The day the world’s fate was played out

Or, how German are the French?

The Path of the Martyrs is available on Amazon

Sidonius Apollinaris was a Roman poet and diplomat born in Lugdunum, modern-day Lyon, who over the course of his life in the fifth century observed dramatic, sweeping change. Born into the empire, the son of the prefect of Gaul, by the time of his death in the 480s his home region was ruled by the Burgundians, a tribe from what is now Poland, ‘hairy giants’ who were supposedly seven-foot-tall and ‘gabble in an incomprehensible tongue’.

They were bad enough, but there was an even more terrifying group of barbarians now in Gaul, ‘monsters’ from the north who he described as sporting hideous hairstyles, so that ‘from the top of their red skulls descends their hair, knotted on the front and shaved in the nape of the neck. Their chins are shaven, and instead of a beard they have locks of hair arranged with the comb’. 

The northern invaders looked different to the natives of Lugdunum; their king Sigismer sported hair the same golden colour as his dress and, Sidonius observed, ‘the fairness of his milk-white silk attire’ was ‘rivalled by his skin.’ These were the Franks, and they were to be the most important of all the Germanic tribes who followed the collapse of Roman rule after it was fatally weakened by plague.  

Not only did the Franks come to give their name to France, but such was their importance that they became a generic name for Europeans. During the Vietnam War local people would refer to American soldiers as firangi; a century earlier the British in India were called firangi and the Portuguese in China the folangji, while Europe became Farangistan in Persian. It is testimony to the success of a once obscure German tribe.

That success was in large due to one of the most significant battles in European history, fought on this day in AD 732 between the Franks, along with their Latin allies, and Arab invaders from Al-Andalus. Called the Battle of Poitiers in France and the Battle of Tours in English, it definitively stopped the progression of Islam into western Europe, although the extent to which they could or would have got is much debated by historians. I wrote a short book on it, here, which is currently on special offer in the UK.

North of Poitiers lies the village of Moussais-la-Bataille, set on a slight hill and giving an overview of the surrounding area. It was somewhere here, between the Vienne and Clain rivers, where the fate of Europe was decided one October day, during the continent’s darkest period. 

On a small hill a Frankish force, assembled at speed, steadied themselves to face an approaching army from Moorish Spain, heading for the holy city of Tours to make a winter base. The charismatic and courageous Arab leader Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi must have been confident. They hailed from the most powerful empire in the world and had in living memory achieved a series of victories that seemed relentless and unstoppable, conquering peoples far more advanced than these northern barbarians.

The Umayyad Caliphate now controlled the known world from central Asia to Spain’s Atlantic coast, their domains including some of the planet’s most populated and developed regions, and most of its largest cities. It was the most powerful military force on earth, and seemed destined to extend its control into the desolate ruins of western Europe. For beyond the mountain range separating Al-Andalus from the former Roman province of Gaul lived only the lingering remnants of the Gallo-Romans, speaking a dialect of Latin in their ruined, depopulated cities — and beyond them were illiterate barbarians, descendants of those German tribes who had settled here when Roman authority collapsed in the fifth century. 

The Near East was entering what later became known as the Islamic Golden Age, its great cities home to countless philosophers and mathematicians, combining Greek, Persian and Syriac influences to produce a rich and enviable culture. The Arabs had quickly absorbed the eastern provinces of the old Roman Empire, lands vastly richer and more heavily populated than these dismal regions beyond the Pyrenees, and yet they had mostly collapsed against the onslaught — so how could these northern men trouble them?

Having subjugated North Africa, in 711 the forces of the Caliphate had crossed the straits of Gibraltar and overrun the Visigoth kingdom of Spain in months. Now, just two decades later, the conquerors of Hispania marched into the former Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis, today’s Provence, moving north and then west with virtual impunity and destroying a Latin-speaking army by the River Garonne. 

The Arabs had come with a large number of fighting men and, ominously, some had brought their families with them. Progressing along the old Roman road north, the coming conquerors of Gaul made for the city of Tours on the banks of the Loire, rich in treasure and crucial for control of the region. Were they to capture the old town before the winter set in, then Francia would be theirs.

