before we get to the books, could you tell us, very briefly, when charlemagne existed and also when charles became charles the great: charlemagne?
charlemagne was born in the middle of the 8th century and died in the year 814. it was a period when europe was undergoing enormous changes. the Roman empire had disappeared, more or less. There was a Merovingian dynasty that had just been exiled and Charlemagne’s father became king. At the time, Charlemagne was three years old. we are talking about a new dynasty here that came to power in a palace coup. Charles’ father was Pippin, Pippin III, we call him now. he played a very clever game, aided by the pope, to overthrow the last Merovingian king, who was from a legitimate dynasty that had been on the throne for two and a half centuries. With really clever maneuvers, Pippin managed to become King of the Franks.
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his son, charles, was just ‘charles’. he became ‘charlemagne’ after his death. he succeeded his father and, like many sons who succeed a royal father, he tried to outdo his father in every possible way. and that worked for all sorts of reasons. we know him as the first emperor of the west after the roman period and the man who conquered most of what is now western europe, more or less.
after the second world war, he became “the father of europe”. you can approve that or not. I feel a bit uncomfortable with that.
there is also a “prix charlemagne”. What is it granted for?
given by the city of aachen, which housed charlemagne’s palace. it is awarded to people who have helped europe “become one”. there is a nice wikipedia page about it, with a list of all the people who have won the ‘prix charlemagne’ or ‘karlspreis’. that’s another thing about him: are we talking about ‘karl der grosse’ or ‘charlemagne’? he is a different person to different people. that’s what makes it so interesting.
When was he given the nickname “the great”?
once he was safely in his grave and the Carolingian empire he had built began to divide into sub-kingdoms, some history writers began calling him ‘the great one’. he took off in the twelfth century. suddenly he’s the hero of the crossover romances. he becomes a very attractive fictional figure from the high middle ages onwards, and that never stops.
He’s also a saint in the Christian church, isn’t he?
unfortunately he was canonized by an antipope; it was a political thing. There are some churches in parts of France where you can still find statues of Saint Charlemagne, but I don’t think he made the official calendar. there was an attempt to upload it and some people and some areas of europe are still sticking to it. that’s another strange chapter in this man’s story. he pushed so many buttons, mainly after his death, that he became many different things, many unrelated to who he really was.
We know very little about this guy. Johannes Fried, a leading German medievalist, published an 800-page biography of Charlemagne based on what we know about him, which is practically nothing. Of course, as a historian, there are all sorts of tricks you can pull out of the box to flesh out the little snippets you have.
If you read biographies of Charlemagne from, say, the 18th century to now, you’ll learn a lot about the historians and what they were interested in and what they were trying to project on this man, but less on him. Even in the 1950s, there were still people who thought that Charlemagne was a lone genius who wanted to resurrect the Roman Empire, more or less single-handedly; that he was this lonely visionary in a barbaric world. this was when people still believed in ‘the dark ages’. That wasn’t too long ago, but things have changed a lot since then.
Let’s move on to the books. The first is from Janet Nelson, King and Emperor: A New Life for Charlemagne. Of all the books you could have chosen, why is this the best biography of Charlemagne?
If you ever want to read a book about Charlemagne, then this would be the one. it is wonderful. A whole series of biographies came out around 2014 to commemorate the 1,200th anniversary of his death. Nelson’s book came out a little later. he has worked on charlemagne for half a century. even so, he manages to reread all the primary sources. she knows what she’s doing: every little bit of information, whether it’s archaeology, art history, history, or some strange manuscript in some obscure German monastery. she has it all and manages to use these fragments as part of a huge puzzle, most of which is missing. she does not try to tell us a coherent work story that begins with birth and ends with death and goes mechanically through the intermediate points. she also tells us what we don’t know, and tries to make the most of the bits and pieces we have. she also shows how hard it is to play them sometimes.
