ABSTRACT
By the end of the thirteenth century Latin Christianity had for the most part reached its furthest limits territorially until the beginning of European expansion overseas two centuries later. The extensive ecclesiastical provinces of central Europe bounded to the east and south upon territories that followed the Orthodox rite and to the north-east upon pagan Lithuania, which did not finally convert to Christianity until the late fourteenth century. The provinces of Gniezno, which corresponded to the Polish kingdom, and Esztergom and Kalocsa, which two were contained within the kingdom of Hungary, had all been established in the early years of the eleventh century, between 1000 and 1009, but the creation of new dioceses within them was not far advanced in the years since then. Kalocsa had recently acquired jurisdiction over Bosnia, following its absorption by Hungary in the course of a crusade against the heretics of the region. The great diocese of Prague, which together with Olmütz corresponded to the kingdom of Bohemia, was still dependent upon Mainz and was not to be erected into a separate province until 1344. In the north-east a number of episcopal sees had been set up in the first half of the thirteenth century to promote and accommodate missionary activity among the Baltic peoples, and these were consolidated into the province of Riga in 1253, with the exception of Reval, which was attached to the Scandinavian province of Lund. Within Scandinavia itself the process of conversion begun in the tenth century with the Danes had been carried forward and culminated in the erection of the three provinces of Lund in 1104, Trondhjem in 1152 and Uppsala in 1164, which three were coterminous with the boundaries of the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, respectively.
