“… cruelties are practised in accordance with acts of senate and popular assembly, and the public is bidden to do that which is forbidden to the individual. Deeds that would be punished by loss of life when committed in secret, are praised by us because uniformed generals have carried them out.” — Seneca, Letter XCV (trans. Gummere)
Stick with me here. I’m going to lead with a metaphor.
A North African bishop makes a credit card swipe in the form of compelle intrare.
The bill goes unpaid for about four hundred years. A new statement arrives. The response is the Saxon Capitulary. There’s been some compounding and someone needs to pay. But it’s not the church. The Saxons get that responsibility dropped on them at Verden.
“Compel them to come in” didn’t lie in the annals of history as a one-off. The Donatists, at least, were part of the church before they split off. Augustine wasn’t responsible for writing the Saxon Capitulary. It developed over time. That ball did get rolling from the northern tip of Africa, but he had no clue which river valley it was going to roll through. But the framework of the argument was his.
Over four hundred years, the framework found its way to a king. A well-loved king. A respected king. And he had an army.
Charlemagne kept wax tablets under his pillow and notebooks on his nightstand. Starting late in life, he made an effort to learn how to write. It just wasn’t meant to be.
Maybe that’s where the credit should be given: a man fumbling about in candlelight, frustrated, embarrassed and unable to write his own name. Using stamps to sign his decrees and letters—his words, his work—handwritten by others. Maybe that’s where the determination to fund and build the schools that taught Europe to read and write came from.
His sons left the kingdom with territories and titles. His daughters, not permitted to marry, were hidden away at court. Not choosing celibacy, children were had outside of marriage. They would be removed from the political line entirely. Modern history doesn’t view it as favorably as the court tried to convey it: he loved them too much to send them away.
When you marry off your daughter in medieval times while having power, your son-in-law, his family, his court likes to use her as leverage. He wasn’t handing any part of that power—his power—to anyone else.
Charlemagne was a man who could not leave things alone. They could not be themselves. Daughters couldn’t become wives. The empire was his alone. Saxons could not be Saxon.
I won’t say the institution made him who he was, but he was exactly what they were looking for.
He brought together the greatest minds from across Europe and formed a “school” that functioned more like a hall of learning: Alcuin from York, Theodulf from Spain, Paul the Deacon from Lombardy.
They created a library culture and a standardized script that most European manuscripts would be written in for centuries to come. These practices brought the seven liberal arts from the past into prominence in the contemporary period, then gave them enough momentum to become the basis of the emerging medieval university system.
Paris, Bologna and Oxford were founded because of the Carolingian structure.
They eliminated region-specific writing and consolidated a body of text that is still a main source for historical documents today. They had it in their hands: Cicero—the largest body of correspondence from ancient Rome. Julius Caesar’s military campaigns. Augustine’s Confessions. The letter from Seneca included in the epigraph above.
The very institution I’m talking about preserved the warning for something they were about to do. They read of the Donatists and didn’t see the past as it should have been. No correctional 20/20 hindsight. They saw a plan.
The court justified the Carolingian Renaissance as the cultivation of the soul through patient teaching. Faith and understanding were meant to grow together. An unlettered congregation, a malformed flock, was deformed Christianity. They couldn’t point fingers at others with unclean hands.
Unlike Charlemagne, the Saxons were not saints. They didn’t have a firm grasp on the art of pacifism. They raided. They killed. Missionaries. Innocents. They were in a war that lasted for decades and they believed in what they were fighting for.
Only one side built a system and called it a law.
The Saxon Capitulary, or the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, became the “become Christians, because I said so” decree, with a subtle hint of Augustinian undertone.
Refuse baptism—embrace death. Hide an unbaptized neighbor—no way. Eat meat during Lent—die. You cannot ritually sacrifice people—we kill you for that.
Baptize your babies, don’t marry your sister and if you steal from or burn a church, you will be dealt with.
“If any one of the race of the Saxons hereafter concealed among them shall have wished to hide himself unbaptized, and shall have scorned to come to baptism and shall have wished to remain a pagan, let him be punished by death.”
