When did people stop believing in the old gods like Greek and Norse? Did the Vikings just wake up one morning and think ”this is bullshit”?
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The stories are different everywhere but often they were compelled to convert. The Knights of the Sword were Germans who conquered much of what are now the Baltic states in the name of the church, from memory around 1200. Many people faced a choice between renouncing their traditional religion and being tortured or killed.
Catholic missionaries came, and converted people and rulers. Rulers might convert because of genuine religious feelings, or because it pays to be on the good side of all the catholic kings south of you. Christianity pushes other cultures to convert in a way that pagan religions really didn’t do, so over time one side kind of pushed harder than the other.
Religion in the early days was used as a unifying force, a way to bring related groups of people who lived separately, sometimes under separate rulers and sets of laws, under one national banner and provide some sort of national identity to those groups of people. Of course, it also gave that ruler a lot more power over more people and more land than he had before… And sometimes that national religion helped provide a sense of protection with other countries, too, though of course not always (look at how many wars there have been over the years).
Modern Scandinavian countries, which didn’t really exist in their modern forms back then, took several centuries (from about the 8th century to the 12th century) to really full adopt christianity. It was not an overnight thing. It took time to build church networks, educate people, get them used to the idea of celebrating *different* ideas for their holidays (since a lot of Christian holidays are based directly on older pagan holidays – it’s a lot easier to get someone to like something and accept something when the traditions look pretty similar…).
When Christians burned/slaughtered or bribed enough of them. How exactly do you think Christianity spread around Europe?
ELI5: new religions replaced old religions because people either started believing new stuff or were forced to.
For the Greek gods, the Roman emperors forced all the temples to close, the popes ordered the books to be burned, and eventually the traditions just weren’t passed on.
Charlemagne cut down the sacred trees and forced the Saxons to convert, and basically the same thing occurred.
The Northern Crusades crushed the old Baltic religions.
Most were coerced, some converted because it was politically convenient. Many Viking invaders were permitted to keep their holdings in the condition that they would stop raids by other Vikings and get baptized. After a few generations, they integrated into the local culture.
There were crusades for the non Christian faith people in Europe. A few of them actually. During the middle of what you imagine when the crusades happened. A lot of Jewish people were slaughtered for little reason because the main target was the “Vikings/barbaric societies” in Modern day Estonia. They fought many bloody battles with the crusaders and won a few battles of their own. They eventually lost power to the crusaders when their own ally’s got sick of being raided by the crusaders and allied up with the crusaders and converted to Christianity.
It took a few decades and thousands if not a million or more people to die for their culture to disappear from the mainstream.
If you’re interested in this I would check out the Livonian Crusade. It’s really fascinating and I never knew that there were crusades that targeted more than just the classic “holy land”.
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Most religions changed over time when invading cultures converted people either by force or by stealing parts of their religion and making them a part of the new religion to make conversion easier to stomach. Christianity is infamous for both of these. Fun fact, Jesus wasn’t born in December and Mary wasn’t the first virgin to give birth the a son of God.
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