524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)

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Charles the Prince, girded boldly with gleaming arms, tamed this people through numerous blows and a thousand triumphs. He crushed it down and subjected it to himself with brandished sword.
He dragged the battalions of those who in the depths of forests worshipped stock and stone into heavenly kingdoms. Afterwards, he poured over with the salvation bringing due of baptism the untaught Saxons and sent them to the stars of heaven and led the new children of Christ into his hall.
So that was a fellow called Paulinus. He was a scholar from Northern Italy.
Lovely poem. I think it's a banger.
And Paulinus, not just a bishop, but a saint, Tom. He becomes one in due course, not when he's written that poem, to be fair, but it's all in the future.
Exactly. You get your sainthood partly as a reward for that beautiful poem yes like the poet laureate so he writes this poem in the year 777 and we are in the realm of charlemagne charles the great warlord of the west great king great emperor as we will discover as this story continues so tom give us a little bit of context charlemagne has been joint king of the Frankish Empire for nine years with his brother, Carloman.
But a terrible thing has happened to Carloman. Carloman had a nosebleed, as listeners will remember, and has died.
So Charlemagne is the last man standing. So give us a little bit of context.
We're in the aftermath of the Roman Empire. Yeah, so Charles, he rules the Franks.
He's the son of Pepin, who's made himself king, getting rid of the Merovingian kings. He's the grandson of Charles Martel, great warlord.
And Charles in Latin is Carolus. And so the dynasty that Pepin has founded and that Charlemagne belongs to is known by historians as the Carolingian dynasty.
So Charles is top Carolingian. He's top Frank.
And to be honest, he's top guy in Europe because he has put the whole of the old heartlands of the Roman empire in his shadow. And he is now pushing eastwards.
And that, I think, excellent poem that you read by Paul Enos, who in due course, as we said, will go on to become a saint. This is celebrating the conquest and the conversion of the Saxons.
And these were a pagan people on the eastern flank of the Frankish empire. Relations with the Franks had been terrible for ages and ages.
They'd endlessly been kind of raiding Frankish lands, nicking their cattle, all that kind of stuff. And this had been a kind of grumbling cause of complaint under the Merovingians and then under the Carolingians.
But Charlemagne, he's very much a guy for a radical solution. And he's piling right in and saying, okay, I'm not going to put up with this.
I'm going to conquer them. So he had gone to war against them in 772.
So that's the year after he's become sole king. And this has lasted on and off for five

years. And now it seems to Paulinus that Charlemagne has succeeded in his aims, that the

Saxons are conquered. It's absolutely brilliant.
And so he salutes Charlemagne, may God grant the

Clement Prince as his reward for achieving such a victory, the sweet pastures of eternal life.

It's all looking good

for charlemagne oh that's nice so people who might be a little bit confused these are saxons

in what is now germany this is not anglo-saxon so saxony yeah in saxony so lower saxony to give

people a sort of sense that's the northern bit of kind of western germany at this point though

saxony then it kind of below denmark yeah exactly right so charlemagne tom charles the great

Thank you. bit of kind of Western Germany at this point, though Saxony then.
Yeah, kind of below Denmark. Yeah, exactly.
Right. So Charlemagne, Tom, Charles the Great.
He's a funny character, isn't he, Charlemagne? Lots of people have heard of Charlemagne, but I think it's fair to say that a lot of people know no more about him than his name. So he is a new figure.
He is an entirely sui generis, an exceptional figure in European history because he's different from all the warlords who've gone before him. Am I right? He's not radically different.
It's just that he is more impressive and he has more resources to draw on. And so therefore he can behave in a way that hasn't been seen in Western Europe for a very long time.
So Peter Brown, the great historian of late antiquity, says of Charlemagne that he was not a warrior chieftain in a fragile epic mode. He trod with the heavy tread of a dominus, so a Roman lord, a lord of Roman determination, capable of deploying resources on an almost Roman scale.
And these resources are preeminently military because he has inherited from Pepin and from his grandfather, Charles Martel, by far the most menacing war machine in Europe. But he adds to that some very, very kind of distinctive personal qualities.
So in the previous episode, we heard from Einhard, who was this very short scholar who wrote a biography of Charlemagne. And Einhard summed up Charlemagne as having two particularly striking character traits.
He said that he had greatness of soul and a constant firmness of mind. And I guess you could, if you were not as prone to praising Charlemagne as Einhard was, you could say that these qualities correspond perhaps to having very broad horizons, a capacity to see things on a very large scale, and also a capacity to take a very, very long view.
And to Einhard, these qualities remind him of perhaps the greatest of all Roman emperors, who is Augustus. And this is why Einhard models his biography on Suetonius,

