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Category: Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

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Christian art Constantinople Eastern Orthodox Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 156

 
The papal revolution fails

The mass of the clergy naturally knew that their power rested above all on the magic of the cause, on the beautiful appearance, on the outward and sensible charm of religious services; therefore they had to stand by the people, who venerated the sacred images.
 

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Editor’s note: This is a continuation of the pages on Byzantine iconoclasm. Religious art is propaganda and the lesson is clear. If you want the masses to change their paradigm, you have to destroy not only their Christian art, but their neochristian art as well (virtually all Hollywood movies, all American music and degenerate Western music of today, etc.). The burning of books should be as public as the Nazis did. But who among the so-called white nationalists thinks so radically? (a clue: they are still Judaeo-Christians or neochristians). Deschner continues:
 

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Gregory’s irritation wasn’t exclusively for theological reasons, but also very specific material reasons. Emperor Leo III successfully defended Constantinople by land and sea (717-718) against the Arabs in one of the most decisive slaughters in world history. And so Asia Minor, which gradually freed itself from Islamic rule in a series of annual campaigns, remained Byzantine and Christian for almost seven centuries. To balance its finances after the war against the Arabs, new taxes had to be imposed; this affected above all the Roman Church, which with its extensive territorial holdings was the leading economic power in Italy…

The monarch had an image of Christ replaced by a cross at the entrance to his palace. But Pope Gregory II was the real leader of Italy in the uprising against his lord, he was ‘the head of the Italian revolution’ (Hartmann). So ‘Be subject to authority’ no longer counted; what counted was ‘It is necessary to obey God rather than men’. And in practice God is always where the pope is! And the pope not only encouraged the patriarch of Constantinople, St Germanus, to fight against the emperor, but he called on the whole world, and so civil war broke out everywhere…

Consequently the exarch Paulus was ordered to depose Gregory from his papal chair. But when the Ravenna militia arrived, the pope opposed them with a league of Italian soldiers and Longboards. Imperial governors and officials were expelled from Venice, Ravenna and Rome, and Byzantine troops in Benevento and Spoleto. The exarch Paulus was eliminated by murderous hands. His generals were also eliminated. Doge Exhileratus and his son Adrian, excommunicated for years by the pope because of irregular marriage, were seized and killed by the Roman militia. The Roman doge Petrus had his eyes gouged out for having written to the emperor ‘against the pope’. The uprising triumphed everywhere: His Holiness and the Longboards rose in common rebellion against the emperor…

But the emperor eventually overpowered the rebellion. He seized all the pope’s patrimony in southern Italy, with Sicily alone representing a loss of 350 pounds of gold.

The dispute over images continued throughout Leo’s reign and became even more acute under his son and successor Constantine V (741-776), called Ikonokiastes, the destroyer of images (and also Kopronymos, for having soiled the water at his baptism, and Caballinus because he liked the smell of horse manure). It is true that when in 742 an iconodule usurper rose, his brother-in-law Artabasdos kept Rome on the side of the iconoclast emperor and had the eyes of the vanquished and his sons gouged out, and Pope Zacharias bequeathed a generous donation of land. Constantine, who took an active part in the long-standing dispute and who showed a remarkable interest in theological questions, had the invocation of the saints and Mary banned and all images of the saints removed or destroyed from the churches.

This emperor especially persecuted the monks, who were all the more fanatical supporters of the cult of images because they had an economic monopoly on the manufacture of icons. The monasteries were expropriated and closed, transformed into barracks and bathing facilities, or destroyed, as was the case with the monasteries of Kallistratos, Dios, Maximinos, and others. Their inhabitants had to choose between giving up their habits and taking wives or being blinded and banished. In Ephesus, nuns and monks were forced to marry and others were executed with the backing of a council held in Constantinople in 754…

The ‘blood and fire’ struggle culminated in the 760s. Abbot Stephanos of Mount Auxentius, leader of the iconodule opposition, was lynched in the streets of Constantinople in November 765. In August 766 alone, sixteen high-ranking officials and officers, supporters of the cult of images, were executed. The following year the head of the patriarch Constantine was also rolled into the palace. The emperor had already had him flogged…

Constantine, clean-shaven and wearing a derisory sleeveless dress, was led through the streets on a donkey to the hippodrome, where he was insulted and spat upon by the entire Christian populace. The donkey was led by the halter by his nephew Constantine, whose nose had been cut off. ‘When he arrived in front of the circus games, they came down from their seats, spat on him and threw filth at him. At the stop in front of the imperial tribune, they threw him off his horse and stepped on the back of his neck’. At the end of the month the man disavowed his belief, and after demanding reparation, he was beheaded. His corpse was dragged through the streets to the slaughterhouse of the executed and his head hung by the ears for three days as a public chastisement.

Isn’t this kind Christianity? Yes: that happened in Byzantium, but how were things in Rome?

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Autobiography Christendom Christian art Constantinople Eastern Orthodox Church 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).
 

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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:
 

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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.
 

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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:
 

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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.

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Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) So-called saints

Christianity’s Criminal History, 154

On 5 June 754, after twenty-five years of ministry, Boniface together with his choral bishop of Utrecht, and fifty companions were killed by the Frisians of Dokkum on the Doorn, fiercely defended by his men, in the fight of ‘arms against arms’ (Vita Bonifatii), as befits the Christians. Uselessly he held over his head ‘the holy book of the gospels’ against the deadly blow.

