Decisive Battles

[Patroklos]

Tous was not an end all death match. At most it would have made France look like Muslim dominated Spain With the CHANCE of further expansion. There is nothing to show they would not have suffered a defeat when entering Germany/Italy/England as crippling as Tours was or that any of those future targets couldn't have invaded themselves.

[Perfection]

Battle of Yavin

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

I don't know how that helps your case. The day after the battle not everyone will be muslim. thnx try again

The day after the battle, the Muslims are taxing all the infidels more than the faithful, and control a forward staging area. A generation later, it's probably made a big difference.

[Sava]

If it takes a whole generation for the end game, the battle itself wasn't that decisive. A lot of other things needed to happen.

[Dauphin]

So today, without Tours, Europeans would be mostly atheists or agnostics with a cultural history of an Abrahamic religion rather than atheists or agnostics with a cultural history of another Abrahamic religion.

[Dauphin]

America would be a fundistan though. Scary.

[Sava]

So today, without Tours, Europeans would be mostly atheists or agnostics with a cultural history of an Abrahamic religion rather than atheists or agnostics with a cultural history of another Abrahamic religion.

yeah

decisive

[Hauldren Collider]

Yorktown

[Hauldren Collider]

New Orleans

[DinoDoc]

Battle of Yavin

That didn't settle things. The Empire was able to carry on for sometime before the Rebels were able to seize the capital.

[Hauldren Collider]

Battle of Endor was the turning point, IMO

If only it didn't involve ****ing teddy bears

[Al B. Sure!]

More and more I realize Sava is Ben 2.0.

At the time of Tours, the Arabs had only been halted at Constantinople. In just under a century from Yarmouk to Tours, the Arabs had conquered this:

Spoiler:

The Muslim conquests of that entire region pretty much did turn everyone Muslim. By the 10th century and probably earlier, there were Muslim majorities in that entire region of the world. Millions of Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians converted. What would make the Christianity of the Franks any more resilient?

However, there are many reasons to think that the Islamic conquests northward would have stopped in Gaul even with a victory at Tours. The forests of central Europe would have been disadvantageous to the cavalry-based raiding armies of the Umayyads. As with their Roman forebears, the Muslims would have probably found Germany too poor to be worth the expense and difficulty in conquering and administering. More likely, they would have turned to much richer Italy where the Lombards were destabilized by Slavic migrations and religious tensions between the Arian Lombards and the Catholic populace, the same recipe that assisted the early Islamic Bedouins in their conquest of the Byzantines.

But the Umayyads probably wouldn't have been militarily successful beyond Italy. They were slowing in the 720's-740's. Tours was just one defeat of many. In 722, they were defeated by the Asturians at the Battle of Covadonga, ensuring the survival of the Visigothic enclaves in Northern Spain. In 738, a Hindu confederation defeated the Muslims at Rajasthan, pushing them across the Indus. In 740, at the Battle of Akroinon, the Byzantines achieved their first victory in pitched battle over the Arabs, halting Muslim expansion into Anatolia.

These defeats on the frontiers were not as damaging to Umayyad expansion as the widespread rebellion of the late 740's sparked by Abu Muslim. In 750, the Umayyad's were defeated and superseded by the Persianized Abbasids. The remnants of the Umayyad's found their way to Spain, permanently fracturing the Islamic ummah.


So while a Muslim victory at Tours would have greatly weakened Christian Europe and produced a more Islamic France, as well as opened the door for a Muslim conquest of Italy, defeats on other frontiers and the destabilization of the Umayyad Caliphate would have prevented the formation of an Islamic empire throughout Europe.

[PLATO]

That's the answer I was looking for. Thanks Albie.

[Felch]

If the Charles Martel had lost at Tours, France today would be as Islamic as Spain.

[Al B. Sure!]

If the Charles Martel had lost at Tours, France today would be as Islamic as Spain.

You are forgetting how significant Frankish intervention in Spain was during the 8th and 9th centuries. Charlemagne was particularly active in Spain, memorialized by the famous Song of Roland. An Islamic France would have left literally no Christian power in Europe capable of challenging Islam. Who was left? The feuding Anglo-Saxon kingdoms? The Arian Lombards? Much of Germany was still pagan.

While the Spanish kingdoms had victories over the Muslims at Covadonga and Toulouse, they probably wouldn't have been able to mount anything approaching the Reconquista without Frankish interventions. They would have remained small kingdoms in the Pyrenees capable of sustaining their survival only by asymmetrical warfare in the difficult terrain that was not conducive to period Islamic armies.