The middle of the eighth century saw the emergence, in Europe and in the Middle East, of political systems that had lost contact with their roots in the ancient world. East Rome became “Byzantium.” It lost its civilian elites and its worldwide horizons. It became a beleaguered, but more cohesive, state. The Iconoclast controversy showed the extent to which its new rulers were prepared to seek the much-needed favor of God by calling to account customs inherited from a richer, more easygoing past. New men from new territories – in the Byzantine empire, persons of military background from eastern Anatolia – had been forced to build fast, in a world that had lost many of its ancient landmarks.
In northwestern Europe, the Frankish state passed through a similar period of urgent turmoil. The nobility of Austrasia had emerged as a distinct group in the late sixth century. They controlled the frontier territories of northeastern Gaul and the lands east of the Rhine. After 700, they rallied increasingly to a family that came from the Maas/Meuse (in Belgium) and the Ardennes. This family was led by Pippin of Herstal (d.714). Pippin was the nephew of Gertrude of Nivelles (Belgium), whom we have already met (at the end of chapter 11) as an influential abbess. As “mayor of the palace,” Pippin of Herstal had acted as the strong “vice-king” to a largely symbolic Merovingian ruler. Pippin’s son, Charles, was later named, all too appositely, Charles Martel, Charles “the Hammer.” He revived the ancient “terror of the Franks.” By the time that he died in 741, Charles the Hammer had shown his supporters what success in war could do, in acquiring new wealth to be distributed among themselves. In 733, he stopped a Muslim army on its way to loot Tours, and, from then onwards, Charles’ armies looted the Christian regions of the south and imposed a northern hegemony on them.
WESTERN EUROPE ca. 700–ca. 840
| Willibrord 658–739 founds Echternach 698 | |
| Pippin of Herstal mayor of the palace 687–714 | |
| Radbod king of the Frisians 685–719 | |
| Boniface 675–754 arrives in Francia 716 destroys Oak of Thunor at Geismar 723/4 | |
| Charles Martel mayor of the palace 715–741 Battle of Poitiers 733 | |
| Boniface founds Fulda 744 Condemnation of Aldebert 745 | |
| Vergil of Salzburg 745–784 | |
| Coronation and anointing of Pippin II as king of the Franks 751 | |
| Pope Stephen II anoints Pippin II 754 | |
| Boniface killed in northern Frisia 754 | |
| Charlemagne 768–814 attacks Saxons 772 conquers Lombards 774 massacres Saxons at Verden 782 Capitulary on Saxony 785 | |
| Alcuin of York 735–804 abbot of St. Martin’s at Tours 797–804 | |
| Admonitio Generalis 789 defeat of the Avars 792 builds palace at Aachen 794 crowned emperor at Rome 800 | |
| Theodulph bishop of Orléans 798–818 writes Libri Carolini 793 Ghaerbald bishop of Liège 785–809 | |
| Louis the Pious 814–840 | |
| Einhard writes Life of Charlemagne 824/836 | |
| Agobard bishop of Lyons 816–840 | |
| Stellinga Revolt in Saxony 841/3 |
Charles Martel’s victory over the Muslims at the battle of Poitiers, in 733, is what is most usually remembered about him. His systematic ravaging of the south of France is passed over in silence. His greatest conquest, however, was less spectacular but more decisive. He took over Frankish Neustria. As we saw in chapter 11, Neustria had been the heartland of Merovingian Gaul. Paris and the rich, well-watered lands around the Seine lay at its center. It was the most stable and prosperous region in Europe. As we have seen, great royal and aristocratic monasteries had sprung up all over northern France in the course of the seventh century. These monasteries were supported by new agrarian wealth. Slowly but surely, the landowners of the region imposed a “seigneurial” system on the peasantry. Greater control of the peasantry enabled the aristocracy to regain, for the first time in four centuries, a level of security and of guaranteed affluence that had once been enjoyed by the villa-owners of the Roman empire. In controlling Neustria, Charles controlled the economic and cultural core of northern Europe.1
The Frankish aristocracy had rallied grudgingly to the family of Pippin and Charles Martel. For much of his life, Charles Martel found himself faced by bitter enemies in a “winner take all” situation. But once he had emerged as victor, a consensus was formed around him and his family. Given an able leader, the combined aristocracies of Neustria and Austrasia found that they could strike anywhere, from Aquitaine and the Rhône valley to the Rhine estuary, the Black Forest, and the Danube, to extract wealth and to tighten up previous ties of submission. Ranging now far outside their homeland, the Franks became the dominant partners in a confederation of widely differing regions which had always been associated, in a looser fashion, with the hegemonial rule of the Merovingian kings.
The armies which Charles and his fellow-noblemen deployed were far from being exclusively made up of cavalry. Frankish warfare was sophisticated in its combination of horsemen, infantry, and siege craft. But it was on their horses that the nobles now rode all over Europe, to pillage and browbeat distant regions. And even their horses, apparently, shared their confidence. In the next century, the great theologian Gottschalk, when dealing with the problem of divination, wrote that warhorses possessed a sixth sense: they became more frisky when they knew that their army would win. Accompanying a Frankish campaign, a thousand miles southeast of Francia, along the Dalmatian coast, Gottschalk had asked his godchild to observe the horses. He was proved right. The horses of the Frankish cavalry cavorted merrily, before yet another victorious charge.2
What we are witnessing, under Charles Martel, are the first stages of a process which would change the face of Europe in the course of the eighth century. The combined Frankish aristocracy of Neustria and Austrasia were on the way to becoming the first truly international elite since the Roman senatorial order of the fourth century. In Germany, in particular, Frankish noblemen had already penetrated the upper echelons of regions that had always been nominally subject to the Merovingian kings. They would eventually do this, also, as far apart as Italy and northern Spain. Like the Roman aristocracy, they were easygoing on matters of ethnicity and local culture as long as it was they who remained on top. They married into the local aristocracies. They became local landowners. They were quite prepared to judge their inferiors according to local laws. They used the regions in which they had settled as local power bases with which to challenge their colleagues (and especially, at this time, the upstart family of Pippin and Charles Martel). But, like the Romans, they did not lose their sense of belonging to a single, highly privileged group. Frankish noblemen (and their wives – who emerged at this time as tenacious guardians of aristocratic, family memories) watched each other across the length and breadth of Europe. It was “their” kingdom, the “kingdom of the Franks.” Eventually, everyone who wished to advance in this new order became Franks (by marrying into the Frankish aristocracy), learned to behave like Franks, and sought out the patronage of the Frankish rulers.3
At the time of Charles Martel, however, it was far from certain what form the “Frankification” of the elites of northern Europe would take. In this respect, it is important to remember the Janus-like quality of the Frankish kingdom. It had been formed in a Roman frontier zone. In the sixth century, the ancient limes had still traced an unmistakable line, which marked the joining of two worlds. The weight of a long Roman and Christian past could be felt along the Moselle, the Rhine, and the Danube. Metz boasted 40 churches, some of which were already 400 years old. At Mainz, solid Roman walls enclosed venerable basilicas. South of the Danube, also, the pattern of a former Roman order was not yet totally expunged. Pockets of Christianity survived as the “folk religion” of “Romans.” A Christian slave escaping southward from the woods of Saxony was heartened by the sight of Regensburg, with its ancient Roman walls and stone church.4
By the year 700, however, the division along the Rhine had become erased. To the east of the former Roman frontier, a Frankish system of landowning had spilled over from northern Gaul and the Rhine valley, and had begun to penetrate eastward into central Germany along the Main. Southern Germany, also, was affected by the same development. Both in the Black Forest area of the Alemanni and in Bavaria, the Frankish model showed that a local nobility, with strong rulers behind them, could tame a once-evasive peasantry in such a way as to extract an unprecedented surplus of wealth. For the elites of the region, it represented a disturbing and enticing development. Our modern maps of Europe make a clear distinction, along the Rhine, between France and Germany, and, to the north, between France, Belgium, and Holland. They do not do justice to the real frontiers of eighth-century Europe. At that time, the truly important frontier lay between the pagan lands of north and eastern central Europe and a “Frankish” style of society, long identified with Christianity, which stretched from modern northern France across the Rhine and up the Main deep into modern Germany.
