Posted on 10/10/2023 6:04:06 AM PDT by SJackson
This week in October marks the anniversary of an epic event that is not widely known except among history buffs, but which nonetheless dramatically shaped the future of the Western world, and which may still hold inspiration for us in the West today.
After the death of the Muslim prophet Muhammad in 632, Islam spread like a bloody tide throughout the Arabian peninsula, north to the Caspian Sea and east through Persia and beyond, westward through Egypt and across North Africa all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. From there it crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and consumed virtually all of the Iberian peninsula, or al-Andalus as the Saracens called it. In a mere one hundred years, the warlord Muhammad’s imperialist legacy was an empire larger than Rome’s had ever been.
By 732 that fallen Roman empire had devolved into a patchwork of warring barbarian tribes across what is now continental Europe. When Abd-al-Rahman al-Ghafiki, the governor of al-Andalus, crossed the Pyrenees with the world’s most successful fighting force and began pillaging through the south of what would become France toward Paris, there was no nation, no central power, no professional army capable of stopping them.
No army except one – led by the Frankish duke Charles, the eventual grandfather of Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne. His infantrymen, as historian Victor Davis Hanson puts it in a fascinating chapter of Carnage and Culture, were “hardened veterans of nearly twenty years of constant combat against a variety of Frankish, German, and Islamic enemies.” Hanson writes that the Roman legions had crumbled “because of the dearth of free citizens who were willing to fight for their own freedom and the values of their civilization.” But the seasoned warrior Charles had gathered spirited, free fighters under his command who were willing to defend their Christian society, and he led them to intercept the marauding infidels leaving a ravaged trail toward the ultimate prize, Paris.
On the 10th of October, 732 (some dispute the exact date), the two armies met on a wooded field between Poitiers and Tours (and so the ensuing confrontation is sometimes called the Battle of Poitiers), barely 175 miles from Paris as the crow flies. Abd-al-Rahman arrayed his cavalry against Charles’ solid block of Frankish footsoldiers, which at 30,000 was by some estimates not even half the size of the Arab and Berber army (Hanson speculates that the armies were more evenly matched, but the Franks were unquestionably greatly outnumbered).
The opposing forces sized each other up for a full week before Abd-al-Rahman ordered the charge that October morning. But his cavalry, which normally counted on speed, mobility, and terror to lay waste to undisciplined tribes, could not penetrate the highly disciplined, heavily-armed Frankish phalanx. In his must-read book Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War Between Islam and the West, my friend, historian Raymond Ibrahim, quotes a contemporary chronicler who described that the Franks “stood as motionless as a wall, they were like a belt of ice frozen together, and not to be dissolved, as they slew the Arab with the sword.”
At the end of the day’s carnage, both sides regrouped for the next day’s assault. But at dawn, Charles and his men discovered that the Muslim army had vanished, beginning their retreat toward the Pyrenees, leaving the booty stolen from ransacked churches and abbeys behind, as well as at least 10,000 of their dead – including Abd-al-Rahman himself. Exact figures in historical sources are questionable, but Arab chroniclers, Ibrahim reports, “refer to the engagement as the ‘Pavement of Martyrs,’ suggesting that the earth was littered with Muslim corpses.”
It was not the last Muslim incursion into Europe – Charles racked up subsequent victories against the Saracens for a few years afterward – but it was the beginning of the end, and Islam never again penetrated militarily as far into European territory. The victory at Tours helped solidify Charles’ standing among the Franks as a great leader (he was afterward dubbed Martel, or “the Hammer”) and defender of Christendom (the Pope reportedly labeled him “the Hammer of God”). He became ruler over all the Franks, essentially unifying all the fragmented territory of western Europe and paving the way for the rise of his grandson Charlemagne to become “the Father of Europe,” the first great ruler of Christendom.
Some historians today downplay the magnitude of the Muslim threat that Martel countered, claiming that Abd-al-Rahman’s force was only a raiding party with no grander designs on seizing the whole of the European continent. They minimize the significance of the Battle of Tours’ outcome, too; at least one historian even claims that Europe would have been better off if Islam had conquered it.
But Hanson notes that “most of the renowned historians of the 18th and 19th centuries… saw Poitiers as a landmark battle that signaled the high-water mark of Islamic advance into Europe.” Edward Creasey included it among the fifteen most decisive battles of world history. Many believe that if Charles –– had not stopped Abd-al-Rahman at Tours, there would have been nothing to prevent the Islamic tide from sweeping across the continent and making Europe Islamic. Edward Gibbon called Charles “the savior of Christendom” and wrote in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776 that if not for Charles’ victory, “perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford.”
