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Tag: Karlheinz Deschner

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s

Criminal History, 189

For the context of these translations click here.
PDFs of entries 1-183 (several of Deschner’s books
abridged into two) can be read here and here.

 

De bellis Parisiacis or ‘Nothing that would have been worthy of imperial majesty’

In November 885, the invaders’ Great Army appeared off Paris. Allegedly with countless small ships and 700 larger ships as well as a force of 40,000 men, they travelled up the Seine—possibly an act of revenge for the treacherous murder of their king, Gottfried, in May of the same year, in which Hugo was also blinded.

Together with Count Odo of Paris, the future king, Bishop Gauzlin (from the noble Rorgonid dynasty, once one of Charles the Bald’s closest confidants and archchancellor, chief shepherd of Paris from 884) initially took command of the encircled city, whose famous siege was described by an eyewitness, the monk Abbo, in his epic poem De bellis Parisiacis. When Bishop Gauzlin fell ill and died another clerical warhorse, Abbot Ebolus of St. Germain-des-Prés, led the defence, which became increasingly difficult, especially as the only East Frankish army sent to relieve the city under the notorious Count Henry withdrew without having achieved anything. The Normans had long since pillaged the surrounding countryside according to all the rules of the ‘art of war’ and did not shy away from cruelty in their assaults on the city. They are even said to have slaughtered their prisoners and filled the moats with their corpses. In any case, ‘many were killed on both sides, even more were incapacitated by wounds’. The Normans ‘continued their assault day after day’, they harassed Paris ‘without ceasing with the most diverse armoury of weapons, machines and wall-breakers. But as they all cried out to God with great fervour, they were always saved; and the battle lasted about eight months in various ways before the emperor came to their aid’ (Annales Vedastini).

It did not help, neither that of various count’s troops nor that of the church—Walo of Metz, ‘who took up arms against the holy precept and his episcopal dignity and went to war’. He fell ‘in the year of our Lord 882’ while fleeing from the Normans. Again and again, we read that there was no help at all, no resistance (nemine sibi resistente), or that if military action was taken, ‘nothing happy or profitable’ came of it (nil prospere vel utile), that ‘nothing memorable’ (nihil dignum memoriae) was accomplished. ‘And they accomplished nothing profitable there but returned to their homeland with great dishonour. For instead of striking a fortunate blow, they barely escaped in disgraceful flight, most of them being captured and killed’ (Annales Vedastini).

The emperor was also disappointing.

It was not until October that he finally arrived and encamped on the heights of Montmartre. The army was formidable, but the commander, Count Henry, himself an accomplished treacherous murderer and slayer fell with his horse into a Norman pit and, abandoned by his own, was killed in it. Charles could not make up his mind to do anything. For weeks he remained inactive and ‘did nothing in this place that would have been worthy of imperial majesty’. When it was even rumoured that a relief army under king Siegfried was already approaching the Seine, he bought off Paris and gave the Normans the territories on the other side of the Seine ‘for plundering because the inhabitants of the same would not obey him’ (Regino von Prüm).

Charles also left Burgundy to be plundered by the enemy but remained in the west for the time being. However, King Siegfried had already invaded the Oise and followed Charles, ‘devastating everything with fire and sword. When the emperor learnt of this—and the fire brought him certain news—he quickly returned to his country.’ Siegfried then continued his work of destruction. In the following year, 887, they ‘continued their usual raids as far as the Saone and the Loire and turned the country into a desert by burning and murder’ (Annales Vedastini). King Siegfried, however, turned to Friesland in the autumn, where he was killed.

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s

Criminal History, 188

For the context of these translations click here.
PDFs of entries 1-183 (several of Deschner’s books
abridged into two) can be read here and here.

 

When Christians have to endure what they usually do to others…

Anyone who reads the Annales Vedastini, the yearbooks of a monk from the monastery of St Vaast near Arras, which were only discovered in the middle of the 18th century, is confronted with this misery again and again, monotonously, certainly, grammatically pathetically. There is always talk of the ‘devastation and murderous fires’ of the pagan robbers, of their ‘thirst for human blood’. Day and night they kill ‘the Christian people’, they set fire to ‘monasteries and churches of God’, and they ‘continue their raids in their usual manner’.

