Controversies 2: the problem of early medieval literacy (the basics)

In this early tenth century manuscript illustration, thought to be based on a lost ninth century original, Charlemagne has a conversation with his son, Pippin of Italy. Meanwhile a scribe, not obviously a cleric (since he isn't tonsured), writes down the minutes of their meeting

You've almost certainly heard it said by someone, somewhere that only priests and monks were literate in the Middle Ages. Now I'm going to say this from the outset. Like so many other things that people think they know about the Middle Ages, from widespread belief in a flat earth and armoured knights being lifted onto their horses by cranes, to iron maidens, chastity belts and the droit de seigneur, this is a MYTH! But of course, the biggest myth about the Middle Ages is that for a whole millennium of history nothing much changed at all. In fact, I'd argue that the period 500 - 1500, give or take half a century on either side, makes absolutely no sense as a single historical epoch. So which segments of the Middle Ages are we talking about when we say that people other than clerics could read and write. 

As longtime readers of this blog will know, and as you might have figured from the title, I'm of course interested here in the early Middle Ages, by which I mean the period before the year 1000. Now while medievalists of all shapes and sizes can unite against ancient historians/ classicists, early modernists and modernists being ignorant or dismissive about the Middle Ages, that's where it ends. 

In the context of medieval literacy, a specialist on the high and late Middle Ages (1000 - 1500) could laugh at the assertion that only the clergy could read and write in the Middle Ages, and say "you what mate? Haven't you heard of Wolfram Von Eschenbach, Marco Polo, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Catherine of Siena, Christine de Pizan or Margaret Paston? Have you not considered the thousands of financial accounts, property deeds, tax records and other government documents, law books, books of hours, chivalric romances and other works vernacular literature that could hardly have been the preserve of a small clerical elite? Think before you speak again, you ignoramus!"  

But those same people might then say, "but for the period before the year 1000, you're probably right. I don't want to offend my early medievalist colleagues too much, but you might be right in calling those the real Dark Ages."

Indeed this is sort of the thrust of three classic studies of Medieval literacy (both of them now 40+ years old), namely Malcolm Parkes' "The Literacy of the Laity" (1973), Michael Clanchy's "From Memory to Written Record" (1979) and Brian Stock's "The Implications of Literacy" (1983). All three of them are rightly celebrated, as they essentially kickstarted the study of medieval literacy as a serious academic sub-field - they themselves took their cues from the pioneering anthropologically-inspired work of ancient historians and early modernists. While both of them argued that reading and writing had a huge level of importance to medieval government, society and culture, they were  focusing on the high and late middle ages. They saw all of this the product of a great transformation taking place in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. They had different views on what was at the root of this transformation. Malcolm Parkes thought it was Anglo-Norman barons, ladies and knights' growing appetite for fiction and historical romances written in the vernacular (King Arthur, chivalric adventures, you know what I mean) in the twelfth century that kickstarted the rise of lay literacy among the aristocracy. With the rise of commerce and towns and growing need for written financial accounts that came with it, the middle classes followed suit in the thirteenth century. Clanchy, on the other hand, argued it all started in 1066 with the distrust the Norman conquerors of England had for native oral testimony and their preference for written records and law, that began the shift from "memory to written record." Initially this mainly concerned churches and clerical functionaries in William the Conqueror's government. But by the reign of Edward I (1272 - 1307) written law, written instructions from the government, written property deeds and estate surveys, written financial accounts, written literature etc had become so important that the aristocracy and urban middle classes all had to receive at least elementary education in literacy in a bureaucratic world.

Meanwhile, all these authors argued that England and Western Europe in the pre-1000 period were essentially oral societies - laws, literature, history, property rights, customs, religion etc were all passed on by word of mouth with literacy only being used by a small, essentially clerical minority. For reasons that we'll soon see, that has provoked ire from early medievalists. Indeed, in the later editions of "From Memory to Written Record" published in 1997 and 2013, Clanchy was a lot more generous when it came to discussing literacy in Anglo-Saxon England in the opening chapters. And in terms of his central thesis, he's absolutely correct - literacy at a societal level did fundamentally change, quantitatively and qualitatively, in the Medieval West between 1066 and 1300. I wouldn't for one minute quibble with the argument that more people could read and write, and there was much greater use of documents for a much greater range of purposes, in Edward III's England than in Aethelred the Unready's England. But that great upsurge in literacy didn't come out of the blue either. So what was literacy really like before the eleventh century. 

So how do we determine early medieval literacy? Now that is a difficult question. I think there's two ways of looking at literacy, on a personal and a societal level. Personal level meaning who exactly could read and write. Societal level meaning the place of literacy in society. 

Personal literacy is probably the hardest to figure out. To state the most obvious, no one in the early middle ages was producing statistics about how many people could read or write. Indeed, prior to about 1850, all data on literacy in Western Europe has to be inferred from various kinds of evidence. For example, ancient historians have tried to infer a high degree of literacy in the Roman Empire, possibly as high as 30% of the adult male population, from things like the Pompeii graffiti, the Vindolanda tablets or the Egyptian papyri found in the Oxyrhynchus rubbish dumps. For historians of early modern Europe (1500 - 1800), the generally agreed baseline is how many people could sign their own names. Unfortunately, and this something I lament all the time, there's no early medieval Pompeii. Though the latter method could work for the early middle ages, its much less reliable than for the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries  given that much less survives by way of original documents, and not of the right type. 

There are individual lay people from the early Middle Ages who we know were literate. From the Carolingian Empire (751 - 888), we have some long-time friends of this blog like Einhard, Angilbert, Nithard and Dhuoda, all of whom wrote works in learned Latin whilst being lay nobles and courtiers. All Carolingian kings from Pippin the Short to Carloman II, we know were literate and had received a full education in Latin. Meanwhile, Margrave Eberhard of Friuli had a huge library of books he read and consulted, and showed an interest in theological debate, and Count Gerald of Aurillac read his psalter regularly. Most famously, Einhard says of Charlemagne that he could read and understand St Augustine's "City of God", a highly difficult theological text, though he never mastered learning to write, but not for want of trying.

From the Merovingian period before it we know that all the Merovingian kings from the generation of King Chilperic (r.561 - 584), whose Latin poems were dreadful according to Gregory of Tours, to that of  Childebert III (r.694 - 711), whose autograph survives on royal diplomas, were literate. We also know that various Merovingian saints like Desiderius of Cahors. Audoin of Rouen, Bonitus of Clermont and Leudegar of Autun had spent their earlier careers as lay civil servants at the Merovingian court and had received secular legal and literary educations. At a humbler level, we have the slave Andarchius who could read Virgil and the Theodosian Code. 

Signature of the Merovingian King Chlothar II (r.584 - 629) to the Edict of Paris in 614. People love to slag off Merovingian handwriting as clumsy and illegible, but this is a good deal more elegant than the signatures of modern politicians. See Donald Trump's signature below.

In Visigothic Spain, King Sisebut (r.612 - 629) and King Chinthila (r.636 - 639) are known to have written poems, and the former corresponded with the great Isidore of Seville on Classical Roman poetry and science. We also know from the letters of Isidore's pupil, Braulio of Zaragoza, that King Chindasuinth (r.642 - 653) and Count Laurentinus (otherwise undocumented) owned libraries in which all kinds of obscure texts that Braulio had difficulty obtaining were located. Another seventh century Visigothic nobleman, Count Bulgar, wrote letters to Frankish bishops in which he expressed anxiety about the Avar horde and their involvement in wars north of the Pyrenees.

For Anglo-Saxon England, we have King Sigeberht of East Anglia and King Aldfrith of Northumbria, who Bede informs us were able to read and write Latin. King Alfred the Great (most famously) translated the works of Gregory the Great and Boethius into Old English. And Ealdorman Aethelweard, a West Saxon aristocrat, wrote a Latin version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for his cousin, a German abbess. 

Early medieval lay literacy in action: Alfred the Great's translation of Gregory the Great's pastoral care

From post-900 Germany and France, we know that emperors Otto II and Otto III were literate in Latin and German (Otto III knew Greek as well from his mother, Empress Theophanu). Likewise, Otto III's contemporary King Robert the Pious (r.996 - 1031) of West Francia/ France was literate in Latin too and enjoyed debating theology. Duke William V of Aquitaine (d.1030), had a huge library and corresponded in letters with Bishop Fulbert of Chartres, who called him a second Maecenas (after Augustus' chief adviser and patron of Virgil and Horace) for his literary interests. 

