The Historians' History of the World 07 [The History of the Later Roman Empire]

Charles himself, however, was already on the march with a new army, and again resistance seemed to be paralysed upon his appearance in person. Witikind gave up Saxon liberty for lost and fled again to the Danes. As a stern avenger and judge, Charles now called the faithless people to account. He demanded the surrender of the guilty; 4,500 Saxons were delivered into his hands, and he had them all beheaded in one day at Verden, thinking that, in this desperate struggle, liberty, if cut down by one mighty blow, would bleed to death at once.

The Final Subjugation of the Saxons

With fearful earnestness Charles pursued his aim of completely subjugating the Saxons. He thought he had attained it with the bath of blood at Verden. But humbled as the Saxons were by the terrible deed it filled them still more with wrath and thirst for revenge against the Franks. At once the whole land was again under arms, and once more Witikind returned from the Danes. In 783 Charles again had to march with the entire force of his kingdom against the Saxons, who now for the first time opposed him in great open battles. They did so to their ruin; first at Detmold, and then on the Haase near Osnabrück Charles inflicted the most bloody defeats on them. The Saxon youths were slain, the resources of the land began to fail. Without meeting any further special opposition the king marched on, plundering and ravaging, as far as the Elbe. Nevertheless Witikind still maintained the field against him, until in the years 784 and 785 plundering expeditions of Charles exhausted the land’s last power of resistance. Then Witikind at the command of the king appeared in the palace at Attigny, made submission, and received baptism. Saxony was now conquered and Christianity and royalty were forced on the people together. Under penalty of death baptism was required and heathen customs were prohibited. Any injury to a Christian priest, any sedition against the king or disobedience of his commands was declared a capital crime.

[785-796 A.D.]

For several years the stillness of death reigned in the land of the Saxons, and Charles could begin to think of directing his arms against the Wends beyond the Elbe. In the year 789 he crossed the river easily and conquered all the country as far as the Peene, thus establishing the Frankish rule in the rear of the Saxons. Now and then, indeed, scattered revolts still broke out among the latter people, but they were at once put down with an iron hand and never again became dangerous to Frankish supremacy. The continuance of Christianity was already assured and the country was divided up into bishoprics.

While Charles was extending the boundaries of his kingdom into Wendish territory on the northeast, great conquests had been made in the southeast as well. A series of campaigns against the Avars in the years 790 to 796 finally resulted in their complete subjugation, the extension of the Frankish authority far down the valley of the Danube, and the restoration of Christianity to lands where it had long since died out.

By the might of his arms Charles had doubled the extent of his inherited kingdom, by his indomitable energy he had crushed all opposition within it and given its political and ecclesiastical institutions such a unity as the West had not known since the time of the Romans. From the Pyrenees and the Frisian coast to the eastern plains in the valleys of the Danube, the Elbe, and the Oder, from the Eider to the highest peaks of the Apennines stretched the rule of the Franks, grasped in the hands of a single man to whom not only all temporal authorities in this wide realm were subject, but whom the entire clergy must also unequivocally acknowledge as their head. To all previous centuries it had seemed impossible to bring all the tribes of the interior of Germany under one rule, to bend the stubborn love of liberty of all Germans to the authority of a king. Charles had succeeded, and he had at the same time reunited under his sceptre the most important lands of the Western Roman Empire which had been separated since the latter’s fall. The first cities of the ancient empire were in his possession, Rome itself recognised his authority. The struggle, the opposition between Roman and German had, for centuries, been a source of disturbance to the West; this struggle seemed ended, this opposition amicably settled, since German and Roman were now embraced in one empire, received in one church.

The Imperial Coronation 800 A.D.

Thus the Frankish kingdom had been raised by Charles to a position of world power of universal importance. Moreover this truly imperial power had arisen in the West at a time when the Eastern Empire had fallen into the greatest discredit. For it was just at this time that the ambitious Irene, who had conducted the government for some time as regent for her son and had then been deposed, had again usurped power in the most infamous manner.