In my post on Tuesday, I linked to a leaflet, ‘Introducing the New Order,’ from which I barely quoted a few words. But other words are so accurate, concerning the new religion that should cover the whole West, that I can’t resist quoting them. In the first paragraphs, we read:
The New Order is a unique and unusual concept.
It is a National Socialist vanguard organization that is simultaneously a revolutionary idea, a spiritual faith, and a great historic movement.
The program of the New Order is summarized in its name. Our goal is nothing less than a whole new dispensation on Earth—a regenerate New Order—to replace the present Old Order, which stands for everything corrupt, decadent, degenerate, unnatural and diseased in this world.
As its antithesis, the New Order represents a call for a great awakening in the spirit of our Race, a rebirth of natural values in human affairs, and for nothing less than a whole new way of life, a whole new folk, a whole new culture, and a new type of man.
In the central part of the triptych, we can read:
A Community of Faith. We are first of all a spiritual community, a community of belief representing the most sacred Cause of all time—a Cause consecrated by the blood sacrifice of tens of thousands of heroes and martyrs as well as that of the author of the faith himself. It is the first task of this community to furnish the spiritual foundations for the coming New Order and for a great new age on Earth.
And on the other side of the page, we read that the New Order represents a continuation of the struggle for a new world that began in 1919, referring to Adolf Hitler’s initial efforts. After a few sentences, George Lincoln Rockwell is mentioned and also the year 1959 (when, by the way, I was already in this world). Then it is mentioned that Matt Koehl took up the torch in 1967 after Rockwell was assassinated; and after more explanatory words the date 1983 is mentioned, when the New Order replaced the old name of the organisation. This is followed by a sentence that I liked:
Participation in the activities of the New Order is through invitation only… The road to membership is not easy. It begins with a personal decision to devote one’s life and one’s destiny to the sacred cause of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist struggle for our Race above every other consideration.
Finally, almost at the conclusion we can read:
You can start to build the New Order of Adolf Hitler in your own life today.
The first step is to sever all emotional ties to the Old Order and all of its corruption. The second step lies in embracing the vision and ideals of the New Order. The third step is to commit yourself to live in accordance with your National Socialist convictions today.
Not only do will you experience a personal renewal which gives your life real purpose, meaning and value, but you discover your identity as a “fragment of the future”…
The printed material, including this trifold sheet, can be requested by mail (I think only on payment of the postal charge). After what happened to Eduardo Velasco, the Spaniard who disappeared together with his site Evropa Soberana, it seems to me that those who have National Socialism as their religion should belong to this organisation.
But to be a true National Socialist in a profound sense means living an NS lifestyle, not just to agree with NS ideas in an abstract manner, or to admire historical National Socialism from a distance. Hermann Göring once noted that one does not become a National Socialist simply as a matter of intellectual endorsement, but rather that one is born a National Socialist.
This is so true that I cannot resist the temptation to translate some passages of El Grialinto English. The words in square brackets mean words that replace the original text to avoid explanatory notes (as these decontextualised passages already appear on pages 99-100 of my third autobiographical book). I will use blue to distinguish it from the indented quotes in Kerr’s article:
It should not be speculated that my mistreatment at home is the primary cause of my now wanting to wipe Neanderthals off the face of the earth. Many years ago [my sister] told us the anecdote of something that I don’t remember well but which, I am sure, her memory is genuine. She said that, when I was eleven years old, I had made [exterminationist pronouncements from the racial POV].
Although I barely remember it, I do remember that as a child the spectacle of visiting the centre of the metropolis caused me such horror that I wanted to sweep it all away. And even younger, perhaps nine or ten years old when Japanese Godzilla films became fashionable, I imagined, lying in bed at bedtime, my favourite monster destroying the street billboards because they degraded my sense of aesthetics. Once I told cousin Julio about this fantasy, which was more ethical than anything else, in the sense of destructive justice, with ‘Godzilla’ being the judge of the degraded society.
