00:08:27.280Gilbert, thank you for your $150 donation towards the Pavilion.
00:08:31.700guys are awesome we appreciate y'all so much um and hopefully you guys can come and celebrate
00:08:40.140under that pavilion often and as early as this uh this i'm here you vote that's the plan
00:08:48.220if we can get our goal accomplished so thank you guys very much for that um that's what we've got
00:08:54.780off the top i am going to well first i'm going to make this note so chris is going to present
00:09:01.660his material then we're going to cover questions that come up uh feel free wherever you are
00:09:07.900listening to the sound of my voice um asking questions you like we would love to answer them
00:09:15.260this is very much question and answer driven program also if you ever have questions at any
00:09:21.020time including now you can email those to bns at runestone.org you'd be happy to answer those
00:09:30.140at the next available opportunity so uh yeah thank you guys all for joining us this evening
00:09:36.700chris i will hand the talking stick over to you sure so this topic kind of as the elsewhere
00:09:46.380really said sort of segues from the discussion we had about rad bod in that it kind of is what
00:09:55.160comes next in the history of the period so i want to front load this one with a large amount of
00:10:05.980historical context so as to explain what is actually going on here in a grander scale and
00:10:12.580And in this instance, because we're not talking about the story of one specific person, sort of preface why we care about this.
00:10:22.880What we're really trying to do here is to contextualize a very broad historical trend, because tonight we're going to look at a specific crop of men and women that were victimized by that trend.
00:10:34.560These specific victims act as a model and archetype for all of the victims of that trend in this time period.
00:10:41.540So the timeline is going to be a little bit quicker, and then I'm going to ramble about a historical period that most people know extremely little about.
00:10:50.660So around 400 AD, the Franks start moving into Gaul. Around 486, the Franks win the Franco-Roman War and conquer Gaul. 507, Clovis begins the Franco-Gothic War. 767, Pepin the Short overthrows Childeric III.
00:11:10.4809 sorry 814 Charlemagne dies and his army or his empire immediately fragments
00:11:18.300987 Hugh of Capet overthrows the last Carolingian ruler and founds modern France
00:11:25.3201096 the first crusade begins so we have a lot of foundational European history happening in about
00:11:35.500600 years, but it's also a period that most people, as I said, know very little about.
00:11:44.400So let's start with the basics of Frankish society and history. So the basic structure
00:11:54.780of Germanic social governance was the warband. At the top was the warlord and his wife. They
00:11:59.440were the fictive parents of the members of the warband who swore loyalty to the person of the
00:12:33.780but also from in doing so about the warband culture in and of itself and i think that's
00:12:40.860really informative if anybody is not familiar wants to know more about it lady with a mead cup
00:12:46.380is a fantastic book it's it's really it really is a wonderful academic work but um so there's the
00:12:55.360the fictive parents of the king and the queen and then the the members of the warband are their
00:13:01.020fictive sons, as it were. So when the members of the war band get rich enough, they become
00:13:07.940warlords of their own, but they're still sworn to their warlord. So there's a pyramidal hierarchy
00:13:13.080that emerges, with each member of the hierarchy swearing allegiance to some singular individual
00:13:19.240above them. At the top of this is the figure we call the king. This term king emerges because
00:13:26.200there's a conflict between the ethno-republican tribal sociality and the monarchic warlord
00:13:34.440sociality. And king basically means big man of the kin, right? So in Western political theory,
00:13:44.180we have monarchies and republics. A monarchy is such a hierarchy as this warlord structure.
00:13:49.960It's a pyramid of personal loyalties. A republic, meanwhile, is membership in a corporate body.
00:13:56.780This is the nation, das Volk, the people, something like that. It's a body that contains
00:14:02.660the members of the society. The Germanic peoples were initially, in the oldest historical period,
00:14:09.240operating under this republican form of governance via tribes, but over time this warlord sociality
00:14:15.060leads to a monarchy. It's important to remember here when we talk about republics, we don't mean
00:14:19.880Republican versus Democrat. We don't mean democracy. There doesn't have to be
00:14:24.680voting in a republic. It's a structure concerning what a society is, not
00:14:30.280necessarily how it functions. The Roman Republic was literally, for various
00:14:35.720periods, a dictatorship while still being a republic. So these warband members1.00
00:14:43.380Germans come in from Francia into Gaul. Gaul is the Roman province where France is today.
00:14:52.960So these Germanic warlords and warband members come in, they take over, and they start extracting0.87
00:14:59.220money and agricultural labor from the inhabitants of Gaul. And of course, they take it from each0.91
00:15:05.960other at first there's an expectation that each rung in the hierarchy pays the rung below it
00:15:12.520but eventually as this system develops the assumption becomes that each rung pays the rung
00:15:17.600above it this is an important distinction in the early germanic war bands the king is the ring
00:15:24.620giver the the king's job is to basically pay his thanes in later feudal structures the thanes pay
00:15:34.460the guy above them, right? So to reiterate, the dukes expect payment from the king, the counts
00:15:43.120expect payments from the dukes, the barons expect payment from the counts, and the soldiers expect
00:15:49.360payments from the barons. In the earliest days, this is usually in the form of booty and shared
00:15:55.080military might to bully the inhabitants of Gaul into paying their taxes. If you've ever seen the
00:16:00.840Sopranos, it's literally that. The DiMeo crime family is a smaller scale feudalism.
00:16:08.260As an aside, part of what makes this operation work historically is that the inhabitants of Gaul
00:16:12.960really seem to have preferred this to the prior Roman regime. The taxes that the Germanics levied
00:16:19.460were honestly puny compared to the massive Roman taxes. So the people involved in this don't really
00:16:28.000think of it as a government or a state like we do. This is really important to understand.
00:16:34.940They are conceptualizing all of this stuff as interpersonal relations. So if you go watch
00:16:41.980movies and you read about people in the feudal period, you hear a lot of like,
00:16:46.000think of the realm for the good of the land. There's no, there's no, but the ideals of the
00:16:52.860or the transcendent principles. This is all about interpersonal relations.
00:16:57.860I'm buddies with this guy. He doesn't like that guy.
00:17:01.860There's no grander ideological justification for a lot of it.
00:17:06.860There's just me, the people that I pay, and the people that we extract wealth from,
00:17:11.860and the people trying to muscle in on our turf.
00:17:14.860And, of course, the people whose turf we're trying to muscle in on.0.99
00:17:18.860A running theme with these dynasties that are the first generation of apostates to Christianity is that they do not care about their families and end up getting into stupid fratricidal bloodshed because Christianity lets you murder your kin.0.78
00:17:32.740That comes up here in spades, and if we were actually giving you a history of the Franks, that would be a really big part of it.0.82
00:17:42.020so each warlord had a mayor of the palace aka major domo aka mayor domos literally big house
00:17:52.380this was essentially the guy that was hired to run the hall of the warlord
00:17:56.760if you follow even passingly british politics you'll hear about
00:18:01.880de pae m the prime minister is the modern british evolution of the major domo
00:18:10.320so this is the guy that the king pays to run his house while he's off stealing booty from people
00:18:20.080only now the operation is much bigger so he runs the household of the king which happens to involve
00:18:25.700managing hundreds of commanders tens of thousands of warriors huge tracts of land literally too huge
00:18:31.180to count the fact that no one at this time knows how much land they own is actually a big problem
00:18:36.400but stuff like that. As the kings make increasing numbers of enemies, the kings increasingly start
00:18:43.660hiding behind the major domo, domos, domoi, domi, whatever, whenever not on campaign. But this gives
00:18:50.880the major domo a huge amount of power to actually run things because he is literally paid to run
00:18:55.120the show for the king on top of the king not being present. So there's a huge pressure to pick up or
00:18:59.840to pick a good major domo so he can run the kingdom. But he also can't be too good or he'll
00:19:04.720take power himself, because the majordomo actually runs the show. There's also
00:19:08.260pressure to make one's children or siblings your majordomo, because they
00:19:12.640are loyal and you want them to be useful. But because of
00:19:16.480Christianity, there's also no reason to not just betray everyone around you if0.98
00:19:20.020they stop being useful to you. That includes your family. So fathers and
00:19:25.620sons and brothers and uncles are all betraying each other throughout Frankish
00:19:28.760history. At this time, these Germanic kings are basically military commanders0.86
00:19:33.520that are entirely reliant upon bribing and threatening to kill literally everyone to
00:19:38.960stop them from rebelling. So the king constantly has to be rallying an army to go fight in order
00:19:44.100to acquire the wealth to bribe his soldiers because they need bribes on top of their taxes
00:19:48.360that they're already acquiring. Eventually, the king started deputizing lesser nobility and the
00:19:54.480major domos to handle military affairs as the kingdom starts requiring multiple armies fighting
00:19:59.360on multiple fronts at once. If you look into this period in history, the king is constantly doing
00:20:03.800this zigzag from front to front with his army, and eventually he needs to start doing multiple
00:20:08.800zigzags, so he has to now get commanders, and uh-oh, now there's another guy with an army.
00:20:14.560Why can't he just take over? So what is this? What really is the resulting body politic that0.91
00:20:24.120emerges from the Frankish conquest of Gaul. This is a giant extortion racket run by glorified0.95
00:20:30.640bandits. There is zero separation between the administration, the military, and the personal0.72
00:20:35.640relationships of the individuals involved. Because the hierarchy is a pyramid of pyramids,
00:20:40.440many of any given king's soldiers are gated by someone else. So the king has this tension between
00:20:45.760wanting to maximize the number of men directly loyal to him so as to minimize the chance of
00:20:50.140any one branch refusing to play ball, but he also has to have some hierarchy to parcel out
00:20:56.700management of territory because he can't personally run it all. Additionally, the more nodes he has
00:21:02.500under him, the harder it is to manage all of them at the interpersonal level. So he wants to make
00:21:07.500the pyramid simultaneously very thin and very tall, but also very fat and very wide, and figuring out
00:21:13.640the right ratio is the trick here. Over time, the Frankish kings become
00:21:19.800increasingly reliant upon the Majordomo because the Majordomo shields them from
00:21:24.260the commanders, but eventually the Majordomos get the upper hand and realize
00:21:28.280they can just shield themselves from the commanders with the kings. Finally, we
00:21:32.820have this tension present in which the commanders see that the Majordomos hold
00:21:36.520the real power in the regime, and as such, choosing the Majordomo is of
00:21:41.020paramount importance more so than choosing the king so they've never so they eventually start
00:21:48.620forcing major domos upon the kings the system is that go on take a pause for the cause um
00:21:58.300timothy in california donated a hundred dollars towards the cigarette pavilion thank you timothy
00:22:03.820uh by the the power of our anonymous donor you have you have made that 100 into 200
00:22:11.020Thank you. And we also have a Leroy, I believe. I've been corrected on pronunciation from your great state of Michigan. What is what is y'all's state nickname?
00:22:29.180We have several. The Mitten Winter Wonderland. I think the state government chose Water Wonderland, too. That one's kind of lame.
