From 772 to 785, Charlemagne would start each spring by heading to the north to fight with the Saxons, then he would move south to fight other battles. He would win some battles, baptize the people, demand tribute, and take hostages, but as soon as the winter came and the king went home, the Saxons would renege on their agreement, attack, and regain what they had lost. Basically, thousands of men and women accepted the Christian faith, but as soon as the conflict was over they would abandon the newly built churches and monasteries.
The Germanic Saxons were divided into four subgroups in four regions: Westphalia was the nearest kingdom to Austrasia, Eastphalia was the farthest away, and in between these two kingdoms was Engria. To the north of the Saxon kingdoms, at the base of the Jutland peninsula, was the kingdom of Nordalbingia.
It was in his first campaign in 773 that Charlemagne forced the Engri-ans to cut down the Irminsul pillar near Paderborn. In 775 he returned to
Westphalia and conquered the Saxon fort of Sigiburg, then marched to En-gria. He defeated the Saxons again in Engria and then in Eastphalia, where the Saxon leader Hessi converted to Christianity. Charlemagne returned through Westphalia, leaving permanent troops at what had been the Saxon bastions of Sigiburg and Eresburg. All of Saxony except for the northern kingdom of Nordalbingia was under his control, but Saxon resistance had just begun.
Following yet another campaign in Italy the next year, Charlemagne returned to Saxony in 776 because a rebellion had destroyed the fortress and troops at Eresburg. The Saxons were once again defeated, but Widukind, their chief and most charismatic leader, managed to escape to Denmark. Preparing for another round of fighting, Charlemagne built a new bastion at Karlstadt.
The king called together his dukes at Paderborn in 777 to integrate Saxony fully into the Frankish kingdom, but it was more of a political statement than a mark of how well the Saxons had been incorporated into the growing Frankish Christian empire. The Saxons agreed to Charlemagne’s terms, were baptized and feasted, but the moment the king left they went back to their pagan ways and customs, ignoring all of the king’s laws and treaties.
Thus Charlemagne had to return and return each summer. For two years only there was peace: in the summer of 779 he again invaded Saxony and yet again conquered Eastphalia, Engria, and Westphalia, dividing the land into missionary districts and assisting personally in several mass baptisms. He then returned to Italy in the fall and, for the first time, there was no immediate Saxon revolt. To encourage this submission, Charlemagne ordered the death penalty for all Saxons who refused to be baptized, who failed to follow Christian festivals, and who cremated their dead. Saxony was peaceful from 780 to 782.
Thinking he had finally subdued the Saxons, Charlemagne returned to Saxony in the summer of 782 and set up a code of law and appointed judges and counts, both of Saxon and Frankish ancestry: good idea, but bad laws. The laws were uncompromising about religion, and while the Saxons may have become theologically Christian, they were still socially and philosophically followers of Germanic polytheism.
This renewed the old conflict: in the autumn of 782 Widukind returned and led a revolt that included several assaults on the church, as the Saxon chiefs would not be torn from their independence, and neither bribery nor conversion worked. In response, Charlemagne (allegedly) ordered the beheading of 4,500 Saxons at Verden in Lower Saxony who had been caught practicing their native paganism after conversion to Christianity. (The chroniclers follow the 4,500 figure, but modern scholars estimate it could not have been more than a thousand men killed.) It was known as the Massacre of Verden (“Verdener Blutgericht”), and it caused three years of bloodthirsty warfare, from 783 to 785, during which the kingdom of the Frisians were also finally subdued and a large part of their fleet burned. Charlemagne had his army rampage through the Saxon lands, killing, burning, and tearing down pagan shrines—creating total devastation. It was only when, in the autumn of 785, Charlemagne managed to appeal to the Saxon leader Widukind—and Widukind agreed to accept baptism—that the fighting eased for seven years.
In 792, the Westphalians again rose against their conqueror, and the East-phalians and Nordalbingians joined them in 793, but the rebellion did not have enough support from the tired masses of Saxons and was put down by 794. It was the turn of the Engrians to rebel in 796, but the quick military presence of Charlemagne, Christian Saxons, and Slavs crushed them. The last rebellion of the independent Saxons rose in 804, more than 30 years after Charlemagne’s first campaign against them: it was the Nordalbingians, who quickly found themselves effectively disempowered from rebellion because the Saxons around them refused support. According to Einhard:
The war that had lasted so many years was at length ended by their acceding to the terms offered by the King; which were renunciation of their national religious customs and the worship of devils, acceptance of the sacraments of the Christian faith and religion, and union with the Franks to form one people. (24)
After the conquest of Nordalbingia, the Franks were discovered by the peoples of Scandinavia as the pagan Danes, “a race almost unknown to his ancestors, but destined to be only too well known to his sons,” as historian Charles Oman described them, began to move outward in expansion (367). While they lived on the Jutland peninsula, they had no doubt heard many stories from Widukind (his wife was Danish) and his allies—the Franks were dangerous, unrelenting, and difficult to defeat, and their Christian religion was spreading like wildfire.
In 808, the king of the Danes, Godfred, built the vast Danevirke across the isthmus of Schleswig. The Danevirke was at its beginning a 19-mile-long earth and stone rampart that protected Danish land and gave Godfred the opportunity to harass Frisia and Flanders with pirate raids. An excellent commander, he invaded Frisia and joked of visiting Aachen in order to upset Charlemagne, but he was murdered before he could do any more conquering (either by a Frankish assassin or by one of his own men). Godfred was succeeded by his nephew Hemming, who knew better than to go up against the Frankish king and agreed to the Treaty of Heiligen with Charlemagne in late 811.
The Saxons were never met with the generosity in victory that Charlemagne had shown in Italy and Bavaria. He treated their areas as conquered lands, and ones that had cost the Franks a lot of lives and blood, and there was always a chance one of the regional warlords could up and start yet another rebellion. The time and tide had turned, however, as the Saxons began to look to their coasts instead of looking landward for enemies: in the early years of the ninth century the Viking raids were beginning.
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