Abstract
In the year 1000 the Emperor Otto III went on a grandiose pilgrimage to Gnesen, to the tomb of his friend St Adalbert of Prague, martyred by the Prussians on the borders of their country on St George’s Day, 997. This visit has been seen as a significant moment in the development of the emperor’s imperial policies, but it may also be taken to mark the end of the first great age in the history of Christendom. By the time that Otto came to pay his respects at the shrine of this Germanized Bohemian, St Vojtiekh, and to raise it to metropolitan rank, Europe was outwardly Christian. The tenth century had completed the process begun with the first urban apostolic missions, and had seen the absorption of the Viking settlers into the Christian community, the conversion of the Magyars, the establishment of the faith in Bohemia, Poland, Russia and Denmark, the beginnings of successful missionary activity in the more northerly Scandinavian lands, and the reconversion of Crete. Whatever problems might remain in Islamic Spain, or with the tenacious paganism of the eastern Baltic, by the year 1000 Europe was Christian, and the missionary millennium was over.
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