CONVERSION OF EUROPE EPUB EB

Richard Fletcher

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780006863021
• eBook ISBN: 9780007502967
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

The story of how Europe was converted to Christianity from 300AD until the barbarian Lithuanians finally capitulated at the astonishingly late date of 1386. It is an epic tale from one of the most gifted historians of today.

This remarkable book examines the conversion of Europe to the Christian faith in the period following the collapse of the Roman Empire to approximately 1300 when the hegemony of the Holy Roman Empire was firmly established.

One of the book's great strengths is the degree to which it shows how little was inevitable about this process, how surrounded by uncertainties. What was the origin of the missionary impulse? Who were the activists who engaged in this work – the toilsome, often unrewarding, sometimes dangerous work of evangelisation, and how did they set about putting over this faith? How did a structure of ecclesiastical government come into being? Above all, at what point can one say that an individual or a society has become Christian? Fletcher's range, lucidity and mastery of his sources brings the answers to these and many other questions as far within our grasp as they probably ever can be.

Like Alan Bullock and Simon Schama, Fletcher is a historian with the true gift of a storyteller and a wide general readership ahead of him.

Fletcher's previous book, The Quest for El Cid won both the Wolfson History Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for History. This book is even better – the most impressive achievement so far of this strikingly gifted historian.

CHAPTER ONE

Who Is It For?

To spread abroad among barbarians and heathen natives the knowledge of the Gospel seems to be highly preposterous, in so far as it anticipates, nay even reverses, the order of Nature.

General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 1796

WHO IS Christianity for? It may seem an odd question. The plainest of answers is furnished by the so-called ‘great commission’ which concludes St Matthew’s Gospel: ‘Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.’ What could be more explicit than that? But it needs only a slight acquaintance with the history of the past 2,000 years to show that Christians have not always heeded even the least ambiguous of instructions. Consider the withering rebuke delivered by a gathering of Baptist ministers to the young William Carey, later to be so famous in the Indian mission field, when in 1786 he first voiced his wish to become a missionary: ‘Sit down, young man. When it pleases the Lord to convert the heathen He will do it without your help or mine.’

This book is about the process by which a religion which had grown up in the Mediterranean world of the Roman empire was diffused among the outsiders whom the Romans referred to as barbarians; with far-reaching consequences for humankind. The eighteenth-century sentiments already quoted might have been uttered by many a civilized Christian of the first few centuries A.D. There was nothing inevitable about the proffer of the faith to barbarians. But it started to occur in the obscure period which followed the decline and fall of the western half of the empire, and thereafter continued with apparently unstoppable momentum throughout the Old World. By the year 1000 Christian communities had been planted from Greenland to China. The acceptance of Christianity by these outsiders was not simply a matter of confessional change, of dogma, of religious belief and observance in a narrow sense. It involved, or brought in its wake, a much wider process of cultural change. The conversion of ‘barbarian’ Europe to Christianity brought Roman and Mediterranean customs and values and habits of thought to the newcomers who were the legatees of the Roman empire. These included, for example, literacy and books and the Latin language with all that it opened up; Roman notions about law, authority, property and government; the habits of living in towns and using coin for exchange; Mediterranean tastes in food, drink and costume; new architectural and artistic conventions. The Germanic successor-states which emerged from the wreckage of the empire – for these are the outsiders with whom we shall be initially concerned – accepted Christianity and in so doing embraced a cultural totality which was Romanitas, ‘Roman-ness’. It was particularly significant that this occurred at a time when two other processes were shattering the cultural unity of the Mediterranean world. One of these was the withdrawal into herself of the eastern, Byzantine, Orthodox half of the former Roman empire. The other was the irruption of Islam into the Mediterranean and the resultant hiving off of its eastern and southern shores into an alien culture. The cultural unity of the Mediterranean disappeared for ever. But what had been harvested from the classical world and transplanted with Christianity into a northern seedbed germinated there, sprouted and grew into a new civilization, one which indeed owed much to the Mediterranean but was distinctively its own: western European Christendom. The growth of Christendom decisively affected the character of European culture and thereby, because of European dominance in human affairs for several centuries before the twentieth, the civilization of our world. That is why the coming of Christianity to north-western Europe is worth examining, and why this book has been written.

