In the 820s and 830s Dorestad was the greatest port in western Europe. During the reign of Charlemagne’s successor, Louis the Pious (814–840), four and a half million silver coins were struck at its mint. They showed a cross placed in the middle of the façade of a classical temple, and bore the inscription Religio Christiana.1 An ostentatiously Christian empire lay at the southern end of the trade routes which led across the North Sea. North of Dorestad and Frisia stretched non-Christian lands, characterized by fragile chiefdoms. In Denmark, along the fjords of Norway, and in the lowlands of southern Sweden, small kings rose and fell according to their ability to gain access to wealth, through plunder on the waters of the North Atlantic and the Baltic. But they were also traders. In this period, Hedeby in Denmark and Birka (Björkö) in southern Sweden became the Dorestads of the North. They were emporia, ringed by fortified ditches. It was there that the merchants of the Christian south purchased the products of the wild lands of the north – all manner of sumptuous furs from the Baltic and precious walrus-tusk ivory from the Arctic seas.2 The Franks referred to the varied inhabitants of Scandinavia as “Northmen.” (What is now called Normandy, on the coast of France, was the “land of the Northmen”: it was the only permanent Scandinavian settlement in Continental Europe.)
SCANDINAVIA, EUROPE, AND THE ATLANTIC ca. 800–ca. 1000
| Offa, king of Mercia 757–796 Beowulf written down ca.780 | |
| Baptism of Harald Klak 826 Anskar 801–865 mission to Sweden 830/1 | |
| Period of Viking Raids in Western bEurope 850+ | |
| Rus’ (Scandinavian) attack on Constantinople 860 | |
| Settlement of Iceland 870 | |
| Settlement of Greenland 930 | |
| Harald Bluetooth, king of Denmark 958–987 | |
| Settlement at Anse-les-Meadows, Labrador 982 | |
| Conversion of Kiev 987 | |
| Olaf Tryggvason of Norway 995–1000 Conversion of Iceland 1000 | |
| Snorri Sturluson 1179–1241 |
The Northmen were pagans. They had remained fiercely loyal to their gods. Only gods could impart to their worshippers the suprahuman vigor and good luck which gave to individuals and to groups a competitive edge over their many rivals. Thus, in around the year 800, two religious systems faced each other at either end of the North Sea. In true Carolingian style, the “Christian Religion” coinage of Dorestad conveyed a message of imperial solidity, protected by the power of Christ. Such confidence was met, in Scandinavia, by a very different set of beliefs. As we saw in chapter 14, thousands of golden amulets associated with good fortune and the protection of the gods have been discovered in Denmark and southern Sweden. They were dedicated to shrines or worn on the persons of leaders so as to increase their numinous good fortune in war. In the fifth and sixth centuries, late Roman gold coins had reached as far as Denmark, where they were promptly transformed into images of victory-bringing gods.
In the ninth century, the Frankish kingdom was far closer to Scandinavia than Rome had ever been. Francia and the lands of the Northmen were close neighbors. Only a few hundred miles of the North Sea lay between them. Frankish goods poured into Denmark and southern Sweden. Not surprisingly, these goods included high-quality Frankish swords. Even the swords spoke of the power of a distant God. The hilt of a Frankish sword, found in Sweden, bears a verse from the Psalms:
Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my
hands to war and my fingers to fight. (Psalm 144:1)
For Franks and Northmen alike, war was a matter of truly religious seriousness. Sacred words – Latin Psalms or, in Scandinavia, arcane runes – showed that the gods were close to hand, to enhance the efficacy of a warrior’s weapons. Christ was the Frankish god. It was possible that he might find acceptance in Scandinavia, provided that he lived up to the expectations of a society of brittle warriors and enterprising pirates and traders.3
Scandinavia itself consisted of a band of coastal settlements, caught between a North Sea whose southern end was ringed by Christian kingdoms and a vast hinterland which stretched as far as the Arctic Circle. But Scandinavia did not only look south. To the east, along the Baltic, the “Northmen” were in contact with a world which reached, through modern Finland, as far as the Siberian forest zone. This was a world of hunters and pastoralists, of Lapps and Finns. Their shamanistic rites, performed in animal costumes, implied an open frontier between the human and the animal and between the spirit and the human world. Shamanistic practices were partly adopted by the Northmen. Performed in southern Sweden, they struck observers from the distant Christian south. In around 850 an abbot in northern Francia wrote to a missionary in Birka to ask about the manner in which the Northmen transformed themselves through wearing animal masks. He wished to bring the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville up to date. Was it really true, he asked the missionary, that a race of dog-headed men lived at the far edge of the earth?4
As this letter shows, contact with Scandinavia had intensified by 850. It had been fed by Frankish imperial policy and by trading relations between the Northmen and Dorestad. But, with this contact, Continental Christians found themselves confronted by a far wider world than they had expected. With the pagan Northmen, it seemed as if they had truly reached the edge of the world, where humans merged with the beasts.
Between the years 800 and 1000, the entire North Sea area – Scandinavia, Britain, Ireland, and the shores of Continental Europe – was an immense “middle ground,” in which Christians and pagans met, much as barbarians and Romans had once met in the “middle ground” of the Roman frontier regions. It was an infinitely more extensive “middle ground” than the frontiers of the Roman empire had ever been. Compared with the highly localized and slow-moving kingdoms of Continental Europe, the distances across which the Northmen moved with ease in their superb ships were unimaginable.
The expeditions of the Northmen reached both eastward and westward. Scandinavian longships reached far to the east along the Baltic as far as Lake Ladoga, behind modern Saint Petersburg. Then they turned south, edging down the great river systems of what are now Russia and Ukraine, to reach Kiev on the Dnieper. These small bands of warriors and slave-traders from distant Sweden came to be known to the local populations as the Rus’. They have left their name on what we now call Russia. Once at Kiev, the way to the southeast lay open – contact could be made both with Baghdad and with Constantinople. A memorial stone set up in Sweden, carved with runic letters in the shape of a great snake, told the story of one such expedition to unimaginably distant lands:
They fared like men
far after gold
and in the east
gave the eagle food
[by the slaughter of battle].
