Sismondi and Michelet have underrated the enduring interest of this great Appeal of Battle between the champions of the Crescent and the Cross.  But, if French writers have slighted the exploits of their national hero, the Saracenic trophies of Charles Martel have had full justice done to them by English and German historians.  Gibbon devotes several pages of his great work[69] to the narrative of the battle of Tours, and to the consideration of the consequences which probably would have resulted if Abderrahman’s enterprise had not been crushed by the Frankish chief.  Schlegel speaks of this “mighty victory” in terms of fervent gratitude, and tells how “the arm of Charles Martel saved and delivered the Christian nations of the West from the deadly grasp of all-destroying Islam”; and Ranke points out, as “one of the most important epochs in the history of the world, the commencement of the eighth century, when on the one side Mahometanism threatened to overspread Italy and Gaul, and on the other the ancient idolatry of Saxony and Friesland once more forced its way across the Rhine.  In this peril of Christian institutions, a youthful prince of Germanic race, Charles (or Karl) Martel, arose as their champion, maintained them with all the energy which the necessity for self-defence calls forth, and finally extended them into new regions.”

Arnold ranks the victory of Charles Martel even higher than the victory of Arminius, “among those signal deliverances which have affected for centuries the happiness of mankind.”  In fact, the more we test its importance, the higher we shall be led to estimate it; and, though all authentic details which we possess of its circumstances and its heroes are but meagre, we can trace enough of its general character to make us watch with deep interest this encounter between the rival conquerors of the decaying Roman Empire.  That old classic world, the history of which occupies so large a portion of our early studies, lay, in the eighth century of our era, utterly exanimate and overthrown.  On the north the German, on the south the Arab, was rending away its provinces.  At last the spoilers encountered one another, each striving for the full mastery of the prey.  Their conflict brought back upon the memory of Gibbon the old Homeric simile, where the strife of Hector and Patroclus over the dead body of Cebriones is compared to the combat of two lions, that in their hate and hunger fight together on the mountain tops over the carcass of a slaughtered stag; and the reluctant yielding of the Saracen power to the superior might of the northern warriors might not inaptly recall those other lines of the same book of the Iliad, where the downfall of Patroclus beneath Hector is likened to the forced yielding of the panting and exhausted wild boar, that had long and furiously fought with a superior beast of prey for the possession of the scanty fountain among the rocks at which each burned to drink.