This immediately confronts us with a problem. Can these people be considered at all representative, or just exceptions to the general rule? Some certainly look more like exceptions than others. King Aldfrith of Northumbria, for example, looks like a fairly obvious candidate for being exceptional. He was trained at a monastery in Ireland and would have almost certainly become a cleric had it not been for his brother, King Egcfrith, dying in battle against the Picts in 685, creating a dynastic crisis which it was up to Aldfrith to resolve by returning home to take up his brother's throne. King Sigeberht of East Anglia likewise spent his childhood in exile in a Frankish monastery. Alfred the Great definitely belongs in a category of his own as well. And for some of the other royal examples, there's an argument that kings belong in a category of their own. But the Visigothic kings we know were literate, Sisebut, Chinthila and Chindasuinth, acquired their thrones either by usurpation or military coup and had had careers as generals and military governors before becoming kings. So we can probably actually take their personal literacy as a sign that literate education was common among the Visigothic nobility in seventh century Spain.

Indeed I'm reminded of a comment I once heard in one of master's seminars from a fellow student. I can't recall exactly what she said, but it was along the lines of "if you have to give the names of powerful women in history, then that indicates they're not very common or significant." Precisely this kind of argument is what the minimalists and sceptics would say about lay literacy in the early medieval West. Of course, there are obvious fallacies with this kind of argument when applied to both, but especially so for early medieval literacy. For the vast majority (90% and upwards) of known individuals from the early Middle Ages, we have no surviving writings and we can say nothing about their education. And for those that we do know about, like all the names I've mentioned, its not because they were the only ones who left writings or received a literate education. Rather its because their writings survive to us today, either by accident or survival, or because we have anecdotal and other circumstantial evidence of them being able to read and write from histories, hagiographies, letters etc. 

But where this kind of argument gets us somewhere is that we need to be focusing on qualitative evidence rather than quantitative evidence. To put it another way, if we want to know whether these individuals were exceptions or not, it makes more sense to try and find what were the general expectations surrounding lay literacy and education, as well as the range of purposes for which writing was used in government and society. What really matters is not finding out how many people outside the clergy could read and write, but to what extent did you need to be able to read and write or at the very least be able to use documents through intermediaries to do well for yourself as an elite (or indeed non-elite) lay person in early medieval society. This is after all, how ancient historians and later medievalists have approached the subject, and its no surprise that this exactly how early medievalists have been approaching the problem since the 1980s. Literacy and education, literacy and government, literacy and society, all of these I'm going to explore here some time to show how lay literacy was much more common than people think in the early Middle Ages. But I'm too constrained by time and space to look at them now. 

Before I finish with this post, we need to consider two things. Firstly, whether or not learning Latin was a barrier to literacy in the early middle ages. Secondly, whether it ever makes sense to speak of early medieval societies as oral cultures. 

As is well-known, the language of the vast majority of early medieval texts (outside of Anglo-Saxon England) was Latin. Traditionally, scholars presumed that only priests and monks would have known how to read Latin in the sixth to tenth century West, and even then not all of them. Let it of course be known that the existence of poorly educated illiterate clerics was a consistent source of complaint from St Boniface and Alcuin in the eighth century to Erasmus and John Colet on the eve of the Protestant Reformation. The presumption was that Latin was a foreign language, albeit a highly important, indeed sacred one, and that only those given a rigorous education could read it in the post-Roman West. This would obviously hold true in areas like Anglo-Saxon England, where the local language was a Germanic one, but even in Gaul, Spain and Italy where scholars used to think that sometime in the seventh or eighth centuries the spoken vernacular had completely evolved into early forms of French, Spanish and Italian and that Latin was no longer intelligible. But Rosamond McKitterick in "The Carolingians and the Written Word" (1989) challenged this and has argued that the spoken vernacular in the Romance regions wasn't actually all that different to Latin, except that it was spelled and pronounced differently.

This is an argument that makes a huge amount of sense when you make the analogy between Standard Chinese and regional dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Gan, Xiang, Min, Yue and Guangxi), Modern Standard Arabic and regional dialects (Iraqi, Levantine, Egyptian, Maghrebi etc) and indeed English. English is an absolute nightmare for pronunciation, and I feel really sorry for my EAL (English as an Additional Language) pupils who have to go through their whole secondary schooling in it. This is also the reason why we had to do a short course on phonics as part of the PGCE. For example the grapheme (combination of written letters) -ough represents eight different phonemes (sounds) in spoken English i.e., borough, rough, cough, hiccough, lough, through, fought, dough and plough. Or the constant arguments between Northerners and Southerners in England over whether to pronounce a as a long vowel or a short vowel.

McKitterick also points out that the standard textbooks used for teaching Latin grammar, syntax, spelling and pronunciation in Carolingian monasteries in Gaul and Italy were ones written in the fourth century Roman Empire, and would not have made sense unless the students reading them already spoke Latin. Its revealing how Latin-vernacular interlinear glosses and dictionaries from the eighth and ninth centuries only appear in Germany, Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England, where Latin really was being learned as a foreign language. A lot of this is going against what I wrote in my post on the Oaths of Strasbourg, but McKitterick's (and by that token, Roger Wright's) arguments are actually quite convincing. And besides the oaths of Strasbourg and the martyrdom of St Eulalia, which could be considered to be just the Latin dialects native to Gaul written phonetically. Its worth noting, as I did in that post, that besides those possible exceptions, we don't have any vernacular texts written in Romance languages until after 950. Its in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries that we start getting inscriptions, charters, short poems and documents of a practical nature (like a list of cheeses from a monastery in Northern Spain from 959) written in Old Italian and Old Castilian. Thus McKitterick, and before her Banniard and Wright, would argue that the real shift from Latin dialects to Romance languages happened around 900 rather than around 700 as per the traditional view. This is by no means settled scholarly consensus though. 

The geographic divide between regions where Latin/ Romance and Germanic languages were predominantly spoken speakers in 750 (green line) and 1914 (red line). Interestingly, the line hasn't changed much since the early Middle Ages, except in regions like the Pas de Calais in France or Tyrol in Italy. You can also see the origins of the Flemish-Walloon divide in Belgium. By Resnjari - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93789268

Thus, there's good reason to think that Latin was not a barrier to literacy in Gaul, Spain and Italy before the late ninth and early tenth centuries at the earliest. In the Germanic and Celtic-speaking lands it would have been more of one, though in those regions you also had vernacular texts. Can we really consider Anglo-Saxon noblemen who couldn't read Latin poems illiterate if they could read Old English poems like the Wanderer, Beowulf or the Battle of Maldon. Furthermore, we should take into account that there were many different levels to Latin literacy, especially how much the Latin language had evolved since Classical times and the range of different registers in which it was written. Virgil and Horace would have been difficult texts to the Carolingians, just like Chaucer and Shakespeare are difficult texts for people in the US and UK today.

As for the whole question of oral culture, I don't think it makes sense to call early medieval cultures oral even if we took the clerical monopoly view of early medieval literacy. The definition of oral culture used by experts like Walter Ong is a culture whose knowledge and worldviews have not been shaped by writing and texts at all. If we go by that definition, then early medieval Western societies cannot be considered to be true oral cultures because they were, after all, Christian.  Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, is a religion based around the written word, specifically its sacred text the Bible - indeed from as early as the seventh century, Muslim writers identified all three Abrahamic faiths as "peoples of the book." Likewise the very existence of written law codes, charters, histories, poems and treatises from Western Europe in the period 500 - 1000 show that writing was important to creating and preserving society's knowledge. And if only a minority could directly access it, even more would be affected by it i.e., as I've shown in previous texts, regardless of whether or not Carolingian peasants were literate, they were affected by the information recorded in the polyptychs and other documents drawn up by landlords. Sufficeth to say that while not everyone in the early middle ages was literate, virtually no one was insulated from the effects of the written word in society. 

On a final note, this blog has, as of a few weeks ago, been around for a year and half. Thank you everyone for reading my posts, whether you're a veteran reader or a first-timer, and to those who have given praise and constructive criticism - it means a great deal to me!

Let;s finish with one of my favourite early medieval artworks, St Matthew from the Ebbo Gospels (first quarter of the ninth century).

