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Carolingian dynasty Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s criminal history, 176

– For the context of these translations click here

Louis the Pious and the death
of the king of Brittany.

Foreign policy

Louis the Pious waged war almost year after year, as befitted a Christian and believing ruler, mainly because of dynastic conflicts and internal political problems. But again and again, he also crossed the frontiers or had them crossed: as a universal ruler, he hardly ever took part in the campaigns himself but had others fight for him. This had long been the method of all rulers in the biggest massacres of the time. Pacts were scarcely of any interest any more.

In 815 a Saxon-Obotrite army attacked the Danes; but, after a series of devastations everywhere, it returned with forty hostages without having achieved anything. In 816 Louis sent his troops against the Sorbs. This time they ‘efficiently carried out’ (strenue compleverunt, Imperial Annals) the emperor’s orders and attacked them, as the sources say, ‘as swiftly as easily with the help of Christ’, and ‘with the help of God they gained the victory.’ The emperor, however, ‘gave himself up to hunting in the Vosges forest.’ At the other end of the empire, on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees, the Basques revolted and were ‘completely subdued’ (Annales regni Francorum).

Louis repeatedly waged devastating campaigns against the Breton Levantines, whose princes claimed the title of king at various times. On several occasions, he attacked the ‘mendacious, proud and rebellious people’, whom even his father hadn’t managed to subdue completely and whom the Merovingians, before Charles and Pippin, had repeatedly tried to subdue. In the summer of 818, he marched in person—almost his only military campaign as emperor—with an army of Franks, Burgundians, Alamans, Saxons and Thuringians against the ‘Breton rebels, who in their audacity dared to name one of their own, named Morman, king, refusing all obedience’ (Anonymous).

The pious sovereign, of whom his contemporary Bishop Thegan carefully exalts that ‘he progressed from day to day in sacred virtues, the enumeration of which would lead too far’, crushed the Bretons with his arrogance. He reduced to ashes all the buildings except the churches, and amid all the fires and murders he had the monasticism of the country widely reported by the Abbot of Landévennec. To kill and to pray, to pray and to kill; so everything went well and everything was permitted, at least in the war, as long as it was in favour of the ‘orthodox’ side.

A great multitude was taken prisoner, plentiful cattle were taken from them, and the Bretons submitted ‘to the conditions imposed by the emperor, whatever they were… And such hostages were selected and taken as he ordered, and the whole territory was organised at his will’, writes Astronomus.

In 819 Louis sent an army across the Elbe against the Obotrites. Their deserting prince Sclaomir (809-819) was captured and taken to Aachen, his territory occupied and he was exiled. Shortly afterwards they defeated him again, but while still in Saxony he succumbed to an illness and in the meantime received the sacrament of baptism. The Slavic people on the banks of the Elbe were still totally pagan, and the supremacy of Louis was still exposed to serious uprisings in the years 838 and 839.

On the other side of his borders, the counts of the Spanish March penetrated across the Segre ‘as far as the interior of Spain’ and ‘from there happily returned with a great booty’, having ‘ravaged and burned everything’, as Astronomus writes. The imperial analyst also notes the devastation of fields, the burning of villages and ‘no small booty’, adding: ‘In the same way, after the autumn equinox the counts of the Breton Mark raided the possessions of a rebellious Breton named Wihomarc and devastated everything with blood and fire.’

In 824 the monarch marched again with three army groups—he personally commanded one—against the Bretons and their prince Wihomarc, Morman’s successor.

In forty days, according to Frankish sources, Louis the Pious ravaged ‘the whole country with blood and fire’, ‘punished it with a great devastation’ (magna plague). He was ‘the most pious of emperors’, as the chorepiscopus Thegan praises him, ‘for even before he respected his enemies, fulfilling the word of the evangelist who says ‘Forgive and you will be forgiven.’ Louis destroyed fields and forests, annihilated a good part of the flocks, killed many Bretons, took many prisoners and returned with hostages ‘of the disloyal people.’ King Wihomarc was soon afterwards surrounded in his own house by the people of Count Lambert of Nantes, who beat him to death.

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Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s criminal history, 175

– For the context of these translations click here

 

Louis the Pious had his enemies’ eyes gouged out and made a public confession of his sins

The first rebellion against Louis’ new order, which was to ensure the unity of the Empire and the Church, of the throne and the altar, came from Bernard of Italy. The only son of King Pippin, the predator of the Avars’ treasure, educated after his father’s death (810) in the monastery of Fulda, officially adopted the title of ‘king of the Longboards’ after the imperial assembly of Aachen (September 813).

When, under the Ordinatio Imperii, he had to submit to Lothair I, son of Louis, as he had previously submitted to his grandfather Charlemagne and Emperor Louis, he rebelled with numerous magnates of his kingdom. The sources are unanimous in stating that this initiative did not come from the young sovereign, who was then in his early twenties, but from his advisors.

A few months after the publication of the Ordinatio Imperii of 817, Bernard, together with ‘some wicked men’ (Annales regni Francorum)—including the court poet Bishop Theodulf of Orleans, Bishops Anselm of Milan and Wolfold of Cremona, as well as some abbots, according to an ancient source—mounted an uprising which was widespread but poorly organised. The aim was to dethrone Louis and put Bernard in his place. But everything suggests that it was not so much a question of dethroning as of ensuring the continued existence of Bernard’s small kingdom.

The emperor mobilised large contingents of troops, and demanded that the abbots and abbesses ‘do military service’ because ‘by Satan’s cunning King Bernard had prepared for sedition.’ He set off southwards at full speed and passed over the Alps into Italy. But even before the uprising had properly begun, and without even having crossed swords, Bernard appeared with his loyalists at Chalon-sur-Saône, apparently of his own free will. He laid down his arms and threw himself at the emperor’s feet. Bernard’s great ones acted similarly, who ‘as soon as the first interrogation began, they openly and motu proprio declared the whole course of the affair’.

In vain. Louis had them arrested, sent them to Aachen and there, in the spring of 818, during the imperial assembly, in a delicate manner—as the imperial analyst repeats—and only after ‘the fasting time of Lent had passed’ he had them sentenced to death, at least all those considered civilians, and then ‘pardoned’ the death penalty by the cruel punishment of plucking out their eyes. ‘They were simply deprived of their sight’ which was ‘legally irreproachable’ (Boshof).

King Bernard, whom Louis had earlier called his son, and who in turn had just fathered a child named after his grandfather Pippin, was severely punished. He died with his eye sockets emptied ‘notwithstanding the emperor’s clement manner,’ two days later, on 17 April 818. His treasurer and advisor Reginhard, as well as Reginhar, the grandson of a Thuringian rebel against Charlemagne, also defended themselves and succumbed to the terrible procedure, for ‘not having endured with sufficient patience to have their eyes gouged out’ (Anonymi vita Hludovici).

