there. Gibbon spent one highly desultory year in Oxford in the 1750s, where he loathed its ultra-narrow, conservative curriculum (only Classics and Theology were on offer to undergraduates) and the parochialism and privilege that its academics wallowed in - "port and prejudice" was his memorable turn of phrase. Desperately in need of intellectual stimulation, Gibbon came across the writings of Bossuet, Louis XIV's confessor and the leading proponent of Gallican theology, which resulted in him converting to Catholicism in secret. This in turn led to Gibbon being expelled from Oxford, and his father sending him on a corrective sojourn to Lausanne on Lake Geneva, the Mecca of Reformed Protestantism, though this instead led to him coming under the influence of secularist thinkers like Jean Jacques-Rousseau and David Hume. And the main target of his irony here is the very religion he flirted with as an impressionable youngster but soon saw the good sense to reject. Charles Martel saved the Catholic Church, yet they expressed their gratitude by deeming him worthy of eternal damnation just because he took landed estates away from the bishops and abbots to support and remunerate the very soldiers that had saved Christendom from the Muslims. Papistical clerics being petty and self-interested ... what a surprise! All of this would have been honey to the ears of Gibbon's readership in Georgian Britain - only a few years earlier in 1780, the anti-Catholic Gordon riots had broken out in London. At the same time, Gibbon had said plenty of things that offended Anglicans too, especially his negative characterisation of the early Christian communities and dislike of laws that favoured one religion over others (only Anglicans could stand for Parliament until 1828). And he'd called Europe's leading proponent of secularism, Voltaire, a "bigot." Like his friend and mentor David Hume, whose iconoclastic A History of England from Julius Caesar to the Glorious Revolution (1761) had rustled many feathers, he claimed to be an "impartial" historian. And, perhaps most notably, Gibbon was one of the first historians of the battle of Tours who had any interest in Islam as a belief system in its own right. Throughout the Middle Ages, indeed ever since Islam first appeared on the scene in the seventh century, and for most of the early modern period as well, Islam was mostly viewed either as a Christian heresy (like in Dante's Divine Comedy) or a form of paganism (like in the Song of Roland). Indeed, terms like Islam or Muslim don't seem to turn up in Latin, Greek and European vernacular sources before about 1800. Instead, Muslims are either referred to as followers of Muhammad or by terms with tribal/ ethnic overtones like "Saracens", "Ishmaelites" or "Hagarenes", and their religion is not given a noun of its own. Gibbon himself denoted the Muslims by the collective noun of "Mahometans", and his contemporary Thomas Paine in Common Sense (1776) referred to Islam as "the Turkish Church." "Islam" and "Muslim" would not enter mainstream use in Western Europe until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and they did so slowly. Yet the period between the relief of the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683 and Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 did see the beginnings of scholarly interest in Islam beyond finding material for interfaith polemics - the impetus behind Abbot Peter the Venerable of Cluny commissioning the first Latin translation of the Quran in the twelfth century. The "Orient" was becoming increasingly an area of intellectual curiosity in its own right, and Gibbon as a teenager living in Kingston-upon-Thames (he went to school on the other side of the road from where I went to school) omnivorously devoured all the secondary works on the histories of the Arabs, Persians, Turks and Mongols which were then available to him in English and French. And his chapters on Muhammad and the rise of Islam is one of the most celebrated bits of the six volumes of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and its possible that had it not been for Gibbon including him, the Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle would not have admitted Mohammad to the pantheon of history's "great men" - Carlyle's glowing account of Muhammad's life formed the basis of western views of the prophet of Islam for about a century to come. I think its fair to say that Gibbon's account of the battle of Tours marked a significant turning point in its historiography - rather than being simply about Frankish military prowess repulsing infidel invaders from Christian Gaul, it became a story of conflict between belief systems and civilisations on which everything yet to come in history hung in the balance. 

Portrait of Edward Gibbon by Henry Walton (1773), in the National Portrait Gallery in London, NPG 1443

That the battle of Tours was an event of world-changing significance was the orthodox view throughout the nineteenth century. The early Victorian historian Sir Edward Shephard Creasy (1812 - 1878) included the battle of Tours in 732 in his The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: from Marathon to Waterloo (1851). Among the other decisive battles featured, apart from the ones in the title, were the defeat of the Romans at Teutoberg Forest (9 AD), the Battle of Hastings (1066), Joan of Arc's victory at Orleans (1429), the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588), Tsar Peter the Great's triumph over the Swedes at Poltava in Ukraine (1709), the defeat of the British at Saratoga (1777) during the US War of Independence, and the defeat of the Prussians and Austrians by the First French Republic at Valmy (1792) at the start of the French Revolutionary Wars. Its highly significant that, in a book so completely biased towards battles from Greek, Roman and English history, Tours, Poltava and Valmy were nonetheless admitted to the Pantheon. The title inspired a line from the Major General's Song in Gilbert and Sullivan's famous comic opera The Pirates of Penzance (1879):

I am the very model of a modern Major-General
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights
Historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical

Thomas Arnold (1795 - 1842), headmaster of Rugby School,  architect of Public School reform in Victorian England and an early proponent of "muscular Christianity", believed that the importance of the battle of Tours was even greater than that of the Teutoberg Forest in creating the modern world, calling it "one of those signal deliverances that have for centuries affected the happiness of mankind." In France, Belgium and Germany, the nations that had once been the heartlands of the Carolingian Empire, the celebration of the battle of Tours in 732 as a world-changing event was even more rapturous. Arnold's contemporary, Leopold Von Ranke (1795 - 1886), the founding father of the modern academic discipline of history (until the 1820s, no university awarded degrees in history, and historical skills and methods were not taught to students in any formal or systematic way - Ranke himself was a philologist by training), declared that the battle of Tours was a turning point that ushered in one of the most important eras in the history of the world.  The great Belgian medievalist, Godefroid Kurth (1847 - 1916), opined "the battle of Tours must remain one of the greatest events in the history of the world as upon its issue depended whether Christian civilisation should continue or Islam prevail throughout Europe." As the German military historian Hans Delbruck (1848 - 1929) saw it, there simply was "no more important battle in the history of the world."

Such viewpoints of the battle of Tours as a world-altering event carried on into the next century, though not all of them were as celebratory. Adolf Hitler, if his close friend and armaments minister Albert Speer is to be believed, saw Charles Martel's victory at Tours as something to be regretted. In his view, the Muslim conquest of Europe would have been a good thing, since he believed Islam was better suited to the Germanic temperament than Christianity and would have made the Germans more warlike and uncompromising. 

While historical knowledge does progress cumulatively, historiographical fashions really do go backwards and forwards. Since the end of WW2 and European decolonisation, the pendulum swung the other way, and it became very unfashionable to see clashes of civilisations, battles and great men as the forces from which the course of history unfolds. More recent assessments of the battle of Tours have moved in line with that. Most historians now would argue that when the Muslims rapidly conquered the Visigothic kingdom in the 710s, they were already reaching the logistical and administrative limits of feasible expansion. That is to say that getting new manpower and supplies to frontier was already becoming too time-consuming and costly for the Arab army to have permanent bases that far north. It is also to suggest that the distances and the geography involved would have meant that Arab military forces in Gaul would have largely been beyond the effective control of the Ummayad high command even in Gibraltar or Kairouan, let alone in Damascus. After all, as we saw in part three, northeastern Spain was under the control of essentially unpoliceable Berber and Bedouin marcher lords, to the point that some even allied with external powers against the central government as Munuzza did with Duke Odo against the Umayyad governor Abdul ar-Rahman. In this light, modern historians see much less as being at stake. They would see Abdul ar-Rahman's military aims as being nothing more than to plunder all the old Gallo-Roman cities and monasteries up to the Loire Valley. This would be done in order to gain enough booty to pay the soldiers (outside Andalusia, the Roman tax system that the Visigoths had kept going for so long was no longer operational) and keep the tribal leaders placated so they wouldn't turn against the centre or each other - all part of the ghanima (plunder economy). The Umayyad regime in Spain and the Western Maghreb of course did implode following the failure of both the Tours campaign in 732 and the Provence campaign of 736 - 737 with the Berber revolt of 740 - 743. The Western Maghreb (Morocco and most of Algeria) was permanently lost to the Arab Caliphate after the Revolt, and Spain was only recovered with Syrian troops being dispatched there in 743. To modern historians this all screams like the Arab Caliphs had bitten off more than they could chew. 

Representative of the prevailing scholarly opinion now is Philip Khuri Hitti's remark in a History of Syria including Lebanon and Palestine (2002), remarks, "in reality, nothing was decided on the battlefield of Tours. The Moslem wave, already a thousand miles from its starting point in Gibraltar – to say nothing about its base in al-Qayrawan – had already spent itself and reached a natural limit." 

Likewise, and also signifying the general shift in historiography that have taken place since the Victorians and accelerated since the end of the second world war, Geoffrey Parker (one of the most eminent military historians currently alive) remarks in the editor's note to The Readers Companion to Military History (2001) "The study of military history has undergone drastic changes in recent years. The old drums-and-bugles approach will no longer do. Factors such as economics, logistics, intelligence, and technology receive the attention once accorded solely to battles and campaigns and casualty counts. Words like 'strategy' and 'operations' have acquired meanings that might not have been recognizable a generation ago. Changing attitudes and new research have altered our views of what once seemed to matter most. For example, several of the battles that Edward Shepherd Creasy listed in his famous 1851 book The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World rate hardly a mention here, and the confrontation between Muslims and Christians at Poitiers-Tours in 732, once considered a watershed event, has been downgraded to a raid in force."

There have however been some dissenting voices in the academy. Norman Cantor, a historian who late in his career acquired something of a reputation as an enfant terrible, wrote in his 1993 revised edition of The Civilisation of the Middle Ages that "it may be be true that the Arabs had not fully extended their resources and they would not have conquered France, but their defeat (at Tours) in 732 put a stop to their advance to the north." Victor Davis Hanson, another historian who is definitely not afraid to be controversial among his more politically correct (he did after all go on to write a book in 2019 called The Case for Trump), argues similar things to similar effect in Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (1999).