“we know him as the first emperor of the west after Roman times and the man who conquered most of what is now western europe, more or less”
in the introduction, you say you want the fonts to speak. And that’s what I find so wonderful about this book. she plays them, but the main characters in her book are all these bits of evidence through which we can get a sense of who Charlemagne was and why it’s interesting. it’s wonderful to have the primary sources at the heart of the book and she makes room for them. she points out things that are weird or inconsistencies between the sources and she asks, “what can we do with that?”, which I love.
Many biographies of Charlemagne have been written, but this one reads like a really fresh and interesting take on the whole story.
Although it is obviously more tentative because it is somewhat more thorough than many of its predecessors, does it present a particular vision or understanding of Charlemagne’s place in history, his role or what he accomplished? Or does he deliberately move away from those kinds of conclusions?
One thing she deliberately doesn’t do is fall into the trap of writing backwards. she calls him charles because ‘charlemagne’ was a later development in the story. and she tries to stick as closely as she can to contemporary material, to really focus on what was happening, not what people later said had been happening. that’s a big difference.
Your Charlemagne is not the lone genius trying to rebuild the Roman Empire. his charlemagne is someone who was sometimes monumentally wrong but was very good at improvising. he is someone who had to learn to rule this huge empire just by doing it and trying things, and trusting people. sometimes that wasn’t a very good idea, as it turned out. He is someone who was very good at thinking on his feet and who was very energetic and interested in many things.
It is not the great emperor with a crown on his head and a big flowing beard, sitting on the throne and ‘ruling’. no, he is running up and down his empire all the time because there were people attacking him and people cheating on him. he was a very busy emperor.
He may not have revived the Roman Empire in the west, but he did have himself crowned Emperor of the Romans in the year 800, so something was going on there. what allowed him to build this empire? Was it the weakness of the surrounding polities, or was he driven by anxiety about the illegitimacy of his dynasty, and did he feel that he had to be more assertive to keep his aristocracy on board by invading other countries? What was behind the strength of his state, to the extent that it existed?
That’s a very good question. and of course you can have a long discussion about whether or not this was a “state” in any modern sense of the word. I believe that there are several parts to the secret of its success. one is simply that he was a very good military leader, with a bigger and stronger army than the neighbors. he certainly benefited from weaknesses in neighboring areas.
but I guess you could also say he wasn’t building an empire. It wasn’t a conscious process, where you woke up one morning, wondered what you should do that weekend, and decided to build an empire. even the imperial coronation has some interpretation problems. what he had to do, given the kind of government he was running, was make sure that the people who were loyal to him, his military leaders, his commanders, his earls, stayed loyal. Since this is not a state as we know it, with a separate army, you have to make sure that these people remain happy. and one way to keep them happy is to win wars and split the spoils with them. this stage of early medieval history has been labeled a “plunder economy”, because it needs to expand to maintain this internal balance. An earl who receives a good treasure to take to his wife and children will come back and fight for you again.
“we know very little about this guy”
that is something that begins to be more difficult under charlemagne’s grandsons when the empire is divided. then, you have three kings to choose from, and sometimes even four. so if one doesn’t pay you enough, you just go to the neighbors.
But Charlemagne was good at this, and having won some wars that produced some truly spectacular amounts of treasure, he had a good base to work from.
The other thing is that he embraced Christianity as a way of life. Christianity, at that time, was more than what we would call a religion. collaborating with the pope he was sure that he ruled by the grace of god on earth. that’s not only good because then you get additional support from heaven in your wars, if you need it, but it also comes with obligations, because then it’s your responsibility to save people who, like the saxons for example, are pagans. saxony was conquered and converted at the same time. then, there is also this ideal of spreading Christianity, in the high medieval style. that’s also a cornerstone, this idea of a Christian empire.
I don’t think he was trying to revive the Roman Empire. this coronation in the year 800 remains a mystery. we have very conflicting stories about it. Charlemagne’s biographer, Einhard, says that Charlemagne had no idea what was to come. according to einhard, charlemagne was there in rome, in church on christmas day, happily praying at saint peter’s tomb when the pope sneaked up behind him and put this crown on his head and said, ‘hurrah, we have a empire and an emperor!’