Louis penitent in Attigny

In August 822 Louis made a public confession of his faults at the imperial diet of Attigny. He regretted his crime against his young nephew Bernard, who died miserably; he regretted the hardness of his heart against his little half-brothers, on whom he imposed the clerical tonsure, and against Adalhard and Wala, his father’s cousins. This was a singular procedure in the history of the Franks, a humiliation of the emperor by the clergy, behind which were perhaps in a very special way Charlemagne’s cousins who had been deeply humiliated in the past.

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Carolingian dynasty Catholic religious orders Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s criminal history, 174

– For the context of these translations click here

 

The emperor, the clergy and the imperial unity

Louis the Pious was even more accommodating to the clergy than his father, and the many historians who call him devout, clerical and prudish are quite right. Already at the beginning of his reign, the young monarch renewed all the ordinances that had been issued in the time of his predecessors in favour of the Church of God. For this, he relied almost exclusively on clerics, mostly ‘Aquitanians’, of whom Bishop Thegan, a personage well acquainted with the emperor, said that ‘he trusted his counsellors more than necessary’.

The one who probably became the emperor’s most important adviser was the Visigoth Witiza, whom he greatly revered, with his programmatic monastic name of Second Benedict, and who was the son of the Count of Maguelonne, one of the dreaded swordsmen. In any case, this Benedict educated in the courts of Pippin III and Charles I (his feast is celebrated on 11 February), took part as a good Christian—a ‘good Christian’ certainly, as well as a ‘great soldier’—in the military campaigns of Pippin and Charles, before the tragic death of his brother pushed him to wear the monastic cowl. But he failed again and again in his ascetic career. He left the monastery of Saint-Seine in Dijon because he found it too lax. Then, at his father’s estate of Aniane in Montpellier, he drove away his first disciples with his rigorism. He then professed the monastic rules of Pachomius and Basil, because he found the Rule of Benedict of Nursia useful only ‘for weaklings and beginners’. But when he again entered into a vocational crisis, he extolled the Rule of Benedict of Nursia, which he reviled as the only valid norm for a monastic existence.

But one can hardly speak of weakness in the Benedictine Rule. When monks were rebuked by a prelate, they had to prostrate themselves at his feet until he permitted them to rise. And if a monk ran away, Benedict ordered him to be dragged back with his legs locked and whipped. The saint also ordered to have a prison in every monastery, and the monastic prisons of the Middle Ages were barbarous, and the conditions of existence in them were extremely harsh, for imprisonment ‘was equivalent in its consequences to corporal punishment’. (Schild). Moreover, this monastic reform ‘always contained a touch of bitterness against human science and culture’ (Fried).

Abbot Benedict of Aniane—to whom Louis first entrusted the Marmoutier Abbey in Alsace and then, very close to Aachen, the monastery of Inden (Kornelimünster), a new foundation generously endowed with crown goods, a kind of model abbey in the whole empire—spent much more time at court than at his monastery. The sovereign went there frequently anyway, and so he was given the name of ‘the Monk’. Benedict, who ruled over all the Frankish abbeys, remained until his death (821) the key man at court, where he dealt with trifles, memorials and complaints as well as important and serious matters, advising the emperor above all on the vast politico-ecclesiastical reform begun in 816.

The reform movement of the abbot, inspired by the Rule of Benedict of Nursia, aimed at the formation of a single Christian people out of the numerous peoples of the empire—which corresponded exactly to state policy. It sought to make Christianity the basis of all public life; moreover, it wanted to establish the Civitas Dei on earth: one God, one Church, one emperor, whose office always counted within the Church more than any ministry conferred by God. The prelates were therefore strongly interested in the unity of the empire, and their leaders passionately defended the idea of such unity. But they were in no way primarily interested in the empire, but in the Church, with the benefit of the Church foremost in their minds.

Benedict’s monastic reform, his ‘principle of one rule,’ affected not only monastic life, the so-called spiritual affairs. At least as important, if not more so, was the ecclesiastical patrimony. The emperor did not want it to be divided or diminished either in his reign or in that of his successors. He also forbade the already long flourishing soul-hunting, the luring of children into the monastery with flattery to gain their fortune, thus prohibiting a practice which had been in vogue since ancient times and which is still practised today, namely the disinheritance of relatives in favour of the churches.

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Carolingian dynasty Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s criminal history, 173

– For the context of these translations click here

Charlemagne crowns Louis the Pious.
 

Louis I the Pious (814-840)

‘Ludwig’s empire was in fact to be an empire of peace… This, however, did not exclude wars against the pagans, but demanded them precisely, since they were regarded as allies of Satan.’ —Heinrich Fichtenau

Charlemagne, the saint, was not only active on the battlefields. As far as we know, he also had nineteen children, eight sons and eleven daughters, and of course with nine different wives (still an almost modest figure compared to the 61 children of Bishop Henry of Lüttich, that tireless worker in the vineyard of the Lord, or Pope Gregory X of the 13th century, who had ‘14 children in 22 months’).

But despite the Carolingian blessing of the sons, there was no problem in the matter of succession. In case of death, Charlemagne divided the empire among his three sons through the so-called Divisio regnorum. In addition, each was to assume the Defensio Sancti Petri, the protection of the Roman Church.

But quite unexpectedly the father saw the two eldest sons go to their graves: in 810 Pippin and the following year Charles, to whom the imperial crown had long been assigned as the main heir. All this affected the ruler to such an extent that he even considered becoming a monk. Of his ‘legitimate’ sons, only the youngest remained, and, as he was well aware, the one least suited to the throne: Louis, born in 778 in Chasseneuil near Poitiers. He would be enthroned emperor at the age of thirty-six, only to be deposed and enthroned again, losing the throne once more and regaining it later.

In any case, Louis the Pious had what it takes: even as a child ‘he had learned to fear and love God always’, as one of his contemporary biographers reports around 837. Charles exhorted his son and successor to love and fear the Almighty especially, to keep his commandments in all things, to rule his churches, to honour priests as fathers and to love the people as his children. He was to force proud and wicked men to enter the way of salvation, help the monasteries and procure God-fearing servants.

From that coronation onwards Charles, who was already quite decrepit and limping on one foot, did nothing—if we are to believe Bishop Thegan—but pray, give alms and ‘improve’ or ‘correct magnificently’ (optime correxerat), as Thegan himself says, the four gospels, the infallible word of God, before he died on 28 January 814. He left his son a gigantic empire, almost entirely the fruit of the plundering that he and his illustrious predecessors and ancestors had carried out, and consisting of four strong units: France, the centre of the state with the royal courts and the great abbeys; Germania, Aquitaine and Italy.
 

Killing and praying

Two fields that had long defined every Christian ruler, and would continue to define them decisively for many centuries, also marked the life of the young Ludwig: war and the Church. All Christian nobles had to learn the profession of war from an early age. As a rule, they had to be trained in equestrian combat even before puberty, and at the age of fourteen or fifteen, and sometimes even earlier they had to be able to handle weapons. And naturally, ‘the nobles were burning with the desire to go into battle’ (Riché).

