spent two years trying to convert King Radbod and the Frisians; Willibrord followed him, with rather more success, and with the backing of the Frankish ruler Pippin II and the pope he became first bishop of Utrecht. Swithberht went as missionary to the Bructeri, and the two brothers called Hewald, who had been living in Ireland, went to Saxony, there to meet savage deaths as martyrs.
The most successful of the Anglo-Saxon missionaries was Boniface, from Wessex, whose main sphere of activity was in central Germany, in an area where, in the seventh century, the Irishman Killian had met his martyrdom. He went to Rome to receive papal permission for missionary work, worked under Willibrord in Frisia, and, after initial successes in central Germany, was created bishop in 722, and given the title archbishop ten years later. He founded the monastery of Fulda as his base for the conversion of central Germany, and was killed in 754, while still trying to convert the Frisians. He was a reformer and organizer as well as a missionary. He organized the Bavarian and central German churches into sees, presided over a number of reforming councils in the Frankish kingdom, and, as archbishop of Mainz, was able to preside over the unification of the Church in Germany. In all this he was supported by the rulers of the Franks, Charles Martel and his son Pippin III, and Boniface's legacy of a reformed and reorganized Church under the headship of the pope was an essential foundation to the rise to royal power of this Carolingian dynasty.
The conversion of Germany in the early eighth century went hand in hand with the reimposition of Frankish power in those areas. The advantage of the Anglo-Saxon missionaries, apart from the closeness of their language to that of the Frisians or Saxons, was that they could distance themselves from Frankish politics to some extent. But the Franks made no pretence that the conversion of Saxony was not part and parcel of their savage wars of conquest. In the first campaign, in 772, the first blow in the conversion took place: Irminsul, the sacred oak tree of the pagan Saxons, was felled. Baptism came to be regarded as an affirmation of loyalty to the Franks; in 785 Charlemagne decreed that if any of the conquered Saxons
-74-