Charles Martel: He Saved Europe From Islam (for 1300 Years, Anyway)

Battle of Tours, October 10, 732.

A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.

–Edward Gibbon on the Victory of Charles Martel at Poitiers, 732 A.D., in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 52.