web analytics

Category: Christendom

Categories
Catholic Church Christendom Deranged altruism Judaism Laurent Guyénot Protestantism Theology

How Yahweh conquered Rome, 2

by Laurent Guyénot

The two sides of the big lie

Is this quest really necessary? Can there be any benefit for Western civilization in questioning its already shaky Christian foundation? And is the Big Lie such a big deal? Before proceeding, I want to share my viewpoint on these questions, on which I have thought long and hard.

‘The greatness of White civilization sprung from the Christian faith.’ Such a statement seems hardly controversial. And yet, I think it is completely mistaken. The achievements of our civilization stem from the inner strength of our race, which include an exceptional propensity to ‘idealize’, by which I mean both to generate ideas and work toward their realization. The genius of our race is to be creators of powerful Ideas that drive us forward and upward. This capacity, which Søren Kierkegaard calls ideality (In Vino Veritas, 1845), is not to be confused with what we commonly call idealism, although it may be argued that idealism is our vulnerability, the weakness inherent to our strength.

For centuries, the Christian faith has been a vehicle—one could almost say a superstructure—for our yearning to idealize and realize; it has not produced it. Priests did not build the Cathedrals in which they officiated (most churches were collective ventures of cities, towns and villages); the troubadours and poets who elaborated the sublime ideal of love which is our ‘civilization’s miracle’ (Stendhal)[5], were not monks; Johann Sebastian Bach wrote Church music, but he was not an clergyman, and his Ave Maria would sound just as great if sung to Isis; many geniuses of our European pantheons, like Dante, Leonardo da Vinci or Galilee, were nominal Catholics by obligation, but secret lovers of Sophia (read my article ‘The Crucifixion of the Goddess’). The source of the artistic, scientific and cultural genius of the White race is not Christianity.

Kevin MacDonald makes a discreet but crucial point in his preface to Giles Corey’s The Sword of Christ when he writes that ‘the adaptive aspects of Christianity’ are what ‘produced Western expansion, innovation, discovery, individual freedom, economic prosperity, and strong family bonds.’[6] This is true if by ‘the adaptive aspects of Christianity’ we mean the aspects that are adopted and adapted from the ancient Greco-Roman-Germanic world, rather than from the Old and New Testament. Among the adaptive aspects of Christianity must be counted its various national colors. Russian Orthodoxy is good for Russia for the same reason that Confucianism is good for China: because it is a national Church, so that being a Russian Orthodox means being a patriot.

The same could be said in the past about Lutheranism for Germany or, in a narrower context, Catholicism for Ireland. But these national versions of Christianity are, in fact, in opposition to its universal (katholikos) mission statement—and to papal Rome. Family values are also adaptive aspects of Christianity. Jesus disavowed his family (Matthew 12:46-50) and Paul taught that, ‘it is good for a man not to marry,’ marriage being recommended only for those who cannot help fornicating (1 Corinthians 7). ‘Christian values’ are not Christian at all, they are simply conservative. In fact, if we look at its popular expressions, Catholicism has been so adaptive that it can be said to be more pagan than Jewish. What’s Jewish about Christmas or Mother Mary?

The problem with Christianity is with its non-adaptive and now prominent Jewish aspects. It is not just the grotesque notion that Jews are chosen, but the even more grotesque character of the god who chose them. Paradoxically, with its anthropomorphic—or should we say Judeomorphic—image of God inherited from the Torah, Christianity has laid the foundation for modern atheism, and, perhaps, harmed Gentile ideality irremediably. Because the Old Testament God is ‘a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a capriciously malevolent bully,’ Richard Dawkins decided to be an atheist, like the vast majority of scholars from Christian background.[7]

They have all, by their own admission, confused God with Yahweh, and fallen victim to the Big Biblical Lie. And because they cannot conceive God outside of the Biblical paradigm, they ban Intelligent Design from universities under the slanderous accusation that it is another name for the biblical God (watch the documentary Expelled: No Intelligent Allowed), whereas it is in fact a vindication of the Greek Sophia. The sociopathic Yahweh has ruined the reputation of God and led to modern Western godlessness.

And so the Big Jewish Lie begot the Big Atheist Lie—or shall we call it the Darwinian Lie? ‘Yahweh is God’ and ‘God is dead’ are opposed like the two sides of the same coin. Our materialistic civilization is in fact more Jewish than the Christianity it rejected, because materialism (the denial of any otherworld) is the metaphysical core of the Hebrew Bible (read my article ‘Israel as One Man’).

If Christianity could include, among its adaptive aspects, the rejection of the Old Testament’s Jealous God and the Big Lie of Jewish chosenness, then it would be redeemable. But Christians would rather sell their souls to the devil than become Marcionites. In two thousand years of existence, institutional Christianity has consistently evolved in the opposite direction, becoming more and more scriptural, Judaized, and Israel-centered: from Orthodoxy to Catholicism, and from Catholicism to Protestantism, the trend is unmistakable. What else can you expect from an institution that has always invited the Jews, and declared that they cease being Jews the moment they receive baptism?

And so Christianity is a dead end. It is now part of the problem, not the solution. It may have served us well for some centuries [Note of the Editor: Guyénot hasn’t read the ten volumes of Karlheinz Deschner’s Christianity’s Criminal History], but in the long run, it has been an instrument of Gentile enslavement to Jewish power. At least, it has not helped us to prevent it, and it cannot help us to overcome it. Many today ask: why are we so weak? It is high time to consider the obvious: having been taught for generations to worship and emulate the man nailed on the cross under Jewish pressure is not the best incentive to resist martyrdom. There is an obvious correlation between being told yesterday that it is moral to ‘love your enemies’ and getting jailed today for ‘hate speech.’

