From Charles the Great, by Thomas Hodgkin, D.C.L., London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1897; pp. 104-124.


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CHAPTER  VI

The Conversion of the Saxons

The year 772, which opened upon a reunited Frankish kingdom (Carloman having died at the close of the year preceding), and which was a blank as far as Frankish operations in Italy were concerned, was memorable as witnessing the beginning of that long struggle with Saxon independence and Saxon heathenism which was to occupy thirty-two central years in the life of Charles the Great.

Whether he entered upon this struggle with a light heart it is impossible for us to say. Many a time he thought it was ended, but found that he had only bent not broken the stubborn spirit of his foes, and assuredly it was with no light heart that he found himself, when past middle life and entering on his sixth decade, still obliged to resume his Sisyphean labour.

The different tribes which made up the loosely bound confederation of the Saxons occupied those territories reaching to the Elbe on the east, and nearly to the Rhine on the west, which now bear the names of Hanover, Brunswick, Oldenburg and Westphalia. This block of territory was divided in nearly equal parts 105 between the three tribes of the Westphalians, the Angarians and the Eastphalians, the first and the last, as we should expect from their names, occupying the western and eastern and the Angarians (or Engern) the central portion. Then, beyond the Elbe, between the German Ocean and the Baltic was seated a fourth section of the Saxon people who bore the name of the Nord-albingians, and whose territory must have pretty nearly corresponded with the modern duchy of Holstein.

Thus the Saxons had no connection with the present kingdom of Saxony, though part of Prussian Saxony was probably within their borders. As Professor Freeman says in his Historical Geography of Europe (p. 207), “After the breaking up of the great Saxon duchy (1191), from most of the old Saxon lands the Saxon name may be looked on as having altogether passed away. The name of Saxony as a geographical expression clave to the Eastphalian remnant of the old duchy, and to Thuringia and the Slavonic conquests to the East.” One might add, that by a curious coincidence, Hanover, the home of the old continental Saxons, was for 123 years (1714-1837) ruled by descendants of Alfred the Great who were kings of the Saxons over the sea.

These Saxon neighbours of the Franks are not to be thought of as mere savages. They had probably to some extent exchanged the nomad life of the shepherd for the more settled habits of the tiller of the ground. The old Germanic institution of the Folksthing as described by Tacitus, still apparently flourished among them. They had already been brought to a sort of loose connection with the Frankish kingdom, having at intervals paid a 106 yearly tribute of 500 cows to a Merovingian king and an Arnulfing mayor of the palace. There does not seem any reason to suppose that at the time of the accession of Charles they nourished any thought of deadly enmity to their Frankish neighbours, or would have dreamed of uniting their tribes in a well-organised invasion of the prosperous Rhine-lands — in fact, throughout the struggle which followed, the inability of the Saxons to combine for the mere purpose of defence against impending invasion is conspicuous and absurd. But no doubt they were lawless and disagreeable neighbours, often indulging in such raids as for centuries kept the Scottish Border in turmoil, and above all the majority of them were still heathens. The missionaries who like Boniface had crossed the sea from England to convert their German kinsfolk had hitherto laboured chiefly among the Frisians, but had also made some impression on the mass of Saxon heathenism. From the fierce wars which Penda, the heathen King of Mercia, waged with Christian Northumberland, we can imagine what suspicious rage the success of these English missionaries would arouse in the minds of the still heathen chiefs of the East and Westphalians.

But, after all, it is probable that on the religious as well as on the political question the attack came from the Frankish side. It was not so much because the Saxons resented the presence of Christian missionaries among them, as because Charles resented the fact of the Saxons continuing in heathenism, that the Thirty Years’ War of the eighth century was resolved on. Throughout his kingly and imperial career Charles took the religious part of his duties seriously. It was not for 107 nothing that he bore the title of Christianissimus Rex, not for nothing that St. Augustine’s famous treatise, De Civitate Dei, was the favourite companion of his leisure. In his interviews with Pope Hadrian at Rome the reform of the Church’s discipline was apparently the chief subject of conversation; and in the thirty-three Ecclesiastical Councils which were held during his reign he zealously co-operated with the churchmen towards the same end. To such a ruler it was intolerable that tribes which were connected, however loosely, with his kingdom should still profess a belief in the absurdities of heathenism. They must be persuaded, or, if persuasion failed, they should be forced, to become Christians.

