Chapter 1 - Before Christianization

Summary

When We Think or, in this case, read about the Christianization process in Scandinavia, we are almost automatically reminded that such a process could only happen if the Scandinavians were not Christians in the first place. This might seem self-evident. However, I believe it to be very important to stress it here because Adam of Bremen also does so in his account of the history of the archbishopric of Hamburg–Bremen. For him, the Scandinavians that became Christian were those who abandoned their previous beliefs and cult practices and adopted the new—for Adam, the only true—belief in the Christian God and the new practices presented and conducted by the Christian Church through their priests and missionaries. As I shall discuss later, for Adam this also means the subordination of these new Scandinavian Christians to the authority of a specific ecclesiastical organization, with the archbishopric of Hamburg–Bremen at its head. Adam is thus concerned mainly with this process as it relates to already Christianized Scandinavians, that is, the Danes, Norwegians, and some of the Swedes, and he defends the need to expand these successes to other Scandinavian communities around the northern frontiers of Christianity. It should be remembered, too, that the north, in Adam’s views, also included some of the Slav communities living beyond the Elbe River. According to his account, after Charlemagne founded the city and established its first bishop, “[t]his same church at Hamburg he designed to establish as the metropolitan see for all the Slavic and Danish peoples.” Adam adds, however, that these plans of Charlemagne’s were never realized owing to his “cares of the realm,” and because after his death, “[f]orgetful of his father’s wishes, Louis commended the Transalbingian province to the bishops of Bremen and Verden.” These events are important if we are to understand some of Adam’s claims concerning the diocese of Hamburg–Bremen and its right to spread the Christian religion in those regions. What seems to be even more important for Adam, though, is the right of the archdiocese to exert ecclesiastical power and influence over the newly Christianized territories. According to Sæbjørg Walaker Nordeide, “[t]he establishment of Christianity by the turn of the second millennium AD is also key to understanding multiple processes of the time.”