They died southward
in Serkland
[the Land of Silk].5
The Dnieper flowed straight into the Black Sea where Constantinople lay, at its southern end. In 860, a fleet of Northmen (already known to Byzantines as the Rôs) even attempted without success to attack the city. Later, these warriors from the far north were employed as special guards for the emperor. One such guard may have scratched the runic inscription which can still be seen on the balustrade of the gallery of the Hagia Sophia.6
A century later, when the Scandinavian colonists of Kiev, the Rus’, decided to accept Christianity, they did it with characteristic canniness. They sent embassies to observe the various religions of Europe and the Middle East. It was the Byzantine, Orthodox Christianity, whose glory was made plain in Justinian’s Hagia Sophia, which won the competition:
We went among the Germans [the Latin Christians] and saw them performing many ceremonies in the churches. But we saw no glory there. Then we went to the Greeks … and they led us to the edifices where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty. We only know that God dwells there among men … For we cannot forget that beauty.7
The conversion of Kiev took place in 987. Kiev lay at the easternmost end of the immense world which had been opened up by the ships of the Northmen. Kiev and Constantinople were as far away from southern Sweden to the southeast as Iceland and the coasts of Greenland were to the northwest. The Northmen had sailed there also. Iceland was settled in 870, a decade after the raid of the Rus’ on Constantinople. Greenland was reached around 930. In 982, five years, that is, before the conversion of Kiev, Scandinavians landed at “Vinland” on the American mainland. An impressive outpost, plainly intended for permanent settlement, has been discovered at Anse-les-Meadows on the coast of Labrador.8
The conversion of Kiev was not an isolated event. It was part of a wave of official conversions to Christianity in Scandinavia and all over eastern Europe which took place in the decades before the year 1000. By A.D. 1000 the “middle ground” where pagans and Christians had once met was closed. From Iceland to the Dnieper, the Northmen became Christian.
It is not the purpose of this chapter to follow the story of the conversion of the Northmen in detail. Briefly, it began with the presence of the Carolingian empire. The new wealth generated in northern Europe under this empire drew the Northmen ever further south. They came first as traders and, soon after, as raiders. After 850, what we call the “Viking raids” gathered momentum. They inflicted great damage on Ireland and England. On the Continent, the “Vikings” intervened, in increasing numbers and with great ferocity, in the civil wars which eventually destroyed the unity of the proud Christian empire of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. Like the barbarians of the last centuries of the Roman empire, the Vikings did not come as invaders as if from outer space. Often they intervened, ruthlessly, as the nominal allies of competing factions within the Frankish empire itself.
But they came with one overwhelming advantage. The small and mobile fleets of the Vikings could strike anywhere along the Atlantic coastline of Europe and the British Isles. Thus, the Viking incursions were never massive. Rather, they generated the sort of terror which is inspired by a ruthless sharpshooter. An account of a slightly later series of raids shows how the Vikings broke the morale of their Anglo-Saxon opponents:
And when they went to the east, the English army was in the west, and when they were in the south, our army was in the north … Finally there was no leader who would collect an army, but each fled as best he could, and in the end no shire would even help the next.9
By a bitter irony of history, the greatest Christian shrines of northern Europe were easy prey to Viking raiders. The great centers of the golden age of Northumbria, Iona and the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, were offshore islands. Viking fleets edged up the great rivers, the Rhine and the Seine, which flowed through the very heart of the Frankish kingdom. They found churches and monasteries which the kings and aristocracies of Europe had filled with golden objects of devotion. An account in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, from a slightly later period, catches a Viking band at work in Peterborough, a major shrine in the Fenlands, beside the river Ouse:
They went into the church, climbed up to the Holy Rood [the great Crucifix] and took the crown off the Lord’s head – all of pure gold – and then took the footrest that was under his feet, which was all of red gold. They climbed up to the steeple and brought down the altar-frontal that was hidden there – it was all of gold and silver – and took there two golden shrines and nine of silver, and they took fifteen great crucifixes, both of gold and silver.10
The Viking incursions of the late ninth century were a terrible moment. But, seen against the overall background of the history of Scandinavia and the North Atlantic, they were over as quickly as an ocean squall. They were only part of the story. For we must remember what “Viking” meant. A “Viking” was an “entrepreneurial” king on the warpath, on the vík. He was in search of tribute and prestige.
Better for you to bestride steed, draw sword, fell a host. Your brothers have fine halls and better lands than you. You should go vík-ing. Let men feel your blade.
In many ways, the Vikings were an unwelcome throwback to the untidy origins of the Christian kingdoms of Europe and the British Isles. They were what the warrior kings of Saxon Britain had been. Clovis and Charles Martel had once acted as they did, when they plundered the lands of southern Gaul. Though they now came in ships with terrifying range and mobility, the Vikings were warriors in the old style. They aimed to gather plunder, to exact tribute, and, if possible, to assert overlordship.11
But, as happened in earlier centuries, conquest meant contact. As a result of the Viking raids, Scandinavia filled up with Christian wealth, with Christian slaves, and with Christian ideas. The fleets of the Northmen bridged the North Atlantic in a single network which linked Dublin to Denmark and Iceland, and Sweden to Kiev and Constantinople. As a result, the Scandinavian world was sucked inexorably into the political and social structures of the Christian south by the very success of its pirate kings.
This happened in both East and West at roughly the same time. As we saw in chapter 17, the conversion of Kiev to Orthodox Christianity, in 987, represented a diplomatic triumph of the Byzantine empire which changed the face of eastern Europe. But in the West, also, the Latin Christianity of the lands to the south of Scandinavia came to penetrate the settlements of the Northmen wherever they were. By the year 1000, Christianity had spread to the furthest corners of a newly created North Atlantic world. Christian crosses marked the headland burial of a Scandinavian adventurer from Greenland, shot by Eskimo on the coast of Labrador. “ ‘Call it Krossanes [Cross Headland] for ever more,’ [he said.] ‘For Greenland was at that time Christian.’ ”12 The runic grave-inscription of the chieftain Ulvljot, set up west of Trondheim in northern Norway in 1008, dated his death by the coming of the new religion. “Twelve winters had Christendom been in Norway.”13 Even in the distant north, Kristintumr, “Christendom,” a word recently coined in Saxon England and now adopted in Norway, had come to stay.
Let us look for a moment at the stages of the process by which this happened. We begin, in the ninth century, with the southern waters of the North Sea dominated by the Carolingian empire. The son of Charlemagne, Louis the Pious, was by no means a pale shadow of his father. He ruled an empire whose ideological ambitions were at their height. In 826, Harald Klak, an exiled Danish king, came south to be baptized. He hoped to return with Frankish support to assert hegemonial power over his fellow-chieftains. The emperor Louis himself acted as his godfather. Klak was brought to the palace at Ingelheim.
