The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity

by Richard Fletcher

The conversion of the pagan world that began in the obscurity of the Dark Ages was in no way inevitable. England did not embrace Christianity until 627, and while confessing communities existed from Greenland to China by the millennium, the last European conversion occurred late in the Middle Ages, in 1386. How did it all happen--and why? In a work of solid scholarship that often reads like a detective story and that owes as much to keen intuition as to the mastery of difficult sources, Richard Fletcher lays out the story of the Christianization of Europe. It is a very large story, for conversion was not merely a matter of religious belief. Christianity brought with it enormous cultural baggage. With it came Latin literacy--books; Roman notions of law, property, and government--even the concept of town life, and Mediterranean customs, including new tastes in food, drink, and dress. Whether from faith or by force, conversion had an immense impact that is with us even today, and it is Richard Fletcher's achievement to make that impact felt and understood.

Genres: History, Religion, Nonfiction, Christianity, Medieval, Medieval History, European History

576 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Richard Alexander Fletcher was a historian who specialized in the medieval period. He was Professor of History at the University of York and one of the outstanding talents in English and Spanish medieval scholarship.

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

The strength of this book is its scope. It runs from the late Roman period down to the conversion of Lithuania, the last pagan state in Europe, in 1386. Each conversion event throws light on the others as the narrative takes in the rechristianisation of parts of the former Roman Empire occupied by pagan, or worse, schismatic Christians, and then the expansion of Christianity into Ireland, central Europe and the Baltic region.

"Social change & religious innovation dovetailed neatly together" ( p.140)

"Secular Imperialism & Christian evangelism went hand in hand." (P.150)

"Boniface's reputation as a giant of the 8th century church tests in some degree upon the preservation of his letters. Supposing that, shall we say, Pirmin's correspondence had survived but Boniface's had not: what then? It is an unsettling speculation." (P.204)

"The convert must be taught as well, & taught along lines acceptable to Roman bureaucrats & Parisian professors. This would involve defining in New and stricter ways The nature and extent of The cultural baggage which The convert might be allowed to carry across The threshold of conversion. That is why, to put it bluntly, we do not have a rich vernacular literature in Old Prussian or Old Finnish to stand alongside The glories of Old English or Old High German literature. (p.489) interesting but there is a rich literature in medieval Irish, but not in medieval Gaelic or Scots (at least not for centuries after conversion) despite their conversions happening closely together, or during an overlapping time period so there is probably more going on than Fletcher suggests.

October 2020
The unsettling speculation thought occurs twice only twice! to Fletcher, but reading I was reminded about the joke concerning a drunk looking for their keys under a street lamp at night, not because that was where they had lot them, but because that was where the light was. The history of the early medieval period in particular is like that, one could say that there is on early medieval history, just the study of certain documents and writers before, say for the sake of the argument, circa the year 1000AD. Or to put it another way you might think you are studying 7th century Northumberland but really you are studying Bede's Ecclesiastical history (or Gregory of Tours, or the life of St. Martin etc). The reader and the student are particularly subject to the interests, concerns, and ideologies of the sources.

Alternatively you might see the history of this era as something of a house of cards. Very delicately constructed, yet which could collapse in the face of a critical breath of air.

Marc makes the point in his review that the book is repetitive, but then the process of conversion was meant to be repetitive, the conversion of Clovis was meant to be like that of Constantine. And the same patterns are repeated, one variant is of Churchmen sent to serve a Christian community in a majority non-Christian society with a slow spread of the new faith into the wider society, another related pattern is marriage to a Christian by a non-Christian leader of a majority non-Christian society, sometimes baptism is a pre-condition of marriage, sometimes allowing Christian worship for the spouse and their cronies. Generally the result is the conversion of the social elite. Often the new faith is added on to the existing faith practises, it can take a generation or two before the idea that the Christian faith is an exclusive one becomes enforced or indeed enforceable. An interesting feature, at least for me was that it was quite hard for churchmen to become martyrs in Europe, at least until around the year 1000AD when missionaries start to reach the Prussians, possibly this is simply because previous generations of missionaries are well protected by the secular powers while later generations had read the saints' lives which had not explicitly mentioned this and so trusted in their faith alone when they chopped at someone's sacred tree with an axe.

