Charles Martel escaped prison and ended up choosing the Frankish kings
When Pepin of Herstal died in 714, his widow locked his son Charles in a cell in Cologne to keep him from the succession. Within a few years Charles had broken out, beaten every rival, and was installing puppet kings of his own choosing. Later chroniclers called him Martel, the Hammer.
Born around 688, Charles was a son of Pepin and a noblewoman named Alpaida. Older histories labelled him illegitimate, though the line between wives and concubines was blurry in 8th-century Francia, and the charge probably owes much to Pepin's first wife, Plectrude, who wanted her own grandson Theudoald, a boy of eight, to inherit. By then the Merovingian kings were figureheads, and the real power belonged to the mayor of the palace, who controlled the treasury and handed out land.
After escaping late in 715, Charles was acclaimed mayor in Austrasia. His one defeat came near Cologne in 716, when the Frisian king Radbod held him off. He regrouped in the Eifel hills and in April ambushed the returning Neustrian army at midday near Malmedy, a surprise so sudden that the enemy thought they faced a far larger force. Victory at Vinchy in March 717 followed, and Plectrude was allowed to retire to a convent.
Between 718 and 732 he campaigned against Saxons, Frisians, Bavarians and Alemanni, pulling northern and southern Germany back under Frankish control. When Chilperic II died in 721 Charles appointed the next king, Theuderic IV, and by the end of his rule he did not bother naming one at all. He also took a Bavarian princess, Swanachild, as a second wife.
In 732 an Umayyad army under Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi marched on the wealthy city of Tours. Charles's largely infantry force held against the mostly mounted attackers somewhere between Tours and Poitiers. The historian Paul Fouracre suggests the campaign was a long-distance raid rather than a war of conquest, and Arabic sources of the time say little about it. Charles died in 741. His son Pepin became the first Carolingian king, and his grandson Charlemagne was crowned emperor.
Source: Charles Martel