The frescoes in the main hall of the palace of Ingelheim conjured up the huge confidence of the Franks that their empire represented nothing less than the culmination of Christian history. Founders of pagan empires – Alexander the Great and the ancient Romans – were placed at the back of the hall. Near the apse, where Louis stood with his newly baptized Danish sub-king, were the emperors of a more advanced and yet greater age. These were “true” emperors, because they were Christian emperors, Roman and Frankish alike. Constantine and Theodosius I faced their equals, Charles Martel, shown conquering the Frisians, and Charles, as he “drew the Saxons under his [Christian] laws.” Harald Klak, now dressed in a purple cloak, was to join the family of Christian kings. He was to establish in Denmark a more forceful style of kingship, linked to Frankish wealth and to Frankish Christianity.14
What seemed possible at Ingelheim, however, was by no means practicable in Denmark and southern Sweden. Harald Klak proved an immediate failure. Over-mighty kings were not welcome in Denmark. We can follow this tale of failed mission in the remarkable Life of Anskar written around 870 by his disciple, Rimbert, who was himself a converted Dane. Anskar was a Frank. He had been a monk of Corbie on the Somme. He first attached himself to Harald’s retinue, and was later made bishop of Hamburg and Bremen. He visited Birka, in southern Sweden, in 830 and 852. Until his death in 865, he enjoyed a commission to evangelize the north which was as wide as that once held by Boniface in Germany. But he was a long way from home. Unlike Boniface, he did not have the support of Frankish armies. Anskar could never be a confident consolidator of previous, looser allegiances to Christianity, as Boniface had once been. The heroic Frankish bishop remained very much a peripheral figure to the chieftains he visited.15
Anskar faced a society that was quite prepared to accept Christ. But it was prepared to do so only if Christ was treated as one god among many, and provided that his usefulness was first indicated to them through traditional forms of divination. To take one example: A raiding party of Swedes stranded in Kurland discussed their dilemma.
“The God of the Christians frequently helps those who cry to Him [they said] … Let us enquire whether He will be on our side.” Accordingly … lots were cast and it was found that Christ was willing to help them.
They later learned from Christian merchants that a 40-day fast from meat (the Christian fast of Lent) would count as an acceptable return to Christ for his help.
After this, many … began to lay stress upon the fasts observed by Christians and upon almsgiving … because they had learned that this was pleasing to Christ.16
Rimbert, Anskar’s disciple, was a man of Danish origin. He knew what Scandinavians wanted and how they made up their minds on matters of religion. In his Life of Anskar, every successful contact between Christianity and the local population was framed by such a scene of divination, testing, and partial acceptance of Christ as a new god. We have come a long way from the triumphal narratives of supernatural confrontation and dramatic conversions of rulers, such as had fed the Christian imagination of the Mediterranean and northwestern Europe. In retrospect at least, Scandinavian societies chose to associate their adoption of “Christendom” with solemn moments of decision-making, in which the new religion was subjected to traditional divinatory techniques. Only when Christianity passed that test could it expect to gain public approval.
Narratives of this kind, which made the acceptance of Christianity dependent on local religious practices, effectively cut down to size the efforts of missionaries from the Christian south.17 But it also cut down the role of local kings. After 900, kings could be overbearing in Scandinavia, especially when they enjoyed the plundered wealth of England and Francia. Harald Bluetooth of Denmark (958–987) was typical of a new style of strong kingship. This new kingship owed more to the Christian countries which he had once terrorized as a raider than to older Scandinavian traditions of consensual chieftainship. Harald Bluetooth was in a position to do what Harald Klak had failed to do. He declared the Danes Christian. And he did this without so much as consulting a missionary. He then built a large church at Jelling, near the graves of his ancestors. He flanked the church with a great rock, that showed a fiercely bearded Christ whose outstretched arms were lost in a tangle of snake-like ornament. The runic inscription declared that Harald had “won all Denmark to himself and made the Danes Christian.” He even made his father a Christian in retrospect. Gorm, the old pagan, was taken from the neighboring royal burial mound and was placed in the church close to the altar. Altogether, Harald Bluetooth showed what a strong king could do.18
The high-handed activities of kings such as Harald Bluetooth were watched with disquiet by other Scandinavians, settled in Iceland, in the middle of the North Atlantic. The settlers of Iceland were proud of the fact that they had come to their island precisely so as to escape the rising power of kings.19 Settled since the 870s at a safe distance from Scandinavia, they did not wish to be overshadowed once again by kings. They were disturbed by what they saw of the forceful Christian rule of Olaf Tryggvason (995–1000), who had established himself as king of Norway at Trondheim, 750 miles across the sea. Converted to Christianity through his contacts with Anglo-Saxon England, Olaf had imposed Christianity with great violence on the Trondelag, the region around Trondheim. The Trondelag was a prosperous fjord. It was the northernmost oasis of agrarian land in Europe, only 200 miles beneath the Arctic Circle. To impose his views, Olaf had broken the will of an entire society of independent farmers.20
Not surprisingly, with such an example just over the water, the Icelanders decided that, if they were to become Christians, it should be entirely on their own terms. They would not appear to succumb to pressure from a powerful Christian neighbor. For Iceland was a resolutely kingless society. The population lived in isolated farmsteads scattered over an immense landscape divided by steep fjords, lava flows, and lowering glaciers. Agreement to follow a common “law” was the only thing that Icelanders shared. The yearly meeting of the chief men of every district at Thingvellir – the Vale of the Assembly – was what knit the island together. A division between pagan and Christian families, each of them following a different religious law, would have destroyed what little consensus existed in these fragile settlements. So, in the Assembly of 1000, the Icelanders authorized their “Law Speaker,” Thorgeir of Ljosvatn, to decide for them whether they should accept Christianity as the sole “law” of the island. “Let us all have one law and one faith. For it will prove that, if we sunder the law, we will also sunder the peace.” An old-fashioned pagan, Thorgeir knew what to do. He could only “speak the law” with authority after he had “gone under the cloak.” “He lay down and spread his cloak over himself, and lay all that day and the next night, nor did he speak a word.”21 It is possible that this was a shamanistic séance. It employed a form of divination, through sensory deprivation, which was common to Gaelic Scotland, Scandinavia, and Finland.22 If that is so, then it was by the summoning of spirit powers, in a pan-North Atlantic ritual, that Christ was declared, next morning, at the Law Rock, to be the new god of the Icelanders:
all people should be Christian and those be baptized who were still unbaptized in this land: but as for infanticide, the old law [which allowed it] should stand, as also the eating of horseflesh.