All the suffering and misery that Christians otherwise brought to other countries, century after century, they experienced themselves. And, of course, their complaints never end. Plundering, devastation, enslavement, extermination everywhere. Everywhere: monasteries, churches, hostage murders, people fleeing and being massacred. Thus ‘in the year of the Lord 882 the Normans destroyed monasteries and churches to the ground, killed the servants of the divine word by the sword or by hunger or sold them across the sea and killed the inhabitants of the country without meeting resistance’. Thus, ‘in the year of our Lord 884: But the Normans did not stop killing, destroying the churches, tearing down the walls and burning the villages. In all the streets lay the corpses of clergy, nobles and other laymen, women, young people and infants.’ Or 885: ‘Then the Normans began to rage again, thirsting for fire and murder.’

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s

Criminal History, 187

For the context of these translations click here.
PDFs of entries 1-183 (several of Deschner’s books
abridged into two) can be read here and here.

 

Charles the Fat, to whom everything falls

The youngest son of Louis the German, Charles III (839-888), who was only given the nickname ‘the Fat’ (Crassus) in the 12th century by historians who probably wanted to express his meagre energy, was the heir to the smallest part of the empire—Alemannia and Alsace—and was initially unusually successful. But he was simply lucky. Without ambition, thirst for action or lust for power, everything fell to him as if by magic: Italy in 880, the imperial crown in 881, then the whole of East Franconia.

Having initially only ruled over the small Swabian kingdom since 876, he reigned after the death of his brothers, the ailing Bavarian King Carloman, who had renounced in favour of Charles in his last charter in 879, and King Ludwig III the Younger, who died on January 882 in Frankfurt without heirs. And after the death of the two West Frankish kings, Louis III, the victor of Saucourt, on 5 August 882, and his brother Carloman in December 884—the former lord of the north, the latter of the south of the Western Empire—Charles III was also recognised as emperor there. In 885, all secular and spiritual rulers submitted to him in the Palatinate of Ponthion, thus restoring the Frankish Empire.

However, he did not fight the Saracens, as the Pope had expected, but the Normans, as he had been constantly urged to do north of the Alps. And of course, he fought in his way; on his return from Italy, he first paid homage in Bavaria, then in Worms, before he surrounded the Norman camp in Asselt (Elsloo) on the lower reaches of the Meuse in July 882 with a huge army, including Lombard troops. But even when a lucky chance came to his aid when a terrible thunderstorm broke a breach in the walled fortifications, he did not storm off. He began to negotiate with the Normans after twelve days and bought their withdrawal with major concessions.

In return for an oath of allegiance and the promise of their leader Gottfried to become a Christian [emphasis by Editor], Charles ceded the province of Friesland to him. Gottfried, probably related to the Danish royal dynasty and often called king in the sources, was personally ‘raised from the holy spring’ by the emperor and allowed to marry Gisla, Lothar II and Waldrada’s illegitimate daughter. However, the attempt to integrate the prince into the Carolingian dynasty failed. And King Siegfried and the other Normans, reports Abbot Regino again, received ‘an immense amount of gold and silver: several thousand pounds of silver and gold’ (Annales Bertiniani), confessing that the pious emperor ‘had taken them from the treasury of St Stephen at Metz and other saints, and allowed them to remain, as they have done ever since, to devastate his and his cousin’s part of the empire’.

At the time, the emperor’s archchancellor, Bishop Liutward of Vercelli, was openly accused of having been bribed by the enemy and of having brokered the settlement together with one Count Wikbert. (In 887 the same ecclesiastical prince sued for adultery with the empress, and lost his court offices, whereupon he switched to Charles’ opponent Arnulf of Carinthia; in 899 the Hungarians slew him.)

Of course, the Norman misery did not end with all this, least of all in the Western Empire.

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s

Criminal History, 186

For the context of these translations click here.
PDFs of entries 1-183 (abridged translations)
can be accessed in the featured post.

 

Death of princes in East and West Franconia

From nearby Frankfurt, the terminally ill King Louis III, the victor of Andernach, sent an army against the invaders. But when he died on 20 January 882 ‘for the church and the realm’, as it is said, ‘after a life without gain for himself’ (Annales Bertiniani), his troops, already standing in front of the fortified camp in Elsloo, turned back, pursued by the Normans, who cheered Louis’ death, scorched and burned their way to Koblenz and then turned up the Moselle. On 5 April, ‘on the day of the Most Holy Supper of the Lord’, they attacked Trier, which they plundered and ‘burnt completely, having partly chased away and partly killed the inhabitants’ (Annales Fuldenses). When they marched against Metz, the local bishop Wala ‘fell in battle’ (Regino von Prüm).

