Odo of Aquitaine

Odo of Aquitaine beat an Umayyad army outside Toulouse in 721, eleven years before Tours, and is largely forgotten because the victory that mattered politically was won by the man who had spent years trying to destroy him. He ruled Aquitaine as an effectively independent duke while the Merovingian kings decayed and the Carolingian mayors of the palace gathered power in the north, and his position depended on being strong enough that neither the Franks nor the Muslims of Spain could afford to ignore him. At Toulouse he had been besieged, withdrew to raise a relief force, and returned to catch the besieging army unprepared; the governor al-Samh was killed and the force broken, and the pope is said to have sent Odo blessed sponges in recognition. He then made an alliance with a Berber commander in the Pyrenees named Uthman ibn Naissa, sealed by marrying him his daughter, which was a rational piece of frontier politics and was used against him afterwards as treason to Christendom. When Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi destroyed that ally and came north in 732, Odo was beaten badly at the Garonne and had to appeal to Charles Martel, who had twice invaded Aquitaine and who granted help on terms. The battle near Tours was won by Charles, and Odo fought in it; the accounts differ on how much. He kept his duchy until his death in 735, after which Charles took it. Aquitaine spent the next century being reconquered by Carolingians. Odo is a reminder that the frontier was a place where alliances crossed the religious line routinely, and that the later story of a single decisive Christian stand was assembled afterwards. The Continuations of Fredegar, written under Carolingian patronage, are the main source and have every reason to diminish him. His son Hunald fought Charles Martel and then retired to a monastery on an island off Toulon.

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