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Watch Holland!
It doesn’t matter that Tom Holland is a normie, a liberal like everyone else and even anti-Nazi: he is spot on in this interview!
Fascism, I think, was the most radical revolutionary movement that Europe has seen since the age of Constantine. Because unlike the French Revolution, unlike and the Russian Revolution, it doesn’t even target institutional Christianity: it targets the moral ethical fundamentals of Christianity. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution are still preaching that idea, that the victim should be raised up from the dust and that the oppressor should be humbled into the dust; it’s still preaching the idea that the first should be last and the last should be first just as Christ has done.
The Nazis do not buy into that. The Nazis buy into the Nietzschean idea that the weak are weak and should be treated as weak, as contemptable, as something to be crushed.
Atheists of today [like Richard Dawkins et al]… they are basically Christians. Nietzsche saw humanists, communists, liberals—people who may define themselves against Christianity—as being absolutely in the fundamentals Christian, and I think he is right about that because I think that in a sense atheism doesn’t repudiate the kind of ethics and the morals and the values of Christianity.
Wow! Holland’s diagnosis of the contemporary secular world… just transvalue his neo-Christian axiology and we arrive at the POV of this site!
Update of June 7
In the full interview, after the half-hour mark, Holland touches on a topic he didn’t get to touch on in Dominion because this book was published the year before the BLM 2020 riots. Holland says that in America blacks have been last and whites first.
‘Why is that inherently wrong?’ Holland asks his interlocutor with emphasis. He elaborates for a few minutes on George Floyd and says that this collective hysteria that whites suffered had its origins in the great inversion of values that was initiated by the figure of a helpless victim on the Cross.
From the 38th minute, the anti-Nazi Holland returns to Nazism and then discusses the genesis of the ultimately religious idea of ‘human rights’ after the French Revolution. Holland says that believing in such rights is as theological as believing that Jesus rose from the dead.
Near the 42nd minute, Holland says that Hitler saw in St Paul the Jew whose ideas destroyed Greece and Rome.
After minute 53 Holland says something very interesting. Christian ethics (which is the same as the neo-Christian ethics of atheists) constantly destroys its structures and reinvents itself. This is clear from the Middle Ages to the present day: all those funny anecdotes Holland tells in his book that I didn’t quote on this site because it would have meant quoting his whole book.
In the final minutes Holland hits the nail of all nails: just what we said recently about Richard Spencer’s ‘doughnut’ metaphor (the black hole of anti-Hitlerism) and the ‘Foundation Myth’ article, quoted in red at the top of this site. Holland said that Westerners today ask what Hitler did and they are doing exactly the opposite of that!
‘And by doing the opposite they are doing it for Christian reasons’.
Bingo (see also this moment from a Holland lecture in Romania).
– For the context of these translations click here –
The papacy in the middle of the 9th century
The Vatican becomes a castle and a holy pope a fortification builder
When in August 846 seventy-five Saracen ships appeared at the mouth of the Tiber, around 11,000 men and 500 horses fell on the districts of Rome on the right bank of the Tiber, eleven thousand men and five hundred horses fell on the districts of Rome to the right of the Tiber, completely sacking the church of St Peter outside the wall of Aurelius as well as the basilica of St Paul and taking prisoner all those who had not fled, ‘including the inhabitants of the monasteries, men and women’ (Annales Xantenses), the contemporaries saw it as a punishment of Providence against the corruption that was invading Rome.
After the surprise attack, it was the defeat, the disgrace provoked by Saracens and pagans, which inflamed the faithful. Why had Saint Peter not been better defended? A capitulary blames the sins of Christianity and points out the remedies: to fight against one’s wickedness, against the sins of the flesh and the theft of the ecclesiastical patrimony! In addition, Lothair I ordered alms to be collected throughout the empire and imposed a special tax for the reconstruction of the church of St Peter and its protection, to which the emperor and his brothers contributed ‘not a few pounds of silver’.