Even sacrifice was allowed for a time, provided that it was not seen by outside witnesses. We have every reason to believe that infanticide (especially the killing of female babies) continued.23
We must remember that this was how an influential group of Icelanders deliberately chose to remember their conversion. At the time, the situation may well have been more complex. The conversion to Christianity owed much to other factors. One factor was a massive influx of Irish slaves, which threatened to alter Icelandic society as drastically as the influx of British slaves to Ireland in the time of Saint Patrick had once threatened to undermine the Irish nobility. Another factor was the presence of important women, such as Aud the Deep-Minded. Aud was an influential landowner. When Aud settled in the Breidafjord, she brought with her the Christianity which she had adopted when she lived at Howth (the Hofd, the “headland,” in Icelandic), which overlooked the Bay of Dublin. Dublin Bay was an open bay similar to that of the Breidafjord. It was a mere 1,600 miles south of her new home in Iceland – such was the size of the world of the Scandinavian settlements of the Atlantic! But, compared with the tale of Thorgeir the Law-Speaker, slaves and women did not make a good story.24
What is truly remarkable about the story is those who told it. The tale of the conversion of the Icelanders was written down over a century later, in the Book of the Icelanders of Ari Thorgilsson the Wise, at the behest of the Christian bishop of Skalholt.25 This was in 1122–33 – the age of Saint Bernard and of the Crusades. Yet, far to the north, the decision of Thorgeir “under the cloak” constituted the only narrative of Christianization worth remembering for the clergymen of Iceland. If the Icelanders had become Christian, what needed to be remembered about the process was that they had done so by following the wise procedures of decision-making laid down in their pagan laws.
The Icelanders were remarkable for their intense attachment to their own pre-Christian past. Many Icelandic clergymen were widely travelled persons. Some had been to the Schools of Paris. Yet, throughout the Middle Ages, they continued to patronize poets and writers of Sagas who drew, without a trace of embarrassment, on a frankly pre-Christian cultural inheritance. In Continental Europe, by this time, the only pagan past which attracted the attention of learned persons was the dreamlike paganism of Greece and Rome. They read of it in classical authors, as of a distant world, discontinuous with their own. But the pre-Christian past of Scandinavia was still very much a part of the present in Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. The only systematic account of what we have come to call “Nordic” paganism, the Edda, was written in the thirteenth century by the great Icelandic antiquarian, Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241).26
But Iceland was not unique. Icelandic literature was not the product of a romantic and exotic periphery. Though written at a later time, it brings into sharp focus a dilemma which had, in fact, dogged the Christian elites of northern Europe since the days of their conversion in the sixth and seventh centuries. It was this: how much of the pre-Christian past could be allowed to linger in the Christian present?
This would not have been so urgent an issue if Christianity had not come to be established in the British Isles and in much of northern Europe by persons who depended on the pre-Christian past for their own authority. The sinews of power in northern Europe reached back to a past which had known nothing of Christianity. This past could not be declared irrelevant, much less could it be declared to have been noxious and deluded. For the authority of kings, the codes of honor which determined the behavior of noble men and women, indeed, law and order itself, were rooted in that pre-Christian past.
The tension between past and present existed all over northern Europe. It is not well documented. It was pushed to one side by more articulate, more stridently Christian texts. Hence we can approach it only through chosen examples, taken at different times and from different regions. But such examples (though they involve skipping between Ireland, Anglo-Saxon Britain, Scandinavia, and the Continent) reveal a muffled debate which was going on all over Christian northern Europe.
Let us begin with the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. As we saw in chapter 15, kings played a crucial role in the conversion of the pagan Saxons. Contemporary clergymen knew very well that the remarkable Christian culture of the island would not have happened if it had not been for the support of Christian kings. But then, what supported the kings? It was their genealogy. And this genealogy reached back, far beyond the coming of Christianity, to ancient gods.
We see one example of this dilemma. In the late eighth century, a priest in Northumbria (a contemporary of Alcuin) faced this problem when he edited the genealogies of the kings of the Angli – of the Saxon dynasties established in Britain. Nobody doubted (least of all our author, the priest) that these kings were men whose vigor and good fortune could be ascribed to their royal lineage. As kings, they were, somehow, a little “larger than life.” And they were “larger than life” because they were descended from ancestors who were larger than human. They were descended from gods. A good Christian, the priest did not hesitate to impose his own, up-to-date Christian views upon these genealogies. He was careful to exclude all sons born out of Christian wedlock. The sons of royal concubines were not mentioned in his list. But he could not bring himself to exclude the gods. The genealogies would not provide a title to power if they did not reach back to their root. And at that root, heading the priest’s list of the ancestors of every Anglian kingdom, stood the god Woden. They had all come from a god.27
As long as power based upon genealogies was taken seriously, the gods were taken seriously all over northern Europe. In this, northern Christianity differed sharply from the Christianity of the late Roman Mediterranean. Around the Mediterranean, Christian apologists had lingered with scorn on the gods of classical mythology. They were trivial and laughable beings, given to love-affairs and to inconstant emotions. But, as we saw in chapter 2, behind the showy façade of the gods of classical mythology, there lurked the real enemy – the Devil himself and his ministers, the wily demons who sought to trap mankind through sinister illusions.
The gods of northern Europe could not be treated in this manner. They were neither trivial nor malignant. They were seen as part of a glorious past. This past still gave a charge to the present. Hence the gods remained. Solemn figures even in their decline, they were like an ancient dynasty which had once ruled the earth until forced to abdicate in favor of the Christ of modern times.28 Without a touch of such gods “in the blood,” as it were, modern kings could not be great. And, if they could not be great, they could not act as effective defenders of the Church.
But it was not only power which came from the gods. The skills of the settled world reached back to the age of the gods. They belonged to a deep past, which could not be disowned. This was a problem which exercised a learned Irish clergyman in around the year 700. The Irish Church, like any other aspect of Irish society, depended on the activity of persons endowed with almost uncanny skills – on lawyers who controlled intricate tribal law and on poets who were known to depend on inspiration. But what sort of skill and inspiration was involved? It certainly did not come from Christianity. Knowledge of “the white Scriptures” of the Church was a phenomenon of recent times. And mere books (even Christian books) could not contain all the arts of life. The clergyman agreed that these skills had come from an earlier age when gods and men had lived side by side. The skills of poetry and law had been taught to the men of Ireland by their invisible neighbors, “the tribe of the gods.” The gods could not possibly be dismissed as demons. They were the source of the high skills on which Irish society depended: “And though the faith came later, these arts were not put away, for they are good and no demons ever did good.”29
All over northern Europe, the clergy took such matters seriously. Indeed, the fact that we know anything at all about the past of pre-Christian northern Europe depended on a process which is extraordinary in itself.
