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Tag: Karlheinz Deschner

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Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) So-called saints Tree

Christianity’s Criminal History, 153

– For the context of these translations click here –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christianity’s Criminal History, 152

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Islam Islamization of Europe Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 151

– For the context of these translations click here –
 

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

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

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

 
The irruption of Islam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 150

 

For the context of these translations click here

The Ascension of the Carolingians

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Armed mission among the Frisians

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

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

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

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

Categories
Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s Criminal History, 149

– For the context of these translations click here –

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

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

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

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

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

 
The throne and the altar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christianity’s Criminal History, 148

– For the context of these translations click here –

 

St. Gregory of Tours (Louvre)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Catholic Church Chess Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s Criminal History, 147

– For the context of these translations click here –

 
Ignorant, criminal on a grand scale and a good Catholic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Catholic Church 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).

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Goths 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.
 

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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:

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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).

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Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty Monarchy

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.