Louis, too, who had a vigorous body and strong arms, and who in the art of riding, drawing the bow and throwing the spear ‘had no equal’, but who, according to the results of research, was a peaceful man, accompanied his father in his desire to annihilate the Avars at least as far as the Viennese forest. Shortly afterwards, in 793, again on his father’s orders, he supported his brother Pippin in a punitive campaign in southern Italy.

And yet Ludwig was a particularly good Christian, even better than his saintly father. On Charles’s orders, the pious and peaceful son also broke into Spain. He subdued and destroyed Lerida. ‘From there,’ writes the Astronomus, ‘and after having devastated and burned the other cities, he advanced as far as Huesca. The territory of the city, abundant in fields of fruit trees, was razed, devastated and burnt by the troops and everything that was found outside the city was annihilated by the devastating action of the fire.’

As was almost always the case at the time, only winter prevented the young Louis from pursuing the actions typical of Christian culture. For the rest, the Catholic hero not only set fire to cities, but sometimes also burned men, but only ‘according to the law of retaliation’ (Anonymi vita Hludovici). All very biblical: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. And, according to the same source, as soon as ‘this was done, the king and his advisors felt it necessary to begin the attack on Barcelona’. And after the besieged, starving for weeks had devoured the old hides that served as curtains at the forty-one gates and others, driven by the desperation and misery of war, had thrown themselves headlong from the walls, the evil enemy surrendered. And Louis celebrated ‘with a feast of thanksgiving worthy of God’, marched with the priests, ‘who preceded him and the army, in a solemn procession and amid songs of praise, entered the city gate and made his way to the church of the holy and victorious Cross.’

Genuine Christianity.

In this connection we read of Ludwig in an old Catholic standard work that ‘he was always in good spirits’, that his spirit was ‘noble’ and his heart was ‘adorned with all good habits’ (Wetzer/Welte). A bloody sword and a heart of gold is something that fits perfectly into this religion. Was it not even a distant and modest reflection of the good God and his handling of hellfire? This is how the doctor of the Church and Pope Gregory I ‘the Great’ expresses himself with his knife-sharp theology: ‘The omnipotent God, as a kindly God, takes no pleasure in the torment of the wretched; but as a just God he defines himself as uncompassionate by punishing the wicked for all eternity’.

A comfortable religion: something that works for all cases.

It was precisely with this God, kind but ‘not compassionate for all eternity’ towards the wicked—and all enemies are wicked—that all kinds of robberies and murders took place, as was already the case in the time of the Merovingians and the Pippinids, and was constantly repeated in the Christian West. And again we read:

But trusting in God’s help, our people, though greatly outnumbered, forced the enemies to flee and filled the path of the fugitives with many dead, and their hands did not cease in slaughter (et eo usque manus ab eorum caede non continuerunt) until the sun disappeared and with it the light of day and the shadows covered the earth and the bright stars appeared to illuminate the night. With the assistance of Christ, they departed from there with great joy and bringing many treasures to their own.

With Louis I (Ludwig or Ludovico Pio i.e., the Pious) ‘the Christian doctrine reached the lowest strata’ and is becoming more and more firmly established. In order that the blood of all those barbarously murdered should not splash too much, that this chronicle of cruelty should not overflow to the brim, the spiritual and divine are always emphasised with greater emphasis, only to be smeared with blood in a dignified manner later on. That is why in the same context the chorepiscopus Thegan says: ‘He never raised his voice to laughter’. And likewise: ‘When he went to church every morning to pray, he always bent his knees and touched the ground with his forehead, praying humbly for a long time and sometimes with tears.’

Louis the Pious was influenced by the clergy from his childhood. For this reason he was so early subject to the Church that, had his father not prevented him, he would have become a monk. And, as the Astronomus also celebrates after his death, ‘he was so solicitous for the divine service and the exaltation of the holy Church, that judging by his works he might be called a priest rather than a king’. Pious, super-clerical and even rather hostile to the culture imposed by his father, Ludwig not only replaced the sensual courtiers in Aachen with clerics but also expelled all prostitutes and locked his sister in a monastery.

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I’ve changed my mind

I had said that the revised edition of the first volume of our abridged translation of Karlheinz Deschner’s criminal history of Christianity would cover the origins of Judeo-Christianity up to Charlemagne.

Now that I have just finished proofreading up to the time of Emperor Justinian of Constantinople, I realised that it is better to finish the first volume up to that monarch and leave the rest of the High Middle Ages (roughly from the 6th to the 10th century) for the second volume.

As I am thinking in editorial terms for my Daybreak Press, I think the cover of the first volume should have the face of Constantine; and the second volume, the face of Charlemagne.

So the revised edition of the first volume will soon be ready and its PDF will be available on this site, and we will continue working on what we still have to translate for volume II.

To give the visitor an idea of what we have translated so far for this site, here is the table of contents:
 

CONTENTS

Editor’s foreword

Introduction

Forgeries in the Old Testament

The bibles
The five books that Moses did not write
David and Solomon
Joshua and Isaiah
Ezekiel and Daniel
The Jewish apocalyptic
Portrayals of the biblical female world
Opposition to the Old Testament
Forgeries in diaspora Judaism

Forgeries in the New Testament

The scriptures are piled up
God as the author?
Christians forged more consciously than Jews
Neither the Gospel of Matthew, nor the Gospel of John,
nor John’s Book of Revelation come from the apostles to
whom the Church attributes them
Forged epistles of ‘Paul’
The second epistle to the Thessalonians
Colossians, Ephesians and Hebrews
Forged epistles of Peter
Forged John and James
Interpolations in the New Testament

The invention of Popes

There is no evidence of Peter’s stay in Rome
The story of the discovery of Peter’s tomb
The list of fabricated Roman bishops

 
Christianity’s Criminal History:

Background in the Old Testament

Moses and the Book of Judges
The ravages of David and the modern translators
The sacred warmongering of the Maccabees
The Jewish War (66-70)
Bar Kokhba and the ‘last war of God’ (131-136)
The Jewish religion, tolerated by the Roman state

Early Christianity

Interpretatio Christiana
‘Orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’
First ‘heretics’ in the New Testament
Thirteen good Christians
Saint Jerome and Origen

The persecution of the Christians

Anti-Hellene hatred in the New Testament
The defamation of the Greco-Roman religion
Celsus and Porphyry
The persecution of the Christians
Most of the written statements about the martyrs are false,
but all of them were considered as valid documents
The Roman emperors viewed retrospectively

Saint Constantine: The First Christian Emperor

War against Maxentius
War against Maximinus
War against Licinius
The Catholic clergy increasingly favoured
Constantine as saviour and vicar of God
No longer a pacifist Church
Savage criminal practices
Constantine against Jews and ‘heretics’
Constantine against the Greco-Roman culture