Outside the world of academic historical scholarship, the picture is, perhaps unsurprisingly, very different. In the popular imagination, battles and great men (great women as well, nowadays), are still the great movers and shakers of history. And when we look to the realm of politics, such a way of viewing history has been exploited for some downright racist and hawkish purposes. A French far-right, anti-Arab terrorist group in the 1970s and 1980s called itself "Club Charles Martel", and orchestrated a number of bombings and kidnappings against the Algerian government/ Algerian citizens in France between 1973 and 1987 as revenge for the country getting its independence in 1962 - fortunately, only one of these terror attacks (the very first) led to any fatalities. More recently, an American white nationalist organisation has called itself the Charles Martel Group, and set up its own journal, The Occidental Quarterly, edited by Kevin B MacDonald, a washed-up professor of evolutionary psychology at California State University turned anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, which has published articles from various fringe academics in the Anglosphere who hold scientific racist views i.e. Richard Lynn, a professor of psychology at Ulster University until his dismissal in 2018, who has argued that black people are less intelligent than white people and endorsed eugenics. Post-9/11, this way of viewing the significance of the battle of Tours as made its way into mainstream American neoconservative circles, where notions of a "clash of civilisations" (itself a term popularised by the neoconservative luminary Samuel P Huntingdon) and "the West and the rest" have never lost vigour. Rodney Stark, a respected sociologist of religion turned Catholic-convert and right-wing public intellectual, argues in the provocatively-named God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades (2005), that the Muslims did indeed attempt to conquer all of Europe in the eighth and ninth centuries, and that if it wasn't for Christian victories like at Tours in 732 this could have indeed succeeded. Stark then uses this as evidence to demonstrate that the Crusades were fundamentally a defensive war done to save Europe from further Muslim incursions by taking a pre-emptive strike at them in their heartlands - back-projecting the Bush Doctrine in other words (Stark was a supporter of the Iraq war). I'm not going to get into a discussion about the causes of the Crusades here, but it suffices to say that Stark's thesis is ahistorical nonsense on stilts, and is not taken seriously by actual trained, professional Crusades historians. Indeed, it is notable that, while eighth century writers did use the language of Old Testament Holy War to describe Charles Martel's victory, Charles Martel did not, unlike Emperor Heraclius or his own grandson, get reinvented as a spiritual father of the Crusading movement later on in the Middle Ages. And in all the surviving versions of Pope Urban II's speech at Clermont on 25 November 1095 (and they do contradict each other in a number of places), no mention of the Battle of Tours or indeed any Muslim aggression against Christians prior to the last 25 years is mentioned.

But enough with the historiographical survey. What do I think of the significance of the battle of Tours? Well, in my opinion, the only way to really approach this question is to do a counter-factual exercise.

What is counter-factual history when it is at home?

Counter-factual history is something that all historians do, if in most cases subconsciously. It involves positing the consequences of "what if" a certain event never happened or did so differently to how it actually did historically, or "what if" certain conditions necessary for an event or process to happen at a given place and time were/ were not in place. Indeed, it is essential to understanding two of the most important concepts in the historian's analytical toolkit - cause and effect. For example, if one were to say "the fall of the Roman Republic was caused by Julius Caesar crossing the river Rubicon in 49 BC", one is implicitly proposing the following counterfactual: that had Caesar not crossed the Rubicon, the republican constitution would have survived and Rome would not have transitioned to military dictatorship followed by autocratic hereditary monarchy. Now many an ancient historian would counter that implicit counter-factual by saying that in 50 BC the Republic was already heading towards its expiry date, and that if it wasn't going to be Caesar, or even his erstwhile ally soon to be arch-nemesis Pompey, then some other ambitious general was going to seize supreme and unlimited power in Rome for himself. Either that, or the Republic was going to implode from the mounting pressures of class-conflict, familial rivalries and political factionalism. Such a response in turn rests on counter-factual reasoning, in more ways than one - it would, of course, imply that some other event, further back in time, was the essential cause of the Republic's demise, or that had Roman government and society been configured differently from the word go it might not have fallen. Without counterfactuals, the history we write would not be able to proceed beyond the descriptive level - "this is how it was, this is what happened" etc. 

Its also been practiced since history writing began. Herodotus, the "father of history", provides a counter-factual for what would have happened had the Athenians not defeated the Persians at Salamis in 480 BC, but had instead decided to abandon Athens and migrate over to Sicily instead. His answer: the Persian fleet would have sailed unobstructed round the Peloponnese, and the rest of Greece would have quickly surrendered to King Xerxes. At the end of the first century BC, Livy considered whether, if Alexander the Great had lived for another twenty years, he would have invaded Italy and conquered Rome. His answer: the Romans would have beaten him with their superior manpower reserves of conscript soldiers (as opposed to the smaller, professional standing army of the Macedonians) and by allying with Carthage. More recently, in 1931, a collection of essays titled If It Had Happened Otherwise was published, which included a contribution by none other than Winston Churchill himself, imagining what had happened if Robert E Lee had won the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. His answer: the Confederacy secures its independence from the United States of America, but the British Empire becomes a broker between the two, leading to the three merging together into the "Association of English-speaking Peoples" which single-handedly prevents WW1 from breaking out.