In the west, Louis III, the victor of Saucourt, was already on his way to stop further enemy troops in the Loire region, but died on 5 August 882, only about twenty years old (because, as the Annales Vedastini reveal, he allegedly ran into the lintel of a girl on horseback and crashed too hard into the door of her father’s house). Although his brother Carloman continued the battle, with varying success and an enormous payment of 12,000 pounds of silver, he died in December 884, only eighteen years old, in a hunting accident in the forest of Bezu (near Andelys)—not by a boar, as was initially rumoured, but, the annalists assure us, ‘involuntarily’, by a fellow hunter, one of his servants, ‘who wanted to help him’. Both kings were buried in St Denis. Louis II had another son by his second wife Adelheid. However, as this son, the future Charles III the Simple, was still a five-year-old child, the greats of the country hoped for help from Charles III the Fat and invited him to West Franconia.

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s

Criminal History, 184

For the context of these translations click here.
PDFs of entries 1-183 (abridged translations)
can be accessed in the featured post.

 

Emperor Charles the Fat in the Chartularium monasterii Casauriensis, ordinis S. Benedicti.


 

Volume V, chapter 5:

Norman plight and
Charles III The Fat

‘But Charles, who held the title of emperor, marched with a great army against the Normans and reached their fortifications; but then his heart sank and, through the mediation of others, he obtained by a treaty that Gottfried and his own were baptised and took Friesland and the other estates which Rorich had possessed as fiefs again.’

—Annales Bertiniani

‘When the emperor became aware of their cunning tricks and the collusion of their machinations, he negotiated with Henry, a very clever man, with the secret intention of using a ruse to get rid of the enemy he had let into the far end of the empire. He decided to try it more by cunning than by force, so he sent off the envoys with an unclear message and let them return to Godefrid with the assurance that he would answer his messengers to all matters of their mission, as befitted both him and Godefrid, just so that he would continue to remain loyal. Thereupon he sent Henry to that man and with him, to conceal the deceit at work, Willibert, the venerable bishop of Cologne. Indeed Godefrid dies after first Everhard had struck him with a blow and then Henry’s companions had pierced him, and all the Normans who found themselves on the Betuwe are massacred. Only a few days later, on the advice of the same Henry, Hugh is lured to Gondreville by promises and deceitfully captured; on the emperor’s orders, his eyes are gouged out by the same Henry. He is then sent to Aiamannia to the monastery of St Gallus. Finally, he was shorn by my hand in the monastery of Prüm at the time of King Zwentibolch.’

—Abbot Regino of Prüm

Categories
Third Reich

Oldtown

Or

The skinny intellectual v. the blond beast

It is amazing how my knowledge of the origins of Christianity, and its bastard son ‘Neo-Christianity’—liberalism—, has changed my worldview thanks to Tom Holland’s Dominion and those books listed in the footnote to this post. So much so that I would like to take issue with what Eduardo Velasco, one of the intellectual heroes of this site, had to say about National Socialism before Blogger took down his site Evropa Soberana. In this post I rescued, Velasco quoted those passages from Mein Kampf in which Hitler said that the racial state’s aim is to train physically healthy men. Only after all this comes scientific instruction.

Hitler added that the racial state must start from the point of view that a man of modest education, but of sound body and firm character, full of will and a spirit of action, is of more value to Völkisch nationalism than a weak super-intellectual. Velasco, the admirer of Sparta, goes on to comment: ‘The NSDAP intended to organise German demography as if it were a farm—indeed, two of Germany’s leading racial ideologues, Heinrich Himmler and Walter Darré, had farming backgrounds’.

But there is a serious problem here. Now that I have finished uploading the most important PDF books to the featured post, I would like to quote my thoughts at the end of the last one I have put together: the second volume of our abridgement of Deschner’s book.