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

What we've been waiting for ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prime Minister Charles on the warpath  

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

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

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

The road to Tours

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

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

The battle of Tours

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

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

The Continuation's account is pretty brief:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aftermath

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

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

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

Charles Martel and the battle of Tours: a turning point in world history? A four part series (part 2)

 The early Islamic Conquests to 721

The areas under the rule (on paper, anyway) of the Muslim Umayyad Caliphs in Damascus in 721. By this point it covered a land area of 4.3 million square miles. This would have made it the largest empire in human history to date at that time - for reference, Alexander the Great's empire covered just over 2 million square miles at the time of his death in 323 BC, and the Roman Empire controlled 1.93 square miles in land area at its territorial height under Trajan in 117 AD. Within the subsequent span of human history, only six empires have ever been bigger than the Umayyad Caliphate in 721 - (in ascending order) the Second French Colonial Empire (territorial height reached in 1920), the Spanish Empire (territorial height reached in 1789) China under the Qing Dynasty (territorial height reached 1760), the Russian Empire/ the Soviet Union (territorial height reached in 1895/ 1945), the Mongol Empire (territorial height reached in 1270/ 1309) and the British Empire (territorial height reached in 1920). Note that maximum territorial extent does not equate to when that empire was at the height of its power generally, the Spanish Empire being a case in point. Nor is land area what determines everything for imperial power - the ancient Roman Empire derived much, or indeed most, of its strength from making the Mediterranean mare nostrum and controlling all its trade routes, and in the case of the British Empire, don't you know the song "Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves." Map Credit: Gabagool - File:Umayyad750ADloc.pngAnd based on: The expansion of the Muslim Caliphate until 750, from William R. Shepherd's Historical Atlas., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92884827

So in order to understand the battle of Tours, we need to have a look at the other side. How did Muslim armies get to Gaul only a century after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia, more than 3700 miles away. Why had Arab Muslim power expanded so far so fast? After all, never before or since in history has everywhere between the Atlantic Ocean and the Tian Shan mountain range and between the Caspian Sea and the Sahara Desert been unified under the control of a single political entity (the Arab Muslim Umayyad Caliphate in this case? So what made this achievement possible? Before we get to the Islamic conquests themselves, we need to cast our minds back a little bit to the geopolitical situation that created them.

Twilight of the ancient world: Rome and Persia's final showdown (602 - 628)

Around the time Clovis and the early Merovingians, whom we talked about in the previous post, were establishing their control over Gaul, and the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were forming in lowland Britain, the geopolitical situation in West Asia was essentially stable, as it had been half a millennium prior. Since the first century BC, the Near East had been dominated by two superpowers - Rome and Persia. The geopolitical situation in 525 AD was, in its fundamentals, the same it had been in 25 BC, and looked something like this:

Map Credit: 

https://www.timemaps.com/history/middle-east-500ad/

Note that stable does not imply peaceful. In 53 BC, Rome's attempts to expand east of the Euphrates were halted when Marcus Licinius Crassus was slain by the Parthians, who ruled in Persia at that time, at Carrhae near Harran in modern day Turkey. When the Bacchae by Euripedes was subsequently performed at the Parthian court, they brought out Crassus' severed head. In 114 - 117 AD, Trajan had conquered Armenia, Assyria and Babylonia (modern day Iraq) from the Parthians, but Hadrian decided it wasn't worth trying to hold on to them and that it was better to scale back and focus on defensible frontiers. Caracalla (r.211 - 217) seems to have been intent on bringing Persia itself under Roman rule, clearly indicated by his proposal to marry the daughter of the Parthian king Artabanus IV in 216, but was assassinated while on campaign against the Parthians.

In 224, the Parthians, who were generally happy to not to bother the Romans so long as they agreed to keep to their established zones of control, were overthrown and replaced by a new dynasty - the Sassanians. The Sassanians took a much more aggressive approach towards the Romans. It was under them that Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of Persia which saw the material world as divided between the cosmic forces of good and evil, underwent a massive revival and became a huge part of the official ideology of the Sassanian state. The Sassanians were convinced that they were the descendants of the legendary Aryan kings mentioned in the Avesta (the authoritative collection of Zoroastrian holy texts). It was thus their goal to subject all of humanity to the rule of Eransahr ("the empire of the Iranians), so that peace and justice could reign throughout the world and the forces of light and good could triumph over the forces of darkness and evil. It was thus necessary for them to bring to heel all rival civilisations, especially Rome and India, by at the very least making their rulers acknowledge the Sassanian Shahanshah (literally "king of kings") as their rightful overlord. An early propaganda victory was scored for the new dynasty when the second Sassanian King of Kings, Shapur I (r.242 - 270), captured the Roman emperor Valerian (r.254 - 260) at the battle of Edessa. This moment would then be immortalised in a stone relief at Naqsh-e-Rostam in Fars province, Iran.

The Naqsh-e-Rostam relief showing the Roman emperor Valerian kneeling before Shapur. photo credit:

Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany. Licenced by Wikimedia Commons. 

What stopped the Romans and Sassanians from knocking seven bells out of each other nearly as regularly as either might have liked came down to a combination of factors on either side. In the case of the Romans:

1. The need to deal with barbarian invaders on their other frontiers. For example, Roman attempts to invade Persia in the 430s were diverted by Attila the Hun going on a rampage through the Balkans; the Roman Imperial court in the East also sent large expeditionary forces to try help their beleaguered Western counterpart deal with the Vandals in Africa and Sicily in 441 and 474. 
2. Opportunistic generals trying to usurp the imperial throne. Always a big problem in Roman history. It was thus imperative that if a full-scale military campaign against Persia should be launched, the emperor should be in charge of it. The last pagan Roman emperor, Julian the Apostate, tried to personally lead a massive amphibious campaign against the Sassanians in Iraq in 363. However, being an edgy Neoplatonist philosopher, he thought he was above wearing armour, which needless to say left him vulnerable, and so he died in battle.
3. Religious divisions, specifically over the nature of Jesus Christ. We saw in the previous post, when we talked about Clovis' conversion, that it mattered a lot whether he chose to be a Chalcedonian/ Catholic Christian (someone who believed that God the Father and God the Son were equal and had always coexisted) or an Arian (someone who believed that God the Son was inferior to, and had been created by, God the Father). In the Eastern Roman Empire, the divide wasn't between Arians and Chalcedonians but between Chalcedonians and Monophysites. Monophysites, like the Chalcedonians, believed that God the Father and God the Son were coequal, but that God the Son was made of one substance. The Chalcedonians, on the other hand, believed that God the Son was made of two separate substances, one completely divine and one completely human. This was the real, super divisive issue of the day kind of like Brexit, Trump, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, Megxit or whatever. The sort of thing that could split families and neighbourhoods against each other. Even the Blues and the Greens, the two chariot-racing teams at the Hippodrome in Constantinople took sides on this issue - the Greens and their fans were Chalcedonian and the Blues and their fans were Monophysite. The obvious modern parallel to this would be the rivalry between the Celtic and Rangers football teams in Glasgow tapping into the bitter religious divisions there - Celtic being supported by the Catholics and Rangers by the Protestants. Much like with Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland and Glasgow, these religious divisions between Monophysites and Chalcedonian often led to violent confrontations and riots in Constantinople and provincial cities like Thessalonica and Antioch. This naturally made issues of public order and religious unity more prominent on emperor's minds than launching costly military campaigns in the east.

In the case of the Sassanians, their main problems were:

1. Regular dynastic instability. Like most societies in the ancient world, the Sassanians practiced open polygamy, or more accurately polygyny (women didn't get to have multiple husbands). The ancient Greeks and Romans were thoroughly unusual at the time in only permitting men of all social ranks to have one legitimate wife, though divorce and remarriage were easy and it was socially acceptable for married men to have sexual relations with concubines (so long as the relationship didn't become public), prostitutes and slaves (male or female). Having many legitimate wives meant that Sassanian Shahanshahs had multiple sons from different mothers with valid claims to the throne. And while the Sassanians didn't divide up the realm following the death of a king like the Merovingians (as we saw in the previous post) did, they didn't have a concept of primogeniture either. Thus, disputed successions and dynastic civil wars were not uncommon, which could draw in foreign powers. For example, Bahram V had to rely on the support of the king of the Lakhmids, a large Arab tribal confederacy, in order to claim the throne from his half-brother, Shapur IV, in 420. Sassanian Shahanshahs often had to placate potentially rebellious brothers and half-brothers by carving out autonomous territories for them to rule as sub-kings.
2. Trouble with the aristocracy. There is some debate amongst historians as to how the Sassanian Empire worked internally. Was it a centralised and bureaucratic state, like Rome or China? Or was it a more decentralised regime, with the Shahanshah essentially being a high king presiding over a federation? What we cannot really doubt, however, is that Sassanid Persia had an very rich and powerful class of nobles, who could boast agricultural estates as extensive, genealogies as ancient and martial abilities as impressive as the House of Sassan. Nobles believed that they had the right to rebel against kings they saw as unjust or incompetent. After the exceptionally long reign of Shapur II (309 - 379), the Sassanians went through four kings in the next forty-one years, each one of them being violently deposed by the nobility. This isn't quite the level of political turnover as the Roman Empire during the crisis of the third century (235 - 284), but comparable to England during the Wars of the Roses (1455 - 1487) or indeed the Merovingian kingdoms in the second half of the seventh century as we saw in the previous post. But, unlike in the Roman empire (no ancient Roman imperial dynasty survived for even a century) and somewhat like with the Merovingian case, there was a strong sense that the House of Sassan was special and had a unique right to rule. Thus when the nobles rebelled and tried to depose a king, they would replace him with one of his brothers or half-brothers. Only in 589 would a member of the nobility, Bahram VI Chobin from the House of Mihran, try to claim the throne for himself. 
3. Invaders from the Eurasian Steppe. It wasn't just the Romans who were troubled by barbarians on their northern frontiers. We all know the Romans were menaced by Attila the Hun in the fifth century AD. But the Sassanians were menaced by Huns too, and for much longer. In the late fourth century, some of the Huns chose to migrate westwards from their Mongolian homeland to the Great Hungarian plain. Instead they went south and conquered the rich cities strategically located on the Silk Road and fertile river valleys of modern day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan from the Sassanians. Then they settled down there, worked hard to win the support of the native Sogdians and Bactrians who furnished them with literate administrators, levied the land tax, minted coins and did everything else sedentary rulers did. By the mid-fifth century the ruling dynasty of the Huns were known as the ... wait for it ... Heffalumps. I mean Hephthalites. Sorry about the slip there. But undoubtedly they were as terrifying as Heffalumps. And just as it wasn't an easy task for Winnie the Pooh and Piglet to try and catch a Heffalump, the Hephthalites with their formidable armies of nomadic horsemen and advanced structures of sedentary government were an absolute Devil for the Sassanians to defeat. Only by enlisting the help of the Gokturks, the new kids on the block among the nomadic peoples of the Eurasian Steppe, were the Sassanians able to finally defeat the Hephthalites and reclaim their Central Asian territories at last in 557. Indeed, it was the common Hunnic threat that meant that the fifth century was largely a period of peace and indeed some degree of co-operation between Romans and Persians.

Via Wikipedia Commons: a fifth century plate depicts Bahram V out hunting

Via Wikimedia Commons: a relief at Taq-e-Bostan, Kermanshah province, Iran, created to commemorate the coronation of Ardashir II (r.379 - 383) depicts him receiving the royal diadem from his brother, Shapur II (r.309 - 379), with the God of light, Mithra, guarding him from behind. The two brothers stand over the corpse of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, who they defeated in 363. Photo credit: By dynamosquito from France - Shapur II investiture at Taq-e Bustan, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32705055

Via Wikimedia Common: '"Help! Help!" cried Piglet. "A Hephthalite! A horrible Hephthalite!"' A mural from the abandoned city of Dilberjin Tepe in Afghanistan depicts a Hephthalite king. 

Thus this superpower conflict dragged on for a very long time, with neither side really gaining an obvious upper hand. In the meantime, it consumed everyone's attention, just as a few generations ago the Cold War did or the tensions between the USA and China does today. Let's take as an example a fairly typical passage from our old friend, Gregory of Tours, in the year 579:

The troops of Tiberius beat the Persians in battle and came home victorious, carrying enough booty to satisfy the cupidity of any man, or so one would have thought. Twenty elephants which they had captured were paraded before the emperor (Book 5, Chapter 30).

How did Gregory, tucked away in his corner of Merovingian Gaul, find out what was going on more than 2000 miles away. His account of what went on in the year 591 gives us some indications:

In the sixteenth year of King Childebert's reign and the thirtieth year of King Guntram's, a bishop called Simon travelled to Tours from foreign parts. He gave us news of the overthrow of Antioch and described how he himself had been led away captive from Armenia to Persia. The King of the Persians had invaded Armenia, sacking the country, burning down the churches and, as I have said, taking this bishop away into captivity with his flock. It was on that occasion that they tried burning down the church of the Forty-eight Saints and Martyrs, who met their deaths in this region, as I have described in my Book of Miracles. They piled the church high with heaps of wood soaked in pitch and pigs' fat, and then set blazing torches to it. Despite all their efforts this inflammable material would not catch fire, and when they saw this miracle performed by God they left the church. One of his fellow prelates came to hear of how Bishop Simon had been led off into captivity, and he sent his men with ransom-money to the King of the Persians. The King accepted the ransom, unchained Simon and released him from slavery. The Bishop then left the region and travelled to Gaul, where he sought help from the faithful. That was how he came to tell me this story, just as I have set it out above (Book X, Chapter 23).

People in the sixth century West hearing news about (attempted) desecration of holy sites and the brutal treatment of civilians in war in the Middle East, and what sounds like an Eastern Christian refugee coming to Europe, really makes you think when reading this "does anything change at all?"

How did this equilibrium come to an end? The answer is that the internal situation was changing in each of the empires.

In the case of the Sassanians, from the time of the aforementioned Bahram V (r.420 - 438), the Sassanian Kings of Kings went about building a strong working consensus with the nobility. Slowly they managed to convince them that a superior kind of power and prestige came from service to the state than from being, well, noble alone. The seals of sixth century Persian nobles, for example, depict them wearing the headgear their offices entitled them to wear at court, and only occasionally vaunted their noble lineage alongside their official, state-issued title. They also began ramping up the propaganda. Court scholars in the fifth century worked to write down the epics and histories of the mythical early dynasties of Persian kings, which had hitherto been passed down orally. These explicitly identified the Sassanians with the Kaynian dynasty, who had saved the world from the legions of nomadic barbarians from the far north and east and demons in the service of Angra-Mainyu, the Zoroastrian equivalent of the Devil. The aristocrats could see themselves in the heroes that had faithfully served the Kaynian kings against the forces of darkness and evil. For exaple, after the general Sukhra had liberated the men held captive by the Huns after they'd defeated and killed Shahanshah Peroz (r.457 - 484), he claimed descent from the heroes Karen and Tus who'd saved Iranian kingship after King Nawdhar had been slain by the forces of evil. Meanwhile the Hephthalites could be identified with the "evil and oppressive" xiaona or xyonyan (too similar to "Hun" to be merely coincidental), one of the Steppe barbarian peoples in the service of Angra-Mainyu. In the Avesta, they had invaded Iran under their King Arjasp but had been been defeated by King Wishtasp. Indeed, Sassanian kings from Yazdegerd I (399 - 420) on had included the title ramsahr, which King Wishtasp had held, to their coins. No doubt as a consequence of this ideology, they were able to get the nobles to co-operate in building 195 km wall in what is now Turkmenistan called the Great Wall of Gorgan, on which permanent forces of 15 - 30,000 soldiers would be stationed, to defend against the Hephthalites. Indeed it was located almost exactly where, in the Avesta, the hero Arash had fired an arrow to define the limit between Iran (the land of good, light and civilisation) and Turan (the land of barbarism, darkness and evil). So through a powerful religious ideology and effective consensus-building with the aristocracy, the Sassanian kings were able to, by the sixth century, build up a stronger, more centralised state than they'd had in the fourth century. And once the Hephthalites were out the way in 557, they were able to focus all their attentions westwards, towards the Roman Empire.

Meanwhile, the Romans were experiencing a downturn in their fortunes. Under Justinian the Great (r.527 - 565) the Roman military, and the tax-system that supported it, became overstretched in his attempts to reconquer the Western provinces from 533 to 554. The long drawn-out war against the Ostrogoths in Italy, was so downright devastating for the Italian economy that the Roman state was barely able to collect taxes in the reconquered province afterwards. Meanwhile, the coming of pandemic disease in the form of bubonic plague in the 540s, decimated the population, especially in the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, which in turn meant less economic productivity and less people to tax. In subsequent decades it would go on to wreak havoc in Gaul (as we mentioned in the previous post), and would even reach Britain. Famines induced by climate change and volcanic activity also depleted the tax base. And from the 560s, new barbarian threats came from the north. Even in good times, the raising of the tax revenues necessary to support the bureaucracy and army was hampered by corruption and various forms of passive resistance. Now, funding them was becoming extremely difficult. And to make matters worse, while all this was going on, new external barbarian threats were appearing on the horizon. The Lombards invaded and overran roughly two thirds of Italy in 568 - not until 1870 would the Italian peninsula be under the effective authority of a single ruler again. And towards the end of the sixth century, the Avars, a Steppe nomad confederacy that had settled on the Great Hungarian Plain, and their vassals the Slavs, began to terrorise the Balkans. It was in the context of the unravelling of Justinian's imperial project in the West, pandemic disease, catastrophic global cooling, famine and incessant warfare, that there was a growing sense among Christians from Gaul (apocalyptic thought is implicit in Gregory of Tours' Histories) to Syria that Biblical prophecies were being fulfilled and the end of the world was coming soon. With everything that's going on in the world right now, its perhaps easier for us to get inside the headspace of people living in the late sixth century than it would have been for historians, say, twenty-five years ago.