That’s not very likely, is it?
sounds a bit farfetched.
but why is einhard writing this? others, later, thought that this train of events was impossible and that Charlemagne must have planned it years and years in advance. but these contradictory stories are already a reason to think that something was going on here. Perhaps the plan was not so much to revive the Roman Empire, but for the pope to get a stronger ally, or to thank him for some favors Charlemagne had done him. or something else.
even once he was emperor, he didn’t use that title as much as “king of the Franks and Lombards”. he was a nice extra, but “the emperor charlemagne” means something very different from what you mean by “the roman emperor”.
let’s move on to the next book charlemagne: empire and society, edited by joanna story.
this is a good book for people who want a charlemagne tasting menu. It consists of relatively short chapters on interesting aspects of Charlemagne and his world. It is a book for beginners. I think it’s the newest and most accessible book of its kind on the market today.
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Do your chapters address Charlemagne-related topics where scholarly debate is particularly lively at the moment?
This book is from 2005 and its intention was to show the state of the debate and knowledge at that time. The ninth chapter of the book, written by Rosamond McKiterick, deals with the Carolingian revival of culture and learning. that’s a big debate right now because this idea of a “renaissance” is hard to sustain. there is a question as to whether we should be talking about ‘reforma’ or ‘correctio’ instead.
“We have a few hundred Merovingian manuscripts left, written over a period of 250 years. then, in the 150 years of the Carolingian period, you have 8,000 or 9,000 books left”
There is a question as to whether this cultural flourishing in the time of Charlemagne was due to the people at court becoming very intelligent and sophisticated, without the rest of the empire realizing it, this old idea that it is a phenomenon small and elite. more recent work has shown that this was not an elite culture at all, but part of a much larger idea of wanting to lead an entire population to salvation, for which they needed books. and these books should be everywhere, even in small churches and small towns.
Wasn’t the Carolingian Renaissance, or however we should refer to it, partly about renewing or developing legal systems?
yes, legal systems, educational systems. the books are a symptom of the larger story. we have a few hundred Merovingian manuscripts left, written over a period of 250 years. then, in the 150 years of the Carolingian period, there are 8,000 or 9,000 books left. And of course that’s just the tip of the iceberg. there was an explosion in book production, which is the result of a new and intensified interest in knowledge. I think that is one of the most important things to remember. these Carolingians were addicted to interesting texts on more or less anything and especially things that could be used to teach because, if you want to lead an entire population to salvation, you need to be able to explain exactly what Christianity is all about.
It can be very simple things, like can you wash your hair on Sundays? a farmer might ask his priest, who needs to know what to answer. the answer is ‘no, unless it’s an emergency’ — and it’s the same for foot washing. the question behind all this is, ‘what does Sunday rest mean? does foot washing work?’ a lot of thought had to be given to questions like that and, as a result, much Roman jurisprudence was brought to the Carolingian empire and copied, studied and pondered. educated people are needed to make decisions and teach people to be good Christians, frank and subjects.
You can see a little bit how the Franks tried to pick up the great ideas that the Romans had. written law is a good thing because then you can search for things. which led to the creation of written law books. they are very useful for earls and others who judge locally. It was decided quite early in Charlemagne’s reign that each distinct group was allowed to have its own law. thus the Lombards, Saxons, Franks, and Frisians all had their own law. and the copying of these laws and the making available of all these books is certainly part of the history of this ‘renaissance’.
And this enormous intellectual and administrative effort was extended to the production of a secular art culture? Are there great poems or other literary works, that sort of thing?
yes, but you can’t really talk about “the secular” in this period because Christianity is like a big umbrella that covers all aspects of your life. it is a code of conduct that covers all aspects of daily life. furthermore, most of the people who wrote were clerics. there were some non-clerical people who wrote poetry, jokes, letters, and the like. Perhaps the best example in this context is Einhard himself, Charlemagne’s biographer. He went to a monastic school but remained secular, married and became one of Charlemagne’s most important advisers.
