1,275 years ago the Christians, under Charles the Hammer (Martel), defeated the Muslim armies advancing into Western Europe at the Battle of Tours. It is considered one of the critical military victories in Christendom's history. Until then, the Islamic advance throughout previously Christian lands had been largely unchecked.
Huge swaths of land, still Muslim today, were conquered by Islamic armies not long after Muhammad lived. But for the Battle of Tours, the same fate might have awaited France and beyond--remember, Spain had already been conquered, and it wasn't until 1492 that Christian rulers reclaimed the realm. They would not have been able to have done so had all of the Christian West collapsed after additional defeats.
Here is how one historian describes the significance of the battle:
There is clearly some justification for ranking Tours-Poitiers among the most significant events in Frankish history when one considers the result of the battle in light of the remarkable record of the successful establishment by Muslims of Islamic political and cultural dominance along the entire eastern and southern rim of the former Christian, Roman world. The rapid Muslim conquest of Palestine, Syria, Egypt and the North African coast all the way to Morocco in the seventh century resulted in the permanent imposition by force of Islamic culture onto a previously Christian and largely non-Arab base. The Visigothic kingdom fell to Muslim conquerors in a single battle on the Rio Barbate in 711, and the Hispanic Christian population took seven long centuries to regain control of the Iberian peninsula. The Reconquista, of course, was completed in 1492, only months before Columbus received official backing for his fateful voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Had Charles Martel suffered at Tours-Poitiers the fate of King Roderick at the Rio Barbate, it is doubtful that a "do-nothing" sovereign of the Merovingian realm could have later succeeded where his talented major domus had failed. Indeed, as Charles was the progenitor of the Carolingian line of Frankish rulers and grandfather of Charlemagne, one can even say with a degree of certainty that the subsequent history of the West would have proceeded along vastly different currents had ‘Abd ar-Rahman been victorious at Tours-Poitiers in 732.
Others follow:
Victorian writer John Henry Haaren says in Famous Men of the Middle Ages, "The battle of Tours, or Poitiers, as it should be called, is regarded as one of the decisive battles of the world. It decided that Christians, and not Moslems, should be the ruling power in Europe." Bernard Grun delivers this assessment in his "Timetables of History," reissued in 2004: "In 732 Charles Martel's victory over the Arabs at the Battle of Tours stems the tide of their westward advance.”
Christians and not Muslims ruling Europe, and then the New World, that is what was decided. Take a moment to think about how different 'Western Civ' would be had Charles lost--it would not be called 'Western Civ' for starters. America would not be America, France not France, England not England, etc. No Christian Church sending missionaries to the New World. No Reformation. Nothing would be as it is.
As Edward Gibbon--historian and author of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"--said, had Charles Martel not won: "The spires of Oxford would have been minarets."
Thanks Charles,
Thomas More
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Posted by: mulberry alexa | November 14, 2011 at 12:28 AM