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On a Saturday in October 732, somewhere in the countryside between the French towns of Tours and Poitiers, two armies that had been circling each other for years finally collided. By nightfall, the governor of Muslim Spain lay dead on the field, and his army was withdrawing south. Historians have argued about what that day actually meant ever since.
The clash is known as the Battle of Tours, though it’s sometimes called the Battle of Poitiers, and the Arabic sources remember it as the “Battle of the Highway of the Martyrs.” Frankish and Aquitanian forces under Charles Martel defeated an invading Umayyad army led by Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi, governor of al-Andalus. For centuries afterward, writers from Edward Gibbon onward have credited this one afternoon with stopping the spread of Islam into Western Europe. Whether it deserves that reputation is one of the oldest arguments in medieval history.
A Collision Years in the Making
The battle didn’t come out of nowhere. It followed two decades of Umayyad expansion that began in 711 with the conquest of the Christian Visigothic Kingdom in Iberia. From there, Muslim forces pushed north into Gaul, the old Roman provinces now held by Franks and other peoples. Umayyad troops under Al-Samh ibn Malik al-Khawlani overran Septimania by 719 and set up a capital at Narbonne the following year. City after city fell with little resistance: Alet, Béziers, Agde, Lodève, Maguelonne, Nîmes.
The advance wasn’t unbroken. At the Battle of Toulouse, Duke Odo the Great of Aquitaine caught Al-Samh ibn Malik’s besieging forces by surprise and mortally wounded him. But the setback was temporary. Raiding parties based in Narbonne, easily resupplied by sea, struck east into Burgundy by 725. Odo, squeezed between Umayyad power to the south and Frankish power to the north, tried diplomacy: in 730 he allied with a Berber commander named Uthman ibn Naissa, sealing the deal by marrying his daughter Lampagie to him. The peace didn’t last. Uthman killed a bishop and broke from his Arab superiors in Cordova the following year, and Abd al-Rahman crushed the revolt before turning his army on Odo himself.
Odo gathered his forces at Bordeaux and was routed. The city was plundered, and at the Battle of the River Garonne the slaughter was severe enough that a contemporary chronicle simply wrote that “God alone knows the number of the slain.” Odo fled. With his losses mounting, he did something that must have cost him: he appealed to Charles Martel, the Frankish strongman to the north, for help. Charles agreed to come to Aquitaine’s rescue, but only after extracting Odo’s submission to Frankish authority.
Two Armies, Neither One Fully Visible to the Other
By 732 the Umayyad advance force was pushing toward the Loire River, having outrun its own supply wagons and much of its main army. The invaders had split into raiding parties scattered across the countryside while the bulk of the force moved more slowly behind them. The campaign’s late start that year seems to have been forced by necessity: the army had to live off the land as it went, which meant waiting until crops were ready.
What’s striking, given how the story turned out, is that the Umayyads don’t appear to have known what they were walking into. Arab chronicles from the period show little awareness of the Franks as a serious power until after the battle. Charles Martel had been building dominance across much of Europe since 717, and nobody scouting northward would have missed it. But nobody seems to have scouted northward.
The two sides are generally believed to have met where the Clain and Vienne rivers join, somewhere between Tours and Poitiers, though the exact site isn’t pinned down in the sources. The Frankish army fought, notably, without heavy cavalry. Beyond that, almost everything about the numbers involved is disputed.
A Battle Everyone Describes Differently
This is where the Battle of Tours gets genuinely strange as a historical event: barely anyone who wrote about it seemed to agree on scale. The Mozarabic Chronicle of 754, the most detailed Latin source, says the Frankish side had more soldiers and better arms, and that they killed Abd al-Rahman—a claim that lines up with several Arab and Muslim histories. But most Western sources flip that entirely, putting the Franks at around 30,000 and the Umayyads at more than double that.
Later estimates swing wildly depending on the historian. Creasy, drawing on non-contemporary Muslim sources, put the Umayyad force at 80,000 or more. Paul K. Davis, writing in 1999, used the same figure for the Umayyads against 30,000 Franks, while noting other historians have guessed anywhere from 20,000 to 80,000 for the invaders. Edward J. Schoenfeld pushed back hard against even those numbers, calling claims of 50,000-plus Umayyad troops (with even larger Frankish numbers) “logistically impossible.” Victor Davis Hanson thinks both sides were roughly even, somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 men apiece. Other estimates place the Franks as low as 15,000–20,000 and the Umayyads around 20,000–25,000.
The casualty figures are even shakier. Chroniclers later claimed Charles lost about 1,500 men while the Umayyads suffered an almost unbelievable 375,000 dead. That number, it turns out, was lifted from a different battle entirely—the Liber Pontificalis originally recorded it for Odo’s victory at Toulouse in 721. Paul the Deacon got this right in his own history written around 785, but later writers, apparently influenced by the Continuations of Fredegar, pinned the figure on Tours instead. A separate source, the Vita Pardulfi, notes that Abd al-Rahman’s retreating forces burned and looted their way through the Limousin region on the way home—hardly the behavior of an army that had just been annihilated.
What the Victory Actually Changed
Whatever the true numbers, Abd al-Rahman was killed in the fighting, and the Umayyad army withdrew. Charles came out of it stronger; Odo, having called in outside help and submitted to Frankish authority to get it, came out weaker. That shift in the balance of power between the two Aquitaine-adjacent rulers mattered more concretely than any grand clash-of-civilizations narrative. The battle helped lay groundwork for the Carolingian Empire and for Frankish dominance over western Europe for the century that followed. As one common historical judgment puts it, the establishment of Frankish power shaped the continent’s destiny, and Tours confirmed that power.
Charles picked up the nickname “Martel”—the Hammer—from ninth-century chroniclers, but they didn’t attach it to this one battle specifically. He’d racked up plenty of victories by then; Tours was just one entry in a long list.
On the other side of the ledger, the Umayyad world was about to be consumed by troubles that had nothing to do with France. The Umayyad Caliphate fell in 750, replaced by the Abbasids, and al-Andalus descended into internal revolts before Abd al-Rahman I established the Emirate of Córdoba. Muslim leaders in Iberia had bigger problems at home than another push into Frankish territory.
What we still don’t know
Almost every specific detail of this battle is contested. The exact site has never been firmly located—historians place it somewhere between Tours and Poitiers based on where two rivers meet, but that’s an inference, not a confirmed location. The size of each army is unresolved, with credible modern estimates ranging from roughly 20,000 up to 80,000 depending on whose logistics calculations you trust. The casualty figures handed down by medieval chroniclers appear to be borrowed from an entirely different battle, which means the real losses on both sides are simply unknown.
Even the broader question—whether this battle actually stopped the spread of Islam into Western Europe, as Gibbon and generations after him assumed—remains a matter of historical debate rather than settled fact. What’s clearer is the immediate political fallout: a stronger Charles Martel, a weakened Odo, and a Frankish realm pointed toward the empire Charles’s grandson Charlemagne would eventually build.
Sources
– This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article Battle of Tours (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tours), by Wikipedia contributors, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). We rewrote and edited the text. The material adapted from Wikipedia is available under the same licence. Readers wanting primary sources should follow that article’s reference list.