In the meantime, Pope Sergius II had died. And on the very day of his death, his successor was elected: a Roman, educated from childhood in the Benedictine monastery of St Martin and an ‘exemplary religious’ (Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche). It was Leo IV (847-855), who after a six-week interpontificium was consecrated pope, and again without imperial approval, which had been necessary since 824. It seems that the crisis caused by the Arab pirates didn’t permit any delay, although the oath of allegiance to the emperor was subsequently demanded of him.
Pope Leo IV and the Fire in the Borgo. The fresco is believed
to have been designed by Raphael, but was likely painted
by Giulio Romano and others in Raphael’s workshop
between 1514 and 1517 when Pope Leo X was pontiff—Ed.
This saintly father achieved a reputation as a master builder of fortifications that can be said to have lasted until the present day. He transformed the suburbs of Rome on the right bank of the Tiber, the entire neighbourhood of the Vatican, into a castle in an undertaking that was important for centuries. It was a plan that Leo III had already been contemplating, but which only Leo IV brought to fruition. In a work of years, personally inspected by him on foot or horseback, he reinforced the old city walls, created new fortifications and thus became the creator of the civitas leonina, to which he modestly gave his name ‘city of Leon’. Between 848 and 852 he built a wall almost forty feet high and as many feet thick, reinforced with 44 towers.
The work of fortifying required abundant materials and numerous workers, who had to contribute to cities and monasteries of the Papal State, dominions and militias. But the papal stronghold also cost large sums of money, which came mainly from the Frankish Empire—something the papal biographer completely omits—on the orders of the very obliging Lothair, with the strange effect that it was due to the pope and his position vis-à-vis the emperor!
The devastated St Peter’s was again lavishly decorated. On the high altar were placed sheets of gold enamelled with precious stones, each weighing 216 pounds; a gold cross, embossed with pearls and emeralds, weighed 1,000 pounds, and a silver ciborium or baldachin over the altar weighed 1,606 pounds. As St Paul’s and many temples, even in the provinces, were also expensively decorated, it could be seen how immensely rich the Church was, for which collections were already being made everywhere because of its ‘poverty’ (as they still are today).
It is understandable that the ‘sons of Satan’, who came from Sardinia, appeared at the mouth of the Tiber as early as 849, long before the fortification of Leon was erected. At last, they had seen what was hidden in those Christian temples and what was piled up at St Peter’s. ‘The imagination cannot comprehend the richness of the treasures piled up there’ (Gregorovius).
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A new story
Or:
On putting the chariot before the horse
There is something important I would like to add to my Thursday post, in which I used a 1993 interview between Tom Metzger and James Mason to say something about Richard Spencer.
On this site I have been very critical of James Mason and his epigones for admiring Charles Manson: the mastermind behind the stabbing to death of the beautiful English rose Sharon Tate (and other Hollywood showbiz personalities).
In Siege Mason compiles his articles from the journal he wrote in the early 1980s. In vain, when I was reading Siege, did I find the reasons why Mason admired Manson, insofar as the latter’s intentions in devising his crimes weren’t racial. But now that I re-watched his interview with Metzger I detected something I had missed the first time I saw it. But before this revelation about the mind of James Mason I would like to digress a little.
Unlike Metzger’s audio-visual interviews, the podcasts of Greg Johnson, one of the leading promoters of American white nationalism, are audio-only. Metzger, let alone Mason, not properly ‘white nationalists’, were infinitely closer in character to the Germans of the Third Reich than Johnson and Spencer. But in one of his podcasts Johnson said something that piqued my interest. He mentioned the decades immediately before the internet as the darkest era, in that the Establishment had virtually absolute control over the narrative. This is very true: and the new generations have no idea how impossible it was for us to find even dissident authors, to the extent that in the past we could never rebel. (Since I grew up in the 1960s and 70s I couldn’t rebel intellectually because of this absolute control of information, as I recount in the third volume of my autobiography.)
Now let’s get back to Mason’s infatuation with Manson. What I detected in the interview with Metzger, which I had missed the first time I saw it, was that the desperation of national socialists like Mason in the face of the System’s absolute control of the media meant that he began to fix his attention on the news of those who broke the law with crimes to shock public morals. It was, it seemed, the only escape valve from an Establishment that was entirely successful in suppressing dissenting opinion.