Ok. The book proceeds chronologically, plainly if Fletcher had attacked the subject analytically: here are the basic patterns of conversion, here are some examples and more recent parallels, it would have been a much shorter book. As it is his method gives the sense that the journey is the destination because another theme is how conversion is not just a question of going outwards towards new countries but also going inwards into the soul of the believer. And in that second sense the Church is perhaps never entirely satisfied, partly because " fashions in piety had changed. Requirements had become stricter" (p.509) both in regard to the development of Protestantism and when in reaction to it Counter-Reformation Catholic activists return to the countryside and as discussed in Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire are shocked at what people believe and don't know. Fletcher doesn't address the perhaps impossible question of what makes a Christian but curiously during the Carolingian period it seems that the barriers hindering sliding between the three monotheistic faiths were quite low. Not that the political and spiritual hierarchies were happy about this.

Conversion appears to change over time, from early on the faith becomes associated with state building, and from Charlemagne onwards the process involves more coercion, with regard to state building conversion supplies the beginnings of a national narrative which for some countries is very important, and linked to that for many countries the beginnings of a national history, which in some cases are mythical or based upon existing conversion narratives. As a reader you sense how fundamental this is in considering European history, here are the founding stories and some of the original sins, occasionally the first entries of the vernaculars into writing. It is a long book journey from the late Roman countryside to the marriage politics of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and there is a lot to see along the way.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're like me and you like your history jargon-less and PoMo-less (which sounds like an awful 80s southern restaurant chain), you'll greatly appreciate this fine volume by Fletcher.
As the title teases, the topic here is how Christianity managed to trickle out from its Mediterranean, read: Roman, centers and infect the rest of Europe. Fletcher, who seems to be a fan of the fuzziness which must be the standard for approaching any complex subject, comes to the subject with an appreciation for the vagaries and vagueness of the conversion process. There's a healthy dose of ecclesiastical exploration here as well as a fondness for the more ambiguous parts of this dubious process, with practices, folklore, and paganistics lingering long and far after the supposed "Christianization" of lands within Europe. This isn't necessarily his main focus, but it is by far the most interesting part of the book. Expect a dizzying and slightly erotic array of saints, martyrs, and missionaries. In fact, rumor has it the original title for this was The Missionary Style.

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

An extraordinary level of precision and detail here. I get the impression on occasion that author maybe is a bit too sympathetic to the progress of conversion contra the ‘barbarians’ (need it be said that the designation, whatever its value otherwise, is kinda gross?). Consider the annoying rhetoric in the first sentence: “This book is an investigation of the process by which large parts of Europe accepted the Christian faith between the fourth and the fourteenth centuries” &c. (xi). The designation of the subject matter as faith carries a specific connotation—perhaps I associate the term too closely with fideism. Text draws up some limits: “The scope of the book is confined for the most part to western, Latin, or Roman Christendom. The history of eastern, Greek or Orthodox Christendom is not my concern, let alone the history of those exotic Christian communities, Ethiopic, Indian, Nestorian” (id.).

Opens by presenting the debate over whether barbarians were worthy of proselytization, based on scriptural injunction: ‘Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them’ &c. (1). Apparently there are interpretations that require proselytization among the barbarian and those that forbid it. Text demonstrates the more or less triumphant expansion of Christian doctrine, beginning with the Anglo-Saxons, then the Irish, Scots, Spain, the Merovingians, various Gothic groups (including the transdanubian ones in former Dacia), the Danes, the Bulgars and Slavs, and so on up through the Baltic crusades. Dude suggests, not strongly, that the extension of Christianity to all within the Roman horizon was made necessary by the Constitutio Antoniana of 212, which rendered all free persons in the empire Roman citizens (37).

Some things worth noting along the way:

Conversion was very much a process, where persons dedicated nominally to the Christian rite also consulted regularly, and without being burnt, the town ariolus (witch doctor, roughly) (54-55). In the “heart of the empire” during the 6th century, one evangelist “demolished temples and shrines, felled sacred trees, baptized 80,000 persons, built ninety-eight churches and founded twelve monasteries” (62). This is all part of the ‘challenge of the countryside’: “Country people are notoriously conservative” because they have “ways of doing things, ways that grindingly poor people living at subsistence level had devised for managing their visible and invisible environments” (64), all that is solid, &c.

The conversion method, as laid out by Gregory in his recitation of the conversion of the Merovingian Franks, became standard: convert the monarch and let the chains of feudal authority do the rest. This leads to the “pivotal role of local elites” (130), wherein manorial landowners are converted and then compel their unfree laborers to adopt the ideology. Nevermind freedom of conscience. Monasticism is noted as a private initiative, often a joint familial enterprise, which is described almost in terms of insurance at times (see 140 ff.). One might want to “be of an aristocratic background and to work in partnership with the royal dynasty,” say (166). It is crucial to highlight that in the early period of English conversion, “Christianity became an inseparable component of the aristocratic identity” (192); this is not to say that there weren't bona fide non-aristocratic adherents who adopted the doctrine as a grassroots movement--but the argument that the opiate of the people was imposed from above for the purposes of the ruling class is fairly obvious (author tries to pooh-pooh this argument, of course, at several points (see e.g. 238-39), mostly by maintaining that the aristocracy seemed to be genuine in its adherence, rather than cynically using it for ideological control; the Marxist position of course is that these items are not mutually exclusive).

