God's Crucible by David Levering Lewis

Author:David Levering Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008-07-28T16:00:00+00:00

The crystallized concept of the imperium Christianum—the “Christian Empire”—was still several years in Charlemagne’s future, as was his regime’s official motto, Renovatio Romani Imperii (“Restoration of the Roman Empire”).12 Charlemagne’s political ideas were refined on battlefields. Expeditions into Saxony and Lombardy took the young king down the road to the future Christian Empire at a fast gallop. Saxony—independent, pagan, and territorially contiguous—mocked the emerging Carolingian design for a Frankish superstate. Saxons were ferocity personified. Allergic to civilization and immune to Christianity in their veneration of the gods of Walhalla, the Saxon people were virtually unchanged three hundred years after the fall of Rome. The tribes lived in a kind of Teutonic cocoon in the north of today’s Germany, between the Rhine and the Elbe Rivers. After losing three veteran legions in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE, a devastated Caesar Augustus fatefully decided to pull back from the Elbe and fix the empire’s frontier at the Rhine. The Saxons and their cousins had crossed the North Sea to occupy parts of Britain after Roman withdrawal in the early fifth century. Clovis had conceded their independence. Charles the Hammer had warred against them with little success. Pippin the Short managed one or two Pyrrhic victories at best. Theirs was a feral heathenism that withstood the best efforts of Willibrord, Boniface, and the Benedictine missions, for, as Einhard regretted, “They did not consider it dishonorable to transgress and violate all law, human and divine.”13 The premier chieftain among them was the leathery, scarred Westphalian freedom fighter, Widukind, brother-in-law to the pagan king of the Danes.

Charlemagne mustered his men on the Marchfield almost immediately after acquiring a replacement for Desiderata. The new wife, thirteen-year-old Hildegard of Swabia (for whom he showed genuine affection), was Tassilo of Bavaria’s cousin, a nuptial arrangement designed to mitigate the duke’s wounded family honor and preclude a Lombard-Bavarian alliance on Frankland’s northern flank. In the summer of 772, he attacked the Saxons with a large force. He crossed the Ems River with a surer knowledge of the forest than the Roman legions had. His army chased Widukind, the canny chieftain, snarling and cursing to the Danish frontier. It was the first of a half-dozen encounters with the dogged Westphalian. At Eresburg, the Saxons’ forest settlement a hundred leagues or more beyond the last Frankish outpost, stood their totem Irminsul, the giant oak tree that connected earth to heaven. Sacrifices, beast and human, were offered to Irminsul. Charlemagne proceeded to chop down and burn the totem. The people were forced to embrace Christ and swear fealty to the king of the Franks. This first Saxon campaign, in what was to become a thirty-year conquest, yielded considerable benefits, at least in the short run. Piled at the base of the totem were the precious stones, hides, old Roman coins, and assorted items of silver and gold that the Saxon people had dedicated to their gods through the decades. From this trove, the king rewarded the magnates who had assembled with retainers and serfs on the Marchfield in answer to his war summons.

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