web analytics

Category: Merovingian dynasty

Categories
Bible Carolingian dynasty Christendom Franks Judaism Kevin MacDonald Merovingian dynasty Old Testament

The Holy Hook, 1

 
Editor’s note: With the subtitle of ‘Yahweh’s Trojan Horse into the Gentile City’, this essay by Laurent Guyénot was published, complete, on May 8, 2019, in The Unz Review.
 

Is the Church the whore of Yahweh?

I concluded an earlier article [‘Zionism, Crypto-Judaism, and the Biblical Hoax’ —Ed.] by what I regard as the most important ‘revelation’ of modern biblical scholarship, one that has the potential to free the Western world from a two-thousand-year-old psychopathic bond: the jealous Yahweh was originally just the national god of Israel, repackaged into ‘the God of Heaven and Earth’ during the Babylonian Exile, as part of a public relations campaign aimed at Persians, then Greeks and ultimately Romans. The resulting biblical notion that the universal Creator became Israel’s national god at the time of Moses, is thus exposed as a fictitious inversion of the historical process: in reality, it is the national god of Israel who, so to speak, impersonated the universal Creator at the time of Ezra—while remaining intensely ethnocentric.

The Book of Joshua is a good eye-opener to the biblical hoax, because its pre-exilic author never refers to Yahweh simply as ‘God,’ and never implies that he is anything but ‘the god of Israel,’ that is, ‘our god’ for the Israelites, and ‘your god’ for their enemies (25 times). Yahweh shows no interest in converting Canaanite peoples, whom he regards as worthless than their livestock. He doesn’t instruct Joshua to even try to convert them, but simply to exterminate them, in keeping with the war code he gave Moses in Deuteronomy 20.

However, we find in the Book of Joshua one isolated statement by a Canaanite woman that ‘Yahweh your god is God both in Heaven above and on Earth beneath’ (2:11). Rahab, a prostitute in Jericho, makes that statement to two Israeli spies who spend the night with her, and whom she hides in exchange for being spared, together with her family, when the Israelites will take over the city and slaughter everyone, ‘men and women, young and old’ (6:21). Rahab’s ‘profession of faith’ is probably a post-exilic insertion, because it doesn’t fit well with her other claim that she is motivated by fear, not by faith: ‘we are afraid of you and everyone living in this country has been seized with terror at your approach’ (2:9). Nevertheless, the combination of fear and faith is consistent with Yahweh’s ways.

The French Catholic Bible de Jérusalem—a scholarly translation by the Dominicans of the École Biblique, which served as guideline for the English Jerusalem Bible—adds a following footnote to Rahab’s ‘profession of faith to the God of Israel’, saying it ‘made Rahab, in the eyes of more than one Church Father, a figure of the Gentile Church, saved by her faith.’

I find this footnote emblematic of the role of Christianity in propagating among Gentiles the Israelites’ outrageous metaphysical claim, that great deception that has remained, to this day, a source of tremendous symbolic power. By recognizing her own image in the prostitute of Jericho, the Church claims for herself the role that is exactly hers in history, while radically misleading Christians about the historical significance of that role. It is indeed the Church who, having acknowledged the god of Israel as the universal God, introduced the Jews into the heart of the Gentile city and, over the centuries, allowed them to seize power over Christendom. [Red emphasis by Ed.]

This thesis, which I am going to develop here, may seem fanciful, because we have been taught that Christianity was strongly Judeophobic from the start. And that’s true. For example, John Chrysostom, perhaps the most influential Greek theologian of the crucial 4th century, wrote several homilies ‘Against the Jews’. But what he is concerned about, precisely, is the nefarious influence of the Jews over Christians. Many Christians, he complains, ‘join the Jews in keeping their feasts and observing their fasts’ and even believe that ‘they think as we do’ (First homily, I,5).

‘Is it not strange that those who worship the Crucified keep common festival with those who crucified him? Is it not a sign of folly and the worst madness?… For when they see that you, who worship the Christ whom they crucified, are reverently following their rituals, how can they fail to think that the rites they have performed are the best and that our ceremonies are worthless?’ (First Homily, V,1-7).

To John’s horror, some Christians even get circumcised. ‘Do not tell me,’ he warns them, ‘that circumcision is just a single command; it is that very command which imposes on you the entire yoke of the Law’ (Second Homily, II,4). And so, with all its Judeophobia (anachronistically renamed ‘anti-Semitism’ today), John Chrysostom’s homilies are a testimony to the strong influence that Jews have exerted on Gentile Christians in the early days of the triumphant, imperial Church. And no matter how much the Greek and Latin Fathers have tried to protect their flock from the influence of Jews, it has persisted as the Church expanded. It can even be argued that the history of Christianity is the history of its Judaization, from Constantinople to Rome, then from Rome to Amsterdam and to the New World.

______ 卐 ______

 
Note of the Editor: This is exactly what apologists of Christianity, like the secular Kevin MacDonald, fail to understand (see e.g., how he misunderstands John Chrysostom in his preface to Giles Corey’s The Sword of Christ).
 

______ 卐 ______

 
We commonly admit that the Church has always oppressed the Jews and prevented their integration unless they convert. Were they not expelled from one Christian kingdom after another in the Middle Ages? Again, this is true, but we must distinguish between the cause and the effect. Each of these expulsions has been a reaction to a situation unknown in pre-Christian Antiquity: Jewish communities gaining inordinate economic power, under the protection of a royal administration (Jews served as the kings’ tax collectors and moneylenders, and were particularly indispensable in times of war), until this economic power, yielding political power, reaches a point of saturation, causes pogroms and forces the king into taking measures.

Let us consider for example the influence of the Jews in Western Europe under the Carolingians. It reaches a climax under Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious. The bishop of Lyon Agobard (c. 769-840) left us five letters or treatises written to protest against the power granted to the Jews at the detriment of Christians. In On the insolence of the Jews, addressed to Louis the Pious in 826, Agobard complains that the Jews produce ‘signed ordinances of your name with golden seals’ guaranteeing them outrageous advantages, and that the envoys of the Emperor are ‘terrible towards Christians and gentle towards Jews.’ Agobard even complains of an imperial edict imposing Sunday rather than Saturday as market day, in order to please the Jews. In another letter, he complains of an edict forbidding anyone to baptize the slaves of the Jews without the permission of their masters.[1]

Louis the Pious was said to be under the influence of his wife, Queen Judith—a name that simply means ‘Jewess’. She was so friendly to Jews that the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz hypothesizes that she was a secret Jewess, in the manner of the biblical Esther. Graetz describes the reign of Louis and Judith (and ‘the treasurer Bernhard, the real ruler of the kingdom’ according to him) as a golden age for the Jews, and points out that in the emperor’s court, many regarded Judaism as the true religion. This is illustrated by the resounding conversion of Louis’ confessor, Bishop Bodo, who took the name of Eleazar, had himself circumcised, and married a Jewess. ‘Cultured Christians,’ writes Graetz, ‘refreshed themselves with the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus and the Jewish philosopher Philo, and read their works in preference to those of the apostles.’[2]

The Judaization of the Roman Church at this time is appropriately symbolized by the adoption of unleavened bread for communion, with no justification in the Gospel. I say ‘the Roman Church’, but perhaps it should be called the Frankish Church because, from the time of Charlemagne, it was taken over by ethnic Franks with geopolitical designs on Byzantium, as Orthodox theologian John Romanides has convincingly argued.[3]

The Old Testament was especially influential in the Frankish spheres of power. Popular piety focused on the Gospel narratives (canonical gospels, but also apocryphal ones like the immensely popular Gospel of Nicodemus), the worship of Mary, and the ubiquitous cults of the saints, but kings and popes relied on a political theology drawn from the Tanakh.