I hold no personal grudge against Christianity. Catholicism is a part of my happiest childhood memories, and the sound of Church bells never fails to strike a deep chord in me. My grandparents on my mother’s side were Catholic bourgeois who raised a large and happy family with sound moral values. If I could see any hope in this social class, I would be a political Catholic like Balzac, or a romantic Catholic like Chateaubriand. But Catholic bourgeoisie is near extinct, having never recovered from Maréchal Petain’s demise. Their children called them fascists and their grandchildren are addicted to pornography. Catholicism has deserted the country too: there are no priests, and what good is a country priest anyway if he cannot bless the crops at Easter?

Therefore, since I don’t believe that Jesus literally rose from his tomb, I consider that institutional Christianity has exhausted its potential for civilization in the West. Look at our pope, for Christ’s sake!

‘Inside every Christian is a Jew’ (Pope Francis).

I speak as a Frenchman, but I doubt that American Catholicism has much more Holy Spirit left. It died in Dallas with Arlen Specter’s magic bullet. Of course, there are brave Catholics like E. Michael Jones, who has captured the evil genius of the Jewish race in his indispensable book on The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit. But Professor Jones is the exception that proves the rule. And I am not even talking of American Protestantism, today a mercenary force for Zion.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s Note:

In this the author is terribly mistaken. Jones is a thousand times worse than a Jew because, as a good Catholic, he is a vile traitor to his race (traitors are worse than external enemies). After he debated Jared Taylor a year ago, I wrote: ‘After 1:39 the Christian Jones showed his true colours. The moderator asked him: If the millions of non-white Muslims and blacks in France suddenly became Catholics should they be expelled? Emphatically Jones answered “No!… They could become Frenchmen, without any problem!” He even added that an African who migrated to Poland could become Polish as well…’
 

______ 卐 ______

 

[5] Stendhal, Love, Penguin Classics, 2000, p. 83.
[6] Giles Corey, The Sword of Christ: Christianity from the Right, or The Christian Question, Independently published, 2020, p. xiii.
[7] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Houghton Mifflin, 2006, p. 51.

Categories
Charlemagne Christendom Destruction of Germanic paganism Evil Justice / revenge Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 166

The butcher of the Saxons

While Charles was making his conquests in northern Spain and losing them again—the only defeat suffered by a Frankish army under his command—Widukind, a Westphalian nobleman who had returned from Danish emigration (and who is first named in 777, when he failed to attend the Diet of Paderborn), advanced with his Saxons south to Fulda and west to Koblenz and Deutz. Feudal castles and churches were destroyed and villages burned and annihilated in a rampage that was not so much for booty as for revenge.

In 779 Charles advanced to the Weser, and in 780 to the Elbe. Again not only the East Saxons but even the Wenden on the other side of the Elbe and ‘people from the north’ were baptised. Again there were pledges of allegiance and new hostages were taken. At a national assembly in Lippspringe, the sovereign tried ‘explicitly to promote [the spread of Christianity in Saxony] and thus accelerate the development of feudal relations’ (Epperlein). Christian priests spread the new ‘enlightenment’ among the occupied burghs. ‘They carried crosses and sang pious songs; soldiers heavily armed with all kinds of weapons were their escorts, who by their determined gestures accelerated Christianisation’ (De Bayac).

The plundered territory continued to be distributed to bishops and abbots, missionary dioceses were created, churches were built and even minor monasteries, such as those of Hersfeit, Amorbach, Neustadt on the Main, were incorporated by Charles into the conversion of the pagans. And above all, of course, Fulda, whose abbot Sturmi held ecclesiastical and military command over the Saxon fortress of Erasburg until shortly before his death. In the northwest, the propaganda was carried out by Bishop Alberic of Utrecht, who had destroyed the remnants of paganism in West Frisia. On his orders and backed by Charles’ military power, Alberic’s monks smashed the statues of the gods and plundered the pagan shrines and everything of value they could find. The monarch gave part of the treasures of the temples to the bishop for ecclesiastical purposes. The Anglo-Saxon St Wilehad, who had already indoctrinated the Frisians, albeit without much success, organised the northern part of subjugated Saxony on Charles’ behalf from 780 onwards. Similarly, St Liudger worked in Central Frisia at Charles’ request.

But when the East Frisians, and also large sections of the population of Central Frisia, rose in revolt against the Saxons, destroyed the churches and turned to their former beliefs, the Christian preachers left the country in haste. The Englishman Wilehad, who shortly afterwards was consecrated bishop for the Saxon mission and first prelate of Bremen, fled to Rome and then devoted himself—according to Echternach—‘for two years to study and prayer’ (Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche). St Ludger, later Bishop of Münster, took refuge in Rome and Monte Cassino. Without the protection of the Frankish arms, the heralds of the good news couldn’t survive. But as soon as the occupiers regained control of the countryside, the ecclesiastical lords also returned with their swords to the propaganda front. Wilehad took up his seat in Bremen and St Liudger established himself, on Charles’ orders, east of the Lauwers. There, with the backing of royal power, he destroyed the pagan shrines (fana), advanced to the islands and, with the support of Frankish soldiers, devastated the sacrificial places of the Frisian god Phoete in Heligoland.

For the rest, many churchmen must have returned only reluctantly among the rebellious Saxons. And when the Saxons, along with the Vendeans, rose again under Widukind, their fury was focused on the clergy and Christianity, with many of the churches being set on fire, while the priests fled. A Frankish army was wiped out at Süntel, ‘almost to the last man being slain by the sword’ according to the Annals, which adds: ‘The Frankish loss was even greater than the figures might indicate’. Two dozen nobles also perished in the slaughter. But before Charles arrived, the Saxon nobility and some Frankish troops had already crushed the rebellion. The Saxon ‘nobles’ surrendered the rebels. And then Charles intensified the expansionist and missionary war until the famous beheading of Verden on the Aller and then, as usual, celebrated Christmas and Easter, the birth and resurrection of the Lord.

