as St Martin of Tours had only recently started going into the countryside on the offensive, and Christian institutions such as monasticism were almost unknown. By 900, in Gaul, Germany, Britain, and Ireland, Christianity was enforced by the state, baptism was, in theory, universal, the Church had become important politically and in the economy, and monasticism was the most important spiritual and cultural force in Europe. The slow process of Christianization, which began normally with the conversion of kings and aristocrats, is clearly one of the most important developments of the period. With Christianity other elements of Roman civilization reached the barbarians inside and outside the former Roman Empire: ideas of law and government, the art of writing, and the wealth of Latin and Christian learning and literature. It is possible that it was only with Christianity that Latin, and subsequently French, became the language of the rural population of northern Gaul. We have the paradox that the process of Romanization reached its climax in the west only after the collapse of the Roman Empire.
The barbarians who settled in southern Europe were almost all Christians by the time of their settlement, though they were all Arian heretics. Clovis, king of the Franks, owed some of his political success to the fact that he brought his people to Catholic Christianity, thus making the Franks acceptable to the Gallo-Romans he wished to rule. The Church in Gaul, which continued to be run largely by Gallo-Romans rather than by Franks, was duly grateful, and offered its support to Clovis's dynasty. Gallic churchmen continued their work of conversion of the peasants of northern Gaul, including those Franks who had come into the area, but they seldom concerned themselves with the pagans beyond their own diocese. The Catholic establishment in the Roman Empire had no missionary policy for the pagan barbarians of the north. It was generally believed that God had brought the Roman Empire into being as a receptacle for Christianity, and that those outside it remained outside by the will of God. The more optimistic could believe that the barbarian invasions were part of God's plan for spreading Christianity. Thus, if bishops were sent outside the empire, as
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