Later, in my puberty, I wondered why there were still other races if it was so obvious that the white race was so superior. It was an inner feeling that told me something like: why are they still here? I didn’t understand why the non-white lands hadn’t already been conquered.
One of the most beautiful memories I have, because it dates back to the time when my life was still innocent, [already in my teens], was when I once went to get my hair cut at the hairdresser’s closest to my house, on Doctor Vértiz Avenue, with one of my younger brothers. It was a very serene afternoon while I was waiting my turn when I saw, in the illustrated stories on the hairdresser’s table, one that presented in pictures the goals of Germany a few decades ago. What stuck very clearly in my mind was the information that it was about producing a line of beautiful blond Aryans with blue eyes. It felt very good to me because those were things I wanted, even though I had never seen them enacted in the written word, even if it was in the drawings of a comic book. In retrospect, I suppose that story had not been illustrated or written by a fan of National Socialism, but to my adolescent mind, what mattered was that someone expressed an ideal that seemed to me so lofty and noble: something I hadn’t heard articulated as openly as on that gentle afternoon, which I still recall with nostalgia today.
The above happened in Mexico City, which is hardly an Aryan town! Kerr’s text continues:
As Adolf Hitler wrote, “Obstacles exist to be broken, not to be surrendered to.” Lincoln Rockwell said that “Life is struggle,” and that the secret to having a happy and successful life was, “to enjoy the struggle.” This is the fundamental NS attitude towards life in general.We welcome struggle, not as a necessary evil, but as a great gift and opportunity that allows us to strengthen ourselves mentally, physically and spiritually. Again quoting Hitler: “Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace will it perish.”
This is what the defeatists and pessimists don’t understand and why I no longer take nationalist forums seriously. It is about fighting morning, noon and evening for the sacred words (as far as I am concerned, to change the paradigm from JQ to CQ, because if the problem lies with us, that would empower us immensely). Kerr continues:
[A] National Socialist gets out and engages in the real world. This may take the form of participating in a public activity to build the Movement, or it may simply be going for a hike in the forest. Citing an old Aryan adage, the Führer noted that, “he who rests—rusts” (Wer raset, der rostet). Do you take the escalator or the stairs? Said Mussolini, “The fascist distains the easy life.” The Duce was not a National Socialist, but in this instance his words are consistent with an NS lifestyle.
Without dropping names, reading this passage brought to mind one of the main promoters of white nationalism in the neighbouring country to the north, who has chosen the bourgeois life.
Every National Socialist accepts the SS saying, “Know the laws of life and live accordingly,” as his or her personal motto.
As a teenager I was enchanted by Seneca’s words, ‘Live according to Nature’!
Consequently, exercise, healthy eating, and nourishing the spirit are key features of an NS lifestyle. Just as laziness is un-National Socialist, so is a diet that consists of processed food, nutritionless (or even harmful) snacks, all washed down with some form of alcohol or a sugar-laden soft drink. Instead, a National Socialist lifestyle includes plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, with as little meat as possible, along with plenty of water and sunshine. He nourishes his soul with Aryan music and art.
For some time now I have chosen the whole food plant based diet as my diet, and I refine it more every day.
Likewise, the National Socialist shuns polluting himself with the degenerate byproducts of an un-Aryan popular culture. These include films that insult the history of the White race, that promote race-mixing, that degrade women or that glorify crime, as well as so-called “music” that offends the Aryan spirit. Likewise, the National Socialist does not contaminate his body and weaken his spirit with drugs and intoxicants.
Again, without dropping names, this reminds me of the huge number of non-NS racialists who talk about movies, pop music, who recommend eating meat or who don’t love Nature to the extent of deifying it, as I have felt since I was a child to the extent that, when I discovered the painter Maxfield Parrish, I knew that this was exactly what I had had inside me for a long time!
