This rigorous Act of Uniformity stirred the deep resentment of the Saxons. But perhaps discontent might not have burst into a flame but for the return of Widukind from his wonted Danish refuge, and for the harangues with which he stirred the vain hopes of the Saxons and roused them to revolt (782). At the same time tidings were brought to Charles of an incursion of a Sclavonic tribe, the Sorabi, from beyond the Elbe. The Frankish king presumed too far on the apparent pacification of Saxon-land. Like his great imitator, Napoleon, he would use the last-conquered people to subdue the enemy next beyond them, and he sent an army composed of Saxons as well as Austrasian Franks to repel the Sclavonic incursion. Adalgisus the chamberlain, Geilo the count of the stables, and Worad the count of the palace, commanded the motley host; but when they entered Saxon-land they found the whole country already in a flame, and the Saxons, by the advice of Widukind, about to march into Francia. Wisely postponing the expedition against the Sorabi, they marched with their Frankish troops—the Saxon contingent had doubtless deserted—to the place where they heard that the rebel host was gathered. In the heart of the enemies’ country they met Count Theodoric, a relation of the king’s, who had made a hasty levy of troops in Rhine-land on hearing of the Saxon revolt. Seeing the over-zeal of the three courtiers, Theodoric advised them to make careful reconnaissances of the enemy’s position, and proposed that, if the ground proved favorable, a joint attack should be made on the Saxon camp at the hill Suntal, near Minden. In pursuance of the suggested plan, they crossed the Weser and pitched their camp on the north bank of the river. Then, fearing that the renown of the joint victory would accrue to the king’s cousin Theodoric, they determined to attack the Saxons alone. Underrating the steadfastness of their foes they dashed headlong and in loose order into the camp, more as if they were pursuing a flying foe than charging an enemy drawn up in order of battle. This time the Frankish fury failed before the stolid Saxon stubbornness. They were surrounded by the enemy, and terrible slaughter was made in their ranks. A few Franks escaped, not to their quarters of the morning, but to the camp of Theodoric; but Adalgisus and Geilo, four counts, twenty nobles of high rank, and a multitude of followers, who, in the true spirit of the old German comitatus, preferred to die rather than survive their lords, fell on the field of fight. The battle of Mount Suntal was certainly the greatest disaster that befell the Frankish arms in the whole course of the Thirty Years’ War.
Terrible was the anger of Charles when he heard of the Saxon rising, of the murders of priests and monks with which it had been accompanied, and lastly of the deep humiliation inflicted on his race by the defeat of the three generals. He collected a large army and entered the land of the Saxons. When thus in earnest he seems to have been always able to crush their resistance. Widukind fled for the fourth or fifth time to Denmark, and the land lay prostrate at the feet of Charles. He summoned before him all the chiefs of the Saxons, and made inquisition concerning the author of the revolt. With one voice all named Widukind, the absent Widukind. As he could not be arrested, the men who had listened to his persuasions must suffer. Four thousand five hundred men (including probably some of the chiefs of the nation) who had shown themselves foremost in the revolt were surrendered to Charles. It was expected probably that the ringleaders only out of this number would suffer; but Charles was evidently in a Berserk rage.[41] All the 4500 Saxons were beheaded in one day at Verden on the banks of the Aller. “Having perpetrated this act of vengeance, the king went into winter quarters at the villa of Theodo, and there celebrated the birth of our Lord, and there also the festival of Easter, according to his wonted custom.”
The year 783 was to Charles a year of domestic sorrow but of military triumph. His wife Hildegard (whom he had married immediately after the repudiation of the daughter of Desiderius) died on the 30th of April; his loved and honored mother, Bertrada, on the 12th of July; but immediately after his wife’s funeral he entered Saxon-land with a powerful army, vanquished his enemies with great slaughter at Detmold, vanquished them again in the neighborhood of Osnabrück, where “there was slain of the Saxons an infinite multitude, great booty was taken, and a large number of captives was led away.” He then swept with his victorious army from the Weser to the Elbe, ravaging wherever he went—for it was thus that this great preacher of Christianity argued for the faith—and then returning to Frankland married his fourth wife, Fastrada, the daughter of the Frankish count Radolf.