It will be as well to begin by looking at one specific example of this process. In or about the year 619 an Italian priest named Paulinus made his way from the kingdom of Kent in the south-eastern corner of Britain to the court of King Edwin, whose realm of Northumbria had its nucleus in what we now call Yorkshire. Paulinus was a member of the team of missionaries sent by Pope Gregory I a generation earlier to convert the English to Christianity. He had been working in Kent, and possibly other parts of eastern England as well, since his arrival in 601. The Gregorian mission had had a modest success in Kent, where the royal family had been converted and an archbishopric founded at Canterbury. The northern venture was a new departure which had arisen from a dynastic marriage-alliance. Paulinus went north as the domestic chaplain of a Christian princess from Kent, Ethelburga, who was to be married to the pagan King Edwin of Northumbria.

Britain, Britannia, had once been a part of the Roman empire. That had been a long time ago, though the memory of it had endured in some circles, perhaps to exert influence upon the mind of Pope Gregory. After the withdrawal of the apparatus of Roman imperial administration in the early years of the fifth century Britain was left vulnerable to her enemies. Prominent though not alone among these were the Germanic peoples of the North Sea coastline from the Rhine to Denmark. It is traditional and convenient, if only approximately accurate, to refer to them as the Anglo-Saxons. In the course of the very obscure fifth and sixth centuries Germanic warrior aristocracies established themselves as the dominant groups over much of eastern Britain. By the year 600 a number of petty kingdoms under Anglo-Saxon princely dynasties had emerged. Kent was one of these, Northumbria another.

Edwin was the most powerful Anglo-Saxon ruler of his day. His kingdom of Northumbria stretched from the Humber to the Firth of Forth between the North Sea and the Pennines. In addition to this he enjoyed a wider overlordship in Britain over many other kings and princes, both Germanic and Celtic. This position of dominance had been gained by incessant warfare against his neighbours. Seventh-century English kings did not ‘govern’ in any sense that we should recognize today. Their primary business was predatory warfare and the exaction of tribute from those they defeated. The spoils of successful war – treasure, weapons, horses, slaves, cattle – were distributed to their retainers as payment for past and lien upon future loyalty. A king who failed to provide rewards would forfeit loyalty. The warriors of his warband would melt away to take service with more successful and therefore more generous warlords, or would thrust the king aside into exile or an early grave to make way for a more promising candidate. It was a risky business being a Germanic king in post-Roman Europe.

Beyond their own arms and those of their retainers these kings looked to their gods to furnish them with victory. It is a grave difficulty with our subject – one which we shall encounter time and again in the course of this book – that we know very little indeed about Germanic traditional, pre-Christian religion. If we ask ourselves the question, ‘What were Germanic kings converted from?’ we have to confess that we don’t know much about it and never will. Most of the traces of Germanic paganism have been diligently obliterated by its Christian supplanter. (This has not deterred modern scholars from writing many weighty books about it.) But we are on fairly safe ground in the supposition that for a king like Edwin and for his heroic warrior aristocracy the cult of a god or gods of war was of central importance. Edwin’s gods had done very nicely by him. He was not a man, one might hazard, who would hastily abandon their cult. Paulinus’ brief was not simply to minister to the spiritual needs of Ethelburga and her attendants but also to try to convert her husband to Christianity. As he journeyed northwards Paulinus must have reflected that Edwin presented him with a formidable challenge. But Edwin did give way in the end. He was baptized at York on Easter Day, 12 April, in the year 627, in a wooden chapel hastily erected for the purpose, along with other members of his family and many of his warriors. The king founded an episcopal see at York; Paulinus was its first bishop. For the remainder of his life until his death in battle in 633 King Edwin strenuously encouraged the missionary activities of Paulinus in his kingdom.

We owe this account to Bede, a Northumbrian monk and scholar who completed his Ecclesiastical History of the English People about a century after Edwin’s death. Bede was an exceptionally careful and honest historian, though in using him we have to bear in mind that his aims and methods in writing history differed widely from those of today. Although his chronology presents difficulties – silently resolved above – no one has ever doubted that the central episode of this narrative, the baptism of Edwin into the Christian faith on Easter Day 627, was one that did really happen. However, if we wish to approach a deeper understanding of the facts there is a great deal more that we should like to know. Bede furnishes some tantalizing scraps of information about the background to the baptism which can be eked out with some even more fragmentary materials from other sources.