00:24:49.380Like, Hlothar got North Neustria, then Hildeberts got West Neustria, then Chodomers got Aquitaine, and Theodorich got Austrasia, right?
00:25:03.780So Burgundy, which shows up later on another map, ends up getting absorbed around 533, but it's actually formed out of a separate Germanic tribe, as is Alemania on this map.
00:25:17.000Evidently, the Burgundians were important in Germanic consciousness because they show up in Norse sagas, albeit highly fictionalized.
00:25:24.000They probably had relations with the Goths, which would make them distantly Norse-adjacent.
00:25:31.000So, you'll see here that these are color-coded.0.53
00:25:35.000So what ends up happening is that Hudwix, a.k.a. Clovis, gives his territory to his sons upon his death.
00:25:43.000This starts a repeating trend. When the Frankish king dies, he splits his land between his sons.
00:25:49.960They then immediately start fighting for who gets to be the big king. This is important.
00:25:55.300Primogeniture has to be invented. It was not an ancient continuous practice going back to
00:26:01.120antiquity. It is invented, in part, because of the failures of the Frankish regime. If you've
00:26:07.900ever played Crusader Kings II, this is where Gavelkind comes from. So there's1.00
00:26:14.140this massive power struggle to be on top of the extortion racket. At the same
00:26:18.900time, there's the Trinitarian clergy who are fighting an ideological struggle
00:26:23.060against Asatru, Greco-Roman polytheistic religion, Arianism, and, coming up, Islam.
00:26:28.420They're also nominally concerned with the treatment of the peasantry because
00:26:32.700they, the clergy, want to be the ones extorting the peasantry, and because they,
00:26:37.280Today, the clergy are the ones in close contact with the peasantry due to Christian ministry,
00:26:42.760and thus their extortion and their ideological goals of apostasy are directly impacted by
00:26:48.220the actions of the royal administrative military hierarchy.
00:26:52.580So they don't like the kings bullying people because they want to bully people, and they
00:26:55.780don't want there to be too much bullying because that leads to people rejecting Christianity,
00:27:02.280which means that priests end up dying.
00:27:05.160As Frankish history progresses, there's an increasing buildup and sophistication of what we would today call government.
00:27:11.060Much of this is driven by the clergy, who are essentially trying to tame the Frankish leadership.
00:27:16.680The priests and monks say, we have to organize these Frankish warlords and warbands, or they're going to ruin everything.
00:30:07.480okay sorry i said okay where are we here and then i found where we were
00:30:14.700So, over time, these major domos become increasingly united, culminating in Pepin the Short being the major domo of all of these provinces.
00:30:28.920Pepin the Short was the son of Charles Martel and the father of Charlemagne.
00:30:32.620Pepin the Short realizes he could just simply take over by formally shaving and imprisoning
00:30:39.740Khildarik III, the last Merovingian king, and then taking power himself as the king and major
00:30:46.540domo of each province. He actually wrote a letter to Pope Zachary asking for permission to do this,
00:30:53.580and Pope Zachary just tells him, it's completely licit and not a sin if you come down to Italy and0.91
00:31:00.940and help the lot help me not get beat up by the lombards so that shaving bit for the king of the
00:31:07.940franks would wear an extra long un probably wasn't ugly but an untrimmed beard and very long hair
00:31:16.700as a symbol of his power and authority and majesty and as the frankish king as the merovingian king
00:31:24.540becomes increasingly irrelevant the hair increasingly becomes this kind of like
00:31:29.300almost like sissy like characteristic like because it it starts out as a similar thing
00:31:37.540to the idea of like Chinese bureaucrats not clipping their pinky finger because it's like
00:31:42.840look at me I spend all day writing I don't have to trim my fingernails to go toil in the rice0.99
00:31:48.120fields like you peasants so the king starts out having these this this long hair because it's0.99
00:31:53.200like, I can afford to grow my hair out. I've got boys to get in between me and someone that wants
00:31:58.300to kill me. And then by the end, it's just this kind of, look how useless he is. He can't fight.0.99
00:32:04.860He'll trip over his own beard kind of thing, right? So who are the Merovingians? There's two0.99
00:32:12.260dynasties of note in this story. There's the Merovingians and the Carolingians. The Merovingians
00:32:17.880of the dynasty started by Clovis. They rule from 481 to 751. However, they quickly become
00:32:24.420sidelined by the major domos. Eventually, the Carolingians take over and oust the
00:32:29.540Marylandians formally. But I must be stressed that these dynasties are not real. The idea
00:32:36.100that any of these people at this time care about the generation after or prior to them is a complete
00:32:41.340fiction by later ideologues attempting to backport later medieval notions of dynastic politics
00:32:46.560onto an earlier time. This is why the Carolingians are actually named after
00:32:50.580Charlemagne and not Pippin or Arnulf, the nominal founders of this dynasty.
00:32:56.880These two men found dynasties that merge and become the lineage that results in
00:33:02.340Charlemagne, hence why they're the Carolingians. The Merovingians, however,
00:33:06.480are actually descended from an individual named Merovach whose name
00:33:11.520means sea bull a late christian tale tells us that this comes from when king clodio's wife
00:33:19.700was impregnated by a half bull half shark sea beast sent by neptune
00:33:25.540but no i was literally looking it up on the side to make sure you mention the bit of trivia because
00:33:33.260it's important it's and i have a i have an aside once you're done with this telling but given how
00:33:42.220germanic names work siebel here could have just been some guy and this could mean he was like a
00:33:48.060great sailor it doesn't necessarily mean he was literally like a sea monster sent by neptune um
00:33:56.140so this this sea monster theory could be just some crackpot monk coming it up to explain the name
00:34:03.260but speaking of crackpot monks so my aside is this
00:34:10.780you run into some strange types on the internet and uh you guys may have
00:34:15.740heard me mention dr flowers on here a number of times the preeminent runologist of our day um0.93
00:34:23.180His ancestry links back in some way to the Merovingian line, and a criticism and grounds for a mentally deranged, pink-haired hee-shee to try to take ownership of the Rune Guild and overthrow Edred, Dr. Flowers goes by the pen name Edred Thorson,0.92
00:34:51.020um was that he is ineligible because he is the uh he is the offspring of a sea monster and that was
00:35:00.740leveled against him as a charge and this was a serious discussion by a person claiming to be
00:37:02.800all right so this is a cleaner map of the frankish empire as i said burgundy starts out as an
00:37:15.360independent germanic tribe and ends up getting absorbed in so let's look at the frontiers of
00:37:22.700this empire to the southeast italy is run by the lombards the lombards were du jour christian
00:37:31.800waffling between Trinitarianism and Arianism, but de facto worshipped the Aesir at all levels
00:37:37.560of society into like the 700s, if the sources are to be believed, when public worship of the
00:37:43.940gods began to be suppressed. Lombardy is really interesting in other stories. The Lombards here
00:37:50.820are basically the Germanic tribe slash kingdom that holds Italy, although they do not hold the
00:37:56.720area around rome which is run by the pope the big summation of all of this is that the romans
00:38:02.640as in the city of roman's periphery ally with the franks against the lombards and the byzantines
00:38:08.160both of whom whom have ideas about conquering rome and putting their puppets on the throne of saint
00:38:13.520peter side note and point of connectivity to the lombards um who became the lombards their name was
00:38:22.720attested to in our war as being the the chosen of frig in a competition with uh odin on who
00:38:31.480went a battle and the trick was the women would um tie their hair in front over their face as if
00:38:41.020they had long beards instead of long hair and it come to it came to be kind of a fanciful telling
00:38:48.700their nomenclature but they you may hear that story in our lore and and recognize that also
00:38:55.020when we did the uh discussions about the bolsunga saga um the burgundians are mentioned in that
00:39:04.700cycle quite a bit a lot of people might not know where burgundy is uh modern folks and this gives
00:39:10.860you a good good understanding of that on this map it's it's kind of southeast france right
00:39:18.060That's Burgundy. So as I said, the Byzantines and the Lombards have their own designs about
00:39:27.100controlling the bishopric of the city of Rome. So this conflict comes to a head in the late 700s
00:39:35.740when in 771 Charlemagne invades Italy to keep the Pope in power. The Lombards were unable to unify.
00:39:42.460Charlemagne defeats them in battle, ends up conquering Italy. This all results in the
00:39:47.500Ghibelein versus Guelph conflict. I want to just kind of take a minute to talk about that,
00:39:52.780even though it's not really relevant to this story, but it shows how important this period is
00:39:57.500while also, you know, showing how fundamental this period is. Okay, so the Roman Empire gets
00:40:07.500split west and east because it's really hard to manage all of this stuff and0.80
00:40:13.120Christianity comes along and Christianity has this this thing called
00:40:17.780the Pentarchy which is so basically Christian Christians are led by bishops0.55
00:40:26.740bishops are all nominally co-equal right but there are patriarchs who are the big
00:40:34.680bishops the five patriarchs the pentarchy are the bishops of rome jerusalem constantinople
00:40:44.280alexandria and antioch right four of those agree that the patriarch of constantinople is uh the
00:40:56.200first among equals the one in charge the bishop in rome starts saying no i am i'm kind of speed
00:41:03.960running a really complicated theological and historical phenomena to get to where we care about
00:41:09.800in this digression. But the Byzantine emperor says,
00:41:15.480Nuh-uh, you work for me, because in Eastern Christianity, the church works for the emperor.
00:41:24.040Is that the case in Western Christianity? Well, that's a big discussion. So the Byzantine
00:41:29.880emperor says nah you work for me everyone works for me i'm in charge god put me in charge if you0.99
00:41:37.320don't like it i'm going to beat you up and kill you and so the byzantine emperor says hey king0.99
00:41:43.960of the lombards go to italy beat up the pope and replace him with whatever goon you feel like0.99
00:41:52.520the pope then turns to the franks and says hey we'll let you do whatever you want if you come0.68
00:41:59.320and keep the Lombards and the Byzantines from overthrowing the papal regime in Rome, right?
00:42:07.720So what eventually ends up happening is Charlemagne just gives territory to the pope,
00:42:16.920as if the pope were like one of his goons in the feudal regime.
00:42:21.480And this leads to the pope being a secular monarch of the city of Rome
00:42:27.160and an ambiguously bordered area around the city of Rome.
00:42:32.660So this leads to the Pope not just kind of being this abstract bureaucracy,
00:42:37.160or the papacy, not being this abstract bureaucracy,
00:42:39.160but being an actual independent regime with an army and a tax base.
00:42:47.160So does the king, the emperor, work for the Pope,
00:42:53.160or does the Pope work for the king or the emperor?
00:42:57.160That is a fundamental rift in Western political and theological history, and it's typically called the Ghibelein versus Guelph conflict, but every single country in Europe has its own little variant of it.
00:43:10.700So like in France, this is the distinction between Ultramontanism and I think it's Febronian, no, Gallicanism. Gallicanism and Ultramontanism. Ultramontanism is the Pope runs everything, Gallicanism is the King runs everything.