If only Gibbon could see Oxford now. Not only is the interpretation of the Koran taught there, but Islam thrives in Oxford, thanks partly to the patronage of the UK’s current dhimmi king. In his essay “Islam in Oxford,” faux moderate Muslim scholar Muqtedar Khan writes that “Gibbon would have been surprised to learn the lesson that military defeats do not stop the advance of civilizations and the globalization of Islam is unimpeded by the material and military weaknesses of the Muslim world.”
Apart from his dubious suggestion that Islam has anything to do with the advance of civilization, Khan is right: today the Islamic incursion into Europe is of the demographic, not military, sort. The continent faces an immigration crisis due in no small part to at least one generation of willfully unassimilated young Muslims. “Nothing can stop the spread of Islam,” insists Islamic apologist Reza Aslan. “There are those who would try, but it simply will not happen. Absolutely nothing can stop the spread of Islam.”
In 732, Charles Martel begged to differ. What it took was the will, the discipline and training, and a warrior spirit and righteous faith.
Note: The painting above is French Romantic Charles de Steuben’s “Bataille de Poitiers en octobre 732,” which depicts a mounted Charles Martel facing Abd-al Rahman Al Ghafiki at the Battle of Tours.
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This article identifies just one little part of history.
Look at history in total (as much total as you can consume), and you quickly find that we humans have developed an ever-increasing ability to kill one another.
I'm not taking sides in the article except to say that the Battle of Tours was indeed a turning point in the expansion of the Muslim empire. It took another 700 or so years to stop it in Europe in Spain and in other fronts across Europe.
You would think we have advanced beyond the stone-age level of annihilating one another instead of sitting at a table nd working through our differences.
We have not.
Also Battle of Lepanto, oTOBER 7 1571, where Christian Holy League under Juan of Austria , Phillip II of Spain illegitimate brother defeated Ottoman forces sinking 50 galleys and capturing 137 more Killing 25000 Ottoman and liberating 12500 Christian galley slaves
Sounds familiar..............................
Islam does not do industrialization well.
They were weak until oil discoveries enabled them to buy what they needed.
And all of this occurred before the first Crusade.
Remember that when leftists try to make Europeans look bad for “oppressing innocents” and use crusades as an excuse for Islamic Jihad.
It was the other way around. The Crusades were a reaction to the expanding Caliphate.
When you read a true translation of the Holy Quran, you will realize it is impossible to "work through our differences".
There are three options.
They kill all of us.
We kill all of them and destroy every copy of the Holy Quran in the world.
They live in their part of the world and we in ours, with us maintaining a military able to defeat them when they attack.
Victor Davis HAnson Ping!..
Okay. Believe what you wish.
I sorta like your last option, though (from your comment).
It is not our job to police the world. Let's stay in our lane, have a real military, not a woke version of one, and let's work on solving our own very real problems ($33 trillion in debt, millions of illegal immigrants, an honest government, and no two-tier justice system).
And, oh, by the way, stop bullying and pushing the rest of the world to align against us.
Yes. As some of our great leaders believed and often said:
Peace through strength.
Remember?
We ain't nowhere close. Are we?
Then over 1,000 years later France made the mistake of colonizing areas of then Muslim Northern Africa (particularly Alegeria) and then permitted massive immigration into France of local citizens of those colonies, whose descendents (and those added over the years sicne) in France today have altered France domestically, in negative ways it may never recover from.
There is no reconciling the mentality of the Arabs from the Quran, for it justifies all the atrocities they do.
The battle of Lepanto was fought on October 7, 1571, according to the Julian calendar then in use—Pope Gregory XIII’s calendar reform was just a few years later (1582). Under the Gregorian calendar we still use, the battle’s date would be October 17.
It could also be argued that Thermopylae was the beginning of Western Civilization as a historical continuum. Molon Labe still used today to indicate that there is something bigger than self that was discovered by the Greeks. Namely, the right of people to govern themselves and defend that right absolutely. And…. Here we are again.
Trump’s theory is the correct one. Do nothing until you have to do something. Then do it fast and dirty so it never has to be done again.
Our pastor did a 3-hour seminar on CRT and how terrible it is. It has it’s roots in Germany (1920”s??), communist in style, and was designed to break down the family and community bonds that men would fight for.
Good bless the West, death to barbaric terrorists.
Close the border, save our country. Send the Squad to Palestine.
Why didn’t those racist whites welcome the ‘refugees’ with open arms into their lands? Why didn’t they recognize the modern religion of “diversity” and how diversity is our strength? racist!
Our ancestors woudl kick our a55es for allowing everything they lived and died for to be wiped out by handing over our nations and our grandchildrens’ birthright to foreign invaders. Sickening what “diversity” “open borders” bleeding heart “multi-cultural” worshippers have done to us.
It’s called genocide folks.
Or you could opt for the Athenian charge at Marathon, ten years before Thermopylae.
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