The next year (784) was somewhat less successful, owing to widespread inundations, the result of sudden and heavy rains, which stopped the victor’s progress northward; but his young son Charles, who had been left with a part of the army in Westphalia while Charles himself went southward towards Thuringia, won a great cavalry battle on the banks of the Lippe. And this year Charles made a new departure. After a short autumnal visit to Frankland, he returned into Saxon-land, spent his Christmas in the neighborhood of Pyrmont, and went into winter quarters at the now strongly fortified Eresburg.
“And when he had decided to winter there,” says the chronicler, “having sent for wife and children to join him, and having left in the said camp a sufficiently staunch and strong garrison, he went forth himself with a flying squadron to lay waste the townships of the Saxons and to plunder their farms, and thus by himself and by the generals whom he sent in different directions, marching everywhere, and everywhere carrying fire and slaughter, he paid back the Saxons in their own coin and gave them a sufficiently uneasy winter.” After holding a general assembly at Paderborn, Charles marched unopposed through Saxon-land as far as the Elbe. In the district of Bardengau, near the mouth of that river, Charles halted, looking across the river to the territory of the yet unsubdued Transalbian Saxons who dwelt in the land that is now called Holstein. While he was here news was brought to him that Widukind and a confederate, perhaps a kinsman, named Abbio were willing to surrender themselves and forswear further resistance if they could be assured of their personal safety. A Frankish courtier named Amalwin was sent across the Elbe with hostages for the safe-conduct which he bore to the two Saxon chiefs. They accompanied him on his return, and were brought into the presence of Charles, who was by this time back again across the Rhine and at his palace of Attigny on the Aisne, near the forest of Ardennes. Charles received his fallen foes graciously. They were both baptized, Charles himself acting as godfather to Widukind and presenting him with costly gifts. As far as we can see, both honestly accepted the duties which the pledge of fealty to the most Christian king involved. Authentic history after this point is silent as to the name of Widukind, but legends, for which there is very likely some foundation, represent him as not only a contented but even an ardent votary of his new faith, a founder of churches and convents, and an endower of the bishopric of Minden. It is probable that he was allowed to retain his large possessions in Westphalia, and he has been chosen as a favorite peg by German genealogists on which to hang the descent of their Serene and Princely patrons. The least doubtful of these pedigrees appears to be that which makes the great Emperor Otho a descendant, through his mother Matilda, of the Saxon hero.
The submission of Widukind ended for the time the resistance of the Saxons. “That obstinacy of the Saxon perfidy rested for some years, chiefly for this reason, that they could not find opportunities for revolting suitable to the matter in hand,” is the quaint remark of the chronicler.
This peace lasted for six or seven years, in one of which (789) we are told that the king “arranged all matters pertaining to the Saxons, suitably to the time.” That is to say, no doubt, the yoke of Church and State was being fitted to the stubborn Saxon neck. So confident was Charles of the subjugation of his foe that he employed both Saxons and Frisians in the campaigns in which he was now busily engaged on the Middle Danube against the kingdom of the Avars.
