Following on from my pervious post about The Gates of Vienna, aka The Siege of Vienna.... and in addition to my 2009 post "Why the Battle of Tours"... below, an update from Grokipedia.
Which adds to my point: that there were two seminal moments in European history where the invasions of Islam were beaten back. First the Battle of Tours (7th C) and second the Siege of Vienna (17th C).
Historians have seen the Battle of Tours as a "historical turning point". As was the Siege of Vienna 1,000 years later. Which also shows just how persistent this ideology is. It's resilient and it's determined. And we face it today, in all its manifestations -- influencers, mosques, push for Sharia law, mass emigration to the west, in politics, in demographics and also in war: bullets, babies and ballots.
Anyway, here's a bit from Grokipedia:
The Battle of Tours is viewed by many historians as a turning point that halted Muslim expansion northward from Spain into Western Europe after the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, helping preserve a predominantly Christian Europe.
In his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789), Edward Gibbon depicted the Battle of Tours as a decisive check on Umayyad expansion, arguing that it rescued Western Europe from the "civil and religious yoke of the Koran," averting a scenario where Islamic doctrine might have supplanted Christianity across the continent, including in institutions like Oxford.
Gibbon emphasized the battle's role in preserving classical heritage and Christian institutions amid the rapid Arab conquests, which had already overrun North Africa and Iberia by 732, viewing the Frankish victory under Charles Martel as the high-water mark of Islamic incursions into Gaul.[30]
Sir Edward Creasy, in Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World (1851), similarly ranked Tours among history's turning points, asserting that Martel's triumph inflicted irrecoverable losses on the Umayyad forces—estimated at tens of thousands—and marked the northernmost extent of Muslim military reach in Europe, thereby safeguarding the region's Christian identity against further conquest.[47]
Creasy drew on contemporary Islamic chronicles to highlight the invaders' intent to extend the caliphate's domain, contending that without this defeat, the Saracens' momentum from prior victories, such as the fall of Narbonne in 720, could have led to the subjugation of Francia and beyond.[48]
Nineteenth-century Western historiography, building on Gibbon and Creasy, framed Tours as pivotal for civilizational continuity, correlating the battle's outcome with Europe's subsequent feudal-Christian development rather than the dhimmi subordination observed in Umayyad-held territories like al-Andalus, where non-Muslims faced jizya taxation and restricted rights.[49]
This perspective underscored the empirical halt in expansion—Umayyad raids persisted but never regained pre-732 scale—as causal to preserving indigenous governance and religious liberty, contrasting with patterns of conquest and conversion in eastern Mediterranean precedents.
