Charles did not immediately pursue the fleeing Moslem hordes. He still feared treachery. Perhaps, too, some wakening sentiment of humanity restrained him from further bloodshed. The vast plains of Tours were covered with ghastly forms horribly hacked and hewed but now strangely still. According to an old chronicle the number of Moslem dead upon the field of Tours was three hundred and fifty thousand; that of the Christians, fifteen hundred. Surely that was enough of slaughtering death even for Karl Martel.
The battle of Tours was fought Oct. 4, 732 A. D. The following Spring Charles went in pursuit of the Saracens who were still ravaging southern France. They withdrew from place to place as Charles drew near; and ultimately—without risking another encounter with the Hammer of Thor—they retired across the Pyrenees. France was freed from the Crescent.
The Eighth Century.
All writers agree that the eighth century was the darkest age of the so-called Dark Ages. The Benedictine monks, authors of L’ histoire litteraire de la France say that the eighth century was the darkest, the most ignorant, the most barbarous that France had ever seen. It seemed to be the seething culmination of four hundred years of Barbarism, one infusion following fast upon another.
In 407 A. D. the Vandals from the upper Rhine invaded Gaul and Germany: in 410 the West Goths under Alaric besieged and sacked Rome: in 429 the Vandals under Genseric came down upon Numidia and Mauritania: in 443 the Burgundian invaders settled on the upper Rhone and on the Saone: in 451 came the Huns under Attila. Towards the end of the fifth century the Franks from the lower Rhine came into Gaul, destroying every vestige of civilization that had survived the invasion and occupation of France by the Vandals and Burgundians. About this time, too, the Angles and Saxons established themselves in Britain, and the Visigoths in Spain. In the sixth and seventh centuries the Heruli, the East Goths, and the Lombards destroyed whatever remained of Roman civilization in northern Italy.
And now to complete this scene of chaotic confusion came the fanatic Moslem hordes from the south. Surely every remaining reminder of old-world civilization seemed about to be crushed and broken to pieces between these contending crest waves of barbarism. The cataclysmic clash and crash came at the battle of Tours.
The Church.
William Turner, S. T. D. in his History of Philosophy speaking of the eighth century says: “We can scarcely realize the desolation that during these centuries reigned throughout what had been the Roman Empire. Although surrounded by all the external signs and conditions of dissolution and decay, the Church remained true to her mission of moral and intellectual enlightenment, drawing the nations to her by the very grandeur of her confidence in her mission of peace, and by the sheer force of her obstinate belief in her own ability to lift the new peoples to a higher spiritual and intellectual life. It was these traits in the character of the Church that especially attracted the barbarian kings. But, though towards the end of the fifth century Clovis became a Christian, it was not until the beginning of the ninth century that the efforts of the Church to reconquer the countries of Europe to civilization began to show visible results. The Merovingian kings—the ‘do-nothing-kings,’ as they were styled—could scarcely be called civilized. Even Charlemagne, who was the third of the Carolingian dynasty, could hardly write his name.”
The Church is for all ages and all conditions of men. She is equally effective in answering the soul-questionings of savage peoples, barbarous, semi-civilized, cultured, and æsthetic: of a superstitious monk of the Thebaid and of the philosopher Augustine, Bishop of Hippo: of a Thais of the desert and of Ursula, virgin and martyr: of Charles Martel, of the bloody battle Tours, and the gentle Francis of Assisi: of Constantine, Clovis, Charlemagne; and of John Henry Cardinal Newman, Mangan, Oscar Wilde, Strindberg, and Francis Thompson. As the manna that fell from heaven for the Israelites had in it every taste that might be in accordance with the peculiar desire of him who tasted, so in like manner, the Church of all ages has ever brought to her children that which was in accordance with their peculiar needs and desires. Fiercely kind, sternly kind, firmly kind, humanly kind, and divinely kind—as occasion may require, the Church has been and may be.
In Charles Martel, hero of Tours, the Church had a gallant defender. Under his son Pepin, and his greater grandson Charlemagne, the Church made that leap forward, away from ninth century barbarism, up and onward to her fair and full flowering in the thirteenth century Renaissance.