his biography of Augustus. And there is something Roman about the approach that Charlemagne takes to the Saxons.
So anyone who knows how the Romans behaved to the Germans, or indeed to the Gauls when they conquered them, they are murderous in their response to perceived slights or insults. And certainly Charlemagne's policy of outright conquest, we've got these kind of fractious barbarians, let's go and conquer them and pacify them.
That is a very Roman approach. And there's an account from a chronicler describing Charlemagne's early campaigns against the Saxons.
And it will sound to people, I think, like the historians of Rome describing the onslaught of the legionaries against the barbarian people. So this chronicle writes, Charles devastated the lands of the Saxons with fire and sword and left them emptied of people.
And when he targets a particularly celebrated Saxon shrine, he's described as destroying it utterly and taking away all the gold and silver he found there. And I think even when we say the Saxons, that again is a Frankish formulation that reflects the tendency that the Romans had, which was to kind of perceive pagan peoples, tribal peoples, peoples on the fringes of their civilization in terms that they would understand.
And of course, that's what the Romans had done to the Franks. And now the Franks are doing it to these people that they kind of bundle together as Saxons.
So sort of sticking labels on people, very Roman thing to do to kind of classify people and say, these are these people and they have red hair and these are their habits and all that kind of thing. Yes.
On the Franks, the Franks presumably now at this point, Charlemagne very much sees himself as the heir, doesn't he, to the Roman inheritance, do you think? I think he does. I mean, not actually to Augustus, but to the Christian emperors who had ruled a great Christian realm.
And of course, that is one point of difference between Charlemagne and Augustus is that Charlemagne is, you know, he's not just a great conqueror, but he is a Christian conqueror. And there's a kind of quality of paradox to that, because there hasn't really been such a figure before.
So when he advances into the lands of the Saxons, he's not aiming just to conquer them. He wants to save their souls.
He wants to bring them to Christ. And this great shrine that I described Charlemagne as destroying in 772, it's not just that it's rich.
It's obviously the fact that it is a pagan shrine. It's fearsome.
It's phallic. It's basically a massive great pole sticking up out of the Saxon earth, famed across Saxony, and believed by the Saxons to uphold the very heavens themselves.
And so Charlemagne chops it down to demonstrate that this isn't true, that it has no sacral potency whatsoever. And I guess even the looting of its treasures can be justified in terms of what churchmen in Charlemagne's realm are coming to describe as a process of correctio.
So it's a Latin word, which means the bringing of order where there is disorder, burnishing what has been besmeared and besmirched. And can I at this point quote for myself from Millennium? Do.
So this programme, here was a programme to whet the ambitions of warlords as well as scholars, and to send men into battle beneath the fluttering of banners, the hiss of arrows, and the shadow of carrion crows quite as much as into the mildewed quiet of libraries. And is that you or is that Paulinus? Well, very hard to tell us apart, I think.
You can see that he's been a great influence on my prose. But there is this idea that Charlemagne cleaves to very, very passionately, that in bringing sword and fire to the lands of the Saxons, he is also bringing order.
And essentially, it's all for their own good. It's all for their own benefit.
But Saxony is not the only place that he's looking at, is he? Because he's looking beyond the frontiers of what was once Gaul, which is now Francia. And he's also looking to Italy, isn't he? Because Italy is still a bit of a lodestar for people who are living in the ruins of the Roman Empire, the inheritance of Rome, and so on.
So what's going on in Italy? Italy is now under the sway of the Lombards. Is that right? Well, in the previous episode, we heard how the Pope in Rome, he had anointed Charlemagne's father, thereby providing him with the religious legitimacy that he wanted.
So it's become very important to the Carolingians. The papacy basically has licensed them to become kings.
So a very important figure. But he's been menaced by the and essentially the quid pro quo between the Carolingians and the papacy basically has licensed them to become kings.
So a very important figure. But he's been menaced by the Lombards.
And essentially, the quid pro quo between the Carolingians and the papacy is that the Pope will anoint kings and all that kind of stuff. And meanwhile, the Carolingians are expected to keep the Lombards, who are these very impotent people in the north of Italy, keep them on a kind of tight leash.
And Charlemagne, whose ambitions are clearly considerable in a way that not even his father's had been, even when he's in Saxony, is thinking about what could I do against the Lombards? I mean, maybe I could just swallow up their kingdom. And so when he strips this great pagan shrine of all its treasure, I think he is thinking, you know, this is great.
I can use this to essentially fund a war against the Lombards. And he will need it because the Lombards occupy a stretch of land that is dotted, as you said, with ancient Roman cities that have walls that are impressive.
The Lombards are a kingdom a bit like the Franks. I mean, on a smaller scale, but kind of a challenge of a different order to the Saxons.
And they're also Germanic, is that right, the Lombards? They are Germanic. They command the Alpine passes, so that's a potential problem.
And there is also bad blood between Charlemagne and the Lombard king, who's a man called Desiderius, because Charlemagne had been married to the daughter of Desiderius for a year and then basically had dumped her, I think for diplomatic reasons rather than personal reasons because he needed to marry someone else from Central Europe. And Desiderius also is harboring a rival claimant to the throne of Francia.
So basically when this bloke died of a nosebleed, Charlemagne's brother, Carloman, his wife and sons had gone off and taken refuge with the Lombards, hadn't they? So that's a bit of a worry for Charlemagne that the wife and the sons are hanging around in what's now Lombardy. Well, I think that is probably actually the biggest consideration of all, because Charlemagne knows that the one thing that could really cripple his offensive capacity and the integrity of his empire is kind of factional rivalry with rival members of his own family.
And we know that this is weighing on his mind because we have a life of Hadrian I, who's become Pope shortly after Charlemagne's come to power. And in this biography, it says that the wife and sons of the late Carlemagne King of the Franks had taken refuge with Desidius, who was trying hard to make good his contention that these princes should assume the kingship of the Franks in the hope of stirring up dissensions in the kingdom of the Franks.
And in fact, Desiderius writes to the Pope and says, look, I've got these two boys, crown them, anoint them, give them your legitimacy. Hadrian refuses because he essentially has to weigh up which of these two guys is likelier to win.
And he decides that Charlemagne is the likelier.