And in a genuinely Christian manner, in ‘the land of the infidels’ burst ‘at once the swift warriors of future vengeance, well-kept but unsatisfied guests’ (sospites sed indevoti hospites), as the priest Willibald of Mainz wittily puts it, inflicting ‘an annihilating defeat on the pagans who confronted them’. The Frisians fled, ‘were beaten down in a huge mass, and turning their backs they lost their goods, estates and heirs with their lives. But the Christians returned home with the spoils of women, children, servants and handmaids of the idolaters’ (Vita Bonifatii).

Isn’t that a joyful and pious religion? Especially when the Frisian survivors of the plunder, the enslaved women and children terrified by murderers, ‘and by divine punishment’, embraced the faith of the one whom they had killed. Traces of this persist to this day in Fulda.

Of course, this is only a half-truth. The whole truth is told by the priest Willibald at the end of the eight chapter of his Vita (the ninth and last chapter is ‘a later addition’—Rau). The point is that, then, many miracles overflowed there:

Where the sacred corpse had been deposited… divine favours overflowed abundantly. And all who came there, afflicted with the most diverse diseases, found health of body and soul through the intercession of the holy man. So that some, whose bodies were almost completely dead, who were almost exanimate and seemed to be breathing their last breath, regained their former health; others, whose eyes were covered with blindness, recovered their sight, and still others who, imprisoned in the snares of the devil, had their spirits troubled and had lost their reason, obtained the primitive freshness of spirit.

And all this thanks to ‘the champion in the race of the spirit’. And, as is to be expected and as Willibald’s work concludes, ‘through the Lord, to whom be glory and honour for an eternity of eternities. Amen’.

Unfortunately, we haven’t finished with Christianity. On the contrary, by now it is developing more and more magnificently. While Boniface committed to the popes, the popes made a commitment for themselves. And for them the most important factors of power were still, above all, the Byzantines and the Longobards.

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Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) So-called saints Tree

Christianity’s Criminal History, 153

– For the context of these translations click here –

 The beatissimus dominus took care of women of ‘the tribe of the Angles’. His kinswoman Leoba, a whole generation younger than himself, he appointed abbess in the see of the archbishopric; Thecla, a relative of Leoba, he made abbess of Vitzingen and Ochsenfurt-on-the-Main. And all certainly for the great cause, the mission of all Germany, for the one whom Gregory III called ‘the apostle of the Germans’ (in reality: of Rome) and whom he appointed archbishop on a further journey to the Catholic capital (732), all for ‘the very advantageous business’ (talis commercii lucro) as is explicitly stated in such a context. Hence, the pope, with the whole Church, victoriously vindicated the apostle.

Of course, ‘business’ doesn’t mean the ‘pinch of silver and gold’ (argenti et auri tantillum), which Boniface occasionally donated to the holy father, but the conversion of ‘paganism and heterodoxy to the knowledge of the true faith’. From Hesse to Friesland he destroyed everywhere, ‘more as a conqueror than as a converter’ or missionary, the pagan places of worship, and on their ruins, with their very stones and timber, he erected Christian churches. He demolished the idols of Stuffo, Reto, Bil, the goddess Astaroth and so on. He tore down their altars, and felled the sacred trees in the Hessian forest, probably where, because they were under the direct protection of the Frankish fortress of Büraburg, they were in no personal danger, such as the oaks of Donar in Geismar, the tribal shrine, erecting with their wood a chapel to St. Peter, ‘his first sign of victory’ (Haller).
 

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Editor’s Note: It is these kinds of historical facts that have moved me in the past to obsess on this site about Game of Thrones. As no normie is going to study Deschner’s ten books, the most astute way to start conveying the most important facts of Aryan history is precisely novels in which these facts are alluded to fantastically, with castles, princesses and dragons. As we saw in past years with my countless entries on the TV series Game of Thrones, in the universe of novelist George R.R. Martin the fanatics of the new religion felled the sacred trees of Westeros.

This is the language the normie understands, and it’s a shame that the Jews who directed both Game of Thrones and the new prequel that has just been released betray fundamental facts of Martin’s prose. In a world where real Aryans took Martin to television, these outrages of the new religion perpetrated on the sacred trees of the old religion could be filmed in such a way that the message would be inspiring to whites.
 

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But Boniface also had to see no less than thirty churches and chapels destroyed in Thuringia. In Rome, however, the apostle didn’t only fight paganism, but at least as much, and probably even more, the sort of Christianity which wasn’t obedient to Rome, as among the Bavarians and the Alamanni. That was the second and shorter, though more important, phase of his activity.

Bavaria, where Boniface reformed (739) the church with the help of duke Odilus, after his relations with Charles Martell had cooled, had already been Christianised much earlier, though not Romanised. Thus, Roman Christianity and the Scottish missionary, ‘the first ‘Von-Rom Movement’ (far from Rome!)’ (Behn), ‘clashed violently’ in Bavaria (Schieffer). But there and in Thuringia Boniface, at the behest of Gregory II, eliminated as far as possible the old Christianity which had developed without violence. He tried to wrest the communities from the successors of these ecclesiastics and, with the help of state power, to bring them unceremoniously under the pontifical yoke.

