Battle of Tours, also called Battle of Poitiers, (October 732), victory won by Charles Martel, the de facto ruler of the Frankish kingdoms, over Muslim invaders from Spain. The battlefield cannot be exactly located, but it was fought somewhere between Tours and Poitiers, in what is now west-central France.The death of the Visigothic king Witiza in 710 left Spain in disarray. The Gothic nobles refused to recognize his young sons and elected Roderick, dux (duke) of Baetica, to succeed him. Gothic Gaul followed Witiza’s son Akhila, and the Basques rebelled. As Roderick marched north to quell the Basques, his rivals appealed to Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr, the Umayyad governor of the Maghreb. Mūsā dispatched an army under Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād in late spring 711. The force landed at Gibraltar, crossed to mainland Spain, and in July 711 defeated Roderick’s army.Instead of returning to North Africa, Ṭāriq marched on the Visigothic capital of Toledo and took the city with minimal resistance. Mūsā arrived with a larger army in 712, and the two Muslim generals soon occupied most of the Iberian Peninsula. Although both Ṭāriq and Mūsā were recalled to the seat of the Umayyad caliphate in Damascus, their successors consolidated Muslim control of Spain and attempted to expand their holdings to the north. In 719 Muslim armies crossed the Pyrenees, taking Narbonne and establishing Berber settlements in Gothic Gaul. By 725 Muslim raiding parties were venturing as far as Burgundy, and in 731 they may have sacked Arles on the Rhône River.