The National Socialist lifestyle includes the love of animals, and kindness towards them. Nothing is so foreign to the Aryan spirit than the sadistic slaughter of animals for food practiced by the Semitic peoples.
This is one of the reasons why those who endorse cruelty to animals (or children) are no longer allowed to comment on this forum.
So even when it is difficult—indeed, even dangerous—he lives his outer life in accordance with his inner being. Yet whatever the cost, he has the great recompense of living his on his own terms. Even in the midst of racial decay and social decline, he lives in the New Order.
And this is exactly what Savitri, my ‘river nymph’ called the Religion of the Strong in the first chapter of her memoirs.
In ‘Under the Redwoods’ I described the loneliness of crossing what I call the psychological Rubicon: from Normieland to the lands of NS. But today I received some printed material from the mailman, including a paper leaflet ‘Introducing the New Order’.
Following my metaphor, I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that we are not so alone on the other side of the river. There are still people on this side after the fateful 1945!
One side of the leaflet I received today can be seen here. On my paper printout, I marked the first three paragraphs of this ‘Introducing the New Order’, and most of what we can read under the heading ‘A Community of Faith’. I also marked the words ‘We come together privately in formal ceremonies, services and celebrations,’ as they reflect exactly what I have been saying about how to found a new religion.
The text continues turning the page, which I could quote. But it is better for Aryans interested in becoming true National Socialists to get the leaflet.
The documents my mother left in her study have been a veritable cornucopia of information for understanding not only her but the family. For example, among them I found a list of sayings that my maternal grandmother, my dear Yoya, used to say. I quote one of them: “Ves la tempestad y no te hincas” (‘You see the storm and you don’t kneel’).
It reminds me that, on both sides of the Atlantic, members of the racial right can see the storm currently ravaging the West. But they never kneel before their true Gods, the Aryan Gods, in repentance and asking mercy and forgiveness. On the contrary: they continue to fellate the god of the Jews, or rather, the Jews who wrote the New Testament insofar they obey its precepts for gentile consumption.
What prevents these so-called defenders of their race from thinking like the lad Magnus?
Now that I have been tidying up the study left by my late mother, I have found a wealth of documents of great interest to the autobiographer. She used to collect postcards and photographs of the countries she had visited and had some splendid postcards of Florentine art, including the famous sculpture sculpted by Michelangelo (which I also saw in Florence, though when I was travelling alone). You can’t contrast that Aryan art more with the degenerate Christian art that we also see in the photographs that my mother collected in other of her travels, in Spanish-speaking countries. For example, compare the grotesquely dressed ‘virgins’ with the nudist statuary of the Greco-Roman world!
There are things I have already said but they are so important that I never tire of repeating them. In his famous Civilisation series of 1969, Lord Clark put the image of the Greek Apollo and then contrasted it with an African mask and another image from an early medieval Irish religious book, and said that the most conspicuous thing was that, in the latter, the classical glory of the human figure disappeared. What we are left with, I would add, is an irrelevant little man full of self-destructive guilt because white people abandoned their beautiful Aryan Gods to worship a god that hated them: the god of the Jews.
I was about to throw away the photographs of this entry—degenerate art—when it occurred to me that I’d better upload them to a new blog post, and explain why I wanted to throw them away.
Since Julian the Apostate in the 4th century c.e., among European rulers only Adolf Hitler tried to transvalue Judeo-Christian values to our true values, already intuited by Renaissance artists. It is known that the Hitler of his famous speeches couldn’t speak so openly about these issues, but with his close friends he opened his heart. What I would give to listen to his after-dinner talks!
At least in this recording we can hear Uncle Adolf when he spoke in his normal voice instead of the pompous videotaped declamations that made him famous, when he couldn’t criticise Judeo-Christianity as fiercely as he did in private.
