Battle of Tours halts Umayyad expansion into Francia

Date

October 732 CE

Category

Military & conflict

Region

Western Europe (Francia)

Era

Post-Classical / Medieval

Significance

In October 732 CE, somewhere between Tours and Poitiers in central Gaul, the Frankish leader Charles Martel and his infantry defeated a raiding army of the Umayyad governor of al-Andalus, Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi, who was killed in the fighting.

Charles drew up his seasoned foot soldiers in a defensive phalanx that withstood repeated Muslim cavalry charges, ending the northward push of Umayyad forces beyond the Pyrenees. Later Christian chroniclers and many pre-modern European historians celebrated the battle as the moment that saved Christian Europe from Islamic conquest, casting Charles as the saviour of the West. Modern scholars treat that interpretation with caution, noting that the expedition was a large raid rather than a campaign of permanent conquest and that Berber revolts in North Africa and the internal upheavals culminating in the Abbasid revolution of 750 did more to halt Muslim expansion. Nonetheless the victory cemented the prestige and military dominance of the Carolingian family, paving the way for the rise of Charlemagne, and it remains a celebrated symbolic marker of the limits of the early Islamic conquests in western Europe.

Empires active in October 732 CE

• Umayyad Caliphate
  661 CE – 750 CE
• Tang Dynasty
  618 CE – 907 CE
• Byzantine Empire
  330 CE – 1453 CE
• Kanem-Bornu Empire
  700 CE – 1900 CE
• Tibetan Empire
  618 CE – 842 CE
• Khazar Khaganate
  650 CE – 969 CE

Related military & conflict events

• The An Lushan Rebellion devastates Tang China
  755–763 CE
• Battle of the Yarmuk ends Byzantine rule in Syria
  August 636 CE
• Arab siege of Constantinople repelled by Leo III
  717–718 CE
• Battle of Talas halts Tang expansion and seeds papermaking in the Islamic world
  July 751 CE
• Umayyad conquest of Hispania begins at Guadalete
  711 CE
• Viking raid on Lindisfarne opens the Viking Age
  8 June 793 CE

Further reading

Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire

The wider story

Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire

Judith Herrin

Vivid, thematic popular history by a top Byzantinist.

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