Constantine’s successors

The first Christian dynasty founded
on family extermination
First wars among devout Christians
Constantius and his Christian-style government
A father of the Church who preaches killing
First assaults on the temples

Julian

Hecatombs under the pious Gallus
Emperor Julian
Christian tall stories

After Julian

Rivers of blood under the Catholic Valentinian
Trembling and gnashing of teeth under the Arian Valens

Athanasius, Doctor of the Church

The complicated nature of God
It was not fought for faith but for power
The Council of Nicaea
Character and tactics of a Father of the Church
The death of Arius
The battlefield of Alexandria
Antioch and Constantinople
Shelter with a twenty-year-old beauty

Ambrose, doctor of the Church

Ambrose drives the annihilation of the Goths
Emperor Theodosius ‘the Great’
Against the Hellenist religion

The Father of the Church Augustine

‘Genius in all fields of Christian doctrine’
Augustine’s campaign against the Donatists
The overthrow of Pelagius
Augustine attacks classical culture
Augustine sanctions the holy war
Christianity sanctions the mistreatment of animals

The Christian Book Burning and the
Annihilation of Classical Culture

The annihilation of the Greco-Roman world
The oldest Christianity is hostile to education
The Christian ideal: the inversion of values
The hostility to culture of the first Greco-Christian writers
The hostility to classics in early Latin-Christian writers
The theatre, ‘The temple of the devil’
Natural Science
Everything a person needs to know is contained in the Bible
The Western world darkens more and more

The Catholic ‘children emperors’

The division of the Empire: Two Catholic states emerge
The massacre of Goths in Constantinople
Alaric enters Rome

Justinian (527-565): A theologian on the imperial
throne

Justin: From pigman to Catholic emperor (518-527)
Emperor Justinian, dominator of the Church
The Vandal state
The great beneficiary of all that hell: The Roman Church

 
The Middle Ages

A panoramic view

From convinced subjects to convinced lords

The Christianisation of the Germans

The spread of Christianity in the West
Conversion methods
Jesus becomes the Germanic broadsword
The weed of the past
‘Demonstrative destruction’

Clovis, founder of the Great Frankish Empire

The Rise of the Merovingians
A great bloodbath and the German Church
A moralistic assessment of history?

The sons of Clovis

The division of the kingdom
A saint and murderer
Theudebert I and kings killer

The Invasion of the Lombards

The last Merovingians
The Conversion of the Visigoths to Catholicism

Pope Gregory I (590-604)

The flight from the world
The man of double standards
Thinking differently: a crime worthy of death
Use and abuse of slaves as livestock
The beginning of papal propaganda in England
Pope Gregory’s books

The Christianisation of the idea of king

The Christianisation of the idea of kingship
Mission and slaughter

The Church in the Merovingian Period

A kind of holy cancerous ulcer
Ignorant, criminal and a good Catholic
St Gregory of Tours
The throne and the altar

The Ascension of the Carolingians

Armed mission among the Frisians
The irruption of Islam

St Boniface, ‘Apostle of the Germans’ and of Rome

Deliverance from ‘all uncleanness’
The dispute over images begins
The papal revolution fails

Charles I, known as The Great or Charlemagne

Papal negotiations
The most momentous event of the Middle Ages
Criminal excesses at the papal court
The beginning of the pro-pope warfare
The bloody mission of the Saxons (772-804)
Plunder and Christianisation
The Christian banners enter Saxony
A mission along military shock lines
The butcher of the Saxons
Last uprisings, war of annihilation
Charlemagne’s bloody laws
Karolus serenissimus augustus

 

Appendix: Constantine controversy

‘Response given’ by Hermann Gieselbusch
Deschner responds to Maria R.-Alföldi

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Regarding the way I rearranged Deschner’s books, as can be seen in the index above, he published his Vol. 3, Die Alte Kirche (full title: The Ancient Church: forgery, brain-washing, exploitation, annihilation) in 1990, from which I took the passages of the first couple of chapters of our abridged Vol I. Twenty years later, biblical scholar Bart D. Ehrman published Forged: Writing in the Name of God: Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are, pictured left.

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Kriminalgeschichte 2022!

 
EDITOR’S FOREWORD
[pages 5-8 of the forthcoming Edition]

In his after-dinner conversations Hitler said: ‘Christianity is the greatest regression humanity has ever experienced: The Jew has thrown back humanity one and a half thousand years’. And the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, who once described himself as a Hitlerist, wrote: ‘The whole world has forgiven Christianity.’

Well, not the whole world. As I confess in my philosophical autobiography De Jesús a Hitler, Christianity played a central role in the destruction of my teenage life and my twenties, something I will never forgive…
 

Some clarifications

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was a Christian, wisely allowed Edward Ericson to abbreviate The Gulag Archipelago so that the heavy volumes of the original work could reach a wider audience in a single, readable tome. The present book, Christianity’s Criminal History: Volume I is an abridged translation of the first volumes of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums. The original German volumes, and also the Spanish translation I have used, contain thousands of endnotes, which are omitted here. This preliminary translation is only the first step towards a more formal German-English translation of Deschner’s maximum opus.

In this abridged translation I have added a few headings, as well as several illustrations with footnotes explaining them, and brackets translating German or Latin terms. Unlike Ericson’s abridgement of the Archipelago, sometimes I have omitted ellipses between unquoted paragraphs, and I have simplified some sentences. I have also replaced some words. I refer to the phrases where the author uses the word ‘pagan’. I replaced it with terms such as ‘Hellenes,’ ‘defenders of Greco-Roman culture,’ ‘classical culture’ or simply added inverted commas on the word ‘pagan.’

The term I have chosen, Hellenes, requires some clarification. It could not be more significant that before the introduction of the pejorative term pagan to refer to unconverted citizens of the Roman Empire, whites were called héllenes or éthne by 4th-century treatises (the expression hellénon éthne can be translated into modern English as ‘the Greek races,’ i.e. the white peoples). As I am aware of the rhetorical use of language, instead of the author’s pejorative term ‘pagan’ I have sometimes chosen the non-pejorative term common in the 4th century vernacular, ‘Hellenes.’

White nationalists claim to be quite informed on the Jewish question. But very few are aware that Jewish subversion began with Christianity, as Hitler said in the opening lines of this preface. Who among today’s nationalists knows the true history of the religion of their parents? Who is aware that Christian fanatics used violence to destroy the ‘pagan’ (i.e., the Greco-Roman world)? Yes: Deschner wrote in German. But how many English-speaking racialists are familiar with Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, published in 2017?

Independently of the nationalists and the racial right, virtually all Westerners ignore the apocalyptic catastrophe of early Christianity after Constantine handed over the Roman Empire to his bishops. They know only the myths of the martyrs (see the chapter ‘The Persecution of the Christians’ in this book), the pious legends, hagiographies and the New Testament fictional tales we were told as children: topics covered in the first section of this abridged translation.