When Savitri Devi wrote the foreword that follows, I was seventeen and at the nadir of my life: mental hells into which my very Catholic father and his damned society had put me, as I confess in Letter to mom Medusa (see the book list on page 3). Curiously, a couple of years before that family tragedy I went to ask, in a bookshop, if they had any pro-Nazi books. An employee of the Librería de Cristal in the Cine Manacar in Mexico City, a fair-haired white man, hesitated a few seconds and informed me: ‘No’. True, that bookstore had the old Spanish translation of Mein Kampf, but what I was looking for was more recent literature.
If the worst country in all of Western history had never existed, the United States, Hitler might have won the war and, as I recount in The Grail, the last book in my autobiographical trilogy, the teenager I was would have been spared from the psychosis that two years after my visit to the bookstore would be brewing in my parents’ minds.
The book I was looking for at the age of fifteen was precisely this one that the reader now holds in his hands. I do not presume that this French-English translation is perfect. Far from it! But it seems to me that, of all the books by Savitri Devi (1905-1982), this is the one that best introduces us to the thought of this impressive woman.
If the American racial right is at a dead end, it is precisely because Americans have not had the nobility to see that only by making National Socialism their new religion can they save their race. Furthermore, unlike Hitler’s anti-Christian pantheism (cf. Richard Weikart’s Hitler’s Religion), the great failure of the pundits of the American racial right consists in not repudiating the Semitic religion of our abusive fathers. And abusive by necessity must be all those who traumatise their children with the idea of eternal torture, as I was traumatised as a teenager.
Although the hellish nature of Christianity reveals the twisted psychology of the Semitic mind, the typical anti-Semite ignores that the Jews created the New Testament for gentile consumption (cf. David Skrbina’s The Jesus Hoax). Anyone who invents a superheated torture chamber and then threatens billions of gentiles with it has a sick soul. Right after white traitor Constantine handed over the Roman Empire to his Semitic bishops (cf. Karlheinz Deschner’s Christianity’s Criminal History, also listed on page 3), the doctrine of hell became the greatest weapon of psychological terror used by Jews against whites. Ben Klassen was right on this point! And this is the kind of anti-Christian worldview I badly needed as a teenager to save me from the doctrines my father had put in my little head. Even now, so long after I abandoned Christianity, I am haunted by the idea of eternal damnation. As Gaedhal, a commenter on my website, The West’s Darkest Hour, told us by email:
If you fear a Jewish Hell, then you are controlled by Jews. I speak by experience. I know, rationally, that Hell doesn’t exist… However, more than thirty years of Catholicism means that I still believe in Hell emotionally. I still believe in Hell in my bones’ marrow. And this residual belief in Hell still has negative effects upon my psychology and behaviour. I probably have religious trauma syndrome…
Alas, the American racial right has been, since its origins, extremely addicted to Judeo-Christianity. I would even claim that white nationalism is an ideology that, at its core, functions as a gatekeeper preventing the transvaluation of our darkest values to Greco-Roman values: that is, the luminous values of Antiquity before the Semitic infection. Thus, white nationalists are actively preventing the Aryan man from freeing himself from the yoke that the Jews have created. How could we shake such a yoke from our necks?
Only Hitler saves. Savitri Devi, Hitler’s Priestess, saw this with extraordinary clarity! And the white man who does not want to recognise this is doomed to extinction.
I have been reproducing most of the text of the article ‘The Holy Hook’.
‘Christianity without the Old Testament?’ is the last section of that essay by Laurent Guyénot. It consists of 900 words. I don’t want to reproduce it here but you can read it in The Unz Review.
In that last section, Guyénot falls into the same errors we have seen time and again in the racial right that desperately wants to save the religion of our parents despite its roots. Since, as we saw in David Skrbina’s book, the New Testament was written by Jews for Gentile consumption, it cannot be sanitised from the point of view of the fourteen words. However, what we have read in the previous instalments of ‘The Holy Hook’ is important to better understand the psyop represented by the forced conversion of the white race to the god of the Jews. But what Guyénot lacked, which Skrbina didn’t lack, was to assimilate the legacy of Nietzsche.
