A medieval rendering of the delivery and effect of the incendiary device known as Greek fire.
Even without their slumbering insularity, the Merovingians have not been remembered respectfully. French textbook convention holds many of them to be rois faineants, or do-nothing monarchs, and one of their number, Dagobert, owes much of his fame to a nursery rhyme that has him putting his breeches on backward. Posterity becomes more charitable in considering the power behind the Merovingian throne—the so-called "mayors of the palace" who led Frankish warrior bands in nearly annual campaigns of murder and rapine. Indeed, referring to northern Europe at this time as Christendom betrays misplaced piety: many of the Franks' Germanic cousins clung to their traditional beliefs, and even among those evangelized, the teachings of the Church often got lost in a thicket of folk culture.
In 678, the year in which Muawiya's charred ships limped away from Constantinople, a mayor of the palace named Pepin of Herstal came to power in Gaul, following an obscure assassination of a Merovingian monarch in a woodland outside of Paris. The advent of Pepin was a godsend to the fractious Franks, for his lineage, the Pippinids, was to upset the Merovingian oxcart and assume royal power. (Much later, under their most illustrious descendant, Charlemagne, they would grant themselves imperial status as the Carolingians.) Pepin began the hard slog of unification that would, in time, enable the Franks to repel the Muslim invader.
Not that this future virtue could have been divined through the fog of war that settled upon Gaul following Pepin's death. The series of events is unclear, but the sons and grandsons of Pepin, through untimely death or birth, showed themselves incapable of continuing his work. Only a bastard, born of Pepin's liaison with a certain Alpaide, seemed to have the necessary belligerence. Long kept under lock and key in Cologne by his stepmother Plectrude (Pepin's widow), in 715 he was sprung from his dungeon by plotters unconcerned with the imperfections in his pedigree.
The freed warrior was past thirty, already a ripening age for an ax-man with countries to cleave. Henceforth Karl Martiaux—Charles Martel—would forge a kingdom that covered much of present-day France, western Germany, and the Low Countries. Martel—the name comes from Martin, not marteau (hammer)—embarked on an unrelenting itinerary of violence, forcibly bringing the eastern and western Franks to heel. Although he was later portrayed as a paladin of Christianity, some of his achievements include deposing the bishop of Rheims, imprisoning the bishop of Auxerre, and exiling the bishop of Orleans. An unholy man of war, he would nonetheless turn out to be the man of the hour. As his reign began, the second half of the Arab century of conquest was well under way, its outriders drawing ever closer, however improbably, to the Pyrenees.
If the road to Poitiers was not straight, the struggle for the African littoral—the "west," al-maghrib—would show that it would not be smooth, either. In the lands now known as Algeria and Morocco, the Arabian tide of the early eighth century seemed less an unstoppable force of nature, subject to reversal only by self-defeating civil war or technological surprises on the order of Greek fire, than an invading army far from home, dogged by the problems of insurgency, long supply lines, and the vagaries of luck. The customary adjectives used to describe the great Arab conquest—whirlwind, lightning, and so on—should be shelved for this moment of its history.
As always, events in the eastern affected those in the west. Following the failed siege of Constantinople in 678, the Muslim impetus slowed. One reason was a generational shift: the fire-breathing Companions grew old and died—an octogenarian Amr Ibn al As had closed his eyes in 663, and Muawiya would do the same in 680. The changing of the guard led to a second civil war, this one over the succession, as opposed to the accession, of Muawiya. The forces of his son defeated those of Ali's son, Huseyn, at Karbala, Iraq—an event mourned by the shia to this day. These turbulent years also witnessed the sacrilegious spectacle of Muslims killing each other in Madina and damaging the Kaaba of Mecca.
Only when Abd al-Malik, a forceful scion of a collateral branch of the Umayyads, rose to power in Damascus in 685 was the repressive apparatus needed to stem successive revolts put in place. Even if dangerous resentments simmered in Iraq, Persia, and Arabia—among the shia, the Khariji "seceders," the rival Qurayshi, and the mawali "clients"—Abd al-Malik managed to give the young empire a sense of permanence. He ordered the construction of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem; built on Jewish holy ground by Christian artisans for the glory of Islam, it made manifest that the newcomer to monotheism was distinct from the other two beliefs, yet as venerable and authentic in its embrace of all human history. In Damascus the Great Mosque, built by the Umayyads in these years, delivered the same message—and its astounding mosaic facade of figurative art, a masterpiece of Byzantine craftsmanship, showed that a cultural exchange of the highest order was taking place.