Even in the 20th century, ‘professionals’ in the Catholic and Protestant camps have sometimes tried to deny the orgy of cruelty and barbarism. Episcopalian devotionalists and some ‘specialised theologians’ worked shoulder to shoulder on this subject, especially during the Nazi period.

In 1935, the ecclesiastical spokesman of the Osnabrück bishopric spoke of ‘the fable of the Verden blood trial’. Similarly, the Protestant professor of Church History at the University of Munich, Kari Bauer, claimed in 1936 that the verb decollare (to cut the throat), which appears in the sources, was a misspelling instead of the original delocare or desolare (to banish); consequently, 4,500 Saxons were only expelled from the place. It must be said, however, firstly, that this verb or a similar one isn’t used in the various sources; and secondly, that four yearbooks of the time speak of the ‘slaughter’ (decollare / decollatio) of the Saxons. Such are the royal Annals, the Annales Amandi, the Annales Fuldenses and finally, in the first half of the 9th century, also the Annales Sithienses. And the chroniclers all from the most diverse places would have committed in a highly mysterious way the same ‘errata’.

And it would be a very different ‘misprint’ if, as one researcher suspected earlier, the author of the sources ‘as a result of a false reading of the original had removed a couple of zeros’ (H. Ullmann). On the contrary, Donald Bullough rightly observes: ‘But not to believe the king capable of such an action was tantamount to making him more virtuous than almost all the Christian kings of the Middle Ages’. The stabbing of a vanquished enemy on the battlefield was then commonplace unless one expected more profit from the slaves and the ransom money. And one thing is also easily forgotten: that most of the hostages, which the king took year after year, were regularly killed, as soon as those whose obedience the hostages guaranteed rose against the king again.

One day in the late autumn of 782, there stood 4,500 Saxons, squeezed like animals in the slaughterhouse and surrounded by their own ‘nobles’, who had handed them over, and by the paladins of the great Charles, ‘the pilot light of Europe’, as a manuscript from St Gallen of the 9th-10th centuries calls him. By his sentence, they were beheaded and thrown into the Aller, which swept them into the Weser and then into the sea. ‘There were 4,500 of them and that is what happened’ (quod ita et factum est), as the royal analyst laconically puts it, ‘and he celebrated Christmas’, just where the future ‘saint’ soon had a church built (not an expiatory chapel, but rather a triumphal chapel) and where the cathedral of Verden stands today: literally, on rivers of blood.

Just imagine: 4,500 people beheaded—and then the canonisation of the murderer! ‘It is true that he eliminated 4,500 Saxons’, writes Ranke, adding later, ‘but later on the serene tranquillity of a great soul stands out in him’.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s note: Can we finally see why we should tear down the churches in Europe and behead the pope and his cardinals? Without avenging the crimes that the religion of the Semitic god perpetrated on the brave defenders of the Aryan religion, there is no mental salvation for the West. The cancer that’s killing us goes back long before the Jews took over our media, and I find it incredible that white nationalists not only refuse to see it, but continue to worship the enemy god.

Categories
Charlemagne Christendom Destruction of Germanic paganism Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 165

– For the context of these translations click here –

 
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).

Illustration of a Widukind with the Saxons against Charlemagne in the years 777-785

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.

______ 卐 ______

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:

______ 卐 ______

 
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.

Categories
Carolingian dynasty Charlemagne Christendom Destruction of Germanic paganism Evil Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 164

The Christian banners enter Saxony

Charles’ armies—which in the larger campaigns consisted of just 3,000 horsemen and between 6,000 and 10,000-foot soldiers—sometimes numbered more than 5,000 or 6,000 warriors. Unlike in the time of his grandfather Charles Martell, the core of the army was made up of heavy cavalry. The horsemen were armed with chain mail, helmet, shield and shin guards, with lance and battle-axe (worth approximately 18 to 20 oxen). And all this for Jesus Christ. The foot companies, still numerous, fought with mace and bow. (Only from 866, under Charles the Bald, was every Frank who owned a horse obliged to military service so that the infantry ceased to play an important role in the army.) Moreover, in the Carolingian wars, no soldiers were paid: the spoils of plunder were shared out.

The Christian butchery (‘mission by the sword’), with which Charles continued his father’s Saxon wars, began in 772. The ‘gentle king’, as he is repeatedly called in contemporary royal annals, then conquered the frontier fortress of Eresburg (today’s Obermarsberg, next to the Diemel), an important starting point of his military operations during the first half of the Saxon wars. And he destroyed (probably there) the Irminsul, the Saxon national shrine, consisting of an extraordinarily large tree trunk, which the Saxons venerated as ‘the pillar supporting the Universe’ in a sacred grove in the open air. Later Charles entrusted Abbot Sturmi of Fulda with the command of the fortress of Eresburg, which had been recaptured, again and again, lost, destroyed and rebuilt.

But other bishops and abbots also provided Charles with military services. Like the counts, they were also obliged to maintain a camp, an obligation which was also incumbent on the abbesses. Even at that time, clerical troops accompanied the Frankish army, so that, according to Sturmi’s biographer, ‘through sacred instruction in the faith, they might subject the people, bound from the beginning of the world with the chains of demons to the gentle and light yoke of Christ’. Exactly from that year onwards, Charles used a seal with the inscription: ‘Christ protects Charles, King of the Franks’.

After the Christians had completely plundered the place of worship, set fire to the sacred grove and destroyed the pillar, they left with the sacred offerings piled up there and with abundant treasures of gold and silver, ‘the gentle King Charles took the gold and silver he found there’, as the Royal Annals succinctly state. And soon after, on top of the plundered and destroyed gentile sanctuary, a church was built ‘under the patronage of Peter’ (Karpf), the gatekeeper of heaven, displacing the Saxon god Irmin (probably identical to the Germanic god Saxnoth / Tiwas). What progress!