00:43:26.460And then there's Februnianism and Josephinism and all of these other silly names that basically come down to the king is in charge versus the pope is in charge.
00:43:36.800That characterizes Western political theory to this day.
00:43:41.700Even though the pope isn't really in charge anymore, the idea of an ideological force as opposed to, simply put, the nation state, that's still a thing we discuss in Western political theory to this day.
00:43:54.200because of this time because of this just yeah sure just just give the pope the tether peasants
00:43:59.960what do i care throw away gesture do you want to say something about this sir i don't but i do want
00:44:05.640to say something about nick in ohio who donated twenty dollars to bms thank you nick i appreciate
00:44:10.360it and while i'm on it and i got the talking stick for a sec i will say this relationship
00:44:17.720relationship between temporal and sacral power is fundamental to a lot of the things that Julius
00:44:25.500Evola writes about. He is very interested in the Guelph-Gibling controversy, and it's a freak,
00:44:35.780it's a, you know, I imagine it was a very important thing growing up in early 1900s Italy,
00:44:42.560but it's something I think that in the United States we don't hear enough about, or at least
00:44:46.520we didn't when i was in school so extraordinarily important this is a point that is not only
00:44:54.440relevant to our topic but helps you understand reading avala if you are so inclined to do
00:44:59.720so just to just to say real quick here um back to the digression real quick then we'll get back
00:45:05.420to the history i apologize so the pope is in rome right and then benito mussolini is doing
00:45:13.260literal actual fascism does the Pope get to have his independent state or not
00:45:19.980because that had actually been a hot-button topic in Italy for about a
00:45:24.080century by that point and there were a lot of people who said no the Pope does
00:45:27.660not get an independent state in Italy um Evola was actually on the side of
00:45:32.660Benito Mussolini basically just drafting the Pope I'm being a little
00:45:37.180flippant here because we just moving on quickly here but Benito Mussolini did
00:45:41.980listen and gave the pope a shell country the european microstate of the vatican city the
00:45:50.700the vatican is an independent country because of mussolini's decision there right so technically
00:45:57.500gone i was just gonna say a side note on evola and mussolini uh il duche was genuinely afraid
00:46:05.740that evola would put a hex on him and like yeah he didn't want to get any evil eye stuff going on
00:46:13.900from evola so right there's that okay so back to frankia all right a thousand years prior to that
00:46:23.900to the west was brittany which is that little peninsula coming off of france this was a romano
00:46:33.420Celtic province that resisted Frankish rule by allying with literally anyone and anyone that
00:46:38.760would fight the Franks slash France for literally any and every reason. At several points centuries
00:46:45.060after this tale, Brittany actually acted as a frequent ally and patron of
00:46:52.180Viking crews because when these Scandinavian pirates showed up, Brittany was like, oh wow,
00:46:58.800you're gonna make things worse for France? Count us in, right? Brittany actually only joins France1.00
00:47:06.960in 1490, for reference. 700 years after today's tale, Brittany becomes part of France.
00:47:14.560So further west was Britain, which was really only distantly of concern to the Franks.
00:47:21.200The people in Britain, however, were very concerned about what was going on with the Franks.
00:47:26.240Go see the episode that we did on the loyal Anglo-Saxons for more of what was going on on the ground at that time.
00:47:33.400So, to the southwest was Navara and Iberia.
00:47:38.380Iberia was inhabited by a complex combination of native Iberians, Vascognics, Celts, Romans, Greeks, North Africans, Levantines, a lot of people.0.57
00:59:46.500Basically, the entirety of the Pyrenees revolts and either turns independent or joins with Al-Andalus.
00:59:52.460The rest of his regime completely explodes, setting up the basic three-way distinction between Italy, what becomes France, and what becomes Germany, the Holy Roman Empire.
01:00:01.980So, I have to step aside for a minute.
01:00:04.860do you want to handle anything in the chat while i do so sir sure um so while i'm talking about
01:00:09.900people's awesome um monikers i don't know if he mentioned sometimes and again this is silly and
01:00:17.580it's obvious to a lot of us but to some of us it might not be charlemagne wasn't the guy's name
01:00:22.940it was charles the great carlos magnus or charlemagne all francais um i don't go with the
01:00:31.580the gust of what Chris does when I'm doing my foreign languages, so you have to forgive me for
01:00:35.580that. Looking over on the side on some questions
01:00:39.660to hit while we wait for Chris's triumphant return,
01:01:05.740I don't presume what the gods ultimately judge as your destination.
01:01:13.960But I think that authentic religion is more natural and straightforward than that.
01:01:26.920I don't think that. We have this idea in the modern West that you get to just choose your religion from a smorgasbord of religious options.
01:01:41.480And you do in the sense that you get to choose what to practice, but you don't get to choose truth. Truth is true whether you choose it or not.
01:01:49.600and there you know might be a great number of religions that have degrees of truth to them
01:01:55.660but reality is reality and when you pass your afterlife is what it is and i don't think that
01:02:04.540the gods take your religious proclivities into designing you a special afterlife or doing some
01:02:13.200kind of, you know, sports team trade with other deities as to your immortal soul. I don't think
01:02:21.000it works that way. I do think that your religious choices in your life factor into how the gods
01:02:28.660might judge you. But again, that's entirely up to them. That's not my call. That's their call.
01:02:36.680But no, I don't think objectively, like if you choose to be a Christian,
01:02:39.900Jewish God gets your soul. I think if you choose to be a Christian, you go to white people afterlife0.96
01:02:46.820and our gods and your ancestors make those judgments about what happens to you in that0.84
01:02:54.040in that instance and in that situation. But I'd also like to say we don't think that
01:02:59.020oftentimes we use the term afterlife and we don't really mean all that afterlife implies.
01:03:07.220after life implies that you have life to live and challenges to face and other things to be done
01:03:14.180beyond the veil so i don't think that your choices in this life are necessarily one and done for the
01:03:22.400progression of your soul beyond the veil i think that's a mystery that we will find out much more
01:03:28.380about when we find ourselves there but yeah in that sense i don't think your choice of religion
01:03:34.580you get to like choose where you go i think your choice of religion though does affect how the gods
01:03:40.580judge who you are as a man or a woman and chris has returned to us i hand you back the talking
01:03:49.300stick yes all right so 814 charlemagne dies the pyrenees revolts and either turns independent
01:03:58.900interjoins with Al-Andalus. The rest of his regime completely explodes, setting up the basic
01:04:04.840three-way distinction between Italy, what becomes France, and what becomes Germany,
01:04:09.080the Holy Roman Empire. So the Carolingian dynasty ends in what becomes Germany in 911,
01:04:16.300when Louis the Child died without heirs. He was 18 and probably killed himself.
01:04:24.380The nobility elects Conrad of Franconia as their king.
01:04:29.180This essentially begins the Holy Roman Empire as we come to know it.
01:04:33.340The Carolingian dynasty ends in 987 in what becomes France when Hugh of Capet dethrones
01:04:39.740the last Carolingian king. Italy remained part of the Holy Roman Empire but was de facto composed
01:04:45.340of independent polities that were never really under Carolingian rule, meaning that Italy
01:04:50.620essentially leaves with Germany but is doing its own thing once they get to the car. Okay,
01:04:58.940the Battle of Tours. This is a big deal in western consciousness anachronistically.
01:05:06.540At the time it wasn't really that big of a deal, but it ends up being seen as one later.
01:05:14.460The meta-historical reason why people care about the Battle of Tours is that it is part of
01:05:18.700of attempting to craft a lineage for several feudal states going back to
01:05:23.040Clovis, who is treated as this progenitor to Charlemagne, the ideal Christian king
01:05:30.020leading Europe out of barbarism, but simultaneously defending it from Islam.
01:05:35.940The Christian intellectual world really does not know what to think of Islam0.97
01:05:40.880for approaching 800 years. The first 400 years certainly it's seen as a very
01:05:48.240foreign strange thing but barely understood many Christian intellectuals
01:05:53.740up until relatively recently did not understand that Muslims were mono0.74
01:05:58.620theists like it's very common for many Christian intellectuals to very
01:06:04.140earnestly believe that Muslims worshipped the evil Trinity of Baphomet0.88
01:06:09.660Mahomet and Apollyon Apollyon isn't Apollo Apollyon is a demon from Jewish
01:06:15.140demonology um and you know mahomet is one of the evil gods of islam in addition to muhammad being
01:06:24.040the evil prophet it's not it's not really well understood at the time right and they don't0.93
01:06:31.780really see it as anything other than a sort of opponent until the islamic world starts having0.98
01:06:39.820philosophy and theology leaking into the christian world you look vexed sir do you want to say
01:06:44.280something no i just want to ask and i it'd be better for a side chat but it is what it is
01:06:49.780are you going to talk about end times theology as relates to christian worldview in this period
01:06:57.520i wouldn't but if i wasn't planning on it um do you have something you want to say we could
01:07:03.700ramble about that that's just some of the some of the thoughts about the evil of islam at this time
01:07:12.340you may have noticed some of what chris was saying christians and it's i mean it's very
01:07:18.900relevant to our day right now with our war united states and israel's war with iran
01:07:28.420it's very common literally since the time of christ to see the end times as right around the
01:07:37.220bend um you start seeing that a lot very early on and then they get bored with it and they're like
01:07:44.580all right you think it's going to happen we don't know cool we'll chill for a little bit
01:07:49.300as you start approaching the first millennium um people start looking that at that a little
01:07:57.460bit more the idea of some of the rise of islam and the rise of a very powerful um
01:08:02.500non-christian force those are always cast in antichrist and so you have you know you have0.82
01:08:13.360the devil and his antichrist in muhammad and you have those kind of things a lot of those
01:08:19.060come into play and crystallize around the forming of the holy roman empire with charlemagne in this
01:08:27.820period again the christian um theologians and church fathers in these days are trying to figure
01:08:36.540out what that looks like it's i suppose akin in my own point of reference uh coming from jehovah's
01:08:43.660witnesses for a time i think i coined a term i don't know if it's an ism but whatever
01:08:49.900or they would come up with calculations
01:08:53.360and be like, aha, the end's coming in this year,
01:11:57.940What's important is that this battle becomes important 300 years later, when these millenarian end-of-the-world, the Antichrist is here, thoughts appear.0.55
01:12:11.940So the Franks don't really care about the Antichrist.0.84
01:12:15.940They don't really care about Islam except in as much as there's these guys in Iberia that are fighting us.0.86
01:12:21.940us. But honestly, the majority of the Muslim forces were just Iberians anyways. So it's0.66
01:12:29.120literally just a struggle between the Franks and the Iberians, right? So why this becomes
01:12:37.360important is because the anti and antichrist properly means the other Christ. He leads
01:12:44.480the parallel enemy church that is trying to found or take over a state that is in opposition to the
01:12:53.640good Christian realm. So around 1000 AD, the Islamic world starts getting really coherent0.92
01:13:01.000and it starts having this tremendous philosophical and intellectual output that starts leaking into
01:13:08.360europe thomas aquinas ends up writing all of his theological works because years after after 1080
01:13:18.160because he and many other christians look out and see that they are completely outmatched by the
01:13:25.160islamic intellectual world part of this is because the islamic intellectual world just had
01:13:30.920a better relationship with philosophy greek philosophy going in it's really complicated
01:13:37.300and not worth talking too much about the specifics
01:13:39.620because from the Christian perspective,
01:13:41.560this matches what they were waiting for.