This revelation came to me in understanding Mason when Metzger asked him why he admired Charles Manson. From Mason’s response, Metzger commented that, given the impasse on all sides due to the absolute grip of the System, the whole thing had to be blown up. (Recall that Charles Manson is not the only criminal to whom James Mason devotes articles in Siege: he also discusses other criminals who, at the time, shocked public morals even though, like Manson, weren’t acting out of racial ideals either.)
That doesn’t mean that, having understood the point James Mason wanted to get across, I now approve of the behaviour of Charles Manson and company. But it does mean that what I didn’t understand years ago when I read Siege directly, I understand now having watched the splendid interview with Metzger again. As I said, for new generations it is almost impossible to imagine the prolonged despair, a suffocation of ideas I dare say, that it meant for noble-minded boomers that there was no relevant information anywhere!
But back to James Mason. While I don’t join his enthusiasm for criminals who acted without racial ideology, what about those who break the law with racial ideology: say, someone like Breivik or Tarrant? In the 2020 discussion thread on the Metzger/Mason interview, one of the commenters chided me because I said that any revolutionary action is premature:
You sound like an old and grumbling geezer.
It’s futile and unfair to accuse the youth of ardour and impatience and narrow tunnel vision. Many of them are sincerely actuated by a heroic impulse to over with this shameful state of things, this disgraceful status quo. Their hearts volcanically explodes with lava of despair and hatred for the world of their worthless parents and cowardly ancestors. Yes, the lives of foolhardy men usually end not well. And tragic triumph is a fate of exceptional ones.
But the young soul has no time to wait, be it in love or war. So, be lenient towards suicidal behaviour of the youth and do not impute to passionate youngsters the carelessness concerning those fucking Austrian economists! All this cultural and historic noise–million words in billion posts–is not a groundwork or an earnest or a linchpin or a promise of coming transvaluation of values.
They dread reaching your age, Caesar, and face their death, especially after a very long life, and realize that all their efforts failed to produce results, moreover the situation has got worse. They know some examples of lustrous persons, whose deeds were vain in spite of their “strategic thinking”. By the way, traitors often justify their betrayal with strategical manoeuvring for the sake of a lofty goal in long-term planning.
The destiny occurs HERE AND NOW, and if this “here and now” is stolen, I will not judge the glowing souls with the destructive power of dynamite inside their cores.
I confess that, now that I re-read my comment years later, I see that I responded to this commenter in a very, very poor way! I would like to reply to him now, even though so much time has passed.
It is not for the youth to make the most important decisions of a state. In a healthy world for the Aryans, as was Sparta, and Republican Rome, it was up to very mature adults. Recall that, for Plato, the philosopher-king had to be a man in his sixties.
To be impetuous, fiery, determined or bold against the System is precisely what President Joe Biden wants to tighten the screws even further (remember his inaugural speech in which he declared war on us). We shouldn’t indulge him because his administration is doing everything it can to commit suicide. The situation in 2023 has changed a lot from the days when, in 2020, the commenter mocked what I said about Austrian economists. Now, after Biden’s blunder with the confiscation of Russian funds abroad due to Putin’s military action in Ukraine, several nations have realised that their funds aren’t safe in dollars and many, even in the MSM, are already openly talking about the last days of the dollar. In other words, my restraint not to rush into revolutionary actions as impetuous youths love, but to wait for the System to collapse on its own, is being vindicated by recent historical events.
But there are even more profound reasons why I think James Mason’s ideology—something like having the System in siege with a multiplication of actions à la Charles Manson—is flawed. And here we come back to what Spencer said in his recent interview: that we need a new story or, as I would say using Jungian language, a story that manages to activate the collective Self that will produce, in the white man, the new galvanising myth. Ironically, in this respect James Mason did hit the nail on the head: ‘Someone did say that prior to 1945 we were a party, since 1945 we have been a religion.’