But the papal legate also and especially fought against the Frankish clergy, who had preserved their autonomy vis-à-vis Rome and whose reformer he had avoided, if not fought against. In 738 Gregory III therefore strongly recommended obedience to his man regarding the bishops of Bavaria and Swabia, and at the same time insisted: ‘You must detect, prevent and annihilate the pagan customs and doctrines of the Bretons who roam everywhere, or of false and heretical priests and all their depravities’.

Boniface, who met with the ‘fierce resistance’ of many freemen (Epperlein), who was rude in his foreign manners, had no compunction and always went about with a large retinue; he was as obliging as they could wish for in Rome and more papist than the pope. He never asked why; he simply had to obey, as he had been taught. He was in fact ‘the heir of the Roman Church in England’ (Lortz).

The ‘apostle of the Germans’ was so unsure of his faith and so imbued for life with his tendency to sin, that he continually sent real questionnaires to Rome ‘as if we were kneeling at your feet’, to receive answers to the supreme questions of conscience.

Gregory II, who on 22 November 726 calmed his apostle’s eagerness to ask questions, let him know ‘the position in our Church’. An example: if parents have already deposited their sons or daughters ‘within the walls of the monastery’ (inter septa monasterii) at an early age, under no circumstances may they later leave the monastery and marry. ‘We strictly forbid it, because it is a sin to loosen the reins of pleasure on children, who were consecrated to God by their parents’. What barbarism beats in that answer, or behind this one: ‘You have also asked the question whether, when a contagious disease or mortality invades a church or a monastery, those who haven’t yet been affected can flee from that place to avoid the danger. That seems utterly foolish, for no one can escape the hand of God’ This rhetoric has not always, but quite often in everyday practice, been a function of minimisation, discharge and beautification. Theologians and historians, thanks to their phrase ‘link to the times’, don’t need to call the crimes and criminals of the Church and the State crimes and criminals.

Those were times when some served two sides, attended the Christian liturgy and at the same time offered sacrifices to Wotan; they ‘ate bulls and goats sacrificed to the pagan gods’, which could in no way harm either Christ or Wotan.

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Lloyd deMause So-called saints

Christianity’s Criminal History, 152

 
St Boniface, ‘Apostle of the Germans’ and of Rome

The Greatest Englishman. —Title of an anthology by Timothy Reuter

‘He was an utterly devoted person, one might almost say tender, not a tempestuous personality or a force of nature. A man of utterly pure and lofty idealism’. —Wilhelm Neuss

‘Moreover, any historian—including an atheist—should recognise that Boniface opened the door wide for us, that through him the frontier of Europe was opened to the east. The same is true of Charles’s wars against the Saxons’. —K. König and K. Witte

‘Boniface, who has influenced the history of Europe more profoundly than any other Englishman after him, was not just a missionary but a statesman and a genius of administration, and above all a servant of the Roman order’. —Christopher Dawson

‘The glory of the Middle Ages rests in a good part on his work’. —Joseph Lortz, Catholic theologian

 

Around 680, probably at the age of seven, the Anglo-Saxon boy Wynfreth (Winfrid), later called Bonifatius in Rome, was given by his father to the monastery as puer oblatas.

Editor’s Note: Anyone familiar with what we have quoted on this site from historian Lloyd deMause will know that paedophilia is not a recent phenomenon in the Catholic Church. From its earliest days parents who didn’t love their young donated them to monasteries—the institution of Oblation—where they could be sexually used by the elders. Deschner continues:

‘But the boy, who had been entrusted to the monastery without consulting his will, grew up to become a man of his own free will’, writes the German scholar Schramm today. In a monastery! A man of his own free will? As if Boniface had not been a servile slave of Rome for the rest of his life! ‘Day and night he cultivated scientific studies to procure eternal happiness’, according to the priest Willibaid in his bombastic Vita, which he wrote about his monastic hero in Mainz at the end of the 8th century.

Boniface began a propagandistic pilgrimage, but with a ‘missionary authorisation’ from Rome. Pope Gregory II (715-731) commissioned him on 15 May 719 ‘to exercise the service of the kingdom of God among all peoples imprisoned in the error of unbelief’. He was to examine—again in the poetic language of the biographer Willibald—‘whether the uncultivated fields of their hearts were to be ploughed by the plough of the gospel’.

 

Deliverance from ‘all uncleanness’ among the people of Hesse, Thuringia, Saxony and some bloodshed

The inhabitants of Hesse were still largely pagan, while the Thuringians—among whom the Frankish conquerors built the first churches in their feudal castles—had been partially converted to paganism by Saxon raids and pagan reactions. In any case, despite his honey-sweet doctrine, Boniface quickly failed here, partly because of the Christian bishops and priests and partly because of the lack of military support.

Still in 719 he left Thuringia and went, ‘filled with great joy’ at the death of the Frisian Duke Radbod (according to Vita Bonifatii), to Frisia until 721, where he was placed under the command of the elderly missionary Willibrord, an ‘Oblate’ like himself, i.e. already spiritually violated as a child.

