ading across the Rhine an unknown
distance into Germany, claiming the allegiance of Thuringians, Alamanni
and Bavarians, fitfully controlling the restless Saxons, touching with
warlike weapons and sometimes vainly striving with the terrible Avars."
[1] Kings of the Bavarian line came to rule in Northern Italy, but
Bavaria was little touched by Christian faith. At last when the
descendants of Arnulf[2] came as kings over a now again united Frankish
monarchy, when Charles Martel made one power of Austrasia, Neustria,
and Burgundy, the time for a new advance seemed to have come.
Theodelind, the Catholic queen of the Lombards, was herself of Bavarian
birth, but a century after her time the people of her native land, it
seems, were still heathen. They were apart from the Roman civilisation
and the Catholic tradition: conversion, to touch them, must be a direct
and aggressive movement.

At the end of the seventh century S. Rupert began the work. He settled
his episcopal throne at Salzburg. He was followed by Emmeran, and by
Corbinian. Slowly the work proceeded, hindered by violence on the part
of dukes and saints, favoured by popes and making a beginning for Roman
missionary interest in the distant borders of the Empire under the
Germans.

{136}

But it was not to these Frankish missionaries, or to Roman envoys, that
the most important work was due. It was due to an outburst of
converting zeal on the part of the newly converted race who had made
Britain the land of the English.

[Sidenote: Saint Boniface.]

Of all the great missionaries of the eighth century perhaps the
greatest was Winfrith of Crediton, an Englishman who became the father
of German Christianity and the precursor of the great religious and
intellectual movement of the days of Charles the Great. He followed
the Northumbrian Willibrord who for twenty-six years had laboured in
Frisia, and supported by the commission of Gregory II. he set forth in
719 to preach to the fierce heathens of Germany. He was instructed to
use the Roman rite and to report to Rome any difficulties he might
encounter. He began to labour in Thuringia, a land where Irish
missionaries had already been at work, and where he recalled the
Christians from evil ways into which they had lapsed. He passed on
through Neustria and thence to Frisia, where for three years he
"laboured much in Christ, converting not a few, destroying the heathen
shrines and building Christian oratories