The Hebrew Bible had been a major part of Frankish propaganda from the late sixth century. Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks, the primary—and mostly legendary—source for Merovingian history, is framed on the providential ideology of the Books of Kings: the good kings are those who support the Catholic Church, and the bad kings those who resist the growth of its power. Under Louis the Pious, the rite of anointment of the Frankish kings was designed after the model of the prophet Samuel’s anointment of King David in 1 Samuel 16.

__________

[1] Adrien Bressolles, ‘La question juive au temps de Louis le Pieux,’ in Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France, tome 28, n°113, 1942. pp. 51-64, on https://www.persee.fr

[2] Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1891 (archive.org), vol. III, ch. VI, p. 162.

[3] John Romanides, Franks, Romans, Feudalism, and Doctrine: An Interplay Between Theology and Society, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1981.

Categories
Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner 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!

Categories
Catholic Church Chess Karlheinz Deschner 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).
 

______ 卐 ______

 

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.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
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).

Categories
Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s Criminal History, 146

 

The Church in the Merovingian Period

‘The Frankish reign of the Merovingians… was an age bathed in blood and murder, full of the most dreadful tragedies, at the same time replete with believing zeal and holiness’. —Franz Zach, Catholic

‘No one in history ever founded so many monasteries again…’ —P. Lasko

‘… a bloody period of the Frankish Church’. —A. Huack

‘Naked violence reigned everywhere… the continually renewed spectacle of almost unspeakable crimes’. —Daniel Rops, Catholic

 
In the Merovingian period Gaul was already fundamentally Christian, and became increasingly Christianised.

It is true that its oldest inscription, certainly Christian, only dates from the year 334 and Lyon; but today it has been lost. And, indeed, at that time Christians were still a minority, even in the cities where the Christian emperors, and of course their Christian collaborators too, lived.

In any case, the spread of Christianity in Gaul had already made rapid progress, and it seems that by 250 there were already bishops there: in Toulouse Saint Saturninus, Arles Marcianus, Paris Saint Dionysius and Narbonne, where a few decades later there is evidence of a Christian cemetery. And in any case, these bishops, like those of Tours, Clermont and Limoges, were in no way delegates of Rome. The alleged Roman mission is undoubtedly a falsehood of the 5th or 6th century: an attempt by the papacy to assert its authority. And, naturally, such a falsehood also had to ensure the apostolic origin of these Gallic bishoprics. The same motif is also found in Spain.

But in the 4th century, episcopal sees already swarmed Gaul. In the Belgian-Germanic territories, too, there are more and more bishoprics: in Orléans, Verdun, Amiens, Strasbourg, Speyer, Worms, Basel, Besançon, and Chalon-sur-Saone. Not to mention older ones, such as those of Trier, Metz and Cologne, all of which—like those of Tongeren and Mainz—falsely claimed to be foundations of disciples of the apostles.

At the end of the 5th century, when Gaul became the epicentre of Western history, some 115 bishops ministered there, almost exclusively in cities. And by the end of the 6th century, Gaul was occupied by 11 metropolitan sees with 128 dioceses: Arles had 24 bishoprics, Bordeaux 17 and Bourges 9, Lyon 10, Narbonne 7, Reims 12, Rouen 9, Sens 7, Tours 8, Trier 9 and Vienne 5.
 

A kind of holy cancerous ulcer

This period, in which Christianity infected the Germanic world, the dominance of the Frankish nobility was forged and the typical medieval society of royalty, church and nobility emerged from the 5th century, was an era characterised, as few others had been, by unbridled passions and bloody atrocities, betrayals and untold crimes.

Palace intrigues, dynastic quarrels, incessant betrayals, the unscrupulous elimination of kings and princes (the average lifespan of the Merovingians was 24.5 years) and the bestial campaigns to wipe out entire families were as commonplace as drunkenness and epidemics, famines and plundering. The history of Gaul in the Merovingian period is a unique chronicle of barbarism. Administration, trade and agriculture all collapsed to a greater or lesser extent, and crime triumphed to the full.

There has hardly ever been a more anarchic period in Europe than these early centuries of the Middle Ages. And yet the clergy didn’t think of forbidding intervention. The prelates were not overly incited by the desire for martyrdom. And the Church itself came to enjoy all the plundering and pillaging. Its real estate, which had already increased in the 4th century, then increased immeasurably.

Already in the 6th century its wealth grew ‘to infinity’ (Dopsch). ‘During the Merovingian period no memorable rebellion of ecclesiastical authority ever broke out, simply because the Church was not in opposition to the civil power, but collaborated closely with it’ (Bodmer). Indeed, the Frankish bishops participated in the power struggles between kings and grandees, ‘albeit with material and not spiritual weapons’ (Bund), going so far as ‘the de facto usurpation… of instruments of state and military power’ (Prinz).

In reality the high clergy and the first nobility are the driving forces of that immense confusion. In the imperium, they set up semi-independent powers, causing it to lurch either to one side or the other in permanent crises, which led to chaos.

There have never been so many saints, perhaps except for the martyrial era with its squadrons of so-called blood witnesses. In the 7th century alone, no fewer than eight hundred have been counted. Moreover, ‘that Merovingian century, so decisive for the development of the West’, found ‘a spiritual expression appropriate to the age in the lives of saints’, hagiography having experienced ‘an undoubted increase’.

The saints enjoyed high prestige. They built great monasteries with pompous churches. Like their biographers, they had an unmistakably positive attitude towards the monarchy and the nobility, most of them coming from aristocratic families. One could almost have the impression that ‘nobility was the anteroom to sainthood’, and one could speak of the ‘self-sanctification’ of Merovingian noble society (Prinz).

This was just as beneficial to the Church as the caste of the lords. Its desire for political-charismatic domination, which had been damaged by the apostasy of the old faith, was strengthened by the resources of the new faith providing Christian legitimisation. At the same time, however, the epoch, and especially the 7th century, was characterised by a ‘flowering’ of hagiography and a taste for the miraculous, which amounted to ‘the greatest falsification of historicity’, and consequently led to ‘the state of prostration of Western historiography’. All in all, this ‘was the result of a barbarisation, after the ancient stream had dried up’ (Scheibelreiter).