Indeed. The Jews have their religion, their story: what Christians call the Old Testament: ‘Ethnocentrism for me’ as Kevin MacDonald reads it in the first book of his trilogy on Jewry. That’s why they always win. It doesn’t matter that their story, what we read in the OT, is literary fiction. It is a myth they believe in and that’s why they will continue to win.
Conversely, whites didn’t write their story, the New Testament. The Jews wrote it for them: ‘Universalism for thee.’ And liberalism, which has mutated into Wokism, the secular neo-Christianity of our day, is an epiphenomenon of that NT story.
The moral is simple: it’s whites themselves who must rewrite their own history. They mustn’t allow another race to write it for them. If one reads the first anthology published by us, The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour, one will discover seminal texts by William Pierce, and Eduardo Velasco in his now-defunct webzine Evropa Soberana, which depict this story written by whites for whites.
And now I can answer properly to the commenter who criticised me. ‘All this cultural and historic noise–million words in billion posts–is not a groundwork or an earnest or a linchpin or a promise of coming transvaluation of values’ he said.
Actually, it is. Any revolutionary action that is not backed by a new story, a new way of understanding the Self, is doomed to failure. James Mason’s own life demonstrates this. After the Metzger interview, Mason went astray with so-called Christian Identity. A dozen years after the interview Metzger himself commented, on 17 May 2005: ‘Unfortunately he turned away from his best thoughts back toward some Christian thing. I don’t know where he is now, but I promote and sell his great book.’
The eclipse of James Mason is symptomatic not only of would-be revolutionaries, but of non-revolutionaries who subscribe to white nationalism. They lack a story to serve as cement and a platform for further action. The fact that very few have read the history of the white race from Pierce’s pen, and that even that book isn’t published (even privately) so that you can read it comfortably in your living room, speaks for itself.
This is the response of a sixty-four-year-old man to the young commenter:
You are putting the chariot before the horse. First goes the horse—the new story that will galvanise the white man’s collective unconscious—and then goes the chariot (the holy racial wars). Reversing the sequence yields results such as what happened to James Mason and his unfortunate epigones, inasmuch as Mason was completely ignorant of the real history of Christianity (which we are telling on this site thanks to the work of Karlheinz Deschner).
The central mission of The West’s Darkest Hour is that, when the System panics and cancels the internet, there remain on my visitors’ hard drives the PDF books from my humble Daybreak Press, which provide the new story the white man must tell himself.
Anyone who hasn’t read The Fair Race should read it now. The rest follows from it.
– For the context of these translations click here –
The Slavic worm and the Frankish people of God
The 46 years of Charlemagne’s reign were an almost uninterrupted war with nearly fifty military campaigns. To mention only the Saxons, the ‘super-pagans’, he fought them mortally for thirty-three years! So what was happening on the periphery of the great and ever-expanding predatory empire was not something that affected the internal ‘peace.’ Quite the contrary. The more ‘peace and order’ there was within, the better the slaughter, enslavement and annexations outside the borders worked. However, the ‘everywhere abundance and joy’ didn’t exist even in the interior of the kingdom. It was enjoyed only by the ridiculously small stratum of the possessors, the nobility and the clergy, who swam in the blood-soaked riches of others, while chronic malnutrition ravaged the ignominiously deprived people themselves. Misery and famine wiped out a third of the population of Gaul and Germania in 784.
Under Charlemagne’s grandsons, foreign war was simply replaced by internal war, by the so-called civil war.
Perhaps the Treaty of Verdun wasn’t yet, as some early historians (Waitz, Droysen, Giesebrecht) believed, a kind of ‘birth date’ of the German and French nationalities, of two peoples in whose interests it was certainly not agreed. But a German history and a French history are emerging: nations are beginning to emerge from older tribes, from the populations of certain countries, and the pre-national consciousness of the tribes will eventually become the national consciousness.
In addition, the emergence of other national kingdoms, for example in England, Spain, Scandinavia, Poland, Bohemia and Hungary, marked the early Middle Ages politically. Certainly, throughout the whole of the 9th century, there was still no thought of nationalist categories, no people still felt themselves to be a ‘national unit’ and no one felt themselves to be ‘German’ or ‘French’; perhaps not even in the 10th century, although this was the immediate transitional phase.
