(Jody Gray) Charlemagne’s massacre has been met with both disgust and approval throughout the modern period. It appears, to me, that how one views “enemies killed” depends on which side (nation) one is loyal to… I’m going to start this Blog Post with some Quotes
Charlemagne justified:
the Saxon nobles had sworn allegiance... Thus the rebellion constituted an act of treason punishable by death,
"the most likely inspiration for the mass execution of Verden was the Bible", Charlemagne desiring "to act like a true King of Israel" -"either they were defeated or subjected to the Christian religion or completely swept away.”
"reputation was of the highest importance to the warrior element of a heroic-age society" - (strategy for preventing further rebellions) the Saxons were probably unable to mount another serious revolt for several years after Verden, since they had to wait for a new generation of young men to reach fighting age.
"exemplary legal vengeance for the deaths of [Charlemagne's ministers] and their men -Charlemagne as their lord, according to the standards of the time, owed them vengeance. -beheading—was also chosen for its symbolic value, for it was the Roman penalty for traitors and oath-breakers.
In the 16h and 17th centuries, historians generally approved of the executions of Verden, as displays of piety.
According to Barbero, the incident would be little more than a footnote in scholarship were it not for controversy in German circles due to nationalistic sentiment before and during the Nazi era in Germany. The controversy over the massacre was linked to disputes among German nationalists about the image of Charlemagne.
Germans against Charlemagne and the Catholic Church:
-Some Germans saw the victims of the massacre as defenders of Germany's traditional beliefs, resisting the foreign religion of Christianity. - "attempted genocide plotted by the Church."
Sachsenhain (Grove of the Saxons) The memorial was inscribed to "Baptism-Resistant Germans Massacred by Karl, the Slaughterer of the Saxons".
it was best for state propaganda on historical matters to align with popular opinion, and thus with and not against Charlemagne.
*782, Massacre of Verden. [https://en.wikipedia.] a massacre of 4,500 Saxons under order of the Frankish king Charlemagne in Oct. 782. The event took place during the Saxon Wars, an intermittent 30-year conflict between the Franks and the Saxons. Charlemagne claimed suzerainty over Saxony [feudal lord, who controls the foreign policy of a tributary vassal state] and in 772 destroyed the Irminsul, an important object in Saxon paganism, during his campaign to Christianize the Saxons. The massacre occurred in Verden in what is now Lower Saxony, Germany. The event is attested in contemporary Frankish sources, including the Royal Frankish Annals.
Charlemagne’s massacre has been met with both disgust and approval throughout the modern period. Beginning in the 1870s, some scholars have attempted to exonerate Charlemagne of the massacre by way of a proposed manuscript error but these attempts have since been generally rejected. While the figure of 4,500 victims has generally been accepted, some scholars regard it as an exaggeration.
The massacre became particularly significant and controversial among German nationalists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and in Nazi Germany. In 1935, landscape architect Wilhelm Hubotter designed a memorial -see, Monument: Grove of the Saxons…
Sources. Royal Frankish Annals [https://en.wikipedia.]: When he heard this, the Lord King Charles rushed to the place with all the Franks that he could gather on short notice… Then all the Saxons came together again, submitted to the authority of the Lord King, and surrendered the evildoers who were chiefly responsible for this revolt to be put to death -four thousand and five hundred of them. This sentence was carried out…
Annales qui dicuntur Einhardi (Annals of Einhard): (Widukind had fled to the Northmen). But the others who had carried out his will and committed the crime they delivered up to the king to the number of four thousand and five hundred; and by the king’s command they were all beheaded in one day upon the river Aller in the place called Verden. When he had wreaked vengeance after this fashion, the king withdrew…
Scholarship. (Historian) the massacre “produced perhaps the greatest stain on his reputation”
Several historians have attempted to lessen Charles's responsibility for the massacre, by stressing that until a few months earlier the king thought he had pacified the country, the Saxon nobles had sworn allegiance, and many of them had been appointed counts. Thus the rebellion constituted an act of treason punishable by death, the same penalty that the extremely harsh Saxon law imposed with great facility, even for the most insignificant of crimes. Others have attempted to twist the accounts provided by sources, arguing that the Saxons were killed in battle and not massacred in cold blood, or even that the verb decollare (to decapitate) was a copyist's error in place of delocare (to relocate), so the prisoners were deported. None of these attempts has proved credible.
He continues: "the most likely inspiration for the mass execution of Verden was the Bible", Charlemagne desiring "to act like a true King of Israel", citing the biblical tale of the total extermination of the Amalekites and the conquest of the Moabites by David. Barbero further points out that a few years later, a royal chronicler, commenting on Charlemagne's treatment of the Saxons, records that "either they were defeated or subjected to the Christian religion or completely swept away.”