At the same time, paradoxically, counterfactual history often carries with it a bit of bad rap in the academy. Too often it can easily be dismissed as a glorified parlour game or speculative fiction writing exercise. The fact there's a whole sci-fi subgenre called "alternate history" doesn't help in this respect - I became acquainted with this when I read "The Man in the High Castle" by Philip K Dick, which imagines a world in the 1960s where the Axis have won WW2, the Third Reich is locked in a cold war with the Japanese Empire and the former United States of America is divided into three zones. 

Indeed, a lot of counterfactual scenarios are far from neutral, scholarly exercises and can end up falling into one of three categories based on their political/ intellectual subtext. The first is Comfort History: "be glad things happened the way they did, because the world would be a whole lot the worse if they did not." Anything that involves speculating about what if the Axis won WW2 almost automatically falls into this category, but arguably so does Herodotus' counterfactual on Salamis and, most relevant to us, all those implicit counterfactuals from Edward Gibbon and his Victorian successors on the battle of Tours. One of the scenarios in If It Had Happened Otherwise (1931), by Ronald Knox, imagined that if the General Strike of 1926 had succeeded, the United Kingdom would have ended up under Bolshevik rule. The second is Wish Fulfilment: "if only things had gone differently, the world would be so much better today than this sorry state of affairs." This is incredibly common, to the point that Sir Richard J Evans, formerly Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, has argued in Altered Pasts (2014) that counterfactuals, when taken as a serious historical exercises, are almost invariably reactionary in their political subtext. It is notable that If It Had Happened Otherwise (1931), as well as featuring a contribution from one of the greatest British conservative statesmen of the twentieth century that undoubtedly fits into the "wish fulfilment" subcategory, also featured contributions from Hilaire Belloc and G.K Chesterton, England's two most celebrated/ reviled conservative Catholic public intellectuals of the early twentieth century. It was itself edited by J.C Squires, a fascist sympathiser who met with Benito Mussolini and Sir Oswald Moseley. Its also notable that many of the leading proponents of counterfactual history today are right-wingers, the likes of Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts or, from the generation preceding theirs, J.C.D Clark and John Charmley. J.C.D Clark, who was a real firebrand among historians of eighteenth century Britain back in 1980s, has indulged the counterfactual of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 not happening, which according to him would then mean that the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Great Reform Act of 1832 wouldn't have happened either. To Clark, a historian who once said at a conference "I am fundamentally opposed to the modern world", such a counterfactual scenario would have been perfect, leading to the preservation of the Ancien Regime with its three pillars of Divine Right Monarchy, Established Church and Aristocracy that he's so nostalgic for on both sides of the Atlantic. Niall Ferguson has likewise argued that the UK should have stayed neutral in August 1914 on the grounds that WW1 would have ended much quicker, millions of human lives would have been saved, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the rise of fascism, Hitler and the Holocaust would have all been pre-emptively avoided, the British Empire would have remained a global superpower into the twenty-first century, Europe would have come under German economic domination and something resembling the EU would have been created. Even more controversially, John Charmley has suggested that Churchill should have kept quiet in the late 1930s/ Halifax should have taken his place as PM in May 1940 and the UK should have made peace with Hitler, so that the Third Reich and the Soviet Union could have fought each other to a standstill before their regimes both imploded, the British Empire could have survived into the twenty-first century as a global superpower (again!) and the USA would have stayed isolationist and not achieved global hegemony. Meanwhile, left-liberal historians, like Evans himself, or Marxists, tend to be averse to counterfactual histories because they believe that historical events unfolded the way they did for good reason, and that they were beyond the control of a few powerful individuals formally making decisions - social groups and economic, technological, cultural and ideological forces, they'd argue, are the ones really in the driving seat. Then third type of counterfactual is Bizarre Fantasy. For example, Arnold J Toynbee, who wrote a monumental 12 volume history of the rise and fall of civilisations between 1934 and 1961 that no one reads today, imagined a longer-lived Alexander the Great not only conquering Carthage and Italy but also conquering China and India, his immediate successors conquering the Americas and the Hellenistic world experiencing an industrial revolution. Toynbee might have had a brilliant imagination, but the idea of Macedonian phalanxes travelling across the Middle East on steam trains really is a science fiction thought experiment, not a serious historical enquiry.

Yet despite all these pitfalls, I'm a lot less pessimistic than Evans is about counterfactuals. I actually think they're both unavoidable and actually quite enlightening - so long as you do them properly! Walter Scheidel in Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and The Road to Prosperity (2019), makes a brilliant case for counterfactuals, along with comparisons, actually being two of the most scientific approaches to history - when done properly, they're the closest we get to actually falsifying our own hypotheses. To avoid pointless speculation/ daydreaming fantasies, he sets up two ground rules. The first is the minimal rewrites rule. The course of historical events can be altered, but the basic facts about the personalities (their backgrounds, traits and aims) and the society in question  (government structures, economic system, cultural values, geographic and ecological conditions etc) cannot. For example, Scheidel argues that had the Ming Dynasty allowed the treasure fleet voyages of Admiral Zheng He to continue past 1433, then China almost certainly wouldn't have discovered the Americas and established a colonial empire before the Europeans got to the New World, because that would mean having to substantially alter all of those things. The second is the short term consequences rule. For example, when asking what would have happened had Catherine of Aragon produced a son/ Henry VIII's jousting accident at Greenwich Palace in 1536 been fatal/ Mary I managed to produce an heir and live longer, one should focus on what the immediate consequences of the English Reformation being aborted would have been for sixteenth century Europe, not what the world would look like in 2022 with a still-Catholic England. The former we can actually know from what was going on at the time. The latter on the other hand involves an infinite variety of second order counterfactuals that are equally plausible/ implausible. 

