The Battle of Tours, 732 A.D. Muslim Expansion into Western Europe is Stopped by the Franks. Feudalism Ascends. The Armored Knight Begins.

The Muslim defeat at Tours shattered any lingering hopes of Muslim expansion into Western Europe. This wasn’t just a battle; it was a defining moment. Frankish victory secured their dominance across the West, carving out a legacy that would blaze a path to empire under Charlemagne. With this triumph, the Franks didn’t just defend their lands—they claimed their destiny as the ruling force of Western Europe.

Tours. October, 732 A.D.
Frankish Forces: Unknown.
Muslim Forces: ~ and up to 80,000 Men.

Additional Reading and Episode Research:

• Creasy, Edward. Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World.
• Fuller, J.F.C. A Military History of the Western World.
• Oman, Charles. The Art of War in the Middle Ages.
• Brehaut Translation: Gregory of Tours. History of the Franks.

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Transcript

Thanks for tuning into today's episode of History's Greatest Battles. As always, please share this episode, or the podcast, with a friend or acquaintance that enjoys this genre of history.

Welcome to History's Greatest Battles, Season one, Episode 69: The Battle of Tours, October of 732, Current Era. 

Frankish Forces: Unknown.
Muslim Forces: roughly 80,000 men.

The Muslim defeat at Tours shattered any lingering hopes of Muslim expansion into Western Europe. This wasn’t just a battle; it was a defining moment. Frankish victory secured their dominance across the West, carving out a legacy that would blaze a path to empire under Charlemagne. With this triumph, the Franks didn’t just defend their lands—they claimed their destiny as the ruling force of Western Europe.

In the years 717 and 718, Muslim forces mounted a relentless assault on Constantinople, the fortified heart of the Byzantine Empire, but their efforts met an immovable wall. This was a true blow to Muslim ambitions. Their armies, driven by fierce purpose and unwavering faith, had thundered across continents—spreading Islam from the plains of India to the distant shores of Spain. But here, at Constantinople, that charge was stopped cold.

This defeat would hold back Muslim expansion into Eastern Europe for over seven hundred years, but it certainly didn’t extinguish their ambitions. If the eastern walls of Europe couldn’t be breached, they would look westward, charting a path through North Africa, across the waters into Spain, and onward into Western Europe.

By the end of the seventh century, Muslim armies had swept through the southern Mediterranean with fierce resolve, and with every conquest, they gathered new converts and fresh warriors, folding the defeated into the swelling ranks of the faithful. In North Africa, the Muslims found passionate allies among the Moors—the very same people known as the Numidians to Hannibal. These Berber warriors of what is now Morocco were fierce in both loyalty and skill.

In 710, Musa ibn Nusair, the Muslim governor of North Africa, set his sights on Spain, just across the Straits of Gibraltar. But he lacked one critical asset—ships. So he turned to Julian, a discontented Byzantine official, who, as luck would have it, was willing to lend him four.

Julian’s cooperation stemmed from a grudge—a bitter hatred of Roderic, the Visigothic king of Spain. With Julian’s four ships, Musa sent 400 men to raid Spanish shores, returning with plunder enough to whet his appetite for a far larger venture.

By 711, Musa was ready to strike in earnest. He sent 7,000 warriors across the straits, led by the indomitable Tariq ibn Ziyad. Though planned as a grander raid, Tariq’s victory over Roderic proved decisive, prying open the gates of the Iberian Peninsula to Muslim expansion. In under a year, Musa had Spain in his grip. But with orders from the caliph to return east, he left his successor, al-Hurr, in command. Hurr wasted no time, driving further into Spanish lands, then crossing the Pyrenees into Aquitaine between 717 and 718. In the years that followed, Muslim power swept up through southern Gaul, brushing against central and even northern regions, their influence rising and receding like the tide.

The Muslims arrived at a moment of rare opportunity, a time when Gaul itself was fractured by internal feuds. The ruling Franks were weak, mired in a struggle for power. When Pepin II died in 714, the Frankish crown was hotly contested between his legitimate grandson and his illegitimate son. Eudo of Aquitaine saw his chance to break free of Frankish dominance and seized it, declaring his independence. But with this act, he invited the wrath of Charles Martel, Pepin’s illegitimate son, who claimed the throne in 719. After crushing Eudo, Charles turned his attention eastward, aiming to secure his northeastern borders along the Rhine. He waged fierce campaigns against the Saxons, the Germans, and the Swabians—ruthlessly securing his hold over the land—until Muslim advances in southern Gaul drew his focus back to the west.