At an assembly of the Frankish nation held at Worms (July ? 772) Charles announced his purpose of carrying war into the country of the Saxons, and in the early summer he marched with a large army, accompanied by a multitude of bishops, abbots, and presbyters, into the territory of the Angarii, the central tribe. The frontier fortress of Eresburg was taken, and the invaders pressed on to the place where, in the midst of a sacred grove, stood the celebrated Irminsul, a column fashioned to imitate the great world-sustaining ash Yggdrasil, which was the chief object of worship of the Saxon tribes. The idol was hewn down, the temple overthrown, the hoard of gold and silver ornaments deposited there by generations of devout Saxons carried off into Frank-land. The work of destruction lasted three days. It chanced that there was a great scarcity of water in the place where the Irminsul had stood. The army was parched with thirst, and perhaps began to be stirred by superstitious fears that the drought was a 108 punishment for the destruction of the idol. Suddenly, at noonday, while all the army was resting, there was a rush of water along a dry river bed. All the army had enough to drink and recognised with thanks the Divine approval of their destructive labours. Charles after this marched to the banks of the Weser, held there with the Saxons a great palaver (to borrow a word from modern reports of similar conferences), and received their submission, for what it was worth, accompanied by the surrender of twelve hostages.

It would be tedious to copy the particulars, meagre as they are, given by the chroniclers concerning the eighteen campaigns in which Charles slowly and remorselessly beat down the resistance of the Saxons. It will be sufficient to notice some of the chief moments of the struggle.

In 774 Charles, intent on his operations in Italy, had left the Saxon March comparatively unguarded. Seizing their opportunity, and apparently heedless of the fate of the twelve hostages who were in the hands of Charles, the heathen crossed the frontier in great force and entered Hesse, which they laid waste with fire and sword. The objective of their attack was the abbey and church of Fritzlar, which had been founded near half a century before by the great Englishman, St. Boniface. The saint had prophesied that his church should never be destroyed by fire, and the barbarians certainly seem to have been prevented — by supernatural means, says the legend — from wrapping it in flames, but there is little doubt that they robbed it of all its treasures, thus taking speedy revenge for the destruction of their own Irminsul. Charles meanwhile returned 109 from his triumphant campaign in Italy only to hear of the insult that had been offered to his crown and his creed by a barbarous foe. The season was far advanced, but, mustering his troops at Ingelheim (a little south-west of Mainz), he sent them in four squadrons into Saxon-land. Three of the squadrons found the Saxons and fought them; the fourth marched through their land unopposed. All returned laden with booty to the Rhine.

Charles spent the winter of 774-775 in his palace at Quierzy, on the Oise, and there came to the conclusion “that he would attack the perfidious and truce-breaking nation of the Saxons in war, and would persevere therein until they were either conquered and made subject to the Christian religion or were altogether swept off the face of the earth.” It was easier to form a ruthless resolution like this in the privacy of the palace than to carry it into actual execution.