Karlheinz Deschner (1924-2014) was a liberal German. He spent the first sixty years of his life researching the history of the Catholic Church before beginning the ten volumes of his Kriminalgeschichte series in 1986, which he completed in 2013. The series is an encyclopaedic treatise on the true history of Christianity.

I started reading Deschner at the beginning of this century, when I was a liberal, and I would not wake up to the Jewish question until 2010. But Deschner, like all Germans of our time who aspire to see his books in bookshops, never woke up. In his Kriminalgeschichte he went so far as to harshly criticise the anti-Semites of the Early Church: passages omitted in this abridgement. This said, the difference between Deschner and liberal theologians like Hans Küng (The Church) and conservative historians like Paul Johnson (A History of Christianity) is that Küng and Johnson concealed a great deal of the criminal history of Christianity. It is remarkable how Deschner, a scholar who like me became an apostate, was able to see Church history in a way that Küng, Johnson and a veritable galaxy of other Christian scholars would never dream of. After waking up to the reality of the Christian problem I realised that Deschner’s massive work, despite his liberal bias, could be rescued. It just has to be processed through the prism of someone who is racially awake. Of course: if Germany had won the war, Deschner, shown here in National Socialist uniform as a young man, could have written his story from our point of view.
 

Three German holocausts

More than one holocaust with millions of victims each has been perpetrated against the Germanic peoples. After 1945, the Allies killed millions of defenceless Germans (see, for example, Thomas Goodrich’s Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany: 1944-1947). This is the best-kept secret of modern history. Conversely, the genocide committed in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War by fanatic Catholics is fairly well known (in the next volume of our abridgement we will incorporate those chapters). But who knows about the millions of other Germanic peoples killed by Emperor Justinian, recounted in this volume?

If the Aryan Man is currently committing ethnosuicide, it is because the System has lied to him about his own History.[1] The System’s favourite method is what we might call lying by omission: not saying, for example, a word about what happened to the Germans in 1945-1947, or how Christianity was imposed on the white race by Constantine and his successors. It was not enough for the Imperial Church to destroy the Greco-Roman world in the 4th and 5th centuries. In the 6th century, after the fall of Rome, Justinian, the Emperor of Constantinople went on to commit a gigantic genocide of the Germanic race, which by then had established itself on the Italian peninsula. Deschner’s chapter on this Holocaust appears in his second volume, Die Spätantike (Late Antiquity), published in 1989. The full title in translation is: ‘Late Antiquity. From the Catholic “child emperors” to the extermination of the Arian Vandals and Ostrogoths under Justinian I (527-565).’ These were the two Germanic peoples that were exterminated during the Byzantine Empire’s military incursion into Italy and Africa (no wonder there are few pure Germanic peoples in those regions today).

Finally, Deschner died in the same year that Richard Carrier published a book which will be considered the most important book since Hermann Samuel Reimarus’ critical approach to the Gospels. I refer to Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Deschner did not have the opportunity to evaluate the Christ myth theory in its phase of full exegetical maturity. For a new history of Christianity to be complete, Deschner’s criminal history must be complemented by Carrier’s ongoing work, and even our axiological critique of Christianity (see our booklist on page 3).

César Tort
November 2022

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[1] See ‘Foundation Myth’ on pages 90-93 of On Exterminationism.

Categories
Catholic Church Constantine Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 172

Constantine I (also Saint Constantine or Constantine the Great)
was a Roman emperor from 306 to 337 c.e.

 

Karlheinz Deschner responds to Prof. Maria R.-Alföldi’s review

Mrs Alföldi reviews and censures in just twelve pages (148-159), and under the title ,,Kaiser Konstantin: ein Grosser der Geschichte?”, the seventy-two pages of my chapter ‘Saint Constantine, the first Christian Emperor: Symbol of Seventeen Centuries of Ecclesiastical History’, which appears in the first volume of my Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums [pages 157-176 of our abridged translation — Ed.]

Almost at the outset, she finds it ‘difficult to give even a rough account of the content of Deschner’s explanations’ (page 149). Why’s that? No doubt because she dislikes the content itself, which is divided into ten subheadings and thus perfectly outlined, just as she dislikes the non-academic orientation, which she describes as ‘popular’ and even ‘populist’ (page 159), ‘marked by a strong tendentiousness’ (page 149), which I had already explicitly acknowledged in my General Introduction. And at the end of her report, she urges a cautious handling of historiography, which I can only agree with all my energy!

Maria R.-Alföldi’s essay appears in the book’s third part, which the editor entitles ‘Model of Concrete Criticism’. Model, pars pro toto. I now submit this rebuttal, closely following the text, to a detailed critique.

‘It is read’, writes the professor ‘that Constantine falsified his genealogy.’ And also: ‘The first years of the young emperor’s rule in the West are nothing but dreadful wars against the poor Germans, who were later taken prisoner and mercilessly slaughtered’.

It all appears as terribly exaggerated by me, as untrue, although again this isn’t said explicitly. Both ancient sources and modern research confirm that Constantine’s barbarism was already in his time something infrequent and appalling. However, the lady critic prefers discreet insinuations, and hurtful ironies, which present me as an obscurantist historian, without her openly expressing it with decent malice aforethought.

But while Mrs Alföldi reproaches me, as she often does, of misleading the reader, it’s she who does it. And while she states that I suggest that Constantine carried out the war, she suggests already with the following sentence, and again against truthfulness, ‘once again one reads extremely emotional descriptions of atrocities of all kinds’ (page 150). Such descriptions, as I wrote, come to me in their entirety from the Church Fathers Eusebius and Lactantius.

With ‘underhanded acrimony’ (page 150), that is what I am reproached for, I then comment on the universal sovereignty of him whom she labels ‘Byzantine’ rhetoric. Constantine ‘forces the Church to come under his sway; and the Church in turn, according to Deschner, willingly and opportunistically bends over backwards to get at money and power’. But that would only be ‘a certain, perfectly recognizable palace group.’

No, because the Church as a whole achieved through Constantine, and his immediate successors, eminent influence and prestige. This is indisputable. Throughout the empire, the bishops exalted the dictator. Their tokens of favour were showered even on the hierarchies of distant countries, and reached the Catholic clergy as a whole—who was now a recognised and privileged caste—in the form of money, honours, titles, basilicas and other buildings; in the form of exemption from burdens and taxes, release from oath-taking and the obligation to testify, permission to use the state post, the right to admit last dispositions and bequests; moreover, the sovereign—as many others would do in the future!—delegated part of the state power to the prelates, although he also decided on matters of faith.

