Episode Details

folks, we are back with our series on Al-Andalus, aka Muslim-controlled Medieval Iberia, and it's time to talk about one of the most famous incidents in its 700-year history: the Battle of Tours. though it was a large battle for the time and contemporary accounts give us a decent picture, Tours and Christian leader Charles Martel have been the benefactors of over a millennia of propaganda, painting it as the first salvo in the big, "civilizational conflict" between Christianity and Islam. we discuss what actually happened, why the truth matters, and why contemporary and postmodern scholars agree but everyone in between certainly did not.