Under Emperor Maurice (r.582 - 602), the situation was starting to improve a bit for the Romans. By intervening decisively on the side of the legitimate Sassanian Shahanshah Khosrow II during the revolt of the usurper Bahram Chobin in 589 - 591, Maurice managed to guarantee peace and security on the eastern frontier. This meant he could divert the Roman legions towards dealing with the Lombards in Italy and the Avars and Slavs on the Danube. But money continued to be a problem. Maurice had faced mutiny in the army back in 588, when he cut soldiers' wages by a quarter. But in 600, he refused to ransom 12,000 Roman legionaries who had been captured by the Avars, despite protests from within the army led by one of his generals, Phocas, and so the legionaries were slaughtered. In 602, when Maurice tried to get his troops to campaign beyond the Danube during the Winter because it was too expensive to have them quartered in Roman territory, they revolted and overthrew him. Maurice and his two sons were executed, and Phocas was proclaimed emperor.

Phocas proved to be a highly authoritarian and unpopular ruler, and the Roman Empire was plunged into a state of effective civil war. Khosrow II saw his chance, reneged on what he had promised a decade ago and renewed war with Rome. By 610, the Euphrates frontier had collapsed. In the same year, Heraclius, the son of the governor of Africa, sailed up to Constantinople with a massive fleet, Phocas' supporters abandoned him and Heraclius was proclaimed the new Roman emperor. 

In 613, Persian armies entered Damascus, and in 614, with the help of local Jews and Samaritans, they captured Jerusalem, massacred the Christians and seized the remains of the True Cross on which Christ was crucified, sending them back to Persia. At this point, the Roman senate in Constantinople tried to sue for peace. They sent envoys, who told Khosrow II that Heraclius was the Shahanshah's "true son, eager to perform the services of your serenity in all things." Khosrow immediately had the envoys executed. He was not fighting an old-style war with the aim of capturing strategic frontier cities and fortresses or making the Romans pay tribute and acknowledge the Shahanshah's authority over all civilised humanity. This was a war of annihilation! Only one empire was going to make it out of the war alive!

Coin of Khosrow II, minted at Ram Hormuz in southwestern Iran and found at Thamesfield, Greater London, in 2017. Another coin of his has been found at Anglesey in Wales. As for how they might have got to Britain in the early seventh century, see this post from Dr Caitlin Green's excellent blog. 

In 619, Egypt fell to the Persians. Now only Anatolia stood in their path. Meanwhile, Heraclius was making crisis measures. The salaries of soldiers and government officials were halved and churches were having their gold and silver plate stripped and melted down to make more coins to be used to pay off the Avars and buy allies in the Caucasus. He also made a religious propaganda drive, tapping into the widespread fears of imminent apocalypse at the time, playing up the Persian atrocities committed in Jerusalem and describing the war against the Persians as a Christian "holy war." He also managed to train a large force of soldiers in guerrilla warfare, so that they could push through the mountains of Armenia to attack the Persians in their own heartland - Heraclius knew that the best defence was a good offense!

In 624, Heraclius got his revenge for the massacre of the Christians in Jerusalem by invading Armenia and destroying the Zoroastrian fire temple at Takht-i-Suleiman. He also dispatched envoys to the Gokturks (its them again), asking them to send armies to fight the Persians. Meanwhile, the Persians were laying waste to the ancient cities and senatorial great estates of Anatolia. Ephesus, Sardis, Halicarnassus, Magnesia, cities that went back to Dark Age and Archaic Greek colonies and were more than a millennium old, were mostly reduced to smouldering ruins, and even after the war was over they were either completely abandoned or were reduced to a much smaller urban area. In 626, Khosrow enlisted the support of the Avars and they laid siege to Constantinople from both sides of the Bosphorus. Heraclius did not take the bait and the siege failed, apparently with the miraculous intervention of the Virgin Mary. 

By 627, Heraclius and his Gokturk allies had broken through the Persians' northern frontier defences in the Zagros mountains and the Caspian littoral. Soon they had reached the plains of Syria, and on 12 December 627, Heraclius won a decisive victory over the Persians at Nineveh. For this battle for the fate of two empires, at the twilight of the ancient world, to have have happened at the site of the old capital of the Assyrian Empire which the Babylonians and Medes had captured and destroyed in 612 BC, is too poetic to be true. The Roman and Gokturk armies then came down into Iraq, one of the great breadbaskets since the dawn of civilisation itself, destroying the rich agricultural estates of the Sassanian nobility. When Heraclius reached the Sassanian capital of Ctesiphon in 628, he was told that Khosrow II had been deposed in a coup, and that the Sassanians now wanted peace. The eastern provinces were restored to Roman rule and the True Cross was restored to Jerusalem. Heraclius was triumphant - he had saved the empire from destruction by showing the political and military skills worthy of an Augustus, a Trajan or a Constantine. Roma Invicta indeed!

News reached far and wide of Heraclius' accomplishments, including to Merovingian Gaul where King Dagobert (remember him from our previous post), at Heraclius' insistence, had forcibly converted his Jewish subjects to Christianity. Such anti-Jewish persecution was in part collective punishment for what had happened at Jerusalem in 614, but no doubt was also linked to a strong sense that the end of the world was coming and thus the remaining Jews needed to be won over to Christ. And they would be much remembered for a long time afterwards. Adhemar of Chabannes, writing in the early eleventh century, remembered what had happened four hundred years ago very well indeed:

(Original Latin) Tunc Eraclius imperator crucem Domini de fano Cosdroe, quod erat in Perside, victor detulit in Hierusalem, et exaltacio sancte Crucis in sua civitate tunc facta est. Eo Tempore, piissimus imperator Eraclius Dagoberto munera misit, et rogavit ut baptizare compelleret omnes Judeos qui erant in omni regno ejus; quod et factum est.

(My translation) Then, the emperor Heraclius, who was in Persia, defeated Khosrau, who had taken away the cross of the Lord from the temple in Jerusalem, and so with holy exaltation erected the Cross in his city [Constantinople]. At that time, the most pious emperor Heraclius sent gifts to Dagobert, and asked that he would force all the Jews who were living throughout his kingdom to be baptised; and that was done. 

The Roman emperor Heraclius, watched over by a Cherubim, receives submission from the defeated Persian King of Kings, Khosrow II, on an enamel and gilt copper plaque from a cross made in Northern France sometime in the 1160s. 

Heraclius defeats the Persians at Nineveh, from a fresco cycle of the history of the true cross painted by the Italian renaissance artist, Piero della Francesca, at Arezzo c.1452.

Islam appears on the stage, the fall of the Persian Empire and goodbye Mare Nostrum 

While the ultimate showdown between Romans and Persians was taking place, a new religion was stirring in Arabia. After all, the Prophet Muhammad (570 - 632), peace be upon him, was of exactly the same generation as Heraclius (575 - 641) and Khosrow II (570 - 628). It was in 610, when the Persians overran the Euphrates and entered Roman Syria, that Muhammad began receiving visions for an angel, as the Quran and the Hadiths relate. It was in 622, as Heraclius was preparing his counter-offensive through the Caucasus, that Muhammad, having established himself as a prophet and started a new religion, fled Mecca to escape his enemies and came to Medina, where he created a model Muslim community. As the Roman-Sassanian war drew towards its climax, Muhammad was starting to unify the tribes of Arabia through a series of military campaigns. And it was four years after Heraclius had utterly defeated Khosrow that Muhammad, having unified all of Arabia, made his sermon at Mount Arafat near Mecca, embarked on his final pilgrimage, and died. 

