Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (17 page)

Christianization aided the consolidation of imperial authority and promoted its extension north and eastwards across the river Elbe. However, unlike the Muslim Ottomans, who would form a majority in their own empire only late in the nineteenth century, the Empire’s population was always overwhelmingly Christian with only a small Jewish minority; the population included relatively few pagan Slavs in the ambiguous border zones of the north-east, who were largely Christianized by the thirteenth century.
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Christianization was not a ‘clash of civilizations’.
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This popular yet controversial approach defines civilization largely through religion and regards cultures as mutually exclusive, homogeneous entities that either clash or engage in dialogue. The Empire’s expansion was certainly legitimated in language which later generations would consider that of civilization overcoming barbarianism. Religious texts and laws certainly distinguished Christians from Slavs, Jews and Muslims. However, culture offers a repertoire of behaviour, experience and attitudes allowing individuals to select what is meaningful or useful in their own context. Interactions depend on circumstances. Boundaries are blurred by negotiation, exchange and integration, and contact is rarely exclusively either benign or violent. Christianity underwent considerable changes in practice and belief throughout this period. What was considered acceptable at one point could be condemned later. The sense of a fully
defined Christendom only assumed its true shape as a singular, exclusive civilization in the period of Romantic nostalgia following the French and Industrial Revolutions.
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Motives

It is unlikely that Charlemagne and the Franks had a conscious policy to create a single
populus Christianus
.
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The principal sources for this view are clerics who put their own gloss on Carolingian actions. Carolingian society was primarily organized for war, not prayer. Its goal was to acquire wealth through plunder and extorting tribute, and to translate claims to authority into reality by gaining prestige, reputation and dominion.
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Christianity channelled these ambitions by identifying non-Christians as ‘legitimate’ targets. Crucially, the Empire’s foundation coincided with the revival of the western European slave trade, which had declined with the demise of ancient Rome and the development of a servile rural population working the land. Demand for slaves returned with the rise of the Arabs, their growing wealth and their switch from tribal to slave armies.
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The Vikings emerged to service this economy by seizing captives in northern and western Europe for sale in the Mediterranean. The Carolingians and Ottonians provided a second supply through their campaigns across the Elbe. The word ‘slave’ is cognate with Slav and began to displace the earlier Latin term
servus
during this period.
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Meanwhile, both the Saxons and Slavs engaged in more localized raiding for women. These practices only ceased with a general growth in population and the assimilation of east Elbian areas into the Empire around 1200.

There were other reasons for laity to answer the clergy’s call to spread the Gospel. The Empire’s elite was uniformly Christian and shared a concern for salvation and the belief that God influenced earthly events. The idea of penance was powerfully attractive to a warrior elite engaged in killing, fitted with Germanic legal customs that demanded reparations for victims, and encouraged lavish endowments of material resources to the church. The development of indulgences at the end of the eleventh century allowed warriors to gain remission from sin by serving in the crusades. Endowments were additionally encouraged by the belief in vicarious merit in which prayers and intercessions by the living benefited the donor’s soul long after their death. These
beliefs in turn encouraged the laity’s concern for monastic discipline and good ecclesiastical management, since ‘a community of lax and negligent monks was a poor investment’.
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Endowments removed wealth from the grasp of rivals and entrusted it to a transpersonal institution headed by Christ. The clergy enjoyed considerable social prestige through their proximity to God and their role as transmitters of written culture. The church offered a secure and attractive career for those of the elite who did not fit into the secular world, either because they were surplus to requirements as younger sons or unmarried daughters, or through personal misfortune. Hermann ‘the Lame’ probably had cerebral palsy and, unable to train as a warrior like his brothers, was placed instead in Reichenau abbey, where he could develop his prodigious literary and musical talents.
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Religious houses were also secure places to confine wayward relatives and rivals.

Spiritual Goals

Thus, Christianization was driven by a powerful mix of conviction and self-interest. The objective was outward conformity and submission. In contrast to Byzantium, before the twelfth century the western church did not enquire too deeply into what people believed. Conversion and winning souls entailed persuading powerful local figures to join the clergy or enter a monastery. The captured sons of Slav nobles were often educated by monks in the ninth and tenth centuries. Later, as Christians, these Slavs used their personal connections to advance conversion among their own people by acting as baptismal sponsors. The Carolingians and Ottonians were likewise quite successful in persuading Viking warlords to convert, thereby assimilating ‘barbarians’ in the same way as did the ancient Roman empire.
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Carolingian kings were already coordinating these activities before 800. A series of church synods between 780 and 820 increased the incentives for lay patronage through written guidelines (
capitulares
) to improve monastic discipline. Monks and nuns were distinguished by their vows and strictly circumscribed lives, setting them apart from secular canons and canonesses who lived a communal life and acted as political and economic managers of church assets. While the first group prayed for benefactors, the second provided suitable roles for noble sons and daughters.
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The synods ensured clergy had the tools of their trade. Eighth- and ninth-century inventories show that most of the Empire’s churches contained at least one religious book – a remarkable achievement in an age without printing.
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The Christian message was also conveyed through non-written methods like wall paintings, sculptures, sermons and mystery plays. Objectives remained realistic. Bishops were to ensure liturgical uniformity and check that lesser clergy preached on Sundays and holy days, visited the sick, and performed baptisms and burials. Burial rites were an important marker of Christianity, displacing earlier customs of interring horses and weapons in warrior graves. However, saints’ days only became regular calendar fixtures in the twelfth century, while it was not until 1215 that confession became at least an annual obligation. Considerable scope remained for local toleration of pagan practices and heterodoxy, all of which eased assimilation.