01:13:43.920The parallel religion with its parallel empire
01:16:39.300wasn't necessarily a big deal at the time it was just another in a series of battles
01:16:48.340but it's come down to us as one of the most heroic you know pivotal moments in history0.66
01:16:54.900those warriors who faced off against the muslims at the time didn't know what they didn't know what
01:17:01.540it would become they knew in the moment they needed to rise to the occasion and what they
01:17:07.940accomplished in that moment became legend it's important for all of us to realize some of us feel
01:17:14.660like we live very simple lives but by doing the right thing at the right time putting yourselves
01:17:20.580in position to do great things sometimes really important things sneak sneak up on you and you
01:17:30.500only realize their significance you know years down the road or uh history realizes their
01:17:36.660significance, perhaps well after you're dead and gone. They're very important. I think it's
01:17:43.800really educational and inspiring for us to look at our life in those terms. You never know what
01:17:52.460you do in this world, the ripples that it sets out or how celebrated it might be by those who
01:17:58.640come after you. So it's worth taking shots because you miss out on every shot you don't take
01:18:06.240And you never know when one of those shots ends up being something that's, you know, possibly history changing.
01:18:14.060Other thing I wanted to mention, and again, because you guys keep it rolling in, I'm not trying to make this about that, but I appreciate it.
01:18:22.740Sarah in Ohio also donated $20 to Frazehoff.
01:19:29.380okay he'll be back you know in a couple of years okay maybe he'll be back in the next generation
01:19:37.780okay a hundred's a round number maybe he'll be back a hundred years from when he died
01:19:43.680and every time they approached a new century or a new landmark thing that they can interpret some
01:19:52.120meaning to okay that's when jesus is coming back we're still in an age where that was a very
01:20:00.120mainstream thing that christian theologians wrestled with whereas now i think there's a
01:20:07.560current to where all right we have no idea and maybe it's allegorical and maybe it's this and
01:20:13.800And maybe it's that. And I think the effect of a 2000 year wait has really changed how modern Christianity in the mainstream, like in orthodoxy or in Catholicism looks at it.
01:20:29.100but you do in the united states still see um a lot in you know protestant baptist flavored
01:20:39.900congregations a very imminent like the end is here we have to put things in place that was a
01:20:47.340very motivating factor for certain elements politically at this time period and it's worth
01:20:54.700remembering, you know, this, you don't realize what matters until much later. Little things
01:20:59.020matter. That doesn't just, that's not just about the Franks. That's about the Al-Andalusi side here0.66
01:21:05.080as well. This, this guy, Ahmad, goes off in a bandit raid a little too far out. 18 years later,
01:21:13.320the Umayyad Caliphate collapses because of a Shiite rebellion in Coruscant. Like, what? Right?0.99
01:21:20.420From the Muslim perspective, they've been on this glorious sprint, waving the flag forward, and then they trip and faceplant right in the dirt.0.91
01:21:32.500And not quickly after this, but relatively soon, all things considered after this, Iberians start retaking, Christian Iberians start retaking land from the Muslim rulers in what is really the only large scale military defeat of Islam as an intellectual force by Christians.0.92
01:22:00.860everywhere else it can't really be said that christianity beat back islam except in iberia0.76
01:22:07.500right so they have a certain consciousness on the other side about this battle of tours that
01:22:15.260is different from how we see it it's not necessarily just the other side of the coin
01:22:21.260right did you want to throw in something there real quick sir
01:22:24.220no i was just that i was just going to refresh for the audience
01:22:28.300the date on the battle of tours and its relation to the topic at hand
01:22:34.320oh do you want me to say it um i'm sorry i don't 7 32 just in case anybody out there is
01:22:42.980is trying to track because we're throwing a lot of things at them and i know that some of my
01:22:48.060digressions are perhaps muddying that so so people attract it it makes sense charlemagne's grandfather
01:22:55.240and 732 why do we care about charlemagne's grandfather in 732 there's about 1000 years
01:23:03.020between the beginnings of christendom as it was seen in the high medieval period and the actual
01:23:09.000beginnings of france and the papacy as we know them today france and the papacy really begin
01:23:14.800around 1000 AD. It's not until this millenarian period that a lot of what we understand as the
01:23:22.180medieval world really begins. Remember, Hugh of Capet only takes power and forms what we now know
01:23:28.800as France in 987. There's 200 years between Tours and France starting, right? So why do we care about
01:23:41.760the Battle of Tours. Why does anyone care about it? The glorification of the Carolingians is
01:23:47.700necessary to fill in a gap between Jesus and 1080. It is necessary to construct the idea of
01:23:59.480Clovis and Charles Martel and Charlemagne as these wonderful Christian kings that lead Europe
01:24:05.660out of barbarism and into a glorious Christian future, in part to just figure out what a Christian0.68
01:24:12.380future looks like, but also to justify all of the problems that arose from Merovingian and0.96
01:24:18.220Carolingian rule. Remember, these people, these Carolingian and Merovingian kings are really
01:24:24.220immoral, like murdering their sons, betraying their brothers, immoral. So there's actually,
01:24:32.620There's an attempt to smooth over the failings, in addition to constructing what it means to be a Christian opposing Islam,0.90
01:24:40.620in addition to constructing what a Christian world order, independent from the assumption of universal Roman rule, looks like.0.71
01:24:48.620This is actually two parallel narrative strains that are being constructed here.
01:24:52.620One is that of a single unified France, which is the sole legitimate European polity, making it as such justified in conquering all other European polities,0.77
01:25:01.620and that of a single unified Christendom, which is justified in offensive action against European polytheists, heretics, and Muslims.0.93
01:25:11.620On the French front, firstly, there's an attempt at creating a glorious and continuous past into antiquity for the very new and very young Capetian state.0.80
01:25:23.620state. Secondly, there's an attempt at dealing with the uncomfortable fact that despite ruling
01:25:28.400in France, the Franks were actually Germans. Like, Clovis becomes Louis. Clovis referred to0.71
01:25:36.600himself as Hlobwix. Like, he didn't go by Louis, right? Thirdly, there's an attempt at smoothing
01:25:44.320over the legitimacy problems that arose from Hugh of Capet, essentially just stealing the crown from
01:25:49.860its rightful owner, right? On the Christian front, the Pope at this time is trying to wage several
01:25:56.100offensive wars against the Islamic world by venting excess Germanic warriors into the0.89
01:26:00.620Dar al-Islam, the Dar al-Islam, the House of Submission, that's their equivalent of Christendom.0.96
01:26:06.640This is new for Christianity because up until this point, Christianity had just been the0.99
01:26:10.820spiritual bureaucracy of a vast empire that ruled the world through the fiat of Jupiter.
01:26:16.880There weren't really ideological opponents to Christianity, they were just thought criminals
01:26:20.560to be tried in the court of law. But now the Pope found himself arrayed by a great number of enemies.
01:26:26.240Firstly, again, Islam wasn't going away and it posed an intellectual and military threat to0.99
01:26:30.800Christianity. Secondly, Baltia and Scandinavia were both full of pagans who were actively waging0.96
01:26:37.120defensive wars against Christian aggression and even engaging in the occasional successful
01:26:41.760offensive action. Thirdly, the Great Schism had happened, circa 1084, in which
01:26:47.760the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches formally
01:26:50.880excommunicated each other, meaning that Eastern Europe and the Levant were now
01:26:54.900officially full of heretics. As an aside, the Pope says that the Greek and
01:27:02.000Russian Orthodox patriarchs are committing mortal sins, or at least he
01:27:07.620used to back in the testicles the greek and russian orthodox patriarchs both say the other
01:27:14.260is committing mortal sins over whether or not the ukraine is part of russia or not so there's
01:27:20.420this 1084 thing there's a cascade a failure cascade of christians just denouncing each other
01:27:28.120that leads to the modern pastor bob at the baptist bible preach man bible revival hour is the only
01:27:35.660her church and everyone else is doing it wrong and going to hell kind of thing we see in American
01:27:39.880Protestantism, right? So starting in the 11th century, there's this attempt at reconstructing0.71
01:27:45.780Charlemagne as not just the big thug that the Pope hired, but rather as a French Christian
01:27:52.440emperor who was waging a preemptive defensive war against the enemies of a singular unified
01:27:58.200Christendom. Then a few centuries later, the Germans get in on the action and instead start0.89
01:28:04.860reconstructing Charlemagne as a German Christian Emperor, waging defensive wars
01:28:09.120against the satanic French regime, hence Clovis's preemptive invasion of Gaul in
01:28:13.920the first place, and his minion, the Pope. Because remember there's this whole... the
01:28:19.440Pope actually excommunicates a Holy Roman Emperor twice during all of this
01:28:24.600european gibberein versus guelph saga so um the song of roland is a is composed during this 11th
01:28:37.560century reconstruction of charlemagne make french noises
01:28:47.960this is a lament about a failed bandit raid that charlemagne waged against the nominally christian
01:28:53.640basques to aid his islamic allies um so uh the the i'll talk about this a little more later but
01:29:04.120the carolingians made the ideal subject of this narrative craft as they fought against the asatruar
01:29:10.040the muslims and heretical christians because remember clovis and really all of all of these0.71
01:29:17.640merovingian and carolingian kings are waging wars against arians really wacky smaller christian0.88
01:29:25.680heresies that we know very little about but when the pope says like go kill that guy he's not jesus0.98
01:29:31.740right they do it right so pagans muslims other christians the franks are the ideal subject to0.89
01:29:41.300glorify on those grounds because they fought those three groups. Both of these competing0.88
01:29:47.520narratives are not just attempting to claim Charlemagne in the name of France and Germany,
01:29:51.040but also to interweave Charlemagne in particular, but also Charles Martel and Clovis to a lesser
01:29:57.840degree, into a distinctly Roman inheritance. The Merovingian dynasty was established by
01:30:03.140overthrowing rule, so Frankish patronage of the papacy is reconstructed to imply some sort of
01:30:08.340continuity, going back to Julius Caesar, and importantly Constantine, who Charlemagne, in his
01:30:14.040life, was compared to. Charlemagne is reconstructed as being the second coming of Constantine, of
01:30:22.380David, of all of these great Christian and Christian kings. This in turn is spliced into
01:30:30.520biblical narratives going back to ultimately what they're trying to do is craft a glorious
01:30:38.320lineage to defend whatever the french german or papal governments are trying to do at a given time
01:30:45.560we've been doing this since charlemagne we have to do this now is what they're trying to say
01:30:51.900well and in case anybody doesn't know and i assume that a lot of us do but there are some
01:30:56.960listening to this that don't, that legitimacy back to the Roman Empire is something that
01:31:06.680was politically relevant up until the First World War. The Kaiser and the Tsar, both of those words
01:31:17.860root from caesar from legitimacy from rome itself the two-headed eagle on the russian heraldry is
01:31:27.500that um so that is it's not just like it's remarkable to think that in
01:31:36.600my great-grandfather's time that was still a very relevant political uh football and it exuded