With Charles engaged in Germany, Eudo found himself cornered—caught between the relentless Muslim forces to the south and a hostile Charles pressing from the north and east. Desperate, Eudo forged an alliance with Othman ben Abi Neza, a Muslim dissident holding sway over parts of the northern Pyrenees. This alliance enraged Abd er-Rahman, the powerful governor of Muslim Spain, who swiftly mobilized his forces in 731 to crush Othman’s rebellion. With Othman defeated, Abd er-Rahman turned his ambitions north, hungry to push deeper into Gaul, spreading Muslim influence and plundering the wealthy Gallic lands as he went.

After smashing Eudo’s forces at Bordeaux, Abd er-Rahman pressed north toward Tours—a city whose abbey was rumored to be brimming with riches. Determined to seize every ounce of wealth and spread fear along the way, he split his vast force of roughly 80,000 men into columns, unleashing them like wolves upon the land. In desperation, Eudo fled north to Paris, seeking an audience with Charles Martel himself. He pleaded for aid, and Charles, ever the tactician, agreed—on the strict condition that Eudo swear allegiance, vowing never again to defy Frankish rule. With Eudo’s promise secured, Charles rallied every fighting man he could muster, gathering his forces and marching with unyielding resolve toward Tours.

Charles’s force was around 30,000 strong—veteran soldiers he had led in battlefields from Gaul to Germany, alongside a rougher assortment of local militias, men with little in the way of weapons or training but fierce in their will to defend their lands. These Franks were tough, formidable warriors, marching to battle as heavy infantry. Clad in armor, they fought with unflinching might, wielding brutal swords and axes—ready to stand firm against whatever came their way.

The extent of the Frankish reliance on cavalry remains a point of debate; Europe had long been a battleground dominated by infantry, and only now was cavalry beginning to make its mark on warfare. What the Frankish forces lacked in strict discipline, they made up for in raw, unbreakable resolve. But Charles had another challenge: he couldn’t afford the luxury of a proper supply train, so his men had to survive off the land, taking only what they could find along the way.

Across the field stood the Muslim forces, largely Moors mounted on horseback. Their armor was light, their bows few, but they relied on a powerful blend of courage and faith to drive them into battle, trusting in their numbers and strength to carry the day. The Moors wielded scimitars and lances, fighting with a favored tactic honed over countless victories—a massed cavalry charge meant to crush their foes by sheer force and courage. This was the very method that had propelled them thousands of miles, sweeping aside all opposition in their path. But this army’s weakness was glaring: they had no notion of defense. They were an attacking force, one-dimensional, and like the Franks, they took what they needed from the land, foraging as they advanced.

As the early autumn of 732 settled over Gaul, the two armies closed in on one another. Abd er-Rahman’s troops had already plundered a string of towns and churches, and their ranks were heavy with loot, burdened by the spoils of their unchecked advance. They met somewhere south of Tours, between that city and Poitiers, though the exact location remains a mystery. Abd er-Rahman was taken off guard by the sudden arrival of the Frankish forces, a shadow he had not expected on his march northward. To this day, the true scale of those opposing forces is a matter of heated debate. Some modern historians estimate the Muslim army at anywhere from 20,000 to 80,000 strong, while others argue the Frankish force could have been larger, or perhaps even smaller.

Abd er-Rahman found himself in a tight corner. To engage the Franks, he’d have to leave the precious loot behind—an order he knew his men would resist bitterly. Fortunately for Abd er-Rahman, Charles chose not to attack. Instead, he held his ground and observed the Muslim army for seven days, watching and waiting. Taking advantage of Charles’s patience, Abd er-Rahman ordered men southward with the spoils, planning to secure it all for retrieval after they had finished off the Frankish threat. Meanwhile, Charles awaited the last of his militia, men he counted on as foragers rather than fighters, scouring the land for food to sustain his warriors.

After seven days of tense waiting, cautious watching, and likely a few probing feints on both sides, Abd er-Rahman decided his loot was safely hidden away. Now, his mind was set—he would finally face the Franks head-on. Though the exact date of the clash remains uncertain—some say October 10—Charles knew precisely what he was up against. He had studied the Muslim tactics well, and he’d chosen his men to counter them in the most brutal way possible. As the Muslim forces gathered for their infamous charge, Charles marshaled his troops into a solid, unbreakable defensive square. It was a formation made up mostly of his own hardened Frankish soldiers, reinforced with warriors from allied tribes bound to Frankish rule.

The exact details of the battle are lost to time, but the accounts we do have tell of relentless waves of Muslim cavalry pounding uselessly against the Frankish square. Frankish javelins and throwing axes tore through men and horses alike, wreaking havoc as the riders tried, and failed, to shatter their iron-clad lines. Undeterred, the Muslim cavalry charged again and again, driven by sheer will, but each attempt to break the Frankish defense ended in failure. The square held, unyielding. The chronicler Isidorus Pacensis immortalized the strength of the Frankish square, saying, “The men of the North stood 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.” These were the Austrasians, Franks from the German frontier, men “vast of limb and iron of hand,” who hewed their way through the thick of the fight with unflinching ferocity. It was here, in this storm of blood and steel, that Charles earned the name Martel—“the Hammer”—for the relentless force with which he struck his enemies.

