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Tag: Karlheinz Deschner

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Charlemagne Christendom Franks Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 163

– For the context of these translations click here –

 
Plunder and Christianisation, a trump card of Frankish government policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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Charlemagne Christendom Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 162

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Autobiography Charlemagne Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 161

– For the context of these translations click here –

The Frankish king Charlemagne was a devout Catholic who maintained a close relationship with the papacy throughout his life. In 772, when Pope Adrian I was threatened by invaders, the king rushed to Rome to provide assistance. Shown here, the pope asks Charlemagne for help at a meeting near Rome.

Anti-juridical sovereignty of Charles and the beginning of the pro-pope warfare

Shortly before Pope Stephen died at the end of January 772, Carloman had died (after having made large donations to churches and monasteries, and especially to the cathedral of Rheims and the abbey of Saint-Denis) on 4 December 771, near the beautiful forests of Laon where he liked to hunt. He was only twenty years old. Such a misfortune probably triggered a fratricidal war that was already in the offing. Charles, then probably in his early thirties, became ruler of the entire Frankish kingdom in flagrant violation of the law, as he deferred the inheritance rights of Carloman’s two sons, both of whom were still children, and in a swift act of plunder, he took over his brother’s kingdom.

This was a centuries-old Christian tradition, both in the East and in the West. And it ran in the family, since Charles Martell, Charles’s grandfather and also a bastard, had already excluded the direct heirs in a very similar way. And in 754, didn’t Charles’ father Pepin tonsure the sons of his brother, the deposed Carloman, locking them up in a monastery and burying their right of inheritance there forever?

The founders of Europe!

Strangely enough, we know almost nothing about Charles’ childhood and youth.

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Editor’s note:

The autobiographical genre I want to inaugurate, analysing our abusive parents, sheds great light on these issues.

Anyone who has read my De Jesús a Hitler will know that my father was picked on in Catholic schools. The priests perpetrated a tremendous psyop on him (remember that the Jesuits say that if you give them a child at six, mentally he will be theirs forever).

In one of the sources Deschner himself quotes, Charlemagne is said to have been educated in a monastery. That is the key to understanding everything he did when he left that place.

As bizarre as it may seem, analysing the mad father who mistreated us sheds intense light on historical figures who caused the darkest hour that the white man is currently suffering from. But who’s interested in this new literary genre?

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Even the year of his birth is disputed. The new Lexicón des Mittelalters (still unfinished), however, gives per other sources that are supposedly second-rate the date 2 April 747. The specific date comes from an old calendar from the monastery of Lorsch.

For a long time Charles was also considered to have been born out of wedlock; it was believed that he was born before the marriage of his parents, Pepin and Bertrada, daughter of Count Charibert of Laon, a relationship that only years later became a real marriage. Einhard wrote his famous book, Vita Karoli Magni, fifteen or twenty years after Charles’s death; but twenty years before that date he was already living in the palace of the then fifty-year-old king. He soon became part of his innermost family circle, sitting at his table and becoming his confidant; so it is completely implausible that he had heard nothing about his hero’s childhood and youth—especially when Einhard says that Charles spoke almost continuously, that he could be considered a ‘chatterbox’.

Pope Stephen’s successor was Pope Adrian I (772-795), who reigned longer than any of the popes who preceded him.

Adrian, who belonged to the Roman nobility, was already the third pope of the house of Colonna, and at the same time a strong supporter of his relatives, who held the most important offices of state. In foreign policy Adrian broke with the pro-Bardic attitude that had been maintained by his predecessor. He soon mounted a front against Desiderius, who refused to return to the Roman Church some of the cities and territories that had been the fruit of Pepin’s wars of plunder. By papal order, as soon as Paulus Afiarta, a supporter of the Lombards, returned from their court, he was seized by Archbishop Leo of Ravenna, who had him tortured and executed.

The elimination of the leaders of the pro-Lombard faction of the curia again provoked the Lombard king’s threats and attacks on the Church-State, with the obligatory arson, plunder and robbery. And so again came the Pope’s cries for help. He openly reminded Charles of the example of Pepin. He repeatedly urged and pressed him to intervene ‘against Desiderius and the Lombards in the service of God, in favour of the rights of St Peter and for the consolation of the Church’, and to ‘complete the preservation of the holy Church of God’. In this way he prepared the way for Charles’ intervention in Italy, who would later march south five times, anticipating the numerous Italian campaigns that the Germanic emperors would carry out in the future.

Einhard says: ‘At the request of Bishop Adrian of Rome he [Charles] launched the war against the Lombards. The pope, whose enlisted troops on all sides could not even remotely cope with the military might of his enemies, was burning with impatience for Charles’ intervention…’

It seemed almost impossible to take the passes that the Lombards had closed and to cross the gorges, ‘the Gates of Italy’. Walls, fortifications and towers enclosed the gorges of the valleys between mountain and mountain. The Franks were pinned between steep walls, their cavalry still less able to manoeuvre than their foot troops. Charles, huddled and sulky in his tent, held one council of war after another with his military, parleyed with the Lombards, and softened his demands more and more; but in vain. Then a skilful deacon, sent by Archbishop Leo of Ravenna, led a scara francisca over a high, undefended ridge, which centuries later, with the ruins of such fortifications still standing would be called the ‘Path of the Franks’. Surprised to suddenly see the Franks in their rear, the Lombards thought they were surrounded and abandoned their positions in disarray. It was a ruse that Charles often used in the war against the Saxons.

The aggressor first conquered Turin and then his army, crossing the Po plain ‘like an immense tide of floating ice’ (Stormer), fell on Pavia. Charles rejoined the other army corps and at the end of September laid siege to the Lombard residential town, which was heavily fortified and well supplied with soldiers, arms and supplies.