But he's still in an awkward position because Desiderius is between him and Charlemagne.

And in fact, when Hadrian sends a messenger to Charlemagne saying,

you know, please come to my rescue, I'm being menaced.

He can't actually use the Alpine passes because they've been shut off. And so he has to send the messenger via Marseille, which then goes up to Charlemagne.

And when Charlemagne gets this message, it confirms his worst anxieties, essentially that Desiderius will be using these two nephews to strike at him. And so he thinks, OK, I've got to go to war.
So the summer of 773, Charles summons his peers, his warriors, his advisors to Geneva in Switzerland, holds a great council there. You know, he wants to get the support of his followers for the war that's to come.
And then having got that, he advances southwards. He seizes control of the two main mountain passes over the Alps.
And once he's done that, he then sends ambassadors to Desiderius. And you can see what his main target is.
Because even at this point, his prime anxiety is to get hold of the nephews. And he says to Desiderius, look, I am willing to hold off war.
And I'm willing to pay you a frankly, enormous amount of money if you will hand these boys over to me. And Desiderius refuses.
And Charlemagne, I think, is really quite surprised by this. Janet Nelson, in her brilliant biography of Charlemagne, offers an explanation for why Desiderius should have refused Charlemagne's offer.
She writes, Charles underestimated one thing that was beyond price, the Lombard king's honor. What father does deals with the man who has repudiated his daughter? And she speaks the truth there.
Do you think that's plausible? I mean, Charlemagne is a man of realpolitik, and so is Desiderius. Do you think Desiderius really is thinking, oh, I'm just really bitter about this family row, and that's the single biggest thing in his decision making? Or do you think he thinks, no, I'd rather keep a hold of these boys because they're such a powerful political pawn for me? I think a bit of both.
I think if his honor had not been insulted, perhaps he might have taken the money and settled for peace. Really? Okay.
Yes, I think so. I think the sense that he's been shamed before the eyes of his own people and of Christian Europe generally was clearly very strong.
And so he decides that he's going to fight. And so war breaks out.
Charles descends from the Alps into Northern Italy. And his immediate target is Pavia, because that is where Desiderius has set himself up.
But it's also because, according to reports, that is where the two nephews are, the two princes, who I'm sure have been kept in a tower. However, when he gets there, Charlemagne finds that he's too late, that the princes have been sent away to Verona.
And so he splits his forces. So the life of Hadrian, the Pope, we're told Charles left most of his forces at Pavia and with a number of his bravest Franks moved rapidly towards Verona.
And this is a move that clearly takes the defenders of Verona by surprise. And Carloman's sons and his wife, who has the brilliant name of Gerberga, they all surrender themselves to Charlemagne.
Although according to the life of Hadrian, Carloman's wives and sons immediately handed themselves over of their own free wills. Yeah, but believe that.
So it sounds slightly like there's some special pleading going on. And the intriguing thing is that from this point on, that is the last dimension of them.
And there were two boys, right? Two boys. Two boys.
And the last we heard of them, they're in Verona. So they ended their lives literally as two gentlemen of Verona.
Well, I mean, they may have been, you know, tonsured, so had their hair shaved off and packed off to the monastery. But if they were, we don't hear about it.
They're probably being killed. They've been killed.
I mean, you know, maybe Charlemagne Richard III did. I mean, we don't know.
Right. Well, that's the end of them.
What's going on in Pavia? The siege there is still continuing, right? Yes. Right the way through the winter, Desiderius holding out.
And Charles seems to have had a slight wobble. He abandons the siege and he goes south to Rome.
So it's his first visit to Rome. And he goes to St.
Peter's tomb and he prays there. And whether it is for St.
Peter to intercede with God to help him in the siege, or maybe, I mean, maybe it's the expression of a guilty conscience. Yeah.
I mean, maybe he feels bad about what he's done to his nephews. We don't know.
But it's clearly the case that when he goes back to Pavia, his morale has been boosted. He's back in the saddle.
He's full of vigor. And he prosecutes the siege with a kind of renewed sense of aggression.
And if he was praying for God's assistance, then God gives it because a terrible plague breaks out in Pavia. And it causes such devastation that Desiderius basically surrenders.
He has no choice.

Wow. So again, quoting from the life of Hadrian, the wrath of God raged and stormed against all the Lombards in that city.
And they were so enfeebled by disease and death that the excellent

king of the Franks captured the city together with Desiderius. And that essentially is the end,

not just of Desiderius's ambitions, but of the independence of the Lombard kingdom. And Desiderius is taken back to Francia.
He is tonsured. He is sent to a monastery.
And Lombardy, the kingdom isn't erased. Charlemagne becomes king of the Lombards.
So from this point on, he is described in his charters as king of the Franks and of the Lombards. But Lombardy is now clearly a part of Charlemagne's empire, and his power now extends right the way to Rome.
So it's a significant advance of the Frankish frontier. And to put that into context, he is the first bloke, presumably, to rule unchallenged in Gaul and certainly the top half of Italy for, what, 200 years, maybe?

