“Europe and Islam: Shared History,
Shared Identity”
Continued ...
East of the Pyrenees lay what the Muslims called the “Great Land” (al–Ard al–Kabirah), where, on a Roman road south of Poitiers, the Arabo–Berber army of the amir of Al–Andalus, ['Abd al–Rahman ibn] 'Abd Allah al–Ghafiqi, encountered the stolid mass of Frankish tribesmen led by Charles the Bastard in 732. In numbers unseen in the Franks’ living memory, no less than 30,000 Arabs and Berbers swarmed over the landscape of Aquitaine. Fifteen thousand were campaign–hardened warriors.
The Franks placed themselves on the plateau above the Roman highway, giving themselves the advantage of wide–angle vision and downhill engagement with their enemy. Al–Ghafiqi gave the order to engage the enemy following noon prayers. Charles commanded his men to lock their shields together to form tight, compact rows of infantry stretching the width of the gradual incline and in parallel with the Roman road. “The men of the North stood as motionless as a wall,” wrote Isadorus Pacensis, an Andalusian monk. “They were like a belt of ice frozen together and not to be dissolved as they slew the Arabs with the sword.” Charles the Bastard’s apotheosis as the Hammer of Martel began that day— a day that allegedly secured the future of Western civilization.
The Battle of Poitiers imparted to the Frankish people an identity largely derived from both the victory and the victor’s narrative. According to historian Pierre Riché, they found themselves at “the center of a new Christian civilization.” And they received a new name. In calling the victors at Poitiers “Europenses,” Isadorus Pacensis introduced a meta–category to replace the lost, lamented civitas romanum. What was the reality of Poitiers then? The great German military historian Hans Delbrück declared, “There was no more important battle in the history of the world.” In Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power, American military historian Victor Davis Hanson expressed the same opinion.
Occasionally, a Western scholar has asked a more philosophical question about Poitiers. Two mid–20th–century French historians, Jean–Henri Roy and Jean Deviosse, enumerated the benefits of a Muslim triumph at Poitiers: astronomy, trigonometry, Arabic numerals, the corpus of Greek philosophy. The Muslim perspective on Poitiers also contains surprises. Far from bringing an end to Muslim incursions beyond the Pyrenees, Poitiers temporarily accelerated them. Later Muslim historians like Ibn Khaldun would blame internecine preoccupations within the Dar al–Islam as the real reason for Christian Europe’s survival after Poitiers.
There is another muted element in this Poitiers–Europe connection. This was a time when few of the foundational outcomes that constitute European civilization as we know it were anything but inevitable. But looking historically, it is evident that Europe’s creation as a coherent culture and polity inhered in the coordination and collaboration of the bishopric of Rome and the regime of Catholic Franks in the immediate aftermath of Poitiers, which laid the foundations for the first European nation–state; the hegemonic politics of the papacy; the alienation of Latin Christendom from Eastern Orthodoxy; and the emergence of religious fanaticism and the chronic, reciprocated hostility of Islam and the Occident. The alliance of the papacy and the Franks, the foundation of primitive Europe, resulted in large part from the fallout from Poitiers.
Forty–two years after Poitiers came Charlemagne’s Spanish campaign of 778— today a somewhat embarrassing sidebar for French scholars, and largely ignored except for the ambush at Roncevaux, immortalized three centuries later in The Song of Roland. This story became first the national epic of France, and one of the greatest constitutive myths of Christiandom. The narrative depicts Charlemagne intending but failing to add Al–Andalus to his huge Carolingian empire. He went to the Pyrenees “at the head of all the forces he could muster,” said Einhard, his faithful biographer. For the first time in history, part of the Dar al–Islam came under significant Christian attack. Had Charlemagne’s invasion been successful, it would have accelerated the armed Christian confrontation with Islam by three centuries. Instead, his massive army failed to conquer a single Muslim city.
The Song of Roland, the greatest of the chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”) is today described as “poetic history,” Levering Lewis noted. Writing in the late 10th century, its author, Turoldus, would have certainly known the Iliad. Turoldus’ chanson serves up the biggest “clash of civilizations” argument since the Greeks and the Trojans, with Islam playing the enemy. By leaving out the true perpetrators of the famous ambush, the Christian Basques, he transformed a costly sneak attack by fellow Christians on a mountain trail at Roncevaux into a Manichean standoff between two civilizations.
Back to the top.Upcoming Event
“Miral: A Palestinian/Israeli Dialogue On and Off Screen”
Film Screening and Panel Discussion
New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts
Thursday, February 2, 2012, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm
(Reception to follow)
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