So, had Charles Martel lost at Tours, could the Arabs have conquered Gaul then?

Ok so lets imagine the following scenario. The Arabs win the battle of Tours. Lets also imagine that neither Charles Martel nor Duke Odo survive the battle. What happens next? What we can say with complete certainty is that the Arabs would have plundered the monastery of Saint Martin of Tours, an event that would likely have sent shockwaves across Francia and beyond and raised questions about why God was trying to punish the Christian faithful. Charles Martel's eldest son, Pippin the Short, was eighteen and so was more than capable of succeeding him as mayor of the palace. Charles' younger brother, Count Childebrand (the youngest son of Pippin of Herstal from Alpaida), would have probably stood by his nephew, though we can't be sure of it. Pippin the Short's half-brother, Grifo, from Charles Martel's second wife/ concubine Swanahild, was a toddler and therefore not going to present a credible challenge. And the Merovingian kings were, at this point, in no position to launch a constitutional coup against their Carolingian mayors of the palace. Even the most revisionist historians would agree that by the 730s, the Merovingian kings, as well as being excluded from any kind of political decision-making, had no powerbase, independent of the mayors of the palace, to speak of. They had no networks of aristocrats, churches or retinues of warriors under their control, and Einhard was probably right in claiming that they possessed a single, essentially stipendiary landed estate. The only trump card they had left was reverence for the bloodline, but all that did was prevent the Carolingians from pushing them aside altogether - due to various circumstances, that would have to wait until 751. It does not seem like there were any other aristocratic families left in Francia who were willing and able to challenge them for the position of mayor of the palace, as Ragemfred had done in 716. Overall, it seems unlikely that Francia would have collapsed into civil war if Charles Martel was slain at Tours in 732. At the same time, as a comparison with Visigothic Spain after the battle of Guadalete in 711 would remind us, its far from impossible that some members of the Frankish and Aquitanian elites would have sought rapprochement with the Muslims following a single crushing military defeat. After all, following King Roderic's death in 711, Visigothic resistance led by King Achila II continued in the central Iberian Plateau until 716, and after Achila's death King Ardo held out in Catalonia and Septimania (modern day Herault department, France) until 721. Yet what undermined these attempts to stall the Muslim conquest was that many Visigothic nobles were willing to make deals with the invaders, in which they kept their lands and offices in return for paying tribute to their new rulers. The Treaty of Orihuela in 713 between General Theodemir, the Visigothic governor of Murcia, and Abd al-Aziz, the son of the Umayyad governor of Africa, is an instructive example. Who's to say that such a thing was unconscionable to a Frankish count? 

We know nothing of the size of the Frankish army at Tours. Neither All estimates of the size of armies are from chroniclers writing long after the event, who almost certainly didn't have access to army lists or any other kind of official statistics. The size of early medieval armies is, at any rate, a super controversial subject that at the moment is in a kind of scholarly impasse. On the one hand, there are scholars who think they could be very large indeed, regularly in the tens of thousands and sometimes on an even greater level of magnitude than that. The leading proponents of this view are the late Karl Ferdinand Werner and more recently Bernard and David Bachrach (a father and son duo of early medieval military historians) and Charles R Bowlus. On the other hand, there are those who think that a field army larger than 5,000 was not economically, logistically or administratively viable for any early medieval western ruler, and that campaign armies were often half, a fifth or an even smaller proportion of that size. The leading proponents of this view include early twentieth century historians like Hans Delbruck, Charles Oman, Ferdinand Lot, Francois Louis Ganshof, more recently the late Peter Sawyer (who influentially argued in the 1960s that the Viking Great Heathen Army that conquered Northumbria, East Anglia and Mercia between 867 and 871 couldn't have been larger than 1,000 warriors), Nicholas Brooks and Timothy Reuter, and currently Guy Halsall. Delbruck, Oman, Lot and Ganshof's views on early medieval warfare generally are far too outdated - the fact they still merit a mention here is ultimately down to the fact that there have never, at any given time, been very many historians writing on early medieval warfare. And some have noticed a gap between historians of Insular early medieval (Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Viking) warfare, who tend to incline towards minimalist views on the size of early medieval armies, and historians of Continental early medieval warfare, who have been more inclined towards maximalist estimates. Reuter and Halsall, however, show that such a tendency is by no means universal. I'm not going to compare the merits of the arguments put forward by both sides of the debate here, nor do I feel qualified to.

And early medieval demography itself is highly contested. Until the ninth century polyptychs, surveys produced for royal and ecclesiastical estates located mostly in what is now northern and eastern France, we have no concrete data at even a local level for creating estimates for the population of Frankish Gaul as as a whole. We therefore can have only the foggiest idea not only of the size of the armies that fought, but also of how much they accounted for of the military manpower pools of the respective states. Put it another way, we really can't know how likely it was for the Frankish military to bounce back had they been defeated at Tours. 