Heinrich Leutemann’s Destruction of
the Irmin Column by Charlemagne

In the following years, ‘the gentle king’ fought mainly in Italy. Through the emissary Peter (that was the name of the envoy), Pope Adrian had invited him ‘for the love of God and in favour of the right of St Peter and the Church to help him against King Desiderius’ (Annales Regni Francorum). But already in 774, barely back from the plunder of the Longobard kingdom, the good King Charles sent four army corps against the Saxons: three of them ‘were victorious with the help of God’, as the royal analyst once again reports, while the contingent corps returned without even having fought, but ‘with great booty and without loss’ to the sweet home.

And then Charles himself somehow introduced ‘Christian banners into Saxony’ (Groszmann), with the result that ‘the war became more and more the war of faith’, as Canon Adolf Bertram acknowledged in 1899.

Concerned about the further course of the war, Charles had consulted an expert by courier if there was any sign that Mars had accelerated his career and had already reached the constellation Cancer. He conquered Sigibur on the Ruhr and crossed the Weser, ‘many of the Saxons being slain there’, advancing towards Ostfalia, intending ‘not to give up until the defeated Saxons had either submitted to the Christian religion or had been completely exterminated’. It was the programme of a thirty-three-year war ‘with an increasingly religious motivation’ (Haendier). Indeed, in its planning, it represented something new in the history of the Church, ‘a direct missionary war, which is not a preparation for missionary work but is itself a missionary instrument’ (H.D. Kahl).

This was precisely the decade in which the prayer of a sacramentary (a missal) openly called the Franks the chosen people. Charles’ wars against the Saxons were already regarded as wars against the heathen and were therefore considered just. ‘Rise, thou chosen man of God, and defend the Bride of God, the Bride of thy Lord’, the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin, one of his closest advisors, urged him. And later the monk Widukind of Corbey wrote: ‘And when he saw how his noble neighbouring people, the Saxons, were imprisoned in vain heresy, he strove by all means to lead them to the true way of salvation’.

By all means. As far as the year 765 is concerned, the royal Annals make it lapidary clear: ‘After having taken hostages, seizing abundant booty and three times provoking a bloodbath among the Saxons, the aforementioned King Charles returned to France with the help of God (auxiliante Domino)’.

Booty, bloodbaths and God’s help are things that keep coming back, and the good God is always on the side of the strongest. In 776, ‘God’s strength justly overcame theirs… and the whole multitude of them, who in panic had fled one after another, killing one another… succumbed to the mutual blows, and so were surprised by God’s punishment. And how great was the power of God for the salvation of the Christians no one can say’. In 778, ‘A battle began there, which had a very good end. With God’s help the Franks were victorious and a great multitude of Saxons were slaughtered’. In 779, ‘with the help of God’, etc. And between the regular mass murders in the summers, sometimes in this palace estate and sometimes in that city, the so-called peaceful king celebrated Christmas…

The heathen were being fought, and that justified everything. Groups of clergymen accompanied the beheader. Miracles of all kinds took place. And after each campaign, they returned with abundant booty. In the principality of Lippe, there were mass baptisms, especially of nobles: the Saxons came with women and children in countless numbers (inumerabilis multitudo) and had themselves baptised and left as many hostages as the king demanded.

And at the brilliant national assembly, held at Paderborn in 777 they again thronged and solemnly abjured ‘Donar, Wotan and Saxnot and all evil spirits: their companions’ and pledged faith and allegiance ‘to God the Father almighty, to Christ the Son of God and the Holy Spirit’.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s Note: Can you see why WDH is the only worthwhile site among our forums? So-called anti-Semitic racialists are unable to see that overthrowing the Aryan Gods and putting the Jewish god in their place is the ultimate treason!

Categories
Carolingian dynasty Charlemagne Christendom Destruction of Germanic paganism Franks Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 163

– For the context of these translations click here –

 
Plunder and Christianisation, a trump card of Frankish government policy

While the Franks had fought in unison with the Saxons in the annihilation of the kingdom of Thuringia in 531, in 555-556 Chlothar I conducted two campaigns against them. In the first he succumbed to a significant defeat, but in the next he imposed a tribute on them. Around 629, during a devastating campaign, Chlothar II had all Saxons who lifted more than his sword killed. But when in 632-633 they helped Dagobert I against a Vendean army, and although they contributed little to the campaign, the king waived the 500-cow tribute they had been paying for over a hundred years. They were thus fully independent. But when they broke into the lower Ruhr territory in 715, Charles Martell waged a series of devastating wars against them, forcing them to pay tribute and taking them hostage.

As among the Frisians, neither among the Saxons, considered to be ‘the most pagan’ (paganissimi), did the attacks alone achieve any success. All these advances beyond the Frankish realm ‘involved something irremediably reckless’ (Schieffer). And, as among the Frisians, the clergy also soon collaborated closely with the conquerors in the subjugation of the Saxons. Both helped each other. First the country was plundered by the sword, then the common rule was consolidated by Christian ideology and ecclesiastical organisation, the conquered and ‘converted’ adapted and were economically exploited.

The Frankish kings and nobles had no more devoted collaborators than the clerics, and the clerics found no more solicitous promoters than Frankish feudalism. The military victory brought with it immediate Christianisation. Where the Frankish sword didn’t reach, like the Danes for example, there was no mission either. Hence, just as among the Frisians, so also among the Saxons their struggle for freedom was immediately transformed into a struggle against Christianity, which appeared to them as a symbol of slavery and foreign domination. Hence, both Frisians and Saxons particularly hated the clergy, destroyed churches in any uprising, expelled missionaries and not infrequently killed bishops and priests, and were suspicious a priori of any Christian preacher who appeared. He was almost always, in fact, in the service of a hostile power which imposed the yoke and acted as its introducer and stabiliser.