Quite a few prelates already imitated the style and ceremony of the imperial residence in their episcopal sees. Again and again, it is said in the sources: ‘He made them respectable and enviable in the eyes of all’, ‘with his orders and laws he brought them even greater prestige,’ and ‘with imperial munificence, he opened up all the treasures…’ Soon, precisely the greatest fathers of the Church, such as Ambrose, Chrysostom, Jerome and Cyril of Alexandria, will praise Constantine, who not only called himself co-bishop, ‘bishop for external interests’ (epískopos tôn ektós) but who modestly didn’t hesitate to call himself ‘our divinity’ (nostrum numen)…

The always obscene association of the throne and altar, especially in countless massacres from the 4th century to the present day, is not a product of my ‘tendentiousness’ (page 149), but something quite appalling. But as with so many conformists by profession, in her prose there is hardly any blood flowing, not a single drop; whereas it reminds me, as it seems to me, with all horror: ‘the battles are awash with blood’ (page 149) as if I had spilt it!

On the contrary, she ignores, no doubt with the bulk of the historians’ guild, the lamentable practice of hanging the little rascals and extolling the great ones. Nothing specifically Christian, no doubt. Already the African bishop Cyprian, martyr and saint, decried this practice in paganism and lamented that when blood is shed in private, the act is called a heinous crime, but if it is shed publicly it is bravery. ‘The extent of the havoc is that which leaves the crime unpunished.’

She speaks only in an aside, summarily and with the coldness of the investigator, of the ‘tragic end’ of Constantine’s relatives. Conversely, my prose narrates that the great saint had his father-in-law Maximian hanged in Marseilles, then had his brothers-in-law Licinius and Basianbus strangled; had Licinius’ son murdered at Carthage, ordered his own son Crispus poisoned (while murdering many of his friends) and had his wife Fausta, mother of five children, drowned in the bath… In addition, Constantine sent other parricides to hell using the terrible and long-gone insaculation (poena cullei, the particularly slow drowning in a leather sack).

This in no way fits in with his apologetic concept of the despot who is still highly celebrated by theologians and historians; who, ‘under the influence of Christian conceptions’, as the Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte exalts him, shows ‘a growing respect for the dignity of the human person’, the ‘Christian respect for human life’ (Baus, Catholic). That saintly usurer would, for example, have the tongues of informers cut out before their execution, would have the domestic servants who had taken part in the abduction of a bride killed, would have the slaves burnt and the wet nurses killed by pouring molten lead into their mouths, would have every slave and domestic who had accused his master executed immediately, without investigation or the production of witnesses.

On all these things and many more, the expert on Constantine doesn’t say a word. Quite the contrary: she goes on to say that I always treat the Constantinian penal legislation negatively, that I even ‘brand the emperor as anti-Semitic’, and this ‘despite the known fact that at that time the Jews were still free to practise their faith’ (page 151).

As if the Jews’ free practice of their faith were in contradiction with the anti-Semitism of the emperor, a sovereign who mocks the Jews as spiritually blind, a ‘hateful nation’ to whom he attributes an ‘innate insanity’; to whom he allows the visit to Jerusalem only one day a year. He bluntly forbids them to have Christian slaves, thus beginning their alienation from agriculture, with such grave consequences. Moreover, this is the first anti-Jewish law on conversion to Judaism (autumn 315), threatening both the Jew who converts and the Christian convert with the stake.

The specialist on the emperor silences the fact that her hero, with increasing power and freedom of movement, also attacked the pagans with increasing rigour.

This is particularly evident in the last years of Constantine’s rule, although he had no interest in opposing the vast majority of the empire. Nevertheless, Constantine forbade the rebuilding of ruined temples and even ordered their closure. In all the provinces, moreover, the temples were stolen and ‘plundered without regard’ (Tinnefeld) for him, his favourites and the churches; in fact, it came to ‘the theft of works of art such as had never occurred before’ (Kornemann). And then Constantine also arranged for their destruction. ‘He destroyed to the ground those temples which the idolaters held in the greatest veneration’ (Kornemann). ‘At a sign whole temples were lying on the ground’, Bishop Eusebius recounts in triumphant tones.

Nor did the potentate delay in ordering the burning of Porphyry’s fifteen books Against the Christians, in which he ‘advanced the entire biblical criticism of the Modern Age’ (Poulsen), which, according to the theologian Harnack, ‘has not yet been refuted’.

On all this Maria R.-Alföldi is once again completely silent…
 

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Editor’s note: I won’t abbreviate the following 4,700 words of Deschner’s retort; the above translation is enough to provide an idea. My post tomorrow Sunday will be devoted to my aspirations on how to pass on Deschner’s legacy in the English-speaking community, especially among those non-Christians who still believe in the fourteen words.

Categories
Catholic Church Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 171

 

Response given

by Hermann Gieselbusch

– Reinbek, 23 August 1996 Sachbuchlektorat Rowohlt Verlag

 
(Left, Karlheinz Deschner with his editor Hermann Gieselbusch.) After some thirty years of preparation, the first volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s ten-volume Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity) appeared in Germany in September 1986. The second volume was published in October 1988 and the third in October 1990. This marked the end of the first epoch: Antiquity.

Three imposing volumes, representing some 1,600 pages, with some 350 scientific notes, around half a thousand names of historical characters and as many place names and thousands of quotations from primary and secondary sources. In all, a veritable Milky Way of names, dates, Christian dogmas, titles and data.

Such a well-founded and fundamental accusation against Christianity—not only against the Church—has never been made before. In any case, the attacked party in principle adhered to Oggersheim’s rule: hold on.

When competent and professional Christians could not ignore it; when tens of thousands of readers devoured every new volume of Deschner’s historical Krimi every two years, when the number of annual departures from the Church was rapidly increasing sixfold and many of the dissidents were giving historical reasons in support of their decision—in particular the cruelties Deschner exposes—then it seemed to the attacked ministers of organised Christianity that the matter had passed the point of no return. And in 1992 they went on a counter-attack.

Hans Reinhard Seeliger, professor of historical theology at the Siegen University of Applied Sciences, organised a conference entitled ‘Criminalisation of Christianity? Deschner’s Church History on the Test Bench’: a three-day symposium at the Katholische Akademie Schwerte am Nordrand des Sauerlandes.

From 1 to 3 October 1992, lectures were given on the twenty-three chapters of the three volumes that have appeared to date, either in general or in particular. Most of the lecturers were professors from Germany and Austria: ordinary, extraordinary, supernumerary, and emeritus, as well as one professor and one honorary professor. Two belong to the Dominican order and one is a Franciscan. The spectrum of specialisations ranges from ancient church history, patrology, Christian archaeology, ancient history, ancient philology and Judaism to historical and systematic theology. The group was joined by a professor of criminal law (because Deschner’s is a criminal history!) as well as a newly qualified doctor of medicine from Freiburg.

