THE CONVERSION OF SLAVS AND NORTHMEN
[Sidenote: Cyril and Methodius, 868.]
The ninth century was a great age of conversion, and the work is very
largely associated with two great names in the development of
civilisation and learning, those of two brothers, born in Thessalonica,
probably between 820 and 830--Constantine (who changed his name to
Cyril when he was consecrated bishop by Hadrian II. in 868) and
Methodius. Their lives show the connection still existing between Rome
and the East in Church matters, and illustrate the zeal for educational
work which was so conspicuous a feature in the converting energy of the
Church of Constantinople. Cyril was not only a priest and a
missionary, he was a "philosopher." Methodius, it is said, had been a
civil administrator. Both were scholars and linguists, and the
influence which they exercised upon the Slavs is incalculably great.
In missions always it is the personal influence which is the most
striking. But the time is needed as well as the man. So much we see
again and again, however cursorily we study the evangelising work of
this age.
In missions the ninth century carried out what the eighth neglected or
was unable to accomplish. The {124} wars against the Finnish
Bulgarians from 755 onwards brought the Church as well as the State
into grave danger, or rather were defensive of each. [Sidenote: The
conversion of the Bulgarians.] In the eighth century there were several
isolated conversions, including a whole family of boïars from whom
sprang the recluse, saint Joannicius; but there was no general
movement. The Bulgarians remained enemies of Christianity and
destroyers of all Roman civilisation: S. Theodore of the Studium
declared that it was criminal sacrilege to exchange hostages with them.
But gradually the geographical nearness brought closer connection;
barbarians enlisted in the Roman armies; at last illustrious prisoners
in Constantinople were the cause of light being brought to their own
land. Boris, the Bulgarian king, obtained teachers from the New Rome,
and applied also to Pope Nicolas I. (858-67) for instruction. In 864
the Bulgarians accepted the faith, and the contest for patriarchal
rights over them was hotly pressed between Nicolas and Photius,
Patriarch of Constantinople (857-86). In the end, after receiving
answers from the pope to 106 questions, and after being treated with
too little consideration by Hadrian II. (867-72), Boris decided to
accept an archbishop from Constantinople in 870, and ten bishoprics
were founded.
[Sidenote: The conversion of the Slavs.]
But the great work of Cyril and Methodius was not directly concerned
with the Bulgarian conversion. In Pannonia and Moravia and Croatia
they were the great missionaries to the Slavs. Cyril invented a
Slavonic alphabet, and was able to preach to the Slavs everywhere in
their own tongue; and in Serbia a flourishing Church sprang {125} up
which retained the Slavonic rite. Early in the tenth century many
Slavonian priests were ordained by the Bishop of Nona, himself a Slav
by birth. But these districts were weakened by incessant strife, and
their contests with the East were often fomented by the popes. Their
Christianity was distinctly Byzantine; but they were never able to be a
real strength to the emperor or the Orthodox Church.
[Sidenote: Poland.]
Poland, on the other hand, and later, received its Christianity from a
Latin source. There may have been earlier Greek influences through the
Slavonic Christians to the south-east; but it was not till 965 that the
king, Mieczyslaw, was converted, when he married a Bohemian princess.
He became a member of the Empire and the vassal of Otto I. The
bishopric of Posen was founded in 968, and the gospel was preached by
S. Adalbert, already Bishop of Prague. S. Adalbert, who for a short
time held the see of Gnesen, passed on to preach to the heathen
Prussians, by whom he was martyred in 997. Otto III. visited the
Christian king in A.D. 1000, and gave him a relic, the lance of S.
Maurice, still preserved at Cracow. The ecclesiastical organisation of
the country was then consolidated; Gnesen was made the metropolitan
see, and Polish and Pomeranian dioceses were placed under it. The
Latin Church was dominant over Polish Christianity.
[Sidenote: The Prussians and S. Adalbert.]
But the pagan Prussians regarded S. Adalbert as a political emissary
and a sorcerer who destroyed their crops, and killed him without
hesitation; Bruno, whom Silvester II. sent to succeed him, perished
within a year, and the attempt to Christianise the Prussians was {126}
abandoned for nearly two centuries. Similar was the course of events
among the Wends. It is not till the tenth century that we know
anything of endeavours for their conversion, and then they were due to
the all-embracing energy of Otto I. Henry I. had borne the royal arms
in victory over the lands watered by the Elbe, the Oder, and the Saale;
and now his successor began the establishment of an ecclesiastical
hierarchy, under the see of Magdeburg. Boso, Bishop of Merseburg, set
himself to learn and preach in the Slav tongue, but it seems that the
German clergy who were introduced were unsuccessful as missionaries,
and won the reputation of greedy political agitators. At the end of
the tenth century a torrent of pagan fury swept over the land,
destroyed the churches, and stamped the growing Christianity under foot.
[Sidenote: The conversion of Russia.]