The issue, in the early eighth century, was who would benefit from these developments. Greater wealth and authority for the part-Frankish local aristocracies could mean two things. Either these developments placed them in a position to act as poles of resistance to the upstart family of Charles Martel. Or they could be cowed or wooed into joining, with other members of the Frankish aristocracy, in the profitable landslide of his success. Nowhere was the “winner take all” situation which had developed in Francia, as a result of the rise of the family of Pippin and Charles Martel, more plain than in Germany.
It is against this immediate social and political background that we should place the development that has come to be known as the “Conversion of Germany.” For the conversion of Germany was part of a larger process, in which the shape of northern Europe itself was at stake. The coming of Christianity to these regions amounted to a closing of the frontier. What had once been an open world, characterized by loose social and political structures and by far greater fluidity in its religious allegiances, found itself drawn into an ever-tighter system of political and religious control.
As a result of this process of consolidation, the lands to the north and east of the old Roman limes and its Frankish extension across the Rhine came to appear truly peripheral. Viewed with Christian eyes, accustomed to the well-established Christianity of Francia, they seemed part of an older world. Frisia and Saxony, from the North Sea coast to the Teutoburger Wald, had remained staunchly pagan. The north German plain had always been a distinctive ecological zone, an extension across northern Europe of the sands of the North Sea. It was a zone of heathlands, abundant cattle, and scattered settlements, populated by independent-minded warrior farmers. The religious frontier between paganism and Christianity had come, for a short period, to coincide with a contrast between two landscapes.
Further to the south, in the region between the upper Rhine and the upper Danube, in what is now northern Switzerland and southwest Germany, in the area in and around the Black Forest, Christianity had long been present. This was the territory of the Alemanni. But the Christianity of the area was not organized on a Frankish model, with bishoprics and large monasteries. Christianity had remained, in effect, a family cult. The archaeology of the region between Strasbourg and Stuttgart shows Christian crosses made out of thin sheets of stamped gold scattered in many graves. At Wittislingen (near Nördlingen), an Alemannic lady was buried with a brooch that bore a perfect Christian epitaph, with classical echoes. But she lay among her family’s prestige graves. There were churches. But these were small buildings in stone or wood, built over the grave of their founders, local priests and nobles. Well-organized villages show the presence of these noblemen. But their Christianity is revealed, by archaeology, to have been very much of a “do-it-yourself” nature. Altogether, the territories of the Alemanni provide a fascinating glimpse of a local Christianity establishing itself from the bottom up. This must have happened elsewhere in Europe and in the British Isles. But here we can see it clearly.5
Further east along the Danube, Christianity was a folk religion which had survived since Roman times. It had flourished with little clerical control. A pagan sorceress would bring animals to the local church, as a thank-offering for the success of her incantations. The panels around the tomb of Saint Corbinian (d.725), at Freising, included an image of a stallion with a gigantic extended penis. A reminder of an earlier, less discriminating age of ex-votos, it was later removed by Corbinian’s more fastidious successors.6
In comparison with Francia, with its royal dynasty and aristocratic landowners, the power of local chieftains in pagan Germany was weak. The Old Saxons functioned without a king. A caste of nobles were content to choose, by lot, a leader whom they would follow in wartime alone. Great holy trees were vital to the Old Saxons. They functioned as the sacral gathering points of their confederacies. Though organized in this apparently loose manner, the Old Saxons proved to be a formidable warrior-society, fully capable of terrorizing and subjugating their neighbors. Yet apart from their unusual social structure and their paganism, they were almost indistinguishable from the Franks, who had frequently made use of Saxon mercenaries. Hence, perhaps, the peculiar bitterness of the rivalry between the two groups. The pagan Old Saxons were what the Christian Franks had once been.
Altogether, the mercurial fluidity of a pagan society such as that of the Old Saxons confirmed the worst suspicions of western Christians. In Francia, Britain, and Ireland, kingship – and an increasingly strong kingship at that – was identified with civilization. An eighth-century Christian author wrote of the outermost edge of the world as ringed by ominously stateless societies, “by brutish peoples, without religion and without kings.”7 The solid structures of the Frankish state and the spectacular flowering of Christianity among the ambitious kings of Britain stood in disquieting contrast to the near-total opacity to the new faith of the kingless Old Saxons. The proper Christian “order” of strong, believing kings was cut down to size by the immense, muted presence, in so much of central and northern Europe, of ancient, less forceful styles of rule, linked to ancient cults.
The decision made in the course of the eighth century to convert such peoples to Christianity, by force if need be, was by no means an inevitable development. Christianity had always thought of itself as a “universal” religion, in that Christians believed that all peoples could be Christians, or, at least, that there could be Christians among all peoples. But in Continental Europe, Christians had been slow to draw the conclusion that Christianity should be the religion of all peoples, even if this involved having to send “missionaries” to the heathen in distant regions. The idea of the “missionary” seems so normal to us that we have to remember that it was only in this period that anything like a concept of “missions” developed in western Europe.8
Up to then a more old-fashioned, more “Roman” view of the world had prevailed. The Franks assumed, much as the Romans had assumed, that beyond the limes a barbarian “back-country” would always exist. It was important that the inhabitants of this “back-country” should be held in check and, if possible, cowed into submission. Those pagans who found themselves on the Frankish side of the old frontier had to be absorbed. In the seventh century, a series of efforts were made by Frankish bishops, many of whom had been disciples of Columbanus, to convert the “unchurched” populations of the Channel coast and the southern side of the estuary of the Rhine (modern Flanders in Belgium). But this was seen as a “firming up” of an untidy frontier. It was not a missionary drive directed to faraway pagans. The populations of the back-country of Frisia and inner Germany were left free to continue their “barbarous” lives. By and large, western Christians on the Continent had not felt the need to reach out to gather in the unruly peoples who lived along the fringes of Christianity.