Now there's a lot of controversy over the life of the Prophet and when exactly did something that we can legitimately call Islam really emerge. While some fragments of the Quran have been pretty conclusively dated to within a generation or two after the death of Muhammad, like the Birmingham folia, the Tubingen fragment and the Sana'a manuscript (the most complete, containing 70% of the Quran we have today), the earliest biographical account of Muhammad's life does not appear until the eighth century, when it was written by Ibn Ishaq (704 - 767). And the earliest complete Qurans - the Topkapi and Samarkand manuscripts - date from the eighth century as well. Likewise the hadiths, authoritative collections of the things Muhammad and his followers said and did, were not compiled until around 800. 

Via Wikimedia Commons: Folio 2 Recto of the Birmingham Quran, putatively dated to 645

Given that this is ancient/ early medieval history we're dealing with, this really shouldn't be surprising at all - our sources are always few, mostly fragmentary and fairly often written relatively late in relation to the events they describe. We've seen problems of this kind on this blog before, with Syagrius and King Arthur (although admittedly much worse in the latter case). At the same time, whatever facts we can or can't ascertain about the lives of Syagrius and King Arthur don't impinge on the beliefs of more than two billion people across the globe. This is undoubtedly an area where one has to tread carefully and sensitively. Much in contrast to historical criticism of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, which got going in earnest in early nineteenth century Germany and has been thriving among liberal Protestants and Jews ever since (but still gets steely reception from traditionalist Catholics and Ultra-Orthodox Jews and hysterical reactions from evangelical Protestants), historical criticism is a very new approach to Islamic holy texts. Basically it all really started in the 1970s with the work of John Wansborough, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, none of whom were practicing Muslims. Thus it was inevitable that their work would be seen as somewhat culturally insensitive. And the positions they took were very extreme. Wansborough cast doubt on whether Muhammad even existed, and argued that nothing reliable could be said about Muslim Arab history until the 690s and that the Quran didn't come together until the ninth century. Patricia Crone and Michael Cook developed his ideas further, and suggested that Islam had originated as a Messianic Jewish sect, which they called Hagarism. Now these positions have been rejected, including by their own authors. Its now fairly clear that Muhammad did exist and played a significant role in the emergence of Islam - a clear indication of this is that an Egyptian Papyrus of 643 dates itself by the Hijri Calendar (in which time began again following Muhammad's flight from Mecca) -  though there's still much debate over the historicity of the traditional accounts of his life. Its also now clear, as we discussed earlier, that bits of the Quran were circulating from the 640s. And inscriptions from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the first major piece of Islamic architecture (completed 691 - 692) clearly name Islam as a religion distinct from either Judaism or Christianity, and Muhammad as its founder (follow this link here for the inscriptions on both the inner and outer octagonal arcade in English translation - together they really do amount to a remarkably coherent summary of Islamic theology as Muslims would still recognise it today).

The Dome of the Rock Interior. The mosaics, circular arches and and Corinthian style capitals show clear Roman influence, especially from early Christian basilicas, though its not without distinctively Islamic features either - inscriptions in Kufic script and an absence of figurative artwork. Photo credit: By Virtutepetens - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66061506

Section of the Dome of the Rock front with Kufic inscriptions above the entrance. Photo credit:By Leon petrosyan - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31680539 

I can claim little expertise in any of these debates about the origins of Islam. But what I can say is that all of what we've discussed in this post and the previous one - the cataclysmic all-out war between the Romans and Persians from 602 - 628, the Bubonic Plague pandemic (an ongoing concern from the 540s through to the 760s),  the collapse of imperial tax bases, famine, the devastating effects of climate change, intense theological disputes about the relationship between humanity and the divine, apocalyptic religious ideas (in Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism) and a plethora of saints and other charismatic holy men - really give us a sense of the world that gave birth to Islam. The Arabian Peninsula may have been peripheral to most of this, but the Arabs were not oblivious to these developments and weren't isolated from what was going on politically and culturally elsewhere. Indeed, the two biggest Arab tribal confederacies, the Ghassanids and Lakhmids, were clients of the Romans and Sassanids respectively. And around the time Muhammad was born in 570, the Sassanids decisively intervened in Yemen, ending the occupation of it by the Christian Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum, which had conquered the Jewish Arab kingdom of Himyar in the region. In other words, Islam definitely did not appear out of the blue - rather, it was kindled by the dying embers of the world of late antiquity. 

After the Prophet Muhammad's death in 632, armies of Arab tribesmen began pouring out of the Arabian Peninsula. As you might have deduced, both the Romans and the Persians were pretty exhausted in terms of resources and military might, after a quarter-century of intense and costly warfare. The Roman imperial control over the eastern provinces of Syria, Palestine and Egypt, which it had temporarily lost to the Sassanids in the 610s, had largely been restored only on paper. Meanwhile, most of the great cities of Anatolia had been reduced to rubble by the Persians and the agricultural great estates of the senators had been torched to the ground. And in Greece, the Avar invasions going on alongside the Persian war had led to most of Macedonia, Epirus and the Peloponnese being settled in by hostile Slavic tribes - it was around this time that ancient Sparta was finally abandoned. The Roman imperial administration and its tax base were in complete tatters!

Meanwhile, on the Persian side, the crushing defeat of Khosrow II and the end of the Sassanid dream of all of humanity being united under the Empire of the Iranians, immediately generated a crisis of legitimacy for the regime. Between 28 February 628 (death of Khosrow II) and 16 June 632 (accession of Yazdegerd III), the Sassanids went through twelve different monarchs in succession. Some of them were from the House of Sassan, others were from aristocratic factions. Interestingly, and uniquely in Sassanian history, two of them were women - Queen Boran (r.630 and again in 631 - 632), daughter of Khosrow II, and her sister Queen Azarmidokht (r.630 - 631). All of them, however, ended their reigns by being violently deposed or assassinated. In terms of levels of political violence and internecine strife reached, seventh century Sassanian Persia really would make England during the Wars of the Roses look like a teddy bears' picnic, and even Merovingian Gaul a generation or so later would appear pretty tame by comparison. Thus Sassanian Persia was left utterly destabilised and enfeebled by the 630s.

Via Wikimedia Commons: Coin of Queen Boran. Note how she appears exactly like a male Shahanshah, just minus the beard and plus the long braids.

At Yarmouk in Syria in 636, the Arab armies under the leadership of Khalid ibn al-Walid, one of the greatest military commanders in medieval history, led a significantly smaller force to completely decimate the Roman field army in the east. This event was a complete and utter disaster for the Romans. Having neither the money nor the manpower to dislodge the victorious Arab invaders, Heraclius had no choice but to leave Antioch. He blamed the defeat on his own moral failure, specifically his incestuous marriage to his niece, Martina. Two years later, all the cities in Syria and Palestine had surrendered to the Arabs. Yarmouk really isn't all that well-known, but it definitely deserves a place among the greatest defeats suffered by the Roman army, alongside more familiar ones like Cannae (216 BC) or Teutoburg Forest (9 AD). Indeed, in the grand scheme of world history, it was almost certainly more decisive than either of them. Indeed, the consequences of Yarmouk are still with us in the present day - without it, the politics of the Middle East, which so rarely escapes our headlines, would be unimaginably different. 

The next stop for the Muslim Arabs was Egypt. There they will have faced the last surviving documented Roman legion - the Legio V Macedonica, which had begun life as one of the 28 legions raised by Gaius Octavianus Augustus in 43 BC. By 642, Egypt had fallen to the Arabs as well - the Roman Empire had now lost three of its richest, most urbanised, most taxable provinces, and without the Egyptian grain fleet Constantinople could no longer sustain a population of half a million people.

Via Wikimedia Commons: Roman legionaries as we're most familiar with them depicted on Trajan's column. Of course the Roman legionaries of the Fifth Legion facing the Muslim onslaught in Egypt no longer looked like this. But they retained the same command structure (i.e. their regiments were still commanded by centurions and tribunes), were given the same level of training, held to the same level of discipline and had the best, cost-effective, up-to-date military equipment. While Roman armies stopped being called legions after the seventh century, they remained  paid, drilled, professional standing forces whose commanding officers were versed in the latest tactical theory (some military manuals were written by Roman emperors themselves), until at least the beginning of the thirteenth century. 

Meanwhile, on the Sassanian front, in 637 Muslim armies had conquered Iraq. By 651 they had penetrated so deep into Sassanian territory that they had reached the modern day Iran-Afghanistan border, and the last Shahanshah Yazdegerd III, grandson of Khosrow II, was killed. His son, Peroz III (d.679), went into exile in China, where he served as a general for the Tang emperors and led the "Governorate of Persia", a Sassanian court in exile which lasted until at least the 720s.