01:31:45.260outwards, the Ottoman Caliph ostensibly justified his rule as being the Qasr al-Rum, the Caesar of
01:31:56.940Rome. When Muslims talk about Rum, they're actually talking about the Byzantine Empire. They're not0.57
01:32:01.180really talking about, like, Italy and Julius Caesar, but it's semantics. When the Ottoman0.93
01:32:09.460caliph conquered constantinople he achieved a massive propaganda victory in the islamic world0.98
01:32:17.960the essentially almost all just nudging him up to being this like the third below the prophet
01:32:28.880muhammad right i'm not the theology doesn't matter here but the ottoman sultanate took
01:32:36.020out rome that means they are the legitimate islamic empire for the rest of history as far as allah is
01:32:44.620concerned they won and kasar al-rum was one of the titles that the ottoman sultan one of the more
01:32:52.760important titles that the ottoman sultan held and the ottoman sultan actually justified conquests
01:32:58.120into the balkans and further deep into europe on the grounds that he's the kasar al-rum he needs to
01:33:05.080rule in the city of rome he is the rightful successor of julius caesar and constantine and
01:33:10.580all of that it this legitimacy of rome literally radiated outwards to competing empires that's how
01:33:21.320important this rome stuff is right and what's going on in this millenarian period is an attempt
01:33:27.860to construct a narrative going forwards to both justify ugly periods in the past but also construct
01:33:36.340an idea of what the heck to do going forwards. That going forwards continues to affect us today
01:33:45.060and part of why I think it's important for us to do these history autism deep dive episodes is for
01:33:52.900us as a satruar to stop and analyze history a little more objectively rather than just
01:34:00.980going forwards with well someone told me the battle of tours was important so i'm just going
01:34:06.500to keep rolling with it that's not just your tism is celebrated amongst our audience chris
01:34:11.780and amongst my household thank you isn't on that's not to say that tours isn't important
01:34:18.660but we should stop and think and ask ourselves why do people say this is important and what does
01:34:25.920it mean for us going forwards right all of this is to say as we get to the final frontier of the
01:34:33.500frankish geopolitical world that the concoction of romanity germanity and christianity gets
01:34:42.960extremely hard to stomach the more you spend time thinking about it. So let's
01:34:49.560come to the fourth and final, and most important, frontier of our story. Let's
01:34:56.000back this up and get to this final frontier. So can you throw up the
01:34:59.880fourth image, Nick? Alright, so what what is happening here? A bandit click
01:35:08.100manages to get a hold of a tax base and use it to fund wide-scale extortion and
01:35:12.680marauding across Europe. This results in chains of bandit hierarchy. As the top
01:35:18.120bandits increasingly centralize power, they become increasingly something akin
01:35:22.380to a government. However, terror, violence, assassination, and intrigue are still
01:35:26.740how anything gets done. Finally, they're using forced
01:35:31.040conversion to a religious and political network as a casus belli to engage in
01:35:35.820wanton violence and wealth extraction. They come to blows with competing
01:35:40.680power centers in Iberia, the Visigoths and then later the Muslims, Italy, the Lombards, and Brittany,0.77
01:35:46.600the Gallaromans. In the east, they wage a near constant military conflict with competing bandit
01:35:53.740cliques, many of whom are actually being funded by the Byzantine Empire that is trying to stop a
01:35:58.820power center from forming in western Europe. In between all of this, there's the north. Gaul and
01:36:05.280Germania were the periphery of the Roman world, and Saxony and Frisia, the northernmost parts of
01:36:11.140Germania, was thus the periphery of the periphery. So Saxony is that area south of Denmark, and then
01:36:18.460Frisia is that coastal area west of Saxony, right? At the same time, this super periphery was also
01:36:26.440the surface upon which a new Europe was in contact with an old Europe. The frontiers of Britain and
01:36:32.600Scandinavia brought their goods or trade to the river port cities of Frisia, which traded them to
01:36:39.140Saxony, which would flow further into Europe. It was the Angles in southern Denmark, the Utes or
01:36:45.700the Judas in northern Denmark, and the Saxons in northern Germany that formed the bulk of the
01:36:52.700colonists of Britain. This region was also a frontier for the westward movements of Slavic
01:36:58.360peoples and of Scandinavians. It was also the last major holdout of Asatru outside of Scandinavia.
01:37:07.000So why does anyone care about Frisia and Saxony? Because there's a lot of people there and a lot
01:37:14.520of people spreading out of that region into the rest of Europe and into this otherwise empty
01:37:21.320frontier of Britain. Because remember, with the wake of the collapse, with the collapse of the
01:37:26.040the roman empire britain is empty it's not you you typically hear like anglo-saxon invasion
01:37:33.280by brits invasion makes it sound like a bunch of guys showed up in chain mail and started
01:37:39.480stabbing dudes in togas when the anglo-saxons showed up to britain they found forums and
01:37:45.140marketplaces full of overgrowth and weeds because everyone just got up and left this was
01:37:51.480one at one of the really empty places of europe right and after britain it's like what iceland
01:37:58.620there's nowhere else that was really empty in europe at the time so there's this massive
01:38:03.360outflow of people there's this massive inflow of goods to continental europe and it's all
01:38:08.800entering continental europe at these river port cities in frisia and saxony because frisia in
01:38:16.000particular but to a lesser degree saxony doesn't really have much in terms of natural resources
01:38:21.040because it's a very lowland river wet place the netherlands comes about because the dutch
01:38:27.760realized that they can pump water out of dikes and levees faster than the sea can push it in
01:38:34.180until then it's just swamps but you know what you can bring into that swamp really easily
01:38:39.440a boat and then you take your goods off of that boat and you bring it into a city where people
01:38:46.180in the city move it further into Europe and everyone makes a lot of money. The Franks look1.00
01:38:52.900north and they see that. This region had much to offer the Merovingian and Carolingian regime,
01:38:59.460but it was also full of people who looked southwards and didn't like what they were seeing.0.71
01:39:20.880Okay, the Saxon loyalists unto death themselves.
01:39:26.200All right, throw up the sixth image, Nick.
01:39:32.580Okay, so one of the secondary antagonists in Radbaud's tale is Charles Martel, who we've been talking about a bit.
01:39:39.880he had been ruling on behalf of the Merovingian kings. In 737, Theoderic IV died, and Charles
01:39:47.360Martel simply took power. A period of civil war took place, culminating in Childeric III,
01:39:52.420the last Merovingian king, being ritually shaved and humiliated, following by his internment in a
01:39:57.800monastery. As an aside, internment in a monastery at this period might very often mean they drop him
01:40:04.880off in a monastery, and then some monk kills him. So his son, Childerick's son, was similarly
01:40:10.980imprisoned. This was all accepted because Charles Martell made a large donation to the papacy,
01:40:15.760which ultimately results in the papal states. Charles Martell died with little fanfare in 741.
01:40:21.240The realm was broken up between his sons, Carolman and Pepin. Charles Martell fought the Battle of
01:40:27.500Tours, so on and so forth. The Aquitanians agreed to... we don't need to get into that.
01:40:34.880In 748 or so, Pepin had a son, Karl. Karl would go on to rule Francia alongside his uncle, helping them to pillage and rape the Aquitanians and the Basque country.
01:40:46.880When Karelman died, a brief civil war ensued, and Charlemagne divorced his wife to acquire a new one and take over.0.67
01:40:52.880After he acquired sole power, Charlemagne began a campaign against the Saxons, who had been a frequent victim of Frankish aggression up to this point.
01:41:00.880This was necessary as Charlemagne pretty quickly needed to start bribing people to accept his legitimacy.
01:41:06.880Much of the period literature attempts to craft Charlemagne and prior Frankish kings as Israeli-style despots
01:41:12.880who had been given a divine mandate over their neighbors.
01:41:15.880The Franks were religiously authorized to commit violence against the Saxon civilians.
01:41:21.880Thus, their very existence as not being under Charlemagne's control meant that they are rebels and bandits.0.95
01:41:29.880So the Franks were justified in preemptively enslaving them, stealing their stuff, murdering0.96
01:41:34.280civilians, burning down villages and cities, etc. Starting in 772 with Charlemagne's destruction0.98
01:41:41.240of the Irminsule, a Saxon leader by the name of Widukind, which means like wooden child. We don't
01:41:47.640actually have a cognitive kind in English, but it'd be something like kinth if we did. Widukind0.93
01:41:53.560leads numerous defensive actions against Charlemagne's commanders when Charlemagne was0.84
01:41:58.280personally busy helping the muslims invade gothic christian strongholds down in uh iberia
01:42:05.240the famous chanson he's not here for me to do it chanson and 11th century ballot is about one of
01:42:12.360charlemagne's officers being ambushed by basques after having raped and pillaged the basque
01:42:16.840countryside specifically the events of the chanson are about a basque force ambushing the army of the
01:42:23.240the Frankish commander Roland after the siege of Pamplona, which was specifically done to destroy
01:42:28.760the walls of the city and end its thitherto centuries-long position as a seat of opposition
01:42:35.080to foreign invasion in the region. Namely, importantly, in opposition to Frankish power,
01:42:41.240but also to the Muslims. The theory was, well, if we can't have it, no one can. If we can't control0.99
01:42:47.540the region, then we're okay with the Muslims taking it. So this results in the destruction1.00
01:42:54.120of the Irminsul. As I said, in 772, Charlemagne destroys the Irminsul as punishment upon the
01:43:01.900Saxons for them not truckling to his tyranny. So do you want to talk about Widukind real quick,0.99
01:43:10.420sir. Do you have anything to throw in about him? No. Okay. All right. So let's talk about the
01:43:20.000Ehrman Sewell. Okay. So I'm not just doing that to be comical. No, carry on with your narrative.
01:43:24.840If it becomes relevant later, we can go into it. All right. So 772 Charlemagne destroys the
01:43:33.400what is the ehrminsule all right an ehrminsule is described as a large pillar but also an altar
01:43:44.040there's a few of these described but the ehrminsule was at uh haasbelg now obermarsbelg
01:43:53.000in germany um modern most pre-modern most pre-modern depictions of the ehrminsule have it
01:44:00.840is a large log or like a greco-roman style column or like a standing but dead tree with the branches
01:44:08.680cut off possibly with a statue atop of it um widokind of corvay describes an irman soul with
01:44:16.220a statue atop it like a statue of a god now to clarify widokind is a normal name in saxony at
01:44:24.400this time it means wood child child of the forest widokind of corvay is a christian writer under
01:44:30.560unrelated to Widukind the Rebel, I guess we could call him. Widukind of Corvay may have been a
01:44:37.240descendant of Widukind the Rebel. We don't have any firm proof of that. It doesn't really matter,
01:44:41.280right? The modern depiction of the Ehrman Sewell, the Hymen depiction, if you will,
01:44:49.320Hymen, ovaries, you know what I mean. You know what I'm talking about. Throw up the seventh image,
01:44:55.400Nick. This comes from a rock carving at De Exensteine, a large sandstone formation in the
01:45:05.060Tudelberg forest. On one of these blocks of sandstone is a relief of Yeshua's removal from
01:45:12.080crucifixion. One of the figures, Nicodemus, appears to be standing on what came to be understood as
01:45:18.440the Irmansul. I'll let the audience take a second. Can you see it? It's not immediately obvious.