Categories
Goths Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty Miscegenation Racial right

Christianity’s Criminal History, 145

– For the context of these translations click here –

 
Mission and slaughter

Under Dagobert I, whose chief advisors included Arnulf, bishop of Metz, and Kunibert, bishop of Cologne, the paganism on the left bank of the Rhine was increasingly combated, and all the Jews in the kingdom were forcibly baptised.
 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s note: This is where it becomes clearer than ever that white nationalists, most of whom have a positive view of Christianity, aren’t honest with themselves.

While it is true that The Northman film that depicts Vikings burning women and children alive isn’t to be believed, it is true that some ancient Scandinavians were brutal in preventing miscegenation, like the Visigoths who burned at the stake those who stained their blood with Mediterranean mudbloods. Christianity came to change things in Visigothic Spain: burning heretics rather than Goths who sinned against the holy spirit of their race. Now even Jews could mingle with Aryans if they only converted to Christianity! And not only Jews…

As long as the racial right in North America is reluctant to revise its history of Christianity, I will be pointedly denigrating them on The West’s Darkest Hour. The German Karlheinz Deschner continues:

______ 卐 ______

 

Dagobert also opened the mission of the Frisians, to which Bishop Kunibert had formally committed himself, with an edict imposing baptism. And just as the king fought in the south, west and north, and just as he fought the Basques, Bretons, Saxons and Frisians, he also invaded the first Slavic kingdom, the great kingdom of the Frankish merchant Samo, which stretched from the Erzgebirbe or Ore Mountains to the eastern Alps…

The only source, which recounts the genocide of the Bulgars, is found in Fredegar: ‘After their defeat the Bulgars were expelled from Pannonia: 9,000 men with women and children, who turned to Dagobert, begging him to take them into Frankish lands for a lasting settlement. Dagobert ordered the Bavarians to take them in for the winter, while he consulted with the Franks about what to do next. When they had been distributed among the various houses of the Bavarians, Dagobert ordered the Bavarians—after taking advice from the Franks—that each of them should kill the Bulgarians on a certain night with the women and children he had in his house. And the Bavarians carried it out immediately’. And of the 9,000 people, only 700 escaped the slaughter and fled across the Windisch to the Duchy of Walluc.

The main reason for the unprecedented carnage was probably ‘the annihilation of the Bulgarian ruling class’ (Stórmer). In principle, this had nothing to do with the ‘mission’ but with an Ostpolitik or Eastern policy, which in turn had a lot to do with a ‘mission’.

‘Mission, Catholicisation and the healing of souls appear in the 5th-6th centuries in close connection with the Frankish king, with the deputy duke of Bavaria and the Frankish aristocracy in the west and east’, writes Kari Bosi after narrating the great slaughter, and adds: ‘It is no accident the name of the last great Merovingian king Dagobert I who pursued a vigorous Ostpolitik strongly emphasised in the Lex Baiuarium… It is known for the close collaboration between Dagobert and St. Amandus’.

Moreover, it is known that the rex torrens was considered a saint like other murderers of entire populations, such as Charlemagne or Charles ‘the Great’. And finally, it is known that St. Amandus reproached King Dagobert, ‘something that no other bishop dared to do’, with capitana crimina for very serious crimes; although these crimes, which one saint reproached another saint for, were less about the sexual life of the sovereign than about his violent actions.

(Left, Dagobert’s tomb at Saint-Denis, remade in the 13th century.) But that was an exception. For nothing prevented the old chroniclers from comparing Dagobert, the great beheader, the initiator of the Bulgarian slaughter and an unscrupulous man in general, with Solomon, the rex pacifica, and exalted as ‘benefactor of the churches’ (ecciesiarum largitor), as ‘most vigorous nourishing father of the Franks’ (fortissimus enutritor francorum) who brought peace to the whole kingdom and won the respect of the neighbouring peoples; which also doesn’t prevent us from reading: ‘He filled all the surrounding kingdoms with fear and terror’ (Liber Historiae Francorum). Nevertheless, or precisely because of this, the ‘great’ Merovingian king, the friend of the monks, Dagobert, who died after a brief illness on 19 January 638-639, still lives on today especially in France, as the bon roi Dagobert (the good king).

Categories
Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty Monarchy Roman Catholic popes

Christianity’s Criminal History, 144

 
The fall of Brunhilda and the first peak in the Christianisation of the idea of kingship

(Left, pen drawing from the earliest manuscript of the Chronicle of Fredegar which is believed to depict Eusebius and Jerome, 715 AD.) On the death of Childebert II, he was succeeded by his two sons: Theudebert II (595-612) in Austria, and Theuderic II (595-613) in Burgundy. Brunhilda was the first to rule in the name of her grandchildren, who were still minors, and who only gradually began to intervene in the struggles with the royal house of Neustria after they had reached majority.

In Burgundy, of which she soon became the true ruler, she continued the struggle against Chlothar and, to take revenge on her Austrian enemies, instigated Theuderic against his brother Theudebert of Austria, who, she kept repeating, was not the son of a king but of a market gardener. As late as 600, the two brothers had jointly inflicted a heavy defeat on Chlothar II, who was then only sixteen years old, and had sacked his kingdom, reducing it to a narrow coastal strip around Rouen, Beauvais and Amiens. And still in 602 they had jointly fought the Basques and ‘with God’s help’ had subjected them to tribute.

But afterwards they fought each other fiercely and bloodily. The Chronicle of Fredegar recounts that

never since time immemorial had the Franks or any other people fought so fiercely. Such was the deadliness between the two armies that, where both sides began the battle, the corpses of the dead had no place to lie, but the dead were so crowded together among the other bodies that they stood upright as if they were alive. But Theuderic, with the help of God, defeated Theudebert once more; and the vassals of Theudebert during their flight from Zülpich to Cologne were put to the sword, covering the ground in stretches. On the same day Theuderic came to Cologne and seized all the treasures of Theudebert.

In Cologne, where the Franco-Burgundians entered, Theuderic had his brother tonsured and then cut off his head and annihilated his entire family. ‘Even a very young son of his was grabbed by the foot by order of Theuderic and beaten against a rock, until his brains fell out of his head’, says the Chronicle of Fredegar.

It was the end of one of the innumerable purely Catholic fratricidal wars.

The victor then attempted to seize control of the whole of Gaul and immediately advanced on Neustria. But when he was at the height of his triumph he died unexpectedly, still in his youth, in the year 613. His sons were also killed by Chlothar II of Neustria. But not his godson Merovech, whom Chlothar imprisoned in a monastery, but ‘whom he continued to love with the same affection with which he had taken him from the sacred font of baptism’ (Chronicle of Fredegar).

