It was the victory at Poitiers, though, that would most enduringly gild the Hammer’s fame. He was not, it was true, universally popular in Francia. Some, suspicious of his lust for power, claimed that his corpse had been snatched from its tomb by a dragon, and hauled away to the underworld. This, however, was a minority view. Most Franks saw in the sheer scale of Charles’ achievements evidence for that favourite conceit of the age: that God had anointed them as a chosen people. In 751, when Charles’ son Pepin deposed the line of Clovis for good, his coup drew its sustenance from the prowess of his father. ‘The name of your people has been raised up above all the other nations.’27 So the pope himself reassured the king. That Charles Martel had been a second Joshua, conquering a promised land, was a staple of Frankish self-congratulation. The Saracens had been as stubble to his sword. Ever more startling estimates of how many had fallen at Poitiers came to be bruited. Within only a few decades of the battle, the total was already nudging four hundred thousand.
There was much, then, that the Franks had in common with their most formidable adversaries. Both believed themselves possessed of a licence from God to subdue other peoples, and both drew on the inheritance of Jewish scripture to substantiate this militant calling. Certainly, a pagan traveller from beyond the eastern frontiers of the Frankish empire, a Saxon or a Dane, would have found it hard to distinguish between the rival combatants on the battlefield of Poitiers. Christians and Muslims alike worshipped a single, omnipotent deity; claimed to fight beneath the watchful protection of angels; believed that they stood in a line of inheritance from Abraham.
Yet the very similarities between them served only to sharpen the differences. More had hung in the balance at Poitiers than the Franks could possibly have realised. Far distant from their kingdom, in the great cities of the Near East, Muslim scholars were in the process of shaping a momentous new legitimacy for Islam, and its claim to a global rule. The Arabs, after their conquest of what for millennia had been the world’s greatest concentration of imperial and legal traditions, had been faced with an inevitable challenge. How were they to forge a functioning state? Not every answer to the running of a great empire was to be found in the Qur’an. Similarly absent was guidance on some of the most basic aspects of daily life: whether it was acceptable for the faithful to urinate behind a bush, for instance, or to wear silk, or to keep a dog, or for men to shave, or for women to dye their hair black, or how best to brush one’s teeth. For the Arabs simply to have adopted the laws and customs of the peoples they had subdued would have risked the exclusive character of their rule. Worse, it would have seen their claim to a divinely sanctioned authority fatally compromised. Accordingly, when they adopted legislation from the peoples they had conquered, they did not acknowledge their borrowing, as the Franks or the Visigoths had readily done, but derived it instead from that most respected, that most authentically Muslim of sources: the Prophet himself. Even as Poitiers was being fought, collections of sayings attributed to Muhammad were being compiled that, in due course, would come to constitute an entire corpus of law: Sunna. Any detail of Roman or Persian legislation, any fragment of Syrian or Mesopotamian custom, might be incorporated within it. The only requirement was convincingly to represent it as having been spoken by the Prophet – for anything spoken by Muhammad could be assumed to have the stamp of divine approval.
Here, then, for Christians was a fateful challenge. Their time-honoured conviction that the true law of God was to be found written on the heart could not have been more decisively repudiated. No longer was it the prerogative of Jews alone to believe in a great corpus of divine legislation that touched upon every facet of human existence, and prescribed in exacting detail how God desired men and women to live. The Talmud, an immense body of law compiled by Jewish scholars – rabbis – in the centuries prior to the Arab conquest of the Near East, had never threatened the inheritance of Paul’s teachings as the Sunna did. Muslims were not a beleaguered minority, prey to the bullying of Christian emperors and kings. They had conquered a vast and wealthy empire, and aspired to conquer yet more. Had Francia gone the way of Africa, and been lost for good to Christian rule, then the Franks too would doubtless have eventually been brought to the Muslim understanding of God and his law. The fundamental assumptions that governed Latin Christendom would thereby have been radically and momentously transformed. Few, if any, who fought at Poitiers would have realised it, but at stake in the battle had been nothing less than the legacy of Saint Paul.
‘For you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God.’28 The pope, when he quoted this line of scripture in a letter to Pepin, was not merely flattering the Franks, but acknowledging a brute reality. Increasingly, it was the empire ruled by the heirs of Charles Martel – the Carolingians – that defined for the papacy the very character of Christian rule. Paul I, unlike his predecessors, had failed to notify the emperor in Constantinople of his election. Instead, he had written to Pepin. The Byzantines, struggling for survival as they were against relentless Muslim onslaughts, appeared to Christians in Rome – let alone in Francia or Northumbria – an ever more alien and distant people. Even more spectral were the lands that for centuries had constituted the great wellsprings of the Christian faith: Syria and Palestine, Egypt and Africa. The days when a man like Theodore might freely travel from Tarsus to Canterbury were over. The Mediterranean was now a Saracen sea. Its waters were perilous for Christians to sail. The world was cut in half. An age was at an end.
CHRISTENDOM
VIII
CONVERSION
754: F
RISIA
As dawn broke, the camp on the banks of the river Boorne was already stirring. Boniface, its leader, was almost eighty, but as tireless as he had ever been. Forty years after his first journey to Frisia, he had returned there, in the hope of reaping from its lonely mudflats and marshes a great harvest of souls. Missionary work had long been his life. Born in Devon, in the Saxon kingdom of Wessex, he viewed the pagans across the northern sea as his kinsmen. In letters home he had regularly solicited prayers for their conversion. ‘Take pity upon them; for they themselves are saying: “We are of one blood and bone with you.”’1 Now, after weeks of touring the scattered homesteads of Frisia, Boniface had summoned all those won for Christ to be confirmed in their baptismal vows. It promised him a day of joy.