522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)

0:10A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire. The repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the highlands of Scotland. The Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Muhammad. From such calamities was Christendom delivered by the genius and fortune of one man.

0:55Charles, the illegitimate son of the elder Pepin, was content with the titles of Mayor or Duke of the Franks, but he deserved to become the father of a line of kings. that was Edward Gibbon in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire one of the most famous passages of historical prose ever written he is describing the legacy of the Battle of Tor which was fought on the 10th of October 732 or perhaps 733 nobody is entirely sure between the Franks and what he called an invading force of Saracens so Tom great passage great book great subject yeah just bring some of it alive for us so who is Charles who are the Saracens where are we and what's going on okay so we are still in our series on the Franks and Charles who Gibbon in that passage is very careful to specify is not a king but a mayor or a duke of the Franks he is perhaps the greatest of all the Frankish warlords since the time of Clavis the king who founds the great kingdom of the Franks as the Roman Empire is falling.

2:07But we're now in the early 8th century, and Charles will be known from the following century onwards as Charles Martel, the Hammer. So a tremendous name for a guy who has a very mailed fist. The Saracens are an army in the service of the Amayad Caliphate. So that is the first great Arab empire, the first great empire of Islam. And this is why Gibbon is casting it as a peculiarly decisive clash. He's framing it as a battle between Christianity and Islam. And he's suggesting that had it gone the other way, had the Franks lost to the Saracens, to the Muslims, to the Arabs, then perhaps we might have seen the interpretation of the Koran taught in Oxford.

2:57And there's a bit of a joke here because Gibbon had been a student at Oxford and had absolutely hated it. He despised all the Dons who at the time were Anglican priests. And so I think he's slightly tweaking the noses of his old teachers and suggesting that they might have been circumcised followers of Muhammad. it. But it's obviously, it's not just a joke, because Gibbon has a genius for, well, Byron referred to his solemn sneer. When he makes a joke, there's often a kind of very serious purpose. And he's making a serious point here. He's saying, this is one of the great decisive battles of world history.

3:34And this is an argument that people made, particularly in the 19th and early 20th century, isn't it that uh the battle of tor if it was 4732 was one of the genuinely pivotal moments when history might have gone differently that had the franks lost to the saracens then islam the advance of the arab armies would have continued up into france and that the entire course of european and world history might have been different and in fact all europe might have fallen within the kind of Islamic world. And people genuinely made that argument very vigorously, among them Adolf Hitler, right? Right. So most of the historians in the 19th and 20th century who are pushing this case, they see the possibility that Christian Europe might have become Muslim as a disaster.

4:24So Gibbon refers to it in that passage he read as a calamity. But one person, he said, who thought it was a great shame that the Franks had won was Adolf Hitler. And the reasons for this, he spelt it out in his table talk, and I'll read it. Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers, he said, already you see the world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing is Christianity. Then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world.

5:03Christianity alone prevented them from doing so. Crikey. Because to Hitler, Christianity is a kind of weedy, wet religion that encourages peace. But this is not what the vast majority of historical scholars now think, is it? Most agree now that the Battle of Tor was massively overblown. It was kind of a propaganda victory above all else, partly because the Arabs are not trying to launch a massive invasion of what was once Gaul, it's a raid, one among many that they launch. And the consequences are perhaps not as great as it's often thought. Yes. So that's one argument that is, I would say, is pretty much the consensus now among academics on the status of the Battle of Tor, that it's not an invasion, that it's a raid.

5:47Also, that it's not a clash between Christianity and Islam, because no contemporary really seems to frame it as such. And also that, in a way, it owes more to faction fighting among various Frankish warlords, of whom Charles Martel is one, than it does to Muslim dreams of world conquest. But, you know, there are plenty of other scholars who do hold to the kind of Gibbonian view, and it's a debate that's been rumbling away now for decades. And it is a debate that has kind of echoed beyond universities in a way that is unusual for debates about Frankish history. Because this, I would say in general, you know, the period that we've been discussing, These centuries of Frankish history are among the most obscure in European history.

6:32It's not a period that people know a great deal amount. But the Battle of Tord does have cut through. And there's an obvious reason for that, which is basically the kind of political context in Europe today. And specifically the fact that over recent decades, the growth of the Muslim population in Europe has been considerable. And this particularly in France, so the ancient Frankish heartland, it has generated quite a far right reaction. But, you know, not only in France. So in Britain, for instance, there are now Muslim scholars preaching the Quran in Oxford. And there are people in here, in Britain, as in France, as in other countries in Europe who regard this with extreme hostility.

