Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland

Boniface had not been so naïve as to think that his mission was thereby done. The task of winning people for Christ could not be achieved merely by cutting down a tree. Converts, even after baptism, continued to practise any number of pestiferous customs: offering sacrifice to springs, inspecting entrails, claiming to read the future. Such back-sliding was not the worst. Travelling through the lands east of the Rhine that lay under the rule of the Franks – Hesse, and Thuringia, and Swabia – Boniface had been horrified by what he found. Churches that in many cases reached back centuries seemed rotten with pagan practices. Merchants who sold slaves to the Saxons for sacrifice; noblemen who hid their worship of idols ‘under the cloak of Christianity’;6 priests who made sacrifice of goats and bulls; bishops who fornicated, and inherited their sees from their fathers, and indulged in spectacular blood-feuds: these were not the kinds of Christian that Boniface was content to leave to their own devices. Rather than venture further into the forests of Saxony, as he had long dreamed of doing, he had embarked instead on a great labour of reform.