The missionary Anskar went north to save the souls of Scandinavia in the 820s and even his biographer Rimbert acknowledges he ‘distributed much money in the northern districts in order that he might win the souls of the people’. His first monks were bought in a slave market as boys: ‘he began also to buy Danish and Slav boys so that he might train them for God’s service.’ To Anskar’s fury, the boys ended up as servants to a grandee who got control of their monastery; they were never free. And when Rimbert himself went north to the Swedes Anskar gave him and his colleagues ‘whatever they needed
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