The Arabs initially fared much better in the far west. The decentralized nature of the Gothic kingdom had made it easy for them to practice divide and rule and to win over many local nobles with generous terms of surrender, allowing them to retain their lands and autonomy. Matters were very different, however, in the land of the Franks, and here the Arab-Berber forces faced much stiffer resistance.6 In the 720s a series of Arab governors launched campaigns against the Franks, even besieging Toulouse, but without achieving any lasting success. The last and greatest attack, commanded by the governor 'Abd al-Rahman ibn 'Abdallah al-Ghafiqi (730—32), began as an attempt to capture the Berber chief Munnuza, who had gone over to the Franks and married the daughter of Odo, the duke of Aquitaine. 'Abd al-Rahman besieged him in his mountain hideout in the Pyrenees. When water became scarce, Munnuza fled, but, wounded, he could not outrun his pursuers and so he threw himself off a cliff, impaling himself on the sharp rocks beneath, out of a desperate desire to avoid being captured alive. 'Abd al-Rahman took the opportunity to raid deep into Frankish territory. He crossed the Garonne and Dordogne Rivers and confronted Odo, who slipped away when it became evident that the battle was going badly for his side. 'Abd al-Rahman pursued him, plundering Tours on the way. Then, somewhere between Poitiers and Tours, in October 732, he encountered Charles, the powerful consul of Austrasia, the northeast sector of the Frankish kingdom. For seven days the two sides nervously eyed each other and tested each other with probing sorties. Finally, battle lines were drawn and the fight began. “The northern peoples remained immobile like a wall, it is said, holding together like a glacier in the cold regions, and in the blink of an eye they annihilated the Arabs with their swords.” The triumph seemed a sign of divine favor to many Christians and the Anglo-Saxon monk Bede summed it up with the words: “The Saracens who had wrought miserable slaughter on Gaul. . . were punished for their faithlessness.”
There are almost no contemporary descriptions of this battle and concrete details about it are hard to come by; even its location is uncertain, and it tends to go by the name of one of the nearest of the two large towns: the battle of Tours or the battle of Poitiers. Gradually, however, its significance grew in the European imagination. Charles was hailed as a savior anointed by Christ and he was later awarded the sobriquet of “the hammer” (Martel). By early modern times the battle had taken on enormous proportions: one of the most important encounters “in the history of the world,” when “the world’s fate was played out between the Franks and the Arabs,” when Europe was saved from subjection to “Asiatics and Africans.” In characteristically vivid prose Edward Gibbon had speculated that were it not for Charles’s victory the Koran might be “taught in the schools of Oxford and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.”7 Yet, though this defeat was a substantial one, it was not the reason that the Arabs achieved no further victories of note north of the Pyrenees. In fact, the very next governor after 'Abd al-Rahman undertook a new expedition against the Franks, but before he had even reached Zaragoza he was informed by letter of the outbreak of a major revolt among the Berbers of Africa and he hurried back to Cordoba. At this stage there were mere rumblings of dissent, but in 740 a full-scale insurgency on many different fronts erupted and continued for a number of years as the Berbers “openly shook their necks from the Arab yoke.” Arab rule was never fully reinstated in the province of Africa, which witnessed instead the emergence of a variety of dynasties, some of local origin, some from outside. This meant that Arab-ruled Spain, known as Andalus, became somewhat cut off from the central government in Damascus and this was made definitive when a son of the defeated Umayyad family, on the run from the Abbasid revolutionary armies that had toppled their regime in 750, installed himself as the province’s new ruler. Losing the support of the caliphs, now based in Baghdad, meant that the Arab sovereigns of Andalus no longer had the manpower to embark upon expansion into other countries, and even in their core territory they had to be careful to cultivate links with the Berber clans and the local Hispano-Roman aristocracies lest these unite to eject them.
World History