That division of the Carolingian empire, which was followed by further divisions and reunifications in the 9th century, was a compromise imposed by circumstances. For the time being, it certainly put an end to the tradition of rushing against each other; but it also meant that the empire gradually lost its pre-eminent position vis-à-vis the papacy, that the triple division of Germany, France and Italy was prepared, and that the old unity never reappeared, if we leave aside the episode of Charles the Fat.
The Slavs were pagans, and even in Christian countries such as Thuringia, Hessen and the East-Franconian cantons they remained ‘infidels’ for longer than the rest of the population. Their culture was demonstrably higher than is sometimes assumed. We must bear in mind that for a long time, from the 7th to the 11th century, Franco-German accounts of the Slavs came almost without exception from Christian priests, who moreover were often not eyewitnesses but had second- or third-hand accounts. And, as was almost always the case, the Christians were at war with the Slavs and mocked them. But when they were regarded as allies, they were suddenly well-liked and sometimes even remarked that they were ‘wonderfully worthy’ of any sympathy.
The Carolingian and Ottonian historiographies also differ in their judgement, although a certain popular hatred, if not hereditary hostility, has long prevailed, due in large part to religious motives, to the opposition of pagans and Christians. This had been the case since Merovingian times. Later, the Slavs were willingly condemned across the board. The more Christian the world becomes, the worse the others become. They are all ‘evil’, i.e. people separated from God; they are all ‘infidels’, which in the medieval view derived from Augustine is equivalent to ‘minions of the devil, who must be annihilated by all means if they do not convert to the cause of God’ (Lubenow).
In the eyes of the Christians, the Slavs were useful only as slaves: a word derived directly from slavus or as pure targets of death; people who were mocked as ‘worms’ and ‘mowed down like the grass of the meadow’ by pious Catholics, for whom they were just that, subhuman beings, animals. ‘What do you want with those toads? Seven, eight, even nine of them I used to skewer on my spear and shake them around, muttering something to myself.’ The Slavs were also radically false and treacherous. ‘The Wendos broke their word in their usual disloyalty to Louis’, comments not only the Annales Bertiniani.
According to the ecclesiastical conception, every Christian prince had to fight the pagans within the country and on the borders. Indeed, according to the dominant Augustinian doctrine concerning the expansion of the kingdom of God on earth, it was necessary to conquer the Slavic East to ‘convert’ it. It is no coincidence that Charlemagne’s favourite reading was Augustine’s magnum opus, The City of God. And Charles himself, the Carolingians, the Frankish aristocracy at one with the other classes of landowners, all without exception, were all the more interested in the ‘plunder’, robbery and tribute of the East when in their own country the agricultural productivity was low and the prospects of increasing land and estates insignificant. The Slavic territories were also always a breeding ground for auxiliary troops and slaves.
The Christian nobility didn’t always view the Slavic mission with unreserved joy; and naturally for a very selfish reason. With the acceptance of Christianity by the pagans, at least as far as the Saxon noble class bordering directly on Christian territories was concerned, a pretext for attack, subjugation and plunder disappeared. ‘Although the Christianisation of the Slavs didn’t entail the complete depletion of an important source of income, it certainly at least made it more difficult for the Saxons to plunder their neighbours’ (Donnert). And of course for the Christians their bloodletting was always more important than the gospel; the Catholic princes were concerned above all with power, greed, the increase of their agrarian possessions and feudal rents, for as Abbot Reginus said ‘the hearts of kings are greedy and always insatiable.’ Archbishop William of Mainz said that the claim of his father Otto ‘the Great,’ that it was about the spread of Christianity, was an excuse. And in the Slavonic chronicle of Helmhold, referring to Henry the Lion, it is later stated in no uncertain terms: ‘There was never any talk of Christianity, but only of money.’
The Temple of a Slavic god (painting in oil by V. Ivanov).