For the rest of this article I would like to talk about issues that I have touched on in recent posts. In the video Gonzalo uploaded today we no longer see him mocking with his typical black humour, because things are getting very ugly in Ukraine, where he is trapped, and perhaps we will see an October surprise before the US mid-term elections next month.
The Dahmer case—again!
Another issue I recently touched on and have given some more thought to is the Dahmer case. As you may recall, at the end of last month I confessed that I had watched the miniseries by pressing the forward button to avoid watching the morbid stuff Netflix shows us. But yesterday I saw, without pressing that button, a couple of scenes based on the real-life Dahmer family that caught my attention.
Jeffrey’s father, once with his new wife and the other time right after Jeff was sentenced, blames both his first wife—Jeff’s mother—and himself, for creating a monster because of how Jeff was mistreated as a child. And after the sentence, the mother writes a confession in which she feels guilty about the way she treated her son before turning on the gas tap in an attempt to kill herself. Having pressed the forward button so many times in the past month, I hadn’t thought about this pair of revealing scenes which, as I said, are apparently based on real-life anecdotes.
As a teenager I had, to some extent, a mother like Jeffrey’s, so I know how one internalises the verbal abuse of what Jung called ‘a dragon mother’. What hurt Jeff the most as a child is that his dad, who should’ve been the countervailing force, left him alone with the dragon and literally walked out of the home. It was in that house that Jeff committed his first murder and precisely when his young victim, Steven Mark Hicks (pictured below) wanted to leave the house.
After several hours of talking, drinking and listening to music, Steve ‘wanted to leave and I didn’t want him to leave’. Dahmer struck Steve from behind with the dumbbell while Steve was sitting in a chair. When he fell unconscious, Dahmer choked him to death with the barbell bar.
It seems obvious to me that the eighteen-year-old Jeff displaced pent-up anger towards the father in a sort of ‘Now you’re not leaving!’ From my own experience I know that resentment towards the passive father who didn’t stop the abuse is far more serious than resentment towards the dragon mother, insofar as he could have saved us and did nothing.
Of course, regarding his psychic wounds Jeff’s twist was very different from mine. He began to recreate his impotent rage with scapegoats, starting with Steve, and the betrayal he had been subjected to at home never crossed his conscience (transferred, unconscious hatred is infinite, since it’s not directed toward the real perp). I preferred to leave a legacy to humanity with my autobiographical confessions—see the only comment in the featured post.
Having been watching so many YouTube interviews with the real Jeff Dahmer, I realised that what trauma researchers say is true. To the extent that the subject doesn’t know himself—Jeff didn’t know himself—he will displace his unconscious rage on others. Bringing to consciousness the horrors of our childhoods (or adolescence in my case) prevents mental disorders, or our taking it out on innocent Steves.
Those who don’t read Deschner’s series on Christendom’s history on which I am now focusing are perhaps unaware that, within those posts, I interject comments of my own. For example, yesterday I commented on Charlemagne’s childhood as follows:
The autobiographical genre I want to inaugurate, analysing our abusive parents, sheds great light on these issues.
Anyone who has read my De Jesús a Hitler will know that my father was picked on in Catholic schools. The priests perpetrated a tremendous psyop on him (remember that the Jesuits say that if you give them a child at six, mentally he will be theirs forever).
In one of the sources Deschner himself quotes, Charlemagne is said to have been educated in a monastery. That is the key to understanding everything he did when he left that place.
As bizarre as it may seem, analysing the mad father who mistreated us sheds intense light on historical figures who caused the darkest hour that the white man is currently suffering from. But who’s interested in this new literary genre?
Unlike our books on racial issues, the good news is that Lulu Inc. is not censoring my books dealing with parental abuse of their children. That means I will be able to translate each of my books originally written in the language of Cervantes: a series I decided to title From Jesus to Hitler. The first of these eleven books appears below in brown because it is possible, once again, to get a hard copy of it.
