If you are the type of person to express opinions about major historical turning points, and you haven’t (and probably won’t) read original scholarship such as The Age of Charles Martel, I highly recommend the recent In Our Time episode, The Battle of Tours. The reason that this episode is worth highlighting in a separate blog post (rather than tweeting) is that over the years I’ve run into too many people who seem keen to offer an opinion about this event due to vague recollections of an assessment by Edward Gibbon. In short, Gibbon’s conjecture was if that the Muslims coming up from Spain in the early 8th century had defeated Charles Martel and the Franks on the plains of central France, then the Islamic tide would have swept over all of Europe (perhaps as the Battle of Yarmouk initiated the fall of the Roman Near East, or Qadisiyyah heralded Persia’s doom). But most scholars have not accepted such an importance for Tours in many years, so its persistence in the popular imagination can be frustrating. The reality is that the Muslim presence on the fringes of southern and eastern France, not to mention southern Italy, persisted for decades. It seems likely that the expansion of the Arab Empire had hit its natural limits, just as it had in western India, central Asia, and the trans-Caucasian region. It was left to Martel’s grandson Charlemagne to expunge the Islamic threat to what became France and Italy.
Why does this matter after all these years? Because moderns take lessons from history, and attempt to learn from it. The Battle of Tours has been placed into diverse and disparate early modern and contemporary narratives, rather than standing within its own historical context. In the age of Christendom it was a titanic confrontation between Islam and the True Religion. In the 19th century it became a battle in a long racial-civilization war. Today some reinterpret it in light of the War on Terror (though the 9/11 fever seems to have broken). The problem here, reappropriating history for the ends of the propaganda of the present, is a common one, not limited to one ideology. For example, in the early 2000s a book was published with the title The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. The title speaks volumes in terms of intent. In the minds of many liberals Islamic Spain has been recast in a soft-tinted multiculturalist lens. It’s as ludicrous as viewing Charles Martel’s actions at Tours as a blow against Islamo-Fascism. The tolerance of Islamic Spain or the Dutch Republic would have horrified moderns. People in the past were different, and had their own agendas. But through discovering the truth of who and what they were (rather than what we find them convenient to be), perhaps we can gain some skill at seeing our own position in history with greater objectivity.
Comments are closed.