There's also the question of aims. It does seem most likely that Abdul ar-Rahman was simply looking to raid Gaul, not conquer it. But then again, Tariq ibn Ziyad came to Spain in 711 to raid, not to conquer, yet ten years from his victory at Guadalete, the Visigothic kingdom had fallen under Muslim rule. Very often things can start small and become something bigger. No one could have known that a skirmish between French troops and British colonists (led by a young George Washington) in the Pennsylvania Back Country on 3 July 1754 (the battle of Fort Necessity) could have escalated into a genuinely global conflict involving all the major European powers - the Seven Years' War (1756 - 1763).  WW1, likewise, could have been a short-lived regional conflict like the First Balkan War (October 1912 - March 1913), had it not been for some decisions made by the respective leaders of the major European powers and their ministers between 28 July and 4 August 1914 - namely France and Russia choosing to go to war with the Central Powers to protect Serbia, and Germany choosing to send its armies through neutral Belgium to attack France, which brought the UK into it. History is full of contingencies, which is why, on the whole, it is not a very effective tool for predicting the future. Most historians in 1973, 1980 or even 1987 did not expect the Berlin Wall to come down, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia to break up or the United States of America to remain the pre-eminent world power into the twenty-first century, which was exactly why the British historian Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), an otherwise magisterial analysis of the fortunes of European imperialism in the sixteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, became famous for the wrong reasons. 

So while there's nothing to suggest that an Arab Conquest of Gaul would have been the predetermined outcome of the battle of Tours, but at the same time nothing to suggest it was completely implausible, lets imagine a scenario in which it did indeed come to pass. How would the Umayyads have securely established rule in Gaul and brought about its Arabisation/ Islamisation. If we think back to part 2 of this series, one of the key ingredients for this kind of thing to happen was a functioning tax system. When the Arabs conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Africa, they were able to simply take over the Roman imperial tax system, and the same held true in Iran with the Sassanian one. Even in Spain, the Visigothic regime bequeathed to them a not as high-powered but still functioning tax system, though it doesn't seem to have operated much outside the south. This may explain why the Umayyad rulers of Spain struggled to exercise effective power outside of Andalusia until well into the ninth and even the early tenth centuries. But in Gaul, the old Roman tax system that the early Merovingians had kept going, and even tried to ramp up in the reign of Chilperic I, was now completely dead. By the end of the seventh century, the gold coinage it was collected in had failed and was now being issued in a debased form by mints in semi-private hands, and the last references to taxes being collected in Gaul are from the Loire Valley in the 720s. 

Without a functioning tax system in the conquered territories, how was the Arab army going to get paid? The answer is simple: by doing what Arab leaders had hitherto always avoided, that being settling troops on the land. And as we saw in part 2, by paying the troops with tax revenue and placing them in garrison cities, the Arabs were able to remain an aloof, conquest elite and have cultural integration work from the top-down. However, if they were settled on the land, then that kind of strict separation between conquerors and conquered would not be possible to maintain, and so the Arab soldiers and administrators were more likely to go native. Some degree of Islamisation may have happened - in Septimania, the only part of modern day France ever to come under Islamic rule and only for about four decades a Muslim cemetery has been found at Nimes. 

And the conquest of Gaul would not have saved the Umayyad Caliphate. It had serious structural weaknesses that stemmed from the nature of its fiscal administration. All tax collection was done by at a regional level by officials from that region and most tax revenue was spent in the region it was collected in, paying the soldiers and officials there. Only a small portion of the tax revenue from Egypt, Iraq and Iran went towards the centre (Damascus), and from the regions west of Egypt nome at all. The Caliphs thus overwhelmingly relied on their Syrian resources. And when faced with provincial rebellions and civil war, they could only rely on the loyalty of their Syrian troops, as was the case in the Second Fitna of 680 - 692 or the Berber revolt in the 740s. Arab tribal rivalries, ethnic tensions between Arabs and Berbers/ Iranians and growing sectarian divisions over what gave Caliphs their legitimacy to rule the Muslim community of believers, made these revolts a persistent and destabilising problem. its really hard to see how the Umayyad Caliphate could have remained intact for more than a generation after 750. As it played out historically, after the Berber revolt in the 740s, the army of Iran turned against the Caliphal centre in Damascus and the Umayyads were ousted from there. By the 760s, the new Abbasid dynasty had established rule over Syria, Iraq, Iran, Khurasan, Egypt and loosely over Tunisia, with their power base in Iraq (the court was at the newly founded city of Baghdad and later at Samarra). The Maghreb however was lost forever and Spain was under the control of an Umayyad court in exile at Cordoba, where their loyal Syrian troops still held out. 

The smaller scale polities that emerged in the western Islamic world in the late eighth and early ninth centuries were much less good at expanding. It took the Aghlabid emirs of Tunisia 75 years (827 - 902) to conquer Sicily from the Roman Empire, even though it was only a peripheral far western outpost, and Constantinople's attention was mostly focused elsewhere. In this light, the idea of Arab armies reaching the confines of Poland and the highlands of Scotland, as Gibbon vividly imagined seems extremely unlikely.