Things looked different when viewed from the British Isles. In Ireland and Saxon Britain, the imaginative barrier of the limes did not exist. What mattered was peregrinatio, the act of becoming a stranger to one’s country for the sake of God. After that, one could go anywhere. Compared with the elemental wrench of self-imposed exile, by which a man breached the barrier of his own kin and his own small tribe, the ancient frontiers of Europe meant nothing. For a religious exile, everywhere was equally strange. To find oneself among “heathens” was not unusual. Furthermore, if one had become an exile to save one’s own soul, the sense of urgency which drove one to that desperate remedy might also lead to a sense of the urgent need to save the souls of others.
As we have seen, the idea of “exile of God” had developed in Ireland. But Ireland was not alone in this. By the year 700, the structures of the newly established Anglo-Saxon churches in Britain were calculated to produce a supply of highly motivated wanderers. The urge to become an exile often coincided with a “middle age crisis.” Indeed, the call of exile occurred at the same time of life as the great converts of the late fourth century (such as Augustine and Paulinus of Nola) had experienced the call to a higher life.
But the reasons for their conversion were different. The exiles of the eighth century wanted to get out of ecclesiastical structures in which they felt themselves to be held too tightly. Given to a local monastery at an early age, between five and seven, able men found themselves entering middle age only to confront a dangerous emotional and social situation. Between the ages of 30 and 40, they faced the prospect of becoming abbots or bishops. They would be compelled to settle down as figures of authority among their own kin and region. This meant that they found themselves inextricably implicated in the compromises that had produced, in Britain as in Ireland, an established Christianity that was shot through with deeply profane elements. For a devout person, it was better to leave home, so as to seek elsewhere the clarity of a true Christian order. Among such persons, religious exile and the sharp sense of a Christian order as it should be went hand in hand.
The first of this new generation of strangers, Willibrord (658–739), was a product both of Wilfrid’s micro-Christendom in Northumbria and of Ireland. He received his vocation when studying, already as an exile, at Cluain Melsige (Clonmelsh, County Carlow). In 690, he arrived, with a small party of monks, to offer his services to Pippin of Herstal, the father of Charles Martel. Unlike an earlier stranger from Ireland, Columbanus, Willibrord did not offer “medicine” for the souls of Pippin and his entourage. His burning wish was, rather, to save the souls of real pagans. He was encouraged to preach to the Frisians of the Rhine estuary, who had recently fallen under Frankish domination. But he also wished to reach out to pagan peoples as far away as the Danes and the Old Saxons.9
We have Willibrord’s own Calendar, written in a clear Irish script, with entries in his own hand. It is a glimpse of the new Europe of an exile. It was a wide, northern world held together by the ritual commemoration of saints and dead persons from the distant British Isles: Patrick, Brigid, and Columba, the three great saints of Ireland, appear together with three kings of Northumbria. Furthermore, when writing the date of his seventieth birthday, Willibrord adopted a new dating system: he wrote of it, much as we do, as “A.D. 728” – “in the 728th year from the Lord’s Incarnation.”
The system of A.D. dating had been elaborated earlier; but it suddenly became important for a small group of men whose sense of time was as majestically universal as was their sense of space. (In this, of course, they had been preceded by the Muslims, who regularly dated the year, throughout their vast empire, from the hijra, the fateful journey from Mecca to Medina of the Prophet and his Companions in 622.) Up to then, time in Europe had been regional time. Often, it was time which still looked straight back to Rome. Many regions still used the old Roman “provincial era.” This was a time-scale where the years were counted from the year in which the region had been incorporated, as a province, into the Roman empire. Local rulers used their regnal years. And the popes, ever intent on proving that they were good “Romans” and loyal subjects of the Byzantine emperors, placed the regnal years, even the honorary consulships and the tax-cycles (the Indictions) of the East Roman emperors on every document that they wrote.
These old-fashioned dating systems were maintained in much of Europe. But in Willibrord’s world (as in the dating system used by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History) there was only one time because there was only one world-ruler – the Lord Christ, whose reign over all humankind began with the year of his birth. It was a time-frame that all Christians could share. The choice of the “Anno Domini,” A.D., dating communicated a sense of time that was as universal, as independent of local traditions, as Willibrord’s vision of the world was independent of local frontiers. All time began with the beginning of Christianity and, by implication, all time was about the time it took for Christianity to reach its fulfillment, through the conversion of ever more pagan regions.10
Seen across the sea from Willibrord’s Northumbria, Frisia was the gateway to Europe. Frisian merchants linked the fast-spending Saxon kings of Britain to the goods of the Rhineland. Precious glasswork, minted silver, even heavy mortars of German stone were exchanged for slaves. Throughout northwestern Europe, Frisian commercial activity brought about the end of a very ancient world. After 670, Merovingian gold coins, greatly reduced but still recognizable echoes of Roman imperial coinage, gave way to silver sceattas. These were minted for the use of merchants in a thriving economy now tilted toward the North Sea. Franks and Frisians fought for the control of Dorestad (Duurstede, Holland), an emporium on the Rhine south of Utrecht.
Dorestad became one of the great ports of Europe. In 800, its wooden wharves and merchants’ houses covered 250 hectares, while a Roman Rhineland city such as Mainz covered no more than 100. Further north, among the terpen – the artificially raised mounds – of modern Groningen and Friesland, a society of free farmers and merchants enjoyed rare affluence. Well fed, they had livestock to spare. They produced large quantities of valuable, tweed-like cloth. Frisia was a standing rebuttal of the growing Christian conviction that paganism was synonymous with underdevelopment.11
Pagan Frisia represented a still undecided “might have been” for the entire North Sea. The Frisian chieftain, Radbod (685–719), established a sub-Frankish state on the borders of Francia. He was a strong ruler with the power to command his chieftains and to hurt his enemies. And he was a pagan. Just because he and his aristocracy had, in many ways, come so close to their Frankish neighbors, it was all the more important for him to assert an essential point of difference. Radbod was careful to maintain the pagan rites which gave so much prosperity to his people and which separated them from the Franks.
The Franks, in turn, were prepared to believe the worst of Radbod. It was rumored in Francia that he had upheld the grim practice of the sacrifice of victims, who were chosen by lot and left to drown in the tide as the great North Sea rose to take them to itself. It was later remembered about Radbod that, when once persuaded to accept baptism by a Frankish bishop, he asked whether the majority of the nobles and kings of Frisia were in Heaven or in Hell. The Frankish bishop’s answer was unambiguous: all were in Hell. Wherewith the old king stepped back out of the font. He would rather be in Hell with the great men of his lineage than share Heaven with Christians such as the bishop.12
Willibrord was not expected to win over men such as Radbod. Rather, Willibrord acted as a consolidator. When the tide turned in favor of the Franks, Willibrord and his monks set to work, in the re-established city of Utrecht, to “weed out” paganism in zones that had fallen under Frankish rule. “Consolidation,” however, meant many things on such a frontier. In 698, Willibrord received from Pippin of Herstal a former Roman fort at Echternach, near Trier, in which to found a monastery. Echternach was not a place set in the wilds. It lay near the site of what had once been a magnificent Roman villa. An ancient Roman road, which ran through the lands of Pippin’s family, connected Echternach to Utrecht, some 250 miles away.
