Odo was defeated so easily at Bordeaux and Garonne, despite winning 11 years earlier at the Battle of Toulouse, because at Toulouse he had managed a surprise attack against an overconfident and unprepared foe: the Umayyad forces were mostly infantry, and what cavalry they did have were never mobilized. As Herman of Carinthia wrote in one of his translations of a history of al-Andalus, Odo managed a highly successful encircling envelopment which took the attackers totally by surprise, resulting in a chaotic slaughter of the Muslim forces.