Though there are moments when “secular imperialism and Christian evangelism went hand in hand” (150), the most notable instance of this type of conversion was the “conquest and forcible conversion of the Saxons” by Charlemagne (195 et seq.)--as opposed to relatively peaceful suasion of elites, who then coerced their always already dominated subjects into the faith; author is specific: “It is a striking feature of the spread of Christianity to barbarian Europe that it was, before Saxony, so tranquil” (232). The new rules were memorialized in the Saxon Capitulary:

Refusal to be baptized became a capital offense. Cremation of the dead became a capital offense. Eating meat on Lent became a capital offense. So did attacks on churches, slaying of clergy, participation in various rituals identified as pagan, alongside disloyal conspiracy against the king. (215)

It is not unfair to locate some early proto-totalitarianism in the ‘regime,’ such as it was, of Charlemagne (some of the items noted by Shirer regarding the NSDAP are also present in the Frankish empire prior to Verdun, I think.) That said, “the Saxon Capitalury stands as a blueprint for the comprehensive and ruthless Christianization of a conquered society” (id.). The same process, again carried out by Crusading Germans, will occur in the Baltics at the end of the conversion period (see 483 et seq.). They just couldn’t help themselves, then or in the 20th century, sadly, as, for the Wends, “Christianization in these lands of the northern Slavs meant ‘Germanization’” (450).

An important ideological interest: “the line of descent was extended beyond Wodan – to Adam. It had become a matter of concern to adopt, to link up to, a biblical, universal and Christian past”—that is, what of “the permissibility of a pagan past, of the Christianization of history” (240). Author also suggests that “the Christianization of space was matched by a Christianization of time” (255), which is a comment that should probably be run through David Harvey’s arguments about the compression of time and space in The Condition of Postmodernity.

Apparently converting monarchs had many questions that the popes answered during the process, and the most important questions concerned marriage and sex, it seems; “the marital question above all others that preoccupied evangelists and their converts was that of consanguinity” (280). Really? Theological doctrine is kinda, yaknow, important in a forever way, and you’re wondering whether you can pork your royal sister?

Anyway, lots more, a thick book, detailed oriented. Much close consideration of Bede, the various Gregories (you know which ones), Beowulf, Eusebius, and so on—so plenty of ancient and medieval points of literary interest; our dear friend Procopius makes an appearance, from the Byzantine fringe of the narrative. So, good stuff overall.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Fletcher's liberal-minded account of the christianisation of Europe from just before the fall of the Western Roman Empire (if it could be said to have fallen at all, given the continuing role of the Church of Rome) to the end of Lithuanian paganism is well worth reading.

It is classic narrative history starting at the beginning and ending at the end with a couple of analytical chapters in the middle and end to give us some sense of what it may all have 'meant'. He writes fluently even if some readers are going to be boondoggled by the flow of obscure names.

His judgements are generally wise ones although he almost lost a star with an excessively (almost sneering, quite unlike him) dismissal of Marxist cynicism. There are good reasons to be cynical about the motives behind the process of christianisation.

He redeems himself somewhat by giving us sufficient evidence of the variety of political, social and economic motives for becoming at least ritualistically christian to allow us to make up our own minds while confirming that the churchmen involved were 'true believers'.

There is no incompatibility involved in class interests aligning themselves with activist faith-based imagined worlds - after all, we are going through a similar phase of mixed faith and cynicism in the alignment of government and business with the green agenda of St. Greta of Thunberg,

Historians, like philosophers, must be prepared to accept that it is possible for many impossible things not only to be thought before breakfast but subsequently aligned so that they appear to be coherent and logical in order to meet the practical needs of all sides. People are very clever.

Fletcher's weakness perhaps is only in accepting this process as more good than it was insofar as the 'victims' of both activist faith-bringers and warrior and then kingly elites were always going to be the poor bloody sods who had to till the fields and do the dirty work.

I found it heartening in his final chapter that so many of these poor sods still held onto their peasant magical thinking in preference to the magical thinking of intellectuals given that non-magical thinking (our own preferred mode of thinking) was still centuries away.