With the backing of the high Frankish nobility and the force of Frankish arms, Willibrord had, since 690, spread his knowledge among the West Frisians under Pippin II and, briefly and unsuccessfully, among the Danes and Saxons. He fled from Radbod with little apparent martyr’s vocation and only returned after his death. Only the victorious campaigns of Charles Martell in 718 and 720 (repeated in 722 and 724) against the Saxons made possible the beginning of their Christianisation, their liberation from ‘demons’, ‘error’ and ‘diabolical fraud’ (Gregory II). With the invocation of the Holy Trinity, Willibrord destroyed the ‘idols’, desecrated and reduced to ruins the sanctuaries of the Frisians, killed their sacred animals and worked astonishing miracles. To put it briefly: it was in connection with the military men Pippin and Charles Martell that he weeded out ‘the tares of unbelief’ and strove to ‘renew by baptism those who had just been subdued by force of arms’ and ‘to spread without delay all the light of the gospel’ (Alcuin).

In 721 Boniface separated from Willibrord for reasons we ignore. He had refused to be consecrated bishop by Willibrord and returned to the territory of Hesse-Thuringia, where he founded a small monastery on the Amoneburg… After the first successes Gregory II called Bonifacius back and on 30 November 722 consecrated him a missionary bishop (without a fixed see). He thus became entirely bound to Rome by oath…

Boniface benefited from the campaigns of Charles Martel and his donations to the church of Utrecht and the monastery of Echternach, which soon became the basis of gigantic Catholic propaganda that extended as far as the Meuse, the Scheldt and the mouths of the Rhine.

In 722 Gregory II had also given the ‘apostle of the Germans’ a missionary commission for the Saxons. It is true that in 718 they had been driven out of the lower Rhine and defeated by Charles, but they remained almost entirely faithful to their ancient beliefs. They were one of those Germanic tribes east of the Rhine. The planned ‘conversion’ of the Saxons with mass baptisms only came about after Charles’ long and carefully prepared campaign of 738, which was carried out in close cooperation with the clergy. Gregory III (731-741), who once called the Frankish warlord who waged war almost year after year ‘St Peter’s beloved son’, declared the following in a letter to Boniface on 29 October 739:

You have given us knowledge of the peoples of Germania, whom God has delivered from the power of the pagans, by having gathered into the bosom of the holy mother Church hundreds of thousands of souls by your efforts and those of the Frankish prince Charles (tuo conamine et Caroli principis Francoruni).

The number is certainly exaggerated. But the Saxons were ‘delivered from the power of the heathen’ only by the military expedition of Charles Martell (738) ‘with dreadful bloodshed’ (Fredegarii continuationes). And in connection with this came the mass baptisms of the Saxons. Their conversion to Christianity took place ‘in close contact with the military-political organisation’ (Steinbach). This is probably even a ‘large-scale attempt at a Saxon mission before the period of Charlemagne’ (Schieffer).

It is true that Charles Martell was not very religious, but for political reasons he was ‘extremely interested’ (Buchner) in the spread of Christianity in the east. And there is no doubt that Boniface ‘owed everything to the victorious arms and personal protection of Charles Martell’ (Zwölfer).

Already in the years 718, 720, 722 and 724 Charles had fought against the Saxons, as mentioned above. He repeatedly crushed uprisings of the Frisians and Saxons, and it was only through these bloody acts of violence that the ‘conversion’ or, as Boniface puts it, the liberation of ‘all the heathen’s filth’ depended. Gregory III attributed the missionary success as much to Charles Martell as to Boniface. And Boniface personally confesses to the English bishop Daniel of Winchester: ‘Without the protection of the prince of the Franks (sine patrocinio principis Francorum) I could neither have guided the people of the Church nor defended the priests and ecclesiastics, the monks and servants of God, nor without his command and his fear could I have eliminated the pagan customs and the horrors of idolatry in Germania’.

Categories
Islam Islamization of Europe Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 151

– For the context of these translations click here –
 

In 718 Charles Martell (depicted left in the French book Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum) ravaged Saxony as far as the Weser and in the same or the following year defeated a detachment at Soissons under the command of the steward Raganfred and Duke Eudo of Aquitaine.

He soon led further campaigns against the Saxons, fighting them until 738, and even then Charles Martell was able to impose tribute and hostages on ‘those incorrigible heathens’. These are the words of our source: ‘The valiant Charles broke through with the Frankish army, encamped according to an intelligent plan at the mouth of the Lippe, by the stream of the Rhine, destroyed most of that strip of land with much bloodshed, made some of that savage people tributary, took many hostages and with God’s help returned home victorious’…

Charles Martell consolidated his power through continuous raids. Year after year he marched on a campaign, not only to secure his frontiers but also to expand them by subjugating and enslaving peoples. He didn’t only advance against the Neustrians; he also fought everywhere against the Alamans, over whom he achieved in 725 and 730 extremely bloody victories, while at the same time making Bishop Pirmin missionary in favour of his hegemony. Martell waged several wars against ‘the savage maritime nation of the Frisians’ (‘one of the main achievements of his life’—Braunfels) and two campaigns, in 733 and 737, ending even with a ‘bold maritime excursion’ and ‘with the right number of ships’ he advanced with his fleet up the Zuider-zee. He completely devastated the country, killed the duke, the ‘crafty councillor’ of the Frisians, and burned the pagan sanctuaries—with the good Christian art of spreading the good news of the gospel. He fought the Saxons, whom he sent Boniface with a letter of recommendation. He marched against the Thuringians and the Bavarians, over Burgundy and Provence.