We know about the pagan past of Greece and Rome from pagan writers writing in pagan times – from Homer, Vergil, and similar classical authors. But (with the exception of a few runic inscriptions) there is not a word which was written about northern paganism that did not pass through the pens of Christian monks and clergymen. Apart from writers of runes (who were common enough, but whose activities do not appear to have extended to the creation of long written texts), the clergy remained the only literate class in northern Europe. And yet it was the clergy who went out of their way to consign to writing – and so have made available to us – all that we know of the pre-Christian narratives, the poetry, and the laws of Ireland, England, Scandinavia, and Germany.
They did this, of course, on their own terms. The act of writing, in itself, was an act of discreet censorship. But write they did. And they wrote because knowledge of such things was considered to be essential to law and order and to their own status in society. Those who wrote down the legends and poetry of the pre-Christian past in Ireland, Anglo-Saxon England, and Iceland were not grudging recorders, catching in written words the last vestiges of a pagan mythology doomed to extinction by the coming of the Christian Church. The situation was not like that at all. Rather, Christian monks and clergymen should be seen as the last great myth-makers of northern Europe. They transformed a living pagan past, so as to use it in their own, Christian present.30
We must never forget what we saw, in chapter 16, in the case of Bede’s Northumbria. Monasteries were never enclosed worlds, totally cut off from the society around them. Monks shared the values of their lay protectors and clients, many of whom were, in any case, their relatives. Abbots and abbesses came from the kin of kings and aristocrats. The central institutions of the Church were microcosms of local society. Many monks, nuns, royal chaplains, bishops, and their clerical dependents were noblemen and noblewomen. They continued to think of themselves as such in their new roles as religious leaders.31
They knew very well what it was to be noble. They grew up in an overwhelmingly oral culture which was awash with stories and maxims. These told them how to behave as noble men and noble women. To be noble was to stand out. It was to live well and to be seen by others to live well. It was to foster with gusto the memory of a past which lay on the edge of the Christian present. This was a past which was always a little larger than life. It was a past where human glory, human tragedy, and the working out of human obligations were so much more vivid and so much more clear-cut, so much more brimming over with magnificent lack of measure, than was the grey, Christian present.32 To be noble was to toast one’s companions with great drinking-horns that carried as much liquor as a present-day bottle of Moselle; to engage in high talk and loud laughter; to listen to the ancient sound of the harpist. To be a noble bishop (noted Alcuin, a prim scholar and a self-made man with little sympathy for his well-born colleagues) was to allow one’s clergy to “gallop bawling over the fields after the fox” and to boast a retinue complete with minstrels, hawks, and performing bears. Most shocking of all, to a “career clergyman” such as Alcuin, was for a noble bishop or priest to appear in church and to conduct worship wearing elegant trousers! The custom was condemned at a council of the English Church in 747.33
All these attributes of aristocratic swagger were regularly adopted, at one time or other, by the upper-class clergy and monasteries of Saxon England and Francia. They were just as regularly condemned, at the same time, by “reforming” episcopal councils in both regions. Yet those members of the clergy who were close to the lay elites were never altogether disapproving. They knew very well that, in an overwhelmingly oral society, epic memories were far more than entertainment. They were more, even, than titles to rule. They were the unwritten law codes of an entire warrior class.
Even the great Charlemagne himself, for all his “Roman” title, felt that he could not do without epic poems. He knew that the cultivation of such memories was an essential strand in his power. He caused
the unwritten laws of all the tribes that came under his rule to be compiled and reduced to writing. He also [Einhard added] directed that the age-old, non-Latin poems in which were celebrated the warlike deeds of the kings of ancient times should be written out and preserved.34
In his mind, epic and law went together.
It is significant that Frankish epics have not survived. Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, was brought up in Aquitaine and surrounded by “Romans” of the South. He did not share his father’s old-fashioned pride in the achievements of the Franks. Louis could also afford to be pious because he felt so powerful. He was the head of a “Christian empire.” He did not need that extra magical charge which came from the ability to invoke an epic past which lay beyond the Christian present.
In neighboring Britain, by contrast, king Offa of Mercia (757–796) was also a very strong king. He called himself “emperor of Britain” with some justice. Like Charles, he could organize the labor of his subjects to create titanic earthworks. Offa’s Dyke stretches for 150 miles (longer than all the Roman walls of Britain put together) between the Saxon Midlands and Wales. But Offa’s power still deployed, with gusto, an epic, Saxon style, tenacious of the past. The royal mausoleum church at Repton flanked ancient burial mounds. Offa’s pedigree ascended into a galaxy of figures known from legend. It may well be that the Anglo-Saxon epic of Beowulf was committed to writing at his court.35
Though it was probably written down around A.D. 780, either in East Anglia or the Midlands, Beowulf was a record of events larger than life which had taken place in geār dagum, “in days of yore” – in fact, as far as we can see, around 520, a quarter of a millennium previously. We must remember that, impressive and complete though the existing text may seem to modern readers, Beowulf was only the tip of an iceberg. It was a mere drop, preserved for us by the accident of writing, from a vast reservoir of memories. The text, as it now stands, assumed a reader’s knowledge of at least 20 similar legends.
Beowulf was very much a moral handbook. It was made up of gripping tableaux of loyalty and courage, of tragic conflict and of ceremonious good cheer in a well-ordered royal hall. All that was worst and best in the life of a Saxon nobleman was seen played out magnificently, in ancient times and in a distant homeland. Epics such as those which went to make up the text of Beowulf were constantly remembered and recited in differing versions, spliced and respliced like genes, to meet the needs of every occasion. Long after their conversion to Christianity, epic tales such as those which came together to make Beowulf constituted nothing less than the moral gene-pool of a warrior aristocracy.36
The accident of the preservation of texts leads us to highlight the epic poetry of Anglo-Saxon England. We treat it, much as we treat the Icelandic Sagas, as a glimpse into an exotic world. But it did not stand alone. The problems which produced such literature were common to much of northern Europe. In ninth-century Germany, for instance, we see similar attempts to heal the gap between the Christian present and the pre-Christian past. Again, it was an attempt made by those whose own standing in society depended on maintaining their links with the past. But in a manner which was characteristic of the Carolingian learned elite, the recuperation of the past of Germany was expressed as much through Latin literature as through patronage of the vernacular.37
The Carolingian “discovery of Germany” took place in Latin. It depended on decisions made in the scriptoria of monasteries founded by Boniface and later set up in Saxony, after Charlemagne’s slow and murderous absorption of the region. To take one example. The Histories of Ammianus Marcellinus, written around 395, contain a uniquely vivid and circumstantial record of fourth-century frontier warfare along the Rhine and the Danube. They describe the sudden appearance of the Huns and the catastrophic defeat of the emperor Valens at Adrianople in 378. They survive in one manuscript only, copied in the ninth century at the monastery founded by Boniface at Fulda. Without the decision made in a German monastery to divert efforts usually spent on copying the “Christian Law” to copying the work of a fourth-century military man and evident pagan, simply because he had so much to say about the German world of his time, we would know next to nothing about the early stages of what we have come to know as the “barbarian invasions.” Whole chapters of this book could not have been written.