01:45:25.400All right, so, or rather, one guy thought it was the Ermenssoul.
01:45:35.380German archaeologist Wilhelm Toit, who would later go on to lead the Annanerba, saw it
01:45:40.160as the Ermenssoul bent over, so this thing.
01:45:43.360There's that lady, and then on her left, there's that thing that Nicodemus is just floating
01:54:36.960He had a nameplate, but how far above his head was it?
01:54:40.200These questions don't matter because the symbol is a symbol, the specific shape.
01:54:47.660If there was an Inquisitor around, it would matter a lot to the inch.
01:54:54.640If there was an Inquisitor around, I have a feeling they would care about other things in my life more than what I think Jesus's cross looks like.
01:55:03.480But this is a good example. What does Thor's hammer look like?
01:55:07.000Oh, well, that's not exactly what Mjolnir looks like. It's a symbol. The Ehrminsule is a symbol. It is a ritual pillar that holds up the heavens. Charlemagne had one of them torn down.
01:55:21.680What precise thing we use to represent the pillar that Charlemagne tore down is less important than the ritual significance of the pillar that upholds the heavens, right?
01:55:37.000I think there's a modern reluctance of, we live in a time where there's so much cynicism
01:55:47.740and so much just critique all the time on social media.
01:55:52.560People don't want to choose the wrong thing.
01:55:55.320Well, actually, that's a stylized palm tree.1.00
01:56:00.920People don't want to get mugged on the X.
01:56:06.380And I think that's ultimate, and it sounds silly, and my grandfather would have laughed at us, but it's the world we live in, and social media and the nonsense bickering that goes on there is a relevant thing.
01:56:27.620So I think in modern Ausatru, people want to celebrate this symbol that traditionally has been very important to us, but they don't want to face the scrutiny of the well-actually crowd criticizing them.
01:57:08.780And Christian chroniclers note this, Charlemagne topples this pillar because he's a big mean bully, therefore Widukin gets off his butt and says, all right, I'm going off to war.0.91
01:57:20.640Christian chroniclers note that chain of causality, knocking over the Irminsoul, whatever was on top of that pillar, caused Widukin to get mad and go lead an army.
01:57:33.000I want to throw in one more thing about the symbol before we move on to Toit, because he's a character that's important in this tale.
01:57:38.780people also expect a higher standard of truth with us like you'll know i've noticed this about
01:57:45.900the pagan sphere not just we internally but people looking at us expect us to be right
01:57:52.700like if you're a christian you can just make up whatever you want like you can just say whatever
01:57:59.560and people are like okay whatever but then if you worship thor it's like oh you're expected to
01:58:05.920actually tell the truth and i it's it's annoying to deal with like well actually on the internet
01:58:13.520and all that but i do kind of like the internal and external assumption that like no we are correct
01:58:19.760it's a problem if we're wrong we have to have our ducks in a row because truth matters
01:58:24.880it is an interesting sort of enforcement upon an enforcement of virtue whether we like it or not
01:58:31.300right? All right, Toit, Wilhelm Toit. Toit shows up in a lot of stuff in the early 1900s because
01:58:42.080he was an early modern scholar of Germany's ancient history. Germany's history was extremely
01:58:47.720poorly documented to the degree that the Germans simply had no idea how many castles there were in
01:58:53.640Germany. So Toit was doing literally anything and that set a massive precedent. He wrote a book
01:59:30.160all the places we used to worship thora that was huge that twight was even just trying this right
01:59:36.120he actually ended up getting kicked out of the annanerbe in 1938 because he his myer uh his0.97
01:59:43.500myers-briggs personality type was quarrelsome jerk and he was apparently physically incapable0.95
01:59:48.940of not arguing with heimerick himmler about literally anything and everything he could get0.98
01:59:53.920is apparently this guy it's not good for career advancement to argue with rights career ss
02:00:02.160yeah so here's kind of a note for anybody who's
02:00:06.720we got a lot we got all sorts listen to the the broadcast so for what it is
02:00:13.280it is always an uncomfortable balance for a lot of people to acknowledge that there was
02:00:24.640a renaissance of things in the 1930s in germany that coincided with other events including
02:00:34.400the second world war including um race relations that are unfavorable to certain peoples
02:00:46.480that doesn't mean that everyone who lived in the german reich was you know a terrible human being
02:00:57.040there was a lot of really um innovative things done in studying about history and studying about
02:01:04.560pre-germanic religion you know people make note that we share a lot of symbology
02:01:11.520what we do because at this time we were uncovering archaeology about our shared ancestry
02:01:18.160and sacred symbols from our past to unfairly loop everything in with um political narratives about
02:01:28.080second world war or about events related to it does a disservice to a lot of very very serious
02:01:35.520academics and good-hearted germans that spent time trying to understand our history understand
02:01:47.120forgotten pieces of that history that have been lost to us and understanding the elder faith
02:01:53.600and the elder period that way and we do you know we do all our folk a disservice
02:02:00.960by discounting things out of hand because nazis are scary or whatever it's worthwhile as noble
02:02:09.360people for us to take a critical eye to look at things and examine scholarship fairly even if it
02:02:16.080occurred during that period so just to give an example of the massive importance of we can look
02:02:24.880at people like wilhelm twight and say that they were silly and wrong about this and that and how
02:02:28.960they should have known better and did they not consider consider that for that less than 200
02:02:37.360years before toit's birth germans did not know where uh tudorberg was like the tudorberg site
02:02:46.560the mountain of the folk the fortress of the race the place where germany beat back rome
02:02:55.840the founding spot of the german germanic even to a degree people germans didn't know where that was
02:03:04.000was in their country it's it was where their country began they could not tell you where it
02:03:08.640was they didn't know it took people like toit trying a lot of things and looking around to
02:03:17.120find it and right we only really succeeded due to modern archaeological techniques nowadays but
02:03:24.800people like toit were setting a massive precedent imagine if we don't we didn't know where the
02:03:29.760declaration of independence was signed where was our country started we don't know so this is a
02:03:37.040this is a crisp flex i'm i'm down to ride we're gonna ride this till the wheels fall off we have
02:03:44.400not substantially talked about the loyal saxons we're two hours in tonight folks
02:03:52.960i genuinely think this should entitle you to a certain amount of college credits
02:03:58.240um this has been a master class on the politics of the carolingian empire and on the birth of
02:04:12.040medieval europe and we still have a lot to go and like i said i'm here for the duration
02:04:19.080This is an awesome episode. Chris, seriously, hats off to you. This is amazing. And anybody listening, the amount of time and research and carefully creating this kind of a presentation, it's truly astounding.
02:04:44.980and uh you know i've talked to the speckinger uh the gothar any number of afa members
02:04:54.740chris you are awesome and we appreciate you and these episodes are fantastic thank you so much
02:05:01.620for what you bring to us thank you sir thank you that that means a lot i'm glad that my efforts are
02:07:21.500and if you have a specific gripe about a person and an alleged war crime or whatever i get that
02:07:28.380But to talk about people, especially in the pre-war period, if we're doing academic research, it's very hard when the official party that is the governing structure of an empire, like the Reich,
02:07:47.880Like, to say that, you know, pre-war, we understood that the Germans were leading a lot of academic fields in a very significant way.
02:08:02.300to delegitimize them because of alleged things that are very far outside of their area of
02:08:13.700expertise of their involvement of their anything they had to do with is grossly unfair to an entire
02:08:22.200generation of people that were loyal to their fatherland and that were very innovative and
02:08:33.380fully committed academics to their chosen field or to their military service or to whatever their
02:08:41.020vocation in life was. There's a lot of time to dissect politics or other things.
02:08:52.200But it's grossly unfair to demonize an entire nation's, you know, citizenry for being loyal to their nation.
02:09:00.960And I think that's something we would extend to all peoples and fair-minded people would tend to do that generally.
02:09:08.820And I think it's really important when examining the scholarship of this period.0.63
02:09:15.960So, 772, Charlemagne destroys the Irwin-Soul.
02:09:21.760This starts a three-decade-or-so period called the Saxon Wars.
02:09:27.000In 782, a Frankish raid goes poorly and over 60 of Charlemagne's top officers die.
02:09:35.300Charlemagne is personally enraged by this, because these men were his friends and loyal things.
02:09:41.620So he personally turns his army to Saxony.
02:09:45.300their stubborn refusal to kneel to him and his bad behavior has now come to a boiling point
02:09:54.880our sources frankish annals then say that charlemagne entered into saxony and declared
02:10:00.200that anyone who turned over the soldiers that had defended saxony against the literal frankish
02:10:05.060bandit raid would be spared uh implying mass violence was occurring that people would be
02:10:12.120spared from. The result was the so-called massacre at Verdun, or Verdun. In a single day, Charlemagne
02:10:19.200had 4,500 Saxons beheaded, we are told, and had their bodies hacked apart and strewn throughout
02:10:25.780the forests. Given the timing of the event, the fact that the conflict between the Saxons and the
02:10:31.120Franks would go on to last another 20 years, and that Charlemagne's authority over Saxony was
02:10:35.380something that his regime said that the Saxons owed him, not that he actually had, it's likely
02:10:41.740that what had been actually happening was that Charlemagne simply gathered up a large amount of
02:10:46.320people and had them massacred. We're not told about a specific battle or anything similar,
02:10:51.820and the chronicles are very terse and administrative and get tercer over time.
02:10:56.980It probably wasn't seen as a glorious victory internally or even a fight, as those chronicles
02:11:03.320detail military conflicts pretty openly. It also seems unlikely to have actually been done in this
02:11:09.900the Saxons hand over their own men manner because the Saxons more or less uniformly seem to be
02:11:15.320opposed to the Carolingians. We're told that up to this point and after it, the Saxons would
02:11:19.540actually execute apostates and traitors left behind in the wake of Frankish raids and invasions.
