Boniface had not been so naïve as to think that his mission was thereby done. The task of winning people for Christ could not be achieved merely by cutting down a tree. Converts, even after baptism, continued to practise any number of pestiferous customs: offering sacrifice to springs, inspecting entrails, claiming to read the future. Such back-sliding was not the worst. Travelling through the lands east of the Rhine that lay under the rule of the Franks – Hesse, and Thuringia, and Swabia – Boniface had been horrified by what he found. Churches that in many cases reached back centuries seemed rotten with pagan practices. Merchants who sold slaves to the Saxons for sacrifice; noblemen who hid their worship of idols ‘under the cloak of Christianity’;6 priests who made sacrifice of goats and bulls; bishops who fornicated, and inherited their sees from their fathers, and indulged in spectacular blood-feuds: these were not the kinds of Christian that Boniface was content to leave to their own devices. Rather than venture further into the forests of Saxony, as he had long dreamed of doing, he had embarked instead on a great labour of reform. Flinty, prickly and exacting, he had not stinted in his efforts to set the churches of eastern Francia on what he saw as a proper footing. The loathing of the local bishops for his finger-wagging he had met with a matching contempt. Not merely a man of unyielding principle, he had displayed a rare talent for securing powerful patrons. As well as the pope, he had won the backing of Charles Martel. The Frankish warlord, no less keen to break the eastern marches to his own purposes than the Anglo-Saxon bishop, had found in Boniface a man after his own heart. Tortured though Boniface was by the need to curry favour at court, and by his frustrated yearning to save the souls of pagans, he had succeeded, by the end of his life, in shaping the churches east of the Rhine to something like his own image. Returning, in the last year of his life, to the mission that had always been closest to his heart, he had done so as the dominant figure in the Frankish church.
To convert was to educate. This, the great lesson taught by Boniface, was one that the Franks would not forget. Touched as it was by the aura of sanctity that clung to him as a martyr, it would bequeath to kings as well as to priests a stern and implacable sense of their duty to God. Yet even as Boniface was being cut down amid the reeds and mud of Frisia, the lead given by missionaries in the spread of Christianity eastwards was passing. A new and altogether more militant approach to paganism was being prepared. The willingness of Boniface to meet death rather than permit his attendants to draw their swords was not one that the Frankish authorities tended to share. Three days after his murder, a squad of Christian warriors tracked down the killers, cornered them and wiped them out. Their women and children were taken as slaves. Their plunder was plundered. The news, spreading through the pagan redoubts of Frisia, achieved what Boniface himself had failed to do. ‘Struck with terror at the visitation of God’s vengeance, the pagans embraced after the martyr’s death the teaching which they had rejected while he still lived.’7
It was a model of conversion that the Carolingian monarchy, for one, would not forget.
Sword and Pen
In the summer of 772, fifty years after Boniface’s felling of Thunor’s oak, another tree – the greatest of all the Saxons’ totems – was brought crashing down. Fearsome, phallic, and famed across Saxony, the Irminsul was believed by devotees of the ancient gods to uphold the heavens. But it did not. The skies remained in their place, even once the sanctuary had been demolished. Yet to the Saxons themselves, it might well have seemed as though the pillars of the world were crumbling. Devastation on a scale never before visited on their lands was drawing near. The desecrator of the Irminsul was no missionary, but a king at the head of the most menacing war-machine in Europe. Charles, the younger son of Pepin, had ascended to the sole rule of the Franks only the previous December. Not since the vanished age of the Caesars had anyone in the West commanded such resources. Prodigious both in his energies and in his ambitions, he exerted a sway that was Roman in its scope. In 800, the pope set an official seal on the comparison in Rome itself: for there, on Christmas Day, he crowned the Frankish warlord, and hailed him as ‘Augustus’. Then, having done so, he fell before Charles’ feet. Such obeisance had for centuries been the due of only one man: the emperor in Constantinople. Now, though, the West had its own emperor once again. Charles, despite his reluctance to admit that he might owe anything to an Italian bishop, and his insistence that, had he only known what the pope was planning, he would never have permitted it, did not reject the title. King of the Franks and ‘Christian Emperor’,8 he would be remembered by later generations as Charles the Great: Charlemagne.
Many were his conquests. During the four decades and more of his rule, he succeeded in annexing northern Italy, capturing Barcelona from the Arabs, and pushing deep into the Carpathian Basin. Yet of all Charlemagne’s many wars, the bloodiest and most exhausting was the one he launched against the Saxons. For years it raged. Charlemagne, despite his overwhelming military strength, found it impossible to bring his adversaries to submit. Treaties were no sooner agreed than they were broken. The whole of Saxony seemed a bog. Charlemagne, faced with the choice of retreating or draining it for good, opted for the unyielding, the protracted, the merciless course. Every autumn, his men would burn the harvests and leave the local peasants to starve. Settlement after settlement was wiped out. Entire populations were deported. These were atrocities on a Roman scale – but Augustus, whose own efforts to pacify the lands east of the Rhine had ended in bloody failure, was not the only model to hand. Charlemagne’s lordship had been sanctified as that of the kings of Israel had been: by the pouring of holy oil upon his head. He ruled as the new David; as the anointed one of God. The record of Israelite warfare was a formidable one. Centuries before, translating the scriptures into Gothic, Ulfilas had deliberately censored it, on the principle that barbarian peoples needed no encouragement to fight; but the Franks, as the new Israel, had long ceased to rank as barbarians. In 782, when Charlemagne ordered the beheading of 4500 prisoners on a single day, it was the example of David, who had similarly made a great reaping of captives, that lay before him. ‘Every two lengths of them were put to death, and the third length was allowed to live.’9
There was more to the bloody rhythms of Frankish campaigning, however, than the goal merely of securing for the new Israel a troubled flank. Charlemagne aimed as well at something altogether more noveclass="underline" the winning of the Saxons for Christ. This ambition was one that he had only arrived at gradually. Like any king in the post-Roman world, he had been raised to view pagans primarily as a nuisance. The point of attacking barbarians was to keep them in order, and plunder plenty of loot. Charlemagne, unlike Boniface, could not convert pagans on the cheap. Toppling the Irminsul, he had been as anxious to strip it of the gold and silver that adorned it as to humble the pride of Thunor. The longer it took him to subdue the Saxons, however, and the more blood and treasure it cost him, so the more he came to realise that his adversaries would have to be born again. Rare was the uprising that did not begin with a burning of churches, a massacre of priests. The taint of the demonic lay heavy on the Saxons. Only by washing away all that they had been, and erasing entirely their former existence, could they be brought to a proper submission. In 776, Charlemagne imposed a treaty on the Saxons that obliged them to accept baptism. Countless men, women and children were led into a river, there to become Christian. Nine years later, after the crushing of yet another rebellion, Charlemagne pronounced that ‘scorning to come to baptism’10 would henceforward merit death. So too, he declared, would offering sacrifice to demons, or cremating a corpse, or eating meat during the forty days before Easter. Ruthlessly, determinedly, the very fabric of Saxon life was being torn apart. There would be no stitching it back together. Instead, dyed in gore, its ragged tatters were to lie for ever in the mud. As a programme for bringing an entire pagan people to Christ, it was savage as none had ever been before. A bloody and imperious precedent had been set.