The beginnings of Russian Christianity may possibly be found, as the
patriarch Photius asserted, before the results of the defeat of the
barbarians by John Zimisces. But it was not till nearly a century
later that anything notable occurred. Olga, a "ruler of Russia,"
visited Constantinople in 957 and was baptized. Yet the Greek
missionaries made but slow progress. It was not till Vladimir married
the sister of the emperor Basil in 989, and restored the city of
Cherson,--in which Cyril more than a century before had been a
missionary,--where he was baptized, to the Empire, that the
evangelisation of Russia really began. Vladimir deliberately chose the
Greek in preference to the Roman form of Christianity, and acted, it
would seem, with some semblance of national consent. The baptism of
the people of {127} Kiev in the waters of the Dnyepr, as one flock,
"some standing in the water up to their necks, others up to their
breasts, holding their young children in their arms," was typical of
the national acceptance of Christ. Everywhere churches and schools
were built and the Slavonic Scriptures taught the people; at Kiev was
built the Church of S. Sophia by Greek masons, in commemoration of the
debt to the great Church of the New Rome. [Sidenote: S. Vladimir,
989.] Vladimir became the apostle of his people. The Church pressed
forward eagerly, forward over the vast expanse covered by the Russian
power, and, not without martyrdoms and tales of heroic adventure, won
its way triumphantly to Russian hearts.
[Sidenote: The conversion of the Czechs.]
The early days of Christianity in Moravia and Bohemia are wrapped in
obscurity. In 801 Charles the Great endeavoured a forcible conversion
of the former country, but with no more than transitory success. Yet
in 836 a church was consecrated at Neutra by the Archbishop of
Salzburg. A little later than this we hear of the beginnings of
Christian faith among the Czechs. Early Bohemian history, when it
emerges from an obscurity lighted by legend, is full of romantic
incident. There are passages again and again in its records which for
weirdness and ferocity remind us of a grim story of Meinhold's.
Paganism lingered there with some of its ancient power, when it had
perished, at least outwardly, in all neighbouring lands. In the
eleventh century Bohemian heathens still went on pilgrimages to the
temple at Arcona on the isle of Eugen, till the practice was stopped by
Bretislav II. Still a beginning had been made. In {128} 845 fourteen
Bohemian nobles, who had taken refuge at the court of Louis the German,
were baptized at Regensburg; but the conversion of the country was to
come from the East. Cyril and Methodius, sent by the emperor Michael
III. from Constantinople, converted the Moravians, and from them the
gospel was handed on to the Czechs. It was Methodius, on whom the pope
had conferred the title of Archbishop of Moravia, who baptized the
Bohemian prince Borivoj. For the history of Bohemian Christianity the
earliest authority is Kristián, brother of Duke Boleslav II., in _The
Life of S. Ludmilla and the Martyrdom of S. Wenceslas_. [Sidenote: S.
Wenceslas.] This is an extremely valuable book, not only as a
biography--hagiological, like so much valuable early material for
history, yet truthful--and as a record of manners in the tenth century,
but as containing the account of the conversion of Moravia to
Christianity, which shows that the conversion came first from the East,
and the Church long retained a special connection with the Eastern
peoples, Bulgarians and Greeks. The account of the murder of S.
Wenceslas is of great interest as showing how close was the connection
of religion with family and dynastic feuds. S. Ludmilla was murdered
in 927 by the orders of her daughter-in-law, who remained a pagan; a
year later,[1] her saintly grandson Wenceslas was slain by the men of
his evil brother Boleslav. "Holy Wenceslas, who was soon to be a
victim for the sake of Christ, rose early, wishing, according to his
holy habit, to hurry to the church, that he might remain there for some
time in solitary prayer before the congregation arrived; {129} and
wishing as a good shepherd to hear matins together with his flock, and
join in their song, he soon fell into the snares that had been laid,"
and it was outside the church that he was slain.
[Sidenote: Restoration of Christianity in Bohemia.]
It was not till the invasion of the country by the armies of Otto I. in
938 that Christianity was restored even to full toleration, and only
when Otto came himself in 950 that it was secured. Boleslav II., the
nephew of S. Wenceslas, was named the Pious; and Prague, in 973, was
separated from Regensburg and became a bishopric. While among the
Moravians the Slavonic rite introduced by Methodius was still largely
used, in Bohemia the Roman rite was followed. Voytech (Adalbert), a
Czech, was the second bishop, and to him, in spite of failures and
difficulties, the conversion of Bohemia was largely due. He died a
martyr (as we have said), while preaching to the heathen Prussians, and
for a time darkness again settled over the history of the Czechs.
[Sidenote: The conversion of the Danes]
Meanwhile the current of conversion had spread northwards. It was in
822 that Ebbo, Archbishop of Rheims, was sent to Denmark in consequence
of a political embassy to Louis the Pious, emperor from 814 to 840.