The campaign of 775, though planned on a large scale, does not differ greatly from previous campaigns in character. The king held a general assembly at Düren, at which apparently the programme of “Christianity or death” for the Saxons was submitted and approved. Then, in August, Charles marched eastwards, took from the Westphalians their strong fortress of Sigiburg, on the Ruhr; retook Eresburg, which had been taken by the Angarii; and then pressed on into the land of the Eastphalians, who do not appear to have offered any serious resistance to his arms. But both with the Angarii and the Eastphalians the campaign ended with the usual formalities of oaths of fealty and surrender of hostages; we do not yet hear of that wholesale conversion or extirpation 110 which Charles had vowed at his setting forth. Moreover, while he was thus penetrating into the recesses of the enemies’ country, part of his force, which he had left in Westphalia to guard his communications with the Rhine, suffered a serious loss from a Saxon surprise. Their camp was pitched at Lidbach, near Minden; it was three o’clock in the afternoon; some of the cavalry had gone forth to forage for their horses; the rest of the army was indulging in a siesta; a troop of Saxons mingled with the returning foragers, feigning themselves to be their comrades (of course the warriors of that day wore no uniform), and thus obtained admission to the camp, where they made great slaughter of the half-asleep and unarmed soldiers. It is said that the Franks succeeded at last in driving the invaders out the camp, and that Charles, hurrying from the east, slew a multitude of the retreating Saxons, but it is probable that we have here the story, only slightly veiled, of a serious Frankish reverse. Next year (776) Eresburg, taken and retaken, was again the prize of war. Sigiburg was attacked, but bravely and successfully defended. Charles came with impetuous rush to the source of the Lippe, and found there a multitude of Saxons, who had flocked thither from all quarters, and who, terrified by Charles’s successes, declared their willingness to embrace Christianity, to became faithful subjects of Charles and of the Franks, and to perform the symbolical act by which they would give him corporal possession of the soil of their country. An innumerable multitude of Saxons, with their wives and children, were baptized in the Lippe stream that flowed past the Frankish camp; hostages, as many as Charles asked 111 for, were given; Eresburg was rebuilt, many other castles were reared, detachments of Franks were posted throughout the country, and the king returned into Frank-land to keep his Christmas at Heristal and his Easter at Nimeguen, feeling probably that the programme of Quierzy was now realised, and that the heathen and truce-breaking Saxons had at last become Christians and stable subjects of his realm.

But the subjugation was only apparent; there was one man ready, at least for a time, to play the part of Arminius, and to resist foreign domination to the death. The next nine years of the long contest (777-785) may be best characterised as the years of Widukind’s strife for freedom.

In the year 777 King Charles held a public synod at Paderborn in the heart of Saxon-land. It was attended, not only by all the Frankish nobles, but also by nearly all the chiefs of the Saxon tribes. “Perfidiously,” says the chronicler, “did they promise to mould their manners to the king’s mind, and to devote themselves to his service. They received pardon from the king on this condition, that if thereafter they violated his statutes, they should be deprived of fatherland and freedom. At the same place there were baptized a very great multitude who, although falsely, had declared that they wished to become Christians.”

But at this great assembly there was not seen the face of Widukind, a Westphalian chief who had large possessions both in Westphalia and also in Mid Saxony, and who must have already taken a leading part in the resistance to the Frankish arms, since he was, says the chronicler, “conscious of having committed many crimes 112 and feared to face the king, wherefore he had fled to Sigfrid, King of the Danes.”

Next year Charles led his army into Spain that memorable expedition which ended in the disaster of Roncesvalles. Hearing that he was engaged in so remote a region and perhaps also having some tidings of his ill-success, the Saxons, headed by Widukind, rose in rebellion, crossed the hills which formed their Western boundary and poured into the valley of the Rhine. The great river itself, not the Frankish armies, barred their further progress, but they rushed along the right bank from Deutz to Coblentz ravaging and burning. “Buildings sacred and profane were equally laid in ruins. No distinction of age or of sex was made by their hostile fury, so that it was plainly manifest that not for the sake of booty but in order to wreak vengeance they had crossed the frontier of the Franks.” Incidentally we learn that so great was the terror caused by this inroad that the monks of Fulda took from the tomb their greatest treasure the body of the holy Boniface, and journeyed with it two days into Frankish territory, but then hearing that the tide of invasion was turned, went back to redeposit their treasure at Fulda. For Charles, on learning the tidings of the Saxon invasion, had not thought it necessary with his war-wearied army to undertake a regular campaign, but had sent a flying squadron of Franks, who by forced marches came up with the Saxons at the river Elder, attacked them while crossing the stream, and inflicted upon them grievous loss.

