How Christianity Took Over Europe

It started with one city and a group small enough to fit in a room. It ended when the last pagan kingdom in Europe took the cross. This is the whole spread on the map, one year at a time, from AD 30 to 1387. CHAPTERS 0:00 Act I - Underground 1:27 Armenia, the first state to convert 1:51 Act II - The empire turns 2:14 Rome stops the persecutions 3:23 The Franks 3:45 Act III - The kingdoms 4:40 Kent 7:09 Bulgaria 8:07 Poland 8:21 Kyivan Rus 8:59 Act IV - The last pagans 13:29 How long it took 14:11 Lithuania, the last one What the map shows. Nothing here is drawn by hand. Every patch of colour on this map comes from a real place with real coordinates: 633 monasteries, each with the year it was founded, and 25 realms with a checked conversion date. The land fills out from those points as they appear, year by year, and the running counter in the corner is counting the same records you are watching arrive. Two churches, not one. In 1054 the map stops being one colour. The Great Schism splits it into the Latin West and the Greek East, and from that year on the two are painted apart, because after it they were apart. Islam is on this map too, in the same colours it held: land that stopped being Christian is shown as land that stopped being Christian. A word about the dates. Medieval records are not a spreadsheet. For a lot of these foundations the sources do not give a year at all, only a century, and this map does not invent one to fill the gap: where the record says a century, the screen says a century. Only a date that is genuinely a date gets a year on it. How long it actually took. Armenia was the first state, in 301. Rome stopped the persecutions in 313. From there it went kingdom by kingdom for a thousand years - the Franks, Kent, Bulgaria, Poland, Kyivan Rus - and the last pagan state in Europe, Lithuania, held out until 1387. Eight cities on this map are marked as the ones to watch, and the counter tracks how many of them had a church yet. Seven of the eight had one long before Lithuania did. SOURCES Monastery foundations and episcopal sees: open historical databases, one record per site, each with coordinates and a founding date; entries with a date coarser than a year are shown as a century, not a year Conversion dates of the 25 realms: encyclopaedia articles read one by one, with the year taken from the article text Coastline and land: an open public-domain map dataset IMAGE CREDIT All photographs are from Wikimedia Commons and are in the public domain or under free licences. A note on what this map cannot do. It shows where the faith was recorded, not where everyone believed - a monastery in the records is evidence of the church arriving, not proof of a converted countryside. The spread of a religion through the people who lived under it leaves far fewer marks than the buildings do, and this map is honest about counting the buildings.