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A mission along ‘military shock lines’
So now the Saxons not only had to answer for their subordination ‘with all their freedom and property’, but the territory of which they were dispossessed was immediately divided, and in the presence of numerous bishops, between the bishoprics of Cologne, Mainz, Würzburg, Lüttich and Utrecht, as well as between the monasteries of Fulda and Amorbach and into mission dioceses, according to the respective geographical situation, becoming firmly incorporated into the Frankish kingdom. Still, during Charles’ lifetime, the bishoprics of Münster, Osnabrüch and Bremen, the real ‘nerve centre’ of Christian propaganda among the Saxons, were established. Thus the division of the missionary bishoprics corresponded from 777 ‘to the military shock lines of the Franks on the Lower Rhine and Main’ (Lowe).
Soon Charles brought missionaries from everywhere to the conquered territory: missionaries from Frisia and Anglo-Saxon, missionaries from Mainz, Rheims, and Chálons-sur-Mame. Clerical propagandists from episcopal cities and monasteries which in ancient times were already ‘feudal castles’ (Schuitze), but which at the beginning of the Middle Ages already had functions that later, when medieval politics was largely a politics of the burgs, belonged to the burgs proper. From Cologne, Lüttich, Utrecht, Würzburg, from Echtemach, Corbie, Visbeck, Amorbach, Fulda, and Hersfeld came the bearers of the good news to the adjacent heathen country. Everywhere the sword was followed by ‘the mission in inseparable connection’ (Petri), and the salvific event was ‘now inextricably interwoven with the military conquest of foreign territory as a common work of the Church and the feudal state’ (Donnert). Annexationist war and missionary politics and the sword and the cross, the military and the clergy, all now formed an inseparable unity, working side by side as it were. What the sword took away, preaching had to preserve. ‘The mission had made a promising start’ (Baumann).
The military backbone of Charles’ wars, ‘veritable bloodbaths’ (Grierson), were (according to the Roman model) the frontier fortresses, built on mountains and on the banks of rivers, which were difficult to conquer. It is therefore not surprising that the first fixed episcopal foundations were at the entrance and exit gates of the Weser fortress: Paderbom, where Charles later, on his return from East Saxony, stopped again and again with his troops, where he built a royal palace and, as early as 777, a ‘church of admirable grandeur’ (Annales Laureshamenses), the church of St Saviour, Osnabrück and Minden as well as the two oldest monasteries of the early Frankish period in Saxony: Corvey and Herford. ‘Under Charlemagne new monasteries were founded almost exclusively as footholds in the newly subdued pagan country’ (Fichtenau).
The bishoprics of Würzburg, Erfurt and Büraburg (in Fritziar) had also already been erected, precisely where a few years later Carloman and Pepin conducted their campaigns against the Saxons (743, 744 and 748). In addition to the missionary centres in Saxony, the monastery in Fulda also played a special role; also the monastery of Mainz, which soon became an archbishopric (around 780), to which the bishoprics of Paderborn, Halberstadt, Hildesheim and Verden were soon subordinated. Thus the ecclesiastical province of Mainz was, until its dismemberment in 1802, the largest in the whole of Western Christendom, while the new Westphalian foundations of Münster, Osnabrück and Ninden were annexed to the bishopric of Cologne.
It is easy to understand why ever larger estates were confiscated there in favour of the Church and protected by the burghs. Charles generously endowed many monasteries and supported them in their struggle against his serfs. Therefore, the Saxons must not only have seen in every Frankish missionary a spy or a defender of foreign sovereignty but ‘in every Christian settlement [they] saw a foothold for the aggressive Frankish armies’ (Hauk). Every war against the Christians was also for the Saxons a kind of religious war: a struggle for paganism and political freedom at the same time. This is precisely what intensified the Saxon resistance; this is precisely why churches were repeatedly destroyed and churchmen were expelled or killed.
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Editor’s Note: This is precisely what white nationalists fail to understand. The first step in recovering the Aryan culture is to destroy the Semitic religion which has been the great vampire of the white soul since Constantine, and then Charlemagne, handed Europe over to the bishops. If the destruction of the churches is done in the name of the transvaluation of all Judeo-Christian values, the next day the Jewish problem would be solved, insofar as there would be no moralising barriers that prevent us from solving it. Deschner continues:
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And just as in the first years of the Saxon conflict King Charles had already sent out repeated military expeditions against the Lombards, so in 788 he also made a famous ‘excursion’ against the Moors in northern Spain, an armed expedition, which, however, turned out somewhat differently… Since Charles’ Hispanic intermezzo had failed, the king tried all the harder to get even with the Saxons.