Conquest and Christianization: Saxony and the Carolingian World, 772–888

"I thought it would be good to have this dual nomination covering Charlemagne in action. One of the blackest pages in his history is the conquest of Saxony. It has been called ‘Charlemagne’s jihad’ and the first case of ‘Western genocide’. There are all kinds of problems with that because it was a very long war. For more than 30 years he was fighting the Saxons—although, as these books show, ‘the Saxons’ did not exist. There were lots of different groups. You get the sense that, at some point, Charlemagne and his leading men started to get a bit fed up with this war. What you see happening all the time is the Franks winning battles, after which the Saxons submit themselves. Then, five years later, there’s a new group of Saxons up in arms. And this goes on and on and on. The reason for this is that there were all these different little groups of Saxons, who didn’t think they had a common identity. These two books came out more or less at the same moment and shed light on the question of Saxony from two different directions. Ingrid Rembold is mostly interested in how Saxony became part of the Carolingian Empire, in how this conquest worked. It was a conquest that went hand-in-hand with Christianisation, with very violent aspects to that. The Saxons, at some late stage of the war, were given the choice between baptism and death and at that point, allegedly, 20,000 Saxons were beheaded because they decided they’d rather die than become Christians. That story has a long echo through history."