Westphalia is a regional name everyone knows and a tribal name hardly anyone can explain. The Westphalians, Latin Westfalai, are the western part of the Saxons, and they enter the sources only in 775: in a yearly report of the Frankish court that does not even name a leader for them. This article sets the testimonies side by side, separates evidence, assumption, late tradition and legend, and says where something is only an interpretation that it is one.
Say "Westphalia" today and most people think of a region in the north-east of North Rhine-Westphalia: the Münsterland, the eastern Ruhr area, the Sauerland, East Westphalia. This article asks about the oldest item in that row: the Westphalians as the western part of the Saxons, Latin Westfalai or Westfali, in the later eighth century. The handbooks set them in a threefold division beside the Angrians in the middle and the Eastphalians in the east; the wider frame is described in The Saxons.
On the territory: according to the German Wikipedia article on the Saxons it lay around the Ruhr, Lippe and Ems, from the Münsterland to the area of Osnabrück, in the south taking in the eastern Ruhr area and the Sauerland, in the east reaching the Weser. The same page notes that Westphalia is the only one of the three tribal names that survived as a political territory. How far the tribal part reached westward is a stipulation of the handbooks. The sources of the eighth century name rivers, districts and places, but no boundary lines.
Three things should therefore be kept apart. First, the tribal part that appears for the first time in 775. Second, "Westphalia" as a medieval spatial term: a project at the FernUniversität Hagen describes it for the Ottonian and early Salian period (919 to the last third of the eleventh century) as a "blurred, overarching spatial designation" for the west of Saxony, without political structures of its own. Third, the province and today's region. The area of the old Angrians and present-day East Westphalia overlap according to the usual assignment, so the regional name does not coincide with the tribal part.
The name itself is usually read as "western part"; the German Wikipedia on the Saxons gives "West men" or "West Saxons" as a reading. On the element -falen, the German Wikipedia on Eastphalia says the ending is of Germanic origin and refers to the plain; no evidence is given there. A district called Fahala is attested in old texts, a tribe "Falen" is not (German Wikipedia on Westphalia). All of this is interpretation. How the group called itself we do not know, because we know the names only from Frankish pens.
A word on the frame of this page: I write only what I have seen in texts or what scholarship expressly holds, and I mark whether a statement is evidence, an assumption, a conjecture, a late tradition or a legend.
Everything we know about the Westphalians of the eighth century comes from authors who made war on them or brought them baptism. The Saxons themselves left no narrative text from this period. That has to be kept in mind with every sentence.
The backbone is the Royal Frankish Annals (Annales regni Francorum), the yearly chronicle of the Frankish court for 741 to 829. According to Matthias Becher's contribution for the LWL (the regional association of Westphalia-Lippe), they were not written year by year but compiled at court around 790, and so are not a neutral observation; they present Charles's campaigns as a success story, and for 775 Becher points out that the account glosses over a Frankish setback. Added to this is the version revised after 814, often called the "Einhard Annals"; it uses other forms of the names (for the Eastphalians, for instance, Ostfalai, according to a digest published by the Ostfalenpost). That Einhard was the reviser is a proposal, not a proof. For the years under Louis the Pious this means that anyone reading the annals reads two layers, and the younger one arranged matters with the knowledge of 814.
Beside them stand legal texts: the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, whose date is open (it is placed around 782 to 785), the Capitulare Saxonicum of 797 and the Lex Saxonum of 802. From the mission come the Old Saxon baptismal vow (late eighth century), the biographies of the missionary Liudger, among them the Vita Liudgeri by Altfrid, and the Old Saxon epic Heliand (first half of the ninth century). For the unrest of 841 to 843 there is Nithard, a grandson of Charlemagne, as well as the Annales Xantenses. Further there are Charles's biographer Einhard and, much later, Widukind of Corvey (around 968).
On method, quite openly: I have read Becher's contribution, the Royal Frankish Annals for 775, 776 and 782 to 784 in P. D. King's English translation (De Re Militari, through a querying read of the page, which is why I give only the content), three clauses from Einhard's Vita Karoli, chapter 7, in the Latin wording, and two shorter pages by the LWL and the FernUniversität Hagen. Nithard, Altfrid, the Heliand, the capitularies, the Lex Saxonum, Bede and Widukind of Corvey I have not read. Where I cite them I rely on summaries, mainly of the German and English Wikipedia. The source list keeps the two apart.
The land between the Rhine, the Lippe and the Ems appears in the sources earlier than the name "Westphalia". Roman troops were there in the time of Augustus: according to the German Wikipedia the camp at Haltern on the Lippe was used only until 9 AD (Konrad Kraft worked this out in 1956 from coin statistics); its beginning probably lies in the years after 8 BC and cannot be fixed exactly. Haltern lies on the north bank of the Lippe, and the Roman camps served to secure this waterway. Whether Haltern is the Aliso named by Roman authors remains a hypothesis; the equation is not confirmed.