 
The irruption of Islam

Islam, which sought to re-establish the original religion, the ‘religion of Abraham’, did not see in Moses and Jesus false prophets, but authentic prophets who hadn’t known the whole truth or whose teachings had been falsified by their disciples. Curiously, the new faith was at first regarded only as a ‘heresy’ of Eastern Christianity; nor is it strange that the scholastics still hesitate to designate the Muslims as ‘heretics or pagans’…

Under Abdul Malik (685-705) and his son Al-Walid I (705-715) the Muslims conquered Turkestan, the Caucasus and northern Africa where they ‘converted’ the Berbers. In 681 they reached the Atlantic coast of Morocco and in 697 conquered Carthage. By 698 they had definitively seized all the North African fortifications, and from Tunis, the new capital, the occupiers’ fleet controlled the western Mediterranean. Even before the end of the 15th century, the Arabs possessed the largest territorial empire in the history of the world, larger than the empire of Rome or the empire of Alexander. Their empire eventually stretched from the Aral Sea to the Nile and from the Bay of Biscay to China.

Within a generation, the Church had lost two-thirds of its faithful to Islam. And almost all Islamic conquests, except the territories of Spain and part of the Balkans, have remained Islamic to this day.

The first troops arrived on the Iberian peninsula, a group of about 400 men, in July 710. And the following year an invasion army of 7,000 soldiers arrived, soon reinforced by another 5,000. They entered through Gibraltar (named after the Arab sub-commander Tariq ibn-Ziyad). In the same year the invaders annihilated the army of the Hispanic Visigoths at the Battle of Jerez de la Frontera (Cadiz). By 715 they had occupied all the important cities in the country and in 720, after crossing the Pyrenees, they conquered Narbonne. The infidels were even said to have advanced as far as Tours to plunder the church treasury, stored in the tomb of Saint Martin.

It was there that Charles Martell faced the ‘infidels’ with the army summoned from all over the kingdom: plunderers against plunderers. Before the battle north of Poitiers they stalked each other for seven days, before the defeated Arabs, on 17 October 732, withdrew to Spain…

Charles Martell continued his fight against the Arabs in 735, 736, 737 and 739, repeatedly penetrating into Aquitaine, ‘the land of the Goths’, and Provence, the Roman province Gallia Narbonensis. After taking Avignon by assault, he had the defenders killed. Charles destroyed Nimes with its ancient amphitheatre and ravaged the cities Agde and Béziers. He had the most famous cities razed to the ground; with their houses and city walls, set fire to them and reduced them to ashes. He also destroyed the suburbs and fortifications of that territory. When Charles Martell had defeated the army of his enemies, he, who in all his decisions was guided by Christ, in whom alone is the gift of victory, returned safe to his region, the land of the Franks and the seat of his government…

The first ‘Carolingian’ ruled over the whole kingdom, moving among the Merovingian puppet kings. The sources call him dux and princeps, and the popes occasionally gave him the titles of patricias and sobregulus while for his part Martell accurately proclaimed himself maior domus. But he also financed many of his massacres with ecclesiastical goods—something which modern scholars have often falsely labelled secularisation—and continued to live as a plunderer of the Church. However, Charles Martell was anything but hostile to the Church or the clergy, as is shown by his exaltation by such prominent propagandists of Christianity as Pirmin, Willibrord and Boniface.

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Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 150

 

For the context of these translations click here

The Ascension of the Carolingians

 

‘…with the help of Christ, King of kings and Lord of lords.’ – Chronicle of Fredegar

‘Soon the Franks attacked with ships and darts, riddled them in the waters and killed them. Thus the Franks finally triumphed over their enemies and conquered much spoil of war, having taken many prisoners. And with their victorious leader the Franks ravaged the land of the Goths. The most famous cities of Nimes, Agde and Béziers he razed to the ground, with the walls of the houses and the city, and set fire to them. He also destroyed the suburbs and fortifications of that territory. When he, who in all his decisions was guided by Christ, in whom alone is the good of victory, had defeated the army of his enemies, he returned safe and sound to his territory’. – Chronicle of Fredegar

‘The profession of the Carolingians was war. They learned nothing else, for nothing else were they educated, and by nothing else could they accredit themselves.’ – Wolfgang Braunfels

The political events of those years lie in a dense fog. The second half of the 7th century ranks among the ‘darkest epochs’ of medieval history because at the end of the Chronicle of Fredegar in 643 the contemporary sources are almost completely silent…

St Gertrude, who at the age of twelve had already taken a vow of perpetual chastity, was ‘consumed by her asceticism’. Already at the age of thirty she retired, handing over the exhausting office of abbess to Wulfetrud, her niece, so that everything would remain in the family. She survived only three more years ‘in prayer and penance’ (Van Uytfanghe). And during the celebration of the holy mass she followed the holy martyr Foillan into paradise. Her cult, however, spread rapidly from Brabant to Germany and Poland. Moreover, it became one of the best-known communities of saints in the Middle Ages.

