This week we’re going to take a look at what may be one of the great military miscalculations of all time. Charles was a solid tactician and an excellent logistician, and clearly very successful in most things he tried his hand at. Politics, religion, culture, war... there was no area in which he did not make an enormous impact during his life. Knowing this, how was it then that he so dramatically failed to see just how long and hard a campaign against the Saxons would be? Einhard, one of the first and most eminent biographers of Charlemagne, and a man who studied the whole of the great King’s life, would describe it this way:

“No war taken up by the Frankish people was ever longer, harder, or more dreadful.”

This is both factually correct and a huge understatement. After all, we are not talking about an extra battle or two; we are talking about nearly 30 additional years of battle, plus additional pockets of resistance that would not be fully squelched until well after Charles’s lifetime. Was it hubris, bad intelligence, an overestimation of his own military capabilities, or an underestimation of his enemies that led to all of this? Or was it a bit of all of the above? Finally, even with all of these factors in mind, did Charles really have a choice of whether or not to face the Saxons? I mean, was their fight inevitable, and if so, could it have been less bloody for both sides?

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