7:15And I think the implications of this for discussion of the Battle of Tours in far-right circles is, I mean, is unbelievably toxic. So you can see this in the way that it's been used by far-right groups. So as early as the 1970s in France, in the wake of the Algerian war, De Gaulle settlement of that, and the growth of Algerian immigration into France, in the 70s, there was an anti-Algerian terrorist group, so far-right terrorist group, and it called itself the group Charles Martel. So drawing its direct inspiration from the Frankish Duke who had won the Battle of Tours. Then in 2015, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, you know, so the publishers of the hysterical magazine in France who were kind of shot by an Islamist gunman.

8:02Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was leader of the National Front at the time, father of Marine Le Pen. There was this slogan, Je suis Charlie. So people saying, you know, identifying themselves with the victims of the attack on Charlie Hebdo. But Jean-Marie Le Pen said, no, je suis Charlie Martel. And perhaps the most brutal manifestation of the way in which the far right have identified with Charles Martel is that in 2019, people may remember, there was a terrorist attack in New Zealand of all places. So the opposite end of the world from France done by an Australian terrorist. And he attacked a mosque and an Islamic center in Christchurch, killed 51 people.

8:43and on his gun he had inscribed the name of Charles Martel. So you can see that for academics, this is very difficult, I think, to kind of banish this from what they're doing, wouldn't you say? I mean, it's kind of... Yeah, of course. I do think when you read an academic on the Battle of Tor, academics who say, oh, it's a terribly important moment, it's a pivotal moment in world civilisation, a battle that changed everything, they always do tend to be of a very particular political persuasion. I think equally you could say that those who say that it's unimportant, that it's a minor border skirmish, also tend to be of a particular political persuasion, which is simply to say that it is difficult, I think, to remove discussions of this battle from current political contexts.

9:27contexts. So just as there are people on the right who say this was the saving of Europe. So on the other hand, on the left, you occasionally you will get the sense that basically it was kind of racist of the Franks not to have surrendered to the invaders at Tor. And I think it reflects the fact that maybe of all the battles we've discussed so far on The Rest is History, this is politically the most sensitive of the lot. So that's why I think before we get into the details of the battle itself it's really important to explain the context for what is going on here in some detail all right well let's start with the arabs so gibbon calls them saracens which is not a word that you often hear these days but actually they're not really arabs are they most of that army are almost certainly berbers from north africa from what we'd once have called mauritania or probably a lot of them from spain so they're not arabs and actually are they even muslims Because, of course, at this point, Islam is still in the process of kind of being formed, isn't it, to some degree?

10:26Yeah, it's really difficult to know what word to use to describe these invaders for the reasons that you said. I mean, and certainly the Berbers in the army, probably the majority, I mean, loads of them would have had only the haziest sense of what Islam was. And as you say, Islam itself is still in the process of evolution at this point. Islam at this point is best thought of as a kind of franchising system. So groups of people beyond the kind of the heartlands of the Ammayed Empire back in Syria and Iraq and Arabia are licensed by the caliph in Baghdad to form their own kind of posses, their own groups.

11:03And essentially the license that the caliph is giving these groups of people is to go out and proclaim the revelations of Muhammad to the limits of the world. But the reason that lots of people kind of buy into this isn't necessarily because they are kind of passionately committed to spreading the message of the Quran. It's because they want to go out and grab stuff and strip and loot monasteries and towns or whatever. It's a raiding party and not, I guess, totally unlike Scandinavian raiding party in a not massively dissimilar period. I think you're right. And again, that kind of parallels with this in the Viking period is something we might come to kind of later on in the episode.

11:39And so what you have going over the course of the late 7th, going into the 8th centuries, is war bands who are kind of nominally Muslim, spreading westwards from Egypt along the northern coast of Africa all the way to Mauritania. And then in 7-11, there's a kind of exploratory raid across the Straits of Gibraltar. So a war band of Berbers, of Arabs, of Muslims, whatever you want to call them, they land in Spain and they have spectacular success. So they meet the king of the Visigoths. This is the kingdom that had given the Franks Brunhilde and wipes the king and his army out. They go on, they capture Toledo, which is in the center of Spain, the main Visigothic city.

12:22And it's a spectacular victory. It's a kind of Hernan Cortes type victory, the overthrow of a great and wealthy empire. And the loot that gets sent back to Syria is so overwhelming that Spain comes to seem to the eyes of the Amayas back in Syria, a kind of land of wonders. It's a place of talking statues where cities are fashioned entirely out of brass, just full of treasure and also full of slaves. So a massive coffle of 30 ,000 Visigothic slaves are sent back to Damascus. And again, this is seen as being something extraordinary. And so it's not surprising in the wake of this success that the invaders press onwards.

