Were Germanic Peoples Forced to Convert to Christianity?

For this idea, I presume this man is called Thor Elptirdalr:

How Christianity was Forced on the Germanic Peoples
Norse Magic and Beliefs | 11 March 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey7Z-yVAbqE

Against, with exceptions, my comments:

the medieval 1:09 Europeans accepted Christianity 1:11 willingly 1:13 oh wait so you guys can all have a laugh 1:16 Christians never force their religion on 1:19 anyone

1:20 Simplification, but not totally wrong.

1) Most nations accepted Christianity without outside pressure.
2) Most places where there was government pressure to accept Christianity had previously had government pressure to accept a non-Christian religion.
3) Where Christian governments were lenient to older believers, like at first in Sweden, like among Anglo-Saxons, Pagans still wanted to force people out of Christianity, until Christian governments getting the upper hand once again forced the Pagans out.

I note that you mentioned both England and Sweden. I'll hear you out and then probably refute you.

1:43 "every place in the world"

That was not the point about the comment. The point was Medieval Europeans. Apart from Germanic peoples, that breaks down into:

• Romans. Including P-Celts.
• Irish and Scots.
• Slavs.
• Balts.
• Finno-Ugrians.

The big "crusader victims" would be just:

• Saxons (or Saxon nobility)
• Estonians
• Livonians
• Curonians.

The rest of the Europeans of the Middle Ages accepted Christianity willingly. Latin America is totally outside the scope of the original comment.

[tried to add]

Oh, Prussians. My bad.

[Franks]

2:25 No, St. Clotildis was not a Catholic priestess. She was a Catholic princess. She was granddaughter of Gunnar. You know Gondicharius. The last king of the Worms Burgundians, before Attila defeated them.

But she was not a Catholic priestess. That is a category that did not exist.

You can argue on whether her friend St. Genevieve was a Deaconness, but she was not a priestess.

So, Clotildis was a Catholic princess, related to Sigurd Fafnis bane ... continue.

2:56 The Alemanni were NOT Christian before Clovis defeated them.

"In 496, the Alemanni were conquered by the Frankish leader Clovis and incorporated into his dominions. Mentioned as still pagan allies of the Christian Franks, the Alemanni were gradually Christianized during the seventh century."

Gradually ... sounds like voluntarily. But that was after the Franks defeated them at Tolbiacum, presumed to be Zülpich.

3:18 Why would you not say they were peacefully converted?

Because of the lie that pretends the Alemanni were a kind of "crusaders" when they were actually pagans at this point?

[Anglo-Saxons]

3:25 "they took some time to convert, over many hundreds of years actually"

Like, they converted peacefully too?

4:04 The instructions by Pope St. Gregory are instructions to missionaries, not to soldiers.

4:17 Christmas, Midsummer, Easter ...

You basically pretend that Pagans were bamboozled to be Christians, but that's nothing like saying they were forced.

For Christmas and Easter, you have no actual evidence of Pagan feasts ... did you say "Yule" or "Midwinter"? That was around Candlemass, beginning of February.

4:30 Christian Churches on top of Pagan Temples. Obviously after some authorities of the up to then Pagan countries had agreed to become Christians.

For reference, St. Augustine of Canterbury was a monk and bishop. He + companions = 42 (as HHGG fans would appreciate). Not an army of crusaders.

5:03 "the Church forcefully baptising children"

Against their wishes or those of their parents? In the latter case, you are complaining that slaves and very lower class freemen (possibly) were forced to have their children baptised, which is a complaint that really doesn't make sense in a Germanic Pagan context, where chieftains were even sacrificing slaves and war captives to Odin (like once every nine years, nine men hung), because chieftains and their wishes were all that mattered in society. The rest mattered so that they could be a good back-up for the chieftains.

Pagans abandoning and killing children? Thank you very much for telling us what a hate cult English Paganism was at this point!

5:22 "just shows how passionate the Anglo-Saxon pagans were"

The few who were still pagans, that is.

"the lengths that the Christians"

The native English Christian chieftains, mind you. Chieftains or kings or gothar would ring a bell to a Germanic Pagan, normally ...

6:00 "so, Christianity was still not accepted at that time" (just before 700).

By a tiny minority of poor people. Know what? Your concern for poor people looks a bit like residual Christianity to me. Key word, residual.

As the Christians were not a foreign invader, Christianity very much was accepted by those in power at that time. What Germanic Pagan was ever (before Christian times) respectful of poor people acting like Christian martyrs?

6:44 Yes, King Edwin listened to birds, and you care about the poor. It's called a residual reflex. As for his wars, a wiki check will tell us, he waged wars against Brythonic and Goidelic peoples, to expand not just Catholic Christianity, but first and foremost Germanic rule in England, not unlike Hors and Hengest. So, a bishop killing a bird is violent conversion of King Edwin?

Take note. Casualties of Christianisation of the Germanic tribes include one crow.

6:55 "it's not like massacres and blood used to convert the Anglo-Saxons" (correct!)

[Bavarians, Thuringians, Saxons]

7:22 Between Franks and Saxons, wouldn't there be Bavarians first?

If you want to paint Christianity as brutal, how is it not very tactic to skip the Bavarians? One might even say "devious" ...

