es Martel’s victory (exhibiting the usual combination of wishful thinking, poetic exaggeration, and bravado that characterized medieval estimations of armies and massacres) credited the mayor with slaying between 300,000 and 375,000 Muslim warriors, among them Abd al-Rahman himself. Frankish losses were calculated at just 1,500 men.
The battle of Tours (also known as the battle of Poitiers) was well known to contemporaries and has been celebrated by western writers for more than one thousand years. Its salient details and exemplary moral lesson were fixed within no more than three years of its conclusion by writers including the Venerable Bede, who wrote in his Ecclesiastical History of
Powers and Thrones
Dan Jones