Bloodthirsty Barbarians and Saxon Pagans

Bloodthirsty Barbarians and Saxon Pagans
By Darren Bailey Art

The Vikings were among those thought of as Bloodthirsty Barbarians but they did not exclusively hold this title.

The Viking raids were indeed very violent, but it was a violent age, and the question is whether non-Viking armies were any less bloodthirsty and barbarian; for instance,

Charlemagne, who was the Vikings contemporary, virtually exterminated the whole people of Avars. At Verden, he ordered the beheading of 4,500 Saxons.
After fighting off the Muslim invaders to the south, Charlemagne then proceeded to launch a bloody war of extermination against the Saxon and other pagan German tribes under his control, which saw the last paganism on the western part of the continent of Europe exterminated.
Suffice to say here that after killing thousands of pagans, Charlemagne managed to create a virtually uniform Christian kingdom even if many of his subjects only paid lip service to the new religion.
Of those executed, approximately
8 % were nobles,
6 % were members of the clergy,
14% belonged to the middle class,
70% were workers or peasants charged with draft dodging, desertion, hoarding, rebellion, and various other “anti-revolutionary” crimes.

What really made the Vikings different was the fact that they seemed to take special care to destroy items of religious value (Christian monasteries and holy sites) and kill churchmen, which earned them quite a bit of hatred in a highly religious time. The Vikings probably enjoyed the reputation they had; people were so scared of them that they often fled from their cities instead of defending them when they saw a Viking ship coming near.

please note this is art and though Vikings did indeed use double side axes its unlikely they looked much like this one

Piece Created using a Nikon D90 and a Nikkor 18-105 Vr

Also Used

1 x Double sided Fantasy Skull Axe
Fake Blood ( Honest )
Black Background
Manfrotto LED Lighting Panels
Flu Tester ( For Smoke )
Splash of Imagination
Pinch of Wibble
And a Dash of Crazy
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