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One version of Carolingian Christianity. The obverse side of Harrach ditpych, made as an ivory book cover for a gospel book by the so-called "Court School of Charlemagne" c.800. At the top we can see the four evangelists, on the middle right the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, the middle left the Nativity, the botton right the Crucifixion and the bottom left Mary and Mary Magdelene visiting Jesus' tomb and finding it empty. So very focused on the Bible and the core of the Christian story in the gospels, fitting the profoundly religious ethos of Charlemagne's court. The reverse side (below) was carved in Visigothic Spain or Lombard Italy sometime between 700 and 750. It shows the apostles Peter and Paul, important symbols of the Institutional church. Photo credit: yours truly. |
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| A very different side of early medieval Christianity is shown in this stone carving from the Cologne region in Western Germany. We don't know the date of it - it could have been made any time between 600 and 1050. We have no idea who made it either, but they were certainly much lower in social standing and prestige than the court of Charlemagne, hence the much cruder artistry. It shows Christ as a charismatic, superhero-like figure, taming the beasts during his 40 days in the wilderness. |
Basically, if we were to divide modern Germany into quarters, Saxony in the eighth century would very roughly correspond to the top left quarter. Indeed, for those of you who know your Cold War history, eighth century Saxony almost (but not exactly) corresponds to the British Zone of Occupation from 8th May 1945 - 1st January 1947. It was also the ancestral homeland of the Angles and Saxons who came over to Britain in the fifth century.
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An early twentieth century map of Old Saxony. Credit: By Gustav Droysen - General Historical Hand Atlas, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2465783. Compare to the map of the British Occupation Zone in post-WW2 Germany (below). |
This was a heavily forested region of Northern Germany that had never known Roman rule. It had no cities or roads. And it knew very little of "government." The Continental Saxons had no kings or written laws. They were basically lots of different independent tribes who, so far as we can tell, all spoke Old Low German. Each tribe was ruled by an ealdorman, who had the power to raze the villages of anyone who opposed his authority though we know little else about them. The Saxon social hierarchy was divided into three groups - the nobles (edhilingi), free peasants (frilingi) and slaves (lazzi). In times of great external threat, they would all come together under the leadership of temporary war-leaders that are called duces in the Latin sources. The instinctive English translation of this word is "dukes", but that is misleading. Representatives from all the Saxon tribes and all three castes met in annual assemblies at a place called Marklo, where they confirmed their unwritten tribal customary laws, settled disputes and made decisions about whether or to go to war. So while the Continental Saxons were generally quite primitive, they didn't lack political organisation altogether either. And most importantly of all, they were Germanic pagans, who worshipped Odin, Thor, Tyr, Frey, Freyja and a whole host of more local deities.
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| Here are the Merseburg charms, a short list of spells and prayers written in Old High German verse from pre-Christian Saxony preserved on a flyleaf a ninth century sacramentary, inserted there by a monk of the monastery of Fulda sometime before 1000 AD. It was discovered at Merseburg Cathedral Library in 1841 by Georg Waitz, a titan of medieval academic history, and was studied extensively by Jakob Grimm of Brothers Grimm's Fairy Tales fame. This is one of the very few pieces of evidence, written or material, we have for what the religion of the Pagan Continental Saxons actually was like. It raises so many questions as well. Why would a Saxon monk include vernacular pagan charms, no doubt ones recited by his ancestors, in a book of hymns and rituals written in Latin for use in Christian church services? Credit: By Unknown scribe - https://archive.thulb.uni-jena.de/korax/rsc/viewer/Korax_derivate_00002549/VDS_Ms%20Cod%20I%20136_088.tif, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78257477 |
Why was it such a big achievement for Charlemagne to conquer Saxony? Its not hard to see the answer. There was no central government to negotiate surrender with, no capital to lay siege to and no head of state to kill or take prisoner. The contrast here with Charlemagne's conquest of the Lombard kingdom in Italy in 774 or the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 couldn't be more obvious. Basically, as the primary sources make incredibly clear, the conquest couldn't succeed until every last Saxon tribe, indeed every last free Saxon male, submitted to Charlemagne. The lack of roads and cities it even more difficult, to the point the Franks had to try and create the infrastructure (fortified towns, canals etc) from scratch in order to conquer Saxony.