Are there great works of art that are not religious from the front? Yes. for example, there are fantastic manuscripts on astronomy, the stars and constellations, beautifully illustrated, probably copied from later Roman examples. the first fragments of old High German poetry appear. but this is, I think, more an expression of a greater interest in literacy and knowledge, than being part of a ‘renaissance’.
what you’re saying is that there certainly wasn’t a conscious revival of pagan literature and culture of the kind that appeared in the 15th century?
People were very interested in Roman, pre-Christian or Christian literature. but the reasons were very different and it was not about reviving Roman paganism. they admired people who wrote beautiful and wonderful Latin stories and thought they could learn a lot from that. if it got too dubious, they probably wouldn’t let their young students read it. they would be careful who they showed the ars amatoria to. there was no hesitation about pre-Christian authors, but there was a kind of “handle with care” awareness, not wanting to put the wrong ideas into overheated young minds.
What does the book say about society and the economy in Charlemagne’s empire? you mentioned that it was a society based on plunder, to a certain extent. Did social or economic relations change much as a result of Charlemagne’s empire building?
for 99.9% of people, life was very hard: subsistence. the loot was not shared equally among all, only a very small elite. most people were not free or semi-free and lived in small rural communities. In that sense, I don’t think much has changed at all. there is no systemic change, but we see charlemagne trying to take care of these people in times of famine. that’s something we didn’t come across with previous rulers. famine occurred from time to time and charlemagne developed a policy to deal with it. By fixing the price of bread and preventing grain hoarding, he prevented the people from reaping huge profits when the famine struck.
Life didn’t change for most people, except that churches popped up more or less everywhere. religion went local, although that’s not really covered in this book. but it does explain how peasants lived and how the subsistence economy enabled trade and sometimes even long-distance trade, although more recent research suggests the effects of that were only felt a little later.
let’s move on to the next book, which is ich und karl der grosse: das leben des höflings einhard de steffen patzold. tell us about it.
patzold is professor of medieval history at the university of tübingen. this is a very brave book. Rather than add yet another book to the thousands that already exist on Charlemagne, he has attempted to write a book on Charlemagne’s biographer, Einhard. And we know even less about Einhard than we do about Charlemagne. what he does to solve that problem is to rely on the historical imagination. that’s why he’s brave. there are a lot of people, especially in germany, who don’t like this approach. they want facts and sources. but he really knows what he’s doing. he talks about primary sources and asks interesting questions about them. he is trying to flesh out charlemagne through the eyes of the man who was with him for 30 years. and he uses einhard to give us an idea of the world in which these people moved.
I think it’s wonderful. it is a kind of historical writing that you don’t see much. it is also intended for a slightly wider audience. he is a good storyteller. I’m surprised it hasn’t been translated into any other language yet.
Is it like a novel?
is not a novel, nor is it just hardcore scholarship. it is in the middle. He will present us with a manuscript and ask us what we should do with it. it also shows the kinds of puzzles historians have to try to solve every day, like what to do with little marginal notes in a manuscript, or something that isn’t hard fact and is open to interpretation. then walks you through the steps that inform your interpretation, making it clear that we can never be sure. he is very conscientious in the gaps he fills. he doesn’t say, ‘it was a sunny morning and einhard was walking in the garden…’ or anything like that. it revolves around primary sources, the material of the time, and tries to reconstruct this world around the king-emperor, who builds this court in aachen, and all the people around him, who are a really nasty and treacherous bunch, because the competition is very tough.
einhard was very small. he wasn’t big enough and manly enough to become a true warrior. probably that is why his parents sent him to a monastery in fulda so that he would have a good education. because of its size, unsavory men at court accused it of being an ant or suggested that it could be used as a table leg. but they also knew that he was one of the most brilliant minds of the time.
there are shards you can use to get an image of einhard, but mainly patzold uses einhard to look through his eyes at this inner circle around the emperor.
