The Bloody Verdict at Verden | Perspectives on Evil
In borderland raids | They came in their hordes | Ransacking villages | Taking the spoils | With nothing to lose | And possessions few | Bold | Sturdy | Fearless and cruel! | I shed the blood of Saxon men.
- Sir Christopher Lee, from the album “Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross”
Ten long years of war in the dark forests of Saxony, and there was no end in sight. Centuries earlier, these woods had witnessed the destruction of mighty Roman legions, a fact that several Frankish scribes had already noted in their chronicles. Per-haps their king would fare better than the Roman Emperor Augustus. Their enemy, the Saxons, were a far greater threat than the older Germanic tribes had been. When confronted with the truth of holy writ and the might of Christendom’s armies, they had refused to bow to the Frankish King Charles and clung to their pagan ways. Now, a decade after the first uprising along the border, Charles had resolved to suppress the Saxons’ desire for independence once and for all. He had learned of a re-volt near the Süntel massif that had killed several members of his court. The Royal Frankish Annals recorded what followed:
When he heard this, the Lord King Charles rushed to the place with all the Franks that he could gather on short notice and advanced to where the Aller flows into the Weser. Then all the Saxons came together again, submitted to the authority of the Lord King, and surrendered the evildoers who were chiefly responsible for this revolt to be put to death—four thousand five hundred of them. The sentence was carried out.
Interpreting Evil
In the last two podcasts, Joe described events that occurred thousands of years ago in circumstances so different from our own that it’s difficult to be certain what happened and why. To close out this “mini-arc” in our season, I thought it important to address events in the past and how people interpret them. Distance in time can sometimes obscure motives, as we saw with Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, and Xerxes. People certainly knew these men’s motives for harsh and evil deeds at the time, but many of those records are gone. And distance is not the only complicating factor in interpreting the past; so is bias.
King Charles of the Franks had waged many “wars of evangelism” in his early reign and was determined to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ by any means necessary. In 772 AD, a rising of the pagan Saxons in what is now northwest Germany compelled Charles to invade the region. He destroyed several towns as well as an Irminsul or “Great Pillar,” a sacred object within Germanic paganism, located either in the modern town of Obermarsberg or fifteen miles away in the Teutoburg Forest (where Germanic hordes had once massacred Caesar Augustus’ legions in 9 AD). Charles hoped that his quick strike into Saxony would end the uprising, but instead, it sparked almost thirty years of war.
A decade into the conflict, the Saxons destroyed a Frankish army encamped near the Süntel massif. Among the dead were several of King Charles’ friends and courtiers, and the Frankish scholar Einhard recorded that Charles was enraged at the Saxons’ refusal to submit to God’s anointed king. He assembled his army and pursued the rebels, cornering them where the Aller and Weser rivers met outside the village of Verden. There, he forced every Saxon who surrendered to him to swear fealty, bow before a crucifix and pray to holy icons, and then give up the names of anyone who had been at Süntel and had killed a Frankish soldier or nobleman. Einhard’s account concludes with a more detailed version of what the Frankish Annals provides, that Charles gave orders that over four thousand Saxon warriors be taken into the forests, their heads cut off with swords and axes, and the bodies be left for animals. This “bloody verdict at Verden” took a full day in October 782 to carry out, and it was burned into Saxon and other Germanic tribes’ collective memories.
The Saxon war continued for another twenty years, and Charles’ armies also battled non-believers in southern France and Spain, across the Alps in northern Italy, and along the coast when the Vikings began to raid settlements in the Low Countries. In fact, some historians credit the massacre at Verden as inspiring the Danes to fight the Franks rather than submit to their rule. There were periods of peace, usually when a Saxon settlement converted and accepted baptism—only to then rise up after the Frankish armies had moved on. What happened at Verden is similar to many barbaric tales of medieval justice, and few contemporaries raised any objections to Charles’ actions. The Church specifically cited his “defense of the faith” eighteen years after the massacre when Pope Leo III proclaimed the king “Charles the Great, Emperor of the Romans.” Charlemagne’s legend as the “Father of Europe” seldom included mention of the massacre at Verden, and historians who brought it up often faced the Church’s ire for daring to critique God’s anointed.