What's more, it was totally unprecedented. The Romans had completely given up trying to conquer Germany in 17 AD, setting the frontier at the strategic chokepoints provided by the rivers Rhine and Danube. Contrary to German nationalist mythmaking, this was not because of Arminius (a.k.a Hermann the German) butchering Varus and the Roman legions at the Teutoburger Wald. Indeed, Augustus' grandson Germanicus Julius Caesar had led expeditions to avenge Varus and punish the Germanic tribes in 15 AD. However, the more time Germanicus spent in Germania, the more he realised that the conquest simply wasn't worth it. Compared to Gaul or even southern Britain, Germany was just too poor and underdeveloped and its people were just too resistant to the idea of Roman rule, so that it would be a lot of hassle for too little gain.
The Merovingians (481 - 751) had managed to bring much of central and southern Germany into their Frankish kingdom, and slowly Christianise it with the help of Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries. But with Saxony, the most they were ever able to do was, every couple of generations, defeat the Saxons decisively in battle, ravage as much of their territory as they could and force them to pay tribute in herds of cattle. Meanwhile, the Saxons regularly raided over the rivers Main and Rhine into Frankish territory and sometimes took sides in internal political struggles in the Frankish kingdom. Thus when the Carolingians took over, it seemed politically advisable to neutralise the Saxon threat. Moreover, an important part of the Carolingians' image as kings involved them being enthusiastic defenders and promoters of Christianity, and by the mid-eighth century peaceful attempts at converting northern Germany were getting nowhere. Charlemagne needed to take a different approach to the Saxons from his Merovingian predecessors, or even from his grandfather and father - namely wholesale systematic conquest.
As I said earlier, and this was something that Charlemagne's biographer Einhard and every historian after him remarked on, the task wasn't easy. The conquest of Saxony took 32 years (772 - 804) as a result of constant rebellion, truce-breaking and resistance to Christianisation on the part of the Saxons. Charlemagne had to respond to this with severe brutality. The most infamous incident was at Verden in 782 where the Frankish sources say that 4,500 Saxon prisoners of war were slaughtered at Charlemagne's orders. Einhard also claims that Charlemagne deported ten thousand rebels from Saxony and forced them to live elsewhere in Gaul and Germany. Its perhaps no surprise that the Saxon wars have provoked a lot of unease in modern times. The massacre at Verden would definitely be considered a war crime today, and certainly reveals a dark, ruthless streak to Charlemagne's leadership. He had of course shown such a streak on a few other occasions. Let's not forget this was the very same Frankish king who divorced his first wife (the Lombard princess Desiderata) then waged war against her father, defeated and humiliated him. He also may or may not have murdered his nephews, Richard III style. Yet I think anyone who claims the conquest of Saxony amounts to a "genocide" is taking it too far. Much like with the comparable case of Oliver Cromwell at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649 (I recently taught this to my Year 8s), some perspective is needed. As Charlemagne saw it, he was punishing oath-breakers, not exterminating an inferior race. Indeed, much of the Saxon nobility converted and became part of the post-conquest ruling class, and the Carolingians allowed the Saxon language and tribal customary laws to survive. And the Merseburg Charms I showed you earlier show the process of Christianisation was in truth a lot more complex than conversion at the point of a sword (more about that later).
It has also made German nationalists question whether they should see Charlemagne as a German national hero. Notably, the Nazi Party in their early days in the power condemned Charlemagne as a French imperialist under the influence of who heartlessly slaughtered the racially pure Aryan Saxons. Indeed, at a Nazi rally in 1934, 4,500 torches were lit in memory of the Saxons slain in Verden, and 4,500 memorial stones were erected for them as well. The pro-Nazi playwright and pseudoarchaeologist Edmund Kiss imagined Charlemagne torturing the Saxon war-leader Widukind into converting to Christianity by having blonde haired, blue-eyed Saxon maidens raped by dusky Jews and Moors. As always, these sauerkraut-flavoured fascists with a passion for ancient Hindu symbols and goose-stepping made monstrous distortions of German history to further their own genocidal white supremacist ideology.