Armed with a renewed sense of self-confidence under Abd al-Malik, Islam once again looked to the horizon. Toward the close of the seventh century, according to quasi-legendary accounts, an adventurer named Ukba ibn Nafi made a razzia of epic proportions, racing clear across the Maghrib until he reached the Atlantic near Agadir, Morocco. Ukba, his appetites unslaked after two thousand kilometers of killing and looting, is said to have spurred his horse into the surf and shouted over the crash of the waves: "My God I call you to witness that if my advance were not stopped by the sea I would go still further!" Boasting in this register begs for a comeuppance: on his return journey home to Kairouan in Ifriqiya, he and his men were waylaid and butchered in the foothills of the Aures Mountains in eastern Algeria. His tomb, Sidi Oqba, is now a hallowed shrine, "a pilgrimage site," one historian dryly notes, "for the descendants of those who took part in his murder."
The agents behind his demise were Berbers, the indigenous peoples of the region, whence the latter-day name "Barbary Coast" for the shores of the Maghrib. The Berbers refer to themselves as Imaiighen, "free men." Unlike the Christian Arabs of Syria or the Copts of Egypt, they would staunch the Muslim advance for a generation. Long experience with conquerors, from the Phoenician settlers of Carthage through the Romans, Vandals, and Byzantines, had made them a protean bunch, capable of alternating moments of deceptive amenability to foreign customs and faiths with instances of sudden, deadly revolt, their hardened mountain men screaming down from the rugged heights of the Aures and the Atlas to wreak havoc on the plain among the colonizers of the moment. They had stepped aside in 698 when the Muslims finally reduced Byzantine Carthage to a ruin and founded Tunis in its place, but their reliability as allies—and as suspiciously eager converts to the new faith—was open to question. The greatest historian of the Middle Ages, Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun, a fourteenth-century native of Morocco who studied the Berbers in detail, counted no fewer than a dozen instances of wholesale Berber apostasy from Islam in less than seventy years.
To the worthies in Damascus, the Berbers were toying with the dignity of Islam. Worse yet, the occasional flaring of Berber belligerence had caused the wealth of north Africa—and its links to sub-Saharan sources of slaves—to drift infuriatingly in and out of reach. The most celebrated revolt against the Arabs occurred at the turn of the century, led by a woman known to us only as Kahina, which means "prophetess."
According to tradition, Kahina was the queen of a nomadic tribe called the Jer-awa, a group of nomadic Berber Jews living in the eastern reaches of the Aures. The legends surrounding Kahina make her the most remarkable personage of the century leading to Poitiers. Fearless in battle, she is said to have repeatedly swooped down from the Aures to assassinate the unwary and strike fear into the new masters of Ifriqiya. Possessed of a temper that made her red hair stand on end, Kahina is credited with uniting the Berbers—perhaps scaring them into submitting to her—and temporarily throwing the invaders back as far as Libya. The Arab chronicles also have her engaging in a scorched-earth campaign that devastated the northern coasts of Tunisia and eastern Algeria—and in so doing, she gradually turned the more sedentary folk
among the Berbers against her. Despite her reputation as a virago, Kahina is also remembered in legend, perhaps inevitably, as a loving mother. In 704 or 705, as her army braced for a final showdown near what is now the border of Algeria and Tunisia, Kahina foresaw, as only befits a prophetess, which way the day would go. On the eve of battle she persuaded her two grown sons to slip away from her camp under cover of night and join the other side, thereby saving the lives of her boys. In the morning she died fighting beside a spring; her head was sent to Damascus for the caliph's edification.
