The Verden Killings and a Death Penalty Charlemagne Later Repealed

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The one incident in the Saxon wars with a reported death figure is the October 782 killing of Saxon prisoners near Verden, after a revolt that had destroyed a Frankish army at the Suntel. The Royal Frankish Annals and its revised version put the number at four thousand five hundred, a figure military historians such as Bernard Bachrach and Alessandro Barbero treat as broadly credible given that both sides could field forces in the tens of thousands, though an older argument by Martin Lintzel held it inflated without offering an alternative count. No figure exists at all for deaths across the war's other seventeen campaigns, its famines, or its forced deportations.

Religious conquest was a stated war aim throughout. The Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, issued around 785, made baptism compulsory and set the death penalty for refusing it and for other pagan acts. Charlemagne's own court scholar Alcuin objected that conversion obtained under threat of death was not real faith, and Charlemagne repealed the death penalty clause in 797, replacing it with fines and requiring more instruction before baptism.