The linking of past to present in Germany could take surprising forms, and would be used by unexpected persons. Thus, Tacitus’ famous work On Germany (written in A.D. 98) was used again, for the first time in 300 years. Tacitus was cited in a preface to a book recording the miracles associated with the transfer of the relics of a little-known saint (Saint Alexander) all the way from Rome to Wildeshausen in Saxony. The founder of Wildeshausen was Walbert. And Walbert was none other than the grandson of the great Widukind, the stubborn leader of the last pagan resistance to Charlemagne. Now ensconced in his home territory as abbot of the monastery which he himself had founded – with the further provision that only members of his kin should succeed him – Walbert was not prepared to believe that the coming of Christianity to Saxony had created a break with the noble past of his own tribe. It had merely added further luster to their pre-existing natural excellence. In the words of the Preface to his book of miracles, Walbert wrote, in around 860:
The Saxons of old went out of their way to maintain many effective customs and high moral standards, as far as the law of nature was concerned. Such a way of life would have gained them the true blessedness of Heaven if only they had not suffered from lack of knowledge of the Creator.38
A tolerant view of the pre-Christian past, first created in Ireland, now gave meaning to the rediscovery of Tacitus in Germany.
Faced by a past which had by no means lost its solemnity, the solution favored by the clergy was to treat it simply, for the first time, as the past. Woden was a glorious ancestor, greater in some indefinable manner than his modern descendants. But he was not a god. That meant, in effect, that he could not come into the present. He was part of the past. He and the other gods had been condemned to history. What the gods could not be for Christians was what they always had been for pagans – creatures out of time, who, as it were, lived alongside the present and who were instantly accessible to their worshippers. The gods were an ever-present source of supra-human energy and blessing. They were always there. They were brought into the present through sacrifice, through spells, and even through the heavy workings of strong liquor. The power of the gods could bubble up at solemn feasts. They stepped into the present through the inspiration which welled up in poets once they had drunk, in the name of the gods, the mead – the honey drink – of memory and had chewed on the heavy lumps of horseflesh in a stew consecrated to the gods.39
But it was never easy to keep the past in the past. In Iceland and Norway, the god Odin (the Northmen’s Woden) remained for centuries far more present than any long-dead king could ever hope to be. Odin was a “culture hero” and a powerful ego-ideal. He would manifest himself with uncanny ease to people and even in people. A small but vivid detail shows this. The father of the great recorder of the Sagas and the author of the Edda, Snorri Sturluson, was Sturla, a wily Christian priest from Hvamm on the Breidafjord in western Iceland. At the height of a dispute, in which Sturla had shown his trickery to full advantage in a legal argument, the wife of his opponent attempted with a knife to blind him in one eye: “Why should I not make you look like him [the one-eyed Odin] whom you most want to resemble?”40 At a time when Gothic cathedrals were beginning to arise all over Continental Europe, a clergymen in Iceland could still be thought of as, in some way, the avatar of an ancient trickster god.
When Snorri himself came to write down the Saga of Olaf Tryggvason’s violent imposition of Christianity in the fjords around Trondheim, he was careful to record that Odin had appeared to the king. For Odin was the guardian of the past of Norway. One night, as Olaf rested at Ogvaldsness,
an old and very wise-spoken man came in. He wore a hood coming down over his face and he was one-eyed. He had things to tell of every land … The king found much pleasure in his talk. [The stranger knew, for instance, all about Ogvald, the king whose ancient burial mound gave its name to the headland.] He told the king those tales and many others about the ancient kings and other stories of olden times.
It was all that Olaf’s bishop could do to persuade the fascinated king to go to bed. Only next morning, when the stranger had vanished, did Olaf realize that his moment of spell-bound access to the past had come from Odin, “the god heathen men had long worshipped.”41
In many ways, the gods could never be put entirely in the past, unless that past itself was appropriated on Christian terms. All over Europe, and even in Scandinavia, sacrifice to the gods – the most clearly visible gesture of pagan worship – was forbidden. Sacrifice appears to have died out. But, in an overwhelmingly non-literate culture, words carried from the past were quite as dangerous as was sacrifice. In Germany, Saxon converts were expected to renounce not only the “works” of Woden, Thunor, and Saxnote but their “words” – that is, the spells recited in their names.42
Words might indeed bring back into the present certain powers that were by no means believed, by Christians, to be nonexistent. They were still there. But Christians had sworn not to turn to them. We can only glimpse, in scattered incidents, how powerful such pre-Christian words were thought to be, and how close to the Christian present they could come. We can see this happening, in around A.D. 1000, at the farthest edge of the European world. When famine struck the Icelandic settlements in Greenland, the prophetess Thorbjorg called for an assistant to recite, at the appropriate moment, the “Spirit Locking” spell. Gudrid had been taught the spell in Iceland by her foster-mother.
“But this is a kind of lore and proceeding I feel I cannot assist in … For I am a Christian woman.”
“Yet it might happen [Thorbjorg reminded her] that you could prove helpful to people in this affair.” [So] Gudrid recited the chant so beautifully that no one present could say that he had heard the chant recited in a lovelier voice.43
What occurred all over northern Europe, therefore, was a competition of words, between pre-Christian and Christian spells. Christian authors of the Penitentials commended those who set about the serious things of life – such as the gathering of healing herbs – with Christian prayers.44 A spell was thought to work because it drew into the present the great moments of misadventure and of healing which had occurred in the glorious past. If the past was to be drawn into the present in this way, then it must be a past linked to the beginnings of Christian time. These were spells which evoked a time when Christian figures, and not Woden and Baldur, were imagined to have trod the woods of Germany. Despite the strictures of the Carolingian elite, clergymen were quite prepared to act as “ritual practitioners” for their flocks. They did so by copying out spells in High German, for themselves and for their clients. Some of the very earliest vernacular texts contained lists of such spells:
Christ was born before wolf and thief were, and Saint Martin was Christ’s shepherd. May Christ and Saint Martin take care of these dogs so that no wolf nor she-wolf should cause them harm, wherever they may run in wood or way or heath.45
It was the same in Anglo-Saxon England. To take one example: in the tenth century the priest on an estate in England was expected to “heal” an infertile field by saying Mass over four sods taken from its four corners. By this Christian ritual, he revived the tired soil. The Mass brought back to the dry sods a touch of the abundance associated with God’s first creation of the ever-fertile garden of Eden.
