the papacy. Poland and Hungary thus avoided German control. At the same time Mieszko and Boleslav were able to use their recent Christianization in the conquest and conversion of pagan Pomerania and Stephen to do likewise in the subjection of the other Magyar dukes. Elsewhere paganism was harder to eradicate because it provided the main political focus against foreign domination. Saints Adalbert and Bruno of Querfurt were among the missionaries who lost their lives in Pomerania around the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries, and in the 1120s Otto of Bamberg found that force was essential since the pagan temples had to be taken and destroyed. Even where such considerations did not apply, the progress of conversion was slow and often superficial. Norway had been Christianized from the end of the tenth century and had its own bishops from the 1050s, but the pagan practices of libations and of exposing infants were still common a century later.
The role of kings thus came to seem ambivalent, valued for the essential force which they might bring to a conversion, but criticized for prejudicing that conversion by attempting to associate it with political domination. Some kings themselves undermined the ideal, as Henry II of Germany did through his alliances with pagan Slavs against Christian Poland, though he later atoned by the foundation of a missionary bishopric at Bamberg. The sacral role of kings was being undermined in other ways too. They were not, and never had been, the only founders and patrons of great churches and monasteries, but from the tenth century the nobility took an ever larger part in these activities, and to a still greater extent in the building of parish churches on their lands. Secular interests sometimes lay behind such acts. Parish churches could bring income to their lord while monasteries might serve as advanced bastions in the extension of a lordship, as did the Angevin house of Holy Trinity, Vendôme, in the counts' contest for Tours with the counts of Blois during the first half of the eleventh century. Great lords no longer occupied lay abbacies after the early tenth century, but by granting disputed lands to a monastery under their control, and then protecting them as its advocate, they had a barely less potent means of domination.
-126-