The Mediaeval Period

THE MEDIAEVAL PERIOD Celtic Missionaries.—The passionate zeal of the Celtic mis sions has never been surpassed in Christendom. The men came from the Celtic Churches of the Scottish Highlands and Ireland, out of a Christianity that is probably a legacy of the Roman occupation of Britain. Their missionary passion owed little to the central organization of Rome. Columba, the founder of the mon astery of Iona in A.D. 563, an Irishman who was to pay back the debt Ireland owed to Scotland in Patrick, was the leader, and he was followed by Aidan who evangelized Northumbria, Columban who preached in the Vosges and to the Burgundians, Callich (St. Gall) the apostle of Switzerland and many others. Their work ranged from Switzerland and the Rhine to the Faroes and Iceland.

Missions from Rome as Centre.

The work of the Celtic missionaries proved lacking in permanency, and the work of later missionaries was directed from Rome and drew on other races in order to supplement the wonderful pioneering of the Celts. The English missionaries, Wilfrid, Willibrord, and, most famous of all, Winf rid or Boniface, the apostle of Germany, representatives of a newly evangelized Church, went in the seventh and eighth centuries to the Low Countries, Friesland, Saxony, Upper Hessia, Thuringia. Anskar (801-865) took the message to the pagan Scandinavian vikings, and was followed by the Englishman Haakon and the famous Olaf Tryggvason through whom the people of Iceland, Greenland and the Orkney and Shetland Islands were evangelized.

Missions from Constantinople as Centre.

While Rome was attending to the missionary task in northern, central and western Europe, the Eastern church did not forget the Slavonic world at its gates. South Russia and the Balkans were evangelized from Constantinople; in 863 Cyril and Methodius produced a Slavonic Bible and a Slavonic liturgy. The work spread from

Bulgaria through Moravia to Bohemia and Poland and finally to Russia, where at the end of the tenth century with the baptism of Vladimir there was symbolized the conversion of Russia, the greatest of all the children of the Eastern Church.

As there was a pause between the end of the great expanding movement of the primitive Church in the Roman Empire and the beginning of mediaeval missions, a pause during which the Church was consolidating its gains and establishing Christian civilization, so now there is a pause until the opening of the modern period. Of the world outside Europe, the world of the Moslem, or the still remoter world of the Hindu and the Buddhist, the mediaeval Church knew almost nothing ; although the Nes torian Christians spread their influence throughout the whole East, in Arabia, Palestine, Persia, India and even China, and as many as twenty-five metropolitans are said to have owed allegiance to the Nestorian patriarch. With the terrible persecution of Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane the Nestorian churches withered away, and are represented now only by tiny remnants of "Chaldeans." The Crusades, which were no true missionary movement, permanently embittered the relations between Christendom and Islam. There are a few great stories that flash out as precursors of the wider missionary movement to come—Ramon Lull's undying zeal for the conversion of Islam, crowned by martyrdom outside the gates of Bugiah in North Africa in 1315, the visit of St. Francis of Assisi to the Sultan, the embassies of Dominicans and Franciscans (to whom with the Benedictines had fallen most of the missionary labour of the Church) to Tartary, and the travels of Marco Polo accompanied by two Dominicans, to the court of Kublai Khan.