But it is not simply ‘that Christianity first gained a foothold beyond the Elbe and the Saale in connection with the war’ (Fleckenstein). No, the Christian Church, and of course, the German Church, was also a ‘driving force’ in this highly aggressive eastward expansion: a force for which faith was also a means to an end; a force, writes Kosminski, that
was on the hunt for tithes, goods and personal services and saw the conversion of the heathen as a highly profitable business. It was most energetically aided in this by the papacy, which was one of the main organisers of the military campaigns against Eastern Europe, hoping to extend its sphere of influence and increase its income.
An independent ecclesiastical mission, such as that of Bishop Ansgar, bought boys in Denmark and Sweden to make clerics of them: the mission of Bishop Adalbert of Prague at the end of the 10th century or that of Günther of Magdeburg among the Luthites at the beginning of the 11th century. As these attempts at conversion met with little success, the Church opted for a second way: spreading the Good News through state armies, by blood and fire or by bribery. In any case, acceptance of Christianity was for the Slavs ‘tantamount to slavery’ (Herrmann), and acceptance would be all the easier the more effective weapons could demonstrate the power of the God of the Christians and the impotence of the old gods.
Categories
Metzger & Mason
vs. Spencer
I had promised myself I would never see anything of Richard Spencer again after he sided with NATO when it started the war in Ukraine. But today I decided to watch a long interview with the new Richard Spencer after his apparent ideological transformation.
In the interview you can guess the causes of his apparent transformation, although you have to listen between the lines: he simply realised that he has to speak from more liberal platforms to be heard (otherwise he will be cancelled).
Spencer says things that resonate with The West’s Darkest Hour. For example, he says that the figure of Jesus on the cross carries a potent message to the West’s collective unconscious, which cannot be contrasted more with the figure of Apollo: a healthy archetype for the Aryan psyche. On this we seem to be in complete agreement, with the difference that the anti-Christianity of this site is far more vehement than Spencer’s anti-Christianity. (This is elemental: Christianity destroyed my life, not Spencer’s, as any reader who dares to read my tortuous autobiography will know.)
Something else Spencer says we have said in entries so important that two of them can be accessed at the top of this page, in red letters. For example, what Spencer calls ‘the empty doughnut’: a negative way for today’s West to define itself as anti-Hitlerian par excellence. That is just what the author of ‘Foundation myth’ says in other words. And what Spencer calls narrative, story or platonic lie that should replace the old story (Christianity’s god is dead) is exactly what I wrote in ‘The iron throne’.
So ideologically Spencer and I are not that far apart. In fact, I would love to put together a show similar to the one above in which I could talk not only to Spencer but to the most well-known people on the American racial right. I would have to do it with a simultaneous translator because I refuse to talk about deep issues in English. On very deep issues, I need my mother tongue.
The funny thing is that except for what Spencer said about Biden near the beginning of the interview, we don’t disagree on basic principles. It’s just the order of magnitude of my fanaticism on which we differ. In short, Spencer says he’s very radical but only the exterminationist is really radical—say, the William Pierce who wrote The Turner Diaries or the Pierce who, in Who We Are, posited how whites should have acted to circumvent today’s sorry state of affairs.
Update of June 2
At any event, I fell infinitely more at home with Tom Metzger and James Mason in this old interview.
‘If you want to use the System to change the System’ (Metzger) ‘you are fooling yourself’ (Mason): something that the apparently transformed Spencer won’t understand.
Shortly afterwards in the interview Mason singles out the US government as the enemy. Compare this with Spencer’s words that Biden is the best president in recent years! And by the end Mason quotes Solzhenytsin: ‘Don’t be part of the lie’ as the number one commandment. This is a commandment that the so-called new Spencer can’t keep.
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Melanie
Watch a brief YouTube video here.
It was in 2009, when I hadn’t yet woken up to the Jewish question and was immersed in the content of Gates of Vienna, a counter-jihad site, that I discovered a quote from Melanie Phillips about “the West’s darkest hour” and thought it was the perfect title to start my own blog.