Augustine wrote a letter. Charlemagne had someone else write a statute. Centuries later, the Donatist principle becomes law.
The mechanism was named by Seneca eight hundred years before them. Institutions do in public what’s considered murder in private. The Capitulary works because officers wear uniforms.
Weeks later, a Frankish army was destroyed by Saxon forces. Charlemagne’s response came at Verden, on the Aller River.
The Royal Frankish Annals—his own court chronicle—recorded what happened next. His own scribes wrote down four thousand five hundred executed in a single mass killing.
“After taking his vengeance, the king withdrew to celebrate the birth of the Lord and Easter as he was accustomed.”
Some scholars argue decollare in the Latin (behead) might be a scribal error for delocare (relocate). And the number seems high and neatly rounded. At minimum, this was a mass execution his own court called a victory, then celebrated.
If the accounting is correct, hundreds, if not thousands, of children lost parents. Hundreds, if not thousands, of families developed human-sized holes. Entire branches, not just limbs, are removed from family trees.
For Saxons who didn’t believe in God, what did they lose that many people in a single day? In the name of what? Were they pagans who believed in something different? Or were they heathens not worthy of taking the same air?
There’s no surviving body of Saxon text. They weren’t a literate culture in the same sense. But what did that look like to them? What words did they reach for to describe what happened?
Charlemagne’s court applied a label, stopped asking questions, wrote a law of intolerance and then, ever so patiently, heads rolled.
The Saxon Wars continued for decades. Alcuin was writing letters from inside the king’s own court, arguing that the policy was wrong and examining it honestly. Charlemagne’s court held the line. Perhaps Augustine’s compelle intrare had picked up so much momentum by this point that it was impossible to stop.
Alcuin isn’t a modern liberal. He wasn’t suggesting religious freedom for the Saxons. That would have made him a heretic.
He was a churchman arguing that the church’s own logic required consent. His argument was phrased within the system.
He had the king’s ear for twenty years. He ran the palace school at Aachen. He wrote the curriculum that defined Christian learning. He was the personal teacher to Charlemagne and his children. He standardized the Vulgate Bible.
In the late 790s, he wrote letters arguing that forced baptism without prior teaching produced false Christians.
Faith arises from the will, not from compulsion. You can force a man to be baptized. You cannot force him to believe.
The institution heard him on Latin grammar. But it would not hear him on the Saxons.
The label gets applied. The inquiry stops. The framework stays. The institution scales it.
Farther down the line, the next generation pays with interest—a compounding that came from a feeling, a reaction, a justification.
A term has grown in power throughout time. It’s wielded men, institutions. It’s been used as a tool. It is not a thing.
Compelle intrare—the swipe. A letter, in 408, from a North African bishop defending coercion of a sect.
The Saxon Capitulary—the statement. A king, in 782, writing a death penalty for refusing baptism into law.
Verden—the late fee. Paid in a currency the men who built the framework would never see, by people who never had a hand in writing it.
The Saxons left no writing of their own. The framework decides what evil means and who gets to apply it. The conquered don’t get to write back.
Different hands swipe, sign and pay.
The institution had been warned before Augustine ever picked up a pen. The Carolingians preserved it, then violated the same principle from the same building. That’s not negligence. That’s institutional momentum.
Augustine wielded an institution.
Charlemagne, by 800, was being wielded by one. He wasn’t a puppet. He commanded armies for 46 years. But he chose Verden.
The church didn’t make Charlemagne. It aimed him. He was the kind of man who would choose Verden. Charlemagne was always headed towards it. On a long enough timeline, the swans keep getting greyer.
The diagnosis isn’t the temperament of one king. The diagnosis is the framework, given a sword and an institution that harnesses sovereigns who wield it.
The cumulative cost of letting a word hang around. Not the inquiry it stops as much as the infrastructure it builds.
Plain truth. Rough edges.
Closing Question
What part of you needs them to be irredeemable so the next step feels justified?
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