Echternach throve. It was, in its way, as much a center of Christianization as was Willibrord’s frontier bishopric at Utrecht. The local nobility rallied round. They defined themselves through public acts of giving to Willibrord, recorded in charters that were witnessed by their peers. Willibrord was a holy person, a vir strenuus, “an active, Apostle-like worshipper of God.” He was the favored holy man of Pippin, their own lord. To give to Willibrord was to touch a source of salvation and, at the same time, to join a group of fellow-givers who stood out in their region as loyal to Christianity and to a lordly, Frankish way of life.
The circle revealed by the charters of Echternach is a microcosm of the changes that were affecting the entire region to the north and east of the Frankish heartlands. These men were landowners whose families had, comparatively recently, established themselves in what had once been an inhospitable frontier zone between the Waal and the Maas/Meuse in modern Belgium and Holland. Their ancestors had been quite content to be buried, as chieftains, among their own dependents, in isolated settlements on the land that they themselves had won. They may or may not have been Christians. Those who gave to Willibrord, by contrast, were a new generation. They formed a tight, distinctive group. They were “nobles” in the up-to-date Frankish manner. They were no longer buried with their retainers, but elsewhere, near Christian churches. They had broken with the pre-Christian code that had linked them, as chieftains, to their followers, in death as in life. They were great landowners, and their followers had become mere peasants. They had been greatly enriched by their own lord, Pippin, so they were ostentatiously faithful to Pippin’s invisible Lord, the God whom Willibrord served with such apostolic zeal. It is in these small ways that an open frontier came to be closed, region by region, through the establishment of a new, more tightly organized social system along the edges of the Frankish kingdom.13
In 716, Willibrord was joined by an impressive but troubled compatriot from a monastery in southern Britain – a six-foot-tall man of 40 called Wynfrith. Wynfrith came to be known as Saint Boniface (675–754), the “Apostle of Germany.” He had come to the Continent as a man already gripped by passionate loyalty to principles of order. He was a gifted schoolmaster. He had even written a handbook of Latin grammar. This handbook was utterly up to date because totally Christian. In grammar, as in all else, so he declared, “the customs of past ages” must be measured by “the correct taste of modern times.” For him, the classical past was irrelevant. All the examples of good style that were cited in his handbook were taken from the writings of the Christian Fathers alone. Wynfrith drew on its opening pages a square enclosing a Cross with the name of Jesus Christ. His own heart remained filled with a similar sense of four-square solidity. He stood for a new form of Christianity, unburdened by the past. He was prepared to shed much of his own past and that of others in favor of a well-organized Christian present. On his first visit to Rome, for instance, in 719, he followed the Saxon custom of taking a Roman name, Boniface. But, unlike Benedict Biscop, he abandoned forever his Saxon name. From henceforth, Wynfrith was Boniface and only Boniface.14
Yet, although he saw himself as an exile, the churches of southern Britain remained close to Boniface. His extensive correspondence with his supporters in Britain reveals a particularly poignant aspect of his life. He felt bound to his Christian correspondents “through golden chains of friendship made for heaven.”15 Looked at from Anglo-Saxon Britain, Boniface summed up the hopes of an entire generation, frustrated by the very success of their own, less heroic Christianity. For Anglo-Saxon bishops, monks, and nuns in Britain, it was good to think of Boniface. His letters to noble nuns are moving to read. Less free to follow a man’s stern road to exile, they looked to him as a distant, comforting abbas, even as a surrogate brother.
Boniface reminded the Saxons of Britain, on one occasion, that the Old Saxons claimed to be kin to them: “we are of the same blood and bone.”16 Indeed, his view of his own mission was deeply influenced by ideas which many Anglo-Saxon clergymen had come to share with the Venerable Bede. As we have seen, as Bede presented it in his memorable Ecclesiastical History (which appeared in 731), conversion to Christianity had made the Anglo-Saxons special and had turned Britain into their Promised Land. As an Anglo-Saxon, Boniface intended to re-enact among the Germans the triumphal coming of Christianity to the Anglo-Saxons of Britain. Not everyone agreed with such claims. But, at least, it was agreed in Britain that Boniface lived a heroic, “apostolic” life in a heroic environment. Even a king of Kent wrote to him for a gift of falcons: for he had heard that falcons were “much swifter and more aggressive” in Saxony!17
Boniface’s lifelong friend, bishop Daniel of Winchester, soon plied him with advice as to how to argue with pagans. He must not do so “in an offensive and irritating manner, but calmly and with great moderation.”
Among other arguments, he should point out that
whilst the Christians are allowed to possess the countries that are rich in oil and wine and other commodities [the gods] have left to the heathens only the frozen lands of the North … [They were] frequently to be reminded of the supremacy of the Christian world.18
Boniface was protected by Charles Martel. Later, in the 740s, he was called upon by Charles’ son, Pippin, the future king of the Franks, to act as a “troubleshooter” and reformer in the Frankish church. But he also went out of his way to receive from the popes (between 722 and 739) a series of ever-widening commissions to act as a missionary bishop and supervisor of new churches throughout Germany. In presenting himself as a special servant of the popes, Boniface, once again, was influenced by his own distinctively Anglo-Saxon view of history. He was convinced that the Church in England had been founded through the mission sent from Rome to Canterbury by Gregory the Great. Had this not happened, the English, he believed, might still have been heathen. It was only proper, therefore, that he should turn to the successors of Gregory in order to validate his own mission to the heathen.19
In the course of 30 years, Boniface came to leave his mark throughout western Germany, from Bavaria to the watershed of the Lahn and the Weser, beyond which stretched the territories of the unconverted Old Saxons. He always presented himself as having brought light and order to a wild country. But Boniface’s letters are so fascinating because they reveal the opposite. They show how little Germany, in fact, resembled the virgin heathen lands which the Anglo-Saxon myth of the missionary had led him to expect. Christianity already had a long and complicated history in central Europe. But that was not how Boniface and those who supported him saw the matter. Thus, when he founded his monastery at Fulda, in 744, he reported to the pope that the monastery lay “in a wooded place, in the midst of a vast wilderness.” That was what Romans expected to be told. Fulda, in fact, lay on the main prehistoric trackway that crossed central Germany from east to west. It had been a Merovingian fort. A deserted church was already present on the site. It was far from being lost in the woods in a land untouched by Christianity.20