Charles prepared for a long siege, had his sons brought from the far-off homeland and also his wife Hildegard, who was fourteen years old. And when he heard that Adalgis, son of Desiderius, had taken refuge with Carloman’s widow and children in Verona, then undoubtedly the most fortified city in Italy, he set out at once with a small troop.

Whether due to treachery or regular surrender, Verona soon capitulated. The kinsmen, Gerberga with her sons, passed at Charles’ disposal but the sources are silent about their fate. At best—as twenty years earlier with the beloved relatives of his father Pepin—they were tonsured into monasteries. In any case, they disappeared from history.

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Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 160

– For the context of these translations click here –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Charlemagne Christendom Kenneth Clark Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 159

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Editor’s Note:

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Catholic Church Christendom Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Monarchy

Christianity’s Criminal History, 158

– For the context of these translations click here –

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

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

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

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

The most momentous event of the Middle Ages

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

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

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

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

Categories
Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 157

 
The formation of the Church-State by wars and pillage

‘But be vigilant, my children, strive earnestly to take part in what we desire! For you know that he who is on the other side will be excluded from eternal life’. —Pope Stephen II

‘The struggle for Christ and the Church is assigned to the Franks as their historic vocation’—John Haller


Plaque marking the casket containing Liutprand’s
bones in San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro in Pavia.

 

Papal negotiations between Byzantium, Longobards and Franks

While the dispute over the images was raging in Byzantium and its repercussions were shaking Byzantine Italy, King Liutprand was trying to seize the opportunity to extend the Longobard kingdom throughout Italy, especially in Emilia and Romagna. He systematically annexed Byzantine territory, conquered castle after castle, and strengthened his authority over the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. In short, he continually increased his political power within and beyond his borders. And when in 732 (or 733) Liutprand first conquered Ravenna—which had been in Byzantine hands for almost two hundred years and the exarch fled to the Venetian lagoons—the ally proved too dangerous for the Papacy…

Liutprand was a pious person, a faithful Catholic, a friend of the priests and an outspoken promoter of the Church. He erected a domestic chapel in his palace and was the first Longobard king to procure private chaplains. He instituted ecclesiastics ‘to celebrate daily divine service for him’ (Paul the Deacon). One of his relatives was the bishop of Pavia. He was generous with the clergy. He founded monasteries, built many churches which he decorated and practised the superstitious cult of relics. A prologue to his laws opens with a biblical quotation. And in a later prologue he expressly presents himself as a defender of the Roman Catholic faith. Gregory II fought against the return of the nuns to civil life, and Liutprand supported him with a relevant law…

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Editor’s note: Contrary to what we were told as children, Christianity was imposed on whites through royal power. This vindicates what I said yesterday: that only a brutal iconoclasm ordered by a Fourth Reich could cure the white man from the mental virus that is Christianity.

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Transamundus II had forcibly deposed his father Farvald in 724, imposing on him the tonsure and entry into the clerical state. When Liutprand advanced against him (738-739), set fire to the Pentapolis and ravaged Spoleto, Transamundus took refuge with the pope, who put the Roman army at his disposal against Liutprand. Liutprand in turn stormed into the Roman duchy, sacking it and conquering its castles on the northern frontier. And war broke out everywhere, both in Roman territory and in the lands of Ravenna. It is true that Transamundus provisionally (in December 740) conquered its capital and killed the new duke Hilderic, instituted by Liutprand. But the pope, who also used his bishops in the Longobard kingdom against his sovereign, was wary of the king’s power and appealed to the Frankish prince Charles Martell, who was far away but strong.

The Frankish steward, who from 720 undisputedly controlled the whole kingdom and fought almost without pause—also involving the Church to a large extent and using the monasteries as bridgeheads (Schwarzach, Gengenbach, Schuttem, the abbey of Reichenau)—saw the expansion of his authority and the spread of Christianity as inextricably linked. To put it briefly, Charles had become the most powerful man in Europe, and so accustomed was he to war and conquest that, as contemporary sources expressly note, there was hardly a year without war (namely 740). And that man appeared precisely as the true patron and protector of Christ’s representative.

So Gregory III tried repeatedly in 739 and 740 to incite Charles Martell against Liutprand, although the two were personal friends. The pope dreamed of unshackling Rome from the Byzantine empire and offered Charles the collation of the Roman consulship as well as the rank of patrician. Gregory III, who persisted in his efforts until his death (‘In no age’, a Frankish chronicler comments flatteringly, ‘was such a thing ever heard of or seen’) appealed in vain to Charles. The latter, who was little devoted to the Church, who was genealogically related to the Longobards, who was allied with and a friend of Liutprand, who in 737 adopted his son Pipin, remained completely deaf to the first call for papal help and died before a second could eventually reach him.

Among the ancestors of the Carolingians, Charles is the only one whom later ecclesiastical authors condemn, casting him into hell for all eternity because of the systematic reduction of the ecclesiastical patrimony due to him (precaria verba regis). In his lifetime this was interpreted in a completely different way, even if he had one of his ecclesiastical relatives beheaded, Abbot Wido, who, according to the monastic chronicle, was more fond of hunting and war than of divine service. Of course, he didn’t have him beheaded for that, but a conspiracy against Charles. What we know for sure is that he was far from being a stubborn enemy of the Church. We know of eight donations of goods, which he made to him personally.

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

Christianity’s Criminal History, 156

 
The papal revolution fails

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christianity’s Criminal History, 155

– For the context of these translations click here –

The dispute over images begins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) So-called saints

Christianity’s Criminal History, 154

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

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

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

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

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

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

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