Oh, I mean, even longer.

I mean, back to the time of the fall of the Roman Empire in the West.

Yeah.

The Alps had always been a kind of frontier.

So the early 5th century, yeah.

So that's an extraordinary achievement.

It is.

And when you consider that on top of that, at this point, he thinks he's conquered Saxony, you know, and those are reaches of land that the Caesars hadn't even ruled.

I mean, he's starting to look very, very impressive. And the truth is that Charlemagne is a very great war leader.
Indeed, he leads his men personally into battle. He conducts campaigns personally.
The strategy is all his. And it's very rare that there isn't a campaign being fought somewhere on the frontiers of the Frankish realm.
So in 790, one of the annals of Charlemagne's reign, so these are histories that record the doings in terms of what happened each year. The entry for 790 is simply the Franks did nothing, i.e.
they didn't go to war. This is the shortest entry we have in this annul.
And it reflects the fact, this is an amazing thing. There were no wars this year.
It's the only time it happens. So every other year there is military action.
And it is taking place on all the various frontiers of Charlemagne's empire. So there's Spain.
So we talked in the episode we did on the Battle of Taur and in the previous one about how the Frankish kings have been pushing, let's call them the Arabs, back from the Loire, back beyond the Pyrenees. And Charlemagne actually crosses the Pyrenees and takes the fight to the Arabs in Spain itself.
he captures the town of Pamplona pulls down its walls so that it can't be used against him and then he returns across the Pyrenees

and this is a retreat that is He captures the town of Pamplona, pulls down its walls so that it can't be used against him.

And then he returns across the Pyrenees. And this is a retreat that is very, very famous because as his rear guard, which is guarding his baggage, is going through the pass of Rosses Valles, Rossivo, it is ambushed.
And the baggage is taken. and the commander of this baggage train, who is one of Charlemagne's palatini, so the people who attend him in his palace, paladins as they will come to be called, Roland the great paladin, he has a horn and he blows on the horn to signal to Charlemagne the disaster that is befalling him.
And this will become the theme of one of the great, great medieval epics. I mean, it's a wonderful story.

We could perhaps at some point do an episode on it. But it's not strictly relevant to the life of Charlemagne himself, because all of that romance is massively overblown.
It's not the great disaster that the poets would make it seem. Although having said that, I mean, it's obviously not brilliant that he's lost all his luggage.
And actually, from that point on, Charlemagne is pretty much content to leave the Pyrenees alone, at least until the beginning of the 9th century, as we will see. But his real focus is Central Europe, right? Yes, it is.
So Central Europe, there's another people who are called the Avars, who are based in what's now Hungary on the great plain of Pannonia. They are horse lords of the plains, aren't they? They are.
So they're a bit like the Huns. You know, they fire bows and arrows from horses.
That's their thing. They are not a Germanic people, are they? The Avars, aren't they? Kind of Turkic or something like that? Maybe nomads from further east.
Anyway, they're causing all kinds of trouble in northern Italy, in Germany. They're kind of ranging around and raiding and doing all this kind of thing.
And Charlemagne decides they're his focus. He's going to deal with them.
Well, the thing is that I think for a long time, the assumption has been among people like the Avars that it's cost-free to go and raid a monastery or something or to attack a town. There's nothing anyone can really do about it because they're so mobile.
But this isn't Charlemagne's perspective at all. If people raid his kingdom, then he's going to go after them.
And so that's exactly what he does. And in 791, he leads what seems to be a very intimidating invasion, which he then has to abandon because there's a massive horse plague.
So all his horses, about 90% it's estimated of his horses get wiped out. And this seems to be really bad for him.
However, it's much worse in the long run for the Avars because of course the plague spreads to Pannonia. And if they lose their horses, then they're completely screwed because without horses, they can't do anything.
Their entire offensive capability depends on their ability to shoot arrows from the saddle. So by the mid 790s, the Avars are being harried by the Franks, but their kingdom is starting to implode.
So in 795, the Avar Kargan, so the kind of Avar chieftain, is killed by his own men. One of his deputies then opens negotiations with Charlemagne, writes to him to surrender his land, his people and