Roger Collins identifies the victims of the massacre as all Saxons held to have participated in the battle of the Süntel. Charlemagne may have found his precedent for mass execution in the Council of Cannstatt of 745/6, whereat his uncle Carloman I executed numerous leading Alemannic noblemen.
The German historian Martin Lintzel argued that the figure of 4,500 was an exaggeration, partly based on the theory of Hans Delbrück regarding the small size of early medieval armies. On the other hand, Bernard Bachrach argues that the 4,500 captured warriors were but a small fraction of the able-bodied men in the region. The annalist's figure of 4,500, he notes, is generally accepted by scholars. He puts it at less than the entire Saxon army that fought at the Süntel, and suggests that Widukind's personal retinue probably also escaped capture.
The medievalist Henry Mayr-Harting argues that since "reputation was of the highest importance to the warrior element of a heroic-age society" the massacre of Verden, whatever its actual scope, would have backfired on Charlemagne: “On the reputational side during Charlemagne's wars, the Saxons' greatest gain will undoubtedly have been the bloodbath of Verden in 783 [sic]. If but one tenth of the 4500 warriors said to have been slaughtered actually fell under the Frankish swords, think what a series of laments for fallen warriors, what a Gododdin, what a subsequent celebration of reputation by poets, that would have made possible!” He further argues that the Saxons were probably unable to mount another serious revolt for several years after Verden, since they had to wait for a new generation of young men to reach fighting age.
Matthias Becher, in his biography of Charlemagne, suggests that a much smaller number of executions accompanied deportations in the year 782. Carole Cusack interprets the method of execution as hanging rather than beheading.
Janet L. Nelson calls the massacre "exemplary legal vengeance for the deaths of [Charlemagne's ministers] and their men in the Süntel Hills". According to her, even if the Frankish leaders at the Süntel were at fault for the disaster, as the Annales qui dicuntur Einhard imply, Charlemagne as their lord, according to the standards of the time, owed them vengeance. Nelson says that the method of mass execution—decollatio, beheading—was also chosen for its symbolic value, for it was the Roman penalty for traitors and oath-breakers.
Controversy within German nationalism and Nazi Germany. In the 16h and 17th centuries, historians generally approved of the executions of Verden, as displays of piety. During the Enlightenment this changed. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was one of the first to suggest that Verden cast a shadow over Charlemagne's legacy. Voltaire considered the king a "thousandfold murderer", with Verden the centrepiece of his barbarism.
According to Barbero, the incident would be little more than a footnote in scholarship were it not for controversy in German circles due to nationalistic sentiment before and during the Nazi era in Germany. The controversy over the massacre was linked to disputes among German nationalists about the image of Charlemagne. Some Germans saw the victims of the massacre as defenders of Germany's traditional beliefs, resisting the foreign religion of Christianity. Wilhelm Teudt mentions the site of the massacre in his 1929 book Germanische Heiligtümer ('Germanic Shrines'). Some Christian nationalists linked Charlemagne with the humiliation of French domination after World War I, especially the occupation of the Rhineland. Of the first generation of German historians after 1871 to defend Charlemagne, Louis Halphen considered their efforts a failure.
Hermann Gauch, Heinrich Himmler's adjutant for culture, took the view that Charlemagne (known in German as Karl der Große 'Karl the Great') should be officially renamed "Karl the Slaughterer" because of the massacre. He advocated a memorial to the victims. Alfred Rosenberg also stated that the Saxon leader Widukind, not Karl, should be called "the Great". During the Third Reich the massacre became a major topic of debate. In 1934, two plays about Widukind were performed. The first, Der Sieger (The Victor) by Friedrich Forster, portrayed Charlemagne as brutal but his goal, Christianization of the pagan Saxons, as necessary. Reception was mixed. The second, Wittekind, by Edmund Kiß, was more controversial for its criticism of Christianity. The play resulted in serious disturbances and was stopped after just two performances. Described by one historian as "little more than an extended anti-Catholic rant", the plot depicted Charlemagne as a murderous tyrant and Verden as "attempted genocide plotted by the Church."
Monument: Grove of the Saxons. (photo, 1937, Sachsenhain, Germany).
