Who won the Battle of Tours?
The Franks under Charles Martel won a decisive victory at Tours in October 7321, defeating a large raiding army of the Umayyad Caliphate on ground between Tours and Poitiers. For centuries it was remembered as the moment the Muslim advance into Western Europe was turned back, and it earned Charles his name, Martel, the Hammer.
In October 732, on ground between Tours and Poitiers, the Frankish leader Charles Martel met and defeated a large raiding army of the Umayyad Caliphate. For centuries the battle was remembered as the moment the Muslim advance into Western Europe was turned back, and it earned Charles the name by which history knows him: Martel, the Hammer.
The raid from the south
The Umayyads had swept across Iberia and pushed north over the Pyrenees2, raiding deep into Aquitaine. When Duke Odo of Aquitaine was beaten in the field3, he turned to his rival, Charles Martel, mayor of the Frankish palace, who marched south with a hardened army to meet the threat.
A wall of men
Charles chose his ground with care, forming his experienced infantry into a dense square on wooded high ground where cavalry could not easily reach them. The Franks stood, in the words of one chronicler, like a wall of ice4, and refused to be drawn out into the open.
The charges break
The Umayyad horse charged the Frankish square through the day5 and could not shatter it. In the fighting their commander, Abd al-Rahman, was killed. That night, with their leader dead and their camp threatened, the raiders slipped away, leaving the field to the Franks6.
What the day decided
Historians still debate how close Europe truly came to conquest5, but the consequences for the Franks were clear. The victory sealed Charles Martel's power, set his family, the Carolingians, on the road to a kingdom and then an empire under his grandson Charlemagne, and gave later ages one of their most enduring images of a continent defended at its gate.
From Martel to the Carolingians
The victory did more than halt a raid; it made the man who won it. Charles Martel was not a king but the mayor of the palace, the power behind a fading Merovingian throne. Turning back the Umayyad column near Tours in 732 sealed his reputation as the shield of Christian Francia and let him consolidate control over the whole Frankish realm. That authority passed to his son, Pepin the Short3, who deposed the last Merovingian and took the crown himself, founding the Carolingian dynasty. Pepin's son was Charlemagne, crowned emperor in 800. The battle fought by a mayor of the palace thus stands near the root of the dynasty that reshaped early medieval Europe.