Was this conversion process benign or malign? Neither probably, much as imperialism, whether Roman or British, cannot be simplified into good or evil. There are benefits of order and relief of poverty in having kings and monasteries. There are disbenefits of exploitation and social control.

Certainly the character of the Church follows an age-old pattern repeated in many societies including ours today. The good tends to get shunted aside in favour of the bad as any form of possible alternative or dissent disappears.

Fletcher is good on the early emergence of the Adelskirche (church as nobility) as warrior societies dumped their war band pseudo-egalitarianism in favour of anointings and fixed land-holding. Clever romanised bosses and intelligent warrior kings could use the church for their own ends.

This is not to claim that the Church was ever just the creature of the aristocracy. This was a partnership that might even break down periodically. The Church had a lot going for it - soft power dominance, heirdom to Roman prestige, a core intellectual consistency, expertise.

The 1,000 year process of turning Western Europe into Western Christendom is shown to have had its logic in this book. As Fletcher wisely points out, the point was that the christians were simply more organised than the pagans to the point where you end up feeling sorry for the latter.

Christendom starts to turn nasty to the degree that its power becomes concentrated. The first major sign of what this may mean (although it was always implicit in Augustine's vicious attitude towards the Donatists) was the brutal treatment of the Saxon pagans by Charlemagne.

However, this arose from the frustrations of power politics. As so often, the battered Saxons became more christian than the christians who worried about their treatment when it came to battering the Wends and other Slavs, a Germanic neurosis that would last in some form until 1945.

The turn to evil (and that is what it must be called) takes place somewhere around the end of the tenth and beginning of the eleventh centuries with the generalisation of a crusading impulse that turned Christian warriors into precisely the same sort of thugs as pagan warlords.

It is a well-worn observation that children who are battered tend to batter their children and the behaviour of the Germans might be considered evidence in favour of that maxim when the evils of crusader ideology came home to roost in the Baltic.

What is interesting about this process is the unthinking role of some fanatic Churchmen, very different in character from earlier generations, not so much fanatic as enthusiastic, who had constructed a missionary ideal in stages during the early middle ages.

By the end of the book (the last half of the fourteenth century), we see a powerful and organised pagan kingdom in Lithuania, last man standing but too late to resist Christianity, undertaking highly skilled negotiations to ensure its political success by adopting the incoming religion.

In essence, Christianity was the soft power survival of the massively prestigious and organised (superior even in collapse) world of 'Romanitas', the vehicle of both order and human exploitation in the interests of collaborating elites but also constraining those elites into right behaviour.

By adopting the 'right behaviour' of a modified christian 'Romanitas', elites got prestige, social control (through family members) and rights to human exploitation in return for modifying their behaviours to maintain some semblance of order and reduce the effects of their inhuman instincts.

So, neither entirely good not entirely bad, the christianisation process was simply how one set of humans in one part of the world managed themselves in a time of limited resources, controlling greed for plunder and employing the emotional and intellectual talents of a class of scribblers.

It was progress of a kind for land owners, merchants and intellectuals though it simply shuffled the cards for the rest of humanity (the bulk of it) as they remained under the control of collaborating plunderers of land and souls.

Older traditions and certainties and a lot of personal autonomy went out of the window although it is true that the Church would provide (at its best) relief from poverty and restraints on lordly behaviour (when it chose to exercise moral authority). As we say, neither good nor bad.

From the point of view of many ordinary folk, the early middle ages under Roman christianity might seem like a golden age sandwiched between an age of predatory enslaving pirates and warlords and the utter lunacy of the Church Reformers, Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

