On Christianity and Europa

Genocidal evangelism

Coercive Christianity takes root

With the use of violent and bloody coercion, Saxon and German paganism was quite literally killed off, and most of the survivors became Christians more out of fear than out of genuine conviction. Christianity finally spread to the Goths themselves, through a Christian slave named Wulfila, who translated the Bible into Gothic.

Before the end of the fourth century, Christianity had spread to the Vandals, the Burgundians, the Lombards and other German tribes within the direct sphere of influence of the Western Roman Empire.

By the year 550 AD, the only non-Christian tribes were to be found in Bavaria and those parts of Germany north from there\u2014including virtually all of the Danes, Scandinavians, Balts and Slavs to the east.


Charlemagne organizes the murder of all non-Christians under his control

In 768, Pepin\u2019s son, Charlemagne (Charles the Great), inherited the Frankish kingdom. It was this king who was directly responsible for the introduction of Christianity to the Germans.

To destroy German paganism, Charlemagne proclaimed harsh laws applicable to those Germans under his control who refused to be baptized into Christianity. Eating meat during Lent, cremating the dead and pretending to be baptized were all made punishable by death.

In 768, Charlemagne started a 32 year long campaign of what can only be described as genocidal evangelism against the Saxons under his control in western Germany.

The campaign started with the cutting down of the Saxon\u2019s most sacred tree, their version of the World Tree or Yggdrasil(the symbol of the start of the earth and the source of all life in the ancient Indo-European religions) located in a sacred Saxon forest near present day Marburg.

Charlemagne quickly turned to violence as a means of spreading the Christian word. In 772, at Quierzy, he issued a proclamation that he would kill every Saxon who refused to accept Jesus Christ, and from that time on he kept a special detachment of Christian priests who doubled as executioners, and in every Saxon village in which they stopped, these priests would execute anybody who refused to be baptized.

Then in 782, at Verden, Charlemagne carried out the act for which he is most notoriously associated\u2014he ordered the beheading of 4,500 Saxons in one day who had made the error of being caught practicing paganism after they had agreed to be Christians.

Charlemagne\u2019s constant companion and biographer, the monk Einhard, vividly captured the event in his biography of the Frankish king. In it is written that the King rounded up 4,500 Saxons who \u201clike dogs that return to their vomit\u201d had returned to the pagan religions they had been forced to give up upon pain of death.

After having all 4,500 Saxons beheaded \u201cthe king went into winter camp, and there celebrated mass as usual.\u201d

Twelve years later, in 794, Charlemagne introduced a law under which every third Saxon living in any pagan area was kidnapped and forced to resettle and be raised amongst Christian Franks.

Teutonic Knights exterminate the last white pagans

The only significant grouping of Whites left in Europe who were not\u2014nominally at least\u2014Christians by the year 1000 AD were to be found in the Baltic and Eastern European regions. To destroy this last bastion of paganism the Church employed the services of some of the most fanatic Christians of all\u2014the Teutonic Knights.

By 1198, however, these knights had changed from being purely passive and took an active part in the war against the non-White Muslims, becoming known as the Teutonic Knights. Membership in the order was strictly limited to Christian German noblemen. The Teutonic Knights received official recognition from Pope Innocent III in 1199, and adopted the official uniform of a white tunic with a black cross.

Soon their deeds on behalf of Christendom became famous. In 1210 they were invited to Hungary by the king of that country to participate in a war against the non-Christian pagan tribes in Eastern Europe.

The Teutonic Knights jumped at the chance, and by using violence and mass murder, soon became known as effective Christianizers amongst the pagan Whites of Eastern Europe. This genocidal evangelism soon became the sole obsession of the Teutonic Knights\u2014by 1226 the order had set up permanent settlements in north eastern Europe.

In 1226, the Holy Roman Emperor granted the Teutonic Knights control over what was then Prussia (today northern Poland) to rule as a fiefdom on condition that they convert all the locals to Christianity. In 1234, Pope Gregory IX granted the Knights control over any other territory that they might conquer from the pagans. The Teutonic Knights soon built a series of imposing castles to defend their new territory, some of which still stand today.

From the safety of these castles they waged their own brand of evangelicalism, which was limited to the Frankish king Charlemagne\u2019s recipe\u2014once a number of pagans had been captured, they were offered the choice of either being baptized and accepting Christianity, or being killed on the spot.

Unsurprisingly, almost all chose conversion. The price for being caught practicing paganism after being baptized, was instant death.

As was the case with the genocidal evangelicalism of Charlemagne, the first one or two generations of converts were in all likelihood not genuine\u2014usually they paid lip service to Christianity in order not to be killed. By about the third generation however, the children knew no other religion, and in this way Christianity replaced the original Indo-European religions.

The Teutonic Knights also encouraged already Christianized Germans to settle in Prussia. This served a double purpose\u2014not only could the new arrivals police the new converts, but also the Teutonic Knights realized very clearly that the easiest way to change the nature of a society was to change its inhabitants.

By 1300, the Teutonic Knights were one of the most powerful organizations in Germany, controlling territory which stretched from the Baltic Sea into central Germany, a private empire which saw them engaging in, on average, eight major wars every year.

However, the Teutonic Knights slowly ran out of pagans to convert. By 1386 the last of the major non-Christian tribes in the north, the Lithuanians, had all more or less been converted, and the order started to lose the reason for its existence.