Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [116]
Once established overseas in Christian lands, Vikings were quite prepared to intermarry and adapt to local customs, and that included embracing Christianity. Conversions of Vikings overseas contributed to the emergence of Christianity at home in Scandinavia, as overseas Vikings returning on visits brought information about the new religion, and as chiefs and kings in Scandinavia began to recognize the political advantages that Christianity could bring them. Some Scandinavian chiefs adopted Christianity informally, even before their kings did. Decisive events in Christianity’s establishment in Scandinavia were the “official” conversion of Denmark under its king Harold Bluetooth around A.D. 960, of Norway beginning around A.D. 995, and of Sweden during the following century.
When Norway began to convert, the overseas Viking colonies of Orkney, Shetland, Faeroe, Iceland, and Greenland followed suit. That was partly because the colonies had few ships of their own, depended on Norwegian shipping for trade, and had to recognize the impossibility of remaining pagan after Norway became Christian. For instance, when Norway’s King Olaf I converted, he banned pagan Icelanders from trading with Norway, captured Icelanders visiting Norway (including relatives of leading Iceland pagans), and threatened to mutilate or kill those hostages unless Iceland renounced paganism. At the meeting of Iceland’s national assembly in the summer of A.D. 999, Icelanders accepted the inevitable and declared themselves Christian. Around that same year, Leif Eriksson, the son of that Erik the Red who founded the Greenland colony, supposedly introduced Christianity to Greenland.
The Christian churches that were created in Iceland and Greenland after A.D. 1000 were not independent entities owning their own land and buildings, as are modern churches. Instead, they were built and owned by a leading local farmer/chief on his own land, and the farmer was entitled to a share of the taxes collected as tithes by that church from other local people. It was as if the chief negotiated a franchise agreement with McDonald’s, under which he was granted a local monopoly by McDonald’s, erected a church building and supplied merchandise according to uniform McDonald’s standards, and kept a part of the proceeds for himself while sending the rest of the proceeds to central management—in this case, the pope in Rome via the archbishop in Nidaros (modern Trondheim). Naturally, the Catholic Church struggled to make its churches independent of the farmers/ owners. In 1297 the Church finally succeeded in forcing Iceland church owners to transfer ownership of many church farms to the bishop. No records have been preserved to show whether something similar also happened in Greenland, but Greenland’s acceptance (at least nominally) of Norwegian rule in 1261 probably put some pressure on Greenland church owners. We do know that in 1341 the bishop of Bergen sent to Greenland an overseer named Ivar Bardarson, who eventually returned to Norway with a detailed list and description of all Greenland churches, suggesting that the bishopric was trying to tighten its grip on its Greenland “franchises” as it did in Iceland.
The conversion to Christianity constituted a dramatic cultural break for the Viking overseas colonies. Christianity’s claims of exclusivity, as the sole true religion, meant abandoning pagan traditions. Art and architecture became Christian, based on continental models. Overseas Vikings built big churches and even cathedrals equal in size to those of much more populous mainland Scandinavia, and thus huge in relation to the size of the much smaller overseas populations supporting them. The colonies took Christianity seriously enough that they paid tithes to Rome: we have records of the crusade tithe that the Greenland bishop sent to the pope in 1282 (paid in walrus tusks and polar bear hides rather than in money), and also an