In 1935, landscape architect Wilhelm Hübotter (de) was commissioned to build the Sachsenhain (German 'Grove of the Saxons') in Verden, a monument to commemorate the massacre consisting of 4,500 large stones. The monument was used as both a memorial to the event and as a meeting place for the Schutzstaffel (SS). The memorial was inscribed to "Baptism-Resistant Germans Massacred by Karl, the Slaughterer of the Saxons". In the same year the annual celebration of Charlemagne in Aachen, where he is buried, was cancelled and replaced by a lecture on "Karl the Great, Saxon Butcher." The attacks on Charlemagne as Sachsenschlächter (slaughterer of the Saxons) and a tool of the Church and the Papacy were led by Alfred Rosenberg. In 1935, seven professional historians fought back with the volume Karl der Große oder Charlemagne? The issue was settled by Adolf Hitler himself, who privately pressured Rosenberg to cease his public condemnations, and by propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who began to issue positive statements about Charlemagne. In 1936, the Nazi historian Heinrich Dannenbauer could refer to Charlemagne's "rehabilitation". A memorial site, Widukindgedächtnisstätte, was inaugurated at Engen in 1939.
In 1942, the Nazi regime celebrated the 1200th anniversary of Charlemagne's birth. The historian Ahasver von Brandt referred to it as the "official rehabilitation" (amtliche Rehabilitierung), although Goebbels acknowledged in private that many people were confused by the about-face of National Socialism. A Sicherheitsdienst report of 9 April 1942 noted that: “There were many voices to be heard saying that only a few years ago one had counted as an unreliable National Socialist had one left Karl der Große with so much as a single unblemished feature and not spoken also in tones of loathing of the "slaughterer of Saxons" and "pope's and bishops' lacky". Many people pose the question as to who in the Party it had been back then who had authorised this derogatory slogan, and from what quarter this completely different evaluation was coming now.” Goebbels opinion was that it was best for state propaganda on historical matters to align with popular opinion, and thus with and not against Charlemagne.
As an example of Charlemagne's post-1935 rehabilitation in Nazi Germany, in 1944 the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne, a body of French volunteers, was named after the "pan-European Germanic hero" instead of after Joan of Arc.
Related: Irminsul [https://en.wikipedia.] was a sacral pillar-like object attested as playing an important role in the Germanic paganism of the Saxon people. The oldest chronicle describing an Irminsul refers to it as a tree trunk erected in the open air. The purpose of the Irminsul and the implications thereof have been the subject of considerable scholarly discourse and speculation for hundreds of years.
Etymology. A Germanic god Irmin, inferred from the name Irminsul and the tribal name Irminoes, is sometimes presumed to have been the national god or demigod of the Saxons. It has been suggested that Irmin was more probably an aspect or epithet of some other deity - most likely Wodan (Odin). Irmin might also have been an epithet of the god Ziu (Tyr) in early Germanic times, only later transferred to Odin, as certain scholars subscribe to the idea that Odin replaced Tyr as the chief Germanic deity at the onset of the Migration Period. This was the favored view of early 20th century Nordicist writers, but is not generally considered likely in modern times.
The Old Norse form of Irmin is Jormunr, which just like Yggr was one of the names of Odin. Yggrasil (“Yggr’s horse”) was the yew or ash tree from with Odin sacrificed himself, and which connected the nine worlds. Jakob Grimm connects the name Irmin with Old Norse terms like iormungrund (“great ground”, i.e. the Earth) or iormungandr (“great snake”, i.e. the Midgard serpent).
Attestations. According to the Royal Frankish Annals (772 AD), during the Saxon wars, Charlemagne is repeatedly described as ordering the destruction of the chief seat of their religion, an Irminsul. The Irminsul is described as not being far from Heresburg (now Obermarsberg), Germany. Jacob Grimm states that “strong reasons” point to the actual location of the Irminsul as being approximately 15 miles away, in the Teutoburg Forest and states that the original name for the region “Osning” may have meant “Holy Wood.” (see, related, Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.)
The Benedictine monk Rudolf of Fulda (AD 865) provides a description of an Irminsul in chapter 3 of his Latin work De miraculis sancti Alexandri. Rudolf’s description states that the Irminsul was a great wooden pillar erected and worshipped beneath the open sky and that its name, Irminsul, signifies universal all-sustaining pillar.
Hildesheim. Under Louis the Pious in the 9th century, a stone column was dug up at Obermarsberg in Westphalia, Germany and relocated to the Hildesheim cathedral in Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, Germany. The column was reportedly then used as a candelabrum until at least the late 19th century. In the 13th century, the destruction of the Irminsul by Charlemagne was recorded as having still been commemorated at Hildesheim on Saturday after Laetare Sunday.
The commemoration was reportedly done by planting two poles six feet high, each surmounted by a wooden object one foot in height shaped like a pyramid or a cone on the cathedral square. The youth then used sticks and stones in an attempt to knock over the object.. This custom is described as existing elsewhere in Germany, particularly in Halberstadt where it was enacted on the day of Laetare Sunday by the Cannons themselves.