On the death of Theuderic in Metz, Brunhilda immediately had his eldest son and great-grandson, Sigibert II, who was about ten years old, proclaimed king of Austrasia and Burgundy. But the Austrasian grandees betrayed her. Led by the glorious ancestors of the Carolingians, the two traitors, the steward Pepin of Landen and Arnulf—the future saint and bishop of Metz—, went over to the side of Chlothar II. And after the high treason of the Austrian aristocracy, the queen was also abandoned by the feudal lords of Burgundy under the steward Warnachar. They had decided it beforehand ‘and of course both the bishops and the rest of the great lay lords, according to the contemporary chronicler… resolved not to let a single son of Theuderic escape, but to kill them all and then annihilate Brunhilda and to promote the sovereignty of Chlothar’.

This sealed the queen’s ruin, the exclusion and even the elimination of the Austro-Burgundian branch of the Merovingian dynasty, as well as the triumph of the nobility over the crown.

Brunhilda’s army deserted without resistance. She fled to the Jura and tried to sneak into Burgundy, but at Orbe (in today French Switzerland), by Lake Neuchatel, she was taken prisoner by the Frankish steward and handed over to her nephew.

Chlothar, as God-fearing as he was cruel and thoroughly ecclesiastical-minded, and who as the first Frankish king compared to David, whose ‘piety’ the Chronicle of Fredegar exalts, was a ruler who granted the clergy new rights and abundant donations, guaranteed them freedom of episcopal elections, exempted them from all the burdens of ecclesiastical property, was ‘clement and full of kindness to all’. The queen consort of Chilperic I, Fredegund, subjected her to torture for three days in the year 613. (Note of the Ed.: queen Brunhilda of Austrasia was Fredegund’s sister-in-law.) This happened when Brunhilda was already almost septuagenarian; she then had the soldiers ride her on a camel, and finally tied by her hair, one arm and one foot ‘to the tail of the wildest steed’ and dragged her to death, until ‘her limbs were torn off one after the other’ (Chronicle of Fredegar). Her bones were burned. And her offspring were also eliminated up to her great-grandchildren, with the sole exception of Prince Merovech, Chlothar’s godson.

(Left, Brunhilde is dragged to her death.) But a modern researcher writes: ‘It was precisely under this ruler that, as can be clearly demonstrated, the Christianisation of the idea of the king reached its first peak’ (Anton).

Pope Gregory had miscalculated. It was neither Brunhilda nor the Austrian branch that emerged victorious from these massive atrocities: the victor was the Neustrian Chlothar II, to whom Gregory had sent only a single letter of his 854 letters that have been preserved. In 614 the king convened a national synod in Paris which marked the beginning of the national Frankish Church, independent of Rome for a century.

Categories
Destruction of Germanic paganism Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty Roman Catholic popes

Christianity’s Criminal History, 143

 

Brunhilda, Chlothar II and Dagobert I
or ‘the Christianisation of the idea of king’.

‘… a wild political animal’. —J. Richards referring to Brunhilda.

‘Precisely under this sovereign, as can be clearly demonstrated, the Christianisation of the idea of the king reached one of its first peaks’. —H.H. Anton, concerning Chlothar II.

‘… God gracious above all measure… he heard him above all in the advice of St. Arnulf, bishop of the city of Metz… He heard him also in the warnings of his steward Pipinus and Kunibert, bishop of Cologne’. —Fredegar, alluding to Dagobert I.

‘He filled with fear and terror all the kingdoms around him’. —Liber Historiae Francorum.

 

Pope Gregory I gallivanting with ‘a wild political animal’

In the year 592, the oldest of the Merovingian kings, Guntram, died in the Frankish kingdom after a series of threats and attacks, and he died without leaving any descendants. But after the death of his own sons he had adopted his eldest grandson, still a minor, Childebert II (575-596), leaving him part of his kingdom. He thus ruled two partial kingdoms: Austrasia and Burgundy. Childebert, who in the last period of his life subdued the rebellious Bretons in the west and a Thuringian people between the Saale and Elbe in the east, soon came under the full influence of his mother.

The powerful Brunhilda, the most prominent figure in the Frankish kingdom, had in 575 imposed her five-year-old son’s rule in Austrasia and settled the ensuing power struggle with the Austrian nobles of Guntram’s camp in her favour, and in favour of the kingship.

In his letters, the holy father completely ignores Brunhilda’s dreadful family discord. He sees her, her son, her kingdom and all the other kingdoms won for the right faith ‘as bright lamps shining and illuminating amidst the night darkness of unbelief’. He repeatedly thanks her for the support she has given to his English missionaries on their journey through the Frankish kingdom. He extols her ‘love for the prince of the apostles, Peter, to whom you are wholeheartedly devoted, as I know’. And he asks for her help, often in vain, against simony, schismatic groups and ‘pagan’ cults.

Gregory exhorts Brunhilda to forcibly prevent the worship of sacred trees and other idolatries and recommends the use of scourging, torture and imprisonment to obtain the conversion of rebellious ‘pagans’. And, of course, the pope also sent relics to the queen.

Gregory I wrote to the powerful queen, who supposedly ruled the Church, about a dozen letters, usually in a tone of syrupy flattery, which he also used with the imperial house, both with the (later) victim and the murderer. With some restraint he began the first papal epistle: ‘Your Excellency’s character, praiseworthy and pleasing to God, is to be seen both in your government and in the education of your son’, but it soon got louder. And while ‘Gregorian chant’ had nothing to do with Gregory, here he could sing in higher and higher tones:

How great are the gifts which God has bestowed on you, and with what clemency the grace of heaven swells your heart, not only do your many other merits attest, but they are especially recognised in the fact that you rule the coarse hearts of heathen peoples with the art of cautious prudence, what is still more meritorious, the regal power is accompanied by the adornment of wisdom.

Brunhilda was not only powerful but also useful to the Church. She made numerous donations and built abbeys, and the pope even asked for her support for the reform of the Frankish Church and the protection of ecclesiastical property.

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s criminal history, 132

– For the context of these translations click here –

 

CHAPTER 5

The last Merovingians

‘No one rules more than the bishops, our glory no longer exists…’ —Chilperic I

While the difference between Franks and Gallo-Romans disappeared little by little, although not the different legislation, the external borders of the Merovingian kingdom remained until the end of the Merovingian period. There were indeed political complications, as well as some attacks by the misers against Thuringia and by the Visigoths against southern France, as well as some outright riots and raids of prey beyond the borders. But the main objective was no longer expansion outwards, nor the expansion of the kingdom as a whole, nor the subjugation and exploitation of strange and distant neighbours.

It was the kings, once again four, and their numerous successors who sought to enlarge their possessions and territories at the expense of the territories of others, and in an almost uninterrupted way to harm and weaken them in this way. In a word, each was seeking supremacy.