himself to the king and to accept the Christian faith at the king's command. A Frankish strike force then advances against the great central palace of the Cargan.
It's called the Ring, a great kind of structure full of all the loot that's been taken from northern Italy and from Bavaria and the Franks take the whole lot and they pile it onto great wagons and it's driven back to Charlemagne's court back in Austrasia, the eastern Frankish kingdom. And Einhard probably saw it, Charlemagne's biographer, because he gives this description of all this treasure coming into town, drawn in 15 carts, each pulled by four oxen and carrying great piles of gold and silver and precious robes of silk.
And Einhard thinks this is great. He describes Charlemagne's victory over the Avars as the greatest and most terrible that he ever fought, but with one exception.
And that exception is the war that Charlemagne fought against the Saxons. Because in fact, the hope that Charlemagne had had and that Paulinus had had when writing that poem, that the war against the Saxons was over, that they had accepted defeat and had accepted baptism, this proves to be massively over-optimistic.
Because in fact, the war rages for decades. And it rages for decades for the same reason that the Romans had found it so hard to conquer Germany.
Because despite their overwhelming military strength, the Franks find it a real struggle to kind of pin their opponents down, to force them to accept defeat once and for all. Is that because the Saxons don't have a capital, they don't have state structures? Right.
They're tribal confederation. So how can you ever beat them, I guess? Yeah.
And this ultimately is what had defeated the Romans. But Charlemagne, in a way, I mean, his policy is kind of even more unyielding, even more unstinting, even more merciless than the Romans had been.
So pretty much every spring, the Franks are riding out to harry the Saxons. If they've broken treaties, then they will be punished really brutally.
Every autumn before they retreat back to their bases, the Franks torch the harvests of the Saxons so that they will then starve through the winter. Wherever they find a settlement in a rebellious area, they will torch it.
And from 795 onwards, and again, this is very Roman, the Franks adopt a policy of mass deportations. So they are taking entire peoples, entire communities and transporting them deep into the Frankish empire.
When they capture the Saxon elites, they're taking them as hostages, which again is very kind of Roman, and bringing them back to Charlemagne's court and kind of educating them as Christians. And as I say, these are atrocities on a Roman scale.
But the truth is that Charlemagne's inspiration is probably not Roman, but in the Old Testament, because the Pope, when he had crowned Pepin, Charlemagne's father, had hailed the Franks as a new Israel. And the example of Israelite warfare actually offers a king like Charlemagne, who wants to extirpate a pagan people, quite a lot of inspiration.
So in 782, there's a famous atrocity after a particularly violent uprising by Saxons who had supposedly accepted baptism and submitted to Charlemagne and then kind of turn against the massacre priests, destroy churches and all of that. So Charlemagne orders that 4,500 prisoners be beheaded on a single day.
And the likelihood is that in ordering this punishment, he is inspired by the example of King David in the Old Testament, who similarly, you know, we have this description in the Bible, every two lengths of captives were put to death, and the third length was allowed to live. So it may be that there were even more prisoners, and Charlemagne spared those.
So if you're behaving in a biblical way, that's fine, fine isn't it so well roman and biblical i mean it's the fusing of the two great inspirations on the carolingans he's bringing it to bear on the saxons and it's a prosecution of total warfare on a scale that is so brutal that by the late 790s saxon resistance finally is starting starting to be broken. And this is a victory of an order that the Romans in Germany never really succeeded in winning.
And to that extent, Charlemagne can celebrate it. But of course, there is an obvious and unsettling question that is hanging over the entire war and particularly the particularly brutal strategy that Charlemagne has been adopting in the kind of final decade of that war, which is that the triumph might be worthy of Augustus, but is it worthy of a Christian? You know, what does Christ think about all this? And this really matters to Charlemagne because Charlemagne is a very devout Christian.
And what he is doing, he's doing as that poem written by Paulinus suggested that you quoted at the beginning of the show, he's doing it in the hope of winning eternal life. And what if the violence and the horror that he's inflicted actually is opening the gates of hell to him? And that is a very pressing question.
What if? Well, let's find out after the break whether he is going to get eternal life or whether he's going to hell. See you then.
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A person can be forced into baptism, but that person will not advance in faith unless he be an infant. Even after people have received the faith and baptism, their weaker minds should be offered instruction with gentleness.
For as the apostle paul said when he wrote to his followers among the galatians i have fed you not with meat but with milk so that was a letter written in 796 to courtier in charlemagne's train at the time when he's absolutely smiting the saxons tom about four seconds before i was about was about to read that, you said, oh, please, can you read that in a Yorkshire accent? Explain to the listeners why you wanted to hear that. Well, partly because I always enjoy hearing your Yorkshire accent.
Right. But also because the author of that letter was from York.
He was a Northumbrian, so an Anglo-Saxon called Alcuin. And Alcuin was a very distinguished scholar in the noblest traditions of the great achievements of Northumbrian scholarship.
Venerable Bede. So he had been taught by a disciple of Bede, exactly.
So there's a kind of scholarly link between those two extraordinary people. And Einhard, again, the biography of Charlemagne, he thought Alcuin was brilliant.
He described him as the most learned man to be found anywhere. And the thing that's impressive about Alcuin is that he's also very, very good at politics.
He's kind of a very seasoned diplomat. So in 781, he gets sent by the Bishop of York, who basically wants to be an archbishop.
And there's some doubt about this. And so Alcuin goes to Rome to negotiate the absolute confirmation

