ABSTRACT
Charles Martel was born about the year 688, and he died in 741. His con temporaries remembered him first of all as a supremely successful military leader. They were particularly impressed by his victory over an Arab force in 732 or 733 in the encounter known as the battle of Poitiers. The fame of this victory spread quickly and widely. In England, for instance, there may be a reference to it at the very end of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History} Bede, or a very early copyist of his work, spoke of a Frankish triumph which turned the tide of war against the ‘dreadful plague of Saracens’. This assessment of the victory would in fact be handed down to modern times, elevating the battle of Poitiers to a place amongst the supposedly decisive battles of history and Charles Martel to a place among the heroes of France. It is a measure of the extent to which this view of Charles Martel as the saviour of France from the Arabs has affected the modern imagination that an extreme right-wing terror group in France has named itself after him. Between 1973 and 1991 this ‘groupe Charles Martel’ was responsible for a series of attacks on people of North African origin. It is most unfortunate that post-war French scholarship has done so little to challenge a national myth capable of inspiring such outrageous behaviour. As we shall see in the course of this study, there is every reason to question the significance traditionally attached to the battle of Poitiers, and Charles Martel is long overdue for removal as a ‘French’ national hero. Most recent work in this area has in fact been done by German-speaking scholars.1 2
Charles, therefore, was, and sometimes still is, regarded as a heroic warrior who defended Christ’s people from unbelievers. His nickname, Martellus, ‘the Hammer’, which was first recorded in the ninth century, invited comparison
1 Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave and R. Mynors (Oxford 1969), V, ch. 23, pp. 556-7.