This caused that at the end of the 6th century and the beginning of the 7th century almost all the Merovingian princes died a premature and violent death, that brutalities and large-scale outrages continued to occur in the kingdom, that civil wars and looting would incessantly break out, that many places were reduced to ashes, entire areas were devastated and innumerable looting, mutilations and murders were committed, to which were added plagues and famines.

The peasants hid in the woods and robbed for their own account. Amid this debauchery and impasse, all means were good for the combatants…

Categories
Catholic Church Catholic religious orders Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s criminal history, 130

– For the context of these translations click here –

 

CHAPTER 3

THE SONS OF CLOVIS

‘The successors of the first great Frankish king also protected the Church and the worship; monasticism developed… The remnants of paganism were fought with increasing energy’. —H. H. Anton

 

The division of the kingdom

The kingdom of Clovis was divided almost aequa lance, almost equally, passing in principle to his four sons: all ‘kings of the Franks’; all heirs with the same rights, according to the German rule of succession; all Catholics, except for Theuderic I, with a saint for his mother. And they all also led a life full of hideous cruelties, wars and military campaigns. In the proven tradition of the father they systematically expanded the kingdom and conquered Thuringia (531), Burgundy (533-534) and Provence (537). The aforementioned annexations were joined by numerous raids in search of loot in an extraordinarily troubled time, one of the darkest and bloodiest times in history, brimming with disorder and brutality, fratricides, wars between brothers and betrayals: a race unleashed ‘for power and wealth’ (Buchner), a ‘foolish desire for loot and slaughter’ (Schulze).

But even critical historians bend the knee before the ‘founding of the kingdom’ of the Merovingians, before the bridge they built ‘between Antiquity and the Middle Ages’, before their contribution to the triumph ‘of Catholic Christianity’ to the alliance ‘between throne and altar’. As if all this had not made the story much more gruesome!

The boundaries of the four partitions of the kingdom are not stated with sufficient precision. The one we know best is the inheritance of Theuderic I (reign 511-533). The presumed Hugdietrich of the saga received the lion’s share with the capital, Reims: a territory which would include what later became Austria with its predominantly Germanic population: the entire east, from Burgundy to the Rhineland, and perhaps even as far as the Fritziar and Kassel region, as well as large territories that had belonged to the Alemanni, which was the case in eastern Aquitaine. But each of the sons obtained a part of the Aquitaine lands south of the Loire, which the father had taken over; three of them were exclaves.

Chlothar I (reign 511-561), the youngest of Clovis’ sons, and perhaps not yet twelve years old, the Salic age to reach legal age, obtained mainly the territory of the Salian Franks with the royal cities of Tournai and Cambrai. For the same reason, it included the old Frankish territory between the coast of the English Channel, the Somme and the Carboniferous Forest, with approximately the same borders that it had before the predatory incursions of his progenitor. As the seat of government Chlothar chose Soissons, in the extreme south. Southern and western France corresponded to Chlodomer and Childebert respectively.

Chlodomer (reign 511-524) was around fifteen when his father died and ruled as king of western Aquitaine, the northernmost territory of the middle Loire, at Orleans. And Childebert I (reign 511-558) controlled the coastal lands from the Somme to Brittany; he resided in Paris, the undisputed capital.
 

A saint and murderer

Shortly after the Auvergne rebellion, the Catholic Frankish kings attacked the Catholic kingdom of Burgundy.

Sigismund (reign 516-523), son of the Burgundian king Gundobad, still ruled there. Since 501 Sigismund was viceroy in Geneva. And what the jealous Avitus had not achieved with the father, he obtained with the son. Around the year 500 Sigismund converted from Arianism to Catholicism. Sigismund later introduced Catholicism throughout Burgundy. He was the first German king to make a pilgrimage to Rome…

Sigismund, the murderer of his own son, makes his way as a saint of the Catholic Church! They ended up thanking him for the conversion of the Burgundians to Catholicism. Soon his cult began in the monastery of St. Moritz founded by him. Those with fever had masses celebrated in honour of Sigismund (who allegedly helped against malaria and tertian fever). In the 7th century he also appears as a saint in the so-called Martyrologium Hieronymianum. At the end of the Middle Ages he will be one of the patron saints of Bohemia and even become a fashionable saint. The Archbishop of Prague declared the feast of Sigismund a feast of the archdiocese.

His statue appears on French and German altars as well as in the Freiburg Cathedral; there are churches dedicated to Sigismund and a brotherhood named after him. His relics were requested, which initially rested at St. Moritz. The head was taken to the church of St. Sigismund, although a fragment of it is found in Plozk of the Vistula; in the 14th century a part of the body was deposited in St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague, and another was taken around the same time to Freising, which eventually became the centre of its veneration in Germany.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s interpolated note: Regardless of the repulsiveness of relic worship—pieces of decomposed corpses —, what is currently happening in France and Germany has very dark and old historical roots that no one in white nationalism sees for the simple reason that none lives under the weirwood but in the inane present.

It should be obvious that, if these Germanics hadn’t been infected with a cult of Semitic origin, they would have regarded Hermann as a hero who fought against the Romans when the latter were already mongrelising.

Instead, after the Christian takeover these Germanics were forced to worship Catholic monsters. Tell me whom you worship and I’ll tell you who you’ll become. Read pages 23-32 of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour: the only article by a Jew in that compilation. Even the Nazis translated it to German in the Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung of September 2, 1933.

Now let’s go back to Deschner’s account of how a female ‘saint’ gives orders to murder her grandchildren:
 

______ 卐 ______

 
On the death of Chlodomer, his three brothers, ‘warriors above all and simple gang leaders’ (Fontal) shared the inheritance, ignoring all the rights of the three minor children of the deceased king and without allowing any regime of tutelary government from their mother.

The pious Childebert got, it seems, the lion’s share. He was a true father of the nation, who promoted ecclesiastical institutions, enjoyed dealing with bishops granting them real estate, war spoils and large sums of money while being in constant communication with the ‘Holy See’. And as Childebert and Chlothar, who had married Guntheuc, the widow of Chlodomer, certainly feared that the hereditary rights of Theuderic and Gunthar, Chlodomer’s minor children, would be asserted, Childebert didn’t doubt in encouraging their murder, of which Chlothar ‘was very glad’.