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| The Sachsenhain: the Nazi memorial to the Saxons slain by Charlemagne in 782. Its truly disturbing to think that the massacre of 4,500 Germanic warriors more than a thousand years earlier was seen by Hitler's supporters as an act of inhuman cruelty, but when they went on to engage in the industrial mass-murder of millions of Jews, communists, homosexuals, disabled people, Slavs etc less than a decade later it was seen as the right course of actiom. |
The consequences of the Conquest of Saxony were huge. Within three generations of the conquest, the Saxons had been completely converted to Christianity and a network of bishoprics and monasteries had been established all over the region. The Saxon aristocracy had become much wealthier and more powerful, and gained much more landowning rights vis a vis the free peasantry. Then in the tenth century, the Carolingians were replaced in the lands east of the Rhine by a new dynasty of kings and emperors who themselves hailed from Saxony and claimed descent in the maternal line from Widukind himself - the Ottonians (919 - 1024). And in the High and Late Middle Ages, Saxony was part of the heartlands of Western Christendom, producing missionaries, Teutonic crusader knights and Hanseatic merchants. Finally in the sixteenth century, it would give birth to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.
Other than through violence, how was this transformation achieved? Fortunately for us, like with a lot of other events in Carolingian history, the conquest and Christianisation of Saxony has generated quite a lot of primary sources by early medieval standards. The one that follows is a Capitulary (royal legislative directive) that Charlemagne issued for the Saxon territories. The date is uncertain. Traditionally it has been dated to 785, when Widukind submitted to Charlemagne and accepted baptism, resulting in a seven year lull in hostilities between Franks and Saxons. But recently, Yitzchak Hen, Robert Flierman and Ingrid Rembold have suggested that it was more likely written a decade later, in 794 or 795.
The dating does make a significant difference. If it was written in 785, then it would have come from a victorious Frankish king, still in his prime, confidently asserting his authority over the conquered Saxons. But if it was written in 794 or 795, then it would have come from a stressed-out, middle-aged ruler who had just been through the fourth (and last) great crisis in his reign. In 792, Charlemagne's own eldest son, Pippin the Hunchback (768 - 811), had plotted with a group of Frankish nobles to assassinate him and usurp the throne. The conspiracy was foiled, and most of the conspirators were executed, though Charlemagne was merciful to his own son - he had him tonsured and imprisoned in a monastery instead. In the same year, the Saxons revolted, Gaul was hit by a devastating famine, Arabs and Slavs invaded the southern and eastern frontiers and war had begun with Avar Khaganate in Hungary. To add to this, a new heresy called Adoptionism was spreading into the Pyrenees from Spain. Charlemagne therefore needed to make a statement about his authority and what direction the regime was going to go now. This he did at the Council of Frankfurt in 794, where Charlemagne condemned both Adoptionism and the worship of images supported by the Greek Church as heresies, fixed grain prices and reformed the coinage. All of this basically showed that he was a good orthodox Christian king who cared for the physical and spiritual welfare of his people. He then embarked on his final military campaign in Saxony.
Its in this context that I think Charlemagne's Capitulary for the Saxon Territories makes the most sense. It would made a good muscular statement of his power and authority as a Christian ruler in a time of crisis/ post-crisis. We've seen other examples of how Carolingian rulers used legislation to this effect, such as the Edict of Pitres (864) issued by Charlemagne's grandson, Charles the Bald. We might not have to go as far as the late Patrick Wormald in seeing most early medieval royal law-making as really being an exercise in propaganda. But there is some merit in this kind of view, considering that there's always a gap between what the law says and what society does. That gap was going to be even bigger in the Carolingian Empire, which possessed only a skeletal government bureaucracy and lacked standing armies, police forces or even professional lawyers and judges (north of the Alps anyway). And Wormald was undoubtedly right to think that laws, first and foremost, reflect the mindsets of the people who make them.
The Capitulary for the Saxon Territories basically lays out the laws by which Saxony will be governed once it is conquered. It prescribes the death penalty for 11 different crimes and transgressions, probably more than any other single legislative act in early medieval history, that some historians have called it the "Terror Capitulary." But what makes the Capitulary so interesting to me, is that it tells us so much about what being a Christian meant to Charlemagne and his advisers as they made one final push to convert the pagan Saxons.
