Muslim invasion of Francia, Tours and Martel

‘Modern’ science’ states that the Muslim evisceration of Spain was a beatific golden age.  Rapes, raids, beheadings, economic devastation, and the destruction of any building including large Cathedrals, bearing a cross or any sign of being Christian, was a high-water mark in man’s ‘evolution’, perhaps even surpassing the pagan-slave civilisation of Rome.  Nothing was built by the Muslims in Spain.  Cordoba’s existing city wall extended.  Churches turned into mosques.  The Alhambra in Granada designed and built by Christian slaves is the only building that the Muslimophile can point out for architecture elegance, built entirely on the bodies of dead Christians and their confiscated lands and money.  The ‘modern’ world’s remarkably ignorant view would have made little impression on those who lived in Spain from 710 to 1492 under the Muslim yoke, or prey to its Jihad and rapine.  Visigothic Spain in the 7^th century was one of the wealthiest areas on the planet.  Muslims squatted, ate, drained and used that vast wealth, which by the 11^th century ensured that Spain was falling into economic and social decline wherever the Muslims dominated.  Muslim-dominated Spain was essentially a slave empire with ‘Dhimmitude’ or knave status for White Christians a norm, subject to sur-taxation, the enslavement of girls for the harem, or the abduction of young boys to serve in the Jihad.

Spain was just a steppingstone into the heart of Europe.  The publicly declared intention of the Muslim Jihad was to extinguish Christianity in Europe and establish a moon-cult Caliphate.  In 719, the Muslim governor of Spain al Khawlani, invaded southern France and took Narbonne sitting near the Mediterranean.  He used it as a base to raid the areas of Provence and the Pyrenes, acquiring slaves, booty and spilling the blood of the local Franks.  Late in 719 the Muslims attempted to take Toulouse, but were defeated in a significant encounter, which bought the Franks time and about a decade to build a reply to the Muslim Jihad.  The Christian victory over the Muslim Arabs at Constantinople in 718, was matched in importance by the Christian victory at Toulouse, under Eudes or Odo the Great, the Duke of Acquitaine, and his Christian knights.  

After this battle Aquitaine declared independence from the Frankish empire.  Eudes made an alliance with a Muslim-Berber chieftain sited in the Pyrenes in order to protect his independence from Charles Martel and the Franks.  Muslims are forbidden to make alliances with the Infidel.  In 731, the new Muslim Arab governor, one Abdul Rahman, invaded the Berber’s lands.  Rahman pointed his vast army to the land of the Franks.  Eudes attempted a stand at Bordeaux, was defeated, and the city put to the sword, with its population raped, its women sent to harems in Damascus and its men enslaved.  Eudes attempted another defence at the Garonne river, only to see his men slaughtered. He fled to Paris, to Charles Martel and the Franks, a man and empire he had recently seceded from.

After eviscerating the forces of Eudes, the Muslims under Rahman do what Muslims do best.  They plundered the land of its riches.  Gibbon refers to the ‘rich soil’ of the Churches and monasteries, their wealth and objects being stolen or set to fire.  Some Bishops were burnt alive as a warning to others.  By early 732 the Muslims controlled all the major towns and ports between the Pyrenes and the Rhone river.  Rahman had a force of 80.000 men, and he divided them into 2 armies with the objective of taking Tours, the wealthiest Basilica in Western Christendom, containing illimitable riches.  Between the coast and Tours, endless numbers of towns fell, slaves taken, women raped, many sent on to the harems in the Middle East, men made eunuchs or slaves, and gold and silver taken.  For the big brains in the ‘modern’ world, 80.000 Muslim men destroying an entire region of Francia is ‘just a raid’, of no great import, and those happy, laughing endearing Muslims had no intention of ‘staying’ or controlling these Christian areas – which begs the question of what they were doing in Spain.

Exactly 100 years after the death of the mad brigand and false prophet Muhammad, an enormous Muslim force, laden with booty and slaves, was in the vicinity of St Martin Of Tours and one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Western Christianity.  The Muslim force was largely composed of Berbers, non-White North Africans, who fought as light calvary.  Moors or Arab Muslims fought mostly on horseback with scimitars and lances, trained to attack, and largely ignorant of defensive manoeuvrers.  The Franks under their leader or Mayor of the Palace, Charles Martel, were largely a heavy infantry force.  A typical infantry man under Martel would bear 70 pounds of iron.  The Franks would be organised into deep phalanx formations, using shields, spears and bearing swords, axes, including the famous throwing axe the francisca and daggers. 

Near Tours Martel chose the high ground flanked by dense woods, both for protection and to hide the numbers of his much smaller force.  So burdened with booty that he was forced to start shipping much of it south, Rahman, with the autumn winter chills in the air, decided to attack on October 10 732.  The Muslims frenetic charges were direct and head on.  They were largely ineffective against the massed ranks of the heavy Frankish infantry situated on a hillside flanked by forests.  The Franks would have had a wall of locked shields, punctuated by long spears which would seek out the underbellies of horses or the body of a lightly armoured Muslim rider.  Charles the Frankish leader found himself surrounded but enacted such a great slaughter at the besieging Muslims, gaining his freedom, that he was nicknamed the Hammer.  As night fell the Franks regrouped expecting another great clash on the morrow.

But during the night the Muslim hordes had fled.  Their leader Rahman had been killed.  No one knows how many Muslims died but probably no fewer than 20.000 against relatively few Frankish dead.  The Berbers always wary of Arab Muslims and their duplicity, and usually treated by the same as badly as Infidels were treated, had decided that some booty and life were preferable over fighting Frankish heavy infantry.  The Franks did not chase the Muslims, knowing that their victory was due to the heavy shield wall and ranks of armour.  The Muslims devastated the land as they headed south, taking more slaves and plunder and setting villages, town and churches alight. 

Martel had to fight more large battles to evict the Muslims from Francia.  The most significant occurred in 737 near Narbonne where he destroyed the Muslim occupying forces, and in 739 not far away from Narbonne, where the last vestiges of Muslim overlordship were extinguished and the Jihadis were driven back across the Pyrenes.  Indeed, until his death in 741 AD Martel was on a yearly campaign to denude Francia of the Muslim pestilence.

The carnage enacted by the Muslims on Francia, in just a decade is hard to calculate.  Tens of thousands would have been killed, far more taken as slaves, with many women feeding the insatiable appetites of Muslim harems across North Africa and the Middle East.  Untold scores of towns and villages were plundered and destroyed.  Hundreds of churches and monastic buildings set to fire or pulled down, their riches stolen or melted down.  The land foraged and ‘scorched’ to supply food and material for 80.000 or so Jihadis.  The destruction would last generations and as with every other area subjected to the Muslim Jihad, social, economic and cultural degradation was immense.  Yet for the ‘modern world’, these brave, resolute Christians, using advanced technology and armour, though outnumbered and often surprised by the alacrity of the Muslim light calvary, who were now in the 730s starting to fight back against the Jihad and in effect saving civilisation, are casually dismissed as ‘dark agers’, ‘superstitious people’ and ‘backwards’.  The exact opposite descriptions in reality apply to these Christians.  They mounted a considerable and ferocious defence of civilisation against the hordes and Orcs of Muhammad.