Was the Battle of Tours really the turning point for the Umayyad expansion into Europe?
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During the battle of Tours, the invading Muslim leader, Emir Abd al Rahman was killed, which represented a major setback for them. After winning the battle in 732, the Frankish leader Charles Martel followed up his victory by "cleaning out" Muslim enclaves established in southern France, meaning that they had lost the initiative.
By about 750, the Ummayad Empire had degenerated into civil war, making it possible for Martel's son and grandson, Charlemagne, to push the invaders out of France entirely, and begin pushing them out of northern Spain.
So yes, the battle of Tours represented a bursting of the Ummayad bubble.
Upvote:-2
Yes, the Battle of Tours was absolutely a turning point for the Umayyad Caliphate in the year, 732 AD/CE...but it was also, a type of starting point for France, as an early Medieval European civilization-(following the more regionally rooted Merovingian dynastic period).
It was under the leadership of Charles "The Hammer" Martel who was able to prevent further Islamic expansion into France. In doing so, France-(unlike a sizable part of Spain during the Middle Ages), was never Islamized or Arabized and was able to retain both the Catholic Faith and the Latin language-(the French language, to the best of my knowledge, emerged as a conversational/colloquial language later in the Middle Ages).
While I won't necessarily say that Charles "The Hammer" Martel "saved Western civilization" from Muslim expansion, one could say that Charles "The Hammer" Martel certainly helped to preserve and conserve Frankish, Catholic and Western civilization during the Early Middle Ages. His grandson, Carlos Magnus-(better known as Charlemagne), would become the First Holy Roman Emperor and a Carolingian Renaissance based in Aachen, Germany would follow.
If the Umayyads were successful and victorious at the Battle of Tours, it is very unlikely that such an above mentioned historical reality would have ever materialized.
However, as the Umayyads were literally forced over the Pyrenees and returned to Spain, the Umayyad Caliphate began a near 300 year Islamic civilizational flourishment largely based out of the Andalusian city of Cordoba.
Upvote:1
As a complementary answer:
While the battle of Tours was an important moment in the Arab expansion into Europe, it was not the only one, for the simple reason that the Arab expansion in that direction (from Africa and the Middle East to the north) was not made (and was not stopped) only there.
I even think that the Frankish victory was disproportionately emphasized by Western historiography until recently against the sieges of Constantinople of 674–678 and 717–718, as if the Franks were the most important European power (which, at that time, they were most certainly not) or even the only European power (in a restrictive, westerly-centered perspective that excludes the Byzantines).
A front where the Arabs were stopped from entering Europe from the east (and from becoming an Eurasian steppe empire in the way that others did before and after the Mongols) is that of the Arab–Khazar wars of c. 642–652 and c. 722–737.
Not only it is doubtful that an Arab victory at Tours would have meant the full conquest of Europe (meaning Franks, Vikings, Saxons, Longobards, and Avars, not to re-mention the Byzantine empire), but the fall of Constantinople or the conquest of the Turkic Khazars (and their possible conversion to Islam) would have surely been much richer in consequences.
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