In the next few years we hear that oft-repeated story of rapid marches right through Saxon-land even to the Elbe, no effectual stand made by the Saxons, but raids 113 and insurrections headed by the restless Widukind. In 780 Charles begins to busy himself with the ecclesiastical organisation of the conquered country. In 782 (apparently) he holds a placitum at the sources of the Lippe, and there promulgates his stern Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae. On any one who violently enters a church and robs it, shall be inflicted the punishment of death; on any one who despises the Christian custom of Lent and eats flesh therein, death (but his life may be saved if the priest shall certify that flesh was necessary for his health); on any one who slays bishop or presbyter, death; on any one who in pagan fashion believes in witchcraft and burns the supposed witch, death; on any practising cremation instead of burial, death; on any Saxon hiding himself in order to escape baptism and remain in paganism, death; on any one offering sacrifice to the demons of the pagans, death; on any one who shall conspire with the pagans against the Christians, or seek to continue with them in hostility to the Christian faith, death. Yet, if, after privily committing any of these crimes, the criminal shall flee to a priest, make confession and do penance, on the priest’s testimony the capital punishment shall be remitted. At the same time a strict tithe-law was passed. “We enact that according to the command of God, all men, whether nobles, freeborn men or liti (serfs), shall give the tenth part of their substance and labour to the churches and priests, so that as God shall have given to every Christian he shall restore a part to God.”

This rigorous Act of Uniformity stirred the deep resentment of the Saxons. But perhaps discontent might not have burst into a flame but for the return of 114 Widukind from his wonted Danish refuge, and for the harangues with which he stirred the vain hopes of the Saxons and roused them to revolt (782). At the same time tidings were brought to Charles of an incursion of a Sclavonic tribe, the Sorabi, from beyond the Elbe. The Frankish king presumed too far on the apparent pacification of Saxon-land. Like his great imitator, Napoleon, he would use the last-conquered people to subdue the enemy next beyond them, and he sent an army composed of Saxons as well as Austrasian Franks to repel the Sclavonic incursion. Adalgisus the chamberlain, Geilo the count of the stables, and Worad the count of the palace, commanded the motley host; but when they entered Saxon-land they found the whole country already in a flame, and the Saxons, by the advice of Widukind, about to march into Francia. Wisely postponing the expedition against the Sorabi, they marched with their Frankish troops — the Saxon contingent had doubtless deserted — to the place where they heard that the rebel host was gathered. In the heart of the enemy’s country they met Count Theodoric, a relation of the king’s, who had made a hasty levy of troops in Rhine-land on hearing of the Saxon revolt. Seeing the over-zeal of the three courtiers, Theodoric advised them to make careful reconnaissances of the enemy’s position, and proposed that, if the ground proved favourable, a joint attack should be made on the Saxon camp at the hill Suntal, near Minden. In pursuance of the suggested plan, they crossed the Weser and pitched their camp on the north bank of the river. Then, fearing that the renown of the joint victory would accrue to the king’s cousin Theodoric, they determined to attack the Saxons alone. Underrating 115 the steadfastness of their foes they dashed headlong and in loose order into the camp, more as if they were pursuing a flying foe than charging an enemy drawn up in order of battle. This time the Frankish fury failed before the stolid Saxon stubbornness. They were surrounded by the enemy, and terrible slaughter was made in their ranks. A few Franks escaped, not to their quarters of the morning, but to the camp of Theodoric; but Adalgisus and Geilo, four counts, twenty nobles of high rank, and a multitude of followers, who, in the true spirit of the old German comitatus, preferred to die rather than survive their lords, fell on the field of fight. The battle of Mount Suntal was certainly the greatest disaster that befell the Frankish arms in the whole course of the Thirty Years’ War.

Terrible was the anger of Charles when he heard of the Saxon rising, of the murders of priests and monks with which it had been accompanied, and lastly of the deep humiliation inflicted on his race by the defeat of the three generals. He collected a large army and entered the land of the Saxons. When thus in earnest he seems to have been always able to crush their resistance. Widukind fled for the fourth or fifth time to Denmark, and the land lay prostrate at the feet of Charles. He summoned before him all the chiefs of the Saxons, and made inquisition concerning the author of the revolt. With one voice all named Widukind, the absent Widukind. As he could not be arrested, the men who had listened to his persuasions must suffer. Four thousand five hundred men (including probably some of the chiefs of the nation) who had shown themselves foremost in the revolt were surrendered to Charles. 116 It was expected probably that the ringleaders only out of this number would suffer; but Charles was evidently in a Berserk rage. All 4500 Saxons were beheaded in one day at Verden on the banks of the Aller. “Having perpetrated this act of vengeance, the king went into winter quarters at the villa of Theodo, and there celebrated the birth of our Lord, and there also the festival of Easter, according to his wonted custom.”

