Trade naturally benefited from the new prosperity and the rulers of peoples on the margins of Christian Europe, drawn further into trading networks, saw the advantages of adopting the faith of their neighbours, in a remarkable series of parallel developments.5 To the east, Poles, Hungarians and Czechs all began succumbing to Christian missions, although it was some time before their monarchs made decisions between Eastern and Western Christianity (see pp. 458–65). Likewise around 1000 Christianity began making renewed progress in Scandinavia – first a conversion in Denmark ordered by its king,
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