Saxon Identities, AD 150-900

"Flierman comes from another direction altogether, because he’s interested in how Saxons became ‘the Saxons’. This is a book about collective identity in those parts. Ironically, this conquest and Christianisation story that Rembold describes led to a speeding up of the development of that collective identity. That is why I thought I had to have them both. I’m not going to choose because they should be read together. Both. The conquest worked as a kind of pressure cooker, in the sense that things that might have happened anyway much more slowly, all of a sudden started to develop rapidly. Groups of Saxons who sometimes collaborated and sometimes didn’t became ‘the Saxons’ as a result of being conquered and resisting conquest for so long. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In the Frankish sources that Rembold works with, the Franks object to the pagans resisting their own submission—they should be keeping to their vows. But Flierman has two sides to the story. In the bit of his book about Charlemagne, he shows that Christianity was a fantastic new label of identity in the course of the 10th and 11th centuries. One of the great ironies of history, here, is that it was the Saxons—who had resisted incorporation into the Frankish Empire and who, to an extent, resisted Christianity—who became the most fanatically enthusiastic missionaries in Scandinavia. The new wave of missionaries in post-Carolingian Europe came from Saxony. So, you could say that Charlemagne’s conquest and Christianisation was a success—in the end. It’s bigger than modern Saxony-Anhalt, it goes further to the north, south and east. Again, borders were very different. Where these people lived tended to expand and shrink over time. The big difference from the rest of the empire is that it had never been under Roman rule, so there were no roads. It was just rather impenetrable forest, bits of swamp, really unpleasant territory. It was a lot less accessible than, for instance, Brittany, Normandy or southern France, which still had a Roman road system. It was a jungle where these scary pagans lived—that was the image. That wasn’t the reality, but that is how people thought about those areas. It wasn’t a crusade because there was no Jerusalem to conquer, but I would say it was both. Problems in the border area had existed for centuries. There were always these struggles for expansion. Part of the story was certainly to put an end to that, because it’s annoying, if you’re busy conquering northern Italy and have to rush home because the Saxons are misbehaving yet again. There were already some islands of Christianity in Saxony. This idea of creating a Christian empire was definitely part of the story, as well. The conquest worked with missionaries and an army being sent in together. The way to build footholds was not by building fortresses, but by founding monasteries—and from these monasteries this new ideology was spread. This was really an early medieval way of doing things, because supply and communication lines were so long and armies hard to organise, particularly if short-term interventions were needed. You can really see both elements: expansion for the sake of military successes, resources, and keeping people loyal; and the will to bring these people into the Christian empire."