d its Christianity from a
Latin source. There may have been earlier Greek influences through the
Slavonic Christians to the south-east; but it was not till 965 that the
king, Mieczyslaw, was converted, when he married a Bohemian princess.
He became a member of the Empire and the vassal of Otto I. The
bishopric of Posen was founded in 968, and the gospel was preached by
S. Adalbert, already Bishop of Prague. S. Adalbert, who for a short
time held the see of Gnesen, passed on to preach to the heathen
Prussians, by whom he was martyred in 997. Otto III. visited the
Christian king in A.D. 1000, and gave him a relic, the lance of S.
Maurice, still preserved at Cracow. The ecclesiastical organisation of
the country was then consolidated; Gnesen was made the metropolitan
see, and Polish and Pomeranian dioceses were placed under it. The
Latin Church was dominant over Polish Christianity.

[Sidenote: The Prussians and S. Adalbert.]

But the pagan Prussians regarded S. Adalbert as a political emissary
and a sorcerer who destroyed their crops, and killed him without
hesitation; Bruno, whom Silvester II. sent to succeed him, perished
within a year, and the attempt to Christianise the Prussians was {126}
abandoned for nearly two centuries. Similar was the course of events
among the Wends. It is not till the tenth century that we know
anything of endeavours for their conversion, and then they were due to
the all-embracing energy of Otto I. Henry I. had borne the royal arms
in victory over the lands watered by the Elbe, the Oder, and the Saale;
and now his successor began the establishment of an ecclesiastical
hierarchy, under the see of Magdeburg. Boso, Bishop of Merseburg, set
himself to learn and preach in the Slav tongue, but it seems that the
German clergy who were introduced were unsuccessful as missionaries,
and won the reputation of greedy political agitators. At the end of
the tenth century a torrent of pagan fury swept over the land,
destroyed the churches, and stamped the growing Christianity under foot.

[Sidenote: The conversion of Russia.]

The beginnings of Russian Christianity may possibly be found, as the
patriarch Photius asserted, before the results of the defeat of the
barbarians by John Zimisces. But it was not till nearly a century
later that anything notable occurred. Olga, a "ruler of Russia,"
visited Constantinople in 957 and was baptized. Yet the Greek
missionaries made but slow progress. I