that the Bishop of York is actually an archbishop and Alcuin succeeds in doing that. And then he's going back through Italy when he runs into Charlemagne and Charlemagne is all over him and says, please come and stay with me, stay in my court.
And the reason for that is that Charlemagne, as well as being a very successful and on occasion, brutal warlord, is also a man who is devoted to learning, to scholarship, to kind of broadening the cultural horizons of himself and of his people. And he essentially, he wants a teacher and Alcuin is a brilliant teacher.
And so he stays at Charlemagne's side. He goes back to England for a couple of years, but otherwise he stays in Francia from this point onwards.
And from his letters, you can see he's a bit scared of Charlemagne. He's a bit nervous of him, but they do seem to have become genuinely good friends.
So Charlemagne has this massive bath complex and they hang out in the baths together, kind of making jokes about Virgil. And Alcuin's a great japester.
He's a great one for a nickname. So he calls Charlemagne perhaps tellingly David, as in King David.
And it's all great banter and they get on tremendously tremendously well and Alcuin is by Charlemagne's side pretty continuously throughout this period and then in 796 he's quite elderly by this point I think he's about 60 he retires to Tor which of course is the great shrine of Saint Martin so it's the most significant of all the Frankish shrines and there he becomes the abbot continues to take an interest, obviously, in what's going on beyond the walls of the monastery. And in 796, you know, which is the year that he's gone to tour, there is one thing more than anything else that is worrying Alcuin.
And essentially, it's Charlemagne's policy in the East, his policy to the Saxons. Right.
And this is because he thinks Charlemagne's let himself down a bit by being so savage, by being so repressive, is it? Essentially, yes. It's because what Charlemagne is doing is a very radical policy.
It's not something that Christian kings and emperors have been in the habit of doing, kind of imposing conversion at the point of a sword. People may have a vague sense that this is all that medieval kings did, but certainly in the early Middle Ages and even back in the final years of the Christian emperor, this wasn't what was happening.
Because the Roman assumption, which the Franks seem to have inherited, is basically that to have faith in Christ is both a kind of a marker and a perk of being civilized. And the Christian God is so powerful.
Why would you want to share him with your enemies? I mean, it's much better to keep him for yourself. But I think that the longer that Charlemagne fights the Saxons, the more obdurate the Saxons seem to be, the more he comes to think that his enemies are fighting in the shadow of demons, that he is making war not just against the Saxons themselves, but against these monstrous demons that they worship.
And that therefore, he will never defeat the Saxons until he has also banished these terrifying and demonic gods from their lands. So in addition to his military strategy, he imposes this strategy essentially of trying to wipe paganism out with extreme prejudice.
So in 776, Charlemagne imposes a treaty on the Saxons that obliges them to accept baptism. They don't have any choice.
And there's this kind of mass baptism in the River Lippe, kind of thousands and thousands are baptized. But then, of course, the moment he's gone, they all revert.
And this then seems apostasy and Charlemagne is made even more furious. And so it becomes a kind of hideous cycle.
In 785, he pronounces that scorning to come to baptism, so refusing the offer of baptism, will henceforward merit death.

And he also lists a whole host of other practices that have been part of Saxon traditional way of

life for goodness how long. And these two are capital offenses, so offering sacrifice to demons,

as Charlemagne describes it, cremation, so you're not allowed to do that, you have to bury a body,

or eating meat during Lent, so the 40 days before Easter. And this is by miles the most

Thank you. cremation.
So you're not allowed to do that. You have to bury your body or eating meat during Lent,