Heraclius' grandson, the Roman emperor Constans II (r.641 - 668), taking advantage of some breathing space gained from a peace treaty with the Arabs, tried to move the capital to Syracuse in 663. While his most immediate concern was his unpopularity with the citizens of Constantinople, it may have been that he had more long term strategic concerns. His reasoning might have been that Sicily was an island, occupying a central place in the Mediterranean, that was less at risk of Muslim attack than Constantinople - already in the 650s, Arab armies were invading the soft underbelly of Anatolia and, having gained a fleet, the Arabs were starting to raid Crete and Rhodes. It would have also placed him much closer to Africa, which after Justinian's reconquest of it from the Vandals had once again become a tax rich province providing valuable financial and economic muscle to the empire. And Italy, where he successfully campaigned against the Lombard principalities in the south, taking advantage of the fact the Merovingians were attacking the Lombard kingdom in the north. Constans II was also the first Roman emperor to visit Rome in two centuries - and the last to visit it until John VIII in the 1420s! One can see why, as we saw in the previous post, Ebroin, mayor of the palace of Neustria, was fearful of his intentions. But none of this was to last. Reminiscent of the fate that had befallen his predecessor as Roman emperor, Commodus, all the way back in 192, Constans II died at Syracuse on 15 July 668 after being suffocated in the bathtub with a bucket by his chamberlain.

Under Constans' successors, Constantine IV (r.668 - 685) and Justinian II (r.685 - 695), the situation in the east began to stabilise - it was clear that the Romans were going to hold on to Anatolia and the Aegean. However, the situation to the west began to deteriorate, which was what Constans II had hoped to prevent. In 698 the Arabs were at the walls of Carthage and the Romans sent out emissaries to request aid from their Berber tribal allies, from King Witiza of the Visigoths and from King Childebert IV and Pepin of Herstal of the Franks. The Merovingians and their (not quite yet Carolingian) mayors of the palace couldn't spare any troops, though the Visigoths sent 500 warriors. As always, the Arabs sent emissaries to the commander of the city garrison giving the offer of surrender or die. Having received explicit instructions from Emperor Leontius not to surrender, the Romans decided to fight on, believing that they could wear out the Arabs while being supplied from the sea. In the end, an amphibious assault from the Arabs led to the city being captured and the Romans being forced to retreat to Sardinia and Sicily. What was going through Arab commander Hasan ibn al-Numan's mind was "Carthago delenda est" (or rather the Arabic equivalent thereof). Thus came the second and final destruction of Carthage and the end of 850 years of Roman rule in Africa that had only been briefly interrupted by the period of Vandal rule from 439 to 534. Just as the the fall of Carthage to the forces of the Roman Republic under Scipio Aemilianus in 146 BC had brought about the beginning of the period of Roman dominance in the Mediterranean, so the fall of Carthage to the Arabs in 698 ended it. History does not get more poetic than this. The seventh century really has always felt to me like a truly epic finale to antiquity, more so than anything a poet, novelist or playwright could imagine. And lets not be in denial that stories are a huge part of what makes us interested in history in the first place!

How did the Arabs do it?

But now we've reached a perfect break in the story, its time for some ultra-necessary sober historical analysis. How did the Arabs manage to it all? They had managed to conquer for themselves a continuous territory stretching from Tunisia to Afghanistan in 65 years, a speed of conquest surpassed only by Alexander the Great and the Mongols. That in itself is not difficult to explain. Arab tribesmen were good fighters, hence why both the Romans and Sassanids had sought them as allies and mercenaries, as briefly alluded to earlier. Recruiting troops for campaigns was not a problem for the Arab commanders - newfound religious unity, the promise of abundant booty and slaves and a stellar military track record after two crushing victories inflicted on the Romans and Sassanians respectively in 636 - 637 would have meant that every able-bodied Arab man with a camel wanted to take part. And the conditions for conquest could not have been more favourable, given the critically weakened state the two empires were in, as described above.

Yet the Arab conquests down to 698 held together as a single unified empire until the 860s. By contrast the empire of Alexander the Great barely lasted a minute after his death, and by the time of Genghis Khan's great-grandsons, the Mongol Empire had irreversibly fractured into four different smaller empires based on pre-Mongol geopolitical and cultural divides. And while that's not to say we can't still speak of a Hellenistic world or a Mongol world existing for centuries after 323 BC or 1294 AD (give the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom or the Crimean Khanate a quick google search), they no longer exist today. The Arab world, on the other hand, does and consists of roughly the same areas as it did in 698, plus Sudan, Algeria, Morocco and Mauretania and minus Israel, Iran and Afghanistan. All those regions are majority Arabic-speaking, are governed by people who ethnically identify as Arabs, belong to the Arab League and and possess a sense of shared history and culture. Why should all this have been the case?

Another way of going about it would be comparisons with post-Roman Europe. Like the Germanic tribes that formed successor kingdoms in the former Western Roman Empire, the Arabs who conquered half of the Eastern Roman Empire's territories were simply too few in number to demographically replace the indigenous Romanised peoples or engage in any large-scale ethnic-cleansing. But with the notable exceptions of England, Flanders, the German Rhineland, the Alpine countries and Bavaria, none of the former territories of the Western Roman Empire were majority Germanic-speaking either in 700 or indeed today. Most of Gaul, Spain and Italy had some form of Vulgar Latin as the dominant language among both the elites and the general population in 700, from which French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese and Italian all descend. The Illyrian provinces meanwhile have now ended up speaking South Slavic languages (Slovene and Serbo-Croatian), as a result of their extremely complicated post-600 history which I am not getting into. So why don't Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco speak some kind of African Romance language today? They had been in the Roman Empire for longer than most of Spain and Gaul, and the Romans had definitely laid down just as deep roots in those places, with the possible exception of Morocco. Why weren't the Arabs just assimilated or form a Romano-Arabic hybrid identity, like the Franks in Gaul (as we saw in the previous post) or the Visigoths in Spain?

Obviously, we shouldn't get too ahead of ourselves. None of this transformation happened overnight, and much of it happened a lot later than our timeframe. In the ninth century, there were still communities of people in Tunisia and Algeria speaking Vulgar Latin and even Punic (the language of the ancient Carthaginians). And when the Crusaders conquered Syria and Palestine in the First Crusade, they found that many, if not most, of the inhabitants were not Muslims and spoke languages other than Arabic. Not to mention that the persecution of Kurds, Assyrians, Copts, Maronites and Armenians in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt in recent decades reminds us that Arabisation/ Islamisation was never total. But nonetheless, the point still stands that the Arabs managed to remain in charge of all of those regions, avoid assimilation by the locals and slowly spread their culture, religion and identity downwards. How?

The first thing to note is that the Arab rulers (the Caliphs), unlike the kings of Ostrogothic Italy, Visigothic Spain or Frankish Gaul, did not derive their right to rule by claiming to be the successors of the Roman emperors. Roman imperial imagery didn't feature that much in their propaganda. Instead, they claimed their legitimacy from being "deputies" and "successors" to Muhammad, God's Prophet on Earth, which gave them the right to lead the Muslim community (Ummah). What exactly gives any individual the right to call themselves Caliph is the most hotly contested thing in Islam. Indeed the primary sectarian division in Islam, between Sunnis and Shi'as is over what makes a legitimate Caliph. Shi'as believe that the Caliph must be a biological descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, whereas Sunnis believe that the Caliph must simply be a righteous leader of the faith. The Sunni-Shi'a divide emerged during the first fitna of 656 - 661. The first Caliphs - Abu Bakr (r.632 - 634), Umar (634 - 644) and Uthman (r.644 - 656), were not biologically related to Muhammad. But after Uthman's assassination in 656, at whose instigation we don't really know, civil war broke out within the Arab Empire. On one side was Ali, who claimed that as Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law he should be Caliph and that Uthman and his two predecessors were usurpers. On the other side was Mu'awiya (602 - 680), Uthman's second cousin and a member of the Umayyad clan, who claimed that Uthman's murder was unlawful and needed to be punished. In the end, Mu'awiya won after his rival Ali was assassinated by the Kharijites, who were outraged when Ali tried to submit the Caliphal succession to arbitration, believing that only God could judge the issue. He and his descendants, the Umayyad caliphs, would rule the Arab Empire from 661 to 750. That wouldn't stop Ali's descendants and the Kharijites from trying to seize power again in the Second Fitna of 680 - 692. Talking of civil wars and assassinations again ... really does feel like seventh century politics is the same everywhere, doesn't it?

