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This book explores the widespread mass conversions to Christianity and Islam that took place in Europe and Asia in the ninth to eleventh centuries. Taking a comparative perspective, contributors explore the processes at work in these conversions. Focusing on Christianity and Islam, it contrasts religious conversion in the period with earlier conversions, including those of Manichaeism in central Asia; Buddhism in east Asia; and Judaism in Khazaria, exploring why conversions to Christianity and Islam led to centralized political structures.
List of contents
1. Introduction - Tsvetelin Stepanov and Osman Karatay .- 2. Approaching Salvation: Early Process of Christianisation in Viking-Age Denmark and Sweden - Wladyslaw Duczko .- 3. The Christianisations in Scandinavia - Henrik Janson .- 4. Bruno of Querfurt and the Practice of Mission - Ian Wood .- 5. Who Converted the Poles? - Przemyslaw Urbanczyk - 6. Great Moravia: The Uneasy Beginnings of Slavic Christendom - Alexandar Nikolov .- 7. The Christianisation of the Kingdom of Hungary - Nora Berend .- 8. Choice of Faith in Early Medieval Eastern Europe: Individual and Mass Conversion - Vladimir Petrukhin - 9. The Times of St. Tsar Boris-Michael of Bulgaria (852-889; 907): Between the Real Historical Facts of the Ninth Century and the 'Facts' of Selective Memory - Tsvetelin Stepanov .- 10. The Conversion of the Volga Bulgars to Islam - István Zimonyi .- 11. Islamization of the Turks: A Process of Mental Change - Osman Karatay .- 12. Establishment of Islam in Central Asia: Geo-Cultural Patterns and Geographical Realities - Erkan Göksu .- 13. Islam in India: Acceleration under the Ghaznavids (10th-11th Centuries) - M. Hanefi Palabiyik .- 14. Postscript: Conversion as History - Vladimir Gradev.
About the author
Tsvetelin Stepanov is Professor at St. Kliment Ohridski University in Sofia, Bulgaria.
¿Osman Karatay is Professor in History at the Ege University in Izmir, Turkey.