When a decade ago I read Hitler’s after-dinner talks in an edition of Ostara Publications, historian Arthur Kemp’s publishing house, the Führer’s laudatory comments on Charlemagne (Appendix I of this PDF) surprised me. It is true that in 1935 Himmler’s SS created a stone monument in memory of the Saxon victims murdered by Charlemagne and his henchmen. But if Hitler had become truly wise, instead of risking his newly created Reich in a foolish adventure against the Soviet Union, he would have devoted all his efforts to founding a New Germania which would have been the cultural centre for exposing Christianity and its bastard son, neo-Christianity (which I now try to do in The West’s Darkest Hour without the Reich’s formidable resources). Gradually, the Third Reich could have become the intellectual lighthouse that, by now, would have illuminated Europe after the Dark Middle Ages—and the Dark Modern Ages! (cf. the book Dominion excerpted in Neo-Christianity).

By putting all the emphasis on the Jewish Question and not on the Christian Question, and by launching a premature war (lack of atomic bombs) against the Soviet Union, Hitler’s Reich put the cart before the horse.

Both National Socialists (NS) and today’s white nationalists ignore that it is impossible to solve the Jewish problem if we don’t first understand that it is precisely Christians—think of the fanatically philo-Semitic Americans—, and atheistic neo-Christians, who have empowered Jewry, blacks, immigrant Muslims in Europe, so-called liberated women, so-called gays, transgender men, etc.

Despite his genius, Hitler never had the opportunity to read scholarly books about Charlemagne’s crimes that had not been written, such as the one eventually written decades after the very young Karlheinz was wearing his NS uniform. If Hitler, Rosenberg and others at the top of the NS intelligentsia had known what we now know, that Jesus didn’t even exist and that the entire New Testament was written by Jews,[1] they wouldn’t have fantasised about an Aryan Jesus and perhaps would have focused all their efforts on refuting Christianity, and its secular offshoots, in a Germania that could well be depicted in the image below, Oldtown.

In other words: Hitler’s Weltanschauung was perfectible but certainly not perfect. It was necessary, imperative I dare say, for NS intellectuals to see what Deschner would eventually discover about the real history of Christianity; what someone like Holland would discover about the history of Neo-Christianity, and how the Jews invented the stories of the four Gospels after the year 70 c.e. and the destruction of their Jerusalem Temple.

The slim Deschner in NS uniform was more important than the blond beast of Himmler’s farms. Hitler ignored this and wanted to win by brute force, with the results we know: after the catastrophe of 1945 the Germans betrayed themselves by internalising the narrative imposed on them by the American Diktat.

____________

[1] The books that would hit the nail on the head on this issue were published about seven decades or more after the death of NS Germany: On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt by Richard Carrier (2014), Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity by Richard C. Miller (2015), and The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul’s Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years by David Skrbina (2019). Carrier’s and Miller’s books are for scholars, Skrbina’s is an essay.

Categories
Daybreak Publishing Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

2nd volume

The abridged translation of our second volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s Christianity’s Criminal History is complete (volume I is available in the featured post).

I insist that these books should also be available in printed form, and if any visitors are interested in contributing a donation so that I can request the services of a technician to learn how to use IngramSpark’s software, in the hope that they will not cancel my account for political incorrectness (as the printer who published our books cancelled me last year), I would appreciate it.

The data Deschner collects is fundamental to curing the Aryan man of his ethnosuicidal passion, as can be glimpsed in the final section of this book, which for the moment will only be available in PDF.

Categories
Daybreak Publishing Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Deschner, book 2

Imperial silver denarius of Charlemagne
inspired by Roman models. This representation
is the closest thing to a contemporary
portrait of the Imperator.

I have decided to discontinue the translations of Deschner’s monumental work that I started doing for this site in August 2013, ten years ago.

The reason is simple, as I explain in the forthcoming preface to the second abridged book, people know about the Christian crimes of the second millennium but hardly anyone knows about the crimes of the first millennium:

Editor’s foreword

The two-book abridgement of the contents of the first volumes of Karlheinz Deschner’s Criminal History of Christianity, originally published in German, is intended for white nationalists. Both nationalists and historically literate people are unaware that Christianity was not imposed on the white man by preaching but by imperial violence. I chose the images for the covers of these two books, Constantine and Charlemagne because they seem to me to represent not only how a cult of Semitic origin was imposed on the whites of the Mediterranean by order of the Roman Empire, but a few centuries later on the Northmen through genocidal wars.

The historical material collected by Deschner is very different from the psycho-historical material collected by Tom Holland in his 2019 book Dominion (page 3 of this book which the reader holds in his hands mentions an abridged version of Dominion available on my website The West’s Darkest Hour). Holland discusses the traces that Christian morality, from its origins, caused the rampant egalitarianism that burns the West today. On the other hand, Deschner collects the cases of Christian crimes hardly known to Christians and non-Christians alike, as it is the winners who write history; and since Constantine the imperial church was particularly successful in destroying the books of its critics (in the case of the Saxons annihilated by Charlemagne, they did not possess a culture as advanced as that of the Greco-Romans).