Now the aim was to ‘convert’ at once as many people as possible: a whole tribe, a whole people. Massive success was sought beforehand, as was always the case later on in the Middle Ages. Thus, in the 8th century, more and more attempts were made to open the way for Christianity at any cost and to baptise the vanquished by force. ‘This connection of war and Christianity heralded the new form of cooperation between Church and State’ (Steinbach).

Christianisation was now on the heels of the campaign of subjugation, with the undeniable aim of binding the subjugated more strongly to the kingdom: ‘A trump card of the Frankish governmental policy, which responded to the conviction that the evangelical doctrine of compulsory obedience was capable of subduing obstinate rebellion even more than the power of the sword’ (Naegle).

Among the Saxons, among whom the enslaved peasants were extraordinarily numerous, the lower working classes partly put up violent resistance to Frankish expansion and forced conversion. For them it led to a kind of slavery. The Saxon nobility, on the other hand, whose dominance was threatened by free and slave in a class struggle that was becoming more and more acute, was much more open to the new religion, which was in fact feudal, and more willing to compromise (the situation was at least very similar in Thuringia). The Saxon nobility very early on favoured missionary action to secure its dominance over the lower classes and to strengthen their position, a characteristic behaviour throughout the war. In 782 and 898 the same nobility openly handed over their less trustworthy peasants to the Franks. They also immediately made numerous donations to the Church. On the other hand, the lower classes (plebeium vulgus) still rejected Christianity in the second half of the 9th century.

The people maintained pagan sacrifices and customs and hated Christian parish priests. Only Charles’ sword achieved the goal. Crushings and uprisings followed one after the other, provoking campaign after campaign. It took a war of more than thirty years, which devastated the country continually, decimated the population, and soon assumed the character of a war of religion, to spread the good news and the kingdom of god a little further into the world; to lead the Saxons ‘to the one true God, to convince them that there was something greater than fighting and victory, than death on the battlefield and pleasures in Valhalla’ (Bertram).

It would have been the bloodiest and longest war waged by the Franks, according to Charles’ confidant Einhard in his Vita Caroli Magni, the first hagiography of a ruler of the Middle Ages. And this ‘iron-tongued preaching’—to use a 9th-century expression—with which the country of Saxony was converted, became a kind of model for all Christian missionary practice in the Middle Ages. And we have to think that only Frankish accounts of the Saxon wars exist, so the clerical chroniclers distorted the mission of blood and fire until it was passed off as a serene and entirely peaceful work of conversion.


Editor’s Note: This engraving of Charlemagne having the Saxons peacefully baptised is what pious Christians, ignorant of real history, believe.

Categories
Charlemagne Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 162

The bloody ‘mission’ of the Saxons (772-804)

Desiderius, the last king of the Longobards, went with his wife and daughter, Charles’ ex-wife, to a Frankish prison, then disappeared into a monastery (probably in Corbie), where he still survived for some time. In any case, he disappeared forever. The Longobard kingdom was wiped off the map.

‘Of all the wars Charles fought’, writes Einhard, ‘the first was the Aquitanian… After that war was over… Charles was induced by the entreaties and pleas of [pope] Adrian, bishop of Rome, and declared war on the Longobards… He then resumed the war against the Saxons… uninterrupted for thirty-three years’.

The Saxons, whose name means companions or people of the sword, are first mentioned in the writings of the mathematician, astronomer, and geographer Claudius Ptolemy, who lived in the 2nd century. ‘Without avarice and without excess, quiet and isolated, they do not provoke any war, nor cause devastation by campaigns of plunder’. Their armed raids were carried out by sea and by land: the former in hollowed-out tree trunks, in which they could fit about three dozen men.

Arriving perhaps from Scandinavia, they preferred to settle in coastal areas. For a long time they stayed in the northern part of France, which was called sinus saxonicus (Saxon gulf), and in Flanders, also occupying the Lüneburg territories after the withdrawal of the Lombards. In the mid-5th century a large part of the Saxons moved to England, but the majority remained on the continent, where their kingdom extended throughout what is now northwest Germany, with the exception of the Frisian territories.

Of all the German counties, only the Saxon shires, of which we know more than a hundred by name, remained in the same hands. Less exposed to Roman influences, they also preserved their national identity better than the peoples living further south. And those pagan Saxons had ‘the best laws’, as even the abbot of Fulda, Rudolf, acknowledges. ‘And they strive for many things of profit and in accordance with the natural law they pursue honourable things with the honesty of manners’.

Their name doesn’t comprise a single tribe, but rather an association of tribes (about which researchers argue), to whose formation contributed, in addition to the Saxons, the Angrivarians, the Cheruscans, the Lombards, the Thuringians and the Semnones. Later, the Westphalians, Ostrophalians and Elbe Saxons also joined them. The Franks, however, regarded them as members of a single people and generally called them ‘Saxons’ without further distinction. After their joint conquest of Thuringia with the Franks in 531, they took the eastern part, which still bears their name.

It is probable that the Saxons, too, originally had kings, but no real kingdom or duchy developed among them. Their society consisted of four classes: nobles (nobiles), freemen (liberi), liti and slaves (servi); the ‘liti’ being those bound to the soil, the serfs of the glebe. The lower classes defended themselves against the Christianisation and domination of the Franks, while the nobility sought to safeguard their interests by relying on the enemy of the state.

Elsewhere, too, it was the wealthy class that was the first to convert to Christianity. While, for example, the nobility of Civitas Treverorum in the bishopric of Trier converted at the end of the 4th century, the tenant farmers, serfs and farm labourers remained longer and more stubbornly attached to the old beliefs, converting only in the middle of the 5th century. And also among the Slavs their princes probably preceded their tribes in baptism. According to Flaskamp:

This was the way things went everywhere with officially directed missionary work, there being nothing special about the fact that the Frankish mission developed ‘from the top down’. A ‘democratic’ construction, starting from below, from the socially insignificant popular strata, would have been impossible, for it would have appeared as demagogy and would have been rejected by the nobility.

