Let's start with a point of divergence. We will say that either the Augustine mission sent to preach amongst the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms by Pope Gregory The Great either fails miserably within a few short years, or is never called at all. Instead the Anglo-Saxons remain largely pagan. Perhaps Oswald of Northumbria never seizes his father's throne as well, so neither is there an influx of Irish monks in the lands of Bernicia and Deira. I'm interested in how this would not only effect the English kingdom's relations with the continent, who may come to see them as an idolatrous people on the edge of the world in need of conversion by the sword in due time, but also by how this would affect whether England even unifies into one kingdom without the aid of a strong religious framework to go along with the power of secular rulers. Of course, this is without mentioning the eventual Viking invasions. Though one wonders if they'd find England as attractive to raid as in our timeline without a number of wealthy and undefended monasteries and churches to plunder.
What if the Anglo-Saxons never converted to Christianity?
- Thread starter Rogue Navigator
- Start date
By the time the Anglo-Saxons converted, the North Sea was still almost entirely pagan, so it's not like they had no option for diplomacy and trade.
You just need to weaken the Franks
more than trade or continental connections, what made Christianity politically useful was that all monasteries were completely dependent on royal power and in return continuously prayed for the king, establishing royal authority without needing the army to have a constant local presence.
Also monasteries were taxable units that were found essentially in the middle of nowhere, so new settlements can spring up around them.
I think as well as having Christianity be slightly politically discredited- perhaps an amphibious Frankish invasion in defence of a Frankish princess is badly defeated by the apostate king she married, perhaps a stronger Arian presence on the continent means the Christian’s are too busy fighting each other- you also need to have heathen institutions able to provide these services to the state.
Also monasteries were taxable units that were found essentially in the middle of nowhere, so new settlements can spring up around them.
I think as well as having Christianity be slightly politically discredited- perhaps an amphibious Frankish invasion in defence of a Frankish princess is badly defeated by the apostate king she married, perhaps a stronger Arian presence on the continent means the Christian’s are too busy fighting each other- you also need to have heathen institutions able to provide these services to the state.
Kill Patrick, and effectively kill the Irish Church. Yeah, there were a few Christians, but not many in Ireland.
Weaken the Franks with infighting. Infighting mean they can't expand into Saxony and other Pagan areas, which weakens the cultural weight of Christianity.
As for providing services to the state, without Patrick, there is a nearby model, the Irish Druids. I don't propose a conversion to Celtic Paganism, but rather, a professionalizing of Germanic Pagan institutions gradually through diffusion of the Irish model.
Weaken the Franks with infighting. Infighting mean they can't expand into Saxony and other Pagan areas, which weakens the cultural weight of Christianity.
As for providing services to the state, without Patrick, there is a nearby model, the Irish Druids. I don't propose a conversion to Celtic Paganism, but rather, a professionalizing of Germanic Pagan institutions gradually through diffusion of the Irish model.
Even without that they'd still make their way there, though i figure Norse presence there would focus more on settlement.
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St. Patrick being single-handedly responsible for Christianity in Ireland is a myth.
You would have to give them writing, or some other more concrete way of passing down the faith
Its challenging. The thing is if you look at the pattern of Christianization it was very strongly associated with pagan realms reaching a certain level of centralization and growth. And the ones that didn't develop in this respect eventually got some external help in the conversion process. Now this was often fiercely opposed, usually unsuccessfully (an exception is Lithuania which 'should' have converted in the mid-1200s but the backlash actually won and dragged things out 100 years). It provided a tool for consolidation and base of support independent of the existing elite.
I disagree to a great degree, not completely but a lot. We could argue it......but Patrick was a personality that went along with the blending and interpretations that fit well with Irish custom, and that empowered saints, and made it an effective missionary church very quickly.
And without him, it would have taken a LOT longer, probably centuries and it would not have been as influential.
Runic says hello. It was widespread and useful and better for bone, wood, and stone (whole legal contracts are literally set in stone). What they need a reason to start putting it on paper and have scriptoriums.
I think the point is more that we just can’t know much about Patrick at all, and we have very good reason to doubt the information handed down to us about him.
The first biography of Patrick was pieced together two hundred years after his death, in the early seventh century, by clergymen who set out to turn Patrick into *the* Irish saint. It was propaganda in the attempt to build a cult of Patrick to glorify their bishoprics and rival other great saintly cults in the region.