As inhabitants the Roman authors name other peoples. Tacitus reports in the Germania (chapter 33) that the Bructeri once lived beside the Tencteri, that now, so one hears, Chamavi and Angrivarii have moved in, and that the Bructeri were destroyed. The English Wikipedia notes that modern historians consider the figure of more than 60,000 dead in Tacitus an exaggeration. The Bructeri lived in the area between the Lippe and the Ems; the Marsi are placed between the Rhine, Ruhr and Lippe, and Tacitus describes (Annals 1,50 to 51, according to the English Wikipedia) Germanicus's attack on them in 14 AD at a sanctuary of Tanfana. The Chattuarii appear later, from 360, as Franks on the Rhine.
The obvious question is whether these peoples are the ancestors of the Westphalians. Nothing more than a conjecture can be said. The German Wikipedia on the Saxons writes that the Saxons subjugated the Bructeri around 695 and the Chattuarii around 715; I have not checked the sources on which these dates rest. The English Wikipedia on the Bructeri gives for Bede only the period "late seventh century" (Suitbert's mission attempt, Saxon attacks) and states that a connection of the Bructeri to the later Westphalians cannot be derived from the sources. Whoever reads "the Westphalians are descendants of the Bructeri" is therefore reading an assumption. Archaeology, the German Wikipedia on the Saxons judges, cannot reliably identify ethnic groups. In the south of the area, around Marsberg and Volkmarsen, place names are often taken for remnants of the name of the Marsi; the English Wikipedia marks this as unproven, and for Volkmarsen it gives a personal name as the origin.
The first mention stands in the Royal Frankish Annals for the year 775, in Charles's second Saxon campaign. According to Becher, Charles first held an imperial assembly at Düren near Aachen, crossed the Rhine, took the Hohensyburg, rebuilt the Eresburg and advanced to the Oker. There the "Austreleudi Saxones" under Hessi, whom Becher equates with the Eastphalians, gave hostages. On the way back, at the Weser, in the Bückegau, the Angrians appeared under Bruno and their other leading men. Then Charles joined a detachment he had left behind to secure the crossing of the Weser; the annals call it victorious, Becher considers it beaten. Charles defeated the Saxons himself, took rich booty among the Westphalians and forced them too to give hostages. The English translation names Braunsberg on the Weser and Lidbach (identified with Lübbecke) as places of the fighting and sums up that Eastphalians, "Angrarians" and Westphalians swore oaths and gave hostages. After that Charles set out for Italy, where a Lombard rising under Rodgaud threatened.
What is missing is striking. Hessi and Bruno have names, the Westphalians do not. Becher explains this by saying their leader did not submit, and suspects it was probably Widukind. That is a conjecture, well founded but not proven; the text does not name Widukind in 775. Becher sees in the three groups larger associations formed under the pressure of the Frankish conquest, because small Saxon communities could not resist alone. Whether they were self-designations, he says, remains open; only this is certain, that Frankish authors used them. Later sources speak of "Heerschaften" (military hosts), which fits the military function.
Afterwards the groups become fixed in the sources. A hostage list from Mainz of 804 records whether a hostage was a Westphalian, an Angrian or an Eastphalian; the Capitulare Saxonicum (797) involves all three in lawmaking; the Lex Saxonum (802) treats them differently. According to Becher a wife among the Westphalians received half of the shared marital property there, among Eastphalians and Angrians nothing. Becher concludes that the groups became fixed units through wartime necessity and then through Frankish written usage. That fits the observation in the article on the Angrians that the threefold division may have been a Frankish scheme of ordering.
The Saxon Wars of Charlemagne run from 772 to 804. I list the entries in which the west appears and name the source; where only a summary was available, that is stated.
772. Charles takes the Eresburg (today Marsberg) and destroys the Irminsul. The German Wikipedia on the Saxons gives the year; the English one wavers between 772 and 773.
775. See above.
776. The Saxons break their oaths, drive the Franks out of the Eresburg and destroy it. The siege of the Syburg fails, the besiegers are chased to the Lippe. Charles returns from Italy, the Saxons submit and are baptised, the Eresburg is rebuilt and another fort is built on the Lippe and manned with guard units (King).
777. First imperial assembly at Paderborn. Many Saxons appear and are baptised. Widukind does not come and flees to the Danes; this is his first mention. (English Wikipedia; the annals for 777 not read.)
779. According to the English Wikipedia Charles subdues Eastphalia, Angria and Westphalia and divides the land at a diet near Lippspringe into mission districts and counties. (Summary only.)
