Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History by Hugh Williams

Author:Hugh Williams [Williams, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007411115
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2010-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

The Death of Mohammed

632 AD

Mohammed’s death gave birth to Islam. The religion that he founded united the Arabic tribes of the Middle East and spread with astonishing speed throughout Europe, Asia and North Africa.

In 732 AD a battle took place near the town of Poitiers in west central France. On one side was the army of Charles Martel, leader of the Franks and a consummate general who had been successful in reuniting an empire consisting of most of France, Western Germany and the Low Countries, under Frankish rule. On the other was Abdul Rahman al Ghafiqi, the Arab governor of the Muslim caliphate of al-Andalus, based in Córdoba in southern Spain.

Having conquered the whole of the Iberian Peninsula the Arabs were looking to invade and occupy territory north of the Pyrenees. They captured Bordeaux, defeated an army under the Duke of Aquitaine on the River Garonne and then pushed north. It was October and the weather had turned cold. An account by an Arab chronicler suggests that Abdul Rahman and his men had extended their supply lines to a dangerous extent as they went in search of loot. ‘It was manifest that God’s chastisement was sure to follow such excesses,’ he wrote, ‘and fortune thereupon turned her back upon the Moslems.’ Charles Martel had no cavalry: his main advantage was that he managed to marshal his army into a position where it caught the invaders by surprise. The Arabs were defeated and Abdul Rahman killed.

On the whole Arab historians have not paid much attention to the encounter. In the West, however, it has been described as an apocalyptic moment, a battle that saved Europe and Christianity from ‘militant Islam’. Poitiers after all is only about 200 miles from Paris and 450 miles from London. Edward Gibbon, the eighteenth-century historian of the Roman Empire, wrote that if Charles Martel had not been victorious ‘perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet’. An exaggeration no doubt: but Gibbon was justified in reminding us that the history of peoples and civilisations often turns on comparatively small events. Other Western writers have agreed with his assessment. The German philosopher Friedrich von Schlegel – who believed that ‘a historian was a prophet looking backwards’ – said of the battle that it ‘saved and delivered the Christian nations of the West from the deadly grasp of all-destroying Islam’.

Resounding verdicts such as these are questionable. The confrontation between Abdul Rahman and Charles Martel was nevertheless an extraordinary event. An Arab army steeped in the faith of Islam was fighting more than 2,500 miles north of where its religion had been born exactly a hundred years previously. In the period of the early Middle Ages, in a Europe still disrupted by the conflicts and uncertainties that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Arabs’ journey northwards represented expansion on an extraordinary scale.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.