And to top it all off, there's the simple fact that Muslim incursions into Gaul did not end at Tours in October 732. In 736 - 737, the Umayyad governors of Spain again invaded southern Gaul, and this time they were able to find an ally in the form of another semi-independent frontier ruler - Maurontus, the Patrician of Provence. Such advances were again beaten back by none other than Charles Martel, who successfully captured the fortified cities of Avignon and Nimes and routed the Arab army at the battle of the river Berre near Narbonne. Perhaps together, these victories can be considered decisive at scuppering Umayyad ambitions in Gaul, but why single out Tours then? The view that Tours was the great turning point in stopping Islamic expansionism, therefore, does not stand to scrutiny.

But there's more to it than that anyway ...

The other thing we need to consider in relation to the battle of Tours' significance is what it meant for the rise of the Carolingians. I think there it was indeed decisive in three ways.

The first is what it meant for the expansion of Carolingian power into the Gallo-Roman south of Gaul. The Tours campaign would have enabled Charles to realise the weaknesses of Duke Odo's semi-independent Aquitaine, which he'd become increasingly aware of from when he first fought against Duke Odo in 720 and from his invasion of northern Aquitaine the year before the battle of Tours. The fact the Arabs had been able to progress as far as they could would have shown that Aquitaine was highly vulnerable militarily. And the fact Duke Odo and his Gallo-Romans had called on Charles Martel to protect them helped hammer home that Aquitaine was part of the Merovingian kingdom, and by that token any future hostility from the dukes of Aquitaine could be treated as rebellion. This would help pave the way for the conquest and subjugation of Aquitaine under Charles' son and successor, Pepin the Short, in the 760s. Meanwhile, the Arab invasion of south-eastern Gaul in 736 - 737 enabled Charles Martel to expand his power there, conquering Provence in retaliation to the perceived treachery of Maurontus and the need to defend Burgundy, as well as making headway into Septimania, the conquest of which would be completed by Pepin the Short in 759. The Arab invasions in the 730s thus paved the way for some brilliant opportunities for the Carolingians to expand their power from the Frankish north into the Gallo-Roman south.

Secondly, winning such crushing victories against non-Christian enemies served to strengthen the prestige and reputation of Charles Martel and his dynasty. To eighth century people, victories in battle were not just a demonstration of the strategic skill of the commanders or martial prowess of the soldiers. They were a sign that God had intervened in the physical world to grant them earthly success, which could take the form of victory in battle. Conversely, defeat in battle was a sign of God's displeasure, which could also take the form of famines, floods, earthquakes, plagues and other natural disasters. And while God's ultimate purpose could not be known, to have his momentary favour was a sign that your cause was legitimate, while to incur his momentary displeasure was a sign that you were in the wrong. As the great Christian theologians and historians of late antiquity, Eusebius, Jerome, Augustine and Orosius had outlined, all of human history from the Creation of Man 3952 years before the Birth of Christ or 5200, depending on how you calculated the passing of time in the Old Testament, and the Last Judgement at some unspecified date in the future was the unfolding of God's ultimate plan for humanity. It was thus linear and passed through successive epochs, marked by key milestones in the plan being reached. From the Creation of Adam and Eve to the Great Flood was the First Age. From Noah's Ark to Abraham offering Isaac as sacrifice was the Second Age. From Abraham's Covenant with God to Moses leading the Hebrews out of captivity in Egypt or David defeating Goliath was the Third Age (you can see where J.R.R Tolkien, a medievalist and a devout Roman Catholic got his inspiration for the ages of Middle Earth). The Fourth Age then went on until the Jews had endured their captivity in Babylon following the fall of the kingdom of Judah (the last remnant of David's Israel) to Nebuchadnezzar. The Fifth Age began with the Persian king Cyrus the Great freeing the Jews from their Babylonian Captivity and restoring Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, and carried the story forward to the Birth of Jesus Christ. At the beginning of the Sixth Age, which medieval people believed they still lived in, Christ had fulfilled God's covenant with Abraham and the Old Law of Moses, had taught humanity the way of Salvation, died for its redemption and then resurrected. The Sixth Age would then continue all the way through to the emergence and subsequent defeat of the Antichrist and Christ's Second Coming (prophesised in Revelation), after which the Last Judgment would happen and with it the end of the world, human history and time itself. When this would happen, could not be known - Christ had given no indication in the Gospels of how far off in the future his Second Coming. Some early Christians thought it would happen at a time when the original Twelve Apostles were still alive, or when the Roman Empire was converted. The Sack of Rome in 410 had raised fresh questions about when the world would end. In response to such questions, St Augustine had argued in 428 that we simply could not know when the world was going to end, and that good Christians should refrain from prophecy. To what extent early medieval people heeded St Augustine's warnings against making apocalyptic prophecies is highly disputed. But as Bernard McGinn and Robert Markus have argued, Augustine's position was hardly meant to be reassuring. On the contrary, while it meant that the onset of the Apocalypse could be a thousand years in the future, it also meant that it could be a generation from now, next Tuesday or even tomorrow. And in the meantime, people in the Sixth Age were left trying to figure out the meaning of the events that God kept throwing at them, which might or might not be connected to the coming of the Apocalypse. Indeed, this gave way to a kind of historical thinking in which personalities and events from the Old Testament might appear to be repeating themselves in the present.