A well ordered and mostly sensitive and kind book with none of my sourness towards the utter absurdity of religious magical thinking, this is well worth reading if only because of its complete honesty in laying out the facts on which we can have our own opinion.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most think that the Christianization of Europe (among those few who think of it at all) was achieved when Constantine converted. In this volume, the late Richard Fletcher clarified, in great detail and at some length, that it took about a millenium. He also, in the last chapter, cited research on offerings made to springs and the welcoming of dead ancestors among the residents of Brittany in the mid-twentieth century as evidence that it was not complete at that date. Surely it would be possible to find similar evidence lasting to the present. (One could argue, on the basis of declining participation in churches and the influx of Muslims, that the process will never be complete). The initial millenium of Christian expansion was full of starts and stops, of missionaries setting out into pagan territory, sometimes to encounter willing converts, sometimes martyrdom, a story familiar to anyone who has read about the process either where it was successful (Latin America) and where it was largely not (Asia). Fletcher, in an exhaustive survey that covers from Spain to Scandinavia to Lithuania, makes interesting observations. First, when conversion of a people occurred, it was not generally the road to Damascus. It generally took about a century during which a group of pagans became familiar with this new group of people, with their prohibitions on sacrifice, their loathing for existing gods and their idols, and, importantly, the strength of the armies and wealth of the kingdoms that backed them up. Often enough, a converting king, in constructing a cathedral, was simply adding to the existing pantheon as a kind of hedge for his Pascalian wager. Sometimes the converts were caught on the wrong end of history, as when the Arians converted to a version of Christianity subsequently declared heretical. Often enough, a converting king was succeeded or even assassinated by heirs who followed Emperor Julian the Apostate back into paganism. The poor Moravians were caught between the two sides of the schism between the Constantinople and Rome until the Magyars settled the argument (for the moment) by sweeping in from the even farther and un-Christian East. Fletcher points out that the Christianity of that millenium was an urban religion--it was after all the new idea and the conservative hinterlands were skeptical. The priestly work force was problematic; for all the heroic missionaries and scholarly monks, the basic priestly class was poorly educated had to be reminded at times not to drink, gamble and consort, or even sell church vestments and implements to inn and tavernkeepers. Which brings us back to the original insight; Fletcher argued that conversion in the sense that we understand it now--more like Paul's experience than that of a barbarian king's--barely existed during all the period under review. He argues for only two instances in that era of conversion to Christianity as radical personal change in belief and behavior: Augustine and Anselm. It was another country, or rather a whole world of them.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bulky and very detailed overview of the Christianization in the period 300 to 1400. Thorough job, but inevitably excessive in the details and highly repetitive.

[Tlaloc · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's been a very long time since I've read a history book that reeled me in like this one. Everything about it - the language, the evocative imagery, the detailed analysis - spoke of great effort, patience, and dedication on the part of the author.

Having read some reviews on the book here and elsewhere, it becomes evident that part of the reason I really enjoyed it is also one of the main gripes of detractors; mainly the authors' 'dancing' around the issue of explaining why the tribes and cultures that occupied central and northern Europe accepted Christianity.

Fletcher explains and suggests possible answers, but he rarely goes outright to stake a claim to the truth. In this way, he accurately illustrates the pragmatic reasons for conversion (or non-conversion, or relapse), while keeping in mind the obvious limitations of modern historical/archaeological scholarship and interpretation, as well as the biased and incomplete nature of contemporary literature from those time periods. Just as conditions varied, so did the explanations.

Overall, it comes off as serous (yet humble) scholarship fit for anybody interested in the evolution of institutionalized Christianity from marginalized sect to mistress of a continent.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

On this reread, I particularly enjoyed Fletcher's complete grasp of his subject -- he poses the breadth of questions that I would have asked of this subject, he writes entertainingly, he presents a vast range of examples (and is sensitive to the feelings of those whose stories he tells), and, when all is said, he is willing to leave some issues open, respecting what cannot be summed up or resolved. I seldom encounter history books -- especially ones concerning the early medieval period -- that seem so alive.

[William Guerrant · Rating 4 out of 5]

I greatly enjoyed this book, from which I learned a lot. Those interested in the history of the Christianization of northern Europe during the early Middle Ages will certainly want to read it. But be forewarned that it is not an easy read. The author is thorough, careful, and scholarly, and the sheer weight of the information presented (literally thousands of names and places) makes for slow reading at times.

Despite the author's commendable effort to make it accessible to a lay audience, ultimately this book will only be appealing to history geeks. Still, he does an admirable job of trying to keep the text lively, while presenting a prodigious load of information. A virtual hat tip to him for this passage (p. 146), which follows a particularly dense section: "The reader has been bombarded with unfamiliar names in the course of the last few pages and (if he has not yet flung the book aside) must be cowering in readiness for the next shell to explode its shrapnel of Audoens and Balthilds and Chagnerics and Dagoberts across the scarred and pitted territory of the mind. Take heart. Lewis Namier once said to Arnold Tonybee, 'You try to see the tree as a whole. I try to examine it leaf by leaf.' We have examined a few leaves (a very few) from seventh-century Francia. Now for the tree."

[Ivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very comprehensive, solid and brightly written book. Even non-specialists in Medieval and Late Roman history will find this book fascinating and easy to read. Through the pages the expansion of Christianity shows not as an abstract linear progression, or a series of religious wars, as it is usually portrayed in the general history course, but as messy real-life process where at times Christianity disappears, melds with local cults and has significant baseline philosophical changes from a hardly recognizable crypt cult, oftentimes split into conflicting branches with great differences of proselyte methods and philosophy, into something that we know today. Ultimately, for those, interested in religion-free world, like me, the book poses a series of challenges due to the uneasy nature of interaction of old and new religions. Was it possible for the humankind to avoid the spread of Abrahamic religions altogether? If so, would it really have been possible to create a much more socially and technologically advanced world than that of today, only taking root in the Roman and other pre-christian religious practices?