Related, Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. [https://en.wikipedia.] took place in 9 CE, when an alliance of Germanic tribes ambushed and decisively destroyed three Roman legions and their auxiliaries -they never again attempted to conquer the Germanic territories east of the Rhine river… (Roman-Germanic Wars) Contemporary and modern historians have generally regarded Arminius’ victory over Varus as “Rome’s greatest defeat”, one of the most decisive battles recorded in military history, and as “a turning-point in world history”. https://www.youtube. -Youtube video and http://www.documentarymania. documentarymania.
Related: Donar’s Oak [https://en.wikipedia.] aka Jove’s Oak (sometimes referred to as Thor’s Oak) was a sacred tree of the Germanic pagans located in an unclear location around was is now the region of Hesse, Germany. According to the 8th century Vita Bonifatii auctore Willibaldi, the Anglo-Saxon missionary Saint Boniface and his retinue cut down the tree earlier in the same century. Wood from the oak was then reportedly used to build a church at the site dedicated to Saint Peter. Sacred trees and sacred groves were widely venerated by the Germanic peoples.
According to Willibald’s 8th century Life of Saint Boniface, the felling of the tree occurred during Boniface’s life earlier in the same century at a location known as Gaesmere. (may have occurred around 723 or 724) “Now at that time many of the Hessians, brought under the Catholic faith and confirmed by the grace of the sevenfold spirit, received the laying on of hands; others indeed, not yet strengthened in soul, refused to accept in their entirety the lessons of the inviolate faith. Moreover some were wont secretly, some openly to sacrifice to trees and springs; some in secret, other openly practiced inspections of victims and divinations, legerdemain and incantations; some turned their attention to auguries and auspices and various sacrificial rites; while others, with sounder minds, abandoned all the profanations of heathenism, and committed none of these things. With the advice and counsel of these last, the saint attempted, in the place called Gaesmere, while the servants of stood by his side, to fell a certain oak of extraordinary size, which is called, by an old name of the pagans, the Oak of Jupiter. And when in the strength of his steadfast heart he had cut the lower notch, there was present a great multitude of pagans, who in their souls were earnestly cursing the enemy of their gods. But when the fore side of the tree was notched only a little, suddenly the oak’s vast bulk, driven by a blast from above, crashed to the ground, shivering its crown of branches as it fell; and, as if by the compensation of the Most High, it was also burst into four parts, and four trunks of huge size, equal in length, were seen, unwrought by the brethren who stood by. At this sight the pagans who before had cursed now, on the contrary, believed, and blessed the Lord, and put away their former reviling. Then moreover the most holy bishop, after taking counsel with the brethren, built from the timber of the tree wooden oratory, and dedicated it in honor of Saint Peter the apostle.
Germanic tree and grove veneration. Veneration of sacred groves and sacred trees is found throughout the history of the Germanic peoples and were targeted for destruction by Christian missionaries during the Christianization of the Germanic peoples. Ken Dowden notes that behind this great oak dedicated to Donar, the Irminsul (also felled by Christian missionaries in the 8th century), and the Sacred tree at Uppsala (described by Adam of Bremen in the 11th century), stands a mythic prototype of an immense world, described in Norse mythology as Yddrasil.
Role in Bonifatian hagiography and imagery. One of the focal points of Boniface’s life, the scene is frequently repeated, illustrated, and re imagined. Roberto Muller, for instance, in a retelling of Boniface’s biography for young adults, has the four parts of the tree fall down to the ground and form a cross…
Notable examples, Germanic paganism. (attestations)
Germanic mythology. In Norse mythology. (attestations)
Note (from wikipedia, See also) Ask and Embla, the first human beings in Norse mythology, created from trees and whose names may mean “ash” and “elm”.
(photo, left) The Green Man, living tree sculpture by Toni Adams. [https://en.wikipedia.], Birmingham, England. Related: Sacred Groves. Sacred trees and groves in Germanic paganism and mythology [https://en.wikipedia.] Trees hold a particular role in Germanic paganism and Germanic mythology, both as individuals (sacred trees) and in groups (sacred groves). The central role of trees in Germanic religion is noted in the earliest written reports about the Germanic peoples, with Roman historian Tacitus: “The tree grove is the center of their whole religion. It is regarded as the cradle of the race and the dwelling-place of the supreme God to whom all things are subject and obedient.”
