Nearly thirteen hundred years ago today, a desperate battle saved Europe from becoming Islamic.
That story is instructive—not least because it took place in France, which now houses Western Europe’s largest Muslim population.
Precisely one century after the death of Islam’s prophet Muhammad in 632 AD — a century which had seen the conquest of 2/3s of Christendom, including Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain — the scimitar of Islam found itself in the heart of Europe in 732 AD, facing that continent’s chief military power, the Franks.
After the Muslim hordes, which reportedly numbered 80,000 men, had ravaged most of southwestern France, slaughtering and enslaving countless victims and desecrating and plundering countless churches, they met and clashed with 30,000 Frankish warriors under the leadership of Charles Martel, somewhere between Poitiers and Tours, on October 10.
An anonymous medieval chronicler describes the battle as follows:
Near the river Owar [Loire], the two great hosts of the two languages [Arabic and Latin] and the two creeds [Islam and Christianity] were set in array against each other. The hearts of Abd al-Rahman [the Muslim leader], his captains and his men were filled with wrath and pride, and they were the first to begin to fight. The Muslim horsemen dashed fierce and frequent forward against the battalions of the Franks, who manfully resisted, and many fell dead on either side, until the going down of the sun.
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