The fact, however, that the Frankish power was thus engaged in a tough struggle with an enemy in the south, at last emboldened the Saxons to make another stand for freedom. Again they allied themselves with the Frisians, and on the 6th of July, 792, the first blow was struck. A portion of Charles’s army which had, for some unexplained purpose, been sent in ships to the mouth of the Elbe was set upon by the insurgents of the two allied nations and cut to pieces. This evidence of unslumbering hostility does not seem to have effectually diverted Charles’s attention from his Danubian campaign, but next year (793) tidings of a similar but more overwhelming disaster were brought to him at his quarters in Bavaria. Count Theodoric, the king’s kinsman and a valiant and trusted general (the same who had saved the Frankish army from annihilation on the disastrous day of Suntal), had been leading an army through the district of Rustringen, on the borders of Friesland and Saxon-land, and at some little distance to the west of the Weser. The reason for his presence in that region is not told us, but it was probably the desire to check the revolt which had burst forth in the preceding summer. What is certain is that he was set upon by the Saxons, his army destroyed, and apparently himself slain. Now, at any rate, if not already in the previous year, the rebellion assumed that character of ruthless vindictiveness, especially against churchmen, which showed how sorely the Saxons had been galled by Charles’s ecclesiastical ordinances. “As a dog returneth to his vomit,” says an annalist, “so did they return to the paganism which they had aforetime renounced, again deserting Christianity, lying not less to God than to their lord the king, who had conferred upon them so many benefits, and joining themselves to the pagan nations who dwelt round about them. Sending their emissaries to the Avars, they endeavored to rebel first against God, then against the king and the Christians. They laid waste all the churches which were within their borders with burning and destruction; they rejected the bishops and presbyters who were set over them; some they took prisoners and others they slew, and, in short, they turned themselves right round to the worship of idols.”
When the news of Theodoric’s defeat reached the king it found him, as before stated, in camp in the centre of Bavaria. The war with the Avars was prospering, but it was still a long way from completion. To deal with two enemies in such widely separated regions as Hanover and Hungary was a hard problem for a commander-in-chief in the eighth century. Charles sought to solve it by a characteristic stroke of his truly imperial genius, and though he failed, even the failure attests the grandeur of his conceptions. Near the Bavarian town of Weissenburg a little stream called the Schwäbische Rezat takes its rise, within a few miles of a larger river, the Altmühl. The Rezat flows northward into the Main, and so eventually into the Rhine and the German Ocean. The Altmühl, on the other hand, soon reaches the Danube, and so sends its waters at last into the Black Sea. Charles’s idea (suggested to him by some professed experts, but eagerly embraced) was to make a navigable canal between the Rezat and the Altmühl, and thus transport his troops and their provisions at will by river navigation either northward against the Saxons or eastward against the Avars. During the whole autumn of 793 a vast multitude of men labored at the great enterprise. They dug a fosse two miles long and three hundred feet wide, but it was all in vain. Nature was too strong for them. The marshy quality of the soil, made worse by autumnal rains, thwarted the operations of the diggers, and however much they dug out by day, by night the heaps had all sunk back into the swampy level. There is still, however, a trench about five miles south-west of Weissenburg called the Fossa Carolina, which remains as a monument of the great king’s project. “What a change” (as has been truly said by Pastor Meier, a Bavarian priest who traced the course of the Roman Limes Imperii through these regions), “what stir, and what activity would have filled all those quiet plains if the grand scheme of Kaiser Karl (not yet Kaiser) had been realized, and this tiny streamlet, the Rezat, had seen the interchange of the products of the east and west.” The scheme itself, or something like it, was carried into execution by King Louis I. of Bavaria, but owing to the introduction of the railway system König-Ludwigs-Kanal, like so many other artificial waterways, has lost much of its importance.
Foiled in this endeavor King Charles allowed the year 793 to pass without an attempt to punish the Saxon rebellion. The next six years (794–799) each had its Saxon campaign. The general features of the war are very similar to those which we have already noticed: rapid marches of the Frankish king, devastation of the Saxon country, oaths of submission and Saxon hostages. It is noteworthy that Charles now carries back into Frank-land large numbers of these hostages—all apparently young lads—has them educated as Christians, generally as ecclesiastics, and when peace is restored instals them in the various churches and convents wherewith, as the Roman imperator of old with his coloniæ, he fastens down the conquered country. It is also to be observed that the struggle is now chiefly confined to the northern part of Saxon-land, to the great gau of Wigmodia, which stretched between Bremen and Hamburg, and to the Nordalbingi who, as has been said, occupied what is now the duchy of Holstein. Further, that Charles, Teuton as he was, did not object to avail himself of the help of a Sclavonic people, the Abodrites, who were the eastern neighbors of the Saxons, and that he bitterly avenged the death of their king Witzin on “the perfidious Saxon nation,” into whose snares he had fallen (795).