What was one of the more gruesome aspects of Charlemagne’s (king of the Franks from 768, king of the Lombards from 774, and Holy Roman Emperor from 800) conquest of West Saxony in 782?

Answer: It involved the mass execution of 4,500 Saxon prisoners at Werden, in today’s Essen. The bloody event was embraced by Nazi sympathisers in the 1930s as a type of pre-Christian Germanic martyrdom.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica

More at: History

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