Fixing the Books, Converting the Saxons

Charlemagne's court sponsored a deliberate program of religious and textual reform, generally called the Carolingian correctio, aimed at correcting the corrupted Latin biblical and liturgical manuscripts then in circulation across Frankish territory and at standardizing church practice around the Roman rite rather than the varied local usages it was displacing. The program drew scholars from across Western Europe to the Carolingian court and to the monastic centers the dynasty patronized, producing more accurate texts of scripture and the church fathers and a new, more legible script, Carolingian minuscule, that spread through the copying houses the reform funded.

The same reign pursued religious uniformity by harsher means on its frontier. Charlemagne's decades long war against the pagan Saxons, beginning in 772 with the destruction of a sacred pillar the Saxons called the Irminsul, combined military conquest with compulsory Christianization, and surviving Carolingian capitularies record death as the prescribed penalty for Saxons who refused baptism or who continued pagan sacrifice after their territory's submission. A history of the empire that emerged from this reign treats the Saxon wars as the harsher complement to the correctio's scholarly reform: one Carolingian program corrected texts inside an already Christian realm, the other imposed Christianity by force at its edge.