We have all heard of the crimes of the Catholic Church in the second millennium of Christianity: the Inquisition for dissenting men and the burning at the stake of innocent women labelled witches. But the crimes of the first Christian millennium are virtually unknown: a blind spot that this two-volume translation of a fraction of Deschner’s work aims to cure. As I have stated on my website, to save the white man from the coming extinction it is necessary to become aware of both sides of the coin: the crimes of first-millennium Christianity (Deschner) and how Christian morality permeates today’s secular world (Holland).

Last month I finished abridging Tom Holland’s book to popularise it through PDF abridgement. Now it is the turn of Karlheinz Deschner’s book.

César Tort
July 2023

If there is little point in continuing to translate other Deschner books on, say, the Inquisition in the second millennium of Christianity (as it is well-known history), the discontinuation of these translations with Charlemagne’s immediate successors seems pertinent to me.

The entries published in this site from the 1st instalment of the Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums series to instalment 100 constitute the first book, Christianity’s Criminal History Vol. I, which can be read through the featured post. In the following days, I will review the syntax of Christianity’s Criminal History Vol. II (entries 101-183), which will have the cover of Charlemagne. Therefore, I will upload a few posts here while I am busy with the next PDF which will also be available for free to the visitors of this site.

We would appreciate your support in this venture, especially monthly donations, even if it is a modest amount so that we can continue in this endeavour. Thank you.

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s criminal history, 183

– For the context of these translations click here –

Miniature in the
Grandes Chroniques de France.

 
John VIII (872-882), a pope in his own right

Inspired by Gregory I and Nicholas I, his models, he took the directional role of the popes to an extreme. Just as Leo IV transformed St Peter’s, the Vatican quarter, the ‘Leonine City’, into a fortification, so John VIII walled up St Paul’s Basilica and the entire annexed suburb, which he called ‘Johannipolis’. And just as his predecessor—after having generously released Louis II from an oath issued through Duke Adelchis of Benevento in 871—had urged the emperor ‘to resume the struggle’ (Regino of Prüm), so also Pope John accompanied Louis’ war against the Saracens with vigorous biblical sentences and, as did Leo IV, absolved from their sins all those who ‘fall with Catholic piety against pagans and infidels’ and promised them the peace ‘of eternal life.’

This representative of Christ also recruited soldiers, obtained a Moorish cavalry from the King of Galicia, probably founded the office of president of the shipyards and probably in a ‘fresh initiative’ (Seppelt, Catholic) founded the first papal navy: ships occupied by troops, equipped with catapult machines capable of throwing stones, spears and hooks for boarding and moved by slave oarsmen. He was the first pope-admiral to go on the hunt for Saracens, managing to kill many of those ‘wild animals’—as he called them with the language of a true saintly father—and seize eighteen ships from Cape Circe. A ‘heroic deed,’ according to the Catholic Daniel-Rops. He was also determined to prevent any serious collaborationist contagion by threatening Christians who negotiated with the Saracens with ecclesiastical ex-communication.

John VIII worked to destroy the empire and the kingdom of Italy to increase the power of his see, to dominate bishops and princes alike, and to direct Italy politically. ‘He who is to be raised by Us to the imperial dignity must first and foremost also be called and chosen by Us,’ he declared with astonishing boldness, while dazzling with the imperial crown, sometimes simultaneously, almost all possible candidates such as Boson of Vienne, the king of Provence, the sons of Louis the Germanic, Carloman and Louis III, and above all the West Frank Louis the Stammerer, son of Charles the Bald. And to each, he promised all exaltation, glory and salvation in this world and the next, all the kingdoms of the world. And to each he inculcated that he was the only candidate, claiming that in no other had he sought help and assistance! And when at last it was clear to him that he could not expect much from the Franks, he turned to Byzantium.

On 16 December 882, in a palace riot, a pious relative, who himself wanted to be pope and rich, poisoned him; but as the poison did not act quickly enough as the Annales Fuldenses report in brief but impressive words: ‘He struck him with a hammer until it stuck in his brain’ (malleolo, dum usque in cerebro constabat, percusus est, expiravit). It was the first papal assassination. And the example created a school.

