refused to be baptized, or insulted Christianity by, for instance, eating meat during Lent, he should suffer the death penalty. A church structure was set up in Saxony, and Christianity was enforced with the help of the Frankish army. The protests of Charlemagne's own close associate, the scholar Alcuin of York, were to no avail; indeed, it is possible that it was another Anglo-Saxon, Boniface's disciple Lull, who urged Charlemagne on.

The horrific 'conversion' of the Saxons marked the last great conquest of Christianity in the period before 900. But beginnings were made elsewhere, both north and east. Anskar, a Frankish monk, was made archbishop of Hamburg to supervise the mission to the north, and founded churches in Denmark and even in Sweden, at Birka, but his mission did not lead to any lasting Christian communities, largely because of the ensuing Viking raids. The attempts at the conversion of Slavs by missionaries from Bavaria likewise came to little, though for different reasons: the German missionaries came up against the rather more successful Greek mission of Cyril and Methodius, sent from Constantinople in 863. These two brothers worked in the first organized Slavic state, Great Moravia, and with some success, as the excavated churches in fortified centres such as MikulĨice show. But the collapse of the Moravian state, and the invasions of the Magyars, brought their mission too to ultimate failure.

What I have described above is the slow process by which kings and aristocrats were introduced to Christianity and brought to adopt it in their countries. This is the most visible, but not necessarily the most important, element of conversion. The real process of Christianization, the training of priests, preaching to people in the countryside, the elimination or Christianization of pagan customs, the teaching of Christian doctrines, was a process which lasted centuries.

The Barbarians

To Romans all those who lived outside the Roman Empire were barbarians: it was a legal or political category, rather than a racial one. Nowadays historians categorize these barbarians

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