[David Montgomery · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everyone knows Christianity started as a small sect in the Roman Empire and ended up as the religion of all Europe. This book fills in the gaps (or at least gaps for non-Europeans) about how exactly the religion got from point A to point B. It's a look at the spread of Christianity from a predominantly urban religion to the Roman peasantry to the barbarian tribes who replaced Roman rule in Europe, then to the periphery where the legions had never marched. I'm glad to have this hole in my history filled in, though the book was rather dense, full of names and places quickly forgotten. Still, I was particularly impressed with how the author handled the miracle stories and hagiographies so dominant in contemporary accounts of early Christianity — neither overly skeptical nor credulous, Fletcher recounts the stories of saints performing miracles with more of a concern for what the people of the time believed than how modern readers would view them.

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid, readable story of what happened with some analysis, covers 337 AD to 1386 AD (edict of Milan to baptism of Lithuanians). For upper-level college and graduate students, but can easily be read by an armchair historian (me). It is more than 20 years old but I think still relevant.
The focus is on Western Europe, mainly because that was where the heathens were. Fletcher frequently points out how little evidence there is, and that this is particularly true of the 'heathen' side. However, given all the difficulties a few general story lines develop. The English example is one (peaceful), Saxony is another (violent, church and state (HRE) working together. There is also a progression after conversion from bare bones to full internal connection. This can take many generations.

The focus on conversion means that most of the story takes place at the edges of Western Europe. It is assumed you already have basic knowledge of history of the same period, Charlemagne, Holy Roman Empire, Gregorian revolution, etc. The maps do not have boundary lines because Fletcher is against all the ‘formation of the Germans, Lithuanians, etc.’ stories from the past two centuries, but this can make the maps difficult for non-professionals. He is definitely of the ‘slow change from Rome to Europe’ school.

3 stars. A good solid read for people interested in the topic.

[Rebekah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I MADE IT!!! Whew, this book was a bit of a slog. But it also holds a wealth of information about the process of European conversion to Christianity that I'm glad I learned. (Hint: it was a complex, slow process. Probably why it took over 500 pages to explain it.) At times a bit meandering, but definitely worth a read if this topic is of interest to you.

[Don]

Reality check that dispels some of the long held misconceptions about the orderly progression of Christianity as first presented in the New Testament book of Acts and the less straightforward path taken by those who actually practiced it in Northern Europe.

The author begins with a pagan Anglo Saxon king of Northumberland, England who converts to Christianity after being approached by a missionary named Paulinus sent by Pope Gregory. The conversion occurs after making a promise or vow to accept Christ if given the victory in a coming battle where his forces are greatly outnumbered. His sincerity in honoring his vow is evidently shared by his people who took no vow, but follow him in the sacrament of baptism upon the victory. This event causes the author to ask 10 prime questions in regards to what is means to be a pagan, what Christianity had meant to these new converts, the training and impetus to become an evangelist, what the sending organization hoped to gain, and so on. The answers take him through some interesting twists and turns in relating the course of events between the 4th and 14th centuries, which has much more to do with the mysteriousness of faith than the rote of Sunday school lessons learned in youth that only tell a small portion of the story. Fascinating!

[Isa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very fair, informative book that provides an in-depth view at the spread of Christianity (mainly in Europe) in the first thousand years or so. For me personally I was only interested in it’s spread until the dawn of Islam and then how the religion interacted with Islam and Judaism in 8th century Spain and onwards.
I noticed that the spread of Eastern Orthodox in Syria, Persia and India is unmentioned, as well as the invasion of the Americas and the missionary work to central and Southern Africa, maybe there is a part 2 I’m unaware of but it would be interesting to see a similar book like this one.

[Gregory John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wasn’t quite what I was looking for. It doesn’t delve into why the barbarians adopted and changed Christianity.

p.10: Early medieval Europe was a world in which persons of every level of intellectual cultivation accepted without question that the miraculous could weave like a shuttle in and out of everyday reality.

p.86: … he [St. Patrick] was the first person in Christian history to take the scriptural injunctions literally; to grasp that teaching all nations meant teaching even barbarians who lived beyond the frontiers of the Roman empire.

[George Shubin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spanning 1000 years of history, and encompassing an entire continent, with a cast of hundreds of characters, this book has a lot to chew on. It's a massive work that traces the conversion of the barbarian tribes that covered Europe and helped topple the Roman Empire, from paganism to Christianity.