782. Assembly at the source of the Lippe. Widukind returns from the Northmen and stirs up a rising. The Franks under Adalgis and Gailo suffer a heavy defeat at the Süntel. According to the annals Charles has 4,500 Saxons executed at Verden (revised version, read). The number and the interpretation are discussed to this day; that something grave happened is not disputed.
783. Charles wins at Detmold and on the Hase (revised version, read). The German Wikipedia places the Hase at a river near Osnabrück and describes a three-day battle; it relies on nineteenth-century literature, and it regards the siege of a "Wittekindsburg" itself as probably a late legend.
784. His son of the same name wins a cavalry victory on the Lippe; according to Becher he defeated the Westphalians in the Dreingau. Charles advances to Rehme, where the Weser and the Werre meet, and winters in the Eresburg (King).
785. Widukind submits and is baptised, probably at Attigny, with Charles as godfather. The annals claim that all Saxony is now subdued; Becher calls this an illusion, because fighting went on.
792 to 794. According to the English Wikipedia the Westphalians rise against conscription for the Avar wars; Eastphalians and Nordalbingians join in 793, and by 794 the rising is put down. This too is attested only through a summary.
797, 799, 802. The Capitulare Saxonicum softens the special laws; in 799 Pope Leo III visits the palace at Paderborn and consecrates an altar there (according to the German Wikipedia on the Kaiserpfalz); in 802 Saxon law is recorded in the Lex Saxonum.
804. The last resistance is put down and the Saxons are incorporated into the Frankish realm, with their Thing assemblies (German Wikipedia on the Saxons). The hostage list of Mainz dates from this year.
"Eaque conditione a rege proposita et ab illis suscepta tractum per tot annos bellum constat esse finitum, ut abiecto daemonum cultu et relictis patriis caerimoniis, Christianae fidei atque religionis sacramenta susciperent … Francis adunati unus cum eis populus efficerentur."
"On this condition, proposed by the king and accepted by them, the war drawn out over so many years is agreed to have been ended: that they should give up the worship of demons, leave the customs of their fathers, accept the sacraments of the Christian faith and religion … and, united with the Franks, become one people with them."Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, chapter 7 (public domain). The three clauses were read in the Latin wording via The Latin Library; the rest of the chapter was not read word for word; the spelling follows that page. Own translation. Einhard speaks of the Saxons as a whole, not of the Westphalians alone, and writes as the biographer of the victor.
In the texts I saw, there is no mention of a Saxon king. The Westphalians stood, like the others, under nobles who led war bands in war and gave judgment in peace. Nithard, writing in 843, distinguishes three estates in Saxony: nobles (edhilingui), free men (frilinge) and half-free (lazzi). I know the passage only from the German Wikipedia on the Stellinga. Whether the Westphalians had a precedence among the Saxons, my sources do not say.
On religion: the Old Saxon baptismal vow of the late eighth century, according to the German Wikipedia, obliges the candidate to renounce Woden, Thunar and Saxnot (probably the tribal god). It names gods, and it stands in a text of the opponents. Charles destroyed the sanctuary of the Irminsul in 772. What the sanctuary looked like we do not know; in the texts I saw it is not described, and what is said about it is interpretation. On the wider question of belief see Germanic religion.
Legally the land received Frankish administration: counties and bishoprics. According to the English Wikipedia the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae provided the death penalty for those who clung to paganism; in 797 this was abolished again. The Saxon Thing remained, according to the German Wikipedia. On the assemblies see Thing.
Archaeology cannot grasp the Westphalians as a group; finds do not say "Westphalian" by themselves. What it can grasp are Frankish installations. At Paderborn Wilhelm Winkelmann excavated from 1964 to 1978 and uncovered a palace: a precinct of about 280 by 250 metres, surrounded by a limestone wall 1.5 metres thick, with a hall of 31 by 10 metres and a church of the Saviour of 9 by 20 metres. That the urbs Karoli named in the annals for 776 was the first building is probable but not proven; the burnt layer of the year 1000 is Winkelmann's interpretation (German Wikipedia on the Kaiserpfalz).
The mission gained density once Charles saw the situation calmed. Liudger, born around 742 near Utrecht, a pupil of Alcuin at York, ordained priest in Cologne in 777, worked in Frisia from 776. Perhaps after the rising of 792 (so the German Wikipedia) Charles put him in charge of the mission in western Saxony; in 793 Liudger founded the collegiate foundation at Münster, from which the bishopric grew. From 796 he bought land near Werden on the Ruhr and founded a proprietary monastery around 800. On 30 March 805 Archbishop Hildebold of Cologne consecrated him first bishop of Münster. All dates come from the summary; I have not read the Vita Liudgeri.