It can hardly be considered accidental that in the complete change of the situation during the first Christian centuries it was everywhere the ruling class that obtained the greatest advantages from the religion of love.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s note: Just as in our times it is the elites—Western governments, media and corporations—who push the Woke ideology to the masses. Both in medieval times and now the aim is to subjugate one’s own people through mad ideologies.

Categories
Christendom Game of Thrones Psychology

‘You must learn…!’

by Gaedhal

I think that Richard Dawkins has been criticized in some quarters for calling religion a ‘memetic virus’. However, for me, it is a good analogy. Comparing a religion like evangelical Christianity to a virus is a good metaphor. Are there perhaps places where the metaphor breaks down? Perhaps. However, this is true of all metaphors.

As Darrel Ray points out in The God Virus (2009) some people have a higher amount of viral load than others. In my view, street preachers have the highest viral load of Christianity.

And the Christian virus is always trying to propagate itself. In Ancient Rome, there were many religions dedicated to many deities. However, Christianity was in a special class of religion. It was a superstition, a type of religious madness.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s note:

As I said yesterday in the comments section, it’s not time for a revolution. For there to be a revolution we must know what we are fighting against.

Since we are far short of two per cent of male revolutionaries in a nation (now there are virtually zero per cent), we have no choice but internal jihad. Seeing the past through our training with the three-eyed raven in the cave beneath the Weirwood tree beyond the Wall is Bran’s only option, the one destined to rule the Seven Kingdoms. Eventually, he will emerge from the cave. But for now, he must learn how to see the real past of Christendom.

In other words, I know that these lessons from Deschner bore most of my visitors, but I will continue with the translations until I finish his ten books. Whoever stays until the end will be like Bran.

Categories
Carolingian dynasty Charlemagne Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kenneth Clark Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 159

 
Charles I, known as the Great or Charlemagne, and the Popes

‘His hair was grey and beautiful, his face radiant and cheerful; his appearance was always imposing and dignified; his health always magnificent’. ‘The Christian religion, in which he was instructed from a young age, he always cultivated with great sanctity and piety (sanctissime et cum magna pietate coluit). He visited the church assiduously, morning and evening, also at night and during mass’. —Einhard

‘His most important interlocutors throughout his life were the popes. The pivot of Carolingian politics, around which everything revolved, was the relationship with the Holy See’. ‘It is curious that while Charles lived he was able to avoid any conflict with the papal see. Charles certainly never won the confidence of the Italian population; there he continued to be an enemy’. —Wolfgang Braunfels

‘The Merovingian state had been predominantly profane; the Carolingian empire, by contrast, was a theocracy’. —Christopher Dawson

‘The image of the Carolingian theocracy harmonised impressively with the Carolingian idea of peace and with the conception of the empire as a corpus christianum’. —Eugen Ewick

‘Then the hour of the man of Providence sounded’. ‘With Charles the Great, the victorious arms of the Franks were the forerunners of Catholic doctrine’. ‘To keep his subjects in harmony and to establish among men concord pacis were the ideal aims of that mighty monarch, under whose reign scarcely a year passed without war. But these ideals fully correspond to a Christian conception of his office’. —Daniel Rops

‘I would rate Charlemagne well up in the top five most evil characters of European history’. —Arthur Kemp (*)

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s Note:

While it is true that I believe Hitler to have been the greatest man in Western history (and the fact that whites currently defame him and continue to worship Yahweh can only mean that they have signed their death warrant), that doesn’t mean that Hitler was infallible. Politically and militarily, he blundered in invading the Soviet Union. But ideologically he also erred, though not so catastrophically, insofar as his opinion was limited to one of his after-dinner talks. I am referring to that evening with his friends when he approved that Charlemagne tamed the Saxons (others, like Himmler and the SS, believed exactly the opposite).

Although Hitler had a much better awareness of the Christian problem than those Americans who since the mid-1990s have called themselves white nationalists, his understanding of Christendom was limited. As far as I know, it was only until this century that Christianity began to be understood as the primary cause, not a secondary cause, of white decline.

Although the syntax correction of my books will take time (I am about to finish Daybreak), only when I have completed the revision of all the books of our Daybreak Press, which includes one by Savitri Devi, will the formal presentation of the new paradigm be available in acceptable English. In the meantime, I must say that our reading of history is diametrically opposed to Kenneth Clark’s not only as far as Charlemagne is concerned (featured on the cover of his book), but in how Clark represented Christendom.

Fortunately, non-Christian authors such as Karlheinz Deschner have shown us a different history of Christendom in general, and Charlemagne in particular, that differs not only from the historical conception of the normies, but of American white nationalists and even Hitler himself.

__________

(*) This last quote doesn’t appear in the original. Deschner usually puts several epigraphs of theologians and Christian historians in favour of a specific character at the beginning of a chapter, and he adds in the end one or two quotes from dissidents who say the opposite. It doesn’t hurt that I take the liberty of adding one more critical quote here because Kemp is the only living historian of the white race.

