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Category: Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

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

Christianity’s Criminal History, 169

Charlemagne’s bloody laws

During his struggle, the king issued draconian laws, evidently whenever he believed that he had finally subdued the Saxons and could bring them to ‘order.’ Notable in this respect are the Capitulatio departibus Saxoniae (782) and the Capitulare Saxonicum (797). And as conversions to Christianity were forced by mass baptisms, while the Saxon people secretly persisted in their paganism and abhorred the clergy, Charles imposed a complete change of ideological education based on the total eradication of ancient beliefs and their rites and by the forced baptism of all Saxons.

Of the fourteen provisions of the Capitulatio, which carry the death penalty, ten refer exclusively to crimes against Christianity. He had previously sought the advice of the pope and was clearly guided by the missionary method of the Fulda monks for the extirpation of paganism, which began with unceremonious mass baptisms and the total destruction of their shrines.

A stereotypical morte moriatur (die without remission) threatened everything the heralds of the good news wanted to erase: the plundering and destruction of churches, the cremation of the dead, the rejection of baptism, the secret avoidance of baptism, the mockery of Christianity, the undermining of church property, the offering of pagan sacrifices, the practice of gentile customs (emphasis added!—Ed.), and so on. This was its tenor:

• If anyone violently breaks into a church and steals anything from it, or sets fire to the church, let him die without remission.

• If anyone out of contempt for Christianity does not keep the sacred fast of forty days and eats meat, let him die without remission.

• If anyone, according to heathen custom, causes the body of a deceased person to be destroyed by fire and reduces his limbs to ashes, let him die without remission.

• If anyone in the future among the Saxon people pretends to hide without having been baptised and stops approaching baptism because he wants to remain a pagan, let him die without remission.

• If anyone in agreement with the heathen plots something against the Christians and seeks to maintain hostility against the Christians, let him die without remission.

Even the transgression of the precept of fasting carried the death penalty!

Baptism in the first year of life, church attendance on Sundays and feast days, the taking of oaths in churches and even the observance of the canon law on marriage were ordered. As Alcuin had already criticised, ‘severe penances were imposed for the slightest faults.’

Since the forcibly converted Saxon people cared little or nothing for Christianity, they had to continue to be forced to support the Church. Everyone, noble, free and common, had to give the Church a tithe for the harvest of their fields and all their earnings. In addition, each church was to get two rural estates, as well as one manservant and one maidservant for every 125 inhabitants, so that the mass of the Saxons was exploited as never before.

The aim of Charles’ war could hardly be stated more clearly and convincingly: the destruction of paganism, expansion of Christianity and annexation.

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

Christianity’s Criminal History, 168

Frankish expansion from 481 to 814

 
Last uprisings, war of annihilation and ‘the serene height of the staff’

The war of the Saxons, which lasted for more than ten years, didn’t, however, affect the foreign sovereignty of the Franks, or even Christianity as such. Rather, it was directed primarily against their representatives and institutions, against the Church, their rigorous attacks on private property, and their brutal collection of tithes, of which Alcuin, Charles’ Anglo-Saxon adviser, had already complained, seeing predators (praedones) in the missionaries rather than preachers (praedicatores). ‘That tithes had destroyed loyalty and faith’ seems to have been a proverbial saying among the Franks. The northern Albigensians then fought the Church with the same harshness that the latter had shown. Everywhere the new temples were destroyed, the ecclesiastics were expelled, and not infrequently the Christian Saxons were murdered and their possessions plundered. In short, the entire ecclesiastical organisation north of the Elbe was completely eradicated.