Missionaries

Christianization varied across the Empire. The church had enjoyed support from local elites in Burgundy and Italy since late antiquity, in contrast to Britain, where Christianity had largely expired by the late sixth century and had to be reintroduced by missionaries. Meanwhile, much of Germany had escaped both Romanization and Christianization. Frankish influence remained limited to the Rhine–Main nexus prior to the rapid conquest of Alamania, Bavaria and Saxony completed by Charlemagne around 800. For most of what became the kingdom of Germany, conquest and Christianization proceeded together and the entire church structure had to be created from scratch. The new German church was both a ‘national’ (i.e. general) and local institution, owing its overall shape to royal initiative, but its specific character to lords and missionaries on the ground.

Frankish kings sent missionaries to Frisia on the North Sea coast from the 690s, and others into central and northern Germany to work among the heathen Saxons from 718.
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St Boniface, the most famous of these missionaries, felled the sacred oak at Geismar in Thuringia to prove the impotence of pagan gods. A major push followed between 775 and 777 when around 70 priests and deacons travelled to north-west Germany, including Willehard, who became the first north German bishop in 787.
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Liudger was a prominent, yet fairly typical missionary.
A third-generation Christian Anglo-Saxon, he had been educated in Utrecht and York, imbibing the literate, cosmopolitan culture characteristic of a period without clear political or national boundaries. He worked among the Frisians from 787, moving his base in 793 to Mimigernaford, an important ford and crossroads, where he established a
monasterium
, giving the later name of Münster to the settlement that slowly developed around it.
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Like Boniface’s felling of the sacred oak, military victories were intended to prove that God favoured only Christians. Acceptance of the conqueror’s religion was a powerful sign of submission, hence the significance attached to the baptism of the Saxon leader Widukind in 785. Germanic warrior culture provided common ground, easing assimilation. The Saxon elite embraced Christianity within two generations. Already in 845, the Saxon Count Liudolf and his wife Oda travelled to Rome to fetch relics and papal approval for a convent at Gandersheim. Five years later, Widukind’s grandson Walbert collected Roman relics for his own monastery at Wildeshausen.
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Christianization and imperial expansion both slowed as the Carolingian civil wars coincided with intensified external raids by Vikings, Arabs and Magyars during the middle and later ninth century. The stabilization of the northern and eastern frontiers allowed renewed activity from the early 930s. The king and his cleric advisors selected suitable monks who were sent to Rome to secure papal backing and holy relics, before being despatched to establish new churches and persuade local pagans to convert.
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In time, these churches were placed on a firmer footing through incorporation within new or existing dioceses. A notable example was the mission of Abbot Hadomir of Fulda in 947, which revived Willehard’s archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen as the primary centre for the Christianization of Scandinavia and the Baltic.

The emperor was rarely able to help missionaries once they set off into the wild north and east. Those sent to Denmark were expelled in the 820s and Christianization made no headway there until the conversion of Harald Bluetooth in the mid-tenth century. The cooperation of local elites proved indispensable, especially as conversion entailed simultaneous acceptance of imperial suzerainty and payment of tithes. The Bohemian leader (and later saint) Wenceslas had been educated as a Christian and accepted imperial overlordship, only to be murdered on his brother’s orders in 929. Bohemia was forced to acknowledge
imperial suzerainty in 950, though resistance to Christianity persisted into the eleventh century. Nonetheless, conversion of much of its elite proved significant in spreading Christianity and imperial influence to the East Elbian Slavs and to the Poles and Magyars. Vojtech (Adalbert), a missionary martyred by the Prussians in 997, came from the Bohemian ruling family.

Despite the impressive scope of its activity, Ottonian Christianization rested on insecure foundations, with few churches and only a tenuous hold on most of the East Elbian and Baltic populations. Its vulnerability was exposed during the massive Slav rising of July 983, which, in turn, was probably encouraged by Otto II’s catastrophic defeat by the Arabs at Cotrone the previous year. Churches and castles were swept away, leaving the partially Christianized Sorbs around Meissen as a last outpost. The other East Elbian bishoprics remained only nominally in existence, and it was not until the twelfth century that the bishops of Brandenburg and Havelberg could visit their dioceses.
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Nonetheless, many Slavs found Christianity attractive, especially the elite, who saw it as a way to enhance their own status through association with Latin culture and power. Bohemian and Polish nobles had already converted before 983 and refused to join the revolt. The Polish Duke Boleslav I Chrobry (‘the Brave’) ransomed Vojtech’s body from the Prussians and placed it in his capital at Gniezno just prior to Otto III’s pilgrimage during Lent 1000. The emperor’s visit resulted in Gniezno’s elevation to an archbishopric with jurisdiction over missionary bishops in Cracow, Kolberg and Breslau (Wroclaw). This entailed the transfer of jurisdictions that were previously part of the Magdeburg and Hamburg-Bremen archdioceses, as well as recognition of Boleslav Chrobry as an allied if still subordinate prince sharing in the imperial Christianizing mission. Cooperation was symbolized by Otto’s gift of a copy of the Holy Lance in exchange for the prized relic of Vojtech’s arm. Boleslav was clearly elevated above his local rivals, while the establishment of a separate Polish ecclesiastical structure provided the basis for that country as an independent monarchy. Polish Christianity was swept away by a pagan rising between 1037 and 1039 during which the rest of Vojtech’s corpse was retrieved and installed in Prague, where it became the focus of a cult extending across Germany, Bohemia, Poland and Hungary. Polish Christianity was rebuilt through new monastic foundations in the later eleventh century.
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