Much of the next twelve centuries of scholarship centered on the two surviving accounts of the massacre, both found in the Royal Frankish Annals. Given that its author, Einhard, was a personal friend of Charlemagne, many historians doubted the Annals’ veracity. Some questioned the number of Saxons killed or Charles’ motive for the massacre, and others doubted whether it even took place since such bloodshed would have enriched the Saxons’ reputation in their warrior-centric society. A few scholars also examined Charlemagne’s opponent in the Saxon wars, the warchief Widukind, who led his people in battle until his capture three years after the Verden massacre. He then submitted to Frankish rule, accepted Christian baptism, and abandoned his pagan ways. Yet amidst all this discussion and debate, almost no one raised the question of whether or not Charlemagne was right to order the death of so many enemy warriors. Widukind was a Frankish bête noir who had to be defeated at any cost, so Charlemagne’s deeds were not acts of evil. They were merely “just what rulers did” or “a display of deep piety.” But then, a turning point in European historiography changed all of that.
Evil Identifies Evil
In 1934, the National Socialist race theorist Hermann Gauche touched off a furious argument among German historians about Charlemagne. As a devout pagan, Gauche believed that King Charles ought not be called “the Great” but rather “the Slaughterer” or “the Butcher” for his actions at Verden. He further claimed that the Franks had used Verden to inaugurate a genocide against pagans and that Widukind was “the Great” leader in that period for fighting to preserve Germanic ways. Gauche’s motives were clear, and he made no excuse for hating Christians, their Church, and their heroes of the past. Other Nazi “scholars” soon jumped on the bandwagon. Alfred Rosenberg, the party’s chief racial theorist worked with the propagandist Joseph Goebbels to write plays about Widukind—which were so awful that only two were produced and neither received a second performance. Heinrich Himmler, an arch-villain of Nazi Germany who would later supervise the Holocaust, built icons that resembled the Irminsul outside the three “order castles,” elite party schools that indoctrinated the Reich’s future leaders in Nazi ideology and filled their lives with neo-pagan Nordic rituals worshipping sun-gods and world-trees. Charle-magne’s reassessment as a villain became complete a year later when the city of Aachen, once his imperial capital, canceled the annual celebration of his birthday and the SS built a memorial at Verden to commemorate the emperor’s victims.
And then, as often happened in the Nazi Reich, something changed. A group of German historians wrote a book, Karl der Grosse oder Charlemagne? that ques-tioned the emperor’s alleged villainy and reminded readers of his many accom-plishments. The German people started asking questions, and this was unacceptable in the Nazi state. So Hitler himself intervened and declared Charlemagne to be a historic figure and Reich hero. The Führer was no doubt dreaming of conquests that would outstrip those of any other world-historical figure, and he wanted his nation to associate Nazi majesty with that of Charles the Great. The emperor became “Karl der Grosse” once again, and Germany’s historians memory-holed their earlier criti-cism of his massacre at Verden.
Perspectives on Evil
The idea that any good came from the Nazi era in Germany is ridiculous, but scholars have acknowledged a minuscule contribution its monstrous leaders made to history. The world was not yet aware of the Third Reich’s crimes in 1935-36, and historians read the works of Gauche, Rosenberg, and others. They then started looking at their own assessments of the “Father of Europe.” Was he a great warrior who Christianized the pagans, unified much of the Continent, and ended the so-called Dark Ages? Frankish scribes and Church scholars thought so and usually ignored what today we would call the war crime at Verden. Or was he a brutal tyrant who murdered pagans and destroyed their culture and traditions? The Nazis took this view, at least until their demented Führer wanted the emperor as a historic forerunner. The answer modern historians came up with was “Yes.” To both. Today’s scholarship around Charlemagne, as we covered three years ago on this podcast in the episode “Light & Darkness” is complex. The emperor’s reign revived European culture and civilization after centuries of post-Roman decline, but that revival came at a terrible (and, sadly, common) price in both lives and treasure.
As we keep saying this season, evil must be opposed. But first, it must be recognized. It is sometimes difficult to recognize villains in history if we only read certain perspectives. This is a growing trend in academics and one that I find deeply disturbing. Many scholars now insist students not read sources because their author said or did something that is objectively evil. That is not only bad scholarship—it can actually be dangerous because it precludes a complete understanding of history. I do not in any way mean to accept or praise monsters just because they happen upon a different interpretation of the past; I am not so foolhardy as to laud the Nazi distortions of history. But today’s understanding of Charlemagne’s massacre at Verden comes directly from conversations that started in Nazi Germany. And there is a lesson in that that goes far beyond one event that happened almost thirteen hundred years ago. If we, as students of the past, want to get the broadest and clearest understanding of historic events so we can avoid old pitfalls and oppose new villains, we should be open to every interpretation of history—even if they come from racists and warmongers. We can recognize the evil in their deeds and the hatred in their words, but we can also learn from their perspectives and gain a better understanding of evil in our world today.
Image credit: https://knightstemplar.co/charlemagne-age-epoch-of-the-great-frankish-ruler-unveiled/