While the Christians were thus attacking one another, not only in the narrow circle of the popes and not only in Italy, while their great ones were extorting money from one another, and while in the south they were robbing, killing and burning the Saracens, in the north the Normans were still present. Indeed, the Norman danger had grown worse. Even the Frankish king Carloman II asked in 884: ‘Is it any wonder that pagans and foreign peoples lord it over us and take away our temporal goods when each of us violently deprives his neighbour of the necessities of life? How can we fight with confidence against our enemies and those of the Church, when in our own house we keep the spoils stolen from the poor and when we go on a campaign to fill our bellies with stolen goods?’

Categories
Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s criminal history, 182

– For the context of these translations click here –

 

The papacy in the middle of the 9th century

The Vatican becomes a castle and a holy pope a fortification builder

When in August 846 seventy-five Saracen ships appeared at the mouth of the Tiber, around 11,000 men and 500 horses fell on the districts of Rome on the right bank of the Tiber, eleven thousand men and five hundred horses fell on the districts of Rome to the right of the Tiber, completely sacking the church of St Peter outside the wall of Aurelius as well as the basilica of St Paul and taking prisoner all those who had not fled, ‘including the inhabitants of the monasteries, men and women’ (Annales Xantenses), the contemporaries saw it as a punishment of Providence against the corruption that was invading Rome.

After the surprise attack, it was the defeat, the disgrace provoked by Saracens and pagans, which inflamed the faithful. Why had Saint Peter not been better defended? A capitulary blames the sins of Christianity and points out the remedies: to fight against one’s wickedness, against the sins of the flesh and the theft of the ecclesiastical patrimony! In addition, Lothair I ordered alms to be collected throughout the empire and imposed a special tax for the reconstruction of the church of St Peter and its protection, to which the emperor and his brothers contributed ‘not a few pounds of silver’.

In the meantime, Pope Sergius II had died. And on the very day of his death, his successor was elected: a Roman, educated from childhood in the Benedictine monastery of St Martin and an ‘exemplary religious’ (Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche). It was Leo IV (847-855), who after a six-week interpontificium was consecrated pope, and again without imperial approval, which had been necessary since 824. It seems that the crisis caused by the Arab pirates didn’t permit any delay, although the oath of allegiance to the emperor was subsequently demanded of him.

Pope Leo IV and the Fire in the Borgo. The fresco is believed
to have been designed by Raphael, but was likely painted
by Giulio Romano and others in Raphael’s workshop
between 1514 and 1517 when Pope Leo X was pontiff—Ed.

This saintly father achieved a reputation as a master builder of fortifications that can be said to have lasted until the present day. He transformed the suburbs of Rome on the right bank of the Tiber, the entire neighbourhood of the Vatican, into a castle in an undertaking that was important for centuries. It was a plan that Leo III had already been contemplating, but which only Leo IV brought to fruition. In a work of years, personally inspected by him on foot or horseback, he reinforced the old city walls, created new fortifications and thus became the creator of the civitas leonina, to which he modestly gave his name ‘city of Leon’. Between 848 and 852 he built a wall almost forty feet high and as many feet thick, reinforced with 44 towers.

The work of fortifying required abundant materials and numerous workers, who had to contribute to cities and monasteries of the Papal State, dominions and militias. But the papal stronghold also cost large sums of money, which came mainly from the Frankish Empire—something the papal biographer completely omits—on the orders of the very obliging Lothair,  with the strange effect that it was due to the pope and his position vis-à-vis the emperor!

The devastated St Peter’s was again lavishly decorated. On the high altar were placed sheets of gold enamelled with precious stones, each weighing 216 pounds; a gold cross, embossed with pearls and emeralds, weighed 1,000 pounds, and a silver ciborium or baldachin over the altar weighed 1,606 pounds. As St Paul’s and many temples, even in the provinces, were also expensively decorated, it could be seen how immensely rich the Church was, for which collections were already being made everywhere because of its ‘poverty’ (as they still are today).

It is understandable that the ‘sons of Satan’, who came from Sardinia, appeared at the mouth of the Tiber as early as 849, long before the fortification of Leon was erected. At last, they had seen what was hidden in those Christian temples and what was piled up at St Peter’s. ‘The imagination cannot comprehend the richness of the treasures piled up there’ (Gregorovius).