Unless death surprises me, I will eventually translate the other ten. Understanding why my father did what he did sheds great light on the subject I am passionate about: deciphering the ethnosuicidal mind of today’s white man, like what I said above about Charlemagne. Once the translation of From Jesus to Hitler is finished, it will be much easier to explain my philosophical ideas. But of course: my visitors would have to know what I have written.
I will now add Letter to mom Medusa to the featured post.
At the moment, my books on racial issues are only available as PDFs. That doesn’t bother me too much because even the thick volume of The Fair Race is comprised of many articles, which means that it is possible to print out one of those articles at home for convenient reading.
That is not possible with From Jesus to Hitler. There are books, such as the volumes of The Gulag Archipelago (whose most brilliant pages are incidentally also autobiographical) that have to be read in book form. Even fiction like LOTR (that is currently being outraged by Amazon) has to be read in book form, as indeed I did with the deluxe edition we see below.
The advantage of dividing From Jesus to Hitler into eleven books is that one can decide, after reading the first, whether it is worth investing time in the second; and so on. Unlike LOTR, in non-fiction it is extremely difficult to write in such an intense way that the reading doesn’t bore but moves us to continue reading a work that exceeds a thousand pages. That’s why it took me so many decades to finish it.
So my books in the From Jesus to Hitler series will not come in PDFs. If you want a copy of the first one you will have to get it by clicking on the brown words in the list above (if you want the whole series in the language in which it was written, click here).
Know thyself and thou shalt know the universe and the Gods, said the inscription on the Delphic Temple. He who knows himself can no longer continue his ethnosuicidal practices. He has freed himself from the Monsters of the Id. He has become what Savitri Devi calls an initiate.
– For the context of these translations click here –
The Frankish king Charlemagne was a devout Catholic who maintained a close relationship with the papacy throughout his life. In 772, when Pope Adrian I was threatened by invaders, the king rushed to Rome to provide assistance. Shown here, the pope asks Charlemagne for help at a meeting near Rome.
Anti-juridical sovereignty of Charles and the beginning of the pro-pope warfare
Shortly before Pope Stephen died at the end of January 772, Carloman had died (after having made large donations to churches and monasteries, and especially to the cathedral of Rheims and the abbey of Saint-Denis) on 4 December 771, near the beautiful forests of Laon where he liked to hunt. He was only twenty years old. Such a misfortune probably triggered a fratricidal war that was already in the offing. Charles, then probably in his early thirties, became ruler of the entire Frankish kingdom in flagrant violation of the law, as he deferred the inheritance rights of Carloman’s two sons, both of whom were still children, and in a swift act of plunder, he took over his brother’s kingdom.
This was a centuries-old Christian tradition, both in the East and in the West. And it ran in the family, since Charles Martell, Charles’s grandfather and also a bastard, had already excluded the direct heirs in a very similar way. And in 754, didn’t Charles’ father Pepin tonsure the sons of his brother, the deposed Carloman, locking them up in a monastery and burying their right of inheritance there forever?
The founders of Europe!
Strangely enough, we know almost nothing about Charles’ childhood and youth.
______ 卐 ______
Editor’s note:
The autobiographical genre I want to inaugurate, analysing our abusive parents, sheds great light on these issues.
Anyone who has read my De Jesús a Hitler will know that my father was picked on in Catholic schools. The priests perpetrated a tremendous psyop on him (remember that the Jesuits say that if you give them a child at six, mentally he will be theirs forever).
In one of the sources Deschner himself quotes, Charlemagne is said to have been educated in a monastery. That is the key to understanding everything he did when he left that place.
As bizarre as it may seem, analysing the mad father who mistreated us sheds intense light on historical figures who caused the darkest hour that the white man is currently suffering from. But who’s interested in this new literary genre?
______ 卐 ______
Even the year of his birth is disputed. The new Lexicón des Mittelalters (still unfinished), however, gives per other sources that are supposedly second-rate the date 2 April 747. The specific date comes from an old calendar from the monastery of Lorsch.
