The Sword is Our Pope

Alexander Murray

• The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity, 371-1386 AD by Richard Fletcher
  HarperCollins, 562 pp, £25.00, September 1997, ISBN 0 00 255203 5

To the modern eye the European Middle Ages were palpably Christian, with all those cathedrals and crusades. But in the minds of the Renaissance scholars who invented the term, the adjective ‘middle’ meant that the Middle Ages began with the fall of the Roman Empire c.400, and for a substantial fraction of that time ‘medieval Christendom’ was largely not Christian at all. Of the area ruled by the late medieval Popes, more than half was unconverted before AD 1000. Even the peoples most self-consciously Christian by that date, like the Franks and Anglo-Saxons, had not been Christian when they migrated from Germany, or for several generations afterwards. The Christianisation of rural Francia, for instance, probably ended around 750: that is, two and a half centuries after the migration – as long as the period that separates us from Madame de Pompadour.