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Thanks for the ping. BTW, when I first learned of my namesake, it was in high school. Granted, a Catholic high school in the 1970s, but still... I later surprised a college history professor with a question about the Battle of Tours.

I learned that even then - long before our modern entanglements in the Middle East - that many in academia were profoundly uncomfortable with Charles and what he accomplished. Beyond the generic white liberal guilt thing, I've never been able to pin down exactly what seems so shameful about *winning* a battle. I guess academics have been generally anti-Christian for a long time now, so anything that represented a victory and a "pin in the map" for the ascendance of Christianity has generally been avoided.

Nowadays, according to my college-age niece, the professors' talking point is that the Battle of Tours is overblown in its importance, as it was just a Saracen raiding party that the Franks fought, not a major invasion. How about that... on the current map of France, Tours is around one-third of the way up from the Spanish border. Not as deep a thrust in 732 (when Frankish lands extended into modern Germany as well), but a *raiding party*? Come on.