For a long time Charles was also considered to have been born out of wedlock; it was believed that he was born before the marriage of his parents, Pepin and Bertrada, daughter of Count Charibert of Laon, a relationship that only years later became a real marriage. Einhard wrote his famous book, Vita Karoli Magni, fifteen or twenty years after Charles’s death; but twenty years before that date he was already living in the palace of the then fifty-year-old king. He soon became part of his innermost family circle, sitting at his table and becoming his confidant; so it is completely implausible that he had heard nothing about his hero’s childhood and youth—especially when Einhard says that Charles spoke almost continuously, that he could be considered a ‘chatterbox’.
Pope Stephen’s successor was Pope Adrian I (772-795), who reigned longer than any of the popes who preceded him.
Adrian, who belonged to the Roman nobility, was already the third pope of the house of Colonna, and at the same time a strong supporter of his relatives, who held the most important offices of state. In foreign policy Adrian broke with the pro-Bardic attitude that had been maintained by his predecessor. He soon mounted a front against Desiderius, who refused to return to the Roman Church some of the cities and territories that had been the fruit of Pepin’s wars of plunder. By papal order, as soon as Paulus Afiarta, a supporter of the Lombards, returned from their court, he was seized by Archbishop Leo of Ravenna, who had him tortured and executed.
The elimination of the leaders of the pro-Lombard faction of the curia again provoked the Lombard king’s threats and attacks on the Church-State, with the obligatory arson, plunder and robbery. And so again came the Pope’s cries for help. He openly reminded Charles of the example of Pepin. He repeatedly urged and pressed him to intervene ‘against Desiderius and the Lombards in the service of God, in favour of the rights of St Peter and for the consolation of the Church’, and to ‘complete the preservation of the holy Church of God’. In this way he prepared the way for Charles’ intervention in Italy, who would later march south five times, anticipating the numerous Italian campaigns that the Germanic emperors would carry out in the future.
Einhard says: ‘At the request of Bishop Adrian of Rome he [Charles] launched the war against the Lombards. The pope, whose enlisted troops on all sides could not even remotely cope with the military might of his enemies, was burning with impatience for Charles’ intervention…’
It seemed almost impossible to take the passes that the Lombards had closed and to cross the gorges, ‘the Gates of Italy’. Walls, fortifications and towers enclosed the gorges of the valleys between mountain and mountain. The Franks were pinned between steep walls, their cavalry still less able to manoeuvre than their foot troops. Charles, huddled and sulky in his tent, held one council of war after another with his military, parleyed with the Lombards, and softened his demands more and more; but in vain. Then a skilful deacon, sent by Archbishop Leo of Ravenna, led a scara francisca over a high, undefended ridge, which centuries later, with the ruins of such fortifications still standing would be called the ‘Path of the Franks’. Surprised to suddenly see the Franks in their rear, the Lombards thought they were surrounded and abandoned their positions in disarray. It was a ruse that Charles often used in the war against the Saxons.
The aggressor first conquered Turin and then his army, crossing the Po plain ‘like an immense tide of floating ice’ (Stormer), fell on Pavia. Charles rejoined the other army corps and at the end of September laid siege to the Lombard residential town, which was heavily fortified and well supplied with soldiers, arms and supplies.
Charles prepared for a long siege, had his sons brought from the far-off homeland and also his wife Hildegard, who was fourteen years old. And when he heard that Adalgis, son of Desiderius, had taken refuge with Carloman’s widow and children in Verona, then undoubtedly the most fortified city in Italy, he set out at once with a small troop.
Whether due to treachery or regular surrender, Verona soon capitulated. The kinsmen, Gerberga with her sons, passed at Charles’ disposal but the sources are silent about their fate. At best—as twenty years earlier with the beloved relatives of his father Pepin—they were tonsured into monasteries. In any case, they disappeared from history.
