Editing Battle of Tours (section)

===Objecting to the significance of Tours as a world-altering event===
Other historians disagree with this assessment. [[Alessandro Barbero]] writes, "Today, historians tend to play down the significance of the battle of [Tours-Poitiers], pointing out that the purpose of the Muslim force defeated by Charles Martel was not to conquer the Frankish kingdom, but simply to pillage the wealthy monastery of St-Martin of Tours".<ref>Barbero, 2004, p. 10.</ref> Similarly, Tomaž Mastnak writes:

{{blockquote|text=Modern historians have constructed a myth presenting this victory as having saved Christian Europe from the Muslims. Edward Gibbon, for example, called Charles Martel the savior of Christendom and the battle near Poitiers an encounter that changed the history of the world. ... This myth has survived well into our own times. ... Contemporaries of the battle, however, did not overstate its significance. The continuators of Fredegar's chronicle, who probably wrote in the mid-eighth century, pictured the battle as just one of many military encounters between Christians and Saracens – moreover, as only one in a series of wars fought by Frankish princes for booty and territory. ... One of Fredegar's continuators presented the battle of [Tours-Poitiers] as what it really was: an episode in the struggle between Christian princes as the Carolingians strove to bring Aquitaine under their rule.<ref>Mastnak, 2002, pp. 99–100.</ref>}}

The historian [[Philip Khuri Hitti]] believes that "In reality, nothing was decided on the battlefield of Tours. The Moslem wave, already a thousand miles from its starting point in Gibraltar – to say nothing about its base in al-Qayrawan – had already spent itself and reached a natural limit."<ref>Hitti, 2002, p. 469.</ref>

The view that the battle has no great significance is perhaps best summarized by {{Interlanguage link|Franco Cardini|it|vertical-align=sup}} in ''Europe and Islam'':

{{blockquote|text=Although prudence needs to be exercised in minimizing or 'demythologizing' the significance of the event, it is no longer thought by anyone to have been crucial. The 'myth' of that particular military engagement survives today as a media cliché, than which nothing is harder to eradicate. It is well known how the propaganda put about by the Franks and the papacy glorified the victory that took place on the road between Tours and Poitiers...<ref>Cardini, 2001, p. 9.</ref>}}

In their introduction to ''The Reader's Companion to Military History'' [[Robert Cowley]] and [[Geoffrey Parker (historian)|Geoffrey Parker]] summarise this side of the modern view of the Battle of Tours by saying:

{{blockquote|text=The study of military history has undergone drastic changes in recent years. The old drums-and-bugles approach will no longer do. Factors such as economics, logistics, intelligence, and technology receive the attention once accorded solely to battles and campaigns and casualty counts. Words like "strategy" and "operations" have acquired meanings that might not have been recognizable a generation ago. Changing attitudes and new research have altered our views of what once seemed to matter most. For example, several of the battles that Edward Shepherd Creasy listed in his famous 1851 book ''[[The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World]]'' rate hardly a mention here, and the confrontation between Muslims and Christians at Poitiers-Tours in 732, once considered a watershed event, has been downgraded to a raid in force.<ref>'Editors' Note', Cowley and Parker, 2001, p. xiii.</ref>}}