Or Thuringians. In Thuringia, St. Boniface came into more conflict over trying to get Catholic clergy and monastics to behave, than over felling the Pagan sacred oak in Geismar.

At the felling of the oak, which was sacred to Donar, it seems Thuringians and Frisians who were present expected Donar to strike Boniface. Nothing happened, and he could use the wood to build a church.

Boniface and Corbinian, respectively from Anglo-Saxons and Franks, had no big trouble in Bavaria either. This was in the 720's. Well before any Frankish brutality to Saxons.

7:44 It's remarkable that the "freedom of beliefs" or the Saxons would have involved the freedom of believing in a gods-given right to plunder Christian neighbours.

When Einhard introduces the "Saxon question" so to speak, it was with the claim that Saxons had been harrassing their Frankish and Christian neighbours across the border for about a century already.

8:12 Destruction of Irminsul. According to the depiction, it would have been a tree, like the oak in Geismar, but it seems from other sources that it was a pillar of already felled wood.

Some have claimed that the Viking age was the revenge for the felling of Irminsul and for the brutalisation of Saxons, especially nobility.

Let's check, 1066, I think most Saxons by then would have come over being Christians, and Irminsul. That's when the Viking Age ended.

9:40 Yes, exactly. Charlemagne in reacting to the Saxons did not act typically as Christians did.

Thanks for clearing that up, and long live Alcuin, inventor of Medieval Latin, and, as a by-product of French!

10:11 You are aware that those killed at the Blood Court of Verden was 4000 nobles, right?

People who were likely to lead armed forces against the Franks, not simply totally civilian peasant-serfs.

[Frisians]

10:54 Frisian-Frankish conflict has a backstory. 733, Charles the Hammer (Martel) defeated King Poppo.

This was the end of a land conflict which had lasted c. 80 years. The end saw pagan sanctuaries of the Frisians plundered, but there were already Christian ones, invited like bishops Wilfred and Willebrord.

This took all of Frisia West of the Lauwers into Frankish power. So, this part of the Frisians were "half" Christened peacefully, by Wilfred and Willibrord, "half" by Conquest (burning of Pagan sanctuaries).

In 772, when Charlemagne gets involved, we deal with Frisians East of the Lauwers. And significantly, they were allied with the Saxons. You know, age old enemies of the Saxons, by this time.

Both before and after 772, Frisians had been far from peaceful, like the killing of St. Boniface before, in 754.

Or the risings under Widukind, an actually Saxon King.

Widukind converted. The back and forth in Frisia and Saxony doesn't seem like a population who were die-hard pagans, brutalised by Christians, but a population who were if die-hard anything die-hard pro-chieftain, and that's why Charlemagne wanted the Pagan chieftains replaced, sometimes very brutally.

[Denmark]

13:12 "in the following decades or hundreds of years slowly accepted Christianity"

Slowly = overall (except the Baptism of HB and his men) voluntarily.

Thanks for noting, not very different from Sweden.

[Norway]

15:13 OK, for one Olaf, you mentioned one occasion when he killed a man who was a chieftain and who refused to become Christian.

You concluded there where probably thousands. Sorry, but I don't think Norway had that many major chieftains at the point. I also have no feeling Olaf Tryggvason did this to peasants.

After that, I'm less inclined to accept your description of Saint Olaf as forcing village after village with his army, as if there were no Christians anywhere before him.

There are traces of Christianity in Norway in certain regions from the mid-900's.

So, basically, like Denmark and Sweden, a gradual transition, mostly voluntary, I might guess. Though, perhaps somewhat less so than in Denmark or Sweden.

[Sweden and Iceland]

16:57 It may be mentioned that when Inge Stenkilsson went into exile, it was from the Stockholm-Uppsala region.

Svein, the King's brother-in-law, remained behind in the assembly, and offered the Swedes to do sacrifices on their behalf if they would give him the Kingdom. They all agreed to accept Svein's offer, and he was then recognized as King over all Sweden. A horse was then brought to the assembly and hewn in pieces and cut up for eating, and the sacred tree was smeared with blood. Then all the Swedes abandoned Christianity, and sacrifices started again. They drove King Ingi away; and he went into Vestergötland.

Westro-Gothia is part of present Sweden. And to this day more Christian than the Stockholm region.

Was not aware of the Norwegian Crusade into Småland.

When you end on Sweden, there is another swathe of Germanic speakers who converted peacefully, that you very tactically missed.

If I say AD 1000, the Allthing, and Njáll Þorgeirsson, that should suggest to you a collective and unforced conversion of all of Iceland to Christianity.

[He concludes and so do I, with a view on witchtrials]

17:40 There weren't all that many witchtrials in Medieval times.

While I agree a real witch (one really perceiving herself as practising witchcraft) was a Pagan, I totally disagree in believing they were a continuation of Germanic (or for that matter Celtic) Paganism (for Slavic, Baltic, Finnish, Lapponian, that may be a different story).

You presume there were lots of unrecorded brutalities against pagans, but how pagan was a man who was punished for sacrificing to vettar, if he also went to Church?

Now, I don't know the details of the trials for Paganism, and in the post-Reformation period, people would be accused for Paganism for sticking to Catholic practises and beliefs, so they are not evidence for actual surviving Paganism.