Once Kahina was slain, Berber resistance gradually petered out into ineffectual local actions. In the early years of the eighth century, the pace of Muslim progress westward picked up speed, dooming the churches and Christian shrines of the Maghrib to the fate of St. Simeon within a century or two. Christianity would never again be the dominant religion on the south shore of the Mediterranean—the confessional geography of a giant swath of the littoral had changed for good. It is interesting to speculate what the greatest north African Christian, Augustine of Hippo, would have made of this new state of affairs—in his lifetime in the fifth century, the sack of Rome had led him, in The City of God, to lament the passing of antiquity. What would he have said of the passing of Christianity?
The new Muslim governor in Kairouan, Musa ibn Nusayr, no doubt had neither the time nor the inclination to linger over such questions, for his problem was, as ever, the unpredictability of the Berbers. He eventually hit upon the solution that guaranteed the pacification of his province. He distracted the Berber warriors from thoughts of revenge by holding out to them the promise of future rewards—not in the next life but in this one, and in an unexpected setting: Spain. When precisely Musa first started sending raiding parties there is unclear, but he undoubtedly gave the fateful order to turn north toward Europe.
Whether his decision was motivated solely by Machiavellian considerations about the restive Berbers can never be known—Musa may also have had empire-building ambitions for himself. Equally uncertain is the question of whether the Muslims received help from complaisant traitors. According to an oft-repeated and colorful tradition, a certain Julian, the governor of the newly forlorn Byzantine outpost of Septem (today's Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on the Moroccan Mediterranean coast), sent out feelers to Musa telling him that he was prepared to provide ships for the invasion of Spain. Julian intensely disliked King Rodrigo, the Visigothic ruler of Iberia. One version of the story has Julian's antipathy stemming from Rodrigo's rape of his daughter—an outrage he surmised after the unfortunate girl, a guest in the capital of Toledo, sent her father a symbolic message in the form of a rotten egg. His anger blinding him to the consequences of ferrying a Muslim army to Christian Spain, the Greek governor unwittingly opened the door to monumental, lasting change.
Whatever the historical truth—the conquerors had hardly needed an invitation anywhere else around the Mediterranean—in the year 711 one of Musa's Berber commanders, Tariq ibn Ziyad, the Muslim governor of Tangier, made the voyage. When Tariq and several thousand Arabs and Berbers rowed across the Mediterranean at its narrowest point, a new era dawned. The two great rock eminences on either shore, long known as the Pillars of Hercules, were about to quit the vague precincts of Greek legend for the sharper outlines of the century of Muslim conquest. To the south now rises the mountain of Musa, Jebel al-Musa; to the north, that of Tariq, Jebel al-Tariq, or as we and Gibbon pronounce it: Gibraltar.
It took twenty-one years for the line of conquest to go from Gibraltar to Poitiers. No one disputes Gibraltar as the landfall of Islam in Europe; there is less agreement about the other end of the march. The most likely candidate is a hamlet twenty kilometers to the northwest of Poitiers called Moussais-la-Bataille, although, owing to the paucity of geographical information in the historical sources, where precisely the battle named for Poitiers (and sometimes Tours) took place will never be established to everyone's satisfaction. The claims of Moussais, defended convincingly in a 1966 study by two French historians, are multifold: its name (la Bataille is an old if undated suffix); its proximity to the Roman road leading from Poitiers to Tours (the ruins of Gallo-Roman Vieux-Poitiers stand just to its north); its eminently suitable terrain for a large-scale battle; and its position just a few kilometers south of the important confluence of the rivers Clain and Vienne, which any northbound invader would have had to ford en route to the riches of the Loire valley—and to which any defender would have barred the way.
The environs of Moussais, itself an exurban collection of modest homes, still attest to their continued role as a route of passage. Near the village, just beyond the Clain, a high-speed train can be heard hissing past on its journey from Bordeaux to Paris, as can the rushed whisper of traffic on France's main western expressway. The occasional honk of a car horn drifts over the screen of mature trees along the riverbank, proof that a secondary road remains popular with time travelers going in the other direction, toward a successful technological theme park called, bravely, Futuroscope.