Categories
Carolingian dynasty Catholic Church Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Monarchy Roman Catholic popes

Christianity’s Criminal History, 158

– For the context of these translations click here –

 
A month after Charles Martel died, in December 741 Gregory III, the last Roman bishop to be confirmed by the Emperor of Byzantium, also died. His successor was Zacharias (741-752). Liutprand died at the beginning of 744, after thirty-twoyears of rule. Before the death of Charles Martel, Charles had divided the power of government between his sons Carloman, Pepin the Short and Grifo…

Already in the year of the change of government, bishoprics were created in Hesse and Thuringia (planned by Boniface since 732), and in the years 743 and 744 three great synods were held in Austrasia and Neustria, in which the total elimination of ‘heresy’ and paganism was decreed. Charlemagne and Pepin—both educated in monasteries, Charlemagne probably in the monastery of Echternach by Willibrord, and Pepin in the monastery of Saint-Denis—carried the war far and wide. Both were, as Pope Zacharias says of his ‘most illustrious sons’, ‘companions and assistants’ of Boniface. Moreover, both were ‘under the inspiration of God’ (inspiratione divina). Thus, the holy father was able to guarantee the two great butchers also ‘an abundant reward in heaven’ for ‘blessed is the man by whom God is blessed’…

Even Pepin the Younger (741-768), who generally resided in the palaces of Quierzy, Attigny, Verberie and Compiégne and to whom Pope Zacharias had already given the title of christianissimus in 747, was ‘a good Christian’ (Daniel-Rops), ‘inspired entirely by the Christian spirit’ (Büttner). In his fight against the Saxons he reached the Weser in 753, in a campaign in which Hildegard, bishop of Cologne, perished on 8 August. In 758 he entered the territory of Münster and promised the Westphalians, on whom he had inflicted a heavy defeat, loyalty, an annual tribute of 300 horses and the free movement of Christian missionaries.

In eight campaigns, conducted between 760 and 768, he subdued Aquitaine, where he had once, and still in the company of Charlemagne, set fire to the suburbs of Bourges and destroyed Loches. Now he destroyed the castles and ruined the country. He set fire to Bourbon-l’Archambault as well as Clermont, setting fire to countless villages. He was accompanied by the eldest son of Pepin, Charles (‘the Great’, Charlemagne): quite a school of life! Year after year, the Franks systematically plundered and destroyed the entire region from one end to the other. And the devastating effects of these wars could be traced back for generations…
 

The most momentous event of the Middle Ages

Theodor Mayer writes about the state conception of the Carolingian period: ‘It is clear what happened in the royal period of Pepin and Charles. It is the conception of kingship as an office, which does not derive from the divine descent of the royal lineage nor a military kingship, but which was instituted by God and conferred by the pope’. It was not until the Carolingian era at the latest when kingship was given a theocratic foundation and the sovereign became ‘king by the grace of God’ (rex Dei gratia), which is a formula of legitimation. ‘The revived idea of “by the grace of God” had elevated and sanctified the royal dignity since the anointing of Pepin’ (Tellenbach). And ever since the sons of Pepin, who were Carloman and Charles ‘the Great’, all medieval kings bore the title gratia Dei rex Francorum, king by the grace of God.

The king was thus sharply separated from the people, to whose choice he originally owed his privileged position, and placed close to God. This means that, since ‘God’, properly understood and in a political vision, is only a symbol for the high clergy and their need for power, insofar as the king is separated from the people, he is linked to the priestly hierarchy and placed at their service.

The king became an organ of it, a sharer in its ministry, its creature: an ‘ecclesiastical person’. God meant de facto the Church, which gradually made its power more and more felt, which had even assigned the office of king, and the more the theocratic character of kingship was accentuated, the greater its influence.

But this collaboration with the king led to an ever more marked weakening of the people and their total powerlessness. For it was no longer the people who were to control the king, but the high clergy. The king was consciously distanced from the people and presented as majestas far above the people. The people ceased to be subjects of rights; they had only duties, absolutely subject to the sovereign, who was no longer accountable to them. In any case, this is what the models developed by the ecclesiastical hierarchy were intended to do, although they were only imposed in the following decades and centuries.

Categories
Autobiography Christendom Christian art Constantinople Eastern Orthodox Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Theology

Christianity’s Criminal History, 155

– For the context of these translations click here –

The dispute over images begins

If we are well-informed about the 6th century of Byzantine history, thanks especially to the detailed descriptions of the historian Procopius, the 7th and 8th centuries remain in great obscurity. Only the chronicles of two theologians, both defenders of images and who died in exile—that of the patriarch of Constantinople Nicephorus and, somewhat more extensively, that of Theophanes the Confessor—shed little light on that violent period, within which the late 7th and early 8th centuries are regarded as one of the darkest epochs of Byzantine history.

Emperor Justinian II (685-695, 705-711), who tried so hard to derive imperial power from the will of God, had many thousands of Slavic families, previously deported by him, executed. In 695 he was expelled from the throne and, with his nose cut off, banished to Crimea. Subsequent rulers succeeded one another in rapid succession, and for two decades total anarchy triumphed. In addition, the Bulgars, nomads from the Volga territories, broke into the empire and in 711 advanced under Chan Terwel to the vicinity of Constantinople. In 717 the Arabs reappeared and besieged the capital, although Leo III (717-741) the Isaurian was able to repel them. But it was precisely this saviour of Byzantium, so exalted by Christianity to this day, who was also the author of a bloody Christian quarrel, which shook the Byzantine world for more than a century and more violently than any other religious dispute, and contributed to no small way to the estrangement between eastern and western Rome.

By general estimation the conflict began in 726, when a devastating earthquake in the southern Aegean was interpreted as a ‘judgement of God’ because of the new ‘idolatry’ that had penetrated the Church: the worship of images. Emperor Leo III ordered the removal of all representations of saints, martyrs and angels, and in 730 ordered their destruction, not excluding images of Christ and Mary. Iconoclasm, which caught on not only among the clergy but also among the masses, has often been the subject of study but has been explained perhaps more contradictorily than any other phenomenon in Byzantine history. What is certain is that it shook the empire to hardly imaginable limits. Much more than a mere theological dispute or religious reform movement, it also represented a clash between civil and ecclesiastical power and reduced the state to a heap of ruins; and this at a time of a certain political recovery within and beyond the borders and when the Christological controversies had already ended.