(All of the following source quotations are taken from Paul Edward Dutton, Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Second Edition), Toronto University Press (2009), pp 66 - 69)
Chapter 4: If anyone, out of contempt for Christianity, shall have despised the holy Lenten fast and shall have eaten flesh, let him be punished by death. But nevertheless, let it be taken into consideration by a priest, lest by chance anyone from necessity has been led to eat flesh.
Chapter 6: If anyone deceived by the Devil shall have believed, after the manner of the pagans, that any man or woman is a witch and eats men, and on this account shall have burned the person, or shall have given the person's flesh for others to eat, or shall have eaten it himself, let him be punished by a capital sentence.
Chapter 8: If anyone of the race of Saxons hereafter concealed among them shall have wished to hide himself unbaptised, and shall have scorned to come to baptism and shall have wished to remain a pagan, let him be punished by death.
Chapter 9: If anyone shall have sacrificed a man to the devil, and after the manner of the pagans shall have presented himself as a victim to the demons, let him be punished by death.
Chapter 15: Concerning the lesser chapters all have consented. To each church let the parishioners present a house and two mansi of land. And for each one hundred and twenty men, noble and free, and likewise liti, let them give to the same church a man-servant and a maid-servant.
Chapter 16: And this has been pleasing, Christ being propituous, that whencesoever any receipts shall have come into the treasury, either for the breach of peace or for any penalty of any kind, and in all income pertaining to the king, a tithe shall be rendered to the churches and priests.
Chapter 17: Likewise, in accordance with the mandate of God, we command that all shall give a tithe of their property and labour to the churches and priests; let the nobles as well as the free men, and likewise the liti, according to that which God shall have given to each Christian, return a part to God.
Chapter 18: That on the Lord's day no meetings and public judicial assemblages shall be held, unless perchance in a case of great necessity or when war compels it, but all shall go to church to hear the word of God, and shall be free for prayers and good works. Likewise, also on special festivals they shall devote themselves to God and to the services of the church and shall refrain from secular assemblies.
Chapter 19: Likewise, it has been pleasing to insert in these decrees that all infants shall be baptised within a year; and we have decreed this, that if anyone shall have despised to bring his infant to baptism within the course of a year, without the advice or permission of the priest, if he is a noble he shall pay 120 solidi to the treasury, if a freeman 60, if a litus 30.
Chapter 21: If any man should have made a vow at springs or trees or groves, or shall have made any offering after the manner of the heathen and shall have taken a repast in honour of the demons, if he shall be a noble [he shall pay] 60 solidi, if a free man 30, if a litus 15. If, indeed, they have not the means of paying at once, they shall be given into the service of the church until the solidi are paid.
Chapter 22: We command that the bodies of Saxon Christians shall be carried to the church cemeteries and not to the mounds of the pagans.
Chapter 23: We have ordered that diviners and soothsayers shall be handed over to the churches and priests.
From these chapters from the Capitulary I've shared with you we can see the following patterns in what made one a Christian, according to Carolingians:
- Baptism is absolutely essential to making someone a Christian, and therefore everyone over the age of 1 year old must be baptised or face consequences.
- Christians must fast during Lent, attend Church on Sundays and celebrate Christian holy days by not working or attending any kind of public meeting other than religious services.
- Christians do not make human sacrifices, pray in sacred groves or bodies of water, burn witches or consult fortune-tellers - these superstitions make you a relapsed pagan in need of punishment.
- Christians must be buried in churchyards.
- Christians must live in a parish community and provide for their local priest, including by compulsory payment of the tithe.