After all, both sovereigns had a saint for their mother, Saint Clotilde, and furthermore, being already a Catholic princess, she had imposed baptism on the children of Clovis, had ‘raised them with love’ and had certainly given them a good Catholic upbringing. And since Clotilde also took care of the education of the minor children of the late Chlodomer, the kings Childebert and Chlothar, who had taken over her nephews, asked Clotilde if she wanted her grandchildren to ‘continue living with their hair cut off [like monks] or if they had to kill them both’. And ‘the ideal figure of the desire for feminine holiness’, the francorum apostle who felt for the two children ‘a singular affection’ (Fredegar), replied: ‘Rather dead than tonsured, if they are not going to reign’…

Chlothar put the knife to the neck first to one and then to the other of his brother’s sons, who cried out in anguish. ‘After they had also dispatched the boys’ servants and educators’ Chlothar mounted his horse ‘and left there’. One of them was ten years old and the youngest seven… Queen Clotilde led such a life that she was venerated by the whole world… ‘Her conduct was always of the utmost purity and honesty: she granted goods to churches, monasteries everywhere to holy places, willingly and supplying them with whatever they needed…’

The third son of Chlodomer, the youngest, named Clodoald, was saved from the carnage and entered the clergy, after allegedly shearing himself. ‘He renounced the earthly kingdom and dedicated himself to the Lord’, Gregory writes beautifully. And Fredegar adds: ‘And he led a dignified life; the Lord deigns to perform miracles on his grave’. Clodoald was the founder of the monastery of Saint-Cloud in Paris, which bears his name, and died around the year 560… Clotaire, the uncle-murderer and the executioner, obtained Tours and Poitiers, with the sanctuaries of the patron saints of France, Martin and Hilary, together with the treasure.
 

Theudebert I, and killer kings

Theudebert [editor’s note: the son of Theuderic I and the father of Theudebald] was the first Frank to call himself Augustus and who felt he was the successor of the Roman Caesars and liked to adopt imperial attitudes like minting gold coins with his image that could be described as illegal. He ordered circus games to be held in Arles in the manner of the emperors and must have even thought of the conquest of Constantinople, cherishing the hope of seizing imperial dignity and world domination through an incursion against Byzantium, something planned jointly with the Gepids and Lombards. Such a man naturally had to be on good terms with the Church…

King Theudebert was a benefactor of the Church, which he ‘exempted from tax obligations and deliberately favoured’ (Zollner) while he did nothing more than bleed his Frankish subjects with taxes in the Roman manner… Very significant is the fact that his finance minister, Parthenius (grandson of Bishop Ruricius de Limoges, the murderer of his wife and her lover), on the death of Theudebert and despite the episcopal protection, was removed in Trier from a church, spat on, beaten and stoned by the enraged people.

Even more criminal and even more devoted to the Church was the family clan, which outlived Theudebert. Chlothar I also fought almost continuously during the last years of his life, without this fact bothering at all and not even attracting the attention of those who preached peace and love of neighbour and enemy. The king, undoubtedly the weakest of the Frankish princes until after the death of Theudebert I (558), took over the entire kingdom. He had nevertheless criticised the growing ecclesiastical wealth, but per his brother’s constitution of 554, he also tried to uproot whatever was left of the indigenous religions of his subjects.

It is true that in a winter campaign (555) against the Saxons he bore the worst of it, but the following year he imposed himself on the association of Saxons and Thuringians and even sent troops against the Ostrogoths of Italy. In 557 he fought again against the Saxons, apparently reluctantly, but ‘he was beaten with such enormous bloodshed, and with such a great multitude of casualties on both sides that no one can calculate or evaluate’ (Gregory). But he managed to beat the Danes and Eutenians…

A year later Clotaire also died, and with him the last of Clovis’ four sons, all of whom—like their father—had lived for robbery, murder and war. Everywhere they had gone in search of relics of martyrs, had taken care of relocating them and had promoted the veneration of the saints. They founded many monasteries and endowed them generously. They awarded large real estate to the clergy and made donations to them. The old annals abound in their praises…

Clotaire I, in whose territory the Church was poorly organised and the victim of special relaxation, perhaps didn’t care about Christianity at all. Anyway, he too became a Christian and a faithful Catholic, who waged war after war and had his closest relatives murdered, including young children, maidens, and even his own son, while personally bankrupting himself with countless concubines and at least six marriages ‘and not always successive’ (Schultze). Despite this, the ecclesiastical author of the 7th century compares this king with a priest, showering him with praise. And it is that, indeed, he worried about the transfer of the remains of martyrs, promoted the veneration of Medard, the patron saint of the royal house and supported the founding of churches and monasteries…

Childebert I showed a very special fervour and devotion to the clergy. The usurper and incestuous erected the Holy Cross and the Spanish proto-martyr Vicente de Zaragoza—whose martyrdom was adorned with great propagandistic displays—a basilica in Paris, which would later become the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He made a pilgrimage to the cell of Saint Euspicius, in whose honour he also built a church. He made donations of land and large sums of money, including the spoils of his wars for Catholic churches and monasteries, in which he ordered to pray for the salvation of his soul and the prosperity of the Frankish kingdom.

Thus he distributed among the Frankish churches dozens of chalices and numerous patens and gospels, all made of gold and precious stones, and all material that he had stolen in his Spanish war. Childebert made Orleans the ecclesiastical capital of his kingdom. There four national synods met (in the years 533, 538, 541 and 549). All Frankish kings sent their bishops to them (exception made for the one celebrated in 538). In 552 Childebert summoned another national council in Paris. He promulgated a decree against ‘paganism’ that was still alive, mostly in northern and eastern France. He harshly persecuted anyone who erected ‘idols’ in the fields or prevented their destruction by the priests. He forbade even pagan banquets, songs, and dances, though certainly without demanding conversion by force…

Vigil, the murderous pope, described Childebert in 546, as ‘our most glorious son’ and praised his ‘Christian will, pleasing to God’… Pope Pelagius died in 561, the same year that Clotaire I, the last son of Clovis, did. In that same decade, and together with the Franks and the Visigoths, another Germanic people began to play an increasingly important role: the Lombards.

Categories
Franks Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s criminal history, 129

– For the context of these translations click: here–

 

CHAPTER 2

CLOVIS, FOUNDER OF THE GREAT FRANKISH EMPIRE

‘One of the most outstanding figures in universal history’. —Wilhelm von Glesebrecht, historian

‘And it is certain that he knew himself to be a Christian, and a Catholic Christian, something that is manifested over and over again in the various performances of his reign’. —Kurt Aland, theologian

 
The Rise of the Merovingians

The original land of the Franks, whose name was associated at the beginning of the Middle Ages with the concepts of ‘brave’, ‘audacious’ and ‘daring’, was in the Lower Rhine. These people, which lacked a unitary leadership, arose probably from the coalition of numerous small tribes throughout the 1st and 2nd centuries c.e., between the rivers Weser and Rhine. They are mentioned for the first time just after the first half of the 3rd century, when they fought fierce struggles against the Romans that would continue throughout the 4th and 5th centuries. The Franks settled on the right bank of the river and then breached the Roman line of defence of the Rhine, which some had probably already overcome before by infiltrating the border region. They advanced on Xanten, that the Roman population had evacuated towards 450, having occupied it later by the small Frankish tribe of Chatuarii. They then entered the territory between the Rhine and the Moselle; the Franks took Mainz and Cologne, a city that, on occupying it definitively around 460, became the centre of an independent Frankish state, immediately on the left bank of the great river. Little by little they annexed more territory. During the first half of the 5th century they conquered the city of Trier four times and the Romans recovered it as many times, until in 480 it became definitively owned by the Franks. The number of its inhabitants, from about 60,000 in the 4th century, dropped to a few thousand in the 6th century.