Altogether, nothing in Germany was quite what it seemed. Boniface had been sent, in the words of the pope, “for the enlightenment of the German people who live in the shadow of death, steeped in error.”21 What he found, instead, was much Christianity, and almost all of it the wrong sort. Cultic practitioners exchanged rituals. Pagans baptized Christians. Christian priests sacrificed to Thunor, ate sacrificial meats, and presided at the sacral funerary banquets of their Christian parishioners. Theirs was an oral Christianity, which mangled essential Latin formulae. A Bavarian priest performed his baptisms In nomine Patria et Filia. He had confused both case and gender. Boniface doubted that such a baptism was valid.22 In Hesse and Thuringia, local chieftains were anxious to please the Franks. But they knew the limits of their powers over their followers. They could not bully them to accept Christianity. They had learned to coexist with pagans. It was not to convert a totally pagan population but, rather, to end an age of symbiosis between pagans and Christians that Boniface decided, in 723/4, to cut down the mighty Oak of Thunor at Geismar. This oak had stood at a joining point between half-Christian Hesse and the pagan Saxons. It may well have been visited by Christians as well as by pagans. He was careful to use its holy timbers to build an oratory of Saint Peter, which would serve as a Christian place of pilgrimage on the same spot.23
More disturbing yet, for Boniface, were Christian rivals – clerical entrepreneurs who had moved into the new territories from Ireland and Francia. He met these particularly in Bavaria, between 735 and 737 and again in 739–40. Despite Boniface’s coldness toward them, many such clergymen were far from being mere adventurers. In Bavaria, they represented a previous missionary establishment, set up largely by Irish “exiles of God,” whose methods had proved quite as effective, in southern Germany, as they had been in northern Britain at an earlier time. Vergil, abbot and later bishop of Salzburg (745–784), had once been Ferghil, abbot of Aghaboe (County Laois, Ireland). He was as much a zealous “Roman” stranger as was Boniface. A man of combative esoteric learning, Vergil shocked Boniface by preaching that “there is below the earth another world and other men.” The bishop’s opinion blended classical speculation on the Antipodes with Irish belief in the world of “the Other Side,” a fairy counter-kingdom which flanked the human race. It was a notion calculated to frustrate the efforts of a man such as Boniface. He had striven hard enough to bring Christianity to all the nations already known to him. It was dispiriting to be told that there were yet others, as yet unbaptized, on the far side of the earth.24 Yet bishop Vergil also had the ear of the pope. He was able to intervene successfully with the pope to protect the poor priest who had muddled the Latin of his baptismal formula. The pope told Boniface, sharply, that mere lack of grammatical precision did not invalidate a Christian sacrament.25
Far more dangerous than rival bishops were those who, in Francia and Germany, threatened to create their own idiosyncratic version of a Christian mission. They did so from elements long associated with a dramatic style of “frontier” Christianity. In 745, at a Roman synod, Boniface secured the condemnation as heretics of Clement, an Irishman, and Aldebert, a Frank. Clement and Aldebert stood for very different Christian options from those upheld by Boniface. They offered very different solutions from his own to contemporary problems.
Take, for example, the views of Clement on the prohibited degrees of marriage. The nature of restrictions on marriage partners was a particularly charged topic at the time among the Franks and in Germany. It was a concern driven by a strong sense of the need to avoid incest in a society based on family solidarity and on complicated family alliances. Clement had his own solution. He supported the marriage of the widow to the dead man’s brother (a practice abhorrent to Boniface) precisely because it was a practice that was found in the Old Testament. As an Irishman, he did this in the same spirit as that shown by the lawyers of the Senchas Már. As we saw in chapter 14, Irish lawyers had appealed to the Old Testament to justify pre-Christian marital practices.
In using the Old Testament in this way, Clement closed the chasm which threatened to open between the non-Christian past and the Christian present of the newly converted populations. He even reassured his flock that Christ had taken out of Hell the souls of all humanity, of all past ages: “believers and unbelievers, those who praised God and those who worshipped idols.”26 This was not at all what king Radbod had been told!
Aldebert was an even greater challenge than was Clement to a man such as Boniface. For Aldebert represented an older strain of Christianity – the Christianity of the charismatic holy men who had brought the faith to so many regions of western Europe and the Mediterranean. Aldebert was born of simple parents. He wrote of himself as a bishop “by the grace of God”: so had the eccentric Patricius. His mother had dreamed of a calf emerging from her side: the mother of Columbanus had “seen the sun rise from her bosom.”27 Aldebert, like Boniface, claimed to have received authority direct from Rome. He claimed to know the contents of a letter dropped by Jesus Christ himself from Heaven, that now lay on the tomb of Saint Peter.28
Thus authorized by Jesus and by Saint Peter, Aldebert created his own Christian mission. He was said to have considered pilgrimage to Rome unnecessary. He himself was a living relic. Any place where he preached was as much a self-sufficient Christian “microcosm” as was any other. He set up chapels and crosses in the fields and at springs. In the absence of country churches, Anglo-Saxon landowners in Britain had done the same, by setting up just such crosses on their estates.29 Above all, Aldebert offered instant penance. There was no need to tell him one’s sins through confession. He already knew them all. Preaching in the hills around Melrose, Saint Cuthbert had inspired almost the same awe: the villagers confessed to him because they were convinced, by his mere appearance, that he already knew what they had done.30 Boniface made himself unpopular by securing Aldebert’s condemnation. He had taken away from the people of Francia “a most holy Apostle, a patron saint, a man of prayer, a worker of miracles.31
We do not know how widespread Aldebert’s preaching had been. But the terms of his condemnation, taken together with the manner in which Boniface had set about his own mission and the way in which his example was remembered by successors, hints at a lively debate on how the process of Christianization was to be continued and who could best act as representatives of the new faith.
In many ways, the erratic Aldebert stood for one vivid strand in a very ancient Christianity. As a wandering holy man, he stood closer to Saint Martin of Tours and to Saint Cuthbert than to the new clerical elite gathered around a man such as Boniface. Boniface, by contrast, was not a charismatic figure. Rather, he radiated “correct” ecclesiastical order. His task turned out to be less to convert the heathen than to clear up anomalies and to put an end to long habits of compromise. He had brought from the “micro-Christendom” of Saxon Britain a blueprint of “correct” Christianity which he was quite prepared to impose on the ancient Christianity of Continental Europe.
Boniface soon learned that, judged by his high standards, Gaul and Italy were no less prone to “barbaric lack of order” than were the supposedly wild woods of Germany. In 743, he wrote to pope Zacharias. He had been told by pilgrims who had visited Rome from Germany that the Kalends of January were still celebrated there:
in the neighborhood of Saint Peter’s church by day and by night, they have seen bands of singers parade the streets in pagan fashion … They say that they have also seen there women with amulets and bracelets of heathen fashion on their arms and legs, offering these for sale to willing purchasers.32
If “ignorant common people” from the north saw such unabashed, ancient profanity in the very center of Christendom, they could hardly be expected to pay heed to the strictures of their priests at home. It is a characteristic letter. Over the years, the “depaganization” of Christians had come to interest Boniface as much as did the conversion of pagans.
Boniface wrote this letter when he had become a major figure within the Frankish kingdom itself. After 742, the pope had authorized him to act as the privileged counsellor of Pippin and of other “rulers of the Franks,” in summoning councils to effect a reform of the Frankish Church. Boniface’s position among the Franks was unprecedented, but his powers were ambiguous. He was not popular. Frankish bishops had their own firm views on how best to set up a Christian order.