It's a very entertaininmg and readable book that fleshes out our usually sketchy understanding of the period from about 400 AD to 1400 AD.

[Kirk Lowery · Rating 5 out of 5]

The unique method of this historian is that he narrates events using the worldview of the participants that includes the supernatural! His goal is to understand, and the historian must enter the world of the sources in order to understand motives, etc. In some respects it is a treatise on missiology, because they were facing many of the same issues that the modern missionary faces.

[Eric Pecile · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very solid book on the history of European Christianisation. Fletcher leaves no stone unturned and explores the demographic, cultural, and military aspects of the process. This book is an excellent companion to Robert Bartlett's Making of Europe as Fletcher is fundamentally describing one of the many components of the formation of a continental European civilization.

[Guillaume Dohmen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very interesting book

This is a book well worth reading. The writer has a real talent to make the process of conversion easy to understand. His explanation does not just apply to Christianity but one could argue that that even in our time movements develop in a similar way.

[Brad · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I ever read

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heavyweight read, but oh so brilliant. The subtitle is 'From Paganism to Christianity 371-1386AD' and it really does that - gives you a picture of 1000 years with a framework to interpret it.

[Larisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was such a slog I had to skip chapters and read the end of some and completely stop after 10 of them. I have seldom read a book which gave me such a headache. The subject matter is indeed huge and perhaps that's the issue - how can you cover 1000+ years of religious history in one book? Well now I know very well you can't or at least not in such a condensed format. I'd compare it with 'why the west rules for now' and that book succeded in telling a story and making me refer to it time and time again. This one after the first few introductory more story woven ones started to weigh on me as a project to be finished not a book to be enjoyed. I don't know who enjoys this, perhaps if you read one chapter a month, it's extremely academic in places and incredibly detailed - which again is impressive but not reader friendly, definitely not for those wanting a casual read and even for academics beware it's....something else. What made me fully stop is the sheer amount of names and skipping between countries (which I understand come with the territory of the subject matter but I firmly believe it could have been cut back or presented differently) plus the very long parallels - I wanted to know about Charlemagne but I ended up reading about some other guy in the middle then going back to Charlemagne. Maybe not my style however, I have read so many varied books on history over the years and this will stick with me as quite a bad one which I wouldn't recommend. Not as bad as Tom Holland's Dominion but still. There's a delicate art to writing history - a good example is Women's work which tackles a huge subject matter but manages to keep the reader engaged because you can't throw at me 1000 years worth of names and expect any storyline to be created by the reader. To my surprise there even was a summary ish chapter somewhere halfway which I've never seen - probably testament that the book should've stopped there and continued in volume two. Don't know why I'm writing so much but I've hardly ever been so impressed and bored at the same time. As the kids say this is a flavour of 'tism even I couldn't crack.

[Artemis · Rating 5 out of 5]

TLDR
This is a long book on what at times is a very dry subject (and oftentimes more incredibly fascinating). Nonetheless I managed to finish it, and I am grateful for the knowledge that I gained - though I admit I will forget far, far more from this book than I can ever hope to remember.

Overview
Speed of Reading
[ ] Zoom!
[♦] Comfortable
[ ] Slog

Thought Provocations (AKA Need-To-Stop-Moments)
[ ] Constant contemplations
[♦] Pondering Pauses
[ ] No thoughts, book empty

Relevance to Proposed Topic
[♦] To the point
[ ] Wanders here and there
[ ] We lost the plot, Bob

Validity of Knowledge (to the best of my ability)
[♦] On point
[ ] It looks questionable to me.
[ ] Misinformation cheesecake

Writing Style
[ ] Brevity Champion
[♦] Comfortable companion
[ ] Prose
[ ] Technical mumbling

Unchallenged/sneaky -isms?
[♦] Refreshingly few
[ ] Yeahhhhh…
[ ] How did this get published

Favourite Quote

“Martin of Braga was not a man, we might judge, subject to self-doubt.” p 54

“because we are so ignorant about the content and workings of pre-Christian traditional paganisms we can know very little indeed about what people were being converted from. Because of the ceaseless process of redefinition of expectations and requirements - as well, of course, as the paucity of evidence - it is almost equally difficult to make out what they were being converted to.” p 512

Final Thoughts
This was refreshing to read, despite being on a topic I do not have a 'natural' draw for. My understanding of European history is much better rounded out and the wave of Christianity through Europe now makes a lot more sense - as much as it can given what literature remains.
The author situates themself and their work incredibly well, they don't wander off into random -isms for seemingly no reason, and they clearly state when they are giving an opinion that is opposed by other scholars. Many thanks to the author for being a sensible and enjoyable read.