– For the context of these translations click here –
The men of the Aquilon
The Normans, also called Vikings and Northmen, were known in the Middle Ages as ‘men of the Aquilon’, the Scandinavians. From the end of the 8th to the 11th century, while still pagan at first, they invaded other lands out of a desire for adventure and plunder and driven by dissatisfaction with their living conditions, eventually settling here and there in Friesland, at the mouth of the Loire and other bridgeheads.
Their highly mobile and reputedly diabolical tactics were full of trickery, with a particular preference for lightning attacks. Suddenly their sails would appear on the horizon, and before the coastal watch could intervene, they had already departed with their booty. On the Christian side, moreover, the civil and ecclesiastical leaders were ‘often the first’ to flee in disarray (Riché). Hincmar of Rheims, the famous archbishop, had forbidden the retreat of the priests, ‘who have neither wife nor children to feed,’ but in 882 he fled in haste, escaping the invaders.
The Norman plundering began in 793 with a surprise raid on the monastery on the island of Lindisfarne (later known as Holy Island). The monastery had been founded in the 7th century by Irish and Scottish monks, off the northern English coast of Northumberland, a very wealthy abbey. It managed to survive and acquired more and more land on the continent, but was abandoned again in 850. The Norwegian Vikings, who usually stayed at sea for weeks at a time, needed timely supplies, so they cut the monastery’s cattle’s throats and brought them aboard their ships in dragon form, stealing all the treasures and murdering the monks.
The Northerners invaded Ireland, upon which the catastrophe was unleashed in 820. ‘The sea threw up waves of strangers upon Erin, and there was no port or place or fortification or burgh or haven without fleets of Vikings and pirates,’ report the annals of Ulster. The northerners fell upon England and from there increasingly invaded the Frankish empire, especially western Franconia with its long and attractive coastline; and from 799 they also attacked Frisian territory. They seized valuables and took hostages for ransom money. And not only did they ravage the coastal places, but with their swift sailing ships they sailed up the rivers, burning cities such as York, Canterbury, Chartres, Nantes, Paris, Tours, Bordeaux and Hamburg, where they reduced the episcopal see to ashes. They gladly attacked the monasteries, as they did, for example, those of Jumiéges and Saint-Wandrille. On the Atlantic coast, in 836, the monks had to abandon the monastery of Noirmoutier, which had been under attack since 820.
It is hardly coincidental that Norman attacks began to become alarmingly frequent at a time when Carolingian family feuds were at their fiercest and when the defensive strength of the empire was at its weakest externally, i.e. in the mid-thirties of the 9th century. Nor is it a coincidence that the Nordic pirates, especially the Danes, then the most formidable enemies, returned year after year. From then on and throughout the century the Norman tide invaded the Christian world.
In 834 and 835 the Danish Vikings fell upon the most important trading centre in the north, ‘the famous Wijk of Duurstede, and devastated it with unheard-of cruelty’. But of ‘the pagans,’ men who were still fervently attached to their old gods, ‘no small number fell’ (Annales Xantenses). Also between 834 and 837 Dorestad, an important trading centre in the Netherlands was abandoned (near the mouth of the Rhine and south of today’s Wijk bij Duurstede): the temporary or permanent seat of the Bishop of Utrecht, it was sacked four times and partly burned.
In 836 the Normans fired on Antwerp and the port town of Witla at the mouth of the Meuse River. In 837 they made a surprise attack on the island of Walcheren, ‘killed many and completely stripped an even greater number of inhabitants of their goods; after settling there for some time and having collected an arbitrary tribute from the inhabitants, they continued on their raid towards Dorestad and there exacted tribute in the same way’ (Annales Bertiniani). In 838 a storm prevented a new attack, but in 839 they ravaged Frisia again. They also devastated the territories of the Loire as far as Nantes: a ‘scourge of God’ of which monastic writers still lamented, perhaps also exaggerating: ‘Pirates, murderers, robbers, profaners, devastators, bloodthirsty, diabolical and, in a word, heathens…’
Ah, how much better the Christians were in their military expeditions!