13:03And by 719, so that's just eight years after they'd landed in Gibraltar, the invaders have crossed the Pyrenees. And in 720, they capture the great city of Narbonne, which there's still a kind of tiny strip of Visigothic territory on the coast of southern Gaul. Narbonne falls to the invaders, and then they fan out to conquer the remaining Visigothic strongholds in southern Gaul, so Bezier, Agda, Nîmes. they all fall and essentially pretty much the whole of the Visigothic kingdom with the exception of kind of the northern reaches of Spain have fallen in the space of basically a decade to these invaders I mean it's an spectacular feat of conquest so now beyond that is the land of the Franks and that's the kingdom we talked about last week it's ruled by the Merovingian dynasty we left it with Clothar II he's won his victory over Brunhilde and he's basically got a monarchy over the whole of what was once the Roman territory of Gaul.

13:59So all the different kingdoms are now acknowledging him as their, all the different bits rather, are now acknowledging him as their king. But I read that the seeds of the Merovingians' downfall had already been sown. It's contained in this very success. So yes, as you say, Clothar II had patched together all the various parts of what had been Roman Gaul. So Neustria, which is the kingdom kind of abutting the channel, Austrasia, which is the kind of the eastern reaches of the kingdom, stretching beyond the Rhine, deep into Germany. Burgundy, which is the kind of the southeast. And Aquitaine, which is the southwest.

14:35And Clothar II has managed to rule them all. But the reason why this ultimately is not good for the Merovingian dynasty is that basically it's too large, it turns out, for Clothar II and his son and heir, Dagobert, to rule. So what Clothar ends up having to do is to essentially send his sons out to rule as kind of sub kings. So one goes off to Aquitaine. He's absolutely useless. A chronicler dismisses him as simple minded. Dagobah, Clothar's son, he's sent off to rule Austrasia. He's slightly more efficient. But when he arrives, he's young, he's inexperienced. And this means that he is very malleable in the hands of the two greatest men in Austrasia who we have already met.

15:20We met them at the end of the previous episode because these are a lord called Pepin and a bishop called Arnulf. And these are the guys who had got together to overthrow Brunhild. They'd betrayed her. And so she'd ended up being captured by Clothar and very horribly executed. So Arnulf serves the young Dagobert as his kind of preeminent counsellor and Pepin serves him kind of off and on. Sometimes he retires, sometimes he comes back. But he is basically not just the kind of the leading magnate in Austrasia, but he is also the leading official in that kingdom. And his status is in Latin, mayor domus, which, you know, you could anglicise that to be major domo.

16:03So his mayor, he's the leading official. And these officials are very, very ambitious. So powerful, ambitious, and resolute were the mayores who stood at the most important junctions of Merovingian polity. So that's how Yitzhak Hen, scholar of the Merovingian kingdom, describes them. And I guess traditionally, so going back to the time of Clovis, the role of these maores, these mayors, let's call them that, was to kind of mediate between the king and the local magnates, the local lords. But Pepin is so able, so powerful, Dagobert is so kind of inexperienced and young that Pepin is able to make himself into something more than that, effectively the power behind the throne.

16:49and Pepin's achievement is to set up what effectively is a kind of shadow dynasty to the Merovingian dynasty so Pepin's daughter goes on to marry the son of Arnulf the bishop who's the kind of the chief advisor yeah and this couple they have a son who is absolutely kind of in every sense a chip off the old block so he like his grandfather is also called Pepin so he's called Pepin of hairstyle by the chroniclers to distinguish him from his grandfather he becomes the mayor of Austrasia in 680. And I mean, he's not just the power behind the throne. He puts the throne in his shadow. He is an absolutely domineering figure.

17:30And he's able to do that because for the mayor of Injun's very unfortunate series of circumstances, there are a succession of kind of children who succeed to the throne, die, succeeded by another child. You know, If they grow to adulthood, they're absolutely useless. And so in the shadow of Pepin of Hairstel, this great overweening mayor, the Merovingian king is reduced effectively to a kind of cipher. And by the time that Pepin of Hairstel dies in 714, he's made himself the master not just of Austrasia, where he's the mayor, but also of Neustria, that northern kingdom of Burgundy. And he's also been pushing eastwards.