Then let the plough be driven forwards and the first furrow opened up, then say:
“Hale may thou be, earth, mother of mortals! Grow pregnant in the embrace of God, filled with food for mortals’ use.”46
The beings of the past were expected to continue to ring the Christian present. What mattered was that they should be held at bay. Here the experience of northern Christians differed significantly from that of Mediterranean persons. Mediterranean Christians had inherited from ancient times a model of the demonic that was, basically, a “cosmic,” vertical model. Demons filled the air with their subtle bodies. They did this because they were, quite literally, “fallen” angels. Thrust out of a heaven identified with the stars above, they swept around the earth in the space beneath the moon. There was something particularly threatening about their chill, ethereal nature: they were truly “spirits,” evil spirits.
What we meet in the north, by contrast, was a more horizontal model. Evil did not come from the sky. It was not “demonic” in that strict sense. It came across the open land, and it was utterly concrete. We are dealing with a patterning of the social imagination which saw settled human society as surrounded, on every side, by the encroaching wild. A “middle world” of human order was forever hemmed in by an “outer world,” whose grim or alluring denizens were quite as palpable as were human beings.47
This belief took many forms in different regions. We have seen (in chapter 14) how, in Ireland, the human and the nonhuman were placed in concentric rings. There was room, in such a map of the world, for innumerable categories of beings. Settled human life lay at the center, domesticated animals in the middle, and, along the edges, there flitted the grey shapes of wolves. In the same way, monks were ringed by tame, penitent lay persons, who, in turn, were hemmed in by the dread bands of outlaws and brigands. Celtic lore made much of the belief that the settled land of human beings was ringed by an entire, alternative population of the Síde, “the Other Side.” The notion of an alternative population survived up to modern times in beliefs about the fairy kingdom. An entire world, untouched by sadness, was believed to exist alongside the Christian present:
Sweet mild streams … matchless people without blemish, love and conception without sin, without guilt. We see everyone on all sides, and no one sees us.48
The ancestors also lived in such an alternative world, next door to the living. In the great barrow-mounds which studded the Irish landscape, the ancient heroes of Ireland were still present, locked forever in a glorious past which knew nothing of the coming of the “White Scriptures.” They could still be visited. It was at the grave-rock of Fergus mac Roich in Connacht that the scholar in search of the full version of the Táin, the Tale of the Cattle Raid of Cooley, was taken into the mist for three days and three nights, to be told the full version of the story by Fergus himself, who appeared to the scholar “in fierce majesty, with a head of brown hair, in a green cloak … with gold-hilted sword.”49
We know this, of course, because, in around 800, an Irish cleric wrote it all down. He was in two minds about why he was doing so – or, rather, felt that he should present himself as being in two minds. In the Old Irish colophon to the Old Irish text, he presented himself, without a trace of embarrassment, as the proud transmitter of a glorious past:
A blessing on everyone who shall faithfully memorize the Táin as it is written here and shall not add any other form to it.
In the Latin note that he added to the same Old Irish text, he adopted a more distanced tone:
But I who have written out this history, or rather this fable, give no credence to the various incidents related in it. For some things in it are the deceptions of demons, others are flights of poetic fancy; some are probable, others are improbable; while others are intended for the amusement of foolish people.50
In Ireland, the people of “the Other Side” and the ancestors appeared rarely to humans. This was not so with the creatures of the wild who flanked the human race in Saxon England, Germany, and Scandinavia. There was nothing elusive or insubstantial about them. Their being drew substance from the inhuman landscapes which were known to be their appropriate haunts. Monsters haunted the eery coastal marshlands of Britain. Entire riding-parties of dethroned gods crashed deep in the woods of Saxony. Trolls wandered across the black lava-fields and misty glacier snouts of Iceland. In the epic of Beowulf there was nothing insubstantial about Grendel, the monster slain by Beowulf, nor about his mother. They had been seen:
huge prowlers of the marshes, patrolling the moors, alien intruders …
an ill-formed creature stalking the paths where outcasts go.51
Grendel and his mother were the primal outlaws. They were the all too concrete, menacing counterparts of the heroic human figures who were believed to have been capable of holding them at bay in the distant past. Such heroes were built for the task. Take, for instance, Hygelac, a sea-king mentioned both in Beowulf and, surprisingly, also (as a failed pirate) in the works of Gregory of Tours. Hygelac was so large that from the age of 12 no horse could carry him.
His bones are preserved in an island in the Rhine, where it flows into the ocean, and are shown to those who come from afar as a miracle.52
This information was included in a Latin handbook written around 800, entitled The Book of Monsters. The larger-than-life Hygelac – and, by implication, the baleful Grendel – were not misty beings. For the clergy who set their pens to work to record them in writing, they were an unquestioned part of the topography of Europe.
As late as the twelfth century, an Icelandic clergyman on pilgrimage to Rome made a travel diary of his journey. He noted only his visits to Christian shrines, except on one occasion: travelling up the Rhine, having seen the relics of Saint Ursula in Cologne, he made one detour to the Drachensberg. For there he went to visit the place where Siegfried (the Icelandic Sigurd) had slain the dragon Fafnir. Even for this pious pilgrim, the encounter between human and dragon had been a real event at a real place that was as well known as any Christian shrine.53
We are dealing with a moral topography which could be fitted with relative ease on to a sharp, Christian patterning of the world. We are even told Grendel’s pedigree. It reached back, not to respectable, old-world gods, as did the pedigrees of Saxon Christian kings, but to the primal outcast of the Old Testament – to Cain, the slayer of Abel, his own brother and kin. Monsters such as Grendel continued into the present a past where, as the Old Testament showed, human beings, subject to human restraints on pride and violence, had been flanked by a “race of the giants” – by menacing outsiders who were the tyrannical embodiments of power and ambition unrestrained by human law. Far from being ethereal beings, or mere fictions, these creatures were still around. And they were spoken about often and with real art, because it was through them that northern persons grappled, in their own way, with the boundary between civilization and the brute violence which lurked along its margins.54
We should see the coming of Christianity to much of western Europe against this distinctive imaginative landscape. It was not a patterning unique to that region. But some regions lingered with greater intensity than did others on the thought of great, marginal creatures from a distant past ringing the present. Armenia of around the year 700 was a similar non-Mediterranean, clan-based society. The learned Armenian clergyman, Ananias of Shirak, viewing the storms which whipped across the surface of Lake Van, noted that many of his fellow-countrymen believed that the fierce white waves were caused by the struggle of a primal hero to remove from the lake the dragons which lurked in its depths.55 Throughout the Middle Ages, in Armenia, blacksmiths would begin the week by striking their anvils so as to strengthen the chains which bound the giant Artavazd in his mountain prison.56
Whether in Christian Armenia or in Christian northern Europe, we meet a patterning of the imagination which implied a sharp distinction between center and periphery, between settled life and a murmurous population of outcasts who inhabited its margins. These beings existed but they did not belong. It was a pattern which gave imaginative weight and concreteness to the Christian claim to possess the center and to stand now for settled life against ever-threatening alternatives.
