The Saxon Wars I: let’s do this

 No war taken up by the Frankish people was ever longer, harder, or more dreadful…^1.Einhard, Life of Charlemagne, ch. 7, p.20

Beginning in 772, Charlemagne waged war against the Saxons for more than thirty years. It was, as his biographer notes, the longest and most vicious of all the wars he undertook. After literally centuries of cross-border skirmishing, of which Charlemagne’s father and grandfather were frequent participants, he decided to finish the job once and for all. Why did he turn his eye to the Saxons? There were plenty of other opportunities, including Spain, Brittany, or southern Italy.

If Carolingian naval power were only a little more robust he could have looked north to Britain, but that’s a tale for a novelist.^2.Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare, pp. 249-254. Charles Martel launched small fleets at Frisia, and Charlemagne fought along the Rhine, but neither ever attempted a military channel crossing. Commerce between Britain and the mainland was extensive, however, so the knowledge existed.

Prof. Bernard Bachrach, who has studied Carolingian grand strategy in detail, believes that Charlemagne was motivated by both religion and imperial ambition as he planned the Saxon conquest. If he could conquer the regions of the former Roman Empire, then (hopefully) the pope would anoint him as a new emperor of the west. His claim would be further buttressed and enhanced by an extensive (and, as it turned out, ruthless) campaign of Saxon Christianization.^3.Personal correspondence with Prof. Bachrach, February 4, 2018.

Charlemagne and his brother Carloman in 768 inherited a divided Frankish kingdom from their father Pepin. Charlemagne first task was to subdue the last Aquitainian resistance after his father’s decade-long war in that province. The “years of joint rule” were not happy ones, and the brothers feuded constantly. On Caroman’s death in December of 771 there followed several campaigns against the Lombard king Desiderius. Then in 777 and 778 came the preparation for and execution of the ill-fated Spanish expedition.

But prior to Spain not all military action was south of the Alps. The border between Saxony and the Frankish kingdoms is undefined and dangerous, and conflict was a constant threat. Either due to a lack of action or a focus on other events, the annalists don’t mention Saxony until 772, four years after Charles ascended to the throne, and the year after his brother died. But Charles, as ever, did not do things in half measures, and the expedition that year was no mere raid, as Charles famously destroyed the Irminsul. He further advanced to the river Weser after this significant piece of spiritual desecration, where he received the usual hostages.

Charles must have felt that his depredations had sufficiently impressed the heathen rabble to leave Saxony to its own devices for a time. The next year (or in 774, depending on whether you’re reading the first cut at the Annals, or the Revised version), involved in the complexities of Italian political life, Charles got word that “those Saxons sallied forth against the Franks’ borderlands with a great army.” They could do so because “the frontier-region over against the Saxons was left wholly unsecured by treaty.” Interestingly, the Saxons apparently made a concerted effort to burn a church at Fritzlar, which Boniface himself had said would never be burned. It is possible that the Saxons wished to inflict a similar spiritual wound on the Franks as had been inflicted upon them.

Both sets of Annals agree that in 774 Charles launched a retaliatory raid, which was a great success. Perhaps it was during this expedition that the king decided that he would no longer endure the endless cycle of reprisals that had marked Saxon-Frankish relations for so long. In 775 Charles “resolved to wage war on the perfidious and treaty-breaking people of the Saxons and to persevere with this until they had either been overcome and subjected to the Christian religion or totally exterminated.”^4.At least according to the Revised Royal Annals, year 775, p. 111.

I wonder how Charles would answer modern day charges of forced religious conversion and ethnic cleansing.

From the descriptions it sounds like 775 was a year of full and unrelenting assault on the Saxon lands. Charles “crossed the Rhine and fell upon Saxony with all the forces of the realm.”^5.Revised Annals, year 775, p. 111. Three battles were fought that summer, and Charles “three times brought about carnage among the Saxons.” The Revised Annals divulge a small incident, notable in that it describes something close to a Frankish defeat due to “a treacherous ruse of the Saxons.” In a previous post about Saxon society we noted how the Saxons and Franks shared a common language, dress, and other modes of appearance.

One afternoon, as Frankish foragers returned from their labors, and emerged from the forests,

Saxons mingled with them as if they were their fellows and so entered the Franks’ camp. They fell upon the men who were sleeping or dozing  and are reported to have inflicted no little slaughter on the unwary multitude. But they were repulsed by the courage of those who were awake, who put up a manful resistance; they left the camp and then departed in accordance with an agreement which the two sides, being in such straights, were able to make with each other.

Charles would not let this imposture go unpunished, agreement or no, and “pursued them in their flight and struck down a great multitude of them.”^6.Revised Annals, year 775, p. 112. Still, the glorious deed must have lived long in the songs of the Saxons.

The following year the Saxons retaliated for the assaults of 775, taking the castle of Eresburg (which seems to have been taken and retaken every year), and advancing on the fortress of Syburg. Here they encountered another of those miracles which certainly convinced the annalists, and perhaps everyone, that God was working with the Christians. Two shields appeared in the sky over the fortress, and this sign threw the Saxons into such a panic that they actually impaled themselves on the spears of their fellows as they stampeded away.

While the year 777 was one of retrenchment and preparation, Charles held the general assembly at Paderborn, in Saxony itself. He did this as a show of force, and to demand and accept the baptism of “an immense multitude of them.” The only dissenter from this show of subservience was one Wikukind, who hadn’t gotten the memo, and “who, with a few others, was in rebellion.”^7.Original and Revised Annals, year 777, p. 77 and 113. The next year the king and a tremendous army marched over the Pyrenees, to annhilation and timeless glory.

What are we to make of this escalating series of skirmishes? There is no doubt that Charles was taking things to another level, particularly when he burned the Irminsul. It seems clear that the young king would not relent in his campaigns to both subjugate and convert the Saxon people. Was there a method to his mayhem?

There were underlying causes that threatened daily to disturb the peace, particularly since our borders and theirs ran together almost everywhere in open land, except for a few places where huge forests and mountain ridges came between our respective lands and established a clear boundary. Murder, theft, and arson constantly occurred along this border. The Franks were so infuriated by these [incidents], that they believed they could no longer respond [incident for incident], but that it was worth declaring open war on the Saxons.^8.Einhard, Life of Charlemagne, ch. 7, p. 20.

It is reasonable to correlate Einhard’s declaration of “open war on the Saxons” with the Annals entry from 775. Aquitaine had been subdued, his brother was dead, and the Lombards had been domesticated. I would guess that by that point Charles was finally able to give the Saxon situation his full attention, and decided to devote the complete resources of the realm to the problem.

In the next post we’ll look at what happened when the king returned from Spain, and what the Saxons got up to during his absence..