And so in October 732, some 12 miles beyond Poitiers, a force led by Al-Rahman arrived between the Vienne and Clain rivers where they saw for the first time the army of the Franks, led by their duke, Charles. Al-Rahman brought with him an elite cavalry force, at a time when no infantry had successfully withstood such a form of warfare.

As the invaders approached, Charles had his men lock their shields, forming into two tightly-packed rows, their aim to defend the incline that ran parallel with the old Roman road. They could not match the Arabs for speed and would need to be highly disciplined to combine their infantry and cavalry forces, something no northern army had managed before. 

Many of the men facing the onslaught from beyond the Pyrenees would have been farmers recruited along the way as the Frankish leader desperately raised an army from the north, answering the call of their lord. No doubt they would have been paralysed with terror, for the Franks were most likely outnumbered, and facing far superior horsemen (although the numbers are obviously disputed).

This was the moment, in the words of historian Henri Martin, when ‘the world’s fate was played out between the Franks and the Arabs’.

One of the first recorded mentions of the Franks comes in AD277, when some members of the tribe were transported to the Black Sea as slaves. The men managed to escape, seizing a number of boats and sailed through the Bosporus and the Hellespont to get back to their distant, northern home by the Rhine. Along the way these desperados raided Asia, Africa and Greece, even attacking the great city of Syracuse in Sicily, before heading out of the Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic and home.

According to Frankish mythology the people originally came from the City of Troy, although quite a few groups claimed that improbable lineage. The slightly less exciting reality is that they emerged from a number of German tribes in the Rhineland and the Low Countries in the third century, the term Frank originally being a political designation for various different allied clans. Franci comes from Frekkr, ‘the fierce ones’, or perhaps ‘brave’ or ‘free’, these qualities all being linked at a time when slavery was ubiquitous.

By the 5th century large numbers of Franks lived inside Roman territory, and many had gone into service for the empire. A Frankish tombstone from the fourth century proclaims a central part of their identity: Francus ego civis, Romanus miles in armis. (‘I am a Frankish citizen, a Roman under arms’). But as Roman authority began to crumble at the edges of empire, the Franks arrived in greater numbers, and as conquerors.

But, like many more primitive conquerors of settled civilisations, they came to adopt the ways of those they ruled. In particular, a pivotal moment in European history came in AD 496, when their king Clovis was on the point of losing a battle to the rival Alemanni, a tribe who lived to the east of the Franks in the Black Forest region, and whose name survives in the French word for Germany, Allemagne.

At this most desperate moment Clovis cried out for help from the Christian God worshipped by his Burgundian wife and was rewarded when the fighting turned in his favour. Leading his troops, and armed with franciscas, the heavy sword of the Franks, he ‘made fearful havoc in the hostile ranks’. And with this great victory, on Christmas Day, 496, Clovis and 3,000 of his men abandoned their old ancestral gods and were baptised at the Cathedral of Reims in the Frankish heartlands. Also baptised were numerous defeated Alemanni, although presumably they didn’t have much choice in the matter. 

The alliance between the king of the Franks and the bishop of Rome, at a time when the Catholic Church was at its most vulnerable, would become a crucial cornerstone of the medieval world, and led to France being called the ‘eldest daughter of the church’. This would come to guide the kingdom’s idea of itself as the heart of western Christendom.

Yet while western Europe continued to wither economically during the 6th and 7th centuries, the Islamic world was born with the Arab conquests of the Near East and north Africa. In 711 Muslim forces crossed the straits of Gibraltar and easily overrun the Iberian peninsula, ruled by the Visigoths; the result was a new civilisation, the beauty of which still dazzles.

So in 732 the Arabs set upon the land of the Franks, whether to conquer or raid; after defeating an army of Latin-speakers in the south, they reached the city of Poitiers, which soon fell, its conquerors marching in under the white banners of the Umayyad caliphate. The Arab cavalry would have been unmatched in Europe, they were also far more mobile than any Christian army, and so it is reasonable that their leader al-Rahman was confident of taking the country, if they could find a large town in which to overwinter. The next major city on the Roman road was Tours. 

