Church history Author:Johann Heinrich Kurtz Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: clergy and the German state, and to set them up as independent motropolitanates of a great family of Christian nationalities recognising the pope as their spirit... more »ual father (§ 82, 9). The Western church did now indeed make a beginning of missionary enterprise, which extended in its range beyond Europe to the Mongols of Asia and the Saracens of Africa, but throughout this period it remained without any, or at least without any important, result. 1. The Scandinavian Mission Field.?The work oi Ansgar and Rimbert (§ 80) had extended only to the frontier provinces of Jutland and to the trading ports of Sweden, and even the churches founded there had in the meantime become almost extinct. A renewal of the mission could not be thought of, owing to tho robber raids of Normans or Vikings, who during the ninth and tenth centuries had devastated all the coasts. But it was just those Viking raids that in auother way opened a door again for the entrance of missionaries into those lands. Many of the home-going Vikings, who had been resident for a while abroad, had there been converted to the Christina faith, and carried back the knowledge of it to their homes. In France the Norwegians under Rollo founded Normandy in A.d. 'J12. In the tenth century the entire northern half of England fell into the hands of tho Danes, and finally, in A.d. 1013, the Danish King Sweyii conquered the whole country. Both in France and in England the incomers adopted the profession of Christianity, and this, owing to the close connection maintained with their earlier homes, Jed to the conversion of Norway and Denmark. 2. In Denmark, Gorm the Old, the founder of the regular Banish monarchy, makes his appearance toward the end of the ninth century as tho bitter foe of Christianity. He destroyed all Christian instit...« less