Einhard was Charlemagne’s main adviser, a kind of prime minister. is that so?
is one of the prime ministers. there were a lot of people competing for that position. einhard spent a lot of time at court, and after charlemagne’s death, his son, louis, took care of him. that shows that einhard was highly appreciated for his advice. perhaps it was to his advantage not to be a high noble. he wasn’t part of a faction, which meant he was able to survive the chaos that erupted after charlemagne’s death and work with louis for a while. It was at Louis’s court that he wrote his biography of Charlemagne, perhaps to show Louis how it’s done and, through the life of his father, to set an example for him.
“einhard tells you that charlemagne was tall and had a bit of a shrill voice and a bit of a paunch and reddish hair”
Historians disagree exactly on the purpose of Einhard’s book. Patzold offers a very different interpretation from Nelson’s. For Nelson, it was intended as a mirror for the new king. here was the story of his great father, as long as he did what his father had done, he would be fine. the book is also a product of the intellectual culture of the time. there is a bit of the life of suetonius caesars there, and also of cicero. it’s a way to show how good your Latin is. people would recognize that; he was the intellectual in the game. But according to Nelson, the book is also a literary experiment, because apart from the lives of the saints, no biographies had been written since Roman times.
patzold agrees that he is, to some extent, a mirror, but points out that einhard doesn’t talk about difficult things at all at the time. he seems to dodge all the controversies and gossip. he says the reason for this is that einhard wanted to stay out of all these debates and keep his hands clean and show that he was a good adviser. he wanted to keep his job, or even get a better one, and this was his letter of application.
how long is it?
it’s not very long at all. It’s about 50 pages.
Do you have any idea what Charlemagne was like, a man under the crown?
you do and you don’t, because einhard tells you that charlemagne was tall and had a bit of a shrill voice and a bit of a paunch and reddish hair. but in these descriptions einhard is borrowing from suetonius. When Charlemagne’s nose is described, it is a direct quote from the lives of the Caesars. then you may wonder what he was doing he. Did Charlemagne have the same nose as one of these emperors, or did he think this sounded good for a text like this? that’s the big conundrum.
We have no direct idea what this man would have been like for a pint. you can see him being kind to the children and the series of wives he had. you can see him being very energetic and running up and down his empire with an army to intervene. he can be seen rewarding the faithful followers of him when he just avoided being killed. that kind of things. but a portrait of a person as we would like to see him now, in a biography? no.
Do we learn a lot about Einhard from him?
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Not really. He points out that it is not worth telling the story of the great Carlos, but that is another literary trope. it is not a text written directly from the heart. it’s very worked and full of quotes and things that we probably don’t even understand today and can’t understand. but this is the best evidence we have about Charlemagne as a person. is the only description of him that is more or less contemporary.
let’s move on to the practice of the empire of charlemagne by jennifer davis.
Davis is a woman on a mission. What he wants to explain to us is how Charlemagne managed to govern the empire that he built. she tries to fight the idea of the lone genius who was “reviving the empire”. but that still leaves open the question of exactly how she did it. she asks if she had a plan and he suggests not. she paints a really practical Charlemagne, who didn’t have a great overall plan, but who was a very good improviser except when he wasn’t, and things went terribly wrong. he sometimes he lost battles. sometimes people were unfaithful at unfortunate times.
Really think about how you run a huge kingdom or empire without modern government structures. If you really only have a group of loyal people to work with, but these people are as loyal as they want to be and feel safe being so, you need to reward them enough and keep them happy. how does this work in practice? And so what do you do if one of your key people decides not to be faithful? And how do you handle things as your empire gets bigger and bigger? can you still rule a place that size or are there limits?