18:08So under his leadership, the Franks have begun conquering swathes of what today are the Netherlands and central Germany. And Pepin of Herstal is no longer content just with the title of mayor. He wants something more. And so he has given himself an absolutely brilliant title. Dux et Princeps Francorum, the Duke and the Prince of the Franks. And he has established this title, as though it was a kind of kingship, as hereditary. And his son, Pepin of Herstal's son, is Charles Martel. Right. So Charles Martel, although there was a Merovingian king, we don't need to really worry too much about him.

18:48He's called Theudoric IV. Yeah, he's useless. But Charles Martel is the ruler of huge swathes of what was once Gaul, Austrasia, Neustria, Burgundy and so on. But that leaves one other place in the southeast of France, which is Aquitaine. And Aquitaine stands against Charles Martel. Is that right? And this is going to be very important for our story of the Battle of Tore. So Aquitaine has got a duke called Odo or Oddo. Let's call him Odo. So tell me about him. He's a very grizzled, experienced bloke. He is battle-hardened, cunning, and absolutely does not want to submit to the rule of Charles Martel.

19:27You know, he wants to effectively maintain his kind of independence. He's Frankish, but he's able to draw on the kind of the ancient traditions of the Roman province that had been there. So it's a kind of independence that he wants to uphold. And this has been fine while he's only had to deal with Charmartelle and the kind of the Franks to the north, north of the Loire. The nightmare for Odo is the arrival of the Saracens, as he calls them. He is sandwiched between these two terrifying enemies. So he's got the Frankish kingdom to the north and he's got the Saracens who are kind of riding up from the south.

20:02And so unsurprisingly, Odo tries to kind of play these two kind of menacing enemies off against one another. So in 721, the Améad forces, they've completed their conquest of the Visigothic stretches of Gaul. And so then they turn their attentions to Aquitaine. and the spring of 721 they lay siege to the greater city in aquitaine which is toulouse and odo turns to char martel and he says look we're all franks together can you come and help me this is a nightmare and char martel far from rallying to the cause of christendom he says no i'm interested you're on your own so poor odo has to kind of basically deal with this crisis under his own agency.

20:46And he does it very, very effectively because he gathers his forces together. He approaches the besieging Arabs around Toulouse by stealth, and he takes them completely by surprise and he wipes them out. And this is the first great defeat suffered by the Amayyad forces in Europe. And Odo's absolutely triumphant. He writes a letter to the Pope saying, I'm absolutely brilliant. I've killed 375 ,000 Saracens, which is possibly an exaggeration. But clearly, it is a crucial victory for the moment he has saved aquitaine from invasion and he's won a breathing space not just for himself but also for char martel up in the northern lands basically to prepare for the storm that they know is going to come they know the storm clouds of war are gathering and so both men prepare for the invasion that is coming and they know this because even though the the emmaids have been defeated before the walls of toulouse they have not been expelled from gaul and they They are launching raids all the time northwards as far as Burgundy, right?

21:49Right. So Autun in Burgundy, which Brunhild in the final years of her regency had made her capital, a kind of very beautiful ancient Roman city that gets put to the torch. Lots of other towns do, particularly monasteries. You compared the Arab invaders to the Vikings for the same reason. They target monasteries because they're full of kind of riches that can be carted off. And so this is looking really bad. So Odo, his strategy is to try and kind of pick Arab warlords off and enter into an alliance with them. And he succeeds in doing this with a Berber warlord called Uthman, who has been given the command of what today is Catalonia.

22:30So for the Amayads, it's a kind of border region, a marcher region. And Odo wants to stabilize his southern frontier. And Uthman wants to carve Catalonia out as a kind of independent fiefdom. He wants to rule it under his own steam rather than in subordination to the emirate governor in Toledo. And the alliance is signed in 730. And to seal it, Odo gives Uthman his daughter in marriage. Can I just stop you right there? So a lot of listeners may find that really interesting because that obviously undermines the idea that this sort of titanic clash of civilizations and that people are consciously engaged in a clash of civilizations.

23:07Because here you have an alliance between Christian and, in inverted commas, Muslim, and a marriage alliance along with that. So there's no sense that they've crossed some kind of tremendous ideological divide in doing that. No, because what matters to both men, Odo and Uthman, is power politics. That's much more important than any sense of a kind of titanic clash of civilizations. And to begin with, it seems to work. There is stability along the line of the Aquitanian border. Uthman is able to establish himself as independent. But trouble is brewing. The storm clouds of war continue to gather because back in Toledo, the news of this alliance goes down like a cup of cold sick.

