📜 772–804 | Charlemagne in Saxony What you’re seeing:
Charlemagne’s thirty-year war to conquer and convert the pagan Saxons of what is now northern Germany, the longest and hardest war of his reign. Who are these people?
The Franks and Saxons were both West Germanic peoples, but by the 700s they lived in different worlds. The Franks ruled a Romanized Christian kingdom with kings, bishops, written law, and imperial ambitions. The Saxons were a loose confederation of northern Germanic communities with no single king, still tied to pagan gods, sacred groves, local nobles, and warrior traditions. Why did this happen?
The war began in 772 when the Franks destroyed the Irminsul, the Saxon sacred pillar. The Saxons surrendered, gave hostages, accepted baptism, then rose again year after year. In the early 780s, resistance centered around Widukind, the best-known Saxon leader, though he was not king of all the Saxons. He submitted and was baptized in 785, a major symbolic victory for Charl...