How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (16 page)

Taking the Muslims completely by surprise, Martel chose a battleground to his liking and positioned his dense lines of well-armored infan
try on a crest, with trees to the flanks, thus forcing the Muslims to charge uphill or refuse to give battle. And charge they did. Again and again.

As noted, it is axiomatic in military science that cavalry cannot succeed against well-armed and well-disciplined infantry formations unless they greatly outnumber them.
⁹¹
In this instance, the Muslim force consisted entirely of light cavalry “carrying lances and swords, largely without shields, wearing very little armor,” as military historians Edward Creasy and Joseph Mitchell recounted. Opposing them was an army “almost entirely composed of foot soldiers, wearing mail [armor] and carrying shields.”
⁹²
It was a very uneven match. As Isidore of Beja reported in his chronicle, the veteran Frankish infantry could not be moved by Arab cavalry: “Firmly they stood, one close to another, forming as it were a bulwark of ice.”
⁹³
The Muslim cavalry repeatedly rushed at the Frankish line, and each time they fell back after suffering severe casualties, with increasingly large numbers of bleeding and riderless horses adding to the confusion on the battlefield.

Late in the afternoon the Muslim formations began to break up, some of them withdrawing toward their camp, whereupon the Franks unleashed their own heavily armored cavalry for a thunderous charge.
⁹⁴
The Muslim cavalry fled and thousands of them died that afternoon, including ‘Abd-al-Rahmân, who was run through repeatedly by Frankish lancers.
⁹⁵

Many historians have regarded the victory at Tours as crucial to the survival of Western civilization. Edward Gibbon supposed that had the Muslims won at Tours, “Perhaps 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.”
⁹⁶
The nineteenth-century German military historian Hans Delbrück wrote that there was “no more important battle in world history.”
⁹⁷

As would be expected, some more recent historians have been quick to claim that the Battle of Tours was of little or no significance. According to Philip Hitti, “Nothing was decided on the battlefield at Tours. The Muslim wave … had already spent itself and reached a natural limit.”
⁹⁸
And Franco Cardini wrote that the whole thing was nothing but “propaganda put about by the Franks and the papacy.”
⁹⁹
This is said to be consistent with evidence that the battle made no impression on the Muslims, at least not on those back in Damascus. Bernard Lewis claimed that few Arab historians made any mention of this battle at all, and those who did presented it “as a comparatively minor engagement.”
¹⁰⁰

Given the remarkable intensity of Muslim provincialism, and the Islamic world’s willful ignorance of other societies,
¹⁰¹
Damascus probably
did
regard the defeat at Tours as a minor matter. But that’s not how the battle was seen from Spain. Spanish Muslims were fully aware of who Charles Martel was and what he had done to their aspirations. They had learned from their defeat that the Franks were not a sedentary people served by mercenary garrison troops, nor were they a barbarian horde. They too were empire builders, and the Frankish host was made up of well-trained citizen volunteers who possessed arms, armor, and tactics superior to those of the Muslims.
¹⁰²
The Muslims tried to invade Gaul once more in 735, but Charles Martel and his Franks gave them another beating so severe that Muslim forces never ventured north again.

Martel defeated not only the Muslim invaders but nearly every other group in western Europe. At his death, the Frankish Realm included most of what had once been the Western Roman Empire except for Spain, Italy, and North Africa. Martel’s conquests also extended to some of the Germanic areas that had never been part of Rome. His grandson expanded the realm to create a new “Roman Empire.”

The Carolingian Interlude

Charlemagne (742–814) was the son of King Pépin III (Pépin the Short) and the grandson of Charles Martel (for whom he was named). In 768 he succeeded his father as king of the Franks, ruling along with his brother Carloman. A potential civil war between the two was averted when Carloman died in 771—but the tension between the two should have warned the Franks against divided rule.

Charlemagne was tall for his era (a study of his skeleton performed in 1861 estimated his height at slightly more than 6'2").
¹⁰³
Although he had received little education, he was fluent in Latin and able to understand Greek. He married three times and had eleven legitimate children as well as a number of illegitimate children by his various concubines.

Soon after his brother’s death, Charlemagne drove the Lombards out of northern Italy, adding it to his empire and placing Rome under his rule. In 795 Leo III became pope, despite opposition from the powerful Roman families who usually controlled the Church. Leo’s opponents soon accused him of adultery and perjury and dispatched a gang to cut
out his tongue and gouge out his eyes. Local soldiers saved Pope Leo, but he was formally deposed and shut up in a monastery. He escaped and fled to Charlemagne, who escorted him back to Rome and reestablished him in office. Two days later, on Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo crowned Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor.

During his reign, Charlemagne was almost constantly at war. Many of his campaigns were fought to extend the boundaries of his empire, and many others were to suppress rebellions against his rule. Most often he went campaigning in the East, usually against the Germanic Saxons, and here an additional motive played a central role—to stamp out paganism and impose Christianity. Thus, Charlemagne issued an edict making it a capital offense to resist Christianization and slaughtered thousands on those grounds. When he died in 814, his new empire included far more of Europe than the Romans had held.

Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s only surviving legitimate son, succeeded his father. But things began to fall apart when Louis chose to divide the empire among his three sons. Wars of succession broke out and the “empire” was rapidly divided into increasingly smaller pieces that soon numbered in the hundreds. Europe’s precious disunity was restored!