Reverence for individual trees among the Germanic peoples is a common theme in medieval Christian denunciations of backsliding into paganism. In some cases, such as Donar’s oak felled by St Boniface, these were associated with particular gods, and the association of individual trees with saints can be seen as a continuation into modern times. There is also a Scandinavian folk tradition of farmers making small offerings to a “warden tree” that is regarded as exercising a protective function over the family and land.
Related: Anthropomorphic wooden cult figurines of Central and Northern Europe [https://en.wikipedia.], sometimes called pole gods…
Related: Grove of the Saxons, Memorial [https://books.google.] pg 289 (title) The Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp Memorial.
Seifert stated that landscape architects had to respect in their plans selections the poverty of species of the German landscape as something that was determined by destiny. In the landscape, Seifert argued, nothing foreign should be added and “nothing native must be left out.” …ideas about the alleged relationship between the German people and their home landscapes. It reflected his identity as a landscape architect who had finally become established during the Nazi era. According to these ideas, as reflected in the Nazi ideology of Blood and Soil, each Germanic tribe needed the appropriate landscape environment for its optimal flourishing, and that included the plants considered to be native to these landscapes. To pursue this particular landscape ideal in the context of the Bergen-Belsen memorial only a few months after the fall of the Nazi dictatorship served more to obscure than remind visitors of the historical events that had occurred at the site.
Related: (archaeological evidence of the Verden Massacre) The Saxons by Robert Sass. [https://books.google.] the bodies of the slain could have been buried elsewhere by their next-of-kin. The Saxons burnt their dead in pyres, which would leave zero bones in the ground.
(the author) It bothers me that Charlemagne’s First Reich is not compared to the Third Reich in Germany. The First Reich set the trend for intolerance in “Germany.” The First Reich taught the Saxon genocide, and eventually the converted Saxons were slaughtering Vikings, Sorbs, and Slavs, spreading the gospel of Christ by force.
The first challenge to the historical records of the Massacre of Verden was published by Karl Bauer in 1937 in his Die Quellen fur das sogenannte Blutbad von Verden. Since then, this view has been repeatedly endorsed by ecclesiastical circles who wish to see Charlemagne’s role in the conversion of the Saxons to christianity without blemish. In 1935, occultic Nazi Germany assembled the Sachsenhain (Saxon Grove), consisting of about 1,000 large stones in Verden, to commemorate the Massacre of Verden. The site today belongs to the youth organization of the Protestant Church and is accessible to the public.
(the author) since the Franks recorded this, we have no reason to believe they as Christians would not record such barbaric actions done by their own king unless they were historically accurate. The Royal Frankish Annals were written for the early Frankish kings, covering the years 741 to 829. At least three different authors were involved in their compilation.
Related: Saxon Wars (772-804) [https://en.wikipedia.], a campaign led by Charlemagne; which resulted in the incorporation of Saxony into the Frankish realm and their forcible conversion from Germanic paganism to Catholicism.
...despite repeated setbacks, the Saxons resisted steadfastly, returning to raid Charlemagne’s domains as soon as he turned his attention elsewhere. The Saxons were divided into four subgroups in four regions: Westphalia, Eastphalia, Engria, Nordalbingia (base of Jutland).
Charlemagne himself assisted in several mass baptisms (780). In 782 he returned to Saxony and instituted a code of law which were severe on religious issues, namely paganism, Widukind led a revolt… in 785 Widukind was baptized and swore fealty to Charlemagne.
The last insurrection of the Engrian people occurred in 804, more than thirty years after Charlemagne's first campaign against them… Charlemagne deported 10,000 of them to Neustria and gave their now vacant lands to the loyal king of the Abortrites. It is constructive now to quote Einhard. Charlemagne’s biographer, on the closing of such a grand conflict: “The war that had lasted so many years was at length ended by their acceding to the terms offered by the King; which were renunciation of their national religious customs and the worship of devils, acceptance of the sacraments of the Christian faith and religion, and union with the Franks to form one people.”
Religious nature of War. Alluding to the Saxons, the contemporary poet of the Paderborn Epic praises terror as a means of conversion: “What the contrary mind and perverse soul refuse to do with persuasion, let them leap to accomplish when compelled by fear.” One of Charlemagne’s famed capitularies outlines part of the religious intent of his interactions with the Saxons. In 785 AD he issues the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae which asserted “If any one of the race of the Saxons hereafter concealed among them shall have wished to hide himself unbaptized, and shall have scorned to come to baptism and shall have wished to remain a pagan, let him be punished by death.”
Related:
This is a monumental episode of north European history that must become more widely known and publicized. Es handelt sich um wahre Geschichte der Teutschen. It helps us greatly to better understand what some would call the Christianization process and what others would call the spreading of the Jesus Myth. Either way, let us learn.
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