Karlheinz Deschner was also invited—a chivalrous gesture—to present ‘the basic and general conception of his work’. One against twenty-two, a very tempting challenge for the combative spirit like Deschner. Nevertheless, he declined the invitation. He had already discussed the proposed topic at length in the general introduction to his work: ‘On the Subject, Methodology, the Question of Objectivity and the Problems of Historiography in General’, which consists of sixty printed pages. To this introduction, as Deschner himself wrote to the organisers, he had nothing to add. [1]

All lectures appeared in book form in the Catholic Traditionsverlag Herder in Freiburg, edited by the initiator Hans Reinhard Seeliger, with a total of 320 pages. On the cover we see the image of the Dominican Savonarola in Florence, painted by Fra Bartolommeo. A joke? (in 1498 Savonarola was burned at the stake). An aspiration? In any case, the editor writes in his introduction that ‘a “beheading” of the author would have been easy to execute’.

Of course, the book published by Herder, which is quite expensive by the way, has not been a bestseller. But even with a limited number of copies it fulfilled its function as a smokescreen. From now on, and with the very erudite reference to this collective volume, is interwoven the verdict that in that book more than twenty experts have shown that Deschner works in an unscientific way and writes with bias. When someone referring to Deschner now asks the Church painful questions, the initiate need only smile with a compassionate expression and refer to the said book—without having read it, of course—and with this magic trick of authority the whole historical mosaic of criminal history is diluted into complacency, and the soul seduced by Deschner must continue to believe that Christianity and its Churches have never had a criminal history, but only and exclusively a sacred history.

The philosopher Hermann Josef Schmidt, a professor in Dortmund, has thoroughly analysed the volume edited by Seeliger in Herder and published his exposé under the title Das ,,einhellige” oder scheinheilige ,,Urteil der Wissenschaf”? Nachdenkliches zur katholischen Kritik an Karlheinz Deschners ,,Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums”.

Deschner assumed that the interested reader can judge for himself which point of view is more convincing, and which author is closer to the critical and historical truth. Deschner, who continually advises his audience to examine what he says, not to ‘believe’ him, believes in the undertow of reason.

But to remain silent in this case would be self-harming and out of touch with reality. Calumniare audacter, semper aliquid haeret: Don’t be shy to slander, there is always something left! A foreign scientist recalled with special emphasis this old, and true, cynicism: Deschner should take a sharp, immediate and clear stand against his Schwerte critics.

The malignant flu in the winter of 1996 made it difficult for Deschner to write the fifth volume of the Criminal History, so he took up the Herder volume again, as a kind of spiritual gymnastics for convalescents, and looked for a modus operandi. To critically analyse the entire three-hundred-page-long text? Impossible. He could only proceed selectively by choosing a single article and analysing it in depth.

Deschner decided on the paper ,,Kaiser Konstantin: ein Grosser der Geschichte?” by Maria R.-Alföldi (the only woman in the Schwerte group). On the face of it, this lecture corresponds to the average level of volume. Some texts yield to all kinds of criticism. A few at least refrain from personal defamation and try to do justice to Deschner’s peculiarities and contribution: Maria R.-Alföldi occupies a middle ground and is therefore representative of the work.

She was born in 1926 in Budapest, received her doctorate in 1949, was appointed professor in Munich in 1961 and worked since then as a scientific advisor and later as a lecturer at the seminar for Greek and Roman history at the University of Frankfurt of Main in auxiliary sciences for archaeology and the history and culture of the Roman provinces (among the auxiliary disciplines of history are epigraphy, papyrology, glyptography and sigillography). Maria Radnóti-Alföldi has mainly published works on numismatics, such as Die constantinische Goldpragung: Untersuchungen zu ihrer Bedeutung für Kaiserpolitik und Hofkunst (1963) and Antike Numismatik: Theorie, Praxis, Bibliographie (1978).

Professor Radnóti-Alföldi is a corresponding member of the Academy of Science and Literature in Mainz. Hans Reinhard Seeliger, at the Schwerte meeting, introduced her as a ‘Constantine researcher of international standing’. Her lecture was received with particular sympathy at Schwerte, but here it seemed like a chorus to torpedo Deschner’s reliability as a historian. How many targets did she make? That is what Karlheinz Deschner discusses in the following reply.

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[1] Editor’s note: Our abridged translation of Deschner’s global introduction to his ten volumes can be read on pages 15-25 of a PDF. Deschner’s response to Professor Radnóti-Alföldi will appear in the next post.

Categories
Charlemagne Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Philosophy of history Racial right

Christianity’s Criminal History, 170

Karolus serenissimus augustus a Deo coronatus magnus pacificas (Charles, most serene emperor, great and peaceful emperor, crowned by God). As the beginning of his prolix title already read in 801, that peacemaking Caesar, crowned by God and reigning also per misericordiam Dei (by the mercy of God), the one who from 802 was also called imperator christianissimus and who (supposedly) died with the words of Psalm 31: ‘Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit’, that man had prepared one slaughter after another, and in his forty-six years of rule—from 768 to 814—he had warred almost continuously with about fifty military campaigns. For only two years (790 and 807) he didn’t fight ‘A happy period for the Church’ (Daniel-Rops).

There is nothing strange about the fact that in the Chanson de geste—the French epic poems of the early Middle Ages—he is already ‘more than two hundred years old’, accompanied by his bravest paladins. He fought against the Lombards, the Frisians, the Bavarians, the Avars, the Slavs, the Basques and the Arabs in Spain, and the Byzantines in southern Italy, with offensive wars almost coldly planned and with which he inflicted death, often cruel and terrible death, on countless people.

And not only did he kill in the wars, but he also had 4,500 prisoners murdered and thousands of families banished. Or, as it is said in one of the oldest liturgical poems in honour of Charles: ‘He struck down thousands, cleansed the earth of the heathen weeds, converted the infidels, broke the statues of the gods, drove out the foreign gods’. For him, according to his biographer Einhard, the wars against the Saxons and the Avars were more important than all other political tasks. Moreover, for certain ecclesiastical circles in the 10th century, the Saxon wars were the most important work he did for the Christian mission.

It is not just that Charles ‘the Great’ in fact killed, subjugated and enslaved without pause (winters generally excepted); that he was nothing but a warrior, conqueror, murderer and predator on the grandest scale—which, as the most learned of scholars have long since taught us, was then so commonplace, so much a part of the ‘Saxon way of life’, was then so commonplace, so much the ‘good’ style of the time, that to criticise it would be a crass anachronism, from our ‘enlightened’ time as well as being arbitrary, rigorist, moralistic and square-jawed in the extreme. No, it is also about the fact that Charles ‘the Great’ carried out all this incredible bloodshed with the most intense participation of Christianity and the Church of his time (which, of course, were also ‘sons of their time’! according to the apologists). And that this Church never protested, but rather took full advantage of it all.

The point is that the Christian feudal state and the Christian feudal Church were one and the same thing—and the same thing in crime.

Charles, whose true ‘book of state’ was the Bible, and whose favourite works included Augustine’s City of God, not only ruled and acted as king of the Franks but also as an enlightened protector of the Church, as an interlocutor and ally of the pope, as evidenced by his legislation, his epistolary correspondence written by ecclesiastics and his closest collaborators. This monarch was a kind of priest-king, he was rector et devotus sanctae ecclesiae defensor et adiutor im omnibus (guide and devoted defender and helper of the Holy Church in all things).