La ville sacree de la Gaule chretienne, the most sacred city of Christian Gaul, had deep associations with the Catholic faith. It was here in Tours that Charles and his old adversary Odo, the southern Duke of Aquitaine, now met, with thousands of soldiers from across Francia converging. The men went to St Martin’s Basilica to pray, ‘where chain-mail tunics and oiled leather jerkins shone and glowed in the suffused light of the tapers. Wafted incense, hymns by sweet-voiced boys, verses of the Te Deum laudamus, and vows to die for Christ must have momentarily exalted many of these veteran killers, adventurers, aspiring panjandrums, and a few honourable men,’ as David Levering Lewis put it in God’s Crucible.

Some time around October 5, 732, the Christians headed south out of the city to meet the Islamic army in this mostly flat region, suitable for horse-mounted warfare. The Arabs continued north, marching and marching, until on a spot between two rivers al-Rahman’s lieutenant al-Ghafiqi saw the Franks and Aquitanians in the distance, encamped on a hill slightly to their right.

The approaching Moorish army was larger, more technically skilled and confident after a number of victories, and Rahman must have expected yet another triumph. And yet the sources state that the Frankish infantry was immoveable. An unknown monk in Moorish Spain wrote in the Mozoarabic Chronicle of 754 that ‘The men of the north stood as motionless as a wall. They were like a belt of ice frozen together, and not to be dissolved as they slew the Arabs with the swords.’ The victory was theirs.

Ibn Idhari, writing in the 14th century, called it the Balat al-Shuhada, the way or Path of the Martyrs, by which it was remembered in the Muslim world. To European chroniclers it became known as the somewhat more prosaic Battle of Poitiers, or in English the Battle of Tours, to distinguish it from a 14th century battle of the same name. Its impact was immense; even if the extent to which the Arabs might have conquered is questionable, it set the seal on the coming Frankish — and French — domination of a reborn Europe.

The Franks spoke a Germanic language but over generations they came to adopt the Latin dialect of northern Gaul, which came to be called ‘Français’, itself one of around 1,000 French words that come from the Frankish language, among them blanc, bourg, baron, batard, choisir, danser, espionage, frais, galloper, guerre, nord and standard. To the north, Old Franconian evolved into Nederlands, or what English speakers confusingly call Dutch. But it was only in the 10th century that Franks, or Frenchmen as they might be called, gave up altogether speaking the language of their ancestors. And so, along with the Rus and Bulgars, they became one of three tribes to give their name, but not their language, to the country they conquered.

Charles ruled as effective leader of the Franks for another 20 years and his son Pippin would seize the throne, overthrowing the ruling Merovingian dynasty. Pippin’s son Charles — the great, or Charlemagne — would rule an empire that covered today’s France and western Germany, the low countries and northern Italy; yet linguistic divisions made it fragile and in 843 Charlemagne’s grandsons, after prolonged conflict over their patrimony, signed the Treaty of Verdun dividing his empire, Charles the Bald of West Francia swearing his oath in the Romance dialect and Louis the German of East Francia making his in Germanic. The future nations of France and Germany were divided.

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’.

France’s German heritage remained controversial. As late as 1714, the scholar Nicholas Freret was imprisoned in the Bastille for trying to prove that the Franks were German. Franks and Gauls continued as a metaphor for the country’s social divisions; during the French revolution radicals such as Abbé Sieyès spoke of liberating the Gauls from Frankish oppression, just as English radicals identified as Saxons against Norman aristocrats; Sieyès said he wanted to send the aristocrats ‘back into the forests of Franconia’ in Germany.

But the battle would also help cement a wider sense of civilisational identity. In the Latin-language Chronicle of 754, written by an unknown Catholic priest in Spain, a word appears for the first time — Europenese. 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. 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. In 814 Agobard, archbishop of Lyon, described a new identity emerging, paraphrasing St Paul when he wrote: ‘There is now neither Gentile nor Jew, Scythian nor Aquitanian, nor Lombard, nor Burgundian, nor Alaman, nor bond, nor free. All are one in Christ.’ On that fateful day by the river Loire, a new idea of Europe was born.