The year 783 was to Charles a year of domestic sorrow but of military triumph. His wife Hildegard (whom he had married immediately after the repudiation of the daughter of Desiderius) died on the 30th of April; his loved and honoured mother, Bertrada, on the 12th of July; but immediately after his wife’s funeral he entered Saxon-land with a powerful army, vanquished his enemies with great slaughter at Detmold, vanquished them again in the neighbourhood of Osnabrück, where “there was slain of the Saxons an infinite multitude, great booty was taken, and a large number of captives was led away.” He then swept with his victorious army from the Weser to the Elbe, ravaging wherever he went — for it was thus that this great preacher of Christianity argued for the faith — and then returning to Frank-land married his fourth wife, Fastrada, the daughter of the Frankish count Radolf.

The next year (784) was somewhat less successful, owing to widespread inundations, the result of sudden and heavy rains, which stopped the victor’s progress northward; but his young son Charles, who had been left with a part of the army in Westphalia while Charles himself went southward towards Thuringia, won a great cavalry battle on the banks of the Lippe. And this 117 year Charles made a new departure. After a short autumnal visit to Frank-land, he returned into Saxon-land, spent his Christmas in the neighbourhood of Pyrmont, and went into winter quarters at the now strongly fortified Eresburg.

“And when he had decided to winter there,” says the chronicler, “having sent for wife and children to join him, and having left in the said camp a sufficiently staunch and strong garrison, he went forth himself with a flying squadron to lay waste the townships of the Saxons and to plunder their farms, and thus by himself and by the generals whom he sent in different directions, marching everywhere, and everywhere carrying fire and slaughter, he paid back the Saxons in their own coin and gave them a sufficiently uneasy winter.” After holding a general assembly at Paderborn, Charles marched unopposed through Saxon-land as far as the Elbe. In the district of Bardengau, near the mouth of that river, Charles halted, looking across the river to the territory of the yet unsubdued Transalbian Saxons who dwelt in the land that is now called Holstein. While he was here news was brought to him that Widukind and a confederate, perhaps a kinsman, named Abbio were willing to surrender themselves and foreswear further resistance if they could be assured of their personal safety. A Frankish courtier named Amalwin was sent across the Elbe with hostages for the safe-conduct which he bore to the two Saxon chiefs. They accompanied him on his return, and were brought into the presence of Charles, who was by this time back again across the Rhine and at his palace of Attigny on the Aisne, near the forest of Ardennes. Charles received his fallen foes 118 graciously. They were both baptized, Charles himself acting as godfather to Widukind and presenting him with costly gifts. As far as we can see, both honestly accepted the duties which the pledge of fealty to the most Christian king involved. Authentic history after this point is silent as to the name of Widukind, but legends, for which there is very likely some foundation, represent him as not only a contented but even an ardent votary of the new faith, a founder of churches and convents, and an endower of the bishopric of Minden. It is probable that he was allowed to retain his large possessions in Westphalia, and he has been chosen as a favourite peg by German genealogists on which to hang the descent of their Serene and Princely patrons. The least doubtful of these pedigrees appears to be that which makes the great Emperor Otho a descendant, through his mother Matilda, of the Saxon hero.

The submission of Widukind ended for the time the resistance of the Saxons. “That obstinacy of the Saxon perfidy rested for some years, chiefly for this reason, that they could not find opportunities for revolting suitable to the matter in hand,” is the quaint remark of the chronicler.