23:47And unfortunately for both Uthman and Odo, the governor in Toledo, he's a new governor, is exceedingly able and also exceedingly devout. And this is a man called Abd al-Rahman al-Gafiki. He is from Arabia. He's from the Red Sea. He comes from the heartlands of Islam. He, probably far more than most people in Spain, is completely on top of what is becoming Islam. And he is not prepared to put up with this. So his response is completely devastating. 731, he invades Catalonia. He defeats Uthman, has him killed, captures Uthman's wife, who is the daughter of Odo. and packs are off to Damascus to live in the califal harem there.

24:31So, you know, that's bad news for Odo and indeed probably for Odo's daughter. And you were saying that there's no real sense of a kind of clash of civilizations going on. While Abdelrahman is doing this in Catalonia, Shah Martel is signally not helping the Christian cause because he has crossed the Loire and is taking advantage of Odo's state of despair of the collapse of his alliance by launching an attack on Aquitaine. and carting off loads of loot northwards to the rise. So that's not helpful at all. Then the following year in spring, Abdelrahman invades Aquitaine. He sweeps northwards through Gastegony.

25:07He descends on Bordeaux. He captures it. He sacks it. Odo has been frantically marshalling men to try and resist this attack. He meets the army of Abdelrahman on the banks of the Garonne beyond Bordeaux and the result is a completely devastating defeat for Odo. And we have a chronicle that was written by an anonymous Christian priest back in Spain. It's called the Chronicle of 754 by scholars and it's essentially our main source, our most contemporary source for what's going on. And he records of this battle that Odo's army was scattered into flight and only God could know the number of those who died or were slain.

25:49So this is terrible for Odo. He survives the battle, but essentially he must fear that Aquitaine is lost. So he musters what troops have survived the disaster, recruits what more he can from the kind of the outer reaches of his duchy. And then he rides with them northwards to the Loire and crosses into the lands that are ruled by Charles Martel. and he comes to the Duke of the Franks and his great rival humiliating for him, but he has no choice. And he begs him for assistance. And Charles is still driving a hard bargain. It's not as though he feels, well, we're all Christians together in the face of this terrible threat.

26:28He drives a really hard bargain. He demands that Odo submit to him, that he acknowledge him as Odo's superior. And Odo has no choice. So reluctantly, he gives his submission. Meanwhile, back in Aquitaine, Abdelrahman's men, they've won this great victory and they are keen to profit from it all that they can. So they are spilling out across Aquitaine. They're falling on towns. They're falling on monasteries. They're stripping them bare. They're loading wagons high with loot and they rumble northwards. You know, the army spilling up the Roman roads that lead towards the Loire, the wagons full of gold and treasure accompanying them.

27:07And the further north they go, the closer they come to the lands ruled by the Duke and Prince of the Franks, Charles Martel. And I think for the Maid forces, there's a definite sense that they're venturing into unknown territory here. You know, it's a long, long way from Toledo, let alone from Africa. They don't know much about Charles Martel. They don't know much about the people that he rules. they don't really have a sense of what might lay ahead but there is one thing of course that they are alert to and that is the prospect of plunder and again in in this they are like the vikings and of course the nearer they head to the loire the more they are picking up the rumors of i mean not just a wealthy shrine but a fabulously wealthy shrine the wealthiest shrine in the whole of gore rich in every kind of treasure.

28:02And this shrine, of course, is the shrine of St. Martin of Tor, the great patron saint of the Merovingian monarchy, but also more generally of the Franks themselves. And there is no way that the Duke of the Franks can possibly allow the invaders, if he can in any way help it to strip the shrine of St. Martin bare. Okay, so what will happen? Will they strip it bare? Will there be a great battle? Who knows? Come back after the break and find out.

28:44In this year, two comets appeared around the sun, striking great terror into those that saw them. One went before the sun, rising in the morning. The other followed it sinking in the evening, as if foreboding dire calamity, for east as well as west. Certainly, one anticipated the day's beginning and the other the night's, so that they might act as a sign that evils threatened mortals at both times. They bore a fiery torch to the north as if to start a fire. They appeared in the month of January and remained for nearly two weeks. at that time a very serious plague of saracens plundered the gauls with miserable slaughter so that was the venerable bead writing in the ecclesiastical history of the english people now bead not brilliant at dates to be fair to him he said this happened in 729 he's pretty good he's the guy who comes up with our dating system he's at least three years out here probably so he dated the Comets to 729, but there wasn't any Saracen invasion of Gornas 729.