Progress between Empires

The final blow to the myth of the Dark Ages is that Rome was not conquered by barbarians. In terms of some technologies such as metallurgy, the people of the North were well ahead of the Romans. They had cities. They had extensive trade networks. And when their turn came, they launched a postimperial era of progress. The Franks almost reimposed an empire that no doubt would have derailed that progress. Fortunately, the Carolingian Empire was short-lived.

5

Northern Lights over Christendom

W
estern civilization was born on the shores of the Mediterranean, but it came of age along the Atlantic Coast and beyond the great rivers that Rome’s legions had been loath to cross. As we have seen, after the fall of Rome, Europe’s social and cultural center of gravity shifted north. Even when the Carolingian Empire fragmented, the Vikings brought new energy and enthusiasm to continue the West’s glorious journey. Remarkably, much of this story has been ignored and some has been falsified.

Despite the fact that historians have given many times more attention to the Carolingian Empire than to the Vikings, the latter played a far more significant and lasting role in the rise of the West than did the Carolingians. Charlemagne was never able to conquer Denmark (let alone Sweden or Norway), and even during his lifetime, seagoing Viking raiders had begun to terrorize Europeans living along the Atlantic coast and to plant colonies, eventually doing so in England, Scotland, Cornwall, Wales, Ireland, France, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland (briefly), and a multitude of coastal islands, including the Shetlands, Orkneys, and Faroes. Not content with these Atlantic possessions, in 860 Swedish Vikings sailed down the Dnieper River and captured Kiev. From there, a Viking fleet of two hundred longboats continued down the Dnieper into the Black Sea and attacked Constantinople. Although they were unable to breach the city’s immense walls, the Vikings pillaged all the suburbs without interference from Byzantine forces, which must have
greatly outnumbered the Viking raiders. Eight years later, in 868, the Vikings based in Kiev imposed a ruling dynasty on the whole of Russia that lasted for seven hundred years—the name Russia derives from
Rus
, a name applied to Swedish Vikings.

Finally, in the tenth century Vikings were ceded a large province on the west coast of France in return for protection against their raiding countrymen. This province became known as Normandy and its residents as Normans (Latin
northmanni
means “men of the North”). The subsequent triumphs of the Normans reveal that the prevailing view of the Vikings as backward barbarians who wore horned helmets and used skulls for drinking vessels is without any basis in fact. The Viking raiders may have been brutal (raiders usually are), but Scandinavia was as civilized as the more southern societies. In 1066 Duke William and his Normans sailed across the channel and easily conquered England. Far to the south, by 1071 Normans had driven out both Muslims and Byzantines and established the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, which included southern Italy. Then, in 1096, Normans played the leading role in the First Crusade—two of the four leaders were Normans.
¹
And Richard the Lionheart, who led the Third Crusade, was a Norman (the great-great-grandson of William the Conqueror).

When the knights of the First Crusade arrived in the Holy Land, they so surpassed their Muslim adversaries in armor, weapons, and tactics that, although extremely outnumbered, they repeatedly routed Muslim forces.
²
Hence, although surrounded by an enormous Muslim world, and being very few in number, Christian knights were able to sustain crusader kingdoms in Palestine (so long as Europeans were willing to pay the substantial costs involved) and sent reinforcements when major crises arose. After two centuries European support dried up and the last knights came home. As the Crusades demonstrated, the real basis for unity among the Europeans was Christianity, which had evolved into a well-organized international bureaucracy. So for that era it would be more accurate to speak of Christendom rather than of Europe, since the latter had little social or cultural meaning at that time.
³

Now for the details.

The Viking Age

From early days, historians have held the Vikings in contempt as brutal savages. Even the distinguished twentieth-century historian Norman Cantor wrote that the “Scandinavians had nothing to contribute to western European civilization. Their level of culture was no higher than that of the more primitive tribes among their German kinsmen. The unit of Scandinavian society was the same kind of war band that is depicted in
Beowulf
.… [They] had a penchant for drowning their rulers in wells.”
⁴

Such views of the Vikings as primitive barbarians are based entirely on reactions to Viking raiders without regard for, and perhaps with no knowledge of, the societies from which they ventured. But, as discussed in chapter 4, as early as the third century (and probably before) Scandinavia had many advanced manufacturing communities such as Helgö, and Viking merchants traveled a complex network of trade routes extending as far as Persia—tens of thousands of early Middle Eastern coins have been found in what is now Sweden.
⁵
Moreover, the Vikings had excellent arms, remarkable ships, and superb navigational skills.

Technology

Viking arms and armor were similar to those of the Carolingians, except that the Vikings made greater use of battle-axes. Otherwise, they had chain-mail armor (although they sometimes preferred to wear only heavy leather into battle to have freer movements), iron helmets (without horns), shields, spears, and long swords of fine steel. But if Viking arms and armor were standard, their boats were far superior to anything found elsewhere on earth at that time.

The magnificent Viking longships, such as the Gokstad ship reassembled and on display in Oslo, were used almost exclusively for warfare. For sailing the Atlantic and hauling cargo, the Vikings used a ship known as the
knarr
. Knarrs looked much like longships, but they were deeper and wider, and the decks were covered fore and aft, open only at midships. Knarrs often were more than fifty feet in length with a beam of about fifteen feet. The knarr enabled the Vikings to haul livestock and supplies to Iceland and Greenland for centuries. It also could sail in shallow water, making it a fine riverboat. It was primarily a sailing ship, using oars only when there was no wind. Under favorable wind and wave
conditions the knarr probably could reach a speed of twenty knots.
⁶
None of the ships Columbus used on his first voyage could exceed about eight knots.