In a pasture on the high ground west of Moussais sits a giant chessboard. It overlooks an anonymous field of shorn barley that may or may not be the setting for the battle. Laid out in 2000 by an association convinced of the site's importance, the board's sixty-four squares alternate between a comic-book narrative of the Battle of Poitiers and a series of apposite quotations from thinkers and artists of the past. The choice of chess is ingenious, for the game, introduced to Europe by the Muslims, involves countless permutations in an encounter where the pieces stand cheek by jowl—much like the variety and closeness of contact that characterized the meeting of Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages. To go along with the memorial makers—to stand on a chessboard under the pale summer sun of northern France and ponder its impishly presented uncertainties—is to realize that memory is a game of continual reconstruction, and that each generation gets to play.
The Rock of Gibraltar, site of Islam s landfall in Europe in yn.
That realization is particularly useful in considering the momentous event preceding the battle—the sudden and utter collapse of Visigothic Spain. Here the modifiers whirlwind and lightning might be profitably used—the Muslims took only five years to accomplish what had occupied the legionaries of Rome for two centuries. The quarry of Tariq and Musa, the Visigoths, would arrive at the terminus of their journey through history as melodramatically as they had begun it.
A Muslim and a Christian playing chess, from the "Book of Games " compiled for King Alfonso X (reigned 1252—84) °f Castile and Leon.
A barbarian people of eastern Europe, the Visigoths had first poured over the Danube to escape the advancing Huns and somehow managed, in 378, to shatter Roman power at the battle of Adrianople (Edirne, Turkey) and kill Emperor Valens in the bargain. In 410 the Visigothic king Alaric took Rome itself—the event that moved Augustine to despair. His restless successors moved on, to be turned away from Gaul by Clovis at Poitiers, in 507, after which they consolidated their hold on Spain, where they finally settled down. Although created by the architects of Rome's downfall, their Iberian civilization possessed more than a passing resemblance to the old regime—particularly in its great slave-holding estates—and, in a peculiarity of the peninsula's history, a characteristic of Christian Spanish regimes of a distant future: an intolerance of Jews. The sheer vituperativeness of seventh-century Visigothic anti-Jewish legislation easily rivaled the measures of the sixteenth-century Inquisition.
Once King Rodrigo heard of Tariq's landing at Gibraltar, he raced from the north of his kingdom, where he had been fighting the reliably rebellious Vascons (or Basques), down the entire length of the peninsula to the tip of what is now Andalusia. In a battle near the mouth of the Guadalete River, the Berbers and Arabs won an annihilating victory, perhaps aided by treasonous Visigoths—they were also given to endemic dynastic quarreling. Rodrigo may have been slain at this engagement of 711, for he disappears from history at this point. Whatever the circumstances of his death
, he was to be the last Visigothic king of Spain. Tariq then headed northward, effortlessly capturing one city after another on his march to Toledo. Many have conjectured that the Muslims were welcomed as liberators by the Jews of Iberia, but no documentary evidence backs up this assertion—although sustained persecution by the Visigoths and news of fellow Jews living peaceably as dhimmi (protected if penalized non-Muslim communities) in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt would hardly have disposed them to be stout defenders of the old order.
By 716 all of Iberia, save for a few slivers in the north, had been subdued. A few captured Visigothic royals may have been shipped off to Damascus as curiosities; certainly Tariq and Musa ended up there—as with Amr Ibn al As and Khalid Ibn al Walid, the magnitude of their achievement had made them suspect in the eyes of the caliph. In these years Damascus could ill afford to countenance rival centers of power.
As Spain was being overrun, yet another attempt had been made to capture Constantinople. An enormous fleet of eighteen hundred vessels (and 120,000 besiegers) had failed to dent the defenses organized by the redoubtable basileus Leo III, whose advent marked the beginning of a lasting Byzantine recovery in Anatolia—and not inconsequentially, the sparking of the ferocious century-long quarrel over the place of icons in Orthodox religious life. In 718 the fleet of the caliph, as battered as Muawiya's had been a generation earler, sailed out of the Hellespont to an even sorrier fate than defeat—almost total destruction by a wild storm off Rhodes. This was clearly not the moment for Musa and Tariq, the Muslim conquerors of Spain, to become too powerful.
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