Eudo, now fighting alongside Charles, led a fierce assault on the Muslim flank. Panic rippled through the ranks of Abd er-Rahman’s men, perhaps driven by fear for the safety of their precious loot stashed in the rear. According to Sir Edward Creasy in Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, a Muslim source recounted, “But many of the Moslems were fearful for the safety of the spoil which they had stored in their tents, and a false cry arose in their ranks that some of the enemy were plundering the camp; whereupon several squadrons of the Moslem horsemen rode off to protect their tents.” With these men peeling away from the front, the cohesion of Abd er-Rahman’s forces began to collapse. Their morale shattered, and the once fearsome offensive crumbled under the weight of confusion and panic.

As the sun began to sink, the Muslims retreated toward Poitiers. Charles held his men steady, choosing not to pursue, certain that they’d face his enemy again come dawn. But during the night, word swept through the Muslim camp: Abd er-Rahman had fallen in the day’s battle. Without their leader, they abandoned the field and fled. At dawn, the Franks arrived to find an empty enemy camp, deserted but filled with the spoils left behind. They claimed the abandoned riches as their reward for the hard-won victory. There was no precise tally of the dead on either side. The day’s true cost would never be known.

The remnants of Abd er-Rahman’s army staggered back toward Spain, though they would not be the last to cross the Pyrenees in search of wealth and conquest. However, this would be the last full-scale invasion of its kind. Muslim strongholds lingered along the southern frontier and the Mediterranean coast until 759, but on the whole, Islamic expansion settled within Spain’s borders and advanced no further.

While Charles Martel’s tactics were certainly decisive, it was internal division within the Muslim world that truly stifled further expansion. As factional infighting erupted in Arabia, the fractures spread throughout the Muslim empire. Fighting forces were split; the Muslim foothold in Spain was isolated from the greater religious leadership in the East. Consolidation became the chosen path over further conquest.

Had the Muslims claimed victory at Tours, it’s hard to imagine any force in Western Europe that could have effectively resisted their advance. Then again, Abd er-Rahman’s army was limited in number, and the religious schism that ignited soon after may have halted his campaign just as decisively as the Franks did. Whether Charles Martel truly “saved” Europe for Christianity remains a subject of debate. But what’s certain is this: his victory cemented Frankish dominance over Gaul, a reign that would endure for more than a century.

For centuries, the Merovingian dynasty had been ruled by kings so weak they surrendered nearly all power to the hands of the majordomos, the mayors of the palace—men who wielded the real authority while the kings merely wore the crown. Acting as the king’s representative to the aristocracy, the majordomos coordinated the realm more than they commanded it, shaping the will of nobles and subjects alike without direct authority. But by the reign of Pepin II, the lines had blurred so entirely that the majordomo and the king were indistinguishable; the monarch was a figurehead, a title with little substance. By the time Charles Martel came to power, he was majordomo without even a king, ruling in all but name. Upon his death in 741, his sons would lay claim to kingship itself, dividing the Frankish realm between them.

Around this time, the aristocracy began seizing hereditary control over their lands, claiming power not at the pleasure of the king, but by blood. Thus, the era of feudalism was born, a system that would soon define European society for centuries to come. Charles Martel, now in need of loyalty from his nobles, granted them land in exchange for military service. But to pay his warriors, he had to pull land from the hands of the Church, Europe’s greatest landowner. This, naturally, earned him Rome’s ire. But ironically, his grandson would soon bridge the gap, forging a powerful bond between the military might of the Franks and the authority of the Church.

That grandson would also bear the name Charles—a name he would carve into history as “the Great,” or Charlemagne. Under him, the Franks would reach unprecedented heights, reigning supreme in both political and military power. After Tours, the very fabric of European military power began to shift. The age of heavy cavalry was dawning, spurred on by a new invention—the stirrup. This simple tool granted warriors unprecedented stability on horseback, enabling them to bear both heavy armor and wield lances with lethal precision. Thus, the era of the armored knight was born—a warrior both shaped by and essential to feudalism, the steel-clad juggernaut that would dominate Europe’s battlefields for centuries. Infantry would remain vital, but from this point on, it fought alongside or even under the supremacy of cavalry, a dynamic that would endure on European battlefields until the fifteenth century.

And so, with Tours as its proving ground, Frankish dominance rose to shape not just the map, but the very destiny of Western Europe.