The uprising grew into a war of annihilation lasting more than ten years, with extreme cruelty on both sides. The counter-offensive, which was only resumed in the autumn of 794 and in which Charles took several relics with him, consisted of simple raids of destruction. Several times he even used pagan Slavs, such as the Wilzos and the Obrodites, whose King Witzin was attacked and killed by the Saxons at the Elbe crossing. Charles plundered, destroyed and ravaged everything he could find, mainly with the use of firebrands, and killed thousands of people. After a victory at Kiel, it seems that 4,000 Saxon corpses littered the battlefield. And year after year he made large numbers of hostages, taking every third males—‘as many as he wanted’ the chronicler says—most of whom he ‘regularly killed’ (Bullough). Until 799 the ‘apostle of the Saxons’, ‘he who preached the gospel with a bronze tongue’ (Bertram), marched annually against them. In 802 he sent out another army, while he spent the whole summer in the Ardennes indulging in the pleasures of hunting. In 804 he returned in person to the battlefield, where the Saxons finally succumbed to his power.

To make any uprising impossible, he ended up ordering mass deportations with frightful large-scale population transplants, such as the Byzantine Christians had already practised. ‘He took out such several hostages as had never been seen in his day, nor the days of his father, nor in the days of the Frankish kings’, says one chronicler. The man who, as early as 794 at the synod of Frankfurt, openly presented himself as ‘head of the Western Church’, had his army settle thousands of Saxons with their wives and children in the years 795-799 and 804, totalling 160,000. Even today, the event is still remembered by some place names on Frankish soil, such as Sachsenfahrt and Sachsenmühie.

Many of the deportees, however, were placed in closely guarded camps and had to spend the rest of their lives there. One source even speaks of ‘total extermination’. And not a few Saxons, who had certainly not yet been cleansed of all pagan filth by the sacred bath of baptism, were sent in the course of the war to Verdun, the great slave emporium.

Thus, in the North, the relations of ownership and possession were completely changed. For even the territory stolen from the Elbe was again divided among bishops, priests and his lay vassals. And in the 9th century, numerous monasteries were founded in Saxony at the expense of private nobles.

Thus, using a thirty-three-year war, Charles had convinced ‘the most heathen’ of the idea ‘that there is still something superior to fighting and victory, superior to death on the battlefield’, as Cardinal Bertram, the encourager of two world wars and Hitler’s assistant, assures us. Charles had ‘planted the victorious and beneficent cross in the virgin soil of the Saxon country’. And, finally, most importantly, ‘the serene height of the staff acted beneficently and alongside the power of the royal sceptre and sword’.
 

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Editor’s immodest note: It is right here that you may notice not only the gulf between us and the white nationalists but even with the Nazis.

Hitler allowed, it seems to me amid the world war, a homage to be paid to Charlemagne because he had Germanic blood (as we shall see when I review one of the chapters of Tom Holland’s Dominion).

While Hitler and those closest to him were already aware of the Christian problem, they, like today’s anti-Christian racialists, didn’t realise that it was far more serious than the Jewish problem.

As we review Holland’s book you will see what I mean. For the moment I can only repeat my metaphor. The active substance that has been killing the white man since Constantine is Christian ethics (cf. the process of miscegenation in the Byzantine Empire and the Americas under Iberian rule). Jewry is only a catalyst that accelerates an ethnocidal process that already existed, albeit slower, in Christendom.

Even Hitler didn’t know that the main enemy was Christianity rather than Judaism: the modern catalyst of Christian ethics. Can you begin to glimpse why the message of The West’s Darkest Hour is the most important of all?

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

Christianity’s Criminal History, 167


Editor’s note: Above, Widukind, the leader of the Saxons from 777 to 785 and worshiper of Aryan Gods, during the Saxon Wars. Alas, Charlemagne, a worshiper of the god of the Jews, ultimately prevailed. For the context of these translations click here.
 

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The resistance of ‘the most heathen’ against Christianity and Frankish sovereignty didn’t disappear, but rather grew stronger. Rebellion broke out again throughout the country. Again Widukind appeared at the front, dragging the Frisians into his uprising. And again all offered sacrifices to the Gods between the Lawers and the Fli. All that was Frankish and Christian was persecuted, rejected and eliminated.

Charles rushed to Saxony, leaving the still-fresh grave of his young second wife, the blessed Hildegard, who died on 30 April 783 in Diedenhofen. Her disappearance must certainly have affected him, unlike the death of the 4,500 Saxons (yet that same year she gave him a successor, who was once again almost a female child). And through Saxony, he advanced again with much bloodshed and ‘with the help of God’.

With God’s help the Franks were victorious, and a very great number of Saxons fell there so that only a few were saved by flight. And from there the most glorious king arrived victorious in Paderborn. And there he assembled his army. And he continued his march to the Haase when the Saxons rejoined. There another battle was fought, and not a few of the Saxons fell, and the Franks were victorious with the help of God.

Those royal Annals, which we have just quoted, about the year 783, refer to the only two great pitched battles of the whole war, near the present Detmold and on the Haase, in the very heart of the Weser fortress. Only ‘a few of the great multitude escaped’, the chroniclers say of the Saxon defeat at Detmold, and ‘many thousands’ were killed. And according to another ancient source, also at the Haase an ‘innumerable multitude of Saxons’ covered the battlefield, ‘again many thousands more than before’. Again Charles won ‘with divine help’, returned among the Franks and ‘celebrated Christmas’ And in the meantime also many thousands were reduced to slavery.

In the following year (784) the monarch devastated Saxony, especially Ostrophalia, while his son, following in his footsteps, devastated Westphalia, again with God’s help, of course. ‘With God’s help Charles, the son of the great King Charles, was victorious with the Franks after many Saxons had died. By divine design, he returned unscathed to his father in the city of Worms’.

The winter of 784-785 was spent by Charles with the very young Fastrada, whom he had married the previous year, with her sons and daughters in Eresburg. And only then did the resistance of the Saxons gradually collapse. And while he was celebrating the resurrection of the Lord, he again sent out a soldiery, and he undertook ‘a campaign’ of devastation, plundering and clearing roads, setting fire to whole forests, destroying crops, blinding springs, murdering peasants, taking fortresses and fortified towns ‘for an order is an essential condition for their work’ (Daniel-Rops).

In 785 the Saxon people, so severely punished, seemed to have almost exhausted their capacity for resistance, and seemed, at last, to have submitted ‘to the soft and light yoke of Christ’, as the biographer of Abbot Sturmi, that fanatical missionary of the Saxons—who preached the fight against the pagans and demanded the destruction of the temples of their Gods and the cutting down of their ancient sacred forests to build churches on them—had long wished.

Charles had communicated his victory to the pope, who had sent him his congratulations, and at the end of June 786, he ordered a triduum of thanksgiving to all Christianity in the West, even beyond the seas, wherever there were Christians.

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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’.
 

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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.

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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.

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Editor’s Note: This is precisely what white nationalists fail to understand. The first step in recovering the Aryan culture is to destroy the Semitic religion which has been the great vampire of the white soul since Constantine, and then Charlemagne, handed Europe over to the bishops. If the destruction of the churches is done in the name of the transvaluation of all Judeo-Christian values, the next day the Jewish problem would be solved, insofar as there would be no moralising barriers that prevent us from solving it. Deschner continues:

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And just as in the first years of the Saxon conflict King Charles had already sent out repeated military expeditions against the Lombards, so in 788 he also made a famous ‘excursion’ against the Moors in northern Spain, an armed expedition, which, however, turned out somewhat differently… Since Charles’ Hispanic intermezzo had failed, the king tried all the harder to get even with the Saxons.

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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’.
 

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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!

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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.

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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.
 

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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.

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Autobiography Charlemagne Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Roman Catholic popes

Christianity’s Criminal History, 161

– 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.

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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?

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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.

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Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Roman Catholic popes

Christianity’s Criminal History, 160

– For the context of these translations click here –

 
Criminal excesses at the papal court with the change of power in the Frankish kingdom

Pope Stephen II, who at the decisive moment had generously granted himself the ‘Constantinian Donation’, died on 26 April 757. At his death, he left a considerably large territory, which for the time being remained in his family. Paul I (757-767), in fact, Stephen’s successor, was also his younger brother, and the second Orsini pope to occupy the Lateran palace. Pope Paul, to whom his unofficial biographer constantly attributes a propensity for clemency, wanted a permanent war against the Longobards…

Scarcely had Paul I closed his eyes on 28 June 767, practically abandoned by all those close to him, when a violent revolt broke out in Rome, as so often before. Already the next day Toto, Duke of Nepi and head of a powerful family, stormed into Rome with his armed colonists and had his brother Constantine, a layman, elected as Paul’s successor. The foundation of the church-state, the papacy’s strengthened position of power, made it increasingly attractive to the nobility. Constantine seized the Lateran, received the relevant clerical orders and within six days was the pope. In St Peter’s Basilica, he was solemnly consecrated by the bishops of Palestrina, Albano and Porto…

Constantine II (767-768), although elected in an anti-canonical manner, occupied the discredited throne for thirteen months without particular difficulty, conducted business, ordained clergy and even presided over a synod. But then he succumbed to a conspiracy of influential people, chief among them his chancellor and provost Christophorus, head of the papal officials, and his son, the chaplain Sergius. Placed under house arrest, at Easter 768 they both preferred to move to a monastery in Spoleto, San Salvatore in Rieti. They undertook to remain there by oath but fled to take refuge with the Longobard king. With the king’s permission, they gathered reinforcements in Rieti, and at the end of July 768, these forces marched on Rome under the orders of the priest Waldipertus. There, one of the city gates was opened to them and a series of bloody street battles ensued; but a traitor, a creature of Christophorus, the ecclesiastical archivist Gratiosus, stabbed Duke Toto in the back. Pope Constantine fled from church to church, until he and his closest entourage were captured and imprisoned…

Cardinals and bishops had their eyes and tongues gouged out. Constantine, deposed and discovered by chance, was dragged through the streets of Rome in an ignominious procession, locked up in a monastic prison and tortured there under the orders of the ecclesiastical archivist Gratiosus, also the murderer of Duke Toto (and later himself a duke). No less bloody was the persecution of his closest supporters, who were mutilated and blinded. Bishop Theodore, who supported Pope Constantine to the end, had his eyes and tongue torn out and was imprisoned in the monastery of Clivus Scauri where he soon succumbed in horrible pain. Passivus, Toto’s brother was also imprisoned in the monastery of St Silvestre, and all his property was seized. Likewise, the priest Waldipertus, the agent of the Longobards who had placed Philip on the papal throne, was given a short trial. True, he sought asylum in a sacred place, the church of Santa Maria Maggiore; but he was torn from there with the image of the Madonna to which he was embraced, and thrown into a dungeon of the Lateran, where he died mutilated.

At Easter 769 a synod was held at the Lateran; in addition to twenty-four Italian bishops, it was attended for the first time by thirteen Frankish bishops. This underlined, as His Holiness said in his opening speech, the ecumenical character of the cause. Constantine, already blind, was led and interrogated on 12 and 13 April in the basilica. In the first session, he confessed to having more sins than there was sand in the sea. He prostrated himself in the dust but declared that the people had made him pope by force because they were not satisfied with the harsh regime of Paulus…

The assembled fathers threw themselves furiously upon Constantine, slapped the pope whom they had already deposed and threw him out of the church. They burned the acts of his pontificate, including those of his election, which Stephen himself had signed. But the pope then intoned a kyrie eleison and all fell to the ground and confessed themselves, sinners, for having held communion with the reprobate Constantine. He was condemned to lifelong penance and probably spent the rest of his life in a monastic prison.

Again and again, it becomes clear that Christians have a compassionate heart; not all enemies are eliminated at once. Here, too, people live and let live… The policy of pope Stephen III concentrated on preventing any understanding between the Franks and the Longobards.