Charlemagne's Campaigns · War Crimes & Atrocities
For all that Charlemagne is remembered as a great civiliser, his conquests — above all the thirty-year war against the Saxons — were waged with a ruthlessness that shocked even his own contemporaries. The Saxon Wars combined battlefield slaughter with mass executions, a legal code that made pagan practices punishable by death, and the forced deportation of whole populations, in a sustained campaign to destroy a people's religion and independence and remake them as Christian Frankish subjects.
4,500+
deaths
Victims: Captured Saxon rebels(The Frankish royal annals record 4,500 Saxons beheaded in a single day; some modern historians question the exact figure but not that a large massacre took place.)
10,000+
deaths
Victims: The pagan Saxon population(Deaths under the capital provisions of the Saxon Capitulary and in the suppression of resistance to forced conversion cannot be precisely counted but were substantial over two decades.)
8,000+
deaths
Victims: The Saxon population, especially north of the Elbe(Many thousands died in the upheaval of forced resettlement; the numbers deported ran to the tens of thousands over the campaigns.)