Panoramic view of the Mosque of the Umayyad Caliphs in Damascus (completed 715), the most monumental building project commissioned anywhere west of Tang China at that time. Photo Credit: By علي الصمادي - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28240133

Mosaics from the courtyard of the great mosque at Damascus. Still done in a late Roman style, but notice how there's no animals or people, thus asserting its distinctively Islamic character. Photo credit:  By Dosseman - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=104570492

Shrine of the Prophet Yahya (John the Baptist) at the Great Mosque in Damascus - the architecture here, for the most part, couldn't be more late Roman in style. Photo credit: By Lars Mongs, Arxfoto - https://arxfoto.se/, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107615055

Via Wikimedia Commons: Coin of Caliph Al-Walid I (r.705 - 715), under whom the Great Mosque of Damascus was completed. Unlike his predecessors, who continued to issue Roman and Sassanian style coins, this represents something radically new - there is no image of the ruler, only Arabic inscriptions in Kufic writing. 

Via Wikimedia Commons: but that's not to say figurative images were prohibited outright in all contexts. While Islam was opposed to figurative religious artwork, which it saw as idolatrous, from an early stage, secular artwork was a different matter. Here is a scene of a semi-nude woman bathing from the bathhouse of the place of the future Caliph Walid II, built in 743 at Qusayr Amra in Jordan. 

The non-Muslim peoples within the Arab Empire, who made up the majority of the Caliph's subjects, constituted the "garden protected by our spears. Their relationship with their Muslim Arab rulers was simple - pay taxes, including the jizya (poll tax on infidels) and in return they'd get protection backed up by the military might of the Arab armies and freedom to practice their faith. 

A really prudent political decision was made early on, most likely by Caliph Umar in 640 - 642, to settle the Arab armies as garrisons in cities. By contrast, the Ostrogoths, Visigoths and Franks had settled their armies on the land - as stated in the previous post, there's still good reason to regard them as standing armies, but this meant they collected their pay in tax revenues at source. Arab soldiers were paid generously in tax revenues and being on the diwan (the army payroll) became a coveted privilege. Very little Arab landholding is recorded, certainly in the core provinces, before 750. As a result the army was kept separate from civilian society and thus there was little chance of it assimilating into provincial society and soldiers becoming landowners, as happened in the West by 600. All of this guaranteed that the tax systems the Arabs had inherited from the Romans and Sassanians never broke down as, given that the army remained directly dependent on tax revenue for funding, no one ever questioned why taxes needed to be paid at all. This in turn meant that the central government remained strong. 

It also meant that the Arabs were preserved as a separate and superior social stratum. They intermarried with the conquered peoples, but their children would be raised as Arabic-speakers and as Muslims. Meanwhile, the old civil government structures and provincial elites from both the Roman and Sassanian empires were maintained - some Sassanian noble houses were still producing local lords in northern Iran as late as the Seljuk Turkish and Mongol conquests in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. It was still possible, even two generations after the conquest, to be powerful in the civil administration without changing one's religion or identity at all i.e. John of Damascus (d.749), the last of the Orthodox Church Fathers, was one of many prominent Greek-speaking Christian administrators in the Umayyad capital, Damascus. But after 700, when the basic language of administrative documents changed from Greek or Persian to Arabic, it became more and more necessary to Arabize if one had the ambition of becoming anything more than a local bigwig. By contrast, in the post-Roman West, neither the Visigoths or the Franks never tried to make Gothic or Old Frankish an administrative language at all, which led to much greater cultural fusion and much more hybridised identities. As we saw in the previous post, Frankish and Gothic identities that had become universally adopted in northern Gaul and Spain in the seventh century were more Romano-Germanic than exclusively Germanic.

Conversion to Islam and Arabisation among the elite was thus essentially incentivised on the grounds that it would grant you access to political power at the centre. By contrast, staying Christian/ Zoroastrian and non-Arab in culture and ethnicity would mean that you could only have power through being a local magistrate or lord. For the peasantry, the benefits of becoming a Muslim were obvious - you got to pay less in taxes. In the meantime, the regime of the Umayyad Caliphs was happy to work with the grain of established local government and social structures in the conquered provinces, and allow the indigenous cultures (i.e. Coptic culture in Egypt) to thrive like nothing had happened. It would be accurate to describe the the internal governance of the Arab Empire under the Umayyad Caliphs as being very light-touch or laissez-faire in approach.

Islam enters Europe

By the opening decades of the eighth century, the Berber tribes of North Africa had acknowledged the authority of the Caliph and nominally converted to Islam. The Berber warrior elites desired booty, slaves and martyrdom, and so were willing to expand with or without the Caliphs in Damascus giving the go ahead. Tariq ibn Ziyad, a Berber military commander, landed at Gibraltar in 711 - it is from him it gets its name (Jabal Tariq in Arabic). 

What was in all likelihood going to be just a raid on Spain turned into an accidental conquest when Tariq ibn Ziyad defeated the Visigothic army at the battle of Guadalete and killed their king, Roderic. The Visigothic kingdom, left leaderless, went into political turmoil. The Arabs quickly conquered the south of Iberia. They successfully made deals with the Visigothic governors in many parts of the country, like the treaty of Orihuela with General Theodemir (d.744) which I've discussed before. But in the north east, a Visigothic rump state led by King Ardo survived until 721 when Narbonne (remember the Visigoths still had a tiny strip in what's now the South of France) fell to the Muslims. In the Northwest, in Asturias and Galicia, older tribal communities rooted in not just the pre-Visigothic but even the pre-Roman past asserted themselves. They gathered together under the leadership of a Christian Visigothic king called Pelagius, and thus ensured the mountainous Atlantic fringe of Spain would never come under Muslim rule. 

The political situation for the Umayyads in Spain was very shaky at this early stage. Arab administrators from Damascus were being sent over by the 720s, but it took a while for them to have effective authority outside of the far south. The areas to the north were entrusted to Berber military commanders who were both not very happy up there and not very amenable to increased control from the centre. Meanwhile, the Merovingian realm to the north was attractive for plundering. As we'll see in the next post, these provide the circumstances for the events that led up to the battle of Tours. 

 Finishing with Theodore

A figure who perhaps nicely links up everything we've discussed in the two posts so far is Theodore of Tarsus (602 - 690), whom we've met before. Theodore was a Greek-speaking Roman from Tarsus in Asia Minor. When he was 11 years old, the Sassanian Persians invaded and conquered his home town of Tarsus, thus meaning that he experienced first-hand the apocalyptic final war between Rome and Persia. Then when he was thirty-five, the Arab armies of the Caliphate came and attacked Tarsus, and he decided it was best to move to Constantinople. From there, he ended up moving to Rome, and then in 667 he and Hadrian, his African friend, were dispatched to Anglo-Saxon England, which had only been converted to Christianity half a century ago, to take up ecclesiastical posts there. When travelling through Francia, as mentioned several times before, they experienced extensive suspicion and surveillance from Ebroin, the mayor of the palace of Neustria for King Chlothar III. Then when he came to Anglo-Saxon England and took up the position of Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore found himself in one of the most dynamic religious and intellectual centres in the former Roman world. This was strange, given that Roman Britain had never produced any great Roman writer and no great church leaders, except for the heretic Pelagius. In the sixth century it had been a magical mystery land to learned authors like Procopius, who managed to be well-informed on things taking place as distant as Transoxiana. But now the Anglo-Saxons, who had been pagans within living memory and many of whose ancestors had never been under Roman rule, had converted to Christianity. Their kingdoms were becoming cosmopolitan hubs for churchmen and learning, both Christian and Classical. Theodore contributed much to his new home by convening important church councils and at Hatfield in Hertfordshire and Twyford in Northumbria setting up a school of Greek at Canterbury. His life was a truly extraordinary. One could say that, with all the different stages put together, he personally witnessed both the final unravelling of the ancient world and the first stirrings of a new era. Thus in these first two posts we have now been completely introduced to the world that Charles Martel was born into and spent his formative years in. Now let us move on to his career as a statesman and military commander and the Battle of Tours itself, where all the threads of the story come together.

Sources I used

Primary 

Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, translated by Lewis Thorpe, Penguin Classics (1974)

Adhemar of Chabannes, Historia Francorum, edited by Jules Chavanon, Collection de Textes pour servir a l'etude et l'enseignement de l'historie (1897)

Secondary 

Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 - 1000, Penguin (2008)

Peter Sarris, Byzantium: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press (2015)

Richard Payne, "The Reinvention of Iran: the Sassanian Empire and the Huns", in Michael Maas (ed), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Attila, Cambridge University Press (2015)

Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, 150 - 750, Thames and Hudson (1971)