[William Adam Reed · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. This book took several months for me to finish, but not because of the subject matter, this is a topic that I find endlessly fascinating! I like to learn how things became the way they did, social movements are a fascination for me. It just so happens that I was reading "Atlas Shrugged" at the same time as this one, and the fiction book took a bit of a preference for me.

This book tells the story of the European conversion from paganism to Christianity. There is a lot to like in this book. It is over 500 pages, but one strength of this book is that Fletcher includes most of the continent and spans wide from the conversion of Constantine up to the last sections of Europe to be evangelized, the Baltics in the 1300's. Fletcher has done his research, his book is thorough and deep. But he also realizes that a good story will go a long ways. All the famous names of the early middle ages are here, including Clovis, St. Patrick, Boniface, St. Stephen, Bede, Leif Ericsson, and many more. One of my favorite sections of the book is when the relationship between Charlemagne and Alcuin was explored, they had a difference of opinion on the best method to use for gaining converts to the faith. There are many well know stories that are given the full treatment here. For example, what was Caedom's call all about? How did Clovis's wife play a key role in his conversion? What was the relationship like between two monotheistic faiths when they came into contact in Spain? There are plenty of interesting stories that are well told by Fletcher. He also includes both the atrocities committed by the Christians and pagans, as well as the moments of lyrical beauty on both sides.

There were sections towards the end where I felt the text got dry at times, but that usually would only last three or four pages. Overall, this book satisfied my curiosity in amazing ways, and I consider the reading time very well spent. This book is my kind of jam, and I think you would be pleased with it also if you have an interest in these sort of things.

[The other John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read a number of books on the history of Christianity in various parts of the world. One book I haven't sought out is the history of Christianity in Europe. I figure it will be essentially the generic church history I originally learned, growing up in a culture with western European roots. (and with a western European bias.) This book, however, caught my interest. It's not really a chronicle of the history of the Church in Europe as it is an attempt to try and discover how Christianity spread amongst the various peoples of Europe. It was a bit of a challenge, the author admits, as historical records in the early medieval period--especially those about the old pagan cultures--are scant. But Dr. Fletcher worked with what he had and put together a meaty book. It's a more scholarly tome, looking to piece together the evidence to illustrate general principals rather than a story. But it did a dimension to the historical tales I already knew. I could better envision how the new churches in a newly christened culture might work... or not work, as was sometimes the case. The principles Dr. Fletcher pieced together also pointed to similar things going on in our modern day, be it in the mission field or in those "Christian" cultures that aren't quite pure.

[Christine O’Neal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fletcher isn’t just recounting the Christianization of Europe — he’s mapping a civilizational operating‑system upgrade. What makes this book so compelling is how clearly it shows that conversion was never simply about belief. It was about repatterning governance, shifting the control surface from ritual and kinship networks to a new identity architecture that could scale across tribes, languages, and geographies.

The brilliance of the book is in how it reveals the mechanics of that shift. Missionaries weren’t spreading doctrine; they were introducing a new generative grammar for social order. Fletcher shows how literacy, record‑keeping, and ecclesiastical hierarchy functioned as early information systems — stabilizing identity, memory, and authority in places where oral culture had previously governed.

Read through a modern lens, the book becomes a study in institutional onboarding at civilizational scale. It’s a reminder that conversion is never just theological. It’s infrastructural. It’s the moment when a society adopts a new model of what a person is, what a community is, and what truth looks like.

A foundational text for anyone thinking about how identity becomes a governance surface.

[Duane Alexander Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly extraordinary book. Working from very patchy and ambiguous documents and archeological remains, Fletcher goes region by region speaking to us of the conversion of Europe to Christianity. We meet noble missionaries and conniving bishops and reckless monks and much more.

The strength of the book is the author's acceptance of complexity in the reality of conversion. The factors were many (economic, cultural, marital, military, spiritual, philosophical) but he resists the temptation to boil it all down to one simple answer. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand what we are able to know about the conversion of the barbarians and the slow creation of European Christendom.

[Taylor Swift Scholar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very good! I learned a lot. The scope of this book is impressive. Fletcher covers a lot of time and space, but he has an uncanny sense for when it is time to take a step back from all of the names and facts and provide a summary. He also has a clear sense of humor that occasionally peeks through.

[Kevin Moynihan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book covering so much. Incredibly in-depth for a book that covers such a long timeframe. Really appreciate the ‘Further Reading’ section which whittles things down to some top additional sources for future reading.