Like Janet Nelson, she’s taken every shred of evidence. is mostly limited to contemporary sources, to be as close to the facts as possible, to reconstruct how he did it. It’s a wonderful book because she’s a very rigorous scholar and she’s not afraid to say that although we used to think of Charlemagne as a man with a plan and a vision, it turns out that he was just improvising as we all do in parts of our lives. the term that comes to mind for this form of government is “an empire of practice.” there is a lot of experimentation and some experiments go wrong. then he comes up with a new way to deal with problems. and that sounds like a very refreshing and realistic Charlemagne to me.
For hundreds of years, Charlemagne has been painted as larger than life, but here we see someone you can relate to. you see it through the rules and regulations, in a very practical way. if the king has decided that people cannot work on sundays because that is what god wants, then what? you have decided in aachen, together with your faithful men, that it is a good idea that nobody works on sundays. but there are ten million little settlements in that empire. how are you going to organize that? That’s the kind of thing Davis thinks about. and the answer is delegated responsibility. there are people in each region that you work with directly and they have their own people and so on. but there is always a weak link. the way to deal with that is to always have more than one person doing the same job. so if a link in the chain breaks, you have alternatives.
and was it some kind of feudal arrangement, in the sense that he used his close baronial peers in the war to be the first link in the provinces?
I still wouldn’t call this society totally feudal, and in any case, that’s not really a current concept anymore. but delegated responsibility works with face-to-face contacts. you would appoint people you trusted and those people, in turn, would do the same. In that sense, it resembles the model we used to think of as feudal, but it’s not as strictly organized.
One thing he did very cleverly, and it’s something the Carolingians continued to do after him, was to try to prevent families from becoming entrenched in a specific region. if you have a talented military leader who has his base of operations in, say, northern italy, you could send him to eastern france. then after a while, when he’s done his thing there, he might get a new job in southern germany. Charlemagne tried to avoid ‘territorialization’.
this is before each knight builds his own castle. this upper layer of faithful men is very mobile. they are rewarded in a super smart way. if you’re a successful count you get some of the spoils of war but if there’s land to divide you get some in belgium and some in the south of france and some vineyards in bavaria and maybe the rights to a toll on a river, so you can’t group things. and you have to keep traveling and managing your widely scattered goods and properties. that was a good way to keep people happy and on their toes.
I just want to get a quick idea of what Charlemagne started with and what he added to that, in terms of territory. his initial domain is the north of france and much of the rhineland, right?
yes. they are bits of belgium, bits of the south of the netherlands, bits of france. it expands to the east, more or less to the Hungarian border. it expands to the italian peninsula, as far as rome, but collides with the dukes of benevento, making southern italy one step too far.
That was the maximum natural size, apparently, that you could handle at the time, with the road system that was there and the people that were there.
And it stretched from the Hungarian border to the Baltic Sea?
yes. Friesland was disputed. I think most Frisians at the time would have denied that they were part of the Carolingian empire, but Utrecht, where I am now, was solidly Carolingian. you shouldn’t think of a border as a line on a sheet of paper. it’s like a gray area where influence slowly fades.
did it extend to the Iberian Peninsula, over the Pyrenees?
tried, but failed. that is the famous battle that ended as the chanson de roland-roncesvalles. that went terribly wrong. there was Islamic rule in Spain and the resistance was too strong. like southern italy, it was a step too far.
southern italy still had a very strong byzantine influence and two of the local dukes, from benevento and spoleto, did not like the carolingians at all. There is a wonderful story in a frontier monastery on the edge of Charlemagne’s area of influence, where he met the Beneventians. Charlemagne sent an abbot. the story, from a little later in the 9th century, tells that there was a man in this monastery who had officially said that he would rather pray for a dog than for Charlemagne. so his popularity in that area was not undisputed.
Davis’s book is a very clever and sophisticated study of how Charlemagne did what he did, with all these mechanisms explained in a very convincing way.
let’s move on to the last book. Let’s cheat a bit here by having two: Ingrid Rembold’s Conquest and Christianization: Saxony and the Carolingian World and Robert Flierman’s Saxon Identities, AD 150-900. why did you choose these?
