§ 2 Methods of Expansion
Every extension of the Church being a means of power and revenue to priests, the process was furthered at once by motives of selfishness and by motives of self-sacrifice. In some cases the latter were effectual, as when a pious hermit won repute among barbarians for sanctity, and so acquired spiritual influence; but the normal mode of conversion seems to have been by way of appeal to chiefs or kings. When these were convinced that Christianity was to their interest, the baptism of their more docile subjects followed wholesale. Thus ten thousand Angli were claimed as baptized by Augustine in Kent on Christmas Day in the year 597—a transaction which reduced the rite to nullity, and the individuality of the converts to the level of that of animals. In this case there can have been no rational consent. A little later, Heraclius in the East caused multitudes of Jews to be dragged to baptism by force; and the same course was taken in Spain and Gaul. Jews so coerced were only more anti-Christian than before; and wholesale relapses of barbarian converts were nearly as common as the wholesale captures, till the cause of kings won the mastery. Nowhere does the Church seem to have grown from within and upward among the barbarians as it had originally done in the empire: the process is invariably one of imposition from without and above, by edicts of kings, who supported the missionaries with the sword. As at the outset of the Church, there were deadly strifes among the pioneers. The earlier British Church having been formed under influences from Ireland, there was such utter hatred between its remnants and the Romanized Church set up by Augustine that, apparently after his death, twelve hundred monks of the older church were massacred at Bangor in one of the wars between the two Christian parties; and the Britons, not unnaturally, refused to have any intercourse with their brethren, regarding them as worse than heathens. The Englishman Boniface, who played a large part (720–55) in the Christianization of northern Germany, and who in the usual fashion claimed to have baptized a hundred thousand natives in one year, secured the excommunication of several rival bishops of the anti-Roman school; and those who would not accept re-ordination at his hands he sought to have imprisoned or flogged, denouncing them, in the style of the Churchman of all ages, as “servants of the devil and forerunners of Antichrist.” His authority was established in new districts at the head of an armed force; and when with fifty priests he met his death (755) in Friesland at the hands of heathen natives, he was marching with a troop of soldiers. Even where force was not used, the persuasions offered were of the grossest kind. Thus a friend of Boniface is found advising him to point out to the heathen that the Christians have the bulk and the best of the world, possessing all the rich lands which yield wine and oil, while the pagans are now confined to the coldest and most barren regions. No religion was ever more unspiritually propagated.
Under Charlemagne, Christian missionary methods left those of Islam in the rear. For the subjection of the still free Saxons, between the Baltic and the borders of Thuringia and Hesse, he needed the aid of the Church’s organization; and they, realizing the state of the case, for the most part refused to be baptized. In his wars with them, accordingly, he decreed that those who rejected the gospel should be put to death. As the wars lasted thirty-three years, the number of the slain must be left to imagination. The survivors were finally bribed into belief by a restoration of their local rights, and by being freed from tribute to the king. They do not seem, however, to have been freed from the exactions of the Church, which, according to the testimony of Charlemagne’s adviser, Alcuin, had been a main cause of the exasperation of the Saxons against it. Among those exactions Alcuin mentions not only tithes—which had now become a recognized form of Church revenue—but the infliction of many penalties for moral and ecclesiastical offences. Such exactions the monarch endorsed; and he it was who enforced the payment of tithes.
King and priest were thus natural allies as against the freemen or the chieftains in each territory; and the advance of the Church was bloody or bloodless according as the king was able to enforce his will. In the Scandinavian countries the founding of Christianity was a life-and-death struggle, lasting in all for some two hundred and fifty years (820–1075), between the local liberties, bound up with pagan usages, and the centralizing system of the Church. Again and again the Church was overthrown, with the king who championed it; and the special ferocity of the marauding vikings against Churchmen wherever they went seems to have been set up by their sense of the Church’s monarchic function. The fact that many priests were ex-serfs made them the more obnoxious; and they in turn would strive the more zealously for the Church’s protecting power. But the Church’s political work did not end with the humbling of the vikings, as such, at the hands of the kings who finally mastered them; it endorsed the aggressive imperialism of the Danish king Knut as it had done that of Rome; and never till the time of the Crusades does the ostensible universality of the Church seem to have checked the old play of racial hatreds and the normal lust of conquest. So clearly did Charlemagne realize the political use of the Church that, while he imposed it everywhere in his own dominions, he vetoed its extension to Denmark, where it would be a means of organizing a probably hostile power, many of the stubborn Saxons having fled thither. From the moment of its establishment it had been stamped with the principle of political autocracy; and only when its own mounting power and wealth made it a world-State in itself did it restrain, in its own interest, the power of kings. In the earlier stages, king and Church supported each other for their own sakes; and it was as a political instrument, whose value had been proved in the Roman Empire, that the Church was sooner or later accepted by the barbarian kings. All the while popes and prelates complained bitterly that many of the converts thus won were baptized and rebaptized, yet continued to live as heathens, slaying priests and sacrificing to idols. When, however, open heathenism was beaten down, the combined political and religious prestige of the Christian priest gave him a hold over the multitude, forever superstitious, such as those of the heathen times had never wielded save in Gaul. To the new regal tyranny was added that of the Church. When the Servians, who had been nominally Christianized under the rule of Byzantium in the eighth century, regained their independence in the ninth, they significantly renounced Christianity; and only after re-conquest were they again “converted.” To this day their old pagan beliefs abound under cover of Christianity.
