Charles Martel at Tours: Seven Days on a Frozen Hill Against the Umayyads

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In October 732 Charles Martel, mayor of the palace of Austrasia and the real power behind the figurehead Merovingian kings, faced the army of the Umayyad Caliphate somewhere between Tours and Poitiers. Frankish armies were normally seasonal levies of farmers, so Charles used papal money and confiscated church lands to build a full-time professional core of Rhineland Franks. When the Umayyad commander Abd al-Rahman crushed Duke Odo of Aquitaine at Bordeaux and the Garonne, Charles agreed to help only after Odo submitted himself and Aquitaine to Frankish rule. He then marched off the Roman roads through forest to avoid enemy scouts and took a wooded hill above the Umayyad line of advance toward the rich Abbey of Saint Martin at Tours.

Neither side moved for seven days. Charles's men, used to the cold, waited in wolf pelts and wool while the Umayyad troops froze and their supply lines thinned. When Abd al-Rahman finally sent his cavalry uphill through the trees, the Frankish infantry held a tight shield wall from morning to dusk, and Abd al-Rahman was killed. Later chroniclers inflated the result into a clash of civilizations, while modern historians see a raid in force at the limit of Umayyad expansion. Either way, the victory set up the Carolingian dynasty of Pepin the Short and Charlemagne.

• Odo had earlier broken an Umayyad siege of Toulouse in 721 with a surprise flank attack, but lost on open ground where heavy cavalry could deploy.
• The Franks planted the butts of their spears in the ground so charging horses impaled themselves or balked and threw their riders.
• At dawn the Umayyad tents still stood but the army had gone, and Charles forbade any advance until scouts ruled out a feigned retreat.
• Christian writers later claimed 375,000 Umayyad dead against 1,500 Franks; modern estimates put each army at 20,000 to 30,000 men.
• Edward Gibbon argued that without Charles the Quran might be taught at Oxford, and Charles earned the name Martel, the hammer, in later campaigns at Avignon and Nîmes.