02:11:26.740These people are also just de facto and de jure not under Charlemagne's kingship, so they'd have
02:11:31.880no reason to willingly hand over their own men to him because said men defended their homeland
02:12:08.120i just want to say they are incorrect in their apologetics for uh charles and butcher
02:12:16.700so the despite what the sources actually tell us because the these christian chroniclers they're
02:12:24.480trying to smooth over charlemagne and clovis and all these guys bad behavior but also they
02:12:29.320sometimes just write down oh yeah and then he had then he had his brother murdered by an assassin
02:12:33.420he just paid some guy to kill him right like what do you want me to write down boss we all saw it
02:12:39.480happen you know so the carolingian court was rife with frequent purges of courtiers wives
02:12:48.380mistresses officers and clergymen disappearing people was just the norm of this society and
02:12:56.200the primary sources tell us frequently that disappearing meant murder not the convent on
02:13:02.460the farm upstate. Historians have, as I said, tried to downplay these, but it has to be stressed
02:13:09.760that these were really common in Charlemagne and Carolingian and Merovingian regimes. The Council
02:13:17.200of Constatte, for example, was enacted by Charlemagne's father against the leaders of the
02:13:22.180Alemanni, who were, as far as we know, entirely Christian and ostensibly loyal to the Frankish
02:13:31.000regime. Notably, a large number of Charlemagne's friends and cronies died in the Frankish attack
02:13:38.460on Saxony that the 4,500 oil-to-the-end Saxons defended against. So the Saxons didn't just defend
02:13:46.040against an incursion, they actually did some damage to Charlemagne's court and his regime.
02:13:51.340A frequent theme in Carolingian attacks on other Germanic groups is an apostatize or die pattern.
02:13:59.040While the Carolingians had no problem massacring Christians, as they're working with Muslims against Baskin, Visigothic Christians, and Aquitanians, attests to, their wars against the Bavari and the Alemanni also attest to this, and so on, when it comes to Asatrara, we're told that they were given a choice.
02:14:16.940The fact that later chroniclers get increasingly terse about a vent, and no one talks about a choice to convert, just this odd hand over the perpetrators and we'll spare you, demonstrates that internally this was a pretty big propaganda failure.
02:14:33.940failure. It indicates that the victims were Asaterer who went to their deaths0.89
02:14:40.960without apostasy. That's actually a really big ideological failure, as0.94
02:14:47.560ostensibly it's not supposed to happen. Dumb pagans are supposed to simply cave0.99
02:14:52.780the moment someone with a Bible shows up. 4,500 men and women, I presume, at that0.99
02:14:59.800scale and number, I presume they were just murdering everyone, either having to1.00
02:15:04.480be butchered in the name of Christianity or simply choosing death before0.56
02:15:08.440disloyalty is quite literally not supposed to happen. It was a massive
02:15:13.600refutation not only of the religion's metaphysical claims, but also the
02:15:17.740legitimacy of Charlemagne as a king. The 4,500 heroes of Verdun here chose death
02:15:24.060before sullying themselves by swearing loyalty to a false king, and remember,
02:15:31.080the power of the king cuts both ways here. Charlemagne is a king, so you're
02:15:38.120supposed to be loyal to him. If he's not a king, you're not supposed to be loyal
02:15:42.780to him, so these people saying they would rather die than declare loyalty to him
02:15:48.600is a massive refutation of his kingship,
02:15:52.720and it's a massive refutation of the evangelical claims of Christianity,
02:15:58.780that people would rather die than choose this.
02:16:18.600ostensibly under the guidance of Bishop Alcuin. There's a lot of ink spilled in Charlemagne's day
02:16:26.760and going forward, comparing Charlemagne to an Israeli despot from the Bible, talking about the
02:16:31.940Amalekites, partly because this idea shows up in Frankish state documents. There's this idea that
02:16:39.620Francia was this new Israel and various competing Germanic peoples were the Amalekites, the Moabites,
02:16:46.120and other such Canaanite, I guess you call them, Jew-adjacent peoples that were scheduled for eradication in the Torah.
02:16:54.760But Alcuin's intervention seems to indicate a displeasure with the Carolingian court's actions by someone within the Christian clergy, which is interesting.
02:17:04.680Remember earlier, last episode I was on, when we were talking about men like Winfrith and Willigrord and Wulfram who wanted to make the Frisians apostatize?
02:17:15.560They didn't actually want to exterminate them or just let other peoples bully them into genocide and enslave them.0.61
02:17:23.240Almost immediately after Widukind is defeated, Catholic clerics actually start organizing the Saxons against the Franks.0.68
02:17:31.680So I'm willing to bet that what was actually going on, which I've alluded to throughout this lecture,0.90
02:17:36.780was that Christianity was used to justify bad behavior by the Merovingians and the Carolingians,0.71
02:17:41.720but that this behavior was viewed as more or less a necessity to tolerate
02:17:46.920in order to establish a power center in Western Europe.
02:17:50.680As at the time in the West, Christianity barely had Italy,
02:17:54.840which remember, Italy at this time is still full of pagans into the 600s.
02:17:59.160It's not until the 600s that the city of Rome stops being like
02:18:02.84051% or greater people who worship Minerva, right?
02:18:08.520this is happening at the tail end of the 800s. Europe is only a century or two away from
02:18:15.720polytheism being the default European position here, right?
02:18:22.440As an aside, Widukind, we are told, ends up converting, and the only source on the matter
02:18:27.640says that he did so willingly to join the Frankish nobility. However, we know from elsewhere that
02:18:32.840when this happened, Charlemagne would immediately chuck converts into the dungeon or to a monastery
02:18:37.560or whatever. It's possible that Widukin was just killed and that this narrative was invented,
02:18:43.480but we don't have any evidence for that. Just reason to cast doubt on certain Frankish narratives
02:18:48.080in an abstract sense. It was such a propaganda victory that the great Widukin, the powerful0.96
02:18:53.960rebel leader and heathen king, willingly accepted Rabbi Yeshua as his lord and savior and Charlemagne0.93
02:18:59.240as the new David. Why not toot the trumpets a little louder, you know? Interestingly, however,0.99
02:19:05.460There's a lot of fanciful and obviously fictional stories about Widukind being a devout Christian and patron of Christianity,
02:19:42.960Like, what is he doing creeping in the bushes to watch Mass?
02:19:47.840These stories come about later, and it's interesting that they view Wittekind as a good guy.
02:19:53.600Medieval Christians in Saxony viewed Wittekind as a good guy to be defended,
02:19:57.520but the Christian clergymen did become patrons of the Saxons against the Franks shortly after the
02:20:05.1004,500 loyal Saxons here died. So a co-opting of this figure of Wudukind, this figure of resistance
02:20:13.760would not only be obvious, it might just have been necessary. The church was over time becoming0.98
02:20:18.340increasingly fed up with the Franks, with Clovis actually starting a conflict that would become0.98
02:20:25.280Gallicanism versus Ultramontanism, and the Ghibelein and wealth conflict, as I said,0.55
02:20:30.740essentially over the question of who is in charge, the Pope or the Emperor slash King.0.72
02:20:36.860So the Christian clergy patronized the Saxons to undermine the Frankish crown and baptize,
02:20:43.120literally and metaphorically, Wadukin's legacy to get rid of the resistance to Frankia equals0.53
02:20:48.320also true connotations. As already stated in the matter involving Alcuin, the church was
02:20:53.600increasingly growing weary of the Frankish tyranny, which was making it increasingly
02:20:57.500difficult to actually convert people. A much more effective strategy was the sort of internal churn0.91
02:21:03.520that is seen by the church demanding the Franks butcher the Saxons, then immediately patronizing
02:21:08.780the Saxons against the Franks that they had up to this point been supporting. This same phenomena
02:21:14.640shows up in Scandinavia, as an aside, this divide and conquer through Christianity kind of thing.
02:21:21.340an overt association with the frankish crown prevents that as an over association of christianity
02:21:31.080with the frankish crown prevents that as from the popish perspective the franks were just a weapon
02:21:36.080to be discarded when they were no longer useful and charlemagne driving these people towards this
02:21:43.160state of i would rather die than apostatize makes it extremely hard to get them to apostatize
02:21:51.320So I want to deviate here for a second.
02:21:57.680I know that Chris has got more for his wrap-up and his, you know, summation,
02:22:06.100but I think now is the appropriate time to talk about Whitakind.
02:22:10.120I know that Speckinger Spahn is excited about the idea and has some questions.
02:22:20.620It is very seductive and a cool idea to think that Whittakin remained the stalwart champion of Alistair True and the Saxons that he was for much of his life, but we don't have that.
02:22:43.460history didn't bring that to us we don't have any alternate tales of him remaining true
02:22:51.860none of those things exist what we do have is the narrative that eventually
02:22:56.980he submitted to frankish authority and he apostatized against the ice here and embraced christ
02:25:21.080As of this year, on October the 9th, we will be celebrating a day of remembrance for the 4,500 loyal Saxons that lost their life for their loyalty to the Iser at the Blood Court of Burden.
02:25:41.900If I knew all of their names, I would cloud your calendar with 4,500 names of heroes that sacrifice their life for their trough to the Aesir.
02:25:58.740The best I can do at this point is acknowledge them en masse on October the 9th.
02:26:11.740But it's important to me that we do so.
02:26:18.740These brave men that stood for the Iser at the cost of their heads are profoundly important,
02:26:32.560and we are obliged as their spiritual descendants to honor them and to acknowledge the sacrifice they made for their faith in our gods
02:26:48.240and for their loyalty um the picture if you could throw it back up for a second
02:26:59.360is of um saxonhaime which is a monumental park raised up i don't know if you guys really see it
02:27:08.560here but it is a pathway lined with 4 500 stones each stone representing one of these
02:27:19.600brave saxon men that stood for our gods and lost his head
02:27:25.920this park is still in existence today it is a place where our founder steve mcnallen and i
02:27:34.560I went and made offerings of mead and showed our respect to these brave men of our folk.
02:27:46.720It's a very special place, and I wish that we could do more to honor these heroes,
02:27:57.020But I want to, at the very least, honor them all on October the 9th in celebration for their loyalty.
02:28:08.660And I'll get to talking about Saxonian here in a moment.
02:28:17.100So to go back to the historical stuff for a bit, we're coming to the close here.
02:28:25.020I just want to talk about, talk briefly about why this all happens this way.
02:28:29.620In other parts of the Germanic world, we see stuff like the Frankish king just waltzes in with an army,
02:28:35.440murders a bunch of people, bullies some lords into apostasy,0.80
02:28:38.460and then the Herderi are now Christian, right?0.93
02:28:42.760Why doesn't this happen with Saxony and to a degree Frisia also?
02:28:46.940I'm going to posit that the Saxon and Frisian societies were not characterized by the warlord society all that much.
02:28:54.000The Frankish Empire was based on a pure middle hierarchy of interpersonal relations,
02:28:58.600so in absence of warbands to bind to loyalty, they actually couldn't really control territory.
02:29:04.340We're told about incredibly few Saxon, and for that matter, Frisian leaders.
02:29:08.700This leads me to believe that the Saxons and Frisians were probably still operating under older Germanic government forms,
02:29:14.700that of the ethno-republican tribe that elected, not necessarily democratically, a theodens or theoden to lead them.
02:29:22.800This would explain why we're mostly just told about raids and invasions rather than battles.
02:29:29.600There really weren't singular individuals for Frankish chroniclers to write about.