To the general rule of propagation by regal edict or by bloodshed there were a few partial exceptions. Vladimir, the first Christian king of the Russians (980), destroyed the old monuments and images in the usual fashion; but under the auspices of his wife, the sister of the Byzantine emperor, Greek missionaries set up many schools and churches, and the kingdom seems to have been bloodlessly Christianized within three generations. It accordingly remained Christian under the two and a half centuries of Mongol rule, from 1223. Elsewhere the conversion of the Slavs was a process of sheer monarchic violence, as in Scandinavia. Always it was the duke or king who was “converted,” and always his propaganda was that of the sword. Through three reigns (870–936) heathen Bohemia was bedevilled by dukes who coerced their subjects with the Church’s help; a pagan prince who led a successful revolt, but was overthrown by a German invasion, lives in history as Boleslav the Cruel; and an equally cruel successor, who with German help used the same means on behalf of Christianity, figures as Boleslav the Pious (967–999). The same process went on in Poland; the converted duke (967), backed by his German overlords, seeking to suppress pagan worship with violence and meeting violent resistance. So among the Wends, who were also under German vassalage, the missionary was seen to be the tool of the tyrant, and the cause of paganism was identified with that of national independence. After generations of savage struggle, Gottschalk, the pious founder of the Wendish empire, was overthrown (1066) and put to death with torture. So in Hungary, where king Stephen (997–1038) combined slaughter with better propaganda, the king’s death was followed by a desperate pagan revolt, which was twice renewed under his son.
Century after century, expansion proceeded on the same lines. The Finns, conquered in the twelfth century by a Christian king of Sweden, were still persistently pagan in the thirteenth, and were bloodily coerced accordingly. In the conversion of the Slavonic Pomeranians in the twelfth century, armed force, headed by the duke, was needed to secure wholesale baptisms after the fashion of Augustine and Boniface; the people of Lübeck, on the opportunity of an emperor’s death, revolted in favour of paganism and independence; and the pagans of the Isle of Rügen were Christianized in mass by Danish conquest (1168). It is recorded by the biographer of St. Otho that the Pomeranians expressly rejected Christianity on the score of its cruelty, saying, “among the Christians are thieves and robbers [unknown among the heathen Slavs]; Christians crucify men and tear out eyes and do all manner of infamies; be such a religion far from us.” The attempt to convert Livonia by preaching was an absolute failure; two crusades had to be set on foot by the Pope and the surrounding Christians to crush its paganism (circa 1200); and finally an “Order of the Sword” had to be organized to hold the religious ground. A little later, two “Orders of Teutonic Knights” in succession were established to conquer and convert the heathen Prussians; and after sixty years of murderous and ruinous warfare, “a broken remnant, shielded in some measure by the intervention of the popes, were induced to discontinue all the heathen rites, to recognize the claims of the Teutonic Order, and to welcome the instruction of the German priests.” Another remnant, utterly unsubduable, sought refuge with the heathen of Lithuania.
The summary of seven hundred years of Christian expansion in northern Europe is that the work was in the main done by the sword, in the interests of kings and tyrants, who supported it, as against the resistance of their subjects, who saw in the Church an instrument for their subjection. Christianity, in short, was as truly a religion of the sword as Islam. When the Mongols conquered part of Russia in 1223 they not only left the Christians full religious liberty, but let the priests go untaxed; and similarly the Turks left to the Bulgarians their faith, their lands, and their local laws. Christianity gave no such toleration; the lands of the heathen Slavs and Prussians being distributed among their German conquerors. The heathen, broadly speaking, were never persuaded, never convinced, never won by the appeal of the new doctrine: they were either transferred by their kings to the Church like so many cattle, or beaten down into submission after generations of resistance and massacre. For a long time after the German conquest any Slav found away from home was liable to be executed on the spot, or killed like a wild beast by any Christian who would. And centuries after the barbarian heathenism of Europe was ostensibly drowned in blood, Christian Spain, having overthrown the Moslem Moors, proceeded in the same fashion to dragoon Moslems and Jews into the true faith, baptizing in droves those who yielded or dissembled, and driving out of the country myriads more who would not submit. The misery and the butchery wrought from first to last are unimaginable. If the Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru, with their Church-blessed policy of suppressing heathenism, be added to the record, the totality of evil becomes appalling; for the Spanish priest Las Casas estimated the total destruction of native life at twelve millions. All this slaughter took place by way of “expansion,” and is exclusive of the further record of the slaughters wrought by the Church for the suppression of heresy within its established field. It is a strange prepossession that, in face of such a retrospect, habitually concentrates Christian thought on the remote and transient persecutions of Christianity by ancient paganism. If the blood shed on the score of religion by anti-Christian paganism and Christianity respectively be carefully estimated, the former might say to the latter, in the words of the latter-day heathen king of the Zulus who was crushed by an ostentatiously Christian statesmanship: “The blood shed in my reign was, to the blood shed since, as an ant in a pool of water.”