In 626 Queen Ethelburga gave birth to a daughter. Paulinus assured Edwin that the queen’s safe delivery and the baby’s survival were owed to his prayers to the God of the Christians. Later in the same year Edwin led his warband against the king of the West Saxons (who gave their name to the kingdom of Wessex). Before he set out on campaign he promised that if God should grant him victory he would renounce the worship of idols and serve Christ. As a pledge of his promise he permitted his infant daughter to be baptized, which took place at Whitsun (7 June) 626. His campaign was completely successful: five chieftains of the West Saxons were slain and Edwin returned booty-laden and rejoicing to the north. He abandoned the worship of idols and sought instruction in the Christian faith from Paulinus, though he did not yet publicly declare himself a Christian. As well as instructing him Paulinus reminded Edwin of a mysterious experience that he had had years before, while in exile before fighting his way to power in Northumbria. At dead of night he had encountered an unknown stranger – in one version of the story this was Paulinus himself – who had prophesied Edwin’s future greatness and held out the promise of salvation. In a final episode of Bede’s conversion narrative the king held a meeting with his counsellors and sought their advice. The chief pagan priest, by name Coifi, made the point that a lifetime’s devotion to pagan cult had brought little in the way of material advantage to himself, the principal intermediary between king and gods. (We should note that Bede regarded these as ‘prudent words’; his nineteenth-century editor and matchless commentator Charles Plummer found it ‘disappointing’ that Bede should have approved such ‘gross materialism’.) A nobleman present likened the life of man to the flight of a sparrow through the king’s hall in winter, from darkness to darkness, and urged sympathetic consideration for a faith which might reveal more of the origins and ultimate goals of mankind. Paulinus also spoke in the debate. At its close Edwin formally embraced Christianity and Coifi led the way in profaning the heathen temples. The royal baptism at Easter followed shortly thereafter.

Bede was writing a century later. He was dependent on oral testimony, stories about King Edwin preserved at the monastery of Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast, where the king was buried. He wrote with a didactic purpose, teaching lessons in Christian living to the kings and clergy of his own day by holding up a gallery of good examples from the past, among whom Edwin and Paulinus were prominent. These features of Bede’s work, for all his honesty and care, render it less than wholly satisfactory as an account of the conversion of Edwin. But it is very nearly all we have.

The coming of Christianity to Northumbria in the seventh century prompts questions which may serve as some kind of informal agenda for enquiries which will range more widely in time and space.

First, there is the problem of the apostolic impulse. It is observable that in the course of Christian history churchmen have been now more, now less concerned with spreading the faith. Why did Pope Gregory I decide to send a mission to convert the English to Christianity? What was it that took Patrick to Ireland, or Boniface to Germany, or Anskar to Sweden, or Cyril and Methodius to Moravia?

Second, there are the evangelists like Paulinus to be considered. Who were these activists who engaged themselves in the work – the toilsome, often unrewarding, sometimes dangerous work – of missionary preaching? What sort of previous experience or training had they had? What models or precedents guided them, what ideas about strategy and tactics?

Third, there is the missionary ‘target’ or ‘host society’, in this instance a warrior king and his household of military retainers. Was it a condition of successful evangelism in early medieval Europe that missionaries worked through and with the secular power? Who indeed were identified as the potential converts – individuals or groups; central people or marginal people; men or women or children; kings, noblemen, farmers, merchants, craftsmen, labourers, slaves, prisoners of war or what-have-you; settled, nomadic, intermittently mobile, or displaced people?

Fourth, there are the expectations of the potential converts, founded in their experience of the traditional religion in whose observances they were brought up. What did they expect of it? It has already been pointed out that we know little of Germanic paganism. The same may be said – must be said, indeed, and the theme is one that needs regular sounding – of Celtic, Scandinavian and Slavonic paganisms. But of one thing we may be reasonably confident. The rich diversity of pre-Christian cults with which evangelists had to contend shared a core of what sociologists of religion like to call ‘empirical religiosity’. That is to say, the belief that proper cult brings tangible reward in this present world, in material benefits like health, prosperity, success or fame, as well as in whatever Hereafter traditional religion might have envisaged. Edwin wanted victory in battle, glory and treasure and power and the continuing loyalty of his retainers. Others of less exalted status would have had different hopes and expectations: enough food to see the family through the winter, murrain-free cattle, cures for sickness or disability, a good husband or wife, successful trading, deliverance from shipwreck, release from enchantment, protection against evil spirits, the death of an enemy, revenge, freedom, a return home. How could widely differing hopes and fears be satisfied?