Harold, the Danish king, had asked aid. The emperor gave him also a
Christian teacher; and in 826 the king and his wife were baptized.
Other missionaries went northwards, but before long the Danes drove out
both their king Harold and his teacher Ansgar. From Denmark, however,
the mission spread to Sweden, and in 831 an archbishopric was
established at Hamburg to direct all the northern {130} missions, and
Ansgar was invested with the pallium by Pope Gregory IV. The missions
had a chequered career. [Sidenote: and of Sweden.] Hamburg was seized
and pillaged by the Northmen in 845, and the Swedish mission was for a
time destroyed. In 849 a new revival took place, when Ansgar was given
the see of Bremen in addition to that of Hamburg; and before long he
won over the king of the Jutes and his people of Schleswig. In 853
Ansgar returned to Sweden, where he was favourably received by the king
Olaf. The tale of his vast missionary labours, from which he was
rightly called the "Apostle of the north," is told with spirit and
feeling by Adam of Bremen, who wrote in the eleventh century, as well
as by the biographer who commemorated him on his death. He not only
preached, but he "redeemed captives, nourished those who were in
tribulation, taught his household. As an apostle without, a monk
within, he was never idle." When it was said that his prayers wrought
miracles of healing, he said, "If I could but think myself worthy of
such a favour from the Lord, I would pray Him to grant me but one
miracle--that out of me, by His grace; He would make a good man."
[Sidenote: S. Ansgar.] S. Ansgar is, in his work as in his training, a
parallel to S. Boniface. Like him one of the finest fruits of
monasticism, which first taught in solitude and then sent out to work
actively in the world, he was brought up at Corbie. For nearly
thirty-five years he laboured incessantly among the peoples of the
north, and at the very end of his life he gallantly went among heathen
chiefs to rebuke them for buying and selling slaves. He died in 865,
and S. Rimbert, {131} his disciple and biographer, was his successor in
his sees.
[Sidenote: Norway.]
Gradually, and in different ways, Christianity spread in the far north.
Haakon, the son of Harold Haarfager of Norway, was sent to be
foster-son to Aethelstan of England, who "had him baptized and brought
up in the right faith," and he became a great king under the name of
Haakon the Good. From England he brought over teachers, and he built
churches; and then at last he addressed all the leaders of his people
and besought them "all, young and old, rich and poor, women as well as
men, that they should all allow themselves to be baptized, and should
believe in one God, and in Christ the Son of Mary, and refrain from all
sacrifices and heathen gods, and should keep holy the seventh day, and
abstain from all work on it, and keep a fast on the seventh day." [2]
But it was long before his people obeyed him. Rebellion and dynastic
war followed in rapid succession; and he died of a wound from a chance
arrow that struck him as he pursued his defeated foes. The first
Christian king of Norway died in a land which was still heathen. But
the seed was sown in the hearts of the men who had seen the brave,
strong, chivalrous life of him who owned Christ for Lord.
[Sidenote: Olaf Trigvason.]
In Denmark the conversion begun in the ninth century was long delayed,
and it was not till Otto I. conquered the Danes and sent Bishop Poppo
who instructed King Harold and his army so that they were baptized,
that the land {132} became definitely a Christian kingdom. From
Denmark the gospel spread again to Norway; but it was not till near the
end of the tenth century that Olaf Trigvason was baptized by a hermit
on one of the Scilly Isles, and then in his short reign devoted himself
to converting his people, often forcibly, as a choice between death and
baptism. To Iceland and Greenland too Olaf sent missionaries. He died
at last, like a true Wiking hero, in a sea fight; and it was not until
the next century and the days of Olaf the Saint that the faith of
Christ conquered the North.
[Sidenote: The conversion of Iceland.]
There seems no doubt that Christianity in Iceland began by missionary
enterprise from Irish monks. From time to time anchorites sought
refuge in that _ultima Thule_, "that they might pray to God in peace";
but whether they did any direct work of conversion is doubtful. The
actual conversion came undoubtedly from Norway. A Christian queen
lived in Iceland at the end of the ninth century, the wife of the Norse
Olaf who was king in Dublin; but little if any impression was made on
the heathenism of the people. Nearly a century later an Icelander
called Thorwald Kothransson brought a Christian bishop Frederic from
Saxony, who wrought some conversions and left a body of baptized
Christians behind him. In the year 1000 came a priest Thormod and
several chiefs back from the Norse court of Olaf, and in a meeting of
the Althing--the great assembly of the people--preached to them the One
God in Trinity. The whole people became Christian, and the few heathen
{133} customs that still lingered, as it were by permission, after the
great baptism, soon fell away like raindrops in the bright sun. Among
the last news that came to Olaf Trigvason was that his distant people
had fulfilled the wish of his heart.
[1] According to the chronicle of Kristián.
[2] The Saturday fast was still observed in many parts of Christendom.
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