The invaders founded small Frankish principalities in Belgium and northern France, each subject to a kinglet or little king. As early as 480 the entire Rhenish region between Nijmegen and Mainz, the Maas territory around Maastricht, as well as the Moselle valley from Toul to Koblenz, belonged to the Frankish territory. The Romans allowed the Franks to settle on the condition that they rendered certain military services as foederati (allies) and they became their most loyal comrades in arms of all Germans, although they were generally torn apart amid fierce tribal strife. But in the end it was the Merovingians who bid for all of Roman Gaul…

King Childeric died in 482. Almost twelve hundred years later, in 1653, a doctor from Antwerp discovered his tomb at Tournai, endowed with such wealth and sumptuousness that it far surpassed the more than 40,000 tombs of the Merovingian period uncovered by archaeologists. At the death of Childeric in 482 he was succeeded by Clovis I (466-511), aged sixteen and apparently an only child. Allied with different sister tribes, Clovis expanded the Salic territory around Tournai, which was insignificant and reduced to a small part of northern Gaul in Belgium Secunda, though he continued the plunder, assassinations and wars, increasingly widespread over the regions from the Roman province to the left bank of the Rhine.

Such attacks reached first as far as the Seine, then as far as the Loire and finally as far as the Garonne, bringing the Gallo-Romans under the rule of the Franks. Even then, that was called ‘having the Franc as a friend, and not as a neighbour’.

Such a bellicose people, over which the reputation of disloyalty also floated, was attractive to the Christian clergy from the beginning. The Arians, and even more so the Catholics, sought to win over their leader. In fact all the notable princes of that time in the West were Arian or heathen. Thus, as soon as Clovis was appointed King of Tournai, he was addressed by the Bishop of Reims, St. Remigius, a man of ‘eminent science’ and resurrector of the dead, according to the praise of Bishop Gregory who simultaneously highlights both traits…
 

A great bloodbath and the first date in the history of the German Church

Clovis soon passed from Soissons to Paris, which became the most important city and, at least since the 7th century, the true epicentre of the Frankish kingdom, in which almost all the Merovingian kings are also buried…

The Alemanni (or Suebi), first named in 213, had emigrated from the Elbe region and probably by the end of the 2nd century had made themselves strong in the Main region through various incorporations of German emigrants and soldiers. The name ‘Alemanni’ would mean what anyone who knows some German can still understand today: all males (alie Manner). The Alamanni, who were pressing on the Rhine and the line of fortifications on the frontier of the Roman Empire, broke in 406, accompanied in part by Vandals and Alans, dispersing through Gaul and Hispania.

When they tried to advance north-west from there, they clashed with the Franks, and in particular with the Francorans, who dominated the Moselle region. They had already allied with the Burgundians in 475 against the Alemanni, without clearly prevailing around 490 in a battle near Cologne, where the local kinglet Sigobert was wounded in one knee. Reason enough for Clovis to attack: in around 496-497 the Alaman king of unknown name died on the battlefield of Toibiacum. Clovis advanced into the German territory of the right bank of the Rhine and annihilated a good part of its still pagan inhabitants.

It is true that a decade later, around 506, they rose again; but again they suffered a bloody defeat, probably near Strasbourg, the Alaman king dying in battle again. Pursued by the Franks, they fled south to the pre-Alpine regions: Raetia Prima (province of Chur) and Raetia Secunda (province of Augsburg): territories under the influence of the Ostrogoth king Theodoric, who restrained his brother-in-law Clovis and who settled to the fugitives in Retia, Pannonia and northern Italy. But in the southern part of the Rhenish Hessen, in the Palatinate and the basins of the Main and Neckar the Alemanni were victims of the direct arrogance of Clovis. And from there the Franks later spread eastward to the Saale, the Upper Main and almost to the Bavarian Forest…

King Clovis had himself baptised in Reims with great pomp and with the assistance of numerous bishops. According to some, it ran annus 496-497, according to others 498-499; while according to some researchers, who put the war against the Alemanni in 506, we should think of the years 506-508. ‘It is the first date in the history of the German Church’ (Kawerau). Curiously, the event is linked to a great bloodbath and constitutes one of the most important events of the early Middle Ages.

The baptism of Clovis was a great feast. Streets and churches sparkled with their ornamentation. The baptismal church was filled with a ‘heavenly fragrance’, to the point that the attendees believed they were transferred ‘to the pleasant perfumes of paradise’.

Clovis was venerated as a saint in France.

Gregory of Tours refers that the king ‘advanced to the baptismal bath like a new Constantine’, and the comparison is terribly accurate, ‘to purify himself in the clean water of old leprosy and the dirty stains, which he had from ancient [pagan] times’. And Remigius, ‘the saint of God’, spoke to him with eloquent words: ‘Sigambrer, meekly bend your neck and worship what you burned and burn what you worshiped (adora quod incendisu, incende quod adorasli)’.

Who was this saint, who so arrogantly incited persecution, as did his colleague Avitus in his time? St. Remigius, like most of the prelates of that time (and not only of then), was of ‘illustrious’ lineage, and already at the age of twenty-two promoted to bishop of Reims. His older brother, Principius, was also bishop (of Soissons) and a saint too (their relics were to be burned by the Calvinists in 1567). Remigius, the apostle to the Franks, preached Catholicism to pagans and Arians with fervent zeal, something that clearly developed a ‘radical war’ (Schuitze), in which, according to a council of Lyon, ‘smashed the altars of idols everywhere and vigorously spread the true faith with many signs and miracles’…

Catholic Clovis made his own converts, pagans or Arians, so that the entire house of the Franks ended up being Catholic. Henceforth, a close ‘alliance between monarchy and episcopate’ (Fleckenstein) was created. The princes of the Church occupy the position of honour in the surroundings of Clovis and exert the maximum influence over him, especially Avitus and Remigius. And naturally the clergy are generously rewarded with the war spoils of the Merovingian. He rewards the prelates with largesse and splendour through foundations and donations of land… Since then ‘monarchy and church acted together for the further spread of Christianity’ (Schultze)…

From the research that we have today, it can well be argued that in reality the conversion of Clovis was a political, as that of Constantine had been before. Unlike the other Germanic peoples, the king and his people accepted Catholicism because it provided in advance a link between the conqueror and the Gallo-Romans who were subjected or who were to submit; linkage that did not occur in the rest of the Germanic kingdoms. Clovis, a sympathiser of the Church from an early age, became a Catholic to subdue the Arian Germanic tribes and win over neighbouring Gaul more easily with his strong majority of Roman Catholics…
 

Are we to free ourselves from a moralistic assessment of history?

