Status Updates From The Path of the Martyrs: Ch...

“ And yet the Franks dominated not just because of their military might, for Charlemagne’s greatest legacy was to gather together intellectuals to spur what became known as the Carolingian Renaissance, the West’s first tenuous steps out of the dark.”

“Hugh Capet, king of the Franks at the turn of the millennium, was the first Frankish monarch to need an interpreter when he crossed the Rhine, and it was around this time that we stop hearing of ‘West Francia’ and begin to talk of France – although it was not until the 13th century, and the reign of the great king Philippe Augustus, that the title ‘King of the Franks’ was abandoned in favour of ‘King of France’.”

“Through his policy of giving out land to his trusted followers, some historians believe that Martel helped to create the European system of feudalism, as it was later called, a giant hierarchy in which everyone was pledged to do homage to a man above him, giving military service in exchange for holding property.”

“Small parts of what is now France remained in the hands of the Arabs for some time after, though…so chaotic was the region now called Provence that in 889 a group of 20 renegades from Al-Andalus were able to set up their own nano-state in what is now St Tropez, simply by establishing a fortress; their statelet, Fraxinet, was not destroyed until 973.l

“…the battle helped lay the foundations of Frankish domination of Europe for the next century and beyond. The political centre of Europe shifted so that, as Carolingian historian Pierre Riche put it, Frankland ‘would be transformed from an outpost of Mediterranean civilization to the centre of a new Christian civilization’ – and that new centre would be Paris, the greatest city of the medieval west.”

“Because of Al-Andalus’s civilizational sophistication it is also argued that, by not being absorbed into the Islamic world, these Europeans missed out on astronomy, algebra, Arabic numerals and Greek philosophy. One historian estimated that Europe had ‘lost’ 267 years because of Tours.”

“ Out of the ruins of the Roman world there emerged a new civilization, mixing Germanic and Latin cultures united by a common Roman Catholic faith – that of the Europeans.[97] As the old Christian world in the east had fallen to domination by another faith, so a new one was born in the barbarian west.”

“…never again would the Arabs seriously threaten western Europe beyond the Pyrenees. Although no one could have foreseen it at the time, it would mark the high point for Islam in this part of the world, and a generation later Muslim forces were largely driven out of Francia altogether.”

“Although some Arabs kept fighting until nightfall, morale was collapsing, and in the dark they buried their dead and made their way south, leaving their tents and much of their booty in the Great Land. The Franks stayed in place over a presumably nerve-wracking night, thinking their enemy’s withdrawal to be a ruse, but at daybreak they realised that they had won a great victory.”