But why did the Vikings also devastate in this way? Wielant Hopfner writes: ‘They had had their first experiences with Christianity. Their contemporary Charlemagne had issued the Saxon Laws to impose forced conversion on the Saxons. The most frequent expressions in them sound like this: “He shall be punished by death…, he shall be put to death…, it is forbidden on pain of death…, it belongs to the property of the Church…, he shall be put to death”…’ Charles’ bloodthirsty laws, which could be described as a derivation of the Good News, threatened with a stereotypical morte moriatur everything that was intended to be extirpated among the Saxons. Of the fourteen provisions of the Capitulate imposing the death penalty, ten refer exclusively to crimes against Christianity.
The Normans knew that the Carolingians ‘had enriched the Church beyond measure’ with treasures that came ‘primarily’ from the plundered ‘pagan places of worship’. The Christian chroniclers reveal that monasteries and churches ‘had been magnificently built’ or ‘wonderfully decorated’. They also wrote: ‘Where could these riches have come from, if not from the property and the personal provision of the Germanic population?’
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– For the context of these translations click here –
The conscienceless episcopal mob once again changed sides
After Louis’s deposition in 833, long years of bitter struggles ensued not only between father and son but also between the brothers, with frequent changes of sides. The desire to dominate various portions of sovereignty led to shifting coalitions according to the expected advantages. This was the strongest political principle, the punctum saliens par excellence. In the beginning, it is clear that the three brothers were looking for ways to increase their power: Pippin of Aquitaine and Louis the Germanic against Lothair, and Lothair against both of them.
In the meantime, in November 834, at the imperial diet of Attigny, the general bad situation had again been mentioned, and again a promise had been made to remedy it. But all that happened was Louis the Pious’ command to return as soon as possible the ecclesiastical goods alienated in Aquitaine. The misery of the people remained unchanged.
At an imperial assembly convened on 2 February 835 in the palace of Diedenhofen, which was above all an ecclesiastical assembly, Louis demanded that the declaration of the nullity of his deposition and canonical penitence, which had already been made at Saint-Denis, be repeated explicitly and more solemnly. And, naturally, the venerable prelates now agreed. ‘A great assembly of almost all the bishops and abbots of the whole empire’ naturally declared ‘unworthy’ the resolution of Compiègne—which was theirs—and declared the machinations of the imperial enemies and the ‘disloyalty of the wicked and enemies of God’ to be annulled by a new ‘sentence of God’.
Thus, just one year after Louis’ release, those always repugnant opportunists again proceeded most solemnly to the reinstatement of the sovereign within the imperial assembly held in the cathedral of Metz on 28 February 835. It is true that Louis’ confidence in the ecclesiastical leaders may have been somewhat shaken. In any case, he remained deaf to their complaints and entreaties, apart from the fact that he had to return the stolen ecclesiastical property.
Louis the Pious, whose lungs had become obstructed, whose chest had weakened and who had aged prematurely, and who was also afflicted by an incurable ulcer, perhaps pulmonary emphysema, began to languish with frequent chest tightness, nausea and a total refusal of food. After passing through the royal palace of Salz in the Frankish Saale and after having arrived by boat on the Main to Frankfurt, Louis I died on Sunday, 20 June 840, in a ‘tent-like summer dwelling’ on a small island in the Rhine downstream from Mainz. The island was opposite Ingelheim and was the sumptuous Carolingian palace where his father had once subjected the Bavarian Duke Tassilo and his family to a notorious trial; later Charles IV converted it into a monastery and it was finally demolished during the Peasants’ War and the Thirty Years’ War.
Louis had been King of Aquitaine for 37 years and Emperor for 27. Those closest to him, his wife Judith and his son Charles were far from him in Aquitaine. Instead, several prelates, including his former jailer Otgar of Mainz, surrounded his deathbed. As long as he could, the emperor made the sign of the cross on his forehead and chest. He also had a splinter of the (claimed) cross of Christ placed on his chest.
Burial in Saint Arbnulf Abbey in Metz.
The body of Louis the Pious was taken to Metz, and there, in the old family pantheon of the Carolingians, he was laid to rest ‘with all honour’ next to his mother Hildegard—although all the children were absent—by his half-brother Drogo. At the time of the French Revolution, the body was removed from the sarcophagus.
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