say the 40 days before Easter. And this is by miles the most brutal program for bringing a people to Christ that anyone has ever attempted.
And this is why Alcuin objects to it. He feels that this is not what a Christian king should be doing at all.
And I think what sharpens this sense for Alcuin is that he is an Anglo-Saxon. And the Anglo-Saxons remember how they had been converted, which is essentially by the example and the inspiration of holy men, not warriors.
So whether it's Irish monks in the north who convert Northumbria, or the missionaries sent from Rome under Augustine, who founds the Archbishop Rick in Canterbury. And I think the Anglo-Saxons also have a feeling of kinship with the Saxons.
There's a sense that, you know, they're cousins. Of course, yeah.
And so this had been an inspiration for a lot of Anglo-Saxon missionaries over the course of the 8th century to go to pagan Germany. So we talked about one of them in the previous episode, Boniface from Devon.
And Boniface had gone out there and he'd certainly given no quarter to paganism. So like Charlemagne, he had been confronted with a great holy tree that had been sacred to Thor and he'd chopped it down and turned it into a church.
But the thing about Boniface is he does this without kind of mailed men at his back. He is doing it as someone who is not carrying weapons.
And even though Boniface was sponsored by Charles Martel, he never turns to the Frankish warlord and says, can you give me some men? The whole point is that if you are confronted by armed warriors, then you allow them to cut you down. And this is what actually happens to Boniface.
So in 754, he's hacked to death by Frisian pirates. The prayer book that he had in his hand, in which he held up to try and stop the blow of the sword, gets cuts all the way through it and is preserved as a holy relic.
And it's an example to Christians of how you should properly convert pagans. You shouldn't be going in and massacring them and burning villages and things.
This is Alcuin's feeling. So when Alcuin, he looks at this, he tells Charlemagne, doesn't he? He has this image of an infant being given milk.
Yeah, he loves that. Let people's newly brought to Christ be nourished in a mild manner as infants are given milk.
If you instruct them brutally, the risk then their minds being weak is they will vomit everything up. I mean, that's a pretty bold thing to write to this guy who's so powerful, to basically say your entire policy is misguided and is actually counterproductive because they will vomit back up the faith that you're forcing down their throats.
Yeah. And of course, unspoken is also the thought that you are going against God's will in doing this.
And I agree, it is brave of Alcuin to do it. I mean, they may hang out in the baths and banter, but Charlemagne is still a very intimidating figure, but Alcuin does write to him.
And what's amazing is that Charlemagne seems to have taken it on the chin. So that same year, 796, he orders the program of forcible baptisms to be eased.
And then the following year, he issues a new charter for the Saxons, kind of easing off the prescriptions. I wouldn't say making the laws against paganism more liberal, that would be an anachronistic way of putting it, but making them slightly less punitive, I guess.
So Alcuin's take is that essentially, you should rely on monasteries rather than on kind of military forts to pacify the Saxons. Charlemagne doesn't go that far.
He continues to harry and burn and whatever. But I think there is a sense in which the monasteries that are built in the kind of the rear of the Saxons and which Charlemagne starts to plant over the eastern reaches of his kingdom, I mean, they have been compared by scholars to the great Roman legionary bases.
These are centers of Christian power from which Christianity can reach outwards and spread eastwards. And in that sense, it kind of perfectly fuses the double meaning of correctio, this Latin word for bringing order where there's disorder, that it is a matter both for warriors with swords and for scholars and monks with pens.
So there's this phrase, the Carolingian Renaissance. The Carolingians don't think that what they're doing is a renaissance, because they think that what they're doing is simply carrying on traditions that reach back to the Christian Roman Empire, but that things need to be corrected.
And so that's what the program is all about. It's not a renaissance, it's a program of correctio.
Right. And not just among the Saxons.
Charlemagne also believes that his own people worthy of, is correction the right word here? I think it is. Okay.
There's this line, let men be chosen for the task of improving knowledge, who have the will and ability to learn and also the desire to instruct others. So basically, it's a huge pedagogical educational program among his own people.
And himself, which is why he had got Alcuin. He wanted a great teacher by his side.
And I think the reason for this, it's a bit like, listeners may remember a while ago, we did an episode on Alfred. After Alfred's victories over the Vikings, his first aim is to restore the monasteries because he sees learning as fundamental to bringing his people to heaven, to winning them eternal life.
And that is his duty as king. If he doesn't do that, if he doesn't succeed in bringing the souls under his charge to Christ, then he will answer for it at the day of judgment.
And I think the same shadow hangs over Charlemagne. It's a really urgent, pressing mission for him.
So it is kind of education, education, education, but it's not just education for its own sake. It's about getting his people to heaven.
And that's why I think he's so keen on Alquin, because he has inherited from his father Pepin and his grandfather Char Martel a sense that actually the Anglo-Saxons are best at this kind of thing. So Boniface, when he had gone out to convert the pagans, he'd actually also had to work quite hard among the people on the eastern flank of the Frankish empire, who supposedly have been Christian for centuries, because he finds that they're in a terrible state.
So he writes of the Frankish clergy. They spend their lives in debauchery, adultery, and every kind of filth.
And he's not writing that in any tone of jealousy. He's genuinely very, very, very appalled by this.
To be fair, it's what so many English writers down the centuries have said about the French, isn't it? That's the first example, perhaps. And the other thing also that's very striking about Anglo-Saxon scholars when they come to frankia you know which was gaul a roman province where people supposedly speak latin the anglo-saxon scholars have learned their latin from books they arrive in gaul and they find the latin being spoken by the franks basically unintelligible and the reason for that is that it's on the verge of becoming french you know it's evolving but yeah to alquine anduin and his compadres, it's a sign that the Franks are hopelessly uneducated, that they've let their inheritance from the Romans slip, and that therefore it's not just their morals that need improving, it's also their ability to speak Latin.
And that matters because to the Anglo-Saxons who had been converted by Roman missionaries, the association between Christianity and Romanitas is much stronger than it is among the Franks. So we talked about this before.
For the Franks, Christianity had always been Gallic. It had always been self-sufficient within Gaul.
It hadn't looked to Rome for its example. But for the Anglo-Saxons, Rome is the great example.
It's a pope who converted them. And so the fact that it's an Anglo-Saxon like Alcuin, who is in charge of the most significant monastery in Francia, is really important in integrating Frankish notions of Christianity into a kind of Europe-wide understanding and making it Roman.
So it's from this point onwards that you really start to have a kind of common Latin Christianity rather than one that is a Christianity that consists of multiple different versions of it. Right.
You know, one in Rome, one in Gore, one in wherever. And the great powerhouse of this process is Alcuin's Monastery in Tor, isn't it? So Tor, obviously, St.
Martin, we've heard loads about St. Martin, how important he was for the Franks.
So this is a real sort of hub of scholarship. They're copying out all these classical texts to try and improve the standards of Latin, and they're producing all these collections of scripture, aren't they? So the first, actually, these are the first Bibles.
Is that right? Explain to people who may be baffled by that how these could possibly be the first Bibles. So the word Bible comes from the Greek word biblia, which means books.
And Christian scriptures consist of lots of different books. And it had not previously been the habit to gather them within a single text.
But Alcuin is all over this. There is a tradition of doing this, say, in the Northumbrian monasteries, and he brings this to Tor.
And it's from this point on, really, that these collections of books, which are being assembled within the covers, within a single set of covers, start to be known collectively as Biblia, i.e. a Bible.
So it's from this point on that you start to get Bibles. And Alcuin's aim is to get as many of these Bibles out as he possibly can.
And it's actually quite kind of information technology. There's a monk in Tor.
He picks up one of these Bibles and he's amazed that you get all the different books of the Old Testament and the New Testament in a single text. And he kind of exclaims, this is a library beyond compare.
And it's a bit like when iPhones or iPads or whatever first came out, that people would say, you know, all the knowledge of the world is on this tiny little tablet, this tiny little phone. And Alcuin is quite Steve Jobs because he has a massive emphasis, not just on the volume of data, but also that this data, these books should be easy to use, easy to read, that they should be beautiful, that the production qualities should be completely streamlined.
And so the Bibles and other books as well that are being produced in the scriptorium at Tor are written to be as user-friendly as possible. And essentially, when you look at a block of text now written in the Roman script, so the script that English and French and