I thought it would be nice to have this double nomination covering Charlemagne in action. one of the darkest pages in his history is the conquest of saxony. It has been called ‘Charlemagne’s jihad’ and the first case of ‘Western genocide’. there are all kinds of problems with that because it was a very long war. for more than 30 years he fought against the Saxons, although, as these books show, “the Saxons” did not exist. there were many different groups.
You get the feeling that, at some point, Charlemagne and his leading men began to get a bit fed up with this war. what you see happening all the time is the Franks winning battles, after which the Saxons submit. then five years later there is a new group of Saxons in arms. And this goes on and on and on. the reason for this is that there were all these different little groups of saxons, who didn’t think they had a common identity.
These two books appeared more or less at the same time and shed light on the question of Saxony from two different directions.
ingrid rembold is mainly interested in how saxony became part of the carolingian empire, how this conquest worked. It was a conquest that went hand in hand with Christianization, with very violent aspects. the Saxons, late in the war, were given a choice between baptism and death, and at that time, supposedly 20,000 Saxons were beheaded because they decided they would rather die than become Christians. that story has a long echo through history.
flierman comes from another direction, because he is interested in how the saxons became ‘the saxons’. this is a book about collective identity in those places. Ironically, this history of conquest and Christianization that Rembold describes led to an acceleration of the development of that collective identity. That’s why I thought I had to have both. I’m not going to choose because they should be read together.
Is Flierman arguing that this collective identity developed in the face of this Charlemagne aggression, or that it was his conversion to Christianity that allowed the Saxons to develop a collective identity?
both. the conquest worked like a kind of pressure cooker, in the sense that things that could have happened much more slowly anyway, suddenly began to develop rapidly. groups of Saxons who sometimes collaborated and sometimes didn’t become “the Saxons” as a result of being conquered and resisting conquest for so long.
In the Frankish sources reboldd works with, the Franks object to pagans resisting their own submission; They should honor their vows. But Flierman has two sides to the story. In the part of his book on Charlemagne, he shows that Christianity was a fantastic new identity label in the course of the 10th and 11th centuries. One of the great ironies of history, here, is that it was the Saxons, who had resisted incorporation into the Frankish empire and, to some extent, resisted Christianity, who became Scandinavia’s most fanatically enthusiastic missionaries. . The new wave of missionaries in post-Carolingian Europe came from Saxony. So, one could say that Charlemagne’s conquest and Christianization was a success, in the end.
and when we talk about saxony here, we’re talking about more than just modern saxony, right? is it a large area of central europe?
is larger than modern saxony-anhalt, stretching further to the north, south and east. again, the borders were very different. where these people lived tended to expand and shrink over time. the big difference with the rest of the empire is that it had never been under Roman rule, so there were no roads. it was just pretty impenetrable forest, bits of swamp, really nasty territory. It was much less accessible than, say, Brittany, Normandy, or the South of France, which still had a Roman road system. it was a jungle where these fearsome pagans lived, that was the image. that was not the reality, but that is how people thought about those areas.
You talked about Charlemagne not having a plan, but did he have a purpose, which is something slightly different? With the war against the Saxons, was he worried about them invading his existing territory, or can you only really understand it as, effectively, an evangelical crusade?
It wasn’t a crusade because there was no Jerusalem to conquer, but I’d say it was both. problems in the border area had existed for centuries. there were always these struggles for expansion. part of the story was definitely to put a stop to that, because it’s annoying, if you’re busy conquering northern italy and you have to run home because the saxons are misbehaving once again.
there were already some islands of christianity in saxony. this idea of creating a Christian empire was also definitely part of the story. the conquest worked with missionaries and an army sent together. the way to build footholds was not by building fortresses, but by founding monasteries, and from these monasteries this new ideology spread. this was really an early medieval way of doing things, because supply and communication lines were very long and armies were difficult to organize, especially if short-term interventions were needed.
You can really see both elements: expansion for the sake of military successes, resources, and keeping people loyal; and the will to bring these people into the Christian empire.