Seen in this light, the establishment of the Church may well have done no more than complete a process which had characterized religious change in Europe since prehistoric times. Europe has always had a religious history. As far as the prehistorian can reconstruct it, from the time of the spread of Bell-Beaker culture in the second millennium B.C. much of this history seems to have consisted in pushing to the margins beliefs, practices, and even social groups, to make room for new, differently organized, and more prestigious conglomerations of power, culture, and religious expertise.57
What happened in early medieval Europe was, in many ways, a continuation of that age-old process. In a process which lasted over half a millennium, from around A.D. 400 to around 1000, Christianity came to hold the center. It came to stand for the world of order. It came to be identified with the world of human settlement as defined in sharp contrast to the wild. It blessed the world of the nobility, linked in epic to the radiant halls of the chieftains. On a humbler level, it protected the tilled fields and even helped to assert (through Christian spells) that most astonishing example of all of the far reach of human control over the natural world – the mysterious loyalty of the swarming bees as they returned, every year, to their owner’s hive.58 All of this now lay under the protection of Christ. Christian rituals upheld that world. Christian kings ruled it.
Around the fringes of a brightly lit Christian center, of which we know so much, beliefs from the deepest past of Europe still clustered. Let us end with one example which is calculated to make us ponder. As we saw in the last chapter, the great monastery of San Vincenzo in Volturno was a triumph of the “corrected” religion of the Carolingian empire. It was filled with solemn Latin inscriptions. Yet, in the humble cottages which abutted its stone walls, neolithic axe-heads (exquisite products of the Stone Age) have been found. They were fitted into the rafters. Gathered from caves and cemeteries, such flints were charged with meaning. They were spoken of as “thunderstones.” They were preserved as charms to protect buildings from lightning. “Thunderstones” are found all over medieval Europe, from Lund, in Sweden, to southern Italy. Many found their way into church treasuries. In Utrecht, which formed the center of Willibrord’s mission to the Frisians (as we saw in chapter 18), a large polished stone axe from neolithic times was kept as a relic in the cathedral. It was known, appropriately, as “Saint Martin’s Axe.” It was believed to have been the axe with which Martin had felled pagan holy trees all over Gaul.59
These flint-stones were mute presences. There is no reason to believe that they spoke directly to the Christians of the early medieval west of rituals which reached back to the stone age. Explicit continuities of belief and practice did not exist between medieval Europe and so distant an age. Yet the carefully honed flints were still there. Whatever they had meant to their first users, at some time in the pre-Christian past they achieved their magical connection with thunder and lightning. As “thunderstones” they carried a barely articulate message from an unimaginably older Europe. Under the shadow of a great Christian monastery, they added their own, subdued note to the texture of “Christian times.” Scholars are condemned by the nature of the evidence to concentrate almost exclusively on Christian texts when writing a history of the early Middle Ages. But they should, nonetheless, attempt to develop a wide field of “peripheral vision.” The “thunderstones,” collected from the ground near stone age sites and still solemnly installed by Christians in their buildings give us a glimpse, out of the corner of the eye, of the sheer age and complexity of the European landscape in which the Christian Church was placed.
And so we end the story of a slow revolution. After many centuries, “Christendom” and the idea of permanence had come to coalesce. This had come to be the case even around the uncertain shores of the North Atlantic. By the year 1000, Christendom was a notion which carried with it the charge of perpetuity. It was thought to be something that would last forever. Times had changed. In A.D. 95 (while Tacitus wrote on the wild lands of Germany), Titus Praxias, in Phrygia in western Asia Minor (southwest of Ankara in modern Turkey), made a testamentary bequest. The bequest has survived, engraved in Greek on his stone tomb. Titus Praxias wished to ensure that his memory would survive in his home town. Every year roses would be placed on his tomb, and the town councillors would gather for a memorial banquet. These arrangements were to remain in force, he said, “for as long an age as the rule of the Romans shall be maintained.”60
Paradoxically, if Titus Praxias had returned to his native Phrygia in the year 1000, he would still have found it ruled by “Roman” emperors. Though greatly changed and frequently ravaged by Muslim armies, Phrygia had never been ruled by any other power than that of emperors who were the direct successors of the emperor Augustus. The Christian populations of Phrygia (whom we Westerners insist mistakenly on calling “Byzantines”) still spoke Greek. They called themselves “Romans.” (Indeed, up to the present, Muslims call Orthodox Christians Rûmi.) In the year 1000, they were as convinced as ever Titus Praxias had been in A.D. 95 that the “Roman” empire was a God-given institution, destined to last forever. Parts of the old order with which we began our account, looking at the world from the Edessa of Bardaisan in the early third century, were still there. The “Roman” empire of the east (though greatly reduced in size) was a sizable fragment of that old order.
But other parts of Bardaisan’s world had changed beyond recognition. In western Europe, it was the Catholic Church, and not the Roman empire, which now stood for all that was most permanent. In around 871/889, a Kentish nobleman, the ealdorman Alfred, granted 200 pence in alms to the church at Canterbury, to be rendered for Masses for his soul. Like Titus Praxias, he wished his gift to last forever. So he wrote that it should last “as long as baptism should last and money can be raised from the land.”61
Fulwiht was the Anglo-Saxon term which the ealdorman Alfred used for “baptism.” The term echoed the Early Christian practice by which the newly baptized wore full white robes. In England as elsewhere all over western Europe, “baptism” was what all Christian inhabitants had in common. “Baptism” had come slowly, over the centuries, to a world characterized throughout by remarkable diversities in landscape, in social structure, in culture, and in the nature of the religious past of each region. But “baptism” was now thought to have come forever.
This book has tried to convey, however briefly, something of the complexity of the process by which Christianity rose to dominance in western Europe. It has attempted to delineate the very different forms which Christianity took in the regions in which it gained a foothold. It is for other books to take up the story, by describing the many forms which Christianity would continue to take in coming centuries, in the Middle Ages and in modern times. But we must remember that, whatever the achievements and the tragedies associated with the later history of Christianity in Europe, these represent the playing out of a Western Christendom which took on its first, distinctive face in the centuries described in this book.