German and everything uses, you are looking at a script that has been mediated by Carolingian

scholars, by Alcuin and his fellow monks. So it's under Alcuin's guidance that for the first time,

words don't run into one another. So if you think of a Roman inscription, you know, there's no spaces, but now you start to get spaces.
Also the use of capitals to indicate new sentences. Again, a complete innovation.
And my favorite innovation, the Carolingians start to introduce new punctuation marks. And in a sentence where there is doubt being expressed, they start to use a kind of lightning flash, which over the course of time will evolve to become the question mark.
Wow. That's brilliant.
So again, Alcuin, he's all about the milk of doctrine and all that, but he also, he's an inventor of the Bible and the question mark. I'd never thought of a question mark as a lightning bolt over a full stop, but that's of course is kind of what it is, a slightly wobbly lightning bolt.
questioning the full stop exactly so they're basically pumping these out all these bibles yeah they're readable they're in a very beautiful user-friendly kind of format and they are presumably a tool of uniformity right exactly across charlemagne's empire that's what he's after yes creating a common Christian culture. Yeah.
And of course, texts are for those who can read. So these Bibles are kind of going to monasteries or whatever.
But Charlemagne and Alquin are both very, very concerned to reach out into the countryside. So people may wonder, it's a long time since Clovis was converted.
The Frankish elites, the aristocracy, all of that are clearly very, very Christian. But what about the peasants out in the countryside? What do they know about it? Probably very little.
And these are the people that Charlemagne is also very, very concerned to reach. And the key people here are the parish priests.
And Boniface complained about the fact that they're hopeless, they don't know anything. And Alcuin also actually says he worries that the priests, they don't really know what they're talking about.
And so again, he devises kind of little books, little format books that can be slipped into a pouch or something that give the basics of Christian doctrine, give the Lord's Prayer, give the Creed, give various key passages from scripture or whatever. And these are sent out into the parishes, out into the countryside.
And it's an unprecedented experiment in the West in mass education. And within a few decades, the bishops in Francia are able to assume that priests should have a basic modicum of knowledge.
And in fact, there's this wonderful account of a priest in about the kind of the 840s who gets imprisoned by his bishop for having forgotten everything that he had learned, which always kind of sticks in my mind. Wow.
I mean, if you got punished for forgetting everything you'd learned, that would be a real problem. And this, again, it's hard to emphasize how significant a moment this is in the history of Western Europe, because this is the moment when the process of Christianization really starts to happen.
It's not just for the elites anymore. It's reaching out into the countryside.
And the most basic rhythms of life, whether it's kind of annual or whether it's from cradle to grave, are starting to be marinated in Christianity. So if you're drawing up a charter, a legal agreement, if you're tending to a sick animal, if you're working out where you should dig a well, you should begin the harvest all of these questions are starting to be framed in christian terms by priests who have been given the kind of intellectual know-how and ammunition that enables them to do this because in every village every town every hamlet there is going to be some parish priest or something who sits standing there with this little book you know this is the for this occasion.
This is what Jesus would do, blah, blah, blah, blah, in a way that wasn't the case 100 or 200 years before this. Yeah.
And Charlemagne has prescribed that every priest should know the Lord's Prayer and should know the Creed and that they should in turn instruct everybody in his kingdom in the Creed and in the Lord's prayer. And so that is giving to people kind of fundamentals of familiarity with Christianity that they hadn't previously had.
And it has a kind of saturating effect. And the consequences of that are utterly profound for the future of European culture.
It means that people start to take for granted assumptions that are rooted in Christianity to the point where they don't even realize where these assumptions have come from. And I think it's in this sense that you can call Charlemagne the father of Europe.
So this is a phrase that is being applied to him within his own lifetime. I mean, in all kinds of ways, it's a ridiculous thing to call him because as we will see, his empire actually doesn't last very long.
But I think in this one sense, the Christianization of people out in the reaches of the countryside, he does deserve that title. But of course, Dominic, Father of Europe is not the only title that he will end up with.
No, he ends up with a much grander title. He does does so maybe we will explore the story of that grander title his imperial title in the final episode and because we're feeling festive tom we will explore that story the climax of this mighty series it will be out not on thursday as usual but it'll be on wednesday christmas day the 25th of december and there is actually a very good historical reason for that isn't there which we will explore next time because obviously you could listen to it straight away if you're a member of the Rest is History Club and you can always join that club at therestishistory.com but the best time to listen to that episode is definitely going to be Christmas Day it's one of of the most, I read in your notes, one of the most iconic moments in the whole of European history.

The scene is Rome.

The year is AD 800.

And the date is Christmas Day.

So please join us for that.

And on that bombshell, goodbye.

Bye-bye.