The cult then got seriously picked up by political authorities in Armagh to strengthen the prestige of the Airgialla as they were fighting for hegemony with their neighbors. The sources make it explicit that other Christian missionaries from the conversion period had almost identical cults tied to other regional identities. For instance:
“In the ninth-century Book of Armagh (which contains the main Patrician archive) we are told that 'Palladius was Patrick by another name.”
Palladius being one of the other major Christian missionaries to Ireland around the time of Patrick. The article goes on to explain why the Patrick cult survived while others didn’t:
“It was not the clergy of Armagh who made this equation but those of the midlands who needed a powerful but distant protector. The cult of Patrick had an enormous advantage over all others. The saint had left personal and very intimate documents that provided a link with the distant missionary period. Through them he continued to speak to the Irish. It is for this reason that disadvantaged churches began to look to Armagh. It also resolves the paradox that much of the propaganda written on behalf of Armagh comes from the scholars of the midlands.”
Doherty, Charlie. “The Problem of Patrick.” History Ireland 3, no. 1 (1995): 15–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27724228.
If you have access, the article goes into some detail tracing what we know of Patrick and the function of his early biographies/hagiographies in the politics of seventh-century Ireland and onwards. Considering we know there were other missionaries and those missionaries had cults of their own, I think it’s fair to say that the idea that Saint Patrick was singularly and individually responsible for the conversion of the pagan Irish to be suspect at the least.
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Late 400s. But in an alternate TL, it could literally have been centuries later, which would have butterflied its influence in otl on early Anglo-Saxon Christianity.
Ireland is also nearly unique in the level of genuine enthusiasm for the new faith instead of the usual, gradual, top down acceptance that doesn't produce the monastic flowering of the following centuries.
Which is why it's being talked about.
They are not Anglo-Saxons in reality either. Though having the Irish not become Christian would help keep the Anglo-Saxons not Christian.
I really don't get why there seems to be a consensus here that it'll be hard. Christian states did trade and diplomacy with Non-Christian states, all the time.
Italians traded with and fought with Muslims, even against other Christians, including slaving Christians. That's how Italian cities grew under Saraceans dominance of the sea and Norse were traders as much or more than they were traders, trading with Constantinople way before they converted and the same in Western Europe.
As for diplomacy, the Mediterranean when it was dominated by Saraceans for one example, Fraxinetum (a Muslim exclave in southern France) survived for like a century or more on diplomacy with French and Italian rulers.
Rus' trade diplomacy didn't really get any better as far as I know before and after they converted.
So, it would be harder to do diplomacy a tiny bit, especially marriage alliances but Christian rulers have married daughters and nieces to powerful Muslim states and I don't think Ireland was in a super exclusivist attitude yet.
This also means a geopolitical explanation for the conversion doesn't necessarily hold up. For an English example, being Pagan didn't stop Penda of Mercia from laying the ground work for Mercian supremacy in both diplomatic and wartime victory.
If anything, I would say if you want to keep them Pagan then that diplomatic isolation might be what you're looking for. Instead of the diplomacy friendly enough up to marriage alliances with Pagans, why not complete exclusion? Such sour diplomacy could also mean expulsion of the church as well for it's ties to Frankish and Ireland.
Italians traded with and fought with Muslims, even against other Christians, including slaving Christians. That's how Italian cities grew under Saraceans dominance of the sea and Norse were traders as much or more than they were traders, trading with Constantinople way before they converted and the same in Western Europe.
As for diplomacy, the Mediterranean when it was dominated by Saraceans for one example, Fraxinetum (a Muslim exclave in southern France) survived for like a century or more on diplomacy with French and Italian rulers.
Rus' trade diplomacy didn't really get any better as far as I know before and after they converted.
So, it would be harder to do diplomacy a tiny bit, especially marriage alliances but Christian rulers have married daughters and nieces to powerful Muslim states and I don't think Ireland was in a super exclusivist attitude yet.
This also means a geopolitical explanation for the conversion doesn't necessarily hold up. For an English example, being Pagan didn't stop Penda of Mercia from laying the ground work for Mercian supremacy in both diplomatic and wartime victory.
If anything, I would say if you want to keep them Pagan then that diplomatic isolation might be what you're looking for. Instead of the diplomacy friendly enough up to marriage alliances with Pagans, why not complete exclusion? Such sour diplomacy could also mean expulsion of the church as well for it's ties to Frankish and Ireland.
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