All the ways in which it defines being a Christian are either through external acts i.e. getting baptised, going to Church on Sunday, fasting in Lent etc, or negative i.e. not making human sacrifices. Nowhere in the legislation does it talk about what Christian ideas and teachings the Saxons should know, other than they shouldn't be believing in certain pagan superstitions like polytheism, nature worship cannibalistic witches or fortune-telling. The bit about witches is worth re-iterating since it corrects the misconception that early medieval Christians burned witches - on the contrary, they saw witch-burning as a pagan superstition be outlawed! In these senses, being a Christian in eighth century Saxony was very different to being a Christian in twenty-first century Britain. If you asked someone nowadays what makes someone a Christian, the first things they would talk about would be believing that Jesus is God and following the teachings of the Bible. And its well known in the modern West that there are plenty of people who are baptised, have church weddings and funerals, attend the occasional Sunday service and celebrate Christmas and Easter, but do not consider themselves Christians because they don't "believe" in Christianity.
A lot of this apparent weirdness can be attributed to the fact that this a piece of government legislation was issued in a region that was still in the process of being converted to Christianity. Certainly, no one in eighth century Gaul, Italy or Anglo-Saxon England, regions where everyone had "converted" to Christianity by 700, was concerned about human sacrifices. But there were lots of condemnations of "pagan" customs and superstitions i.e. the Anglo-Saxon monk and missionary Saint Boniface complained in the 740s that people were celebrating the New Year in the "pagan fashion" by singing, dancing and feasting outside St Peter's Basilica in Rome. We've also seen before how Agobard of Lyon condemned belief in weather magic, popular among the Burgundian peasantry, as unchristian. Boniface and Agobard were of course extreme puritans by the standards of the day and the people they were condemning would have likely seen nothing "pagan" about their own activities. But it does go to show that even in the areas that were already long since converted, Christianity was still being defined, and it was very much the Carolingian dynasty's mission to make sure everyone was following "correct" Christianity.
Its also in the period 700 - 900 that in Gaul, Italy and Anglo-Saxon England we get lots of legislation mandating infant baptism and observing Christian fasts and holy days. Carolingian Saxony was, however, unusual in making church attendance compulsory. The King of Mercia and his bishops at the Council of Clovesho in 747 simply said that all people should be allowed to attend church on Sundays. Likewise, the Capitulary for the Saxon Territories, is unusual in legally enforcing Christian burial for all. While most churches elsewhere in western Europe had graveyards by 900, there was no legal requirement that worshippers be buried in them. That was the decision of individuals and their families. Most Frankish and Anglo-Saxon bishops only required their flocks to receive communion bread and wine three times a year. Its also in this period that the practice of confessing your sins to a priest, originating in sixth century Ireland, became widespread and mandatory across Western Europe. Meanwhile, Frankish and Anglo-Saxon churchmen were prescribing religious penances for all kinds of crimes and misdemeanours, and were getting creative with all kinds of public religious rituas. Finally, it was in this period that a parish system was being established - most villages in Gaul and Italy had a local church, though Germany and Anglo-Saxon England lagged behind.
So in many ways the Capitulary for the Saxon Territories reflects the general flavour of eighth century Christianity for most ordinary lay people. It was all about what you did in public and how you belonged to and participated in a community through various festivals, rituals and obligations. But what you actually believed deep inside didn't come into it very much.
Oh, and as a final bonus, here is a link to Charlemagne's own verified descendant, Christopher Lee, singing in a death metal band about the massacre at Verden in 782.
Most of you will know that Christopher Lee over the course of his very long theatrical career played a vampire, a Bond villain, a wizard, a Sith Lord and a dentist. But a blessed few know that he played Charlemagne too.
References:
Paul Edward Dutton, Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Second Edition), Toronto University Press (2009), pp 66 - 69
Patrick Wormald, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West, Hambledon Continuum (1998)
Paul Fouracre, Frankish Gaul to 814, in Rosamond McKitterick (ed), The New Cambridge Medieval History Volume 2: 700 - 900, Cambridge University Press (2008), pp 85 - 109
Julia Smith, Religion and Lay Society, in Rosamond McKitterick (ed), The New Cambridge Medieval History Volume 2: 700 - 900, Cambridge University Press (2008), pp 654 - 678
Ingrid Rembold, 'Quasi una gens: Saxony and the Frankish world,c. 772–888', History Compass 15 (2018), pp 1 - 14
Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two Lives of Charlemagne, edited and translated by David Ganz, Penguin Classics (2008)
I think the apostles’ names are given as Filipus and Andreas, Philip and Andrew.
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