Fifth, there is the question of the communication of the message. How did evangelists set about the business of putting over the faith and its associated standards of conduct to potential converts? For a start, what language did they use? For Paulinus the vernacular of every day in his native Italy was Latin; for Edwin it was a Northumbrian dialect of Old English, a Germanic language having its closest counterpart in the Frisian coastlands of north Germany. When Edwin’s mysterious nocturnal visitor spoke to him of ‘salvation’, what Old English word or phrase might he have used? How did missionaries render key Christian concepts in the vernacular – ‘sin’, ‘regeneration’, and so forth? Most important of all, what word did they choose to render ‘God’, and what cluster of associations might it have had for their converts?

Sixth, there is the delicate problem of the adaptability of the message. How much elasticity or ‘give’ did missionary Christianity have in an early medieval context? What compromises or adjustments did evangelists have to make, and with how much heart-searching? How and where were the limits drawn between what was tolerable in traditional belief and practice and what was not? To what extent could or did Christian activists try to change traditional custom – in respect of, say, marriage, penal practice, the disposal of the dead, warfare, blood feuds, slave-trading?

Seventh, there are the differing patterns of acceptance. What did the new converts make of the new faith and its demands? What models of Christian living were presented to them? How, if at all, was Edwin different (to human eyes) as man and as king after Easter 627 from what he had been before? Bede tells us that subsequently Paulinus spent thirty-six days at King Edwin’s royal residence at Yeavering (in present-day Northumberland) engaged in non-stop baptism in the nearby river Glen of all who flocked to him. What did they think had happened to them? Do we have even the faintest shadow of a chance of finding out? How much of a leap into the unknown was conversion, how high a hurdle? Were converts required to abandon all, or some, or hardly any of their previous customs, rituals or taboos?

Eighth, there is the consolidation that has to follow close upon the initial acceptance and conversion, the process by which a mission becomes a church. How did a structure of ecclesiastical government come into being in the mission field, and in what respects did it differ from the Mediterranean model whence it derived? Why were such enormous numbers of monasteries founded in newly converted regions such as seventh-century England or eighth-century Germany? How were cathedrals and monasteries endowed, and what implications might this process have had for legal notions about the ownership and transfer of property? How did parishes come into existence? What positions were taken up on such potentially controversial matters as the formation of a native priesthood, the role of women within the young churches, the imposition of dues such as tithe upon the new converts, the translation of Christian scriptures into the vernacular? What was to be the architectural form and the constructional technique of new church buildings? Could ‘native’ art become ‘Christian’ art?

Ninth, and almost finally, there are the cultural consequences of conversion, already glanced at. We do not know exactly where Edwin’s wooden chapel stood, though there is some likelihood that it was in the pillared square of what had once been the praetorium or headquarters building of the Roman fortress at York. Excavation has shown that this enormous and imposing structure was still standing in Edwin’s day. If this supposition about the siting of York’s earliest Anglo-Saxon cathedral is correct, Edwin’s baptism at the hands of an Italian missionary bishop took place in an unambiguously Roman architectural setting. Bede tells us that Edwin used to have a standard of Roman type carried before him. He quotes papal letters which addressed Edwin with exalted Latin titles, ‘glorious king of the English’, ‘most excellent and surpassing lord’. To Bede it was clear that there was something Roman about Edwin’s kingship after his conversion. Whatever the reality might have been, from Bede’s angle of vision the perception was a just one. Within little more than a century of Edwin’s death the cathedral school at York had become the most important centre for the study of Christian and classical learning in western Europe. Among others it educated Alcuin, that early example of the brain-drain who, head-hunted by Charlemagne, king of the Franks, was the architect of that revival of literature and learning under royal patronage, the so-called Carolingian renaissance, which was the threshold to the cultural achievements of western Christendom in the Middle Ages.

These are all questions to which answers may be found – however hesitant or provisional, however swaddled in circumlocutory cautions our formulations may need to be – in the meagre sources which are all that have come down to us from a remote epoch. The tenth and last question on our agenda is the most perplexing beca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Preface
• 1: Who is it For?
• 2: The Challenge of the Countryside
• 3: Beyond the Imperial Frontiers
• 4: The New Constantines
• 5: An Abundance of Distinguished Patrimonies
• 6: The Chalice and the Horn
• 7: Campaigning Sceptres: the Frankish Drive to the East
• 8: Rising by Steps: Christian Consolidation
• 9: Rival Monotheisms
• 10: A Certain Greek Named Methodius
• 11: Scandinavians Abroad and at Home
• 12: The Eastern Marches from Wenceslas to Nyklot
• 13: Mission Into Church
• 14: The Sword Our Pope: the Baltic and Beyond
• 15: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
• Further Reading
• Praise
• Index
• Notes
• Copyright
• About the Publisher