been particularly impressed by what he had heard from a delegation of Arabs. When the Arabs had tried to penetrate Central Europe in the 8th century, they had been driven back at the Battle of Tours; if they had won that battle, the world would have become Muslim (maybe). Theirs was a religion, Hitler said, that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to that faith. Hitler considered that Islam was perfectly suited to the "Germanic" temperament and would have been more compatible to the Germans than Christianity. In Muslim history Eastern historians, like their Western counterparts, have not always agreed on the importance of the battle. According to Bernard Lewis, "The Arab historians, if they mention this engagement [the Battle of Tours] at all, present it as a minor skirmish," and Gustave von Grunebaum writes: "This setback may have been important from the European point of view, but for Muslims at the time, who saw no master plan imperiled thereby, it had no further significance." Contemporary Arab and Muslim historians and chroniclers were much more interested in the second Umayyad siege of Constantinople in 718, which ended in a disastrous defeat. However, Creasy has claimed: "The enduring importance of the battle of Tours in the eyes of the Muslims is attested not only by the expressions of 'the deadly battle' and 'the disgraceful overthrow' which their writers constantly employ when referring to it but also by the fact that no more serious attempts at conquest beyond the Pyrenees were made by the Saracens." Thirteenth-century Moroccan author Ibn Idhari al-Marrakushi, mentioned the battle in his history of the Maghrib, "al-Bayan al-Mughrib fi Akhbar al-Maghrib." According to Ibn Idhari, "Abd ar-Rahman and many of his men found martyrdom on the balat ash-Shuhada'i (the path of the martyrs)." Antonio Santosuosso points that "they (the Muslims) called the battle's location, the road between Poitiers and Tours, 'the pavement of Martyrs'." However, as Henry Coppée pointed out, "The same name was given to the battle of Toulouse and is applied to many other fields on which the Moslemah were defeated: they were always martyrs for the faith." Khalid Yahya Blankinship argued that the military defeat at Tours was one of the failures that contributed to the decline of the Umayyad caliphate: Supporting the significance of Tours as a world-altering event Ninth-century chroniclers recorded the outcome of the battle as