This peace lasted for six or seven years, in one of which (789) we are told that the king “arranged all matters pertaining to the Saxons, suitably to the time.” That is to say, no doubt, the yoke of Church and State was being fitted to the stubborn Saxon neck. So confident was Charles of the subjugation of his foe that he employed both Saxons and Frisians in the campaigns in which he was now busily engaged on the Middle Danube against the kingdom of the Avars.

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The fact, however, that the Frankish power was thus engaged in a tough struggle with an enemy in the south, at last emboldened the Saxons to make another stand for freedom. Again they allied themselves with the Frisians, and on the 6th of July 792 the first blow was struck. A portion of Charles’s army which had, for some unexplained purpose, been sent in ships to the mouth of the Elbe was set upon by the insurgents of the two allied nations and cut to pieces. This evidence of unslumbering hostility does not seem to have effectually diverted Charles’s attention from his Danubian campaign, but next year (793) tidings of a similar but more overwhelming disaster were brought to him at his quarters in Bavaria. Count Theodoric, the king’s kinsman and a valiant and trusted general (the same who had saved the Frankish army from annihilation on the disastrous day of Suntal), had been leading an army through the district of Rustringen, on the borders of Friesland and Saxon-land, and at some little distance to the west of the Weser. The reason for his presence in that region is not told us, but it was probably the desire to check the revolt which had burst forth in the preceding summer. What is certain is that he was set upon by the Saxons, his army destroyed, and apparently himself slain. Now, at any rate, if not already in the previous year, the rebellion assumed that character of ruthless vindictiveness, especially against churchmen, which showed how sorely the Saxons had been galled by Charles’s ecclesiastical ordinances. “As a dog returneth to his vomit,” says an annalist, “so did they return to the paganism which they had aforetime renounced, again deserting Christianity, lying not less to God than to their lord the 120 king, who had conferred upon them so many benefits, and joining themselves to the pagan nations who dwelt round about them. Sending their emissaries to the Avars, they endeavoured to rebel first against God, then against the king and the Christians. They laid waste all the churches which were within their borders with burning and destruction; they rejected the bishops and presbyters who were set over them; some they took prisoners and others they slew, and, in short, they turned themselves right round to the worship of idols.”

When the news of Theodoric’s defeat reached the king it found him, as before stated, in camp in the centre of Bavaria. The war with the Avars was prospering, but it was still a long way from completion. To deal with two enemies in such widely separated regions as Hanover and Hungary was a hard problem for a commander-in-chief in the eighth century. Charles sought to solve it by a characteristic stroke of his truly imperial genius, and though he failed, even the failure attests the grandeur of his conceptions. Near the Bavarian town of Weissenburg, a little stream called the Schwäbische Rezat takes its rise, within a few miles a larger river, the Altmühl. The Rezat flows northward into the Main, and so eventually into the Rhine and the German Ocean. The Altmühl, on the other hand, soon reaches the Danube, and so sends its waters at last into the Black Sea. Charles’s idea (suggested to him by some professed experts, but eagerly embraced) was to make a navigable canal between the Rezat and the Altmühl, and thus transport his troops and their provisions at will by river navigation either northward against the Saxons or eastward against the Avars. During the 121 the whole autumn of 793 a vast multitude of men laboured at the great enterprise. They dug a fosse two miles long and three hundred feet wide, but it was all in vain. Nature was too strong for them. The marshy quality of the soil, made worse by autumnal rains, thwarted the operations of the diggers, and however much they dug out by day, by night the heaps had all sunk back into the swampy level. There is still, however, a trench about five miles south-west of Weissenburg called the Fossa Carolina, which remains as a monument of the great king’s project. “What a change” (as has been truly said by Pastor Meier, a Bavarian priest who traced the course of the Roman Limes Imperii through those regions), “what stir, and what activity would have filled all those quiet plains if the grand scheme of Kaiser Karl [not yet Kaiser] had been realised, and this tiny streamlet, the Rezat, had seen the interchange of the products of the east and west.” The scheme itself or something like it, was carried into execution by King Louis I. of Bavaria, but owing to the introduction of the railway system König-Ludwigs-Kanal, like so many other artificial waterways, has lost much of its importance.