In northern Francia and in the Rhineland, Boniface was by no means the hero of his generation. He faced determined opposition from bishops who regarded him as an interloper. He returned their scorn with a vengeance. Many Frankish bishops struck him as standing for all that he had left Britain to escape. They were aristocrats. They believed that a man must hunt; and that a man of honor, even a bishop, must, of course, kill with his own hands the killer of his father (the father being also, of course, a bishop!). It hurt Boniface to mix with such people at court, and to share Frankish good cheer with them at Pippin’s great feasts. But he had no option. He wrote to his friend Daniel:
Without the patronage of the Frankish prince I can neither govern the faithful … nor protect the priests … nor can I forbid the practice of heathen rites and the worship of idols in Germany without his orders and the fear he inspires.33
Altogether, correct order was hard to find in Francia. Even books were written in a crabbed hand, which strained his failing eyesight. He remembered a copy of the Old Testament prophets which had been used by his teacher in Britain. “I am asking for this particular book because all the letters in it are written out clearly and separately.”34 By now a blind old man, Daniel replied by ordering the transcription of long passages from Saint Augustine on the need for patience when living with evil men. Written in North Africa, almost four centuries before, now copied by an Anglo-Saxon in Winchester for an Anglo-Saxon working in central Germany, these were what a friend could offer, “culled from the works of ancient scholars, things useful to bear in mind in the midst of so much barbaric lack of order.”35
Altogether, the Franks had been a disappointment to Boniface. Only the new-won lands gave the missionary in Boniface the opportunities for which he craved. Now an old man in his late seventies, Boniface turned back to the far north. He went on a tour of the mission fields in a Frisia barely pacified by Frankish armies. On June 5, 754, his entourage reached Dokkum, on the edge of the North Sea. With its liturgical paraphernalia and great chests of books, Boniface’s progress through Frisia was, as he always intended it to be, a splendid sight, designed “to impress the carnal minds of the heathen.” Almost by accident, the great man became a martyr. A band of pirates – hard sea-rovers, not indignant pagans – fell on his party. In the great iron-bound treasure chests, which every nobleman carried with him when travelling, they did not find gold, as they had hoped. Rather, they found the heart of Boniface’s sense of order. They found texts.
Disappointed in their hope of gold and silver, they littered the fields with books … throwing some into the reedy marshes … By the grace of God, the manuscripts were discovered a long time afterwards, unharmed and intact.
In the Episcopal Seminary at Fulda we can still see one of these books. It is a thoroughly ordinary manual. It contains an anthology of Patristic texts, partly concerned with the Arian controversy – that is, with a theological controversy which had happened four centuries previously, far to the south in the Mediterranean, when there was still a Roman empire in western Europe. It was an unpretentious volume, one of the many strictly functional books from which Boniface hoped to build a Christian order on the shores of the North Sea. It has violent cuts across the margins. It may well be the book which Boniface raised, instinctively, above his head, as the pirate’s sword descended.36
Boniface had died as a martyr. But he had lived very much as a schoolteacher, bringing order and instruction to untidy lands. It is not that the conversion of Germany was without drama. We can glimpse a small part of the process in a later account of the life of an Anglo-Saxon nun, Leoba. Leoba was a kinswoman of Boniface. She and other nuns had been taken by Boniface from Wimborne in Dorset, and placed in Tauberbischofsheim, southwest of Würzburg. The little community of foreign women did not find themselves among pagans. Instead, they faced a local population which was anxious to have an enclave of “holy” virgins in their midst. They turned hostile only when this reputation for holiness seemed to have been sullied. A crippled girl, who had lived from the food given as alms by the nuns at the convent gate, drowned her illegitimate baby in the nuns’ millpond. The villagers were appalled. They claimed that the nuns, these so-called virgin “mothers,” had disposed of their love-child in the very water which they used both to baptize the villagers and to drive their mill. By so doing, they had polluted the water of the village. Only days of dramatic penitential processions could reassure the villagers that the nuns were “pure” of guilt. The convent was to be a “sacred” place. Only then could it act as a powerhouse of prayer and a place of atonement. Far from being indifferent to Christianity, the people of the region had been enraged when it appeared that the holiness which they wanted from a convent had been desecrated by the sins of a nun.37
Slowly, after proving that it was indeed a “sacred” place, the convent at Tauberbischofsheim gained support.
Many nobles and influential men gave their daughters to God to live in the monastery … Many widows also forsook their homes … and took the veil in the cloister.38
Tauberbischofsheim was another link in a Christian network, similar to those formed around the convents and monasteries of Ireland, Britain, and northern Gaul in the days of Columbanus and Bede. It was a smaller version of Willibrord’s Echternach. These little nodules of local support for places endowed with an aura of the supernatural, such as Leoba’s convent, brought about the “grassroots” conversion of Germany more effectively than did the high ecclesiastical policies associated with the leading missionaries.
Apart from these accounts, however, the supernatural was strangely distant in Boniface’s world. What he and his followers considered themselves to have brought, rather, was the miracle of preaching and of “correct” instruction. It is revealing to see the extent to which Boniface and those around him linked up, across two centuries, with the tradition represented by Caesarius of Arles. After a long period of neglect, Caesarius’ works came to be copied again in Frankish circles. They were copied in women’s monasteries in the Rhineland and instantly put to use in Germany.39 As we have seen, Caesarius had been a tireless preacher and critic of local semi-pagan customs. He had not been a wonder-worker. Caesarius was a significant model for a missionary to have chosen.
In 743, an Index of Superstitions and Pagan Practices was drawn up, in connection with Frankish councils over which Boniface had presided. The list shows practices very different from those of the Mediterranean peasantry, which Caesarius had denounced when he preached at Arles. They mention, for instance, the nodfyr, the “fire of need.” This was fire created anew by rubbing wood, with all other fires extinguished, so as to fortify the powers of the land against cattle-plague. The nodfyr was still lit in Marburg in the seventeenth century. As late as 1767, it was used in the once Scandinavian western Isles of Scotland.40
These details hint at a sacred landscape of which Caesarius had never dreamed. But the attitude which brought such a list together was significantly similar to that of Caesarius. The document declared, in effect, that paganism, as such, had ceased to exist. All that the bishops had to deal with, now, were “survivals,” “superstitions,” paganiae, “pagan leftovers.” The continued existence of such practices merely showed the ignorance and the stubborn attachment to old habits of an unenlightened Christian people. Such people were “rustic” in the true sense of the word. They were under-educated Christians. They were not pagans. In speaking of popular practices in a tone similar to that once used by Caesarius, the Index of Superstitions declared that the ancient gods of Germany were already safely dead. The “superstitious” practices of “rustic” believers were no more than lack of instruction. They did not betray the continued, uncanny presence of the old gods.41
It is worthwhile to linger a little on the implications of this attitude. It shows that, in this as in so much else, the eighth century marked a significant change in the mental horizons of the elite of the Christian Church. Christianization was no longer perceived as taking the form of an outright clash of supernatural powers. As we saw in chapters 2 and 3, this had been the principal element in all narratives of the triumph of Christianity. But in the eighth century, victory over the gods could be taken for granted. That victory lay in the past. The real task of the Church, therefore, was a mission civilisatrice. Education was as important as miracles.
In this, the revival of the preaching texts of Caesarius of Arles was decisive. It ensured that forms of religious instruction which had once been brought to bear on sophisticated urban populations in the late Roman Mediterranean – in the Hippo and Carthage of Augustine and in the Arles of Caesarius – were now applied in central Europe to the populations of an overwhelmingly rural society, gathered around monasteries and served by parish priests.
