This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Over thirty two years and eighteen separate expeditions from 772 to 804, the Frankish king Charlemagne conquered the independent Continental Saxon peoples of northern Germany and compelled their conversion to Christianity. The war opened in 772 with the destruction of the Irminsul, a sacred pillar or tree at the center of Saxon cult practice, near Eresburg. Saxon resistance, led for much of the conflict by the noble Widukind, produced repeated uprisings against Frankish garrisons and missionaries, met in turn by mass executions, forced resettlement and legal compulsion to convert on pain of death.
Widukind himself submitted and was baptized in 785, and organized Saxon resistance effectively ended there, though sporadic revolt continued for two more decades. The war closed in 804 with the deportation of roughly ten thousand Saxons from the Nordalbingian region north of the Elbe, and Saxony was absorbed into the Frankish realm as a Christian territory, with new bishoprics established at Paderborn, Munster, Bremen and elsewhere, and Saxon nobles who cooperated, Widukind's own line among them, absorbed into the Frankish aristocracy.