Charles Martel
Charles Martel beat an Arab army near Poitiers in 732 and made his family kings. He was the illegitimate son of Pippin of Herstal, mayor of the palace to the Merovingian kings, and had to fight his stepmother and the Neustrian nobility for years after his father's death before controlling the Frankish realms. The Merovingian kings by that point were figureheads, and the mayor of the palace was the government. The battle of Tours or Poitiers in October 732 stopped a raiding army under Abd al-Rahman that had come up from Spain, sacked Aquitaine and was moving on the shrine of St Martin. The Franks held a defensive position in a square of infantry on wooded ground and did not break, which is what the sources emphasise, and Abd al-Rahman was killed. Whether it saved Europe, as Gibbon's famous passage suggests, is doubtful — the raid was one of many and the Arab position in Gaul was already overstretched — and it certainly made Charles. He took the name Martel, the hammer, and spent the following decade campaigning in Aquitaine, Burgundy, Provence and Frisia. He financed the wars by taking church lands and granting them to his followers in return for mounted service, which is one of the origins of the feudal arrangement. He supported Boniface's mission to the Germans. He divided the realm between his sons without ever taking the crown, and his son Pippin deposed the last Merovingian in 751. Arab sources barely mention the battle and call it the pavement of the martyrs, treating it as one reverse among many on a distant frontier. It became decisive in European memory much later, and it did in fact mark the furthest north an Arab army reached in force.
- Lived: 688 CE – 741 CE
- Nationality: Frankish
- Roles: military_leader
