re: Today is the anniversary of the most important battle in history

Wait does that emoji mean you don't understand what I meant?

I'll be happy to tell you.

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Therefore, without the Battle of Tours at Poitiers (732) where Charles Martel defeated Muslim invaders in north central France, the Muslim invasion of Europe would have come centuries earlier and from the West! The Battle of Lepanto (1571) Would not have occurred in the Muslim Mediterranean.

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You really want to take this reasoning further, then I submit any of the early battles of Islam, when it was in infancy and could've been quashed. Notably the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah or the Battle of Yarmouk.

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You really want to take this reasoning further, then I submit any of the early battles of Islam, when it was in infancy and could've been quashed. Notably the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah or the Battle of Yarmouk.

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There would be numerous battles that could have "quashed" Islam, but the fact that the tribes of the peninsula had an organizing principle, and also allowed for a good deal of autonomy for conquered peoples means that they had subjects who were willing to be ruled by them, as many groups in West Asia had been caught in the crosshairs of the Sasanian-Byzantine conflict, and were eager for change.

That eagerness also characterized the later Western European ventures, as the Umayyad relied on newly conquered Byzantine allies to help them move across the Mediterranean, and the Umayyad incursion into France was helped by various French lords, first Oddo, and then another lord whose name I forget when they invaded France again a year after Tours. The Umayyads had French holdings for nearly 30 years after Tours as well. If we concede that Tours stopped Umayyad expansion, then shouldn't we also concede that the Berber revolt a decade or so after Tours also curbed Umayyad expansion? After that revolt, many independent North African kingdoms were only nominally Muslim as well, and Islamification took a relatively long time.

I dislike focusing on specific battles as macro-historical turning points because the details show that the history was much more complicated, so much so that these battles are not so much turning points as a factor among a multitude of factors. If the Umayyads had not taxed the Berbers so heavily and did not treat them as second class citizens, then wouldn't that also be a major reason why Umayyad expansion did not continue? Why then focus on battles and not the complex social arrangements which underpin the motivations of groups of people?