Foiled in this endeavour King Charles allowed the year 793 to pass without an attempt to punish the Saxon rebellion. The next six years (794-799) each had its Saxon campaign. The general features of the war are very similar to those which we have already noticed: rapid marches of the Frankish king, devastation of the Saxon country, oaths of submission and Saxon hostages. It is noteworthy that Charles now carries back into Frank-land large numbers of these hostages — all apparently young lads — has them educated 122 as Christians, generally as ecclesiastics, and when peace is restored instals them in the various churches and convents wherewith, as the Roman imperator of old with his coloniæ, he fastens down the conquered country. It is also to be observed that the struggle is now chiefly confined to the northern part of Saxon-land, to the great gau of Wigmodia, which stretched between Breman and Hamburg, and to the Nordalbingi who, as has been said, occupied what is now the duchy of Holstein. Further, that Charles, Teuton as he was, did not object to avail himself of the help of a Sclavonic people, the Abodrites, who were the eastern neighbours of the Saxons, and that he bitterly avenged the death of their king Witzin on “the perfidious Saxon nation,” into whose snares he had fallen (795).

In several of these campaigns the Frankish king was effectually seconded by his son Charles, now a young man of between twenty and thirty, to whom it was the father’s custom to impart a portion of his army that a combined attack might be made from different points of the compass. The plan of operations seems to have been generally well laid, for we never hear of these concerted invasions failing to meet at the point agreed upon.

One of the fiercest campaigns was that of 798 against the Nordalbingi who had grievously enraged Charles by the murder of his missi or plenipotentiaries, one of whom was clothed with the sacred character of an ambassador to the King of Denmark. In his vengeance for this murder Charles was powerfully seconded by Thrasco, Duke of the Abodrites.

During the next four eventful years (800-803) Charles 123 had abundant occupation south of the Alps. In 804 he led his army into Saxon-land, “transferred all the Saxons who dwelt beyond the Elbe and in Wigmodia with their wives and children into Frank-land, and gave the shires beyond the Elbe to the Abrodites.” As these Sclavonian allies of Charles were heathens, this handing over to them the duchy of Holstein was so far a confession of failure in the attempt to win the whole of the Saxon territory for Christianity. The number of the Saxons on both banks of the Elbe thus transported is given by Einhard at 10,000. When the inhabitants of whole districts were thus forcibly removed, much injustice, even from the point of view of Frankish “law and order,” must often have been committed. In the next generation complaints reached the ears of Charles’s successor from the sons of loyal and peaceable dwellers by the Weser who had been swept off into exile together with the rebel Wigmodians, and had never recovered the property of which they were then despoiled.

The resistance of the Saxons was powerfully aided by their Danish neighbour on the north. “Godofrid, King of Denmark,” says the chronicler, “with his fleet and all the cavalry of his kingdom came to a place which is called Sliesthorp, on the borders of his kingdom and Saxon-land, for a conference with Charles, but would not venture further. Charles remained close to the river Elbe in a place which is called Holdunsteti, from whence he sent an embassy to Godofrid to treat about the surrender of deserters.” As “the place called Sliesthorp,” is Schleswig, and “the place called Holdunsteti” is Holstein, the student of contemporary history will recognise in this passage the germs of that controversy 124 on “the Scleswig-Holstein quesion,” which was settled in our day by the Dano-German war and led eventually to the supremacy of Prussia in the Germanic Confederation.

At last the Saxon war was ended. The wholesale transportation of inhabitants to which Charles had at length resorted, and which was balanced by the invitation to Franks to settle in the evacuated lands — acts which remind us of the proceedings of Shalmaneser and Nebuchadnezzar towards the people of Israel — had the desired effect.

“Freedom’s battle once began

  Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son”

in this instance was not “ever won.” Christianity, or a religion which believed itself to be Christianity, was triumphant from the Rhine to the Elbe, and three fat bishoprics, Bremen, Münster, and Paderborn, divided between themselves the conquered land. “Saxonia” was henceforth an inseparable part of the newly-founded Frankish Empire.