02:29:35.100This 30-ish-year struggle was really more of a conflict between the Frankish mafioso hierarchy
02:29:41.600and the Saxon and Frisian people as ethnosis, rather than between individual big men like we see with, for example, the Aquitanians or the Burgondians.
02:29:52.100Charlemagne would die on 814s, January 28th, and his empire would collapse into, you guessed it, a pointless fratricidal bloodbath.
02:30:02.200One of Charlemagne's greatest achievements was his massive library of Germanic history and lore.
02:30:07.560It would be burnt to the ground by his son, Louis the Pious, on the orders of the Pope.
02:30:12.280Louis ruled in Aquitaine, so this act of arson was an ironic final strike by Aquitaine against the Carolingians,
02:30:18.100and another in a long line of Carolingian and Merovingian father-son betrayals,
02:30:23.580which is particularly ironic given the numerous times that Charlemagne had betrayed his own sons.
02:30:28.520So ridiculous thing that I just want to mention because it was there and I wanted to mention it earlier.0.65
02:30:35.680After all this battling with the Muslims, as the emperor of the West,0.95
02:30:41.580Charlemagne received as a gift from Caliph Haran al-Rashid an elephant named Abul Abbas.
02:30:55.080And this elephant came into, I assume, the court at Aachen and was an amazing sight to be seen for Europeans that had not seen an Indian elephant that was given to him by the Caliph.
02:31:11.580It is not relevant to what we're talking about at all, but it was a fun point of interest that I learned in high school about Carlos Magnus.
02:40:20.080So having the opportunity to commune with the dead that we cherish who are beyond the veil is a special and celebrated thing amongst Alcetor, but it's terrifying amongst the followers of Christ, and I think that's an important thing for us to keep in mind.0.57
02:40:42.420And there is a sanctity of holy ground like Saxonite, but having German women and kids playing and walking their dogs and going for a jog and spending time there, that's a beautiful thing to our ancestors.0.74
02:41:09.240And its existence in this day and age is a real testimony to the memorial that folks put into effect in the 1930s to celebrate these people.
02:41:25.080And that's a noble thing that they did and something that we certainly want to celebrate and do our part to acknowledge in our time.
02:41:39.140Chris has vanished on us after his amazing presentation.
02:41:44.820He'll be back with the thrilling conclusion here momentarily.
02:43:32.460There is a fear factor or at least a discomfort oftentimes in saying openly before whoever's in front of you, hey, what church do you go to?
02:44:40.660I suppose standing against opposition.
02:44:45.520When others would criticize our faith or call us names or say that we're racist or that we're, you know, whatever names they want to call us.
02:44:59.620To bear the burden of that, and to stand strong for the Aesir, even when people are calling us names, I think that is another courageous lesson to learn from these brave men who sacrificed their lives for their loyalty.
03:01:30.600What would you say to the people that say Europeans could not accomplish anything worthwhile and would have remained uncivilized barbarians without the conversion to Christianity?
03:03:52.540that for the last 2 000 years have been a part of it and keep it biblical and it sucks0.96
03:04:03.720Biblical Christianity is not appealing to the Western mind and psyche and the warrior ethos that is defined in the West.
03:04:16.200The defining current that has shaped Western Europe, and Central Europe for that matter, shoot, and Eastern Europe for that matter, has been our Aryan roots to the Aesir.0.84
03:04:36.940you find the Middle Eastern communism0.61
03:04:44.600that is Christianity setting in very late in our development1.00
03:06:51.220Um, the next question we've got. So here's a more controversial one, and Chris will get your take on it first. And this kind of came up, I don't know if this is the weft of erther or what, but this came up in a men's chat in our MeWe chat today.
03:07:16.560I've heard talk in the past about how the AFA will not perform a marriage ceremony that isn't legally binding.
03:07:25.600How is paying Zod, the Zionist-occupied government, for those that aren't in the loop, for a marriage license a good thing?
03:07:35.460All I'm seeing are potential negatives.0.78
03:07:38.300What is the benefit of this legal arrangement?
03:07:40.860It doesn't keep anyone from cheating or leaving.
03:19:46.680There is a, for whatever it's worth, and there's plenty of argument to why it doesn't work out right, that it's not fair, and it penalizes men more than it does women, and cry me a river, any number of things.
03:29:52.280I want to throw in two things here. Yes, the courts disfavor men in these situations. They disfavor white people in these situations. They could just as soon disfavor people for a lot of reasons and favor people for a lot of reasons.
03:30:07.420not living because you could be discriminated against is silly
03:30:15.540i also i want to just reframe this for a minute here
03:30:21.940you know who divorce really screws up screws up children it actually it also actually really1.00
03:30:30.900screws up women. Statistically, women suffer greatly from divorce. It might not seem that way1.00
03:30:39.960to men, but if you look at the outcomes of divorce for women, they are not pretty. Women do a lot1.00
03:30:46.960worse off after getting divorced than men do. Most women suffer more than men do in the long
03:30:54.460term from getting divorced. Now, I'm not saying that, like, oh, you should get married because
03:30:59.980it's a weapon to use against your spouse in a divorce that's looking at this wrong it gives
03:31:06.760gravity and consequence to an arrangement that quite frankly i actually had this thought when
03:31:12.880i was going through getting married why does the government let us do this like this is a lot of
03:31:19.640work and a lot of a lot of bureaucratic procedure and there's tax breaks and there's privileges for
03:31:28.020for married people. There's benefits with health care. Here's the thing. If you get health care
03:31:33.860through your employer, your wife and kids can get it if you're married. They can't get it if you're
03:31:39.220not. Why does the government let us do that? Honestly, the fact that the government lets us
03:31:46.220do this is a really weird benefit that they give us in a certain sense. I was working for the other
03:31:55.280team, if I was on team evil, this would be one of the things I'd want to get rid of. Because
03:32:00.400if you do it right, it's really helpful for you and your spouse and your kids, and it makes
03:32:07.860everything better. So yes, it can be dangerous. A lot of things can be dangerous. But rather than
03:32:18.360thinking about what could go wrong all the time stop and ask yourself what could go right
03:32:27.640so jv i want to i want to put this and thank you for this discussion i think it's very honest and i
03:32:34.120don't this isn't contentious at all um from our end
03:35:21.360all the arguments and all the concerns other than
03:35:26.880buying somebody a new dreidel with your 20 bucks
03:35:32.880cool you know spin to your heart's content it's 20 bucks i'm not that cheap
03:35:40.720making it real versus not real is something we owe our lives and our children
03:35:44.880if you don't want it weaponized against you and choose your partner correctly
03:35:51.200again I'm on my second marriage I'm not telling you I'm better than everybody else I'm not
03:35:59.280I am so blessed that Mandy and I are united by faith and values and the things necessary to
03:36:12.760raise our daughter. Find that for yourself. Let us help you with that. But it's real or
03:36:21.520not real. And I think we all feel the gravity of that. But again, I wax overly verbose when
03:36:35.600the beer hug isn't pointing. So we don't have a lot of questions tonight, so I am kind of
03:36:43.040entertaining. There's a number of things. Also with the marriages, there are benefits that do
03:36:50.020factor in. With the homosexual incursion into the marriage space, some of those benefits are1.00
03:36:59.100diluted sucks but this one it is um question from wanderer do you believe the political conversion0.95
03:37:14.700harold clack while in exile in 826 to secure an alliance with the carolingians to retake0.93
03:37:24.140denmark sparked a domino effect that led to the conversion of later scandinavian kings
03:37:32.700or were there more isolated and independent decisions christopher what say you
03:37:41.740yes to both um with scandinavia in this isn't this episode wasn't about scandinavia so i don't
03:37:51.020want to go too much without having like a kind of prepared thing on it but with scandinavia in
03:37:59.660particular by the time that christianity started making inroads there there were multiple christian
03:38:06.540powers that could essentially pull apart scandinavia there was continental germany
03:38:13.580there was the vatican itself denmark as you point out had become christian relatively early through
03:38:18.860the Franks, but then there was also the French. There were the Anglo-Saxons, there were the Scots,
03:38:23.500there were the Irish. If you were a Scandinavian warlord with a particularly loose attachment to
03:38:30.460the Isere, you actually had a lot of people you could get backing from. Scandinavia was also
03:38:37.580pretty far away from most of these places, unless it was Denmark, but you know what I mean. That
03:38:42.780That meant that you didn't really have to do a lot other than profess Christianity to whatever your patron saw as acceptable, which meant whatever for whoever, right?
03:38:56.700So, yes, I don't think it's as simple as, oh, well, if Harold Glack had died on the way to the Carolingian capital, then this wouldn't have happened.
03:39:07.000And I think there were other entry points and vectors, but yes, I think this would have certainly impacted Denmark, which would have impacted southern Sweden, which would have impacted southern Norway, and so on.
03:39:20.400I know that's kind of simplistic, but that's my answer.
03:39:37.000Yes, so I am also, I feel like, I feel like yes, but I'm, Chris could probably bust out
03:40:00.040really cool Latin version of this. At some point, the dais cast. And Chris busted out as soon as
03:40:12.760you know the Latin for the phrase because it entertains me and it makes me smile. But either
03:40:19.380Anyway, there's a situation where once conversion was on a certain course, that was going to go, the momentum was headed one direction.
03:40:37.200If not that, it would have been something else.
03:42:34.740There is a question here from ML Wiz. Unless you consider the marriage stuff bookended. I'm sorry.
03:42:44.780I thought it was, but since you opened the jar of worms, go ahead and address it. Go ahead, Chris Cook.
03:42:52.540He says, are you tying the law around marriage to the official Ossetre stance on marriage? Does that translate to other things such as racial issues?
03:43:02.840I'm a little too tired to have a coherent big brain answer to that I don't I don't think so
03:43:11.720I think you and I are more so positing that it's a happy confluence of factors that the government
03:43:22.280can put weight behind oaths because as I pointed out like the government
03:43:27.520doesn't necessarily have to do marriage you could just not have marriage
03:43:30.940so christopher my brain is on school the hour is late but i shall still participate
03:43:44.060that being said i don't know if i understand the implications of the question as it was positive
03:43:53.340But you lose everything you don't participate in, we're at a time in the United States where
03:44:06.820our government recognizes religions officiating weddings.
03:44:18.340We can do that, or we can choose not to.
03:44:23.700I don't think the government has a right to invalidate or to encroach upon our understanding
03:44:31.500of marriage, because our understanding of marriage and the government of the United
03:44:38.160States' understanding of marriage was completely in alignment up until, I don't know, 10 years
03:44:46.700ago i think that's legitimate the government can't force me as a gothi to solemn solemnize0.87
03:45:01.500solemnize a interracial marriage or a homosexual marriage i will not and our gothar will not do
03:45:11.340such thing but we don't get to dictate to the united states what they can or can't recognize
03:45:23.820we can occupy the space to as recognized religious authorities perform legally binding weddings and
03:45:34.140we do. We will only provide those weddings under our belief of what marriage is between
03:45:46.080man and woman, between white man and white woman in our context. We can't be compelled
03:45:59.840to do other than that, and we'll maintain our right