After Clovis had won the war against the Visigoths with the help of the Francorans, between 509 and 511, the last years of his life, he achieved royal dignity over them. In any case, it forced the fusion of the Francorenan tribes with the Salian Franks.

He first instigated Chlodoric, son of King Sigobert of Cologne, to get rid of his father. ‘Look, your father has grown old and is limping with a crippled leg’. Sigobert ‘the Lame’, a former companion of Clovis, had limped since the battle of Toibiacum against the Alemanni, in which he had been wounded. At the hands of a hired assassin the prince eliminated his father in the beech forest. Through a delegation, Clovis congratulated the parricide and through it, he crushed his skull. The German historian Ewig describes all this with an elegant expression, too elegant we would say, of ‘diplomacy of intrigues’. After the double act, Clovis went to Cologne, the residential city of Sigobert, solemnly proclaimed his innocence in both crimes and, joyfully welcomed by the people, seized the ‘kingdom and the treasures of Sigobert’ (Gregory).

Then he fell on the Salian kings, with whom he was related. Such was the case, for example, of a Frankish king, Chararic, who had not once fought against Syagrius. With tricks Clovis seized him and his son. Later he locked them up in a monastery, had their hair cut off (the tonsure was a sign of the loss of royal dignity), forced Chararic to be ordained a priest and his son a deacon, and after having them beheaded he took over their treasures and kingdom.

Another relative, King Regnacar of Cambrai, his first cousin, was defeated by Clovis after having won over his entourage with a great amount of gold, which later turned out to be fake. After the battle, he mocked Regnacar, who was led into his presence in chains and who in 486 had helped him in the war against Syagrius: ‘Why have you humiliated our blood to that point and allowed yourself to be put in chains? You’d be better off dead!’ And he smashed his head off with an ax. They had also arrested Richar, the king’s brother: ‘If you had helped your brother, we would not have taken him prisoner’, Clovis rebuked him and killed him with another blow. ‘The named kings were close blood relatives of Clovis’ (Gregory of Tours). He also had their brother, Rignomer, liquidated in the vicinity of Le Mans. ‘Clovis thus strengthened his position throughout the Frankish territory’, to quote again the historian Ewig, thus summarising the existing situation.

The victims of Clovis’ consolidation of power throughout the Frankish territory were, it seems, several dozen Frankish cantonal princes. The tyrant had them murdered, seized their land and wealth, without ceasing to complain that he was alone:

‘Woe to me, now I find myself as a stranger among strangers and none of my relatives could help me, if calamity befalls me!’ But this was not meant because he was sorry for their death, but by cunning, in case perhaps there was still someone he could kill.

Such is the comment of St. Gregory, for whom Clovis was a ‘new Constantine’, and who embodied ‘his ideal of the ruler’ (Bodmer) and to whom he frequently appeared ‘almost like a saint’ (Fischer). Without shame the famous bishop adds:

But day after day God brought down his enemies before him and he increased his kingdom, because he walked with a right heart in His presence and did what was pleasing to His divine eyes.

This, as the context shows, also applies to Clovis’ murders of relatives. All is holy in the extreme, even the extreme crimes!

Such, then, was the primus rex francorum (Salic law), the king who ruled following to the letter the words of St. Remigius at his baptism: ‘Worship what you burned and burn what you worshiped’. Such was the Catholic king, that no longer tolerated any pagan vestige, although he commanded almost like an absolute tyrant and was bursting with hypertrophic brutality and rapacity, showing himself cautious and cowardly in front of the strongest and mercilessly crushing the weakest; the king who did not back down from any treachery and cruelty, who waged all his wars in the name of the Christian and Catholic God; the king who, with a sovereign power like few others and at the same time as a good Catholic, combined war, murder and religious piety, who ‘began his Christian reign with all premeditation on December 25’, who with his booty built churches everywhere, then he splendidly endowed and prayed in them, who was a great devotee of St. Martin, who carried out his ‘wars of the heretics’ against the Arians of Gaul ‘under the sign of an intense veneration of St. Peter’ (K. Hauck), and whom the bishops at the National Council of Orleans (511) exalted as ‘a truly priestly soul’ (Daniel-Rops).

That was Clovis. A man who, hearing the passion of Jesus, seems to have said that had he been there with his Franks, no such injustice would have been committed against the Lord. In the words of the old chronicler, he was as ‘an authentic Christian’ (christianum se verum esse adfirmat—Fredegar). And as the current theologian Aland also says: ‘And it is certain, and again and again he manifests it in the different performances of his reign, that he felt of himself as a Christian, and certainly a Catholic Christian’. In a word, that man who made his way ‘with the ax’ to climb the absolute rule of the Franks—as Angenendt graphically puts it—was no longer simply a military king, but thanks precisely to his alliance with the Catholic Church became the ‘representative of God on earth’ (Wolf). A man who, in the company of his wife St. Clotilde, finally found his last resting place in the Parisian Church of the Apostles, which was later called Sainte Geneviéve, when he died in the year 511, just turning forty: a great criminal, devious and ruthless, who established himself on the throne and, according to the historian Bosi, ‘a barbarian, who civilised and cultivated’.

The theologian Aland qualifies Clovis as akin to Constantine and euphemistically says that both were men of power, violent sovereigns and believes that justifiably: ‘Such rough times could only be controlled by such men’. But is it tough times that make tough men? Or is it not rather the other way around? One and the other are intimately united. And already St. Augustine had corrected the stupid accusation of the times: ‘We are the times; which are we, that’s the way the times are’. Aland wants to leave open the question of whether Constantine and Clovis were Christians:

Because both the sons of Constantine and Theodosius were rulers, of whose Christian confession there can be no doubt, and yet committed perfectly comparable acts of blood. If we want to understand them, we must free ourselves from such a moral assessment of history. Well, who among us whose people have a history of 1,500 years behind under the sign of Christianity, can say that he is Christian? Luther speaks of Christianity, which is always being made and which is never finished.

The Merovingian chroniclers glorify Clovis mainly for two reasons: for his baptism and his many wars. He became a Catholic demolishing and depredating everything around him he could destroy or prey. And thus, from an insignificant territorial principality, he created a powerful German-Catholic imperium, sealed in France the alliance between the throne and the altar, and became the chosen instrument of God who day after day struck down his enemies before him— :

because before God he walked with an upright heart, doing what was pleasing to His eyes.

—according to the enthusiastic praise of the bishop, St. Gregory.

As long as history is viewed in this way, as long as it remains outside of its ‘moral’ valuation and the vast majority of historians continue to crawl before such hypertrophic beasts of universal history with respect, reverence and admiration… history will continue to unfold as it does.