Charles Martel's encounters with the Muslims were ripe for interpretation in this way. Indeed, as we can see from that short extract from Bede, pretty much from the very moment that the battle of Tours took place it was interpreted as the judgement of God against the infidel Saracens at work. And when the Carolingians started to write the histories, they immediately drew connections between Charles Martel's successes against the Arabs and events in the Old Testament. The Continuation of Fredegar, written in the 750s, uses the verb inruit ("he rushed in") in its account of the Battle of Tours, the same verb that is used in the  prophecies of Balaam in Chapter 24 of the Book of Numbers when he describes how the spirit of God "rushed in" to the tents of the Israelites before crushing their pagan enemies. The Fredegar continuator also refers to Charles Martel by the epithet belligerator, used in the Book of Maccabees that recounts the struggle of the Jews against the Seleucids. And of course it says that Charles Martel won the battle with the help of the Lord. In its account of the siege of Avignon in 737, the Continuator likens it to the fall of Jericho to Joshua - these would make their way into Adhemar of Chabannes' early eleventh century account of the siege, where he also compared the besieging Frankish army to Gideon's men fighting the Midianites. It also works to very consciously portray Charles Martel as a defender of Christian holy places from Saracen depredations. And the Earlier Annals of Metz (806), likewise gives a lot of attention to Charles Martel's battles with the Saracens, and uses them as evidence of how the rise of the Carolingians, ever since it began with the battle of Tertry in 687, was backed by God. Whether or not this is at all reflective of the general response to Charles Martel's victories against the Muslims at the time they happened (the 730s), they do at least show how important they were to legitimising the Carolingian dynasty as the eighth century progressed further, and indeed how the Carolingians themselves saw them - the Continuation of Fredegar was commissioned by Charles Martel's own brother, Count Childebrand, and the Earlier Annals of Metz was written under the patronage of Charles' granddaughter Gisela, abbess of Chelles and sister to the emperor Charlemagne. If such perspectives were indeed sincerely held by the Carolingian family, then their victories over the Saracens may have helped them gain the self-confidence needed to do away with the Merovingian royal figureheads who still nominally ruled the Frankish kingdom.

And that brings us to the final way in which the battle of Tours and the second campaign against the Umayyads in 736 - 737 were decisive in relation to the rise of the Carolingians. It brought them to the attention of the Papacy. The eighth century papacy was in a very precarious situation. It was beginning to fall out with its political sovereign and military protector, the Roman emperor in Constantinople, over a messy theological issue - Iconoclasm. Now you see, the struggle against the Muslims, who had taken so much territory from them and threatened Constantinople twice (in 674 - 678 and again in 717) made the Roman emperors wonder what they had done that was so displeasing to God. They decided to put the blame on figurative religious art, which had always had a certain ambiguity about it in Christianity it due to the condemnations of idolatry in the Old Testament and a general sense of the superiority of scripture to images in conveying Christian messages. So in 726, the Roman emperor, Leo IV the Isaurian (r.718 - 741), banned artistic depictions of Christ, the Virgin Mary and the saints from churches. This was immediately met with opposition from Pope Gregory II and his successor Pope Gregory III, which resulted in the papacy being deprived of its estates in Sicily and Calabria and jurisdiction over the metropolitan sees of Southern Italy, Sicily and Illyria, which was transferred to the Patriarch of Constantinople. The Roman Emperor was the main source of military protection for the Pope in Italy against the hostile Lombard kingdom. So if the Pope wasn't going to give in and accept Iconoclasm as a theological doctrine, then he would need to find another protector. Since the Pope also took great interest in the struggle against Islam - remember how he congratulated Duke Odo for his victory over the Muslims in 721 - he identified a candidate for his new protector in none other than Charles Martel. Sometime between 739 and 741, towards the end of his life, Charles Martel received an embassy to Francia from Pope Gregory III, where they exchanged gifts and Charles promised military support to protect the "patrimony of Saint Peter" from the Lombards should the Pope request it. This Carolingian-Papal alliance would then set off a chain of events that would lead to the Pope giving the go ahead for Pepin the Short to depose the last Merovingian king in 751, Pippin the Short's invasion of Italy in 754, Charlemagne's conquest of the Lombard kingdom in 774 and the coronation of Charlemagne as Western Roman emperor in 800. The Carolingian-Papal alliance was thus an development of macrohistorical importance, both for propelling the ascent of the Carolingian dynasty and Frankish hegemony in Western Europe, and the long-lasting damage it did to relations between Rome and Constantinople and the Greek and Latin churches. While I don't think Henri Pirenne in Mohammed and Charlemagne (1937) and Peter Brown in The World of Late Antiquity (1971) were right in identifying the eighth century as the moment when the ancient world became the medieval, its importance should not be understated. And by 800, the Mediterranean world, now polarised between the Latin Christian Franks, the Greek Christian Romans and the Muslim Arabs couldn't have been a further cry from what it had been four centuries earlier, when all of it had been under the political, cultural and ideological hegemony of the Roman Empire. And in the meantime, the Carolingians' continual quest for legitimacy and divine favour led to various developments that would shape government, religion and intellectual life for centuries and whose legacies last to this day. It is these that I hope to explore in detail in subsequent posts on this blog.