From Bavaria to Frisia, the generation of Boniface and of his successors was characterized by a plethora of little books. These are neat books, copied in a business-like manner and meant to be carried and consulted. Books of penance were carefully kept up to date to do justice to the prevalent sins and misdemeanors of the various regions in which they were used. We can even guess which one was used by Willibrord among the Frisians, while others were meant for different regions.42 Books of rituals were equally important. They provided the correct form of words for the administration of Christian sacraments. Some of these even contain the first, hesitant translations into German of the Lord’s Prayer and of the convert’s baptismal oath that promised to renounce the gods.43 Most moving of all, in many ways, were collections of sayings culled from all over Christendom. They were brought together in little volumes, so as to create a new Christian “wisdom literature.” An almost folkloristic, gnomic lore, more like riddle collections than the encyclopedic anthologies of the seventh century, circulated in Latin among the clergy of Bavaria and other regions.44
These books are all well worn. They had been frequently used. When we see them in modern library collections they are, in their own way, as moving as the compact, slashed volume associated with the death of Boniface. For we are looking at the humble tools which passed the message of Christianity, from the great centers of Ireland, Britain, and the Frankish kingdom, to networks of monks and priests working in new lands.
For such people, the missionary was no longer the wonder-working, itinerant holy man. He or she (for the convents played a crucial role in the quiet elaboration and distribution of orderly bodies of information) was increasingly perceived as, first and foremost, a teacher. When Huneberc, an Anglo-Saxon nun, wished to sum up the life of her kinsman, Willibald, the first bishop of Eichstätt (whom, surprisingly enough, we have already met, at the end of chapter 13, as a pilgrim wandering through the Holy Land in the first century of Muslim rule – such was the range of these religious exiles!), she chose a loaded phrase. Willibald had been the populi paedagogus, the Educator of the Christian people.45 It was a suitable ideal for a world reduced to order. Whether it came in the form of newly founded bishoprics and monasteries, which cast a net of Christian books and Christian teachers over the new territories, or in the form of an agrarian system based upon a greater measure of control over the lives of the peasantry, by the middle of the eighth century Christianity and order had begun to come in earnest, and hand in hand, to Germany.
In the half-century after the death of Boniface, however, the missionaries were less important in Germany than was the unprecedented power and determination of the Frankish kings. Charles Martel and king Pippin had made the “people of the Franks” frightening, once again, in Europe. From 768 to 814, Charlemagne, the son of king Pippin, made them overpowering.
We need to go back, for a moment, to the last years of Boniface, in order to appreciate the circumstances under which Charlemagne came to enjoy such power. Charles Martel had still to be content to act as “mayor of the palace” to the kings of the Merovingian dynasty. After his death, in 741, the Frankish aristocracy agreed that they needed a “real” king. As also happened in Byzantium, the Franks preferred to move forward, to do something new, by claiming to move backwards. They would leap the centuries and identify themselves with the ancient “people of Israel.” The “people of Israel” had chosen their kings so as to be effective, “to lead the people out to war.” The “people of the Franks” should do the same by choosing a new king, in fact Pippin the son of Charles Martel, to replace the ineffective Merovingian dynasty.46
In order to validate this unprecedented step, the Frankish bishops and their aristocratic colleagues sought the blessing of the pope in Rome. This approach from the distant north could not have been more welcome. If there was a city of the ancient Mediterranean which had well and truly died and that needed to “re-create” itself, it was the city of Rome in around 750.47
As we saw at the end of our last chapter, separation from the Byzantine empire had left Rome exposed to the ambitions of the Lombards. Worse even than the prospect of conquest by the Lombards was the fact that Rome was bankrupt. Byzantine gold no longer circulated in the region. The local coinage consisted of pathetic pieces of gilded copper. Centuries of neglect ensured that Rome had come to look like a bombed-out European city in 1945. The shape of ancient Rome had been lost. The local aristocracy lived in houses that were no different from the simple farmhouses in which they lived in the countryside, built into a landscape where the classical pattern of great forums linked by regular streets had vanished. Huge Christian shrines surrounded by gardens and little monasteries towered above a formless, partly empty landscape, encircled by crumbling walls which marked out the huge extent of the former city. In this atmosphere of decayed gentility (reminiscent of the state of the Venetian nobility, lingering in their decayed palazzi in the middle of the nineteenth century), the popes were so poor that one of them could even be suspected of making ends meet by engaging in the slave trade.48
Yet the popes and those around them showed amazing tenacity and skill in “re-creating” Rome to meet the needs of its new, northern patrons. By the end of the eighth century, they had brought about a remarkable triumph of urban memory over a truly desolate urban scene. For the beauty of Rome still lay in the eyes of the beholder; and, seen from the north, Rome was still an awe-inspiring city. As we have seen, from the sixth century onwards, former Roman cities in Gaul had also become faceless conglomerations. In the former cities of the north, large, semi-rural spaces were ringed by ancient walls and studded with Christian shrines built around relics of the saints. Such a city (and not a classical city as we might wish to imagine it) was what a northern visitor would expect to see; and, by those standards, Rome was overpowering. It still had a population of around 25,000. Huge churches still dominated the landscape. The papal palace and library at the Lateran were still magnificent. It would have struck visitors as a dream-like temple city as vast as Angkor Wat.
This was not the first time that Rome had re-created itself. In the fourth century, Rome ceased to be the effective capital of the empire. As we saw at the beginning of chapter 6, the local aristocracy successfully maintained the prestige of the city for centuries by presenting Rome (in the words of a modern scholar) as a theme park of the classical past. Now, in the eighth century, a succession of exceptionally gifted popes turned Rome into a theme park of the Christian past.49
What they presented was a Rome of the saints and a Rome which was a depository of the order and wisdom of the Early Christian past. In Rome the relics of the saints were everywhere. In the words of a graffito scratched at this time by a pilgrim, Rome was “the new Jerusalem, the display case of the martyrs of God.”50 And the visitors who came to worship the saints came also to observe, at Rome, the ceremonies and to find the books which linked them to a Christian past far more ancient than their own.