From this world comes the Heliand, an Old Saxon gospel epic in alliterative verse, probably composed in the first half of the ninth century. Where it was written is open: the German Wikipedia names Fulda and, on linguistic and palaeographic grounds, Werden on the Ruhr as possibilities. The Munich manuscript was probably written around 850 at Corvey; its dialect counts for Haubrichs as East Westphalian.
Hardly any figure is so closely tied to the Westphalians as Widukind, and hardly one is so hard to grasp. The annals name him in 777 as the absentee at Paderborn, in 782 as a returnee from the Danes and in 785 as a baptismal candidate. Everything we have comes from his opponents. That he was a Westphalian rests on Becher's reasoning about 775 ("probably"); the English Wikipedia says expressly that his origin is not established. That he was a "tribal duke" cannot be found in the passages I read; the German Wikipedia on the Saxons calls him only the leader of the renewed rising after 777, and the English one does not know what title he bore. What happened to him after 785 stays open; confinement on the Reichenau, as Gerd Althoff proposed, is largely rejected by scholars. The grave at Enger is mentioned only in the early thirteenth century. The article on Widukind treats the sources in detail.
The last risings fall in the years 841 to 843. According to the German Wikipedia the Stellinga turned against their own lords; Nithard says the rebels wanted to live as their forefathers had before the Frankish conquest. Lothar I, after his defeat at Fontenoy, appealed in August 841 for their help against his brother Louis the German. In 842, according to the German Wikipedia, Louis had 140 leaders beheaded and 14 hanged. The page says the rising broke out "everywhere in Saxony"; whether the Westphalians were especially affected, my source does not say.
In Ottonian and Salian times Westphalia, according to the Hagen project, had no political structures of its own. Ernst Schubert sees the detachment from eastern Saxon preponderance in the Saxon wars of Henry IV (1073 to 1075). Then the cut: after the fall of Henry the Lion, the court diet of Gelnhausen on 13 April 1180 transferred to Archbishop Philipp von Heinsberg of Cologne the ducal power in Westphalia and, according to the Deutsche Biographie, in a part of Angria; from then on he bore the title "Duke of Westphalia and Angria". The charter regulated neither boundaries nor rights. The Cologne holding stayed a scattered territory, about 83 per cent of it Sauerland, with Arnsberg as residence; the county of Arnsberg was added in 1368. The Duchy of Westphalia did not end in 1803, as one often reads, but was occupied by Hesse-Darmstadt in 1802 and confirmed in 1803 by the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss. In 1816 Prussia took possession. It was a duchy of Cologne and not a tribal duchy of the Westphalians.
The Westphalian area reaches westward to the Rhineland, and the connection is attested, though mostly as a road. In 775, according to Becher, Charles held an imperial assembly at Düren near Aachen before crossing the Rhine. In 782 he held his assembly in Saxony at the source of the Lippe (King). The Westphalian missionary Liudger was ordained priest at Cologne in 777, and Archbishop Hildebold of Cologne consecrated him bishop of Münster in 805. After his defeat at Fontenoy Lothar fled to Aachen in 841 (German Wikipedia on the Stellinga). The book that shaped Westphalian identity strongly also appeared on the Rhine: Werner Rolevinck's "Book in Praise of Westphalia" was published in Cologne in 1474. The archbishopric of Cologne is thus the strongest attested link. For Aachen itself and for Alsdorf no attested connection of the Westphalians can be made.
The Westphalians did not vanish as a group; they became the name of a land. According to the LWL text the name spread from the ninth to the thirteenth century over the whole area between Rhine and Weser and displaced the name Angria there; in the thirteenth century Westphalia was seen as the antiqua Saxonia. The awareness of being a landscape with a history of its own was fully formed by the end of the Middle Ages and supported in 1512 the formation of the Lower Rhenish-Westphalian Imperial Circle.
Later uses were added. The Kingdom of Westphalia (1807 to 1813), created for Jérôme Bonaparte, comprised mostly areas that today lie in other states and, according to the German Wikipedia, is no basis for the region. The Prussian Province of Westphalia existed from 1816 to 1946; North Rhine-Westphalia was formed on 23 August 1946, and Lippe joined in 1947. The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 (Münster and Osnabrück) bears the name of the landscape but has nothing to do with the Saxons.
Legends grew around Widukind: a "Wittekindsburg", the grave at Enger, descendants such as Queen Matilda (the descent is not proven; the English Wikipedia writes "apparently") or the Billungs. All of that is late.
Related articles: The Saxons, The Angrians, The Eastphalians, Widukind, Franks, Irminsul, Bructeri, Marsi, Chattuarii, Thing, Carolingian armies, Christianisation of the Germanic peoples and Germanic peoples in the Rhineland.
The Saxons · The Angrians (Engern) · The Eastphalians · Widukind · The Franks.
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