Charles Martel: the master of the Franks who was never king

Charles was born around 688 to Pepin, mayor of the palace of Austrasia, and a woman named Alpaida. When his father died in 714, it was the widow, Plectrude, who governed in the name of an infant grandson, and Charles found himself in prison. He escaped. Four years of civil war followed, a defeat against the Frisians, a successful raid at Amblève, a pitched battle at Vincy on a Sunday in Lent in 717. Then Cologne, where Plectrude gave him back his father’s treasure.

The chronicle written inside his own family sums up what came next in one line: he then gave himself a king named Chlothar. A king is something you give yourself. Chilperic II would follow, then Theuderic IV, installed by Charles in his turn.

The rest of his life is a map that widens: the Saxons beyond the Rhine, Bavaria, Burgundy as far as Lyon, judges sent down to Marseille and Arles, Aquitaine after the death of Duke Eudo, an army beaten on the Berre, a failure before Narbonne. He died of fever on 22 October 741 at Quierzy, and is buried at Saint-Denis.

Mayor of the palace, on paper, is the steward of the royal household. In practice, among the Franks of the eighth century, it is the man who raises the army, hands out land and decides on war. The source closest to Charles calls him the prince, or the duke. Never the king.

When Theuderic IV died in 737 he gave him no successor: he governed four years with an empty throne. The chronicle, having no king left to name, ends by writing that he governed the two kingdoms for twenty-five years. His sons would put a Merovingian back on the seat in 743, Childeric III; in 751 Pepin took the place himself, and that is the Carolingians.

One measure of his weight: towards the end of his life Pope Gregory III had carried to him from Rome the keys of the tomb of Saint Peter, the apostle’s chains, gifts beyond counting, and, says the chronicle, the consulate of Rome into the bargain. A thing never seen nor heard of at any time. What the pope wanted was his arm against the Lombard king Liutprand. Charles received the envoys magnificently, and was careful to commit to nothing.

The closest source is the continuation of the chronicle known as Fredegar’s, written for Childebrand, Charles’s brother. The whole episode (Bordeaux, Saint-Hilaire of Poitiers burned, the march on Saint-Martin of Tours, the battle, the death of the emir Abd al-Rahman) takes a few lines. No day, no precise place, no numbers. And the chronicler, writing for the family, accuses Duke Eudo in passing of having called the Saracens in.

A chronicle written in the Iberian peninsula, the Mozarabic chronicle of 754, tells the same clash as one between Arabs and Europeans. The rest comes from later texts: annals put the fight in 732, on a Saturday, ad Pectavis, which can mean the whole of Poitou as easily as the city. In 1938 Levillain and Samaran proposed Saturday 11 October, at Niré, near Loudun: a conjecture, as they write themselves. Michel Rouche and Philippe Sénac lean towards 25 October.

The numbers come from no witness at all. Gibbon, writing in English in the eighteenth century, had already dealt with them: “the monks of Italy could affirm and believe that three hundred and fifty, or three hundred and seventy-five, thousand of the Mahometans had been crushed by the hammer of Charles, while no more than fifteen hundred Christians were slain in the field of Tours. But this incredible tale is sufficiently disproved by the caution of the French general.” The figure comes from Paul the Deacon, a Lombard writing some sixty years later and a long way off.

Poitiers did not end Muslim expeditions into Gaul. They went on: Avignon was occupied and retaken, an army was beaten on the Berre around 737, and Narbonne entered the Frankish kingdom only in 759, under Pepin. Historians hold 732 to be one clash among others, whose clearest effect was to strengthen Charles’s family.

The byname is not of his own time. His family’s chronicle calls him Charles, prince or duke, never Martel. The word comes from later texts. Gibbon offered an explanation in passing: “The epithet of Martel, the Hammer, which has been added to the name of Charles, is expressive of his weighty and irresistible strokes.” No text close to Charles explains anything at all.

And the image everyone has in mind is not a testimony. The helmeted, crowned horseman raising his axe in the middle of the melee comes from a painting by Charles de Steuben dated 1837, commissioned by Louis-Philippe for his historical museum at Versailles. Charles Martel never wore a crown.

His memory has changed sides several times. Carolingian clerics reproached him with taking Church property to reward his followers, to the point that a vision attributed to a holy man of the time, Eucherius, shows him in hell. Then he was rehabilitated. In the eighteenth century Gibbon opens his account of the battle with a sentence that made its fortune: “From such calamities was Christendom delivered by the genius and fortune of one man.” It is written a thousand years after the chronicle’s few lines.

Since then the battle has served as a banner for causes the texts of the eighth century never imagined, and in France it has become an emblem of the far right. The historians who have retraced those uses do the opposite work: saying who wrote what, when, and for whom.