One battle in rural France is credited with halting an empire's advance into Europe

In 732 AD, Frankish forces under Charles Martel met an Umayyad raiding army near Tours, in what is now France, and held their ground in a dense infantry formation that cavalry charges couldn't break. The Umayyad commander was killed and his forces withdrew south, and later European historians, most notably Edward Gibbon, treated the battle as the high-water mark of Islamic expansion into Western Europe, though modern historians debate how decisive it really was.

— the Mozarabic Chronicle of 754 (earliest surviving account), Battle of Tours — fought October 732