The visitors now came principally from north of the Alps. By the year 750, Rome had lost its Mediterranean dimension. The Byzantines had withdrawn. The great churches of Spain and Africa lay under Muslim rule. Only the roads to the north lay open. The sort of visitors who came to Rome were men such as Boniface. Such men had a perfect command of Latin, through the careful study of Latin texts. But they could not trust themselves to speak “vulgar Roman.” For the Latin of Rome had already come to resemble Italian. Whenever Boniface had something of importance to communicate to the pope, he insisted on writing it down.51
The northerners – Irish, Anglo-Saxons, and Franks – found in Rome relics of Christian saints from the earliest days of the Church. They also found texts which claimed to have caught the Christian past in amber. Things had always been like this, so the Romans told them, in Rome. Rome gave the much-needed dimension of antiquity to “micro-Christendoms” which saw themselves, for all their immense creativity, as in need of a past. In Neustria, for instance, liturgical books from Rome, though copied out and adjusted to Frankish custom, were especially esteemed in the Frankish kingdom because they were presented as authentic copies of the Mass-books which had once been used by Gregory the Great. One such “Gregorian” text was known, from its famous patron (the son of Charles Martel), as the “Sacramentary of King Pippin.”52
Eventually, the blessing and the “authenticity” which only the popes could provide eased the delicate experiment in usurpation by which the family of Charles Martel took over the kingship of the Franks. Duly consulted by the Frankish bishops in 751, Zacharias II declared that Pippin could be made king. The ceremony took place in the most up-to-date manner possible for eighth-century Christians – that is, by a return to the Old Testament. Pippin was anointed as king with oil by the bishops, for the kings of Israel had been anointed with oil.53
Not surprisingly, the Lombards reacted to the threat of an alliance between the popes and the new kings of the Franks by occupying Ravenna and by turning south to Rome. Early in January 754, pope Stephen II arrived in Francia, exhausted by a hurried journey across the Alps in the middle of winter, to beg, in the name of Saint Peter, for Frankish help in Italy. It was an unheard-of event. No previous pope had ever made such a journey to the distant north. Arrived in Francia, Stephen repeated the ceremony of anointing in such a way as to designate Pippin’s own family as the sole royal stock entitled to rule the Franks. Thus, with papal blessing, king Pippin initiated the “Carolingian” dynasty named from Charles Martel. Stephen got protection for Rome. Pippin invaded Italy so as to check the Lombard advance on Rome. He returned to Francia in 756, after two campaigns across the Alps, with a “heap of treasures and gifts.” He had forced the Lombard kings to give him one third of the royal treasure stored behind the high walls of Pavia. There was money for everyone. That was what the Frankish aristocracy expected of a strong and well-blessed king.
When Stephen II came north to Francia, Pippin’s eldest son, a solemn seven-year-old, had escorted the battered pontiff to his father’s villa. The boy would be known to future generations, in the late, late Latin of Gaul, as Charles le magne (from the Latin magnus, “great”), as Charlemagne. In 768, Charles became king of the Franks. He had a reign of 46 years ahead ofhim – a reign longer than those of Augustus and of Constantine.
Charlemagne proved to be a man of truly “Napoleonic” energy and width of vision. He was constantly on the move and constantly planning. In one year alone (in 785) he covered 2,000 miles, pacing the frontiers of his new dominions. Such energy boded ill for the Old Saxons. The fate of the pagan Saxons was crucial to Charles’ new concept of Christian empire. Not only were the Saxons pagan, they were a surprisingly aggressive warrior confederacy whose raids affected precisely the areas in central Germany where Frankish settlement and a Frankish style of life had begun to be established.
As had once been the case along the Roman limes, so now in the eighth century part of the danger posed by the Saxon challenge came from the fact that Franks and Saxons had drawn closer to each other. Saxon noblemen had already come to adopt a large measure of Frankish customs. Yet, like king Radbod, they clung all the more tenaciously to paganism so as to differentiate themselves from the Franks. It was all the more essential for the prestige of the Carolingian family that the Saxons, who had come to adopt so much of Frankish ways, should be declared to be outside the pale as pagans, and that, as pagans, they should be well and truly defeated.54
In 772, Charlemagne led the Franks into Saxony. They were said to have desecrated the great intertribal sanctuary of the Irminsul, the giant tree which upheld the world. They rode home again, with much plunder, in time for the hunting season in the Ardennes. Next spring the Franks were in northern Italy. In 774, Charles became king, also, of the Lombards. He even made a short visit to Rome. It was the first time that a Frankish king had set foot in Rome. It was also the first time since the fifth century that a western ruler of such power had been greeted in Rome with the sort of elaborate ceremonies which the Romans knew so well how to put on. Charles entered St. Peter’s and, next day, was led through the gigantic basilica churches of the city. In return, Charles proved to be a generous donor. An influx of Frankish silver marked the beginning of a dramatic recovery in the fortunes of the popes, which was made plain by an unprecedented boom in buildings and repairs.55
But it was in Germany, and not in Italy, that Charles showed himself to be a ruler as determined to be obeyed in all matters as any Roman emperor had been. The Saxon war was fought along the same routes into northern Germany as had been taken by the legions of Augustus. But this time, unlike Augustus who lost his legions in the Teutoburger Wald, Charlemagne won. It was an unusually vehement war, characterized by the storming, one after another, of well-defended hill-forts. The very flexibility of the kingless society of the Old Saxons prolonged the misery. Total surrender of the Saxons as a whole was impossible. Fifteen treaties were made and broken in 13 years. One Saxon nobleman, Widukind, was able to avoid submission for decades on end. He fled to the Danes and involved even the pagans of Frisia in his resistance.
For a decade, an entire Frankish order was challenged in the north. Charles found himself forced to take over more territory than he had, perhaps, first intended to do. He pressed on from the Weser to the Elbe, entering the northern heathlands, as far as the Danes. The populations of whole areas were forcibly relocated. In 782, he had 4,500 Saxon prisoners beheaded at Verden, southeast of Bremen. Only Romans had been so self-confidently barbaric in their treatment of unreliable neighbors. It is revealing that the victims had been handed over to the Franks by members of the Saxon nobility. For Charles was Roman, also, in the skill with which he played a game of “divide and rule” in “free” Germany. He wooed the pro-Frankish faction in the Saxon aristocracy through lavish gifts and through the promise of incorporation in a new social order that would strengthen their hands against their own peasantry.56
In 785, Widukind finally submitted and accepted Christian baptism. In the same year, Charles issued his Capitulary on the Region of Saxony. A Capitulary was a set of administrative rulings “from the word of mouth of the king,” grouped under capita, short headings. These were very different in their brusque clarity from the long-winded rhetoric of Roman imperial edicts. They registered, in writing, the invisible, purely oral shock wave of the royal will. The royal will was unambiguous. In theory at least, the frontier was now definitively closed. No other rituals but those of the Christian Church could be practiced in a Frankish province.
If anyone follows pagan rites and causes the body of a dead man to be consumed by fire … let him pay with his life.
If there is anyone of the Saxon people lurking among them unbaptized, and if he scorns to come to baptism and wishes to absent himself and stay a pagan, let him die.
If anyone is shown to be unfaithful to our lord the king, let him suffer the penalty of death.57
A small body of clergymen (notably Alcuin, a Saxon from Boniface’s Britain, who was himself connected with the family of Willibrord) were challenged by such brusqueness to restate, more forcibly than ever before, a view of Christian missions which emphasized preaching and persuasion.58 But, in fact, when it came to Charlemagne’s treatment of the Saxons, most later writers took no notice of Alcuin’s reservations. They accepted the fact that, as befitted a strong king, Charlemagne was entitled to preach to the Saxons “with a tongue of iron” – as a later Saxon writer put it without a hint of blame.59 Force was what was needed on a dangerous frontier. Education began, rather, at home. In the reigns of Charlemagne and his successors, a substantially new Church was allied with a new political system, both of which were committed, to a quite unprecedented degree, to the “correction” and education of their subjects.