Empire and Church became indissolubly intertwined in the imperium christianum, with hardly any difference between political diets and ecclesiastical councils. Charles convened synods, over which he presided; he chose bishops and abbots as he pleased, and in Saxony he instituted the bishoprics he needed. When he needed an archbishopric for his attacks on the miserly, he had the pope erect the archbishopric of Salzburg. He also disposed of church property, enriching popes and bishops with territories. He granted them numerous privileges of immunity and punished the violation of ecclesiastical immunity with the doubled royal penalty of 600 solids. He freed the bishops from taxes and granted them the right to mint money. He punished the plundering and burning of churches with capital punishment.

But above all, he imposed the universal obligation of tithes on the clergy and demanded tithes for the Episcopal churches at the state level. He also bequeathed three-quarters of his cash to the Church, which he took special care of in his last years (while he left only one-twelfth to his children and grandchildren as a whole, and one-twelfth to the palace servants). And the prelates were also entirely dependent on him, although their influence during his reign—considering him at least all the Frankish bishops as the universal head of the Church—grew considerably: under Charles, they marched to war, acted as judges alongside the counts and were at the head of the royal court.

A 1967 study lists no less than 109 places of worship of St. Charles. These include Aachen (where Charles’ death day, 28 January, is still celebrated in the cathedral today, and where I celebrated my name day as a child), Bremen, Brussels, Dortmund, Frankfurt (one of the main places of Charles’ cult), Fulgem (another of the main places of Charles’ cult), Falkirk (another of the main places of Charles’ cult’), Fulda, Halle, Ingelheim, Cologne, Constance, Lüttich, Mainz, Minden, Münster, Nuremberg, Regensburg, Strasbourg, Trier, Vienna, Würzburg and Zurich. It is also noteworthy that Charles received cultic veneration throughout Saxony. For centuries Charles ‘the Great’, Charlemagne, has been regarded as the ideal model ruler, and for many, for very many, he still is today.

Voltaire and Gibbon stigmatised his barbarism and denied him personal greatness.

At the beginning of the 19th century, Napoleon was exalted to the full extent of his power as a ‘Charlemagne redivivus’. After the founding of the German Reich in the 19th century, Germans rediscovered Charles’ Germanness and his bellicose spirit. In the fascist era, amid the Second World War, the 1200th anniversary of Charlemagne’s birth was celebrated on 2 April 1942, and he was presented as ‘Charles the Unifier’.

The Carolingian empire, the imperiun christianum, as Alcuin called it from 798, the regnum sanctae ecclesiae (Libri Carolini), stretched from the North Sea to the Pyrenees and the Adriatic. It covered what is now France, Belgium, Holland, western Germany, Switzerland, most of Italy, the Marca Hispanica and Corsica. It was approximately 1,200,000 square kilometres in area: almost as large as the Western Roman Empire.

 

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Editor’s Note:

I have been very critical of American white nationalism on this site, but hardly at all of German National Socialism.

It is time to realise that Hitler and the Nazis weren’t perfect. As I implied in my post yesterday, if they had become wise instead of, using chess imagery, gambit the Third Reich against General Winter in Russia, they would have devoted all their efforts to understand the root causes of the dark hour. Karlheinz Deschner, the author of the above text, wouldn’t have hung up his Nazi uniform and become a philo-Semitic liberal because Hitler would have kept his Reich. Deschner could have written his criminal history of Christianity from the point of view of a Germany that had already transvalued its values.

I have said it and it bears repeating: To win the war we must know what we are fighting against. Both the most populist Nazis, like Goebbels, and today’s white nationalists emphasise Jewry. I think Manu Rodriguez, quoted in my post yesterday, was right: the Semitic hydra also includes Christianity and Islam. From time immemorial, anything to do with the Semitic race has been the enemy. Recall that Republican Rome began to decline just after Hannibal and the Carthaginians decimated the flower of the Roman army. That created the spiritual degradation that resulted in the later Roman Empire’s citizens beginning to interbreed with mudbloods. Eventually, the Judeo-Christians took advantage of that opportunity and the rest is history.

After I finish proofreading On Exterminationism, I will start putting together other books-PDFs of the most important entries on this site that show this meta-perspective.

Categories
Charlemagne Destruction of Germanic paganism Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 169

Charlemagne’s bloody laws

During his struggle, the king issued draconian laws, evidently whenever he believed that he had finally subdued the Saxons and could bring them to ‘order.’ Notable in this respect are the Capitulatio departibus Saxoniae (782) and the Capitulare Saxonicum (797). And as conversions to Christianity were forced by mass baptisms, while the Saxon people secretly persisted in their paganism and abhorred the clergy, Charles imposed a complete change of ideological education based on the total eradication of ancient beliefs and their rites and by the forced baptism of all Saxons.

Of the fourteen provisions of the Capitulatio, which carry the death penalty, ten refer exclusively to crimes against Christianity. He had previously sought the advice of the pope and was clearly guided by the missionary method of the Fulda monks for the extirpation of paganism, which began with unceremonious mass baptisms and the total destruction of their shrines.

A stereotypical morte moriatur (die without remission) threatened everything the heralds of the good news wanted to erase: the plundering and destruction of churches, the cremation of the dead, the rejection of baptism, the secret avoidance of baptism, the mockery of Christianity, the undermining of church property, the offering of pagan sacrifices, the practice of gentile customs (emphasis added!—Ed.), and so on. This was its tenor:

• If anyone violently breaks into a church and steals anything from it, or sets fire to the church, let him die without remission.

• If anyone out of contempt for Christianity does not keep the sacred fast of forty days and eats meat, let him die without remission.

• If anyone, according to heathen custom, causes the body of a deceased person to be destroyed by fire and reduces his limbs to ashes, let him die without remission.

• If anyone in the future among the Saxon people pretends to hide without having been baptised and stops approaching baptism because he wants to remain a pagan, let him die without remission.

• If anyone in agreement with the heathen plots something against the Christians and seeks to maintain hostility against the Christians, let him die without remission.

Even the transgression of the precept of fasting carried the death penalty!

Baptism in the first year of life, church attendance on Sundays and feast days, the taking of oaths in churches and even the observance of the canon law on marriage were ordered. As Alcuin had already criticised, ‘severe penances were imposed for the slightest faults.’

Since the forcibly converted Saxon people cared little or nothing for Christianity, they had to continue to be forced to support the Church. Everyone, noble, free and common, had to give the Church a tithe for the harvest of their fields and all their earnings. In addition, each church was to get two rural estates, as well as one manservant and one maidservant for every 125 inhabitants, so that the mass of the Saxons was exploited as never before.

The aim of Charles’ war could hardly be stated more clearly and convincingly: the destruction of paganism, expansion of Christianity and annexation.