Muslim presence in medieval France

A second phase of presence lasted nearly 80 years, between 890 and 973, during which Muslims had established several fortified camps in the vicinity of Saint-Tropez in the middle of the Massif des Maures,[1] with Fraxinetum as its chief town, which Arab written sources call Gabal al qilâl ("the mountain of the summits"), and farahsinêt (the phonetic transcription of Fraxinetum), i.e., the present-day hinterland of the Gulf of Saint-Tropez.

After the submission of Roussillon to the Frankish kingdom following the capture of Narbonne in 759, Pepin immediately directed all his war effort against the Duchy of Aquitaine.

Pepin, Charlemagne's father, fulfilled the Frankish objective of extending the kingdom's defensive borders beyond Septimania and the Pyrenees, creating a solid barrier between the Emirate of Cordoba and Francia.

The territory gained from the Muslims, called the "Marca Hispanica", became a buffer zone made up of counties dependent on the Carolingian monarchs.

Muslims may have given name to the neighboring village of Ramatuelle; Évariste Lévi-Provençal, who is not a toponymist, derives the toponym Ramatuelle from the Arabic Rahmat-ûllah (or Rahmatu-Allah) "divine mercy",[3] but not to the Massif des Maures, nor to the Maurienne, where part of the Muslim community settled in the Arc valley,[4][5] "The name Maurienne does not find its origin in the word "Maure", relating to the incursions of the tenth century Saracens.

Since 921, the Muslim bands, coming from Provence, had taken control of many important passages in the western Alps (other sourcesclaim that the Franks had installed them there to block the Lombards) including the Mont-Joux pass that the abbot had just crossed before being recognized and taken.

At the head of the Provençal host reinforced by the troops of Ardouin, Count of Turin, they tracked down the Moors whom they crushed during the Battle of Tourtour in 973, then drove them out of their fortified bases in Provence.

This military campaign against the Muslims, conducted without Conrad's troops, in fact masked a bringing to heel of Provence, of the local aristocracy and of the urban and peasant communities which had always refused feudal mutation and countal power until then.

[9] With Isarn, bishop of Grenoble, he undertook the mission to repopulate the Dauphiné and authorized an Italian count named Ugo Blavia to settle near Fréjus at the beginning of the 970s in order to cultivate the land.