wealthy monastery of St-Martin of Tours". [ 85 ] Similarly, Tomaž Mastnak [ 86 ] writes: “ 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 Poitiers as what it really was: an episode in the struggle between Christian princes as the Carolingians strove to bring Aquitaine under their rule. [ 87 ] ” The Christian Lebanese-American historian Philip 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." [ 88 ] The view that the battle has no great significance is perhaps best summarized by Franco Cardini ( it ) [ 89 ] says in Europe and Islam “ Although prudence needs to be exercised in minimizing or 'demythologizing' the significance of