Happy Battle of Toulouse Day!

by The Philosopher June 08th, 2009

You all know what June 9 is! And in case you didn’t, the ever-helpful and editable Wikipedia will tell you:

The Battle of Toulouse (721) was a victory of a Frankish army led by Duke Odo of Aquitaine over an Umayyad [Moslem] army besieging the city of Toulouse, and led by the governor of Al-Andalus [that's Spain to you and me, kids!], Al-Samh ibn Malik al-Khawlani. The victory hindered the spread of Umayyad control westward from Narbonne into Aquitaine.

Al-Samh ibn Malik al-Khawlani, the wali (governor) of Al-Andalus, built up a strong army from Umayyad territories to conquer Aquitaine, a large duchy in the southwest of modern-day France, formally under Frankish sovereignty, but in practice almost independent in the hands of the dukes of Aquitaine. He besieged the city of Toulouse, then Aquitaine’s most important city, and Duke Odo of Aquitaine, also known as Eudes, immediately left to find help. He returned three months later—just before the city was about to surrender—and attacked the Muslim invaders on June 9.

The victory was essentially the result of a classic enveloping movement by Eudes. After Eudes originally fled, the Muslims became overconfident, and instead of maintaining strong outer defenses around their siege camp, and continuously scouting, did neither. Thus, when Eudes returned, he was able to launch an almost totally surprise attack on the siege force, scattering it at the first attack, and slaughtering units which were resting, or fled without weapons or armour. Al-Samh ibn Malik al-Khawlani managed to get away with a fraction of his forces, but died shortly thereafter, leaving Anbasa ibn Suhaym Al-Kalbi (721-725) as governor.

Is Odo of Aquitaine running for office?

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Columns, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Philangelus

I wouldn’t call Wikipedia ‘ever-helpful’. For the most part it is OK but I read two articles on two well-known Catholic saints that were very slanderous and implied very immoral things about these two saints. As for being editable, try re-editing it and see if it stays that way. A more reliable source is the old Catholic encyclopedia from 1913. I got the following from a thread on a Catholic forum:

“Wikipedia is anti-Christian as well as anti-Catholic. BC and AD are being removed from articles and replaced with the non-Christian demarcators CBE and CE.

When a couple of Catholic editors tried to retain these most commonly used dating markers BC and AD one was blocked from editing and the other is suffering a bashing campaign.

The reason why this is so improtant is that this Wikipedia is like a disease its information just keeps spreading around throughout the internet and people will read this garbage and think that they are getting unbiased scholarly information when in fact it is coming form a website that hates Christians and Catholics!”

Here is another link on the Scholasticum forum titled “Wikipedia used to promote Anti-Catholic Hate – St. Anselm is grossly slurred:

http://scholasticum.blogspot.com/2006/02/wikipedia-used-to-promote-anti.html.

The amount of filth on the Internet is horrendous. The amount of good is very little.
The Philosopher

Thank you, Philangelus, for the information. I guess you could not see that my comment was tongue-in-cheek (both my tongue and cheek were hardly visible online, I know!). I do consider WP helpful, but in a limited sense, as encyclopedias in general are. Aside from the Catholic Encyclopedia — which has its own problems (like promoting modernist scripture theories, e.g., the documentary theory for the authorship of the Pentateuch) — most encyclopedias have a bias of some sort among the contributors. Frequently, these are part of the intellectual avant-garde, and therefore are progressivists, which makes them anti-Catholic to some degree. (Note, I said “frequently,” not “always.”)

All that said, I agree with your negative assessment of WP. I’ve noted, for instance, that the way they throw around the word “antisemitism” in relation to Catholic saints, one would think that hatred of Jewish people was a prerequesite for canonization in the Catholic Church. (And it really isn’t!)
Philangelus

To the Philosopher:

I missed the tongue-in-cheek. Perhaps if I saw a ;) symbol or a (sarcasm) insert I would have gotten it. I had just read a slur on WP of one of my favorite saints the day before and hence the angry reaction to WP.

I should have known that the Philosopher would know about the deviousness of WP.

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