Moreover, the starting point of the dispute over images was a purely theological-dogmatic problem. Already the primitive Indo-European religion was devoid of images, as were the Vedic, Zarathustrian, Old Roman and Old Germanic religions. And so was the Jewish religion in particular. The Old Testament already strictly forbade any worship of images. Nor did early Christianity know of any figurative representation of God. Quite the contrary. Just as ancient Judaism expressly condemned the making of representations and just as the prophets mocked ‘those who make a god and worship an idol’, so also the early church fathers fought long and hard against the worship of images, which was to become so widespread later on.

Even in the 4th century, theologians such as Eusebius and Archbishop Epiphanius of Salamis were against graphic reproductions, while the Council of Elvira forbade the reproduction and worship of images. On the contrary, it was ‘heretics’, the Gnostics, who initiated the change and who introduced the image of Christ and its veneration into Christianity.

Its use spread to the East from the 4th century, and by the 6th century it was as widespread there as it is today. Not only images of Christ were venerated, but also those of Mary, the saints and angels. It was mainly the monks who encouraged this practice for a very specific material reason: iconolatry was part of their business (e.g. the pilgrimages that brought money). The pro-icon theologians (iconodules) justified it all, because according to their interpretation it was not the dead image that was worshipped, but the living God, and, as Nicephorus said, ‘a vision leads to faith’. On the other hand, the destroyers of images (iconoclasts) tried to give renewed validity to the Christian prescriptions, which were unquestionably older.

But the people venerated the icons themselves as bearers of health and miracles. The icon became the content and synthesis of their faith. It was engraved on their furniture, clothes and armour. Thanks to heaven or priestly art, icons began to speak, bleed, to defend themselves when attacked. Moreover, there were eventually icons that represented a real novelty, since they were ‘not made by human hands’ (acheiropoietai).
 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s Note: For The West’s Darkest Hour, the only thing that matters is the destruction of Greco-Roman art by Christians (Christians destroying their art is as good for us as BLM destroying the statues of white Christians). In this image we see St Benedict’s monks destroying a statue of Apollo. Regarding those images Karlheinz Deschner speaks of in the last sentence, the supposedly miraculous images ‘not made by human hands’, for two years I researched the most famous relic of this type, the image on the shroud of Turin, and published my findings here. In my humble opinion, the so-called ‘shroud’ of Turin was the last ditch of Christendom’s dying apologetics (the apologetics of American fundamentalists is so ridiculous that no one takes it seriously). Deschner continues:
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Thus the believing people increasingly exalted the images, identifying them with the saint they represented. They kissed the statues and the representations, and lit candles and lamps for them. The sick sometimes took coloured and scratched particles from them to obtain health. They were incensed and the faithful knelt before them; in a word, the people treated such objects in exactly the same way as the pagans treated their ‘idols’.

And it was precisely the opponents of iconolatry, the iconoclasts, who interpreted this as a kind of idolatry. They came from the imperial household, from the army and especially from certain regions under the influence of anti-image Islam, such as the territories of Asia Minor. They also lived in the borderlands of the eastern part of the empire, where especially the Paulician admirers of the Apostle Paul were opposed to the worship of the cross and images, ceremonies and sacraments. These were ‘heretical’ Christians, who first appeared in Armenia in the middle of the 7th century and who for more than two centuries were extremely active on the eastern Byzantine frontier.

It is, however, curious, and at the same time sheds some light on the whole controversy, that the emperors and army, who were the most bitter enemies of the cult of images, had earlier been its special promoters. The rulers of the 6th and 7th centuries, taking advantage of the delirium of the masses for images, had used them for their political and especially military purposes. The images were led into countless battles and whole cities were placed under their protection, turning them into fortress defenders.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s note: This seems like a long time ago. But for me it is very close. When years ago I tried to tell my Catholic father that the Islamisation of Europe was a very alarming phenomenon, and France came into the conversation, he replied triumphantly: ‘Nothing can happen there: there is the Virgin of Lourdes!’

My smiling father’s statement couldn’t be understood without an explanation. In 1883 my great-grandfather Damián Tort Rafols, who could speak French, brought back a bronze replica of the Virgin’s grotto, which he bought in France. The replica became an object of worship for the Tort people of Chiapas and Puebla, and still stands a few metres away from where I am writing. The level at which the ancient Tort worshipped this replica, according to intergenerational anecdotes, has always impressed, and embarrassed, me.

What struck me most about my father’s triumphant declaration is that, more than a thousand years after that Byzantine delirium, there are still people who believe such things as that a specific Virgin can protect a city or nation, be it modern France or any other. Deschner continues:
 

______ 卐 ______

 
But all too often they had failed in that function as one city after another fell to the ‘infidels’, which undoubtedly brings us closer to the direct cause of iconoclasm. If the images had performed the miracles expected of them, their destruction would probably never have happened. ‘But the icons hadn’t delivered what the people expected’ (Mango).

The revolt had come mainly from the Eastern episcopate. The iconoclastic party had its main representatives in the minor Asian bishops Constantine of Nakoleia, Metropolitan Thomas of Klaudioupolis and Theodore of Ephesus. The iconoclastic party also had its first fatalities: several of the soldiers sent to remove the images were killed in a popular uprising. The iconodules, the image-worshippers, were found in almost every corner of the empire. In the East they included the nonagenarian Patriarch Germanos of Constantinople (715-730) and the metropolitan John of Symnada, as well as monks. In the West, the cult of images was defended by the great masses, and above all by the papacy, which claimed greater autonomy and even political leadership from the very beginning. It was no coincidence that Byzantine sovereignty succumbed to a considerable extent in central Italy.

The imperial court soon renounced iconoclastic actions in Italy. Although the monarch Constantine V (741-776), a vehement enemy of images, who declared himself a true friend of Christ and a worshipper not of his image but his cross, personally wrote some polemical writings and created his own theology, especially against the representation of Christ, which for him was an expression of Nestorianism or Monophysitism, i.e. the separation or mixing of ‘the two natures’ in Christ. And the Council of Constantinople (757) rejected outright the worship of images as the work of Satan and as idolatry.