Consequently, Gertrude became first the patron saint of wanderers and then the patron saint of the good death (‘May St. Gertrude prepare a place for you!’). From the 15th century onwards, her protection against rats and mice was invoked. In iconography, she appears in the habit of an abbess or princely dress, including a princess’s crown or hat, but with mice around her, which climb up her abbess’s staff or perch on her bosom. A symbol of impurity and evil, the mice, in fact, ‘disturbed her in her pious meditation’. A whole tangle of entanglements and clerical propaganda!
 

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Editor’s note: ‘God’, in the pantheistic sense we recently read in Weikart’s book on Hitler, rewards those who comply with the laws of Nature. The Jews have been complying with those laws and that’s why they are in power. The white assholes, on the other hand, with their Christianity and neochristianity that has reached the Woke movement of today, violate those laws for which they are being punished—and will continue to be punished until (1) their extinction or (2) they transvalue their values and comply with Nature’s laws (exterminate your enemy, etc.).

This case of the Belgian Gertrude of Nivelles (628-659 c.e.), represented here on glass window, was a bad omen for the future of the white race. A cute nymphet taking perpetual vows of chastity? Compare it with David Lane’s 14 words! One could imagine the Jewish or Moorish nymphs and nymphets of the nascent Islam of that time taking perpetual vows of virginity! But the most pathetic thing is that, even today, the so-called defenders of the Aryan haven’t been able to repudiate this whole Catholic thing that caused so much damage with its vows of celibacy. Deschner continues:
 

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Armed mission among the Frisians

Alongside the Saxons (and the Bretons), it was the Frisians who put up the fiercest resistance to the Franks. It took Christian soldiers and missionaries a whole century to subdue them.

The Frisians were a people of peasants, fishermen and merchants, who didn’t abandon their tribal settlement by the North Sea in the coastal territories between the Ems and Weser, even during the migrations of the Nordic peoples. Perhaps as early as the middle of the 6th century, the Frisians were (partly) subdued under the rule of Chlothar I. What is certain is that in 630 King Dagobert gave the Bishop of Cologne the castle of Utrecht with the task of converting them. During the bloody feuds under Dagobert’s successors, Frisia’s potential and economy flourished, and some foreign preachers resumed conversion attempts, to no avail. Bishop Wilfrid of York, vigilant of Roman observance, wasn’t happy…

Pepin himself made his fortress of Traiectum (Utrecht) the seat of Willibrord ‘because the spread of Christianity among the Germans strengthened his political influence on the border of the kingdom’ (Buchner). ‘Frankish rule and Christian mission were mutually supportive’ (Levison). ‘Political and ecclesiastical interests went hand in hand in the new mission territory’ (Zwolfer). All this has long been proven and undisputed. First the sword of the nobility, then the loquacity of the clergy, and finally the general bloodletting.

On Pepin’s death the pagan Frisian duke Redbad, who called himself king, repulsed the Franks. He reconquered the territories west of the Alter Rhein, and without Frankish rule the Christian Church collapsed. Only after Redbad died in 719 did the Franks break into West Frisia. Charles Martell, who supported Willibrord’s ministry with magnificent donations and tax concessions, marched three times against the Frisians and in two wars against Duke Bobo (733 and 734). He seized the whole of central Frisia while eastern Frisia, at one with the Saxons, could only be subdued by Charles ‘the Great’.

Categories
Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s Criminal History, 149

– For the context of these translations click here –

 
From the 4th century the bishops also exercised public law functions, and in late antiquity they became ‘lords of the civitas’ (cities), and the foundations of monasteries, increasingly frequent in their cities, further increased their power.

The high clergy steadily seized all possible powers. It took advantage, for example, of the release from military service, which it so inflexibly imposed on others. The same was true of the release from taxes and duties, which it naturally imposed on others. At least until the 5th century, the bishops were exempted from the annual grain tax (annona) and from the land tax on all church property, as well as from the munera sordida (dirty work) and the extraordinaria (special allowances). They fought for emancipation from other public obligations and for new rights, such as the right of asylum for their churches, which was so abused.

They also acquired ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the privilegium fori. And they increasingly extended their juridical authority. They had almost unlimited jurisdiction over their clergy, and in certain cases even over the laity, while they could only be condemned by an episcopal assembly. And secular judges, who without their authorisation pronounced on canon law, were excommunicated.

The clergy needed the bishop’s permission to do anything. The bishop also held sway in the monasteries. It was the bishop who decided on the legates to the monasteries, subjected the abbots in matters of appointment and penalties, and had almost unlimited authority over the monks.

But the influence of the bishops was all the greater because the Germanic kingdoms of the 5th and 6th centuries did not touch the possessions of the Church at all. Moreover, the Church’s possessions were increased by the extensive donations of the kings in the 6th and 7th centuries, as well as by many other transfers of property. In a short period, the Church became ‘the largest landowner after the king’ (Stern/Bartmuss).

 
The throne and the altar

It is true that the growing power and wealth of the Church led to certain tensions and disagreements. But monarchy and episcopate saw that they depended on each other and worked together. The hierarchical structure of the Frankish national church supported the political system, and the political system in turn favoured it. It was the old Do ut des business. A ‘tight intertwining of state and church’ (Aubin) prevailed. It was precisely the most powerful families of the Merovingian kingdom—the lineages of the Waldeberts, the Burgundopharones, the Crodoins, the Arnulfingians and the Pipinids—who reinforced their old privileges through Christianity and even through the work of the saints who came from their ranks, the ‘domestic saints’.

Of course, these princes also recognised the ecclesiastical authority of the pope, who in turn could hardly impose his decisions against the royal will. The Merovingians often had ecclesiastics in their court administration and bestowed episcopal sees as sinecures on meritorious fighters. They showered some prelates with enormous possessions and privileges, but almost all were treated with great veneration.

The most powerful bishops had particularly extensive holdings, occupying an almost feudal position. Some even maintained personal relations with the emperor of Byzantium. They were protected and dominated by Merovingian kings, who became the princes’ godfathers. They not only accepted their violence but supported it, complacently sanctioning their wars and cruelties.

In addition to the ever-increasing Church lands—which represented an enormous and, to say it again, inalienable source of income—there were other financial advantages. Such were, for example, the offerings, the raising of taxes, the tithe, which was invented in the 5th century as a kind of alms until the end of the 6th century when it was transformed from a moral obligation into a legal duty, with corresponding penalties for transgressors. Anyone who refused to pay it was excommunicated. A document, drawn up shortly after the Council of Tours (567) and signed by the metropolitan of the place and three of its bishops, demanded that the faithful pay the tithe, and not only of goods but also of slaves. This is the first time that the tithe is mentioned in a Merovingian text. The Synod of Macon threatened excommunication against anyone who violated the correct application of the tithe. In 779, under Charles ‘the Great’, it became a compulsory tax.

The bishops, who had long since ceased to come from the middle class of society—Chlothar II (584-629) made it a rule that they should be chosen from among the members of the upper nobility—oppressed the people with the rest of the ruling class. Sometimes they ruled like true despots. They hardly fornicated and drank less than the laity. Sitting at the king’s table, they spoke of their perjuries and adulteries; Bishop Bertram of Bordeaux was even suspected of having had something to do with Queen Fredegund. They often appointed their successors themselves.

It happened that some towns even had two bishops at the same time. Thus, in Digne-les-Bains, two bishops divided the ecclesiastical property between them, before a synod deposed them both. Something similar happened in the monasteries, which also represented from the 5th century onwards important points of support in the urban sphere for the episcopal government of the cities, since from the 6th century onwards they multiplied considerably and from the 7th century onwards they belonged to the most important landowners in the country, often becoming richer than the cathedrals of the bishops themselves. At the end of the 7th century, when there were more than four hundred monasteries in the whole kingdom, such monasteries and churches owned a third of Gaul!

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Catholic Church Franks Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) So-called saints

Christianity’s Criminal History, 148

– For the context of these translations click here –

 

St. Gregory of Tours (Louvre)

When we read the History of the Franks, as amorphous as it is detailed, by Gregory of Tours, which is the main source of that period, we are surprised that the same head in which such a grotesque belief in miracles and the devil was floating around, and that seems to have no other concern than some obscure miracles and signs—for him unquestionable facts, gesta praesenti—, we are surprised, I repeat, that this same head relates with the most realistic tone and often with an almost amoral indifference the horrors of the time without admiring either the decadent displays of conscience or the most criminal heroes of the age.

He doesn’t feel the slightest scruple and knows nothing of the conflicts between loyalties, being unreservedly in favour of the brutal policy of the princes, that is, in favour of their crimes insofar as they represented the advance of the Catholic Church. This means, however, a halfway between securing for the Church a stable situation and for the high clergy’s ever-increasing riches; he belonged to that clergy. (Someone has observed that the episcopal ministry, supposedly so exhausting, left Gregory sufficient time to write his extensive works.)

No doubt civil and fratricidal wars didn’t entirely fit into the saint’s mind, for they naturally affected him and his Church. But external wars, wars aimed at the aggrandisement of the Christian kingdom—the annihilation of the ‘heretics’ and especially the Arians (four times he tells the hoax story of the fathers of the Church, according to which Arius burst in the toilet); the extinction of the pagans and other infidels—, could never be terrible enough. Thus, at the beginning of the fifth book of his History of the Franks, he confesses without a qualm: ‘Would that you too, O kings, were engaged in battles like those in which your fathers struggled, that the heathen terrified by your union might be crushed by your strength! Remember how Clovis won your great victories, how he slew opposing kings, crushed wicked peoples and subdued their lands, and left to you complete and unchallenged dominion over them!’

Fighting battles, killing enemy kings, and subjugating hostile peoples as well as his own, is what a famous Catholic saint, after more than half a millennium of Christianity, calls all this. For ‘the triumphs of the Franks are also the successes of Gregory’ (Haendler).

Even when it comes to sexually motivated murder, Gregory acts as a modern ‘progressive’. Without batting an eyelid he recounts the case of the exuberant Deoteria. While her husband was on a trip to Béziers, she sent word for King Teudebert: ‘No one can resist you, dearest lord. We know that you are our master. Come, then, and do what is pleasing in your eyes’. And Theudebert came to the castle, made Deoteria his concubine, his wife; and Bishop Gregory calls the Catholic lady (who afterwards began to fear her own daughter’s rivalry and had her killed at Verdun) ‘a skilful and clever woman’. As skilful and clever as Theudebert himself because, as Gregory himself proclaims, ‘she ruled her kingdom with justice, honoured the bishops and made donations to the churches’; and ‘all the taxes, which had hitherto reverted to the royal treasury of the churches of Auvergne, she graciously remitted to them’.

In other words, Gregory turns a blind eye to the well-known Catholic double standard.

Categories
Catholic Church Chess Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s Criminal History, 147

– For the context of these translations click here –

 
Ignorant, criminal on a grand scale and a good Catholic

It is true that we cannot judge that epoch, an epoch of ignorant, superstitious, fallacious and bloody people, with our modern—oh so ethical—modern standards: we must not act anachronistically against history! But can we and should we still measure that era, a thoroughly Christian era, by Christian criteria, by certain biblical criteria, such as the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount or the commandments of the Decalogue? And precisely because we look at it in this way, shouldn’t we recognise it by its fruits?

The Catholic author Daniel-Rops, too, feels a prevailing sense of ‘horror’ at ‘the continually repeated spectacle of crimes that are frankly unspeakable’. ‘Everywhere there is blatant violence, ready to explode at any moment. Nothing stops it: not family ties, not the precepts of the most elementary decency and not even the Christian faith’. Not even that? Didn’t the faith allow all that to go on? Didn’t it provide what we might call the supreme consecration, the endorsement of the status quo? Didn’t the faith pray for the rulers, the generals, the cutthroats? Didn’t it pray before wars, during wars, and after wars? Didn’t it participate in wars and plundering, or make continual donations to the Church from the spoils of war or plunder? Didn’t it fatten the powerful on the misery of the masses?

The Church unreservedly sided with the scoundrels and butchers. And while the violent acts of the kings are more and more unbridled, the chain of blood vengeance never ends, the murders of relatives multiply precisely among the great ones: the Catholic son kills the Catholic father, the brother kills the brother who is as Catholic as him, the Catholic uncle kills the Catholic nephew, and while the robberies of the Merovingian kings occur, the annihilated enemies who were Germanic princes, and the snatched booty of gold, jewels and weapons could hardly be hidden any longer under the underground vault of the palace of Braine; the episcopate saw in those crowned Catholic criminals the legitimate representatives of state authority, the representatives of God on earth.

Since the Church sided with the Merovingian potentates from the beginning as their ally, it was able to develop as it hadn’t done for a long time. Its influence grew, and both the secular and monastic clergy became incredibly wealthy. And to a large extent the almost permanent catastrophes, and the terror that rarely ceased, greatly favoured the appearance of donations to the Church. ‘As people expected protection and help from them, and were continually threatened by looting, arson, murder and violence, they turned to the Church and its saints’ (Bleiber).

The Church thought nothing of opposing this. Its wheat increased. It was only between 475 and the beginning of the 6th century that the number of Gallic monasteries increased tenfold; but in the first half of the following century more abbeys were built there than ever before or since. And looking back to the middle of the 7th century, a modern researcher even speaks of ‘an episcopal and monastic state’ (Sprandel). The episcopate, which was a ‘great power’ not only economically but also politically (Dopsch), played almost as decisive a role in the kingdom as the absolute sovereign monarchy did in the Church. The two were closely linked and intertwined, for the ruler also had to show himself devotissimus of the Church and, at least in the Carolingian period, was regarded ‘as a clergyman’ (Brunner).
 

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Editor’s note: Chess, as it is known today, emerged in Medieval Europe as an evolution of a Persian game which in turn evolved from an Indian game (the earliest reference to the latter is found in the Mahabharata: an epic-religious text of the Aryans from the 3rd century BC).

As can be seen in the picture, two bishops flank the king and queen in the original formation of the game, already in its European incarnation.
 

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The whole period, cruel in the extreme and extraordinarily fraudulent, was at the same time very ‘pious’. Attendance at Sunday mass was widespread ‘at the ringing of the bells they crowded into the churches’ (Pfister). Eucharistic communion became almost as widespread. Church singing was zealously cultivated. Almost everyone attended the processions. Catholic festivals were celebrated as great popular festivals. People prayed before they began to eat, and not a glass of water was drunk without first making the sign of the cross. And it was not only God who was prayed to, but all imaginable saints were invoked continually. Numerous churches were built with marble columns and marble-covered walls, stained glass windows and many paintings; the rich even had their own domestic chapels. The kings dealt with saints, as Theuderic I did in 525-526 with St Gallus in Cologne (who set fire to a temple there, ‘because none of the foolish pagans were to be seen’ after which the arsonist took refuge in the royal palace). Childebert I visited a saint. Queens, like Radegund for example, washed the feet of bishops. Crass superstition was commonplace. Relics from Rome and Jerusalem were hoarded, and pilgrimages were made, looking for health, to the supposed tombs of the apostles.

In a word, there was a deep conviction ‘of the reality and power of the living God’ (Heinsius). There abounded ‘a vigorous and fresh faith in God and his providence; one dealt with the divine, not as an abstraction or an idea, but as a very real force. This conviction prevailed among all, shared by ecclesiastics and laymen without distinction’. The first half of the 7th century was openly regarded as ‘a flourishing period of the Frankish Church’ (Hauck